Even when he took black-and-white photographs of jatra artists — some out of work — for an earlier exhibition, Soumya Sankar Bose heightened the theatricality of his frames by shooting each ‘subject’ in the garish make-up and costume of the roles they played in their professional lives. He was thus establishing a link between their real and assumed personalities.
In A Discreet Exit Through Darkness (April 21-June 17) at Experimenter, Hindustan Road, Bose seems to have gone a step further and entered the world of penny dreadfuls. The lurid story that he tells in the film is little better than that, not withstanding the cutting-edge technology he uses and the convoluted title of the show. Technology cannot rescue a film that is supposed to be spooky, which it is only in the juvenile manner typical of Bengali ghost stories popular from the 1950s to the 1970s. It is a throwback without a shred of irony or humour.
A handout explains the story, the sudden disappearance of Bose’s mother in her childhood and the reasons there of. But how can a viewer be aware of the misfortunes that befell the family that had taken refuge in a dilapidated, old house? It’s impossible to guess a back story of that length.
Actually, the malevolent old building — it is the impression one gets — is the protagonist of the film and it dominates the visuals. Shadows and sounds add to the eeriness and the human characters are spoken of but remain unseen.
Tenebrous inkjet prints on archival paper of images related to the film were displayed on the walls of the gallery. Shadowy forms picked out by an orange glow were visible against the black background. The most curious of these was one of a human being wearing a cape and a mask with a beak, similar to the ones that physicians wore to tend to plague victims in medieval Europe. Is this some clever reference to the pandemic that dominated our lives not too long ago?
