Hay Festival Dhaka
CELLULOID BLUES From Words to Screen
Rahul Bose, Photo: Prabir Das
Amit Ashraf and Rahul Bose discuss the challenges of translating literature into films.
The words playing on the screen and the debates surrounding the art form became a part of discussion on the first day of the festival, where the panelists- Amit Ashraf, and the much celebrated darling of art cinema Rahul Bose talks about the process of translating literature into the screen.
For Andre Bazin, a French theorist on cinema, the art of cinema has always already existed in a form of dream in somebody's mind. People always carry an idea of a fictional character, as the novelist describes in his text. Perhaps, what is written in the book is very important for audience but it often contradicts with the director's thought. “I keep the two very separate. I don't really care if a movie has properly adapted from the novel or not. I always try to make it interesting like the novel's character. But I don't think film has to follow what is written in the main text,” Bose believes.
The dilemma he encounters is the illusion of an audience perspective regarding a character, which might become distorted in a film. Bose believes that the audience can catch the untruth right away and no amount of embellishment can hide it. To get rid of the problem a story board or graphic novel helps a lot.
The preconceived mind of a reader already experiences the sequence, so it is a better way to film a shot according to the features of the novel. “Graphic novel actually been given visual cues, we are being told to see the production design a little bit. You are even being shown a camera angle or too. It really helps me, since the graphic novel shows- there are certain ways a character looks, certain dynamism and movement in each shot. So, from textual experience, without questioning, a viewer will be influenced by the cinema,” Bose concludes.
Film is a highly collaborative medium, so often it is hard to indentify precisely what is the most important component in this multi-faceted form of communication. However, many filmmakers believe that there are strong examples to support the idea that the most vital piece of a film is the screenplay. The notion of screen writing and its precise and perfect use in film medium produces great movies in our time believes Catherine Masud, an American-born filmmaker, residing in Bangladesh since 1995.
Celluloid Blues a session on screen writing and its use in cinema was discussed by the two prominent filmmakers of our time- Nasiruddin Yousuf Bachchu and Catherine Masud at the Hay festival, Dhaka.
Bachchu shares his experience how he changed the manuscript of Syed Shamsul Haque while he shot the film Guerrilla, “The movie was not only the writer's experience or novel 'Nishiddho Loban' but it was my journey of nine months of war during 1971.”
Bose said that a film permits the experience of a director and sometime it contradicts with the written text or with the writer's narration. So people often love to remain with the memory of the text book and reject the celluloid art form. Bachchu completely agrees with the notion and he believes that it is the core challenge a filmmaker has to face during shooting.
Above all there is a wonderful thing about cinema that at its best it creates a fourth dimension. It invites the viewer to take a journey in different layers of memory, “it takes you somewhere, you are completing the circle of life that's what a great screen writer does. He/she transforms words into moving memories,” says Bose.
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