Miss Lovely director Ashim Alhuwalia’s new short is a remake of artist Akbar Padamsee’s experimental film that was lost 45 years ago
Stills from Events in a Cloud Chamber
When Akbar's (Padamsee) Syzygy was shown to an audience in 1969, after much reluctance, it was introduced to the audience by the Films Division as a film they may need an asprin to watch,” says filmmaker Ashim Alhuwalia, who we know as the man behind 2014's stellar Miss Lovely. “He was so dejected that he didn't even bother showing his other movie, Events in a Cloud Chamber. When he told me about the two, I knew I needed to do something with this." Padamsee had sent a print of Events in a Cloud Chamber to an art expo in Delhi which eventually lost it. Already embarrassed by it, Padamsee never bothered to retrieve it.
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Stills from Events in a Cloud Chamber
What 44-year-old Alhuwalia has done with his version is recreate the experimental film in collaboration with the 89-year-old legendary artist and art gallery Jhaveri Contemporary. The film will premiere at the 73rd Venice Film Festival at the end of this month.
Ashim Alhuwalia. Pic/Bipin Kokate
“A friend introduced me to Padamsee. She was writing about his film works, which I had never heard about before. He said I have stopped painting, but I miss working with films, and maybe we could make something together, just for fun. I didn't have a project in mind then but I then started thinking about this lost film. I thought it would be interesting to rebuild it through memory and also form a intergenerational bond between me and him to create a language, which becomes historically interesting,” says Alhuwalia as we chat over lunch at a South Mumbai café. Padamsee's movie also released a time where it had no context, as very few people were doing this type of thing. “It's a film about ageing. It's about us filming the remake. Talk to him about his film work, and he seemed embarrassed.”
Originally, the movie was shot like a painting — a static landscape with different pieces shot separately and superimposed on each other and shot with a 16mm Bolex camera. The six-minute film featured a single image of a dreamlike terrain, inspired by one of Padamsee's own oil paintings, and he experimented with a new technique of superimposing shapes formed with stencils and a carousel projector. “He did all of that again. He would get up and cut out shapes — for example one of a moon — and then paint different slides and shoot it through those slides. He is inspiring in his will to work every day — someone who is just not jaded and still so positive. I was left wondering, would I be like that at 89?” smiles Alhuwalia.
The film is made up of conversations between Padamsee and Alhuwalia, and snippets of home movies that Alhuwalia's father shot in the 60s, and is eerie and ghostlike. “But it's a ghost story of sorts, about a story that was lost,” he says. “It's been cathartic for both of us - for him, it's about when to let go. And for me, it was about chronicling the last of his generation. And also about knowing that this generation is not pioneering anything. It was already done by greats like him. This is about memory, dying, ageing… it's a very vulnerable portrait.”
Alhuwalia, who is also working on a biopic on Arun Gawli's life called Daddy starring Arjun Rampal, is excited that a film that had no plan, and was so small and handmade has managed to find a life outside. “At the end of the movie I recreated my version of Cloud Chamber and I asked Akbar 'is this anything like the original film', and he just said, 'I don't remember, I don't remember. And I thought that was beautiful.”
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