Focus on Guru Dutt’s cinematic excellence

Nagpur: Nostalgia and a glimpse of Bollywood history marked the final day of cultural festival Anubhuti. On Sunday, cinema buffs gathered at Chitnavis Centre to hear about Guru Dutt’s craft.
Filmmaking is as much an art, felt architect Habib Khan who gave the opening remarks for the segment, as he discussed the architectural contours of cinema. The next segment included reading of a book ‘Guru Dutt’ written by journalist Sathya Saran as narrated to her by Dutt’s long time associate Abrar Alvi.The event closed with a talk by cinematographer Arun Khopkar, who has extensively studied filmmaking style of Dutt.
Picking up portions from the book to recreate the life, times and the tragic death of Guru Dutt, Saran expanded upon facts like how Waheeda Rehman came to be signed for two of his films, CID and Pyasa, the ten year association of Alvi and Dutt and the events of the night that led to the death of the filmmaker.
Dwelling on the sequence of events, Saran narrated how Alvi left Dutt’s house hours before he died and how his wife Geeta Dutt kept checking on him on phone throughout the night having a premonition that something dreadful was about to happen.
Steering the audience back to his craft, Khopkar said, “Guru Dutt used melodrama as a form to make his cinema as his films had both melody and drama.” Splitting his works into two parts, Khopkar said the brighter side of his cinema was before he made ‘Pyasa’ and the darker side after ‘Pyasa’, when he also made ‘Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam’ and ‘Kagaz Ke Phool’. “The later three films are like a trilogy. Individual versus society was a recurring theme in all three.”
Being a disciple of dancer Uday Shankar, Dutt came to cinema with the idea of opera. “His use of light, darkness, camera and close up have created some immortal and exquisite frames and puts him miles apart of other directors.” Dutt worked on frames through textures, playing with symbols repeatedly. The director had the widest concept of dance. “His films are the best kind of flowering of dance and music,” concluded Khopkar.