BOMBAY MIX: Indian cinema meets the rest of the world in a mix of movies that share themes, stories and genres. Part of an on-going programme of double bills that invite audiences to explore cinema and make new connections.
SUPAKINO presents a “Living For The City” double bill of Charles Chaplin’s MODERN TIMES (1936) & Raj Kapoor’s SHREE 420 (1955). Ranjit S. Ruprai will be exploring the connections between these films and will be joined by special guest Dr. Kulraj Phullar, film scholar and teacher.
Intro + Modern Times 13:00 Tickets / Intro + Shree 420 15:00 Tickets
MODERN TIMES (1936) Dir. Charles Chaplin
Chaplin’s final outing for his globally iconic character of “The Tramp” is a remarkable silent film from the age of talkies. Despite having a synchronised soundtrack, it is free from dialogue apart from occasional words emitted via mechanical equipment and Chaplin’s gibberish as a reluctant singing waiter, the only time The Tramp has ever spoken.
Although the movie industry had adopted sound and 1930s cinema audiences were lapping up wisecrack-filled screwball comedies, Modern Times was still the most popular film at the British box office that year.
Partly inspired by a debate Chaplin had about humanity and mechanisation with Mahatma Gandhi, this socio-political comedy portrays the struggle to survive in the industrial 20th Century city during an economic depression and asks whether its inhabitants are living in or for the city.
SHREE 420 (1955) Dir. Raj Kapoor
“This is Bombay, brother, Bombay! The big city… if you lie and cheat, there are 420 ways to make a living.” Section 420 in the Indian Penal Code deals with fraud and the number is often used by Indians as shorthand for small-time confidence tricksters and ne’er-do-wells. But to really make it to the top in newly independent India, you have to be a rich and outwardly respectable 420, a “Shree” 420.
Raj Kapoor’s film was not only popular around the world (screening to 10s of millions, the highest-grossing Indian film of 1955 and of all time at that point) but it has also endured as a cinema classic. The romance-in-the-rain scene is as iconic for Indian cinema as Gene Kelly singing and splashing about in the rain is for Hollywood. The beautiful songs and memorable moments have been and continue to be referenced in pop culture to this day.
Kapoor’s eponymous character Raj puts on metaphorical masks to cope with the struggle for the poor to survive in the 20th Century city in a time of mass urban migration. His default mask is an evolution of Chaplin’s “The Tramp” character, a clownish vagrant that pokes fun at this topsy-turvy world and stands on his head to understand it better. He is torn between knowledge and money, wisdom and illusion, and the women that embody them. Come and see the path Raj eventually takes in this rare screening.