Want to programme a film festival? It’s not as tough as you think.
 In August last year, a group of students and cineastes played “Curator Curator”. They were part of a workshop organised by the Katha Centre for Film Studies, the India Foundation for the Arts and the Bhau Daji Lad Museum. With some help from programmers Amrit Gangar and Shai Heredia, scholar Ravi Vasudevan, filmmakers Kabir Mohanty and Mukul Kishore and critic and filmmaker CS Venkiteswaran, the participants learnt the mechanics of programming film festivals. They learnt how to discern common themes in seemingly disparate movies and to place cinema within a larger context.
You can judge the success of the workshop at an event titled Cinema Satsang this fortnight. Five participants will be each given one day to show thematically linked films. The festival will kick off with Sisir Anand’s selection of feature films and documentaries on sport. Filmmaker Pankaj Kumar will show personal documentaries. Malcolm Pope will examine independent films such as Pi and Katalin Varga. All the screenings will be from DVDs.
Among the more interesting selections is the programme by Chennai filmmaker Sruti Hari, who will screen three key films of popular Tamil actor Rajinikanth. “Rajini didn’t become the superstar that he is today overnight,” Hari said on the phone from Chennai. “Rajini is a vast topic and he has done over 200 films.” On the advice of a couple of friends, she began putting together a list of films that would best trace Rajinikanth’s arc from bit-part actor to villain to superhero. The August workshop helped Hari see a pattern in Rajinikanth’s vast filmography. “The workshop gave us perspective into curatorial practices applied in cinema,” she said. “I hadn’t come across anything like that before.”
In Moondru Mudichu (1976), Rajinikanth plays a complex character with shades of villainy. In Pathinaru Vayathinile (1977), Rajinikanth is a village thug who sets his evil eye on the village belle, played by Sridevi. Baasha, made a little under two decades later, sealed Rajinikanth’s status as superhero in Tamil Nadu. Loosely inspired by the Hindi movie Hum, Baasha is the story of a Tamil gangster from Mumbai who tries to shake off his past and live in relative anonymity in Chennai as an autorickshaw driver. “Rajini went through three phases,” observed Hari. “The first phase sees him as an actor, a performer. There was something unique about him and he stood out. Then he started getting attention being the bad guy. In Baasha, he became a larger-than-life superhero with the common man in mind.” For contemporary audiences who want to understand the Rajinikanth cult better, these screenings are a good place to begin. Nandini Ramnath
Source : Time Out Mumbai VOL. 7 ISSUE 13, February 18 - March 3 2011.
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