The spirits who have power over the delta of Bengal are clearly hostile to the easy preservation and dissemination of serious Bangla cinema from the years gone by. Wherefore you have the epic sagas of the touch-and-go rescue of Ritwik Ghatak's films, restored just in time in the East Berlin of the late 1980s, and then the tragedy of the lost original negatives of some of Satyajit Ray's early classics, destroyed in a fire at a lab in London, the lost and found and lost tale of Barin Saha's Tero Nodir Paarey, the continuing unavailability of Gautam Chatterjee's films, and so on and so forth. Add to this the general sad and humiliating situation of the continuing devastation of the National Film Archives in Pune, where P.K. Nair's herculean life's work to save India's cinematic heritage is being turned into rotting film-vinegar as we speak. Given this context, it feels good to hear that another lost gem from the 1950s has been put back together from different negative and print reels dug up across three countries.
Jago Hua Savera (Day Shall Dawn) is a rare thing, a Pakistani neo-realist film based loosely on Manik Bandopadhyay's Padma Nodir Maajhi. Made in 1958, the film has a script, dialogues and lyrics by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and direction and production by West Pakistanis, A.J. Kardar and Nauman Taseer. From the Indian side, the collaborative contributions come from Tripti Mitra, the only professional actor in the movie, and Timir Baran, who does the music. The cinematography is by Walter Lassally (who later won the Oscar for shooting Zorba the Greek and worked a lot with Merchant-Ivory), with sound and editing also done by Europeans. Yet, shot entirely on location around Saitnol village on the banks of the Meghna, 30 kilometres south of Dhaka, this film is entirely about Bengal and Bengalis, specifically the fishermen of Bandopadhyay's novel. The film is also a testament to the Indian People's Theatre Association movement and its strong leftist politics that continued to cut across the Partition borders over a decade after the formation of Pakistan and the republic of India.
Jago Hua Savera is clearly inspired by the Italian neo-realist films and not least by two of the three most famous Indian films inspired by the neo-realists - Pather Panchali and Aparajito (Apur Sansar comes later). Sadly, JHS doesn't get even a fraction of the acclaim and dissemination of the trilogy. Ayub Khan takes over as dictator of Pakistan while the film is being completed and he's far more interested in competing with Nehru's India militarily than culturally; the Ayub regime is what one would today call a godi regime of peak Cold War US, with any whiff of communism being anathema, and JHS is redolent with communist messages; Ayub's people tell the producer, Nauman Taseer, to pull the film and, after a three-day outing in the cinemas, it is buried. Abroad, JHS wins a gold medal at the Moscow Film Festival but nothing in the West, and it never makes it to either East Pakistan or India. Faiz and others involved with the film are later arrested for their politics. Independent realist cinema meets a stillborn death in Pakistan.
Recently the film is resurrected by Taseer's grandson and European festival programmers, being shown at Cannes and other venues as a rediscovered classic. In India, though, the film is withdrawn from the Mumbai Film Festival in 2016 because, no surprises, it's a Pakistani film.
Last Sunday, CAMP, the artists collective based in Mumbai, organized multiple simultaneous screenings of the film in Chittagong, Dhaka, Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai, Karachi and Lahore. The locations and timings of all the venues were announced, except it said the film would be shown at 6.30 pm "somewhere in Lahore". In Delhi, the audience watched the film at the on-strike JNU campus, in an open air screening also well attended by mosquitoes. In Calcutta, we saw it in an old house near Deshapriya Park, the huge screen forcing us to squeeze our chairs to the side so that our shadows didn't cut the frame. People were transfixed at both screenings.
There is a double-lensing that always happens when you see a film made a long time ago. There is one kind of filtering if you've seen the film several times across the decades and a quite different optical shift if you're watching it for the first time, 60 years after it was completed. From the first majestic shot, Jago Hua Savera announces both its beauty and its ambition: a flotilla of big boats dot the massive expanse of what can only be a river in the southern part of the Bengal delta; the white sails catch the sunlight as the camera floats towards them; a weakly sung folk song, too pretty, too milky, vaguely bhatiali in tune, the words in Urdu, smudges the soundtrack, the opening credits flick on and off, ruining the beautiful frame, but it doesn't matter, you are hooked.
Watching JHS, there is the constant push and pull of contradictions. Visually, a lot of the black and white film is stunning; rarely has east Bengal's riverine landscape been as sensitively filmed (and forget the notion that you need to 'be from there in order to understand the visual codes of the land') and yet some of the framing in the theatrical scenes is worse than amateurish; some of the shots are brilliant, even hand-held in 35mm, which was rare in those days, and yet Lassally doesn't even come close to achieving what Subrata Mitra has already done as far as bounce, or reflected, lighting goes. The characters are almost all played by non-actors; the combination of this and a clearly novice director leads to an overall wooden-ness and yet there are moments of great power. Tripti Mitra is again, in a different universe as an actor, electric, dangerous, her face and body tremendously mobile, again forcing us to look at the others in comparison, but again, somehow the two levels of acting blend and hold for many sequences. The film is set deep in Bengali peasant reality and yet we hear precious little Bangla or local dialect, most talk being in educated Urdu which jars hugely (and would have jarred politically had the film been shown in East Pakistan after the Bhasha Andolan had already begun). The plot is drenched in cliché (screenplays were clearly not Faiz Sahab's strong point), you can almost metronomically predict oppression, exploitation, sorrow and death; and yet, when Mian is tempted to steal from a wallet lying open, or when Ganju's new boat is carried through the village, or when the blind mother hears her son coughing to death, the film surprises you and leaves a sharp mark.
The tragedy of JHS is that it was such a one-off, that its promise was snuffed out so quickly and brutally from so many directions. It would have been fascinating to see what Kardar did next, or Taseer, or even what Zahir Raihan, the local assistant director, could have done with similar budgetary support (the film doesn't seem to be short of money or production time at all) and in a milieu where their work was showing regularly in theatres all over the subcontinent. Instead, we never hear from Kardar or Taseer again in the context of serious cinema, and, as a friend at the screening pointed out, Zahir Raihan becomes one of the victims of the slaughter of the intellectuals conducted by the Pakistan army in December 1971.
Jago Hua Savera reminds many of us of Ritwik Ghatak's Titash Ekti Nodir Naam. JHS precedes Titash by about 15 years, and those same shots, the wide river, the huge blocks of sails undulating on flat water, the now iconicized fishermen and peasant women, are all brought to different life under Ghatak's fecund and fracturing vision. I don't know if Ghatak ever saw JHS somewhere, but somehow, now having seen the film, Titash becomes the first in a row of films that owe the earlier film a sort of zeitgeist debt. For me Titash would be followed by two Bangladeshi films, Tanvir Mokammel's Chitra Nodir Paarey and Tareque Masud's Matir Moina, and the debt would be in the irrational sense that Ritwik and the others who followed with their riverine Bengal films somehow plucked down the energies that Jago first released into the clouds over the delta 60 years ago.
