The population density of Mumbai makes survival a mad scramble. Apart from a couple of art museums that are seldom interesting, there's nothing really happening that can grab anyone by the scruff of one's neck. The civic authorities, too, are apathetic because they are purportedly too busy tackling civic issues and believe that lack of public spaces should hardly be something the public should be kvetching about.
In the meanwhile, NCPA and PVR Cinemas are doing their mite for the arts scene with a bevy of screenings. Last month, I watched a couple of gripping documentaries on two Western painters: Vincent van Gogh and Rembrandt. Here were perfect examples of art documentaries without the furniture of art documentaries, which is usually Wikipedia-like chronological recollection of the artists' lives, too much emphasis on the important works, nary an insight into the artistic process. As someone who never saw any painting of his in person, it was instructive for me on what Rembrandt can teach us about a selfie. Here was someone whose persistent muse was his own self and really knew how to daub a lot of paint and work it into a solid texture. The documentary, essentially shot at Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the biggest repository of the masterful Dutch painter's works, was a splendid sneak peek into how he evolved from ensemble pieces to utterly gorgeous self-portraits. Only after watching this could I completely grasp what Nina Siegal meant in her The New York Times piece when she wrote: "The most important lesson Rembrandt can teach us about the selfie, perhaps, was that in order to begin to understand others, we must first look at ourselves. But it is a process that begins with really looking, and not just pointing and clicking." Equally enchanting was the van Gogh documentary laden with the perfect kind of pathos considering the early death of its subject.
Even in this age of YouTube, these documentaries deserve to be viewed within a cavernous auditorium that allows one to immerse oneself into the kind of solitude required for understanding the inner workings of a painting like, say, Rembrandt's Syndics of the Drapers' Guild or van Gogh's The Potato Eaters. Later this month, NCPA will show a couple of more such screenings on Vermeer and the Impressionists. You could give them a miss only at your intellectual peril.
Equally stimulating are NCPA's near-monthly screenings of recordings of plays at London's National Theatre. Over the last four years, I have witnessed some of the most spectacularly mounted plays that complement the hilariously acerbic writing. Most recently, I watched the infuriatingly brilliant play, Man and Superman, written by the redoubtable George Bernard Shaw. This ravishingly funny play, with Ralph Fiennes as protagonist, showed me why exactly Shaw's mastery of the written word remains unheralded. It is so funny and ponderous that I'm fairly convinced that I was in as many splits as the audience that saw it in person. PVR is also showing some of the older National Theatre plays in all the metros across the country. If I could, I would physically implore you to check out these plays, which are utterly transforming.
Another venue in Mumbai that has been a cultural haunt for me lately is Matterden in Lower Parel. This near-dilapidated theatre has been refurbished into a proper single-screen theatre, which shows the latest English and Hindi movies apart from an old foreign movie every week. I watched everything from early Kubrick to late Bergman here in the past 18 months. Recently, I watched David Lynch's Elephant Man on the big screen, which was a stunning experience. Lynch's brooding eponymous character played with heartbreaking brilliance by John Hurt deserved a trip to the cinema. Every year, during the course of eight days, whole of cultured Mumbai descends at the International Film Festival but that enthusiasm is rarely seen at the screenings at Matterden, which go completely empty. As much as the latest darlings of Cannes deserve to be watched at such festivals, it'll amount to nothing if we don't pay enough attention to their precursors.
