INDIA MATRI BHUMI ssss
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
From this standpoint, India can be regarded as the pinnacle of Rossellini’s richest period, his crowning masterpiece. Jean-Luc Godard once referred to it as “the creation of the world,” and unlike many other films about India made by Westerners–Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) is prototypical–it can’t be accused of either presumption or pretension. It’s remained one of the hardest to see of Rossellini’s major works, in part because of the complex and chaotic conditions under which it was made and initially received. Then 51, Rossellini became romantically involved with his main script collaborator, 27-year-old Sonali Senroy Das Gupta, a traditional Brahmin who was married with two small children and, ironically, went to work for Rossellini only at her husband’s insistence. The ensuing scandal forced her and Rossellini to leave the country before the film was finished. (It was completed in French and Italian studios.) Its French producers were so dissatisfied with it after its Cannes premiere that they refused to give it a commercial release, and the Italian reception was lukewarm at best.
India, like Paisan, is divided into separate stories with different characters and settings, but with a strictly documentary prologue and epilogue. Originally it was supposed to have nine episodes, but five were eventually discarded. (It was also originally meant to be called India 57–dating it by year, like Europa 51 and Germany Year Zero [1947]–but the number was dropped after its release was delayed.) Like most of Rossellini’s greatest work, it conforms to what Godard once called “the definitive by chance.” It has the spontaneous, unpredictable feel of a jazz improvisation while remaining so simply and lucidly focused it’s difficult to imagine it any other way.
The third episode is narrated by an 80-year-old man, happily married, who spends his days communing with his cows and the animals in the jungle near his home. His contemplative life is disturbed one day by the sounds of trucks prospecting for iron, causing most of the birds and animals to flee. With no other prey, a tiger attacks a porcupine and is wounded in the process. Vulnerable and threatened, the tiger becomes dangerous to men for the first time, and a hunt ensues. But the old man, believing “the world is big enough for everyone,” ultimately carries out a plan of his own.
when Fri 8/31, 10:30 PM, and Sun 9/2, 7:30 PM
