![]() ![]() ![]() These cineplays were launched exclusively online this week for India on Hotstar under its ‘Originals’ banner. Woyzeck, and on the other are young filmmakers like Mishra and Mahajan interpreting Sarkar. On the one hand, there is the veteran cinematographer and director, Santosh Sivan, bringing alive George Buchner’s The 20 titles in the catalogue offer a mix of the classics and the modern - from Mohan Rakesh’sīombay Talkies. And yet, unlike theatre, where the script is the Bible, in a cineplay, as in cinema, action can evolve on the sets.Ĭineplays have since drawn talent from across the country. Had he understood it right? Was he conveying it well? For him, it became all about learning the basics - that, in filmmaking, the story is everything and all else is just baggage. But he also found something opening up within him as a filmmaker: “The challenges became the liberating factor.” It helped him break through some of his own mindsets, took him to the core of filmmaking, the story. Menon found it intimidating initially to transform a live stage play to “cinema/ play”. And then there have been the huge 20 camera set-ups for the ambitious National Theatre Live in the U.K. World over, plays adapted for cinema or live performances have been shot for archival purposes with the typical three-camera set-up. ![]() There was initial scepticism: would the magic and energy of live actors and audience, feeding off each other in the enclosed space of a theatre, get replicated on screen? Or would it feel too static and limiting on camera?Ī still from Nandita Das’ cineplay ‘Between the Lines’. The first to roll out of the stable was Menon’sīetween The Lines, originally written and directed by Das, who calls herself the cheerleader, and Maskara, the mastermind of the endeavour. “The idea was to merge the language of cinema and theatre and see what hybrid emerges,” says Subodh Maskara, co-founder and chairman of the eponymous enterprise Cineplay. Pagla Ghoda, come to stand for a larger, eternal reality - how men often wrong the women they love.Ĭineplays were born out of a very clear-cut desire: to push the artistic envelope and experiment with a new form of storytelling. And the four men, drinking, chatting and revealing their close secrets at the funeral of a young woman in writer-director Bikas Mishra’s version of Sarkar’s Zakir Hussain is as compelling, in bringing alive the inner world of a tortured, tormented soul with a rare rawness and ferocityin filmmaker Nikhil Mahajan’s cineplay of Badal Sarkar’sīaaki Itihaas. “Sulabha Deshpande played the same role in the late 60s and 70s and it still rings true, how easy it is to stereotype women and to blame them for everything,” says Das. And at the same time, with the aid of the camera, it makes you notice the tiniest flicker on an actor’s face that you would have missed were you sitting in the last row.Ībout a mock trial turning into a vicious accusatory game, with a single woman, Miss Benare, at the receiving end of society’s chauvinism and cruelty, it turns you into a stakeholder in her plight, makes you feel one with her, more so because of the power of a splendid ensemble - Saurabh Shukla, Swanand Kirkire, Yusuf Hussain, among others - and specially the bravura turn from Nandita Das as Benare - at once coquettish and spirited, vulnerable, brazen and rebellious. A unique blend of cinema and theatre, a bit of both, yet not wholly either, Menon’s interpretation of the timeless play, first performed in Marathi in 1968, draws you into its world and makes you feel as close to the action as the audience in the first row of a theatre. Shantata Court Chalu Ahe ) would be just another video recording of a stage performance, shorn of all the immediacy, intimacy and impact of a live theatre experience. Khamosh Adalat Jaari Hai (Marathi original My assumption was that filmmaker Ritesh Menon’s cineplay of Vijay Tendulkar’s Sometimes a viewing experience becomes all the more rewarding because of the initial trepidation with which you go in. ![]()
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