.::Song Of The Little Road::.

The third session of Experimental Cinema screenings (and my second), Gallery Beyond showcased the last four of Avant-Garde movies they had chosen to screen. I say chosen to screen because the Avant-Garde Collection (from which the movies are being shown) is a much wider collection comprising many more movies than time would have allowed them to show.

The four movies screened were:

• Regen (Rain) (Netherlands, 1929) directed by Joris Ivens, 14 minutes: This is a movie every Bombayite would love to watch, especially if you’ve grown up watching the rain and what gentle poetry it can create on the streets and in the minds of men. If you can catch this short film anytime, please do so. It is a lovely evocation of rain in Amsterdam and how people react to it. Perhaps the most lyrical of all Avant-Garde movies, it is for the best that it is a silent movie. The gentle strumming of the guitar throughout the movie is the only sound the movie has. It is the director’s best documentary before he moved on to doing political documentaries. It is now my favorite documentary; when you have watched it, it will be yours too.
• H2O (US, 1929) directed by Ralph Steiner, 12 minutes: This movie demonstrates what light can do with surfaces, especially with water. An intensive exploration of the play between light and water, it soon delves into abstractions leaving the consciousness of the existence of water behind. Recommended only if you love the sort of cinema that academics can argue and debate over.
• Even - As You And I (US, 1937) directed by Roger Barlow, Harry Hay, and LeRoy Robbins, 12 minutes: A story of how three directors, fed up with the traditional boy meets girl plot, decide to create a surreal movie for a competition. A funny take on surrealism, it shows the three directors shooting the movie from every angle, even inside drains and on electricity poles. Finally when they are done with the movie, the deadline for the contest has already passed. The movie ends with them seeing the ad for another competition of surreal cinema.
• Ballet Méchanique (France, 1924) directed by Fernand Leger, 11 minutes: The only movie which I did not like, perhaps for lack of knowledge. It shows different objects in repetitive motion and from different perspectives. I have to agree that this was perhaps the most experimental of the experimental genre.

After the four movies one of which was a spoof of surreal cinema, an anthology of surreal cinema was screened. Then two of Luis Bunuel’s movies - Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or both of which were absolutely likeable classics. I’d not planned to sit through them but saw them anyway.

However, there was a noisy crowd to watch the movies with cells ringing and whispers doing the rounds and the shifting of chairs and the moving of people and one guy even suppressing his laughter at his simple comprehension of the complexity of L’Age D’Or, unlike my first time when the screening hall was perfectly calm and silent and it was fun watching the great movies.