Indian tale via Western lens

Surekha Kadapa-Bose

For over a century, the sand dunes have been the same, those ornamentally carved havelis of Rajasthan, the eerie dry land of Ladakh, the bustling lanes of Delhi, the crowded beaches and local trains of Mumbai... Bollywood has painted a certain picture. However, of late, there has been some freshness. Thanks to a whole new bandwagon of cinematographers from abroad, Bollywood is telling stories in a new visual language.

Wonder what is it that is bringing foreign DoPs to Bollywood... “Big adventure, new challenges!” admits Pawel Dyllus, the DoP from Poland and the man behind the camera in film Mirzya. The film may have flopped, but whoever watched the Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra film is still raving about its look. For Dyllus, who has not seen too many Bollywood films with song and dance sequences, Mirzya was a good start. “In Mirzya there is no singing. When I’m looking at typical Bollywood movies, storytelling is very different, compared to what I’m normally doing,” he says. Dyllus is winner of the Golden Tadpole and Golden Frog awards given by the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camerimage, for films like Wild Dusk Season ( 2006) and Life Feels Good (2013).

Sophie Winqvist Loggins, the Swedish DoP of Bipasha Basu starrer Aatma, finds Bollywood an “exciting” place to be. “I had already watched Hindi films and knew about the different cultural use of the media,” says Sophie and adds that as a foreigner, she also has a different idea about the tone of the film. Maybe that is what adds freshness to the film.

That is also probably why people remember some films. For instance Rock On 2. The movie flopped, but people and critics are all praise for the cinematography by Marc Koninckx. The Belgian DoP had earlier worked on Bharat Bala’s Tamil film Maryan.

Remember Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara? If you do remember if for the witty dialogues, you also remember it for mesmerising Spain. The credit goes to its Spanish DoP Carlos Catalan. Our favourite scene is the one where four horses run alongside a car on a long stretch of road and the crazy mood at the La Tomatina festival.

It’s not only the locales that pulsate differently in the foreign hands, even our actors seem to look great! Dhanush scorched the screen in Maryan in the harsh locales of Sudan. The twinkling laughter of his eyes looked scintillating.

The freshness that we talk about was also felt in Aatma. The film was certainly not the first in the genre of spooky films; from the days of Woh Kaun Thi to Ek Thi Daayan, we have seen many. However, watch it and you will know the difference. Its DoP Sophie says, “Spookiness is about the uncanny and the abject. When you study images and storytelling, you learn how to connect with the core idea of the movie. Then you need to figure out how that can be represented visually in a way that does not communicate to the mind, but to the body.” And she succeeded in doing it.