The Dutt aesthetic

It was sculpted with light and moulded in music

- BY IRA BHASKAR

Guru Dutt’s love for music and dance flourished at Uday Shankar's Almora cultural centre where he trained as a dancer and choreographer in the early 1940s. And, with the experience of choreographing on the sets of Prabhat [Film Company), it is not surprising that Dutt began to develop his own film aesthetic in which the choreography of light and music would be central. Dutt's individual film form drew from different cinematic traditions, including Hollywood and Indian cinema, and his experience as an assistant director and minor actor on the sets of films made in Pune and Bombay meant that he was internalising a developing Indian film aesthetic in the 1940s.

While he began his directorial career with noir melodramas and romantic comedies with their own genre features and styles, Dutt was already developing an expressionist aural aesthetic along with cinematographer V.K. Murthy, his key collaborator, without whose contribution to lighting and camera movement Dutt’s aesthetic would not have been possible.

While Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) are examples of this form, even in a romantic comedy like