IT’S DIFFERENT: A scene from the telefilm Jam

If you thought Bengali television only churned out emotion-charged family sagas and dramatisations of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore, think again. A whole new trend is sweeping through Bangla television — and it’s summed up in two words: experimental telefilms. These short films, often made on a shoestring budget, are radical in form and content. What’s more, audiences are lapping up the unconventional fare.

Take the telefilm Jam, shown on local channel Tara Muzik earlier this year. The script, by director Mandira Mitra’s own admission, was “so ‘high-risk,’ both in terms of content and form,” that she says she was “pleasantly surprised that Tara agreed to produce it at all.”

Jam’s story — of three women who meet when their vehicles get stuck in a traffic jam — does not unfold through the conventional (read, ‘safe’) linear narrative method. Instead, it is pieced together using a series of broken images in bold colour and muted shades (such as a scene shot in a bright blue bathroom, where a husband casually tells his wife, who appears in a shadow, that he is leaving her for another woman). The characters too, contrary to time-tested television tradition, are highly stylised, delivering their fragmented dialogues in situations of suspended reality.

Or consider film maker Birsa Dasgupta’s K, another experimental film produced by Tara Muzik. From the title to the treatment to the tale itself, it tries to challenge the conventions of Bengali telefilms. Here the hero is actually an anti-hero, a contract killer called ‘K’. The heroine is a has-been actress in her mid-thirties who is prone to drinking binges and has a son for whom she feels no maternal affection. While admitting that some of this may not appeal to everybody, Dasgupta observes that there are “many amongst today’s audience who prefer complex characterisations.”

That telefims such as these are a hit with the audience is borne out by the fact that advertisers are lining up to book commercial spots on these films. Says Chhanda Guha, senior vice-president, Tara Muzik, “Advertisers do not usually buy up television spots months in advance for commercials to be beamed during reruns. But that’s what they’ve done for our end-of-the-year programme where two of the three telefilms being shown are repeats.”

Tara Muzik claims to have an avowed policy of producing experimental telefilms. Says Rathikant Basu, chairman, Tara Network, “Our policy, as far as telefilms are concerned, is to experiment. We’ve tried to steer clear of the run-of-the-mill and introduced the big screen equivalent of parallel cinema to the small screen.”

Directors are also welcoming this opportunity to experiment. “I have made films for several Bengali television channels and, yes, today you are allowed to fiddle with content and form,” says actor-director Parambrata. “This is important because not only are you, the film maker, exposed to standards of international cinema but your audience is perhaps exposed to it as well. While it may be difficult to achieve the grandeur of the big screen on television, you have to come up with ways of meeting these standards.”

In his film Pagol Naki, made for Zee TV, Parambrata experiments with “the language of camera.” That is, instead of the familiar static camera, there is a more fluid camera movement. His Premer Golpo, made for Tara Muzik, makes use of humour to create a kind of utopian imaginative space.

Indeed, examples of unusual telefilms abound. Director Raj Chakraborty has made a film called Kaal which will be shown at the Delhi Film Festival on December 25. Produced by Tara Muzik, the film revolves around the subject of terrorism where the ‘terror’ is revealed, not through any external events or situations, but by exploring the phobia-ridden psyche of an individual. Saibal Mitra’s Dronacharya, also produced by Tara Muzik, takes a macabre look at modern-day consumerist society, exploring its mindless pursuit of materialism with a suspense-thriller type of plot, punctuated with documentary footage of a war.

Most telefilm buffs, as well as a cross-section of people, ranging from college-going young men to housewives, agree that these films are a refreshing change from the run-of-the-mill fare that’s regularly on view. On Sunday evenings, 57-year-old homemaker Ratna Roy wraps up her housework early so that she can catch a good film on television. She flips through channels until she finds something that interests her. While admitting that she likes “family dramas that focus on life’s problems,” she claims that she also has an open mind. “I don’t like to limit myself to watching only a certain type of film. I get bored sticking to the same recipe for particular dishes. I experiment with different spices and ingredients. Similarly, I like watching films that are different.”

If audiences are game for a new wave on Bangla TV, aren’t other Bengali channels such as Akash Bangla, Zee Bangla or ETV Bangla also jumping on the experimentation bandwagon?

According to Shyamal Sengupta, former dean of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, Calcutta, who has directed a number of telefilms for ETV, they were never really off the bandwagon. “Since it introduced the Bengali telefilm, ETV has produced at least 10 to 12 excellent films which can be termed experimental whether in terms of daring subject matter or otherwise,” he says. While it was never really a policy decision, several film makers (for example, Anjan Dutta, a pioneer in the genre, and Kaushik Ganguly) ushered a brand of telefilms which, says Sengupta, could beat the so-called “alternative” big screen Bengali cinema hands down.

Lamenting that these never got the recognition they deserved, overshadowed as they always were by their counterparts on celluloid, he says, “They could compete with the best parallel cinema in terms of idea or execution.” An example is Sengupta’s own telefilm Tin Shotti which too did not follow a conventional narrative structure. It strung together a series of small incidents to create a sort of a collage of the life of a working woman from morning to evening, examining it not just on the plane of apparent reality, but putting it through the prism of three distinct psychological possibilities.

However, at the moment ETV is not producing telefilms — experimental or otherwise — regularly. Sengupta says that the reason for that is related to changes pertaining to slotting. And among the film makers who are continuing to direct telefilms, there are those such as Anindita Sarbadhicary who deliberately stay away from “experimentation.” As she says, “Television is a mass medium. It is not the forum for me to practise high art. In order to reach my audience I have to keep the language appropriately simple. Otherwise, I might lose them. It’s a matter of a click of a button on the remote control.” So other than a “touch of magic realism,” her latest telefilm Sadharan Meye is, as the title suggests, the tale of an ordinary girl, whose story is chronicled in a simple linear narrative.

Mitra too feels that there are limits to how much you can experiment using the medium of television. She says, “It’s great that telefilms have created a more liberal space, but radical experimentation is neither possible nor perhaps desirable. You don’t have a niche audience, so you cannot be too arcane. Your treatment has to adhere to some of the medium’s idiomatic norms. You have to strike the right balance.”

Among the more pressing constraints, of course, is the budget. Film makers agree that a main deterrent to the small screen achieving the same high quality of alternative cinema on the big screen is money. “You cannot be a perfectionist, and take retake after retake,” says one director.

At the moment, Tara allocates Rs 1.5 lakh per telefilm. According to Chhanda Guha, the shoestring budget, which was her brainchild, proved a successful marketing strategy, making experimentation possible. “When I took charge of Tara’s telefilms, it occurred to me that if we wanted to take the risk of experimenting we should do it with the minimum risk to our coffers. So we slashed our per-film budget to half. The logic was that if a film didn’t rake in the TRP, at least it wouldn’t be an unrecoverable loss.”

Today, Guha admits that when she started out with the experimentation plan, she was, in fact, quite apprehensive. So why did Tara venture into it in the first place? Rathikant Basu answers. “When we introduced telefilms, the main criterion was to try and achieve high standards of film making. You cannot have that without experimentation.”

In fact, as Sengupta sums up, “It’s not that you set out thinking that ‘I’m going to experiment.’ Your evolved artistic sensibility compels you to it.”