R.I.P Michael Winner !

Michael Winner

 The renowned English filmmaker Michael Winner passed away at the age of 77 in London. He is one of my favourite Hollywood filmmakers of action/thriller genre and I grew up watching his movies.  The name Michael Winner may not be as familiar as say, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg or James Cameron. Yet if you go through the list of his movies, many movie-fans could recognise them - esp. if you are a Charles Bronson fan. His famous movies include The Mechanic(1972) Chatos Land (1972) Law Man (1971) The Stone Killer (1973) Scorpio(1973) The Sentinel(1977)Fire Power(1979) and of course, Death Wish- 1,2 & 3. As a hardcore Charles Bronson fan, I've watched most of these movies (esp. during the VHS-era of late 80s and early 90s) over a dozen times!  

Like most action/thriller movies of 1970s, Michael Winner's movies too depicted brutal and graphic violence. Keeping with rebellious spirit of that era, his movies had the existentialist/nihilistic hero - a sort of American Raskolnikov - out to finish off the baddies who had wronged him. Despite its dark and gloomy themes, Michael Winner could often create poetry out of his frames. The brilliant cinematography and music-score (often by Jerry Fielding) came as a bonus.

Winner was a prolific filmmaker who also dwelled into other genres like comedy and drama. But it was his action/thriller movies that achieved greater success. His action sequences were innovative, spectacular and even bizzare. For instance - the (in)famous final scene of Death Wish 3 - the villain (head of street punk gang) was advancing agressively towards Bronson and the only weapon Bronson could lay his hands was a rocket-launcher! The brutal annihilation of that cruel and loathsome villain was exactly the audience wanted to see so badly !

Like some other prominent filmmakers of his era, Michael Winner clearly understood the audience psychology well and often played with it. Even his non-action sequences  had a calm and soothing effect - as if to give viewers a respite from the big bad world of crime & punishment. Just as Fyodor Dostoevsky did with his novels, Michael Winner (and some other film-makers of the 70s) did not glorify violence, but portrayed its ugly side, where there are no permanent winners and losers. The graphic and brutal depiction of violence was used infact to promote the concept of an alternative world - an utopia where there is no crime, no violence and no exploitation.

Guru Dutt : A Life In Cinema

Excerpts from Guru Dutt's biography by eminent film scholar Nasreen Munni Kabir 

Guru Dutt won a five-year scholarship of Rs.75 a month to study at the Uday Shankar India Culture Centre in Almora. Uday Shankar's father was a diwan (minister) in the service of the Maharajah of Jhalawar. When he retired, a pension permitted the family to live in Benaras while Uday Shankar moved to London with his father who practiced law but also staged musical productions in the mid-twenties. Uday Shankar had initially wanted to be a painter, and studied at the Royal College of Arts in London; but soon his passion for dance overtook his other interests. He lived in London for ten years, during which period he worked for a while with the celebrated Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova. In 1929, Uday Shankar returned to India to form a troupe of dancers and musicians whom he took back to Europe to live and perform in Paris. The troupe included his younger brother, Ravi Shankar.

In 1938, Uday Shankar  returned to India to stay, and realised his

dream of opening a cultural centre forperforming arts. Uday Shankar's Centre attracted many talented musicians such as the great Ustad Allaudin Khan together with two promising disciples : his own son, Ali Akbar Khan, and Ravi Shankar, who both spent a short time at Almora. Many talented dancers also worked at the Centre, including Simke from France and Uday Shankar's wife, Amala. Madame Simkie is wellknown in Bombay for havingchoreographed the magnificent dream sequence in Raj Kapoor's Awaara(1951). The style of dancing in this dream sequence is clearly inspired by Uday Shankar's own choreography in his film Kalpana(1948). In Ravi Shankar's autobiography titled My Music, My Life (1969) Ravi Shankar describes his brother's Centre :

Uday Shankar

Uday started this culture center on almost twenty acres of land, and he constructed modern studios for dance, drama and music, with built-in stages, costume rooms, workshops and rehearsal halls. He brought in  the best known gurus of India, among them Shankaran Namboodri, the great Kathakali dancer, from whom Dada (Uday Shankar) received his own dancing training and the only real guru Dada ever had in his life. There were also Kandappan Pillai, one of the notable Bharatanatyam teachers, Manipuri guru Amobi Sinha, and even Allaudin Khan to supervise instrumental music. The center was an ideal combination of the old ashram type of school plus the modern workshop atmosphere one finds in some of the open-air institutions in the West. The teachers and the students were all very close, and Uday , with his magnetism and strong personality. kept the entire complex funtioning.

The Culture Centre attracted students from all over India, and Uday Shankar made sure that it was also possible for students of modest means like Guru Dutt to join. Uday Shankar's main criterion of selection was that a student should be genuinely interested in dance. Many students at Almora became well-known in their own right, and not only in dance but also in other disciplines. 

book : Guru Dutt : A Life In Cinema  by Nasreen Munni Kabir