For years, a Nandi bull replica from the sets of Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996) sat in silent company to the bustling evenings that gathered in my friend Annie Mathews’ home. The statue, part of the art of the same film that Annie had worked on, was one of the many remnants from shoots that were preserved and given a home by her.
These objects — created for the film shoot — had lived their limited tenure on the sets but, when preserved, they acquired associations and memories of their own. Nandi’s second role was just as exciting, and over time, it had firmly contributed to the identity of the space where it lived with other similar carefully preserved objects.
There were other things my friend had, like her carefully prepared Excel sheet of a film production that could take over the large queen-sized dining table and then be folded in James Bond-ish fashion into the smallest piece of paper to be carried in the pocket.
Story of survival
Objects from a film shoot tell the story of the processes and labour that go into creating cinema, the semblance of reality on screen. Sometimes they move houses and change cities with their collectors and take on different identities in different spaces. Sometimes, as their ideal situation should be, they live on in an archive that gives the exact history of their origin and the story of their being.
This story of survival of objects from film sets came back to me when I visited well-known production designer and artiste Aradhana Seth’s unique exhibition Set Reset last month in Saligao, Goa. A Portuguese house that was converted into an exhibition space brought forth every tiny detail that goes into the creation of the magic that is cinema.
The life and soul of a film is made up of the smallest things. Like in Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1998), Lenny’s mother Bunty has a dressing table with glass bottles of lotions and perfumes. In one corner of Seth’s little museum of film set memories, the perfume bottles used in Earth were placed along with the original script and notes marked with corrections. There was a dedicated space for every such film she has designed and gathered objects from.
Trunks full of handwritten design notes by Arundhati Roy made up the section that documented the production of Pradip Krishen’s In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones (1989). Alongside were photographs and production documents from Farhan Akhtar’s Don (2006). The train in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) was not a regular Indian train.
Every detail, from the interior of the train to the dinner plates and the fabric used in a scene, had a story tucked away in it. The process of using the works of miniature artistes, truck lettering, and indigenous styles, for instance. A table had all the stationery with The Darjeeling Limited signage that was a part of the film. A dinner table set in another room was reminiscent of another scene in the film. There were photographs from Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005). A section titled ‘Fragments’ was about the archival materials representing the three elements in Mehta’s Fire (1996), Earth and Water and the diverse social universe created by these films.
The objects bear witness to the intricate work and processes that go into the art direction of films. As you walk into the kitchen, a board saying ‘Airport’ on the tiled roof created a surreal effect. In another room, an intricately designed ‘Juice Centre’ board showed up. Each object had history behind it.
There were residues of street scenes, of villages in Rajasthan, of Jason Bourne’s house in Goa (from the Bourne series), of pre-Partition Lahore, Delhi, bits of London from West is West (2010), remnants of the wedding in Monsoon Wedding (2001), pieces of rooms and images that became almost characters in the films they existed in.
Relating to a scene
Seth, in a conversation with me, spoke of how she realised that things needed to be archived. Her years as a production designer and art director meant that she had a personal relationship with the many things that go into the making of a scene.
The archive keeps the objects alive, even if some of the films themselves disappear from public memory.
The exhibition was produced and put together by Seth through a collaboration with Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. An installation by the students responding to Seth’s archive was also a part of the exhibition. A zoetrope, a device used to animate still images before the invention of film, was displayed alongside images of the closing scene of The Darjeeling Limited .
A large space belonged to The Bourne Supremacy (2004) files. Memos and confidential correspondence between the crew and teams as well as a blueprint of the bridge from where the car plunges into the river gave a sense of the tedious processes that go into even a single frame.
I had my exhibition favourites in that section: an article that gives this write-up a meta-narrative. Pinned among many letters was one from a former editor of The Hindu, a response to a letter sent by the film team seeking permission to place a copy of the newspaper in a scene in the film. The scene may or may not have featured in the film, but the letter remains a reminder of the process of creation of a film’s mise-en-scène .
My other favourite was another letter, a stern one, from the production controller of a film unit, and my friend Annie, who I began this story with. The letter was to a film crew on the need to maintain discretion about the details of shooting a film like The Bourne Supremacy . And just like the objects from a film set, such letters too carry the history of a film within them.
The author teaches English literature at Delhi University. She also writes screenplays and obsesses about her cats.
