Artistic Path Poem by gershon hepner

Always the artistic path
is lonely. Who
is Sylvia? Franz asked. She’s Plath,
but I’m the Jew
who writes outside the box and jar,
a bell whose views
should cause no harm because they are
unlike Ted Hughes’.

Inspired by Rachel Saltz’s article on Guru Datt, whose movies are being screened in the New York Film Festival (“Recalling Indian Cinema’s Orson Wells, ” NYT, October 7,2009) :
Guru Dutt, the great poet of Hindi cinema, was also in his heyday — the 1950s and early ’60s — something of a matinee idol. No wonder: with his soulful eyes, sensuous mouth and flyaway locks of wavy hair, he looked like the brooding artist he so often played. But Dutt, who has been called the Orson Welles of India, was first and foremost a director and producer, one who created an unmistakable personal voice within the commercial industry. Along with Raj Kapoor (the showman to Dutt’s poet) and a few others, he ushered in what most consider the golden age of Hindi cinema. Revered in India, he is too little known here, a wrong that the New York Film Festival helps to right with its series “A Heart as Big as the World: The Films of Guru Dutt, ” beginning on Wednesday. The series — astonishingly the first American retrospective of his work — includes movies he directed and starred in, as well as a couple that he produced (and starred in) , and a documentary, “In Search of Guru Dutt.” The tragic-poet image clings to Dutt partly because his life, too, seemed to follow a Hindi movie script. It’s hard to resist the temptation to link him to the character he plays in “Kaagaz ke Phool” (“Paper Flowers, ” 1959) , a successful film director who falls from grace and dies a destitute alcoholic. Told in flashback, the story is bracketed by scenes of the old director wandering a vacant back lot. At the end, he sits one last time in a director’s chair in an empty studio. He dies there, just as the crew arrives. Only one man recognizes him. “Kaagaz” was a flop, and Dutt was heartbroken: he never directed another movie, though he continued to produce. He died in 1964 at 39, a possible suicide, having mixed sleeping pills and alcohol. In “Pyaasa” (“Thirst, ” 1957) , his other masterpiece, Dutt again plays an unhappy artist, this time an unemployed poet. Like the hero of “Kaagaz, ” he has been rejected by his family, only to find the artistic path a lonely one. These characters stand apart from the crowd in newly independent India, depicted by Dutt as spiritually bankrupt, a country that values money over art, “that worships idols and destroys humans, ” as the poet in “Pyaasa” says.

10/7/09