I didn’t know that Hinds once played the perpetrator of a famous covert murder: a night-time guerrilla attack on the Pandava camp in the Mahabharata. Ashwatthama on Peter Brook’s stage and the 1989 screen production of the epic featured a short, lean hindsight Ashwatthama.
I first watched Brooke’s Mahabharata in the early 1990s, but revisited it during an online Mahabharata course and featured scenes from it. You can even say that I was very familiar with it. And yet, I never made the hindsight connection until I was able to flip through a book about the production. It’s something like ‘Whoa! Was it the same person?’ Lately I have seen actors in a variety of shows and movies.
A more recent episode was that the role of teacher Kamala Choudhary in the new series Rocket Boys was played by actress Neha Chauhan, who had played a salesgirl in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love, Sex Aur Dhokha more than a decade ago. LSD was a favorite movie, and I remember what happened to its low-profile actors. But not before I went to IMDB.com before a coworker made a connection between an emotionally tortured T-shirt and jeans-clad Rashmi and the beautiful Kamala.
At such times, one has to wonder whether old memory receptors are deteriorating due to age. For obvious reasons, I prefer the alternative explanation. So, here’s one: This kind of disorientation is inevitable in this chaotic era of movie-and-series watching. We have a bigger pool than ever before to see. Those of us who go out of the comfort zone (instead of following the algorithm) can, in a single week, watch a Tamil film, followed by a Nordic crime series and then a mainstream Hindi film, which dazzles newcomers. We knew in the 1980s who become the grandsons of actors. We encounter many artists across cultures and genres that we may have seen only fleetingly before.
How this affects you – or you even realize it – depends on the type of audience you are. I’m the person who keeps the Wikipedia page of a movie open so that I can see an interesting cast’s other work, or a plot point that wasn’t very clear.
This is partly essential to being a professional writer who must take notes, but it’s also a personality quirk. I don’t understand how people absorb their way through show after show and wonder what they just saw. Even as a young, fresher film buff, I couldn’t watch three or four films one after the other in one festival.
That is not to say that such an illusion never happened then. As a teenager in world cinema without internet in the early 1990s, it was thrilling to make an impression of an actor’s personality and later see him in a very different role or environment. Here, for example, is Toshiro Mifune as the scruffy, bearded samurai of the Edo period in Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 Yojimbo, and then as a clean-shaven cop, dressed in contemporary clothing in Kurosawa’s 1949 Stray Dog Noirish means walking on the streets.
Once, upon realizing that the older Chishu Ryu in the classic Tokyo Story, directed by Japanese Yasujiro Ozu, was still only in his 40s and looked young in other films of the time, I began to wonder if this extraordinary versatility. A case of or a viewer’s disconnect due to unfamiliarity. Would a non-Indian viewer have the same experience if he had first seen Rajesh Khanna as an elderly man in 1983’s Avatar (a Tokyo tale about neglected old people) directed by Mohan Kumar? Would this viewer be surprised if he saw RK as he was then, still playing the role of the romantic hero – even if the movies and performances are pedestrian?
These are questions worth considering. But alas, one can only think of them – if one does – in the very narrow spaces between our binge-watching sessions.
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