Joneed Khan is a senior journalist with La Presse in Montreal.
Battu’s Bioscope has become something of a cult movie. The 58-minute documentary made in 1998 by Polish director Andrzej Fidyk has won, among other honours, the Grand Prix in Strasbourg, the 1998 Golden Spire in San Francisco, and the 1999 Grand Prix in Banff. It continues gleaning praises at festivals in North America and Europe.
When the Kabir Cultural Centre announced its screening at Concordia University in Montreal, to be followed by a panel discussion led by Indian film expert Smti Vijaya Mulay, I felt I could not miss the opportunity – having already missed a presentation on the CBC Newsworld’s ThePassionate Eye programme a couple of years ago.
Like everyone else in the audience familiar with Indian cinema, I had a chuckle as shots from Bollywood movies of the 1950s and 1960s blared across the screen from the very outset. And I found Mr Battu, the quietly obsessed Bengali owner of a mobile cinema unit mounted on a colourful old truck that plies the dirt roads of rural India, his assistant Mama, a cranky old midget who loves his booze, and the latter’s respectful young aide, Amit, likeable, endearing even.
The plot is intriguingly simple. Mr Battu’s wife was kidnapped and he travels around West Bengal and Orissa in the hope of finding her. But he also believes “the world is an illusion” and “the screen shows the real world”. And he has a dream : to show a popular Indian movie to a community of tribals in Orissa who have never seen a movie before and who do not even know what the cinema is.
But by this time, which occurs well into the movie, a definite sense of discomfort had set in. The Bollywood movies glimpsed within the movie invariably showed scenes of men savagely brutalizing women. Fidyk’s camera lingered on the terrorized faces of the rural women in the audience gathered in front of the sheet screen set up in anonymous villages. And it was not clear whether showing a movie to uninitiated tribals was really Battu’s “dream” or Fidyk’s own fantasy.
Kylie Boltin, w riter, filmmaker and tutor at the University of Melbourne, whose review of Battu’s Bioscope is one of the rare pieces I managed to google on the net, accepts the definition that “if the material is actual, then it is documentary; if the material is invented, then it is not”. What then of the Gualtiero Jacopetti-Franco Prosperi duo of the Mondo Cane “shockumentary” fame who Pauline Kael, of the New Yorker, called “perhaps the most devious and irresponsible filmmakers who have ever lived”?
The fact that, in the absence of Mr Battu recovering from an accident, the tribals are bored by the movie and leave early because there is work to do the next day is interesting counterpoint. But it was a somewhat expected ending, given the narrative flow. That one can see post-colonial issues raised about the rural-urban divide and the national-diaspora hybridity of contemporary India is also a fact, but one wonders whether that was intended all along or just accidental – or merely incidental.
Some 2000 mobile cinemas roam the Indian countryside. Tens of thousands of movies, not all of them brutal, are available for show. Educational films focusing on development are part of the circuit. Television is mediating the urban-rural divide more and more. Civic organizations of all sorts are active in villages. The movies of Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Mrinal Sen, Aparna Sen and Aravindan, to name but a few, powerfully document this awakening and the struggle for empowerment.
Yet, Battu’s Bioscope gives us a rural India frozen in time immemorial and out of reach of modernizing forces. The stops in a snake charmers’ village, a leper colony, a village awaiting film star Uttam Mohanty as a God, and in the tribals’ home village, together with the scene of an elephant pulling Mr Battu’s truck across a wooden bridge, are the fodder road movies are made of; they are also stereotypes worthy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. One then wonders whether Andrzej Fidyk, working in post-communist Poland, chose communist-ruled West Bengal with a purpose, especially as Mr Battu’s bioscope is an archaic Soviet-era projector used to bring Bollywood’s opium to the “masses”.
“Documentary cinema is intended to inform”, writes Kylie Boltin, adding : “This ideology stems from the function of documentary cinema as the extension of the anthropologist’s gaze in which the camera masquerades as an invisible voyeur into the lives of its subjects”. Fittingly, Battu’s Bioscope figured prominently at the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival which toured the United States in 2000.