| September 1, 1997 | ||
|
|
|
|
|
The guru of the soft-focus frame assembles a dazzling array of portraits. By Arun Katiyar FACES There have been periodic attempts to document, examine and explain the mysteries of the Indian film industry. Film historian Firoze Rangoonwalla has two excellent books to his credit, a massive encyclopaedia of Indian cinema exists, more recently Rafique Baghdadi and Rajiv Rao made an attempt with Talking Films, and B.D. Garg's So Many Cinemas, The Motion Picture in India held some hope for those interested in the subject. The absence of a pictorial book on Indian film stars comes as no surprise. Who would take such a book seriously? However, Gautam Rajadhyaksha's Faces takes up the challenge. And, admirably, shows the way. In doing so, the book also tells us why no one made the attempt before: there has been no single photographer with the kind of access to film stars who could make such a book possible. Rajadhyaksha's family has known three generations of Durga Khote's family. His images of Rekha have kept her on magazine covers for the last 15 years, and his home has been the launch pad for more recent names like Shilpa Shirodkar, Pooja Bhatt, Kajol and Jugal Hansraj. Not surprisingly, Faces spans entire generations, from Naseem and Saira Banu to Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar. Only an exceptional photographer could have done justice to such a broad spectrum of stars. Rajadhyaksha, an extraordinary artiste himself, ensures that his portraits capture the glamour, rarely straying towards the glitz. This is the central triumph of Faces. Rajadhyaksha's portraits, always beguiling, always seductive, never turn seedy or tacky. Even when faced with something as obvious as Urmila Matondkar on the golden sands of Jaisalmer, you can only marvel at the way his camera captures her feral charm. Perhaps it is this reassuring quality in Rajadhyaksha that brings the stars to his studio. Shooting movie stars calls for a high level of familiarity and intimacy with the subject. This is apparent enough from the kind of pictures included in the book: Rajesh Khanna with Amitabh Bachchan; Anupam Kher in the famous drag outfit where make-up artist Mickey Contractor turned the balding star into Prabhadevi, the 'lost' sister of Sridevi. However, at some point, the images become predictable. Which is when you can start browsing through the no-brainer text and discover the wealth of insight that Rajadhyaksha has amassed over the years. The anecdotes he recounts are intimate and revealing. Example: Rajesh Khanna turning up for a photo session after a preview of Anand and candidly admitting that the "tall man (Amitabh Bachchan) in the film is going to shake up the industry". The real joy of going through Faces is the unexpected text. The book is an obvious delight to look at. You know that Rajadhyaksha is gifted so his portraits are going to be flawless. Finally, it may only be a toss-up between deciding whether his black and white images are better than his colour pictures. Mukherjee's latest novel reads a bit too much like a travelogue. LEAVE IT TO ME On a good day, Mukherjee comes across as a poet in novelist's clothing -- shimmering, wacky similes, thoughts leap-frogging across continents and, above all, a language which has long off-loaded the Raj. On a bad day, she's more like a travel guide taking the reader on a romp through ultimate-cool, multi-ethnic, melting-pot America-on-the-boil. A travel writer in the guise of a novelist. Leave it to Me is essentially a retake on the search for roots and identity (in this case multiple) with an interesting twist of Karma Cola territory revisited. The protagonist is Debby DiMartino, the by-product of an encounter on this trail between a Californian hippie back-packer and a Eurasian Indian who sounds suspiciously like Charles Sobhraj. Dumped in an orphanage run by Gray nuns , she is later adopted by an Italian-American family. The flashbacks to the India-in-the-mind land are bleeps from the subconscious. For, within Debby, there are identities straining at the leash. And so Debby, aware of other, distant landscapes in her mind, sets off for California to find her mother, and en route picks up the name Devi Dee from a licence plate number on an automobile. The story, like a picaresque novel, unfolds across the US, a prose version of the road movies of women, often predators, pushing frontiers to come to terms with themselves. And like many of Mukherjee's earlier works, the novel is looking at the many diasporas which meet, mingle and then perhaps diverge in the US. Interesting territory to explore, for the author seems to have used an abandoned, adopted child as a metaphor for the immigrant. Had she tried less hard, reined in some over-the-top prose, this could have been a good novel. |
|
© Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
BOOKS
