|
|
|
Beyond commercial cinema
It’s a far cry from Rex Theatre, or even Hashoo Auditorium. When I walked into the City Press Film Club on the third floor of a shopping mall on Karachi’s Abdullah Haroon Hall, after a harrowing encounter with traffic snarl-ups, there were exactly two people seated on plastic chairs in a darkened small room watching a Spanish movie with English sub-titles. My first reaction was to beat a hasty retreat, if only to spare my host the embarrassment of my being witness to the rather meagre turnout. But the 30-minute traffic jam and the three flights of stairs decided in favour of my staying there.
Kika by Pedro Almodovar was playing on a pull-down screen in what was really a bookshop. While the purpose of this piece is not to review Kika, suffice it to say that it was a very thought-provoking film that drew attention to life in the European fast lane.
Ajmal Kamal, the moving spirit behind the City Press Film Club, is a retired finance man with a literary leaning. He has invested his golden handshake into his passion, and since 1989 has been publishing the quarterly Urdu magazine Aaj containing translations of world literature.
The CP Film Club started in April 2000, and the first film it screened was Chronicle Of A Death Foretold based on a novel of the same name by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winner from Colombia. Kika was the 121st screening of the CP Film Club, whose purpose is to promote the appreciation of good fiction and create an understanding of the language of cinema. Some of the other directors whose films have been shown at the CP Film Club include Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen (India), Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Keisuke Kinoshita, Kon Ichikawa and Shohei Imamura (Japan), Ingmar Bergman (Sweden), Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsin Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi, Samira Makhmalbaf and Jafer Panahi (Iran), Michel Khliefi, Mohammad Bakri and Elia Suleman (Palestine), Zhang Yimou (China) Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Moore (USA), Danis Tanovic (Bosnia), Philip Noyce (Australia) and Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia). The main idea has been to explore the relationship of literature with film and other visual arts, and to generate a dialogue between the practitioners and audiences of different arts.
‘Before we can have good films we must have knowledgeable film viewers. I see a movie every Friday at 6:30 pm, and people are invited to see it with me’
“Before we can have good films we must have knowledgeable film viewers,” says Ajmal, whose plans include starting a dialogue on creative cinema and film appreciation courses and workshops. His audience so far has ranged from two to 32 on a good day, but he is not deterred. “I see a movie every Friday at 6:30 pm, and people are invited to see it with me,” he says, mentioning that while the film is free, the snacks and interactive session costs a mere Rs50.
Ajmal has been on the KaraFilm jury for three years, and finds the local cinema quite disappointing, even the experimental kind. “There are two kinds of film-makers,” says Ajmal. “The first kind has no idea of film-making and makes only commercial cinema. The second kind has the technical know-how but does not have roots in classical storytelling of this land because they do not read local literature. They have no connection with the people.” He takes issue with the much-celebrated Khamosh Pani, saying that it distorts history and is technically weak.
Ideally, Ajmal would like to see the flourishing of small film clubs in various neighbourhoods, and a vibrant interaction amongst the various groups. This, he says, could lead to all manner of possibilities. Indeed it could, and does, as a matter of fact, with small groups watching movies as their leading entertainment in most households.
The bulk of such movies lie in the commercial domain shown on cable television. The move to art movie appreciation is what Ajmal hopes for, with more knowledgeable viewers paving the way for quality cinema.
|
|
|
|
