SHOOTING STAR WHO LIT UP SCREENS & LIVES

NE of the best times I have had at the movies was watching a newly-restored print of Ritwik Ghatak's 1958 film Ajantrik (known variously in English as The Mechanical Man or The Pathetic Fallacy) at the 2019 Pingyao International Film Festival in China.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

It felt entirely felicitous for a film about a man's love for his rundown car to play in a diesel-engine plant of Mao Zedong's times that had been redeveloped into a sprawling Festival Palace. The screening happened in the presence of one of Ghatak's beloved students, filmmaker Kumar Shahani, and the Chinese icon Jia Zhangke.

Ajantrik took the average Chinese viewer-for whom Indian cinema seemed to begin and end with Aamir Khan's Dangal and 3 Idiots-by surprise. That a 60-year-old black-and-white film could have them emotionally invested, all by humanising an inanimate object. For the young students of cinema, the man-machine dialectic, the formal experimentation, and especially the sound effects made the film way ahead of its time.

Ghatak's Chevrolet called 'Jagaddal' foreshadowed the Volkswagen Beetle in Disney's