Michelangelo Antonioni with his wife Enrica. (Right) Ingmar Bergman with Liv Ullmann (AFP)

The burden of years and the struggle of epic proportion required to survive on slender means in a city, where life becomes harder by the day, have blurred the distinguishing lines between Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini. Today they coexist and commingle in his memory — L’Avventura, Sawdust and Tinsel and La Strada forming a magnificent and magical mishmash of moving images, and he has to refer to his collection of books on world cinema to clear the cobwebs.

Unlike the handful of young cinephiles that the city has bred in recent times, Saktipada Datta at 74 is by no means a techie. He would not be able to tell the difference between a DVD and an LCD projector, he is not familiar with terms like downloading films from a file-sharing network, and he has not even heard of the pricey Criterion Collection of films, leave alone its pirated copies freely available in Chandni Chowk.

Yet excitement is palpable in his voice when this man, who was trained as an artist at Government Art College and was for years a science teacher at a government school at Bally, speaks of the “haunting scene in Virgin Spring after this young girl is raped and the brutal men try to make music to ward off fear” and of the scene in which a clown carries his naked wife on his shoulder who was splashing in water for the entertainment of some soldiers. “You recoiled in loathing,” he says.

Ingmar Bergman had written in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, published in 1988: “When you die you are extinguished.” But the death of this great Swedish director, followed immediately afterwards by that of Michelangelo Antonioni, raises questions about Bergman’s remark on death’s apparently irreversible judgment.

Thanks to nearly 60 years of exposure, good cinema still generates a lot of enthusiasm. And it is not academics or film studies intellectuals who have kept these great directors alive, but ordinary people from all walks of life and young students.

They were in the forefront of the film society movement in the mid-1950’s, and although today these clubs draw mostly members facing mid-life crisis, it is the nameless film buffs, however limited their numbers may be, who still go for screenings in art galleries and educational institutions.

The likes of Satyajit Ray and Chidananda Dasgupta had kicked off the film society movement. Foreign consulates, which often organised screenings, were generous hosts, serving snacks and cold drinks. The Chinese were known for their hospitality.

At Artistry House, which made way for The Park, certain sequences of a film would be shown twice on demand. Besides regular cinemas, screenings were held in Indrapuri studio too. For this privilege students paid the princely sum of Re 1 per month as membership fee.

Theatre personality Debtosh Ghosh, 77, says: “This is when we learnt to recognise the fact that good film-making was not confined to Hollywood. The film festival in the 1950s introduced us to besides Bergman, Antonioni and Fellini to Bunuel, Kurosawa and Polanski too. I remember I used to rush out after rehearsals at Park Circus, jump into a bus or a taxi and rush to Jyoti cinema, so that I didn’t miss a show.”

As ordinary people started becoming members of Calcutta Film Society they discovered it was not an elitist movement.

“The foreign consulates began to screen these films for the public. It created an environment conducive to watching good films. There was cross-fertilisation of the arts. Gradually, it began to attract even those who had initially branded it highbrow. Mainstream English newspapers took note of the movement and people became acquainted with East European films, the French Nouvelle Vague, Dutch, Vietnamese and even Canadian films,” says veteran journalist Pradipta Sankar Sen, who had spearheaded the film society movement.

Ray would not mind watching films sitting on the steps of the Academy of Fine Arts hall. Uday Shankar and his wife Amala, Hiren Mookerjee and directors and technicians from Tollywood were regulars.

But students like Saktipada Datta and his ilk were the mainstay. They came to watch the grainy black-and-white 16 mm films — often al fresco — and did not mind walking back home after midnight.

It is the same today, and a small organisation like Drishya, which is trying to take cinema to the masses, will vouch for it.

When they have screenings at Chitrakoot gallery it is always full house.