Cinema Marte Dum Tak: A game-changing look at pulp cinema of the 90s
Cinema Marte Dum Tak: A game-changing look at pulp cinema of the 90s
For Vasan Bala, quirk is what works. In this six-part sting of beauty and a joke forever, he deep-dives into sheer slush and comes out smelling like roses.
It is not as if the pulp cinema of the 1990s has not been talked about before. Just when in this millennium we thought the Kanti Shah brand of filmmaking had lost its moment we had that Kanti Shah moment in 2010 when the post-adolescent protagonist in Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan watches Shah’s classic Angoor (not be mistaken with Gulzar’s classic of the same title).
An actor associated with the pulp cinema of the 1990s, draws attention to the historic place occupied by Kanti Shah’s Angoor in the hoary history of pulp cinema. There are several illuminating interviews with actors associated with pulp cinema. Some of them, like Raza Murad and Kiran Kumar, we are familiar with. Others like Sapna Sappu and Amit Pachauri were new to me.
Series creators Vasan Bala and Samira Kanwar, writer Rigved Siriah, and directors Disha Rindani, Xulfee and Kulish Kant Thakur evidently have a huge amount of respect for the cheesy cinema targeted at rickshaw wallahs, hawkers and the likes who knew exactly at what time the heroine would begin to take off her clothes and run across the beach with a seriously heaving bosom. They would enter the theatre precisely at the moment when the sexy parts (often added illegally) began and leave when they ended.
The series doesn’t allow us to feel sorry for the technicians and actors who were part of this sleazy caucus, as THEY never feel sorry for themselves. In fact, the actors, directors and other architects of this kinky joyland speak of their commitment as though they were all great film artistes making Gunda and Angoor instead of Sholay and Naseeb because, well, they didn’t have the budget.
What makes the series stand out is the bedrock of dignity it confers on the pulp directors. We would think the series was spoofing the architects of perverse entertainment. If we didn’t know that these directors were taken so seriously, we would think their solemn pronouncements on their revolutionary cinema was a joke.
The blessed series explores the sleazy underbelly of pulp filmmaking in the 1990s through the focused attention on four directors of those times, Vinod Talwar, J Neelam (the only woman among the male sleaze-makers), Kishan Shah and Dilip Gulati. These generated a constant flow of sleaze all through the 1990s.
And, mind it, this quartet was not even the front-runner of the genre. Kanti Shah and the Ramsay Brothers were. Talwar, Shah, Neelam and Gulati were the bottom-most layer of the bottomless pit. Their belief in what they did is incredibly inspiring. Often they speak as if they actually performed a social service: during those times there was no porn on the internet, there was only this alternative in ramshackle theatres where men ogled at actresses like Sapna Sappu and climaxed.
Sappu had no inhibitions about saying double-meaning lines. But there is an actor who comes on the midway in the series, when he hears his penile dialogue his nervousness spills over.
The tone of narration, though seemingly casual, secretes a tremendous concern for the armpit of filmmaking in mainstream Hindi cinema. Seemingly offhand remarks have an enormous relevance to what is being said about these fringe people who survived on shoestring budgets and audiences that didn’t mind the tackiest of production values.
Cinema Marte Dum Tak breaks the glass ceiling with bare ankles. It breaks open the taboo on ‘that’ kind of cinema in the 1990s which the sex-starved audience insisted on frequenting.
Abb bhala ‘horny’ ko kaun taal sakta hai? Zigzagging through a labyrinth of vulgarity, this series bestows a rare dignity on that ‘crass’ section which didn’t mind being ostracized as long as the bills were paid and the family was fed.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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