Mumbai: 1980s film club Screen Unit's fascination with French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard

Amrit Gangar was the founder of Screen Unit, a film society that revered Godard for the alternate ways in which he narrated stories. Pic/Atul Kamble; (right) Jean-Luc Godard during the shooting of Contempt in 1963. Pic/Getty Images

The 1980s was an era of retrieval - mostly from the 1960s - be it histories and humanities, arts and arguments, reflections and reverberations. Do not confuse it with nostalgia. In cinematography, it was Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022) who became a major source of retrieval of iconoclastic inspiration. Screen Unit, a Mumbai-based film club was in its apotheotic enthrallment in the 1980s, and Godard came in with a gusto. The witness to this temporal phenomenon was SU's mimeographed (cyclostyled) programme notes that were replete with the Godardian presence. In mid-July 1986, five of the French master's iconic films were screened, one of which was the 1965 anthology film Paris vu Par (Paris seen by…) comprehending six perceptions of Paris by six different directors including Jean-Luc Godard. Much later, such an anthology film was made on the city of Mumbai, Bombay Talkies (2013), which included four well-known Bollywood filmmakers including Anurag Kashyap.

True to its applied philosophy, Screen Unit, active from 1976 to 1998, always preferred to remain small in terms of its membership, but not in the intensity and youthfulness of its programming, analysis and interpretation. A warm reception to JLG was absolutely natural, his defiance of the orthodoxy and formal rigidity struck a chord with our young minds. The programme notes quoted Godard of the 1960s, "Frequenting cine clubs and the cinematheque was already a way of thinking cinema." To my knowledge, not many film clubs in India were fond of showing JLG's films as they found his narratives much too fragmentary, non-linear, unconventionally political and hence, not easy to comprehend. In SU's collective pool of young minds, JLG found a comfortable groove through his provocative aphorisms he spoke and his characters uttered often as his alter-ego. JLG infected many a young cineaste in this country with his thoughts and practice of filmmaking which, for him, wasn't too compulsive as we might have presumed. The mimeographed programme note recalled him, "You can't write a book like Ulysses every two years."

What JLG did with our youthful minds was to provoke them to find alternative ways to narrate stories. He whispered into our ears, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." And with a chuckle he added, "To be or not to be. That's not really a question." In the Marxian vein, JLG's character in the film La chinoise says, "Art is not the reflection of reality, it is the reality of that reflection." We remembered these lines like Hindi film fans would remember by heart the dialogues delivered by Dilip Kumar in Devdas or Dev Anand in Guide, but not in their mannerisms.

Unlike Vittorio De Sica's "neo-realism", Godardian practice of filmmaking and thinking wasn't so easy to imbibe or mimic. Infectious he remained, nevertheless.

Interestingly, more than feature filmmakers in India, it is the advertising filmmakers who appropriated the Godardian technique of "jump-cut" as they had earlier done with Eisensteinian "montage". Perhaps one Indian director who was genuinely influenced in his filmmaking practice by Godard was Mrinal Sen, my broad reference is his Calcutta trilogy. The French nouvelle vogue movement had affected Sen tremendously, as Dipankar Mukhopadhyay maintains in his book on Mrinal Sen. On the other hand, Ritwik Ghatak had found the term nouvelle vogue, fuzzy and vague. His disciple, Kumar Shahani, to my mind, has offered us the most perceptive critique of Jean-Luc Godard's filmmaking practice. Shahani is the only filmmaker in India who has theorised cinematography so perceptively including Godard's. We, at Screen Unit, gained a lot from Shahani's knowledge and wisdom during the 1980s when he lived in Bombay. Our minds acquired a polemical edge with his elegant articulation.

Godard's discreet charm of anarchy would keep daunting our young minds though. He always turned the normal into an abnormal which many a film club in India found puzzling, and they largely remained away from him. But you cannot avoid the matter-of-fact. I think, one of the major paradoxes of our times is the production of linear films on the non-linear machines that technology has offered us. Is it because the mind has been enslaved by market and its monstrosity? Or the technological strides have just baffled us, depriving us of new ideas. In the present scenario, I think, many young Indian filmmakers would find Godard inspirationally relevant in terms of finding ways of engagement and endearment with technology and telling stories that navigate intricate existential anxieties.

SU's mimeographed programme note had also quoted Pablo Picasso: "I don't seek, I find." We had "found" you Monsieur as you cherished your cigar! But perhaps it was typical of you to have invited death through an "assisted suicide". Yet another "jump cut" via Breathless (A bout de souffle, 1959)?

Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based film theorist, curator, historian and a cultural activist and was the head of Screen Unit