A Movie Nearly Every Night: Kaagaz Ke Phool

Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) (1959)
Dir: Guru Dutt
Starring: Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, Kumari Naaz

Director starring as director

Okay, so not all Hindi Cinema is happy-go-lucky spectacle cinema. The New York Times turned me onto Guru Dutt when they did a review on a retrospective of his films last month. He was an interesting man, both as an actor of spectacle and as a director defying the superficiality of the same puff cinema that made him popular. Kaagaz Ke Phool was a failure when it was released, probably because it isn't puffy and things don't all turn out okay with a song, but the story was intensely personal to Dutt and the visuals are absolutely stunning.

Shanti and the ray of light ...

... which brings her together with Sinha.

The story is about a director, Suresh Sinha (Dutt), and his relationship with Shanti (Waheeda Rehman), a poor girl who gets hired as an actress when she comes to return his overcoat --- I was about to type "it's a long story," which already makes it well above any typical Bollywood movie, and when it focuses on itself as a film about film it's at its most interesting. Fame is brilliant white with frames filled of crowds of chanting faces and failure is filled with dark, angry faces and then empty isolation.

Sinha coming to the end of his movie

What fascinated me most was how Dutt and cinematographer V.K. Murthy use lighting to create flim reel backgrounds out of windows and ladders in scenes depicting important moments in the director's life. At the end the elderly Sinha descends a film reel staircase as he finishes reflecting on his declining life ("Intellectually, you are finished. You can't make hit films anymore," his producer has told him), and when he first meets Shanti it's under a banyan tree brilliantly backlit by a row of windows echoing the light and dark of film frames.


Amazing, stylish, touching, passionate, poetic, lovely lovely cinema.

It was the first Hindi film in Cinemascope and that alone should generate more interest in its preservation, but, whatever it takes, Criterion Collection, you need to make some space for this and Pyaasa. No excuses. (and please, someone, print up Mr. & Mrs. '55.)