KARACHI: Legendary Bengali filmmaker and Padmabhushan awardee Mrinal Sen died at his home in Bhawanipur area of Kolkata on Sunday.According to international media his body will not be cremated until Sen’s son Kunal Sen who lives in Chicago arrives in Kolkata. Mrinal Sen told his family that after his death people should not place flowers and wreaths on his body and it should not be kept in a public place for people to pay their respects.Eminent actors such as Saumitra Chatterjee Dhritiman Chatterjee and Aparna Sen Director Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Anjana Dutta all of whom worked with the director expressed their grief. “I lost my guiding star today,” said Dhritiman Chatterjee. An era came to an end said Saumitra Chatterjee.Mrinal Sen made his first feature film Raat Bhore in 1955. It had the iconic Uttam Kumar who was not a star then. The movie was a let-down. His next film Neel Akasher Neechey, Under the Blue Sky, earned him local recognition while his third film Baishey Shravan. The day when Rabindranath Tagore died was the first film that gave him international exposure. After making five more films he made a film with a shoe-string budget provided by the government of India. This film Bhuvan Shome Mr Shome finally launched him as a major filmmaker both nationally and internationally. Bhuvan Shome also initiated the New Cinema film movement in India. The films that he made next were overtly political and earned him the reputation as a Marxist artist. This was also the time of large-scale political unrest throughout India. Particularly in and around Calcutta this period underwent what is now known as the Naxalite movement. This phase was immediately followed by a series of films where he shifted his focus and instead of looking for enemies outside he looked for the enemy within his own middle class society.This was arguably his most creative phase. During this period he won a large number of international awards. It could be argued that although his films show the development of ideas from existentialism, surrealism, Marxism, German expressionism, Postmodernism, Nouvelle Vague and Italian neorealism Sen’s cinema for the most part does not provide a happy ending or a definitive conclusion unlike many of the films of Sen’s better known contemporary Satyajit Ray.In many of Sen’s later films the audience becomes a participant in the process of the development of the plot. The director invites and provokes the audience into a shared process of forming multiple conclusions that are at the same time unique and different. The director does not play the role of god his audience does.It is not really surprising that unlike Allen who has a steady niche audience in the Western literati and aficionados Sen’s experimentation with parallel cinema had significantly cost him much of a devoted audience composing of largely the Calcutta-based westernised intelligentsia.In 1982 he was a member of the jury at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival In 1983 he was a member of the jury at the 13th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1997 Sen became the member of the jury at the 20th Moscow International Film Festival. Mrinal Sen never stopped experimenting with his medium. In his later films he tried to move away from the narrative structure and worked with very thin storylines. After a long gap of eight years at the age of eighty he made his latest film Aamaar Bhuvan in 2002. During his career Mrinal Sen’s films have received awards from almost all major film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Montreal, Chicago and Cairo.
12-31-2018, 05:06 PM
Legendary filmmaker Mrinal Sen dies
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