Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)

QFS No. 147 - The invitation for July 17, 2024
Let’s complete another chapter in our on-going Introduction to Indian Cinema 101!

Guru Dutt is one of the unheralded filmmakers from India. “Unheralded” is in quotes because he’s quite ... heralded? ... in India. Though recognized as a great in his own country, he never achieved international acclaim in his lifetime the way that Satyajit Ray did, for example. For me, I was first introduced to Dutt’s work about twenty years ago when Time magazine’s legendary film critic Richard Schickel listed Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) as one of the 100 greatest films ever made. Pyaasa is a classic that’s moving and also has the unofficial Hindi film mandated musical numbers. But the musical numbers in Pyaasa are not superfluous – they serve the story, bringing poetry to life and enhancing the story. His follow-up Kaagaz Ke Phool – which translates to “Paper Flowers” – is known as one of the great films from the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema.

Now is a good time to recap our course materials for Introduction to Indian Cinema. Here are the films the QFS has selected (in chronological order):

1. Apur Sansar (World of Apu, 1959, QFS No. 16) – part of Ray’s “Apu Trilogy” and the origin point of Indian independent and art cinema.

2. Sholay (1975, QFS No. 62) – a glimpse of a big mainstream Indian movie during an era when such films were uninfluenced by global cinema. Also, our first viewing of Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous movie star in the world.

3. Dil Se.. (1998, QFS No. 32) – where we could see the influence of MTV’s arrival into South Asia, in which a movie produced standalone music numbers that felt separate from the main film. Also showcasing the ascension of Shah Rukh Khan as global heartthrob and second most famous movie star in the world.

4. 3 Idiots (2006, QFS No. 118) – closer to present-day Hindi filmmaking ripe with broad humor, earnestness, and adapted from a popular contemporary novel.

5. RRR (2022, QFS No. 86) – example of a regional language film (Telugu) that exploded into the world consciousness, showcasing modern filmmaking India style.

That’s not bad for a four-year, unstructured and barely planned course into the filmmaking of the largest movie producing country on earth!

You’ll notice in the above list that Apur Sansar and this week’s film are both from 1959. But they represent completely different branches of Indian cinema. Apur Sansar is from Bengal and not considered part of the national films of India (which we now call “Bollywood” but is really known as “Hindi Films” you may recall from our previous lessons). Ray’s Apu Trilogy was more popular abroad than in his own country, where he produced and directed from outside of the national movie industry. He is the first known filmmaker to make a successful film outside the traditional Indian movie studio. The independent scene in India remained very thin for the next 50 years, but the Apu Trilogy is where it begins.

Whereas Guru Dutt was already a Hindi film star known all over India by 1959. While Ray toiled as what we would now call an independent filmmaker, Dutt was a studio filmmaker. He operated within the Hindi film ecosystem, casting stars (including himself) but told deeply personal stories in between the songs and the dances. Kaagaz Ke Phool represents our QFS selection from the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema.

And while Dutt made commercially viable films, his personal life was marred by strife. Perhaps the melancholic storytelling he showcased on the screen came from his world at home. Tragically, he died before he turned 40 possibly from an accidental overdose or possibly, he committed suicide. This is his final film as a director (he acted in eight or so more after this) and though his life was short, he left behind an incredibly impressive body of work as a filmmaker. Dutt remains a revered artistic luminary in India and in film circles – both Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool appear on “Greatest” lists in India and internationally, including the latter once appearing on the BFI/Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time list in 2002. I believe India also issued a stamp in his honor as well. 

So join us in watching Kaagaz Ke Phool – the first Indian film in Cinemascope! – and we’ll discuss in about two weeks.

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) Directed by Guru Dutt

Reactions and Analyses:
In Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), there are a few scenes that concern horses and take place at a horse racing track. For a movie set primarily in the world of the 1950s Hindi cinema industry and very little to do with horses, this feels superfluous. And, for the most part it is superfluous – it doesn’t have much to do with the main storyline. But it pays off in a way later on thematically.

Rocky (Johnny Walker), who owns and bets on horses, reveals late in the film that one of his prized horses had to be shot and killed because it broke its leg and couldn’t race any more. Not much good now, but the horse had made me millions before, Rocky says. So we had to shoot the horse, he reveals, almost as an afterthought.

At the same point in the film, the protagonist Suresh Sinha (played by Dutt himself), a director who was successful and made many hits for his studio, has hit rock bottom. Drinking, depression, and abject loneliness left him a shell of a man – unemployable and forgotten. Not much good now, but this director made them all millions before. Suresh is not being put out of his misery in the manner of a horse, but perhaps he should be?

The metaphor is clear, and it’s brutal. Fame is fleeting and also no matter what you’ve done before or how successful you once were, you end up dead and alone. Which is what happens to Suresh, who, in what is the most savage scene of the film, dies quietly on the soundstage in which he had once flourished. The morning crew comes and finds him dead in a director’s chair, but the producer doesn’t care. He just wants the body moved (“what, you’ve never seen a dead body before?” he shouts) because the show must go on. The camera rises up to the heavens in a wide shot as light pours into the stage from the outside as Suresh’s lifeless body, small in the frame, is carried off.

Suresh (Guru Dutt), slumps into the director’s chair, now a broken old man left only with memories.

And the crew enters the soundstage to start the day, Suresh’s lifeless body callously removed as the production marches on.

It’s an incredibly cynical portrayal (and likely accurate from Dutt’s experience) of a ruthless world, specifically the movie industry. The fact that this is in a 1959 Hindi film – a film industry very well known for cheery, elevated and escapist fare – makes it even more surprising. What’s less surprising, perhaps, is that audiences at the time weren’t too keen on seeing Kaagaz Ke Phool, a notorious flop, only to be rediscovered and cherished now. Perhaps that says more about the times we currently live in than the quality of the film itself.

And to that quality – Kaagaz Ke Phool is a stunning masterwork of directing. Someone in our QFS group pointed out that not only do the shot selections evoke Orson Welles – deep focus, wide frames, low angles utilizing Cinemascope lenses for the first time in India – but Guru Dutt himself looks a lot like a young Welles himself. Both were prodigy actor-directors, both fought inner demons. And while Welles lived with his for a long lifetime in which he fought to regain the fame and power he had when Citizen Kane (1941) reached its ascendancy, Dutt’s demons proved too much for him, and instead died before he was 40. Dutt left behind a legacy of classics and a the tragic feeling that we were deprived of more great and meaningful films to fortify the Indian film industry.

It's easy to find parallels between Suresh in Kaagaz Ke Phool to Dutt’s own life. But beyond that, the film is a masterclass in portraying loneliness. Dutt with VK Murthy – one of India’s legendary cinematographers – has Suresh move between shadows and silhouettes, throwing the focus on the background and trusting the audience with extracting meaning from his imagery and juxtaposition of characters in the frame.

Beams of light, shadows, darkness - all part of the language Dutt uses to portray loneliness and distance.

Dutt’s use of framing foregrounds versus background evoked the work of Orson Welles, another actor-director prodigy.

Perhaps the most evocative scene comes about halfway through the film. Suresh has discovered and clearly has fallen in love with the luminous Shanthi (Waheeda Rehman), a non-actor who reluctantly becomes a star in his movies. He’s still technically married to Veena (Veena Kumari) but has fallen in love with Shanthi, and Shanthi, has definitely fallen for him. But they can never be together. To portray this visually, Dutt has music playing between the two characters on a darkened soundstage, featuring the now-legendary Mohammed Rafi song “Waqt Ne Kiya Haseen Sitam” which roughly means “What a beautiful injustice time has done (to us).” There are only shafts of light in an otherwise dark space with each going in and out of shadows and light. It begins with his wife Veena in the scene (possibly imagined), looking distraught as the camera pushes in to a close up, cut with a similar closeup of Suresh as well.

Next, in a wide profile angle, Veena and Suresh are on opposite sides of the frame, the light is shining down in a shaft between them. Then, ghost-like, their translucent “spirit” selves separate from their bodies and move towards each other. The spirits come together in the center of the frame, a special effect shot dispatched for emotional utility. Then, Veena walks into a shadow, but when the figure emerges - it’s now Shanthi, the lover he cannot be with, smiling at him as the music swells.

Dutt uses special effects to convey an imagined connection instead of a physical one, the characters in love but never able to be together.

It’s beautiful, it’s magical realism, and it feels as a definitive example of this is the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema. What characterizes the Golden Age of Hindi Cinema? My admittedly scant knowledge is that the Golden Age is this: all the hallmarks of Hindi film as we know now – melodrama, plot contrivances, depths of extreme emotion, goofy comic relief, evocative musical numbers – but told with a level of cinematic artistry and a trust in the audience’s ability to make meaning from the visual language made by the filmmakers. In the decades to follow, it’s clear that many of those hallmarks continue but two aspects don’t as often – the artistry and trust in the audience.

Not to say that Hindi films today aren’t awash with art and color and life – they surely are. But where Dutt uses all the language of cinema through camera, movement, performance, blocking, light, shadow, and nuanced performance (relatively speaking), modern Indian filmmakers tend to rely on spectacle and over-wrought performance and emotion. This is, of course, broad and my own observation as an Indian American filmmaker born and raised outside of that country’s film industry. But to me, it’s clear why so many Indian film goers who are old enough to remember the Golden Age lament the state of modern Hindi cinema. It simply was better in its basic storytelling, if not the technology and craft. Also, note the musical numbers. They express emotion and flow into the story, as opposed to the standalone numbers that follow and become the standard as Indian cinema progresses in the 20th Century.

Shanthi (Waheeda Rehman) beautifully photographed in a musical number, riding in a car. The scene is quintessential Golden Age filmmaking - music used to convey the inner emotions of the characters as we see them falling in love.

One thing that was surprising for all of us in the QFS discussion group was how “modern” Kaagaz Ke Phool felt – a movie about movies and movie makers. The opening shots, if you weren’t paying attention, could’ve been out of Welles or John Ford or Michael Curtiz, reminiscent of American cinema of the 1940s. The film, though indigenously India and about India’s own cinema industry, could’ve been very easily the Hollywood of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) or All About Eve (1950). There’s a timeless elegance to it – and perhaps that, too, is a hallmark of Hindi cinema’s Golden Age.

Dutt (here, as Suresh) and his filmmaking style feels modern - a movie about movies and the movie industry - or at the very least reminded us of timeless American cinema.

Dutt suffered from depression and addiction, as is now well known and was perhaps known then, too. He attempted suicide at least twice before his actual death, in which he may have killed himself (or perhaps accidentally overdosed – it’s not known for sure). This internal melancholy may have led to the abundant and drawn-out final quarter of the film where we watch Suresh’s deep and inexorable decline. This underlying melancholy is a feature of what is considered his preeminent classic, Pyassa (1957) which came out before Kaagaz Ke Phool.

Towards the end of the movie, Suresh, now at true rock bottom – an alcoholic shell of himself – has been cast as an extra in a film where Shanthi is the star. When she realizes who he is, she desperately runs after him but can’t catch him, cut off by adoring fans – an echo of a scene with Suresh from the beginning of the film. The song that plays is “Ud Ja Ud Ja Pyaase Bhaware” and in it, the lyrics say “Fly, fly away thirsty bee. There is no nectar here, where paper flowers bloom in this garden.”

At the beginning of the film, Suresh reminisces about being swarmed by adoring fans

At the end of the film, Shanthi is swarmed by adoring fans and cannot chase down the old, broken down Suresh.

Perhaps Dutt is saying here, as one QFSer pointed out, that there is no glory here in this world where things appear beautiful, like paper flowers, but it’s all an illusion. Paper flowers and fame are not real, will not give you nectar. If you want true meaning, true love, true fulfillment, then you need to seek it somewhere else.

If that’s truly what the filmmaker intended, then this sequence, this final sequence in this master filmmaker’s final film, is a cry for help, placed in a beautifully downcast work of true art. Not all films from the Golden Age of Hindi Film have endured in this way, and perhaps it’s because Dutt placed his finger squarely on something universal, deep, tragic, and true.