"The Fine Art of Going to the Pictures."

Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni's Nursing Home at Chemould Prescott Road brings together 26 paintings featuring a series of dramatic scenes from Hindi and Bengali films. In conversation with Abhay Sardesai, artist Atul Dodiya talks about childhood trips to movie halls, painted figures gripped by tension, and the closeness and remoteness of cinematic images.

- Abhay Sardesai

Abhay Sardesai: The freeze frame in cinema is inevitably a moment of narratory interruption. The story gets arrested as the shot takes over. As a device that becomes a driving force in your current suite of paintings, the freeze frame channelizes power, crystallises a moment, assembles a concentration of meaning.

In painting after painting, one sees characters caught in the middle of scenes, trapped, as it were, between an event that has happened and a scene that is poised to unfold. The character, or the actor as the character, seems to exist porously between the past and the future. What leads you to arrive at these ‘decisive moments’?

In other words, how does Johnny Walker as Isabhai Suratwala scramble out of the room where Rajesh Khanna as Anand is fighting cancer to step into a deferred after-image where he will continue to weep inconsolably?

What kind of image, according to you, has the capacity to move despite its stillness?

Atul Dodiya: It is the dramatic expression of a character on the screen that convinces me about the aptness of the image – this includes, among other things, the location of the figure in the setting, the figure’s pose and the situation of the scene. I watch films on a big screen with alertness, move backward and forward when certain scenes catch my attention, and then, capture eight to ten images on my cellphone. There is a cluster of images that I gather.

Then, there is the dilemma – which image should I choose to paint from? For every image that is picked out, a series of images are left out. In Isabhai Suratwala