My first impression of Aatmapamphlet: it was like a very fast rotating Laterna Magica. One might me afraid, this Laterna Magica will bust at any moment. One has to get used to the enormous speed of this film.
Like a chameleon, the film originally filmed in Cinema scope changes into various aspect ratios. Often the film uses archive footage and at the beginning it looks like a collage. As the English title Autobio-Pamphlet suggests, the film appears for now as an ironic distanced and sometimes exaggerated point of view. As the film tries to display relations between the individual memory and the certain part of history in which the director grew up, it is also a very ambitious approach. In the last 20 years, quite a few films are more or less obvious autobiographical inspired. That includes all forms of cinema, experimental films, documentary essay, art cinema until mainstream like the very anticipated new film by Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans. The list is long and it includes filmmaker like Yang Yong-hi, Patricio Guzman, Paramita Das, Terrence Malick, Anjan Dutt or recently James Gray, to mention only some of them.
The changes between aspect ratios, the contrast between references to Indian history and the rather burlesque episodical narrative style offers as well a small tour de force through film history, especially through the almost forgotten art of slapstick. One of the classic elements of most of “Coming of Age”-films, the first love of the boy to his class mate is in this film a strange gravitation field. The film will always return to this chapter of a memory like a song to its refrain. The episodical narration is not flowing but literally jumping from event to event which is is indeed an interesting analogy to the kind like human memories are working. Some moments are completely absorbed by the event which takes place right now, another reminder of the great art of American slapstick. How history is finally related with an individual biography is something one learns in retrospect. In the rousing montage of this film all the Indian history with its riots, its clashes between Hindus ans Muslims or between castes would have offered enough stuff for tragedy or melodrama. Bende seems to choose often the anarchistic humor, an essential element of slapstick at all. All this gives the film an almost music-like character.
To bring some order in this funny, chaotic and nevertheless likeable film, one has to re-edit it in the own head. And if I think of the autobiographical inspired films I mentioned above, most of these filmmaker offer not only a certain vision of their place in a certain part of history, but most of these films offer as well the filmmakers place in the diversity of film history, what Truffaut once called a “vision about filmmaking”.
Aatmapamphlet is quite a work which makes us thinking about cinema. The seemingly disorder created by the montage is finally an invitation to crate an order solely by watching the film. Strangely the spectator has to become a accomplice. If I think about all these films which are inspired by autobiographical events, I have to think of Walt Whitman´s great poem "Song about Myself". Bende adds another inspiring and funny variation to this long list.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings:
Fri, 24.2, 15.30, Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
Sat, 25.2., 15.30, Cineplex Titania
Screenings
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