Literature’s cinema and cinema’s literature (Sahityer cinema, cinema r sahitya) was the title of a session at the Kolkata Literature Festival in association with The Telegraph at the Calcutta Book Fair on Sunday, the last day, with speakers like directors Goutam Ghose and Aniruddha Raychaudhuri and veteran actor Paran Bandopadhyay on the stage.
Ghose started the conversation with how Alfred Hitchcock while working in London, was asked to write a script for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
“Hitchcock did the script. He was told it would be a flop because the best passages were left out. These passages couldn’t be made into a cinema. So I had decided that I wouldn’t make a film on famous literature,” said the director of Paar.
But Paar was based on Samaresh Basu’s Pari. “Only the last scene was based on the book. I did a documentary on caste violence in Bihar. But it had a limited audience. I did a feature film on it, I wanted to show human endurance. Samaresh Basu hugely liked it. The famous scene of Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi crossing the river with a herd of pigs was metaphoric. One is influenced by literature. Film-makers’ and writers’ experience must merge to make a great cinema,” said Ghosh.
Pink film-maker Aniruddha Raychaudhuri’s Aparajita Tumi, an adaptation of Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Dui Nari Haate Tarabari, said: “When I read a book, I think in my way, I take stories from the environment. What I am reading, I see in actuality. In the US, one has wealth, but there is also an emptiness and decay and that is what I showed in Aparajita. It is an extension of my thoughts.”
Regarding Buno Haans, he said: “In 1984-85, I asked for money from someone and he told me to deliver a bag somewhere and warned me if I got caught, I would be jailed. Of course, I couldn’t do it. But that is where I got the plot for Buno Haans. I got it from the atmosphere.”
Actor Paran Bandopadhyay has done many of Sandip Ray’s films that are based on his father, Satyajit Ray’s books.
“The directors are our masters. Cinema’r what not. They think like a researcher. I act. When a screenplay is made from literature, not everything is taken. Sanglap abhinay na. (Saying dialogues is not acting). Acting happens between the dialogues,” he said.