Paathshaala — A Revolution Part 20

Paathshaala — A Revolution Part 1

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Edited by Parveen Maghera

Overall, mobile fram­ing is used in Paathshaala to make the viewer almost feel like a stu­dent in the school. There is fre­quent dol­ly­ing of the cam­era through the cor­ri­dors as it films the events hap­pen­ing in the class­rooms through doors and win­dows. It has been shot from the point-of-view of a stu­dent who is walk­ing through the cor­ri­dors and peek­ing through the win­dows at the lessons; at their school­mates, their friends. The audi­ence is brought into the school and made to feel like one who who lives, works and stud­ies in it. After all, Saraswati Vidya Mandir is as much a school as it is one big family.

Low cam­era angles are used in this film to por­tray power and grandeur. The school build­ing itself is fre­quently shot in a low angle, as if the viewer were a small stu­dent look­ing up at its grandeur on his first day at school. When the author­i­ties of Saraswati Vidya Mantir, highly-distinguished men includ­ing the school’s trustee, come to the school in order to con­front Principal Sahay, they are is also shot at a low angle as they exit their car to show how intim­i­dat­ing they would seem to a young child.

The cam­era move­ments become shaky and unpre­dictable at cli­matic points in the movie to por­tray a sense of chaos. An exam­ple would be what fol­lows the scene men­tioned above, the moment when the school author­i­ties walk through the cor­ri­dor towards Principal Sahay’s office. In the scene where Anjali, played by Ayesha Takia, tries to feed a worn-out child his din­ner but finds out he has fallen asleep with­out eat­ing like the rest of his friends, the cam­era moves diag­o­nally upwards and down­wards almost hes­i­tantly in a sharp con­trast to its move­ments in most of the film.

One notice­able error in this film cinematography-wise is the lack of head­room char­ac­ters are given at some points in the movie. The actors often have the top of their head cut-off onscreen for no rea­son, even when they are shot in a medium close-up or medium shot. The lack of head­room how­ever, can be over­looked at some points as there are lot of close-ups in this film, par­tic­u­larly in the con­ver­sa­tions. In con­ver­sa­tions, the over the shoul­der shot-reverse shot is rarely used and Director Milind Ukey relied mostly on alter­nat­ing close-ups between characters.

Lighting for the most part of this movie, and for nearly all of the day­light scenes, mim­ics warm, nat­ural sun­light in India. Unnatural light­ing and shad­ows are rarely used except in the school’s dark­est hours, when the stu­dents finally buckle from the stress the new sys­tem has put on them.

In the scene where Rahul Prakash Udayavar, eager to find out the rea­son for the changes to the school, looks through a file the school’s super­in­ten­dent Grandpa Waghmere has stolen from Principal Sahay’s office, shad­ows cover a large per­cent­age of this frame and effec­tively por­tray the emo­tional den­sity of the situation.

In the Teri Marzi musi­cal sequence, Anjali has visions of the tor­tured young school­child­ren reach­ing out to her. Harsh under-lighting (ghoul light­ing) is used to por­tray how the stu­dents are mere ghosts of their for­mer noisy, happy selves.

Setting Paathshaala apart from other Bollywood films are how the song and dance sequences are shot, and how they fit into the movie. The musi­cal sequences all take place within the Saraswathi Vidya Mandir com­pound and enhance the sto­ry­line, some­times even push­ing the plot forward. The song Khushnuma for example, details the feel­ings of the stu­dents as they dive head­first into the new sys­tem the school is run­ning under.

The com­po­si­tional con­cept of shal­low depth is used very often in this film. Great depth is rarely seen. Even when the char­ac­ters in the back­ground are in focus, those in the fore­ground are often blurred. Director Milind Ukey did use this small depth of field to his advan­tage to bring atten­tion to dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters at dif­fer­ent times in the same scene. Switching the camera’s depth of field enabled him to first shoot two or three char­ac­ters and their reac­tions in focus, and then to show the change of expres­sions in the other three char­ac­ters by mov­ing the posi­tion of the camera’s depth of field.

Paathshaala is a film, there is no doubt­ing that. But once shown to a large audience, the impact of a film can go beyond what it earns at the box office. If you are an older per­son, this movie will prompt you to think of your high school days and if you had fun, you would do some­thing to make sure kids every­where could share in the same joy you had. If you are a younger per­son watch­ing, you will relate to the char­ac­ters. I myself, like one of the stu­dents in the film was infat­u­ated with my English teacher when I was in Secondary School. It is a delight­ful film to watch, remem­ber, and to make you remem­ber. Attendance for this movie is compulsery.

The end­ing is happy, but there is a lack of com­ple­tion to the story. Somehow though, I can’t help but to think that this was on pur­pose. Did Saraswati Vidya Mandir ever recover from the sys­tem. Was the new sys­tem even abol­ished? Did the money-hungry lions that forced this new sys­tem onto the school ever get locked in a cage? And if they were, where did the school go for financ­ing? Maybe these ques­tions should be taken out of the con­text of the movie and put into the con­text of not just India’s Education sys­tem, but in that of every coun­try in the world. The answer is up to us to decide.

The job of a film­maker isn’t always to pro­voke ques­tions and then pro­vide you with the answers. Maybe he just wants to give us a test, and it’s up to us to do a bit of self-directed learn­ing. After all,

“When it’s about future, every ques­tion needs to be answered.”