Cinematography

In his 30-year career, Mitra shot only 17 features. Ten of these were with Satyajit
Ray. Standard cinema histories rate these among the best films ever made. His
work began with Ray’s debut Pather Panchali in 1955, wound its way
through Jalsaghar, Devi, Mahanagar and Charulata, and ended with Nayak in
1966.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, Mitra conducted regular workshops at the Film and
Television Institute in India. Just like Ritwik Ghatak had fired the minds of
direction students in a previous generation, Mitra laid open the secrets of the
camera for a new breed of technicians. They included Virendra Saini, Anil Mehta,
KU Mohanan, Dilip Varma, Sunny Joseph and Anoop Jotwani, who would go on to
become eminent cinematographers in their own right.

“He was like an Impressionist painter who would concentrate on different tones on
the face,” Virendra Saini said. “The background was as important as the
foreground.”

For cinema connoisseurs, the Ray-Mitra combination ranks alongsde the alchemic
partnerships between Jean-Luc Godard and Raoul Coutard, Ingmar Bergman and
Sven Nykvist.

For Mitra’s devotees and even for some Ray followers, there are two distinctive
phases in the director’s long career. The dividing line is provided by Mitra.

Born in Kolkata on October 12, 1930, Subrata Mitra is among cinema’s most
reputed autodidacts. A keen photographer who studied science at St Xavier’s in
Kolkata, Mitra shot Pather Panchali  without any experience in filmmaking. Mitra
hadn’t even been an apprentice to another cinematographer, as was the practice at
the time. He was just a 20-year-old kid with a still camera, one of a small group of
enthusiasts that hung around the sets of French director Jean Renoir’s The River  as
it  was being filmed in Bengal in 1950.

Mitra met Ray with the hope of being enlisted as an assistant cameraman on Pather
Panchali, Marie Seton wrote in her Ray biography Portrait of a Director. “He had
never handled a movie camera in his life,” Seton wrote. “All he knew was still
photography.”

Like Mitra, Ray had no formal training in filmmaking either. He taught himself
about cinema by watching movies and devouring magazines and books. Perhaps
that’s why he never doubted Mitra’s abilities. “He kept explaining to me that film
photography was only photography in movement and I would be able to manage,”
Mitra told Seton.

A lifelong student of cinema

Mitra would spend the rest of his life sharpening his understanding of
cinematography, its role in a narrative and the joys and mysteries of light. His
ability to mine wonderment from the ordinary – he “wrote with light”, as director
Ramesh Sharma put it – was achieved in primitive conditions, with clunky cameras
and basic technology on minuscule budgets.

“Even now, his films with Ray are so fresh, so refined,” KU Mohanan told “I still
get goosebumps when I watch Pather Panchali. Every shot is beautiful, the
camera movements are flawless and impossible to imagine with the kind of
equipment he was using at the time.”

Ray’s biographer Andrew Robinson wrote in The Inner Eye, “Ray’s is the art that
conceals art; by the greatest economy of means he creates films that are the most
life-like in the history of the cinema.” This vision was translated by Mitra into
unforgettable screen moments.

Suffused with a quality that is frequently described as “lyrical realism”, Pather

Panchali includes shots of water lilies swaying in a pond as the monsoon arrives,
the sight of Durga, the elder sister of the protagonist Apu, enjoying being soaked
by the rain, and Apu and Durga finally setting eyes on the train whose sounds they
have been hearing for weeks.

In Aparajito (1956), Apu and his indigent family briefly relocate to Varanasi. For a
sequence set in Apu’s new home, Mitra used the method known as bounce lighting
– a revolutionary approach at the time.

Ray described the shadowless lighting technique in his memoir My Years with
Apu:

“The shooting in Benaras would consist of all the scenes supposedly taking place
there except the ones in Harihar’s house, which Bansi was to build in the studio.
These houses, especially those in the Bengali neighbourhood in Bengali tolla,
usually fall into a pattern. As you enter you find yourself in a curved courtyard,
which is surrounded by rooms. The source of light is the sky above the courtyard.
Subrata had planned to reproduce the overhead shadowless lighting effect by
stretching a sheet of cloth above the studio-built courtyard and bouncing the light
back from it. As it turned out, it worked so beautifully that it was impossible to tell
that the shooting was done in the studio. This system of bounced lighting was used
ten years later by Bergman’s cameraman Sven Nykvist, who claimed in American
Cinematographer that he was its originator!”

Aparajito also contains a memorable moment in which Apu’s mother, Sarbojaya,

dies slowly as a sparkle of fireflies descends on a pool.

All the time, Mitra had kept working tirelessly on his craft. He procured a series of
yellow and orange filters “to produce a range of tonalities – of the dark foliages as
well as the skin tones – which in time became a recognisable sign of the Apu
Trilogy”, In 1956, “Mitra on his own initiative ordered an Arri IIA for
approximately Rs 25,000…” she added.

Mitra also devised light boxes to achieve the desired lighting effect. “He made
light boxes with 200-watt bulbs, over which he would hold butter paper to create
soft light,” Virendra Saini explained.

Cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay added, “He didn’t have the support system
for the kind of realism he wanted to achieve at the time, so he had to do everything
himself.”

Cloudy with a chance of greatness

Devi (1960) ends on the indelible image of a housewife who has been declared a
living goddess disappearing into a field of grass. In Ray’s first colour
film, Kanchenjunga (1962), set in Darjeeling, characters move in and out of a
thicket of mist as they negotiate their complicated feelings towards each other.

“A film unit from Mumbai was also shooting in Darjeeling at the time,”
cinematographer Anoop Jotwani recalled. “They would say, don’t go there, there
are clouds, and Subrata said, great, there are clouds, let’s go.”

Director Goutam Ghose added, “Kanchenjunga is unique, in that it is told in real

time. Subrata created this sense of real time with mist and fog. He brought along
many mirrors and filters to maintain the colour temperature.”

Mahanagar (1963) dexterously moves between the cramped home in which Arati

lives with her family and the bustling office and streets that she navigates for her
new job.

Charulata  (1964), the story of a housewife’s unbidden passion for her husband’s
cousin, contained some of Mitra’s finest work. Its best regarded scenes include the
lonely Charulata’s long walk along the windows of her home, through which she
spies on passersby with her lorgnette. In another iconic sequence, Charulata swings
in the garden while gazing at the relative to whom she has shifted her affections.
Mitra placed his camera on the swing, inviting viewers to accompany the lurching
in Charulata’s heart.

“The intricacy of shooting nearly all of Charulata inside a studio is fantastic,”

filmmaker Dilip Varma said. “The magic of bounce lighting is impressive and has
such subtlety and grace.”

The film seems to have been one of Mitra’s personal favourites. “In his wallet, he
had the negative of a close-up of Madhabi from Charulata, wrapped in
cellophane,” said director and cinematographer Ranjan Palit.

Charulata (1964). Courtesy RD Bansal.

In one of his essays, Ray described Mitra’s camerawork as “truthful, unobtrusive

and modern”. Yet, differences between Ray and Mitra began to appear during the
making of Charulata. Ray’s cinematic prowess was the stuff of legend: in addition
to writing screenplays, he picked his cast, designed the posters and composed
musical scores for all his films from Teen Kanya onwards. In 1961,
with Charulata, Ray began operating the camera – putting his eye to the
viewfinder and guiding the shots, rather than letting Mitra do the job.

“This is not because I do not trust my cameraman’s abilities, but because I want to
know exactly at all times how a shot is going, not only in terms of acting, but of
acting viewed from a chosen set-up which imposes a particular spatial relationship
between the actors,” Ray noted in an essay in the anthology Our Films Their
Films.

By this time, Ray was already the most recognised and feted Indian director in the
West. His productions travelled frequently to festivals and were released in Europe
and America. Ray was a home-grown international personality, the darling of the
critics and the envy of his peers.

“The fireflies were simulated in the studio with the unit – in all about 30 people –
dancing with torch bulbs, which had been painted black save for a pinpopint,”
Mitra told Marie Seton. He was unsatisfied with the effect – he told Seton it wasn’t
“neatly done” – but the scene “gives an imaginative and psychological valid
sensation of passing out of life”, Seton wrote.

Nayak in 1966 revealed another facet of Mitra – his skill with sound. The film,
about the experiences of a Bengali movie’s star trip to Delhi, is set almost entirely
on a train. The train was a set. The sounds we hear during the journey were
recorded by Mitra, Avik Mukhopadhyay said. Mitra also recorded sound for
Mrinal Sen’s Chorus and Calcutta 71.

For the back projections used in Nayak to simulate an actual train journey, Mitra
got his crew to move around with bamboo poles to create shadows and the illusion
of the landscape whizzing by, Goutam Ghose said.

After Nayak, Ray replaced Mitra with Soumendu Roy, who had previously been
Mitra’s assistant. The Ray-Roy combination yielded more acclaimed films,
including Seemabaddha, Pratidwandi, Aranyer Din Ratri and Shatranj Ke
Khilari. However for some Dadaists, Ray’s golden run ended with Nayak.

“Ray got a lot more acknowledgement than Subrata did,” said Dilip Varma, who
had planned to make a documentary on Mitra. “Because they [Ray and Mitra] were
both demanding personalities, it was a foregone conclusion that they couldn’t be
working together. From what I have gathered, Subrata was extremely respectful of
Ray’s talent, personality and generosity. He knew he had been given the chance of
a lifetime. But reading the interstices, one does get the feeling that it was finally a
question of control.”

Ranjan Palit put it more bluntly: “Ray overstepped his jurisdiction, and Dada
resisted this.

Goutam Ghose added, “Sometimes, he would take a long time to achieve perfect
lighting. People were scared of taking him, and they were stupid people. You have
to respect a cinematographer who is doing good work.”

Anil Mehta added, “He set his own parameters about how he wanted to light. He
knew the aesthetic, technical and scientific aspects of cinematography. If he was
fastidious, it was for a purpose. He was uncompromising, and if he took time, so be
it.

“Subrata brought out the mood of the story, the sense of the night, camera
movements that subtly created drama,” Sharma said. “The famous scene in New
Delhi Times, where we showed the fear on the face of a chowkidar in a lunatic
asylum, was shot with his handheld Arriflex camera in two takes. Another tracking
shot in which Shashi Kapoor is attacked in a car was timed to perfection.”

The distinctive mood lighting in New Delhi Times was another Subrata Mitra
innovation. “Nobody used a tubelight at the time – light from tubelights doesn’t
have a continuous spectrum and has a slightly greenish tint,” KU Mohanan
explained. “Since the film was set in a newspaper office, Dada made all his lights
out of tubelights.”

New Delhi Times  bagged  Mitra his only National Film Award. This egregious
oversight is galling for Mitra’s admirers, and yet another indication that he didn’t
get his due at his peak. “We tried for years to give him the Dadasaheb Phalke
Award,” Virendra Saini said. “If anybody deserved it, it was him.”

outam Ghose was on the National Film Awards jury in 1986. “Some members
said New Delhi Times looked darkish, but the thing with Subrata Mitra is that he
treated the darkness with light,” Ghose said.

During his workshops, Mitra shared the way he used the Zone System, a tool
created by photographers Ansel Adams and Fred Archer to determine correct
exposure.

“Ansel Adams had made a scale of grey divided into nine zones,” Ranjan Palit
explained. “Dada made it into seven zones set to the seven notes of music. Ma
corresponded to the mid-grey. He knew theory better than all of us, and we were
studying theory.”

Mitra inspired Palit to “go dark” – explore the black tones rather than sticking with
the bright bits. “I got into that zone because of Subrata da,” Palit said.

The film that never was

Back home in Kolkata, filmmakers both current and aspiring landed up at Mitra’s
two-storeyed home at 70 Lansdowne Road. Mitra lived there with his youngest
brother Prajnan Mitra, known as Bachu.

Bachu Mitra handled and maintained Subrata Mitra’s equipment. The siblings
were bound by tough love, acquaintances said. Despite living on separate floors in
the same building, there were days when they would not talk to each other. Yet,
Bachu Mitra’s loyalty towards his brother was evident in the manner in which he
guarded Mitra’s equipment after his death.

Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the founder of the Film Heritage Foundation aimed at
preserving and archiving prints and memorabilia, still remembers his first meeting
with Bachu Mitra. “When I peeped into the window of his house, I saw this man
wearing a ganji and a dhoti, sitting at a desk and watching a soap on TV,”
Dungarpur recalled. “A black trunk was chained to the bed, and in it was possibly
Subrata Mitra’s famous camera.”
Mitra’s unorthodox manner might startle outsiders. But they are not particularly
unusual for people in show business or, for that matter, people of the arts, where
one person’s eccentricity is another person’s genius.

In his pursuit of beauty, Mitra might have gone farther than most, but then he was
one of a kind.

“He was an extremely contradictory person,” Dilip Varma said. “You had to deal
with it in a way that you didn’t get his ire up. This is not to denigrate him, but he
was a bit irascible. Ray too was very demanding, and equally generous.”