A meeting with AK Bir, and 27 Down

As the train pulls into Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus, dozens of people, keen to gain a headstart over their fellow travellers, begin to spill out from its doors, like seeds bursting from a pod. They are followed by more people – and more – and still more, till they flood the entire frame, a sea of bodies pulsing in the same direction. Beautiful in their togetherness, rendered both anonymous and archetypal by the black and white image, they remind the viewer of the massed audience in a movie theatre. Except that here they face not the screen, but the camera, in a shot that runs for 55 seconds. 

And that camera, watching them through a broken windowpane in VT station, was held by Apurba Kishore (“AK”) Bir, the cinematographer of Awtar Krishna Kaul’s iconic black and white film 27 Down (1973). Backed by a sitar that runs ever faster as though keeping pace with a thousand footfalls, that unforgettable shot still brings tears to the eyes, capturing as it does the rhythm and speed of Bombay, the romance of train travel, and the unconscious urges seeded in the human body by modernity. And it immediately marked out Bir, a debutant cinematographer fresh from FTII, as a true artist of cinema. 

More than half a century later, Bir, a member of the Technical Committee at IFFI, sits in his chambers, reminiscing in a quavering voice about his youth in Bombay. “70 per cent of the shots in 27 Down are handheld,” he says. “When AK Kaul came to me with the script – the story of a young ticket collector on the train who is seeking to find a meaning to his life as a drifter – I said that the only way to establish the authenticity and immediacy of the story was to use a handheld camera and to shoot really close to the actors using block lenses.” 

“But of course if you shoot in that style in India, crowds immediately gather around the scene and you lose the sense of naturalness. So for much of the shoot, we would cover the camera with a black cloth and only uncover it at the last moment. Often the crowd emerging from a train doesn’t see what’s right in front of them.” 

In the film, the hero, played by MK Raina, falls in love with a woman he meets on the train. The role, of a middle-class girl working for the Life Insurance Corporation of India, was played by Raakhee. What was it to shoot a low-budget movie with a rising star of Bengali cinema and Bollywood? “I said to Awtar, ‘Please tell Raakhee not to wear false eyelashes or makeup for her scenes. She is a middle-class girl in the film, and we want the camera to capture her natural beauty. He said, ‘Bir, why don’t you go tell her that!’”

“Raakhee was already a bit suspicious of me because of my unusual shooting methods. She said, ‘Who is this boy who shoots a feature film with a handheld, and shoots in low light?’ One day, she wanted to see the rushes we had shot. Although this is usually not done, I said to Kaul we should let her see them. After that, she completely understood what we were doing and became a changed person.” 

After 27 Down, for which he received the Best Cinematographer Award at the National Film Awards, Bir worked on a number of other, usually non-mainstream projects. He was a first-unit cameraman on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), and went on to win another National Award for cinematography for his debut feature as a director, Adi Mimamsa (1991), made in his mother tongue Odia. “I never worked with directors of conventional films,” he says, “because our respective visions of cinema would not match.”

Film cinematography has been transformed in our own century by digital. “It’s very convenient to shoot with a digital camera. Almost too convenient,” Bir says. “For me, the flow of images in digital has a somewhat synthetic quality.” “In black and white filmmaking, the subtle tonal qualities and gradations of the image generate an enhanced sense of aesthetic pleasure, because the brain is interpreting all the visual information on a much deeper level and the viewer participates in the story in a much richer way." 

"Yes, I miss black and white.”

This piece was first published in The Peacock, the official newspaper of the International Film Festival of India. The portrait of AK Bir is by Assavri Kulkarni and copyright belongs to the photographer.