Gamak Ghar: Pure Cinema

You rarely encounter a piece of art that makes you think about the first principles of the art form. Gamak ghar is one such film. As you watch the film, you start wondering, Is this cinema? It does not have any of the things you will normally associate with a film. It does not have any narrative, not at least explicitly, it does not have any drama, no music and nothing that fits the description of cinema as we have come to understand. 

So one is forced to ask, what is cinema? Cinema is a collection of images that are arranged in a sequence to make you feel and think. In the hands of masters, images are sufficient, but clearly there are only a few masters. Satyajit Ray was one of them, whose images in Pather Panchali were able to transcend time and space and continues to be masterpiece and probably cinema at its purest. Others, who are not masters, acquire the crutches of story, drama, music, background scores, and clever narrative tricks to elevate but also, sometimes, submerge the image. 

Gamak ghar throws away all the crutches and completely relies on images to show, not tell, how life of a family and their home changes as the world around changes. The film, in its defiance, does not care for its characters or audience, metaphor for the life as it is, without caring for those living it. It does not care for the story, the bulwark of contemporary film making. There are no remarkable ‘performances’, there are no close ups, no faces suggesting what to feel. The film captures the being of a space, a certain poetic, a certain rhythm that almost imitates life.