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Film Review: The Churning of Kalki (2015) by Ashish Avikunthak

"This is the pain of inaction."

's place in the Indian cinematic canon is on the liminal margins where avant-garde experimentations take refuge from the mainstream consciousness. His works exist at the intersection of film theory and political ideologies, formulating a unique set of aesthetic principles for the presentation of agitprop.

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” is a notable attempt to document a spiritual and political revolution that has been indefinitely deferred, fragmented by the forces of modernity. Although Avikunthak has previously conducted visual translations of his obsession with the works of Samuel Beckett in films like “End Note” (2005), it reaches new heights in “The Churning of Kalki”. The latter is Avikunthak's interpretation of Beckett's seminal theatrical masterpiece “Waiting for Godot” and continues most of the play's investigations, contextualised differently within frameworks that have Indian history and mythology embedded in them.

Filmed during the Maha Kumbh Mela which is one of the largest gatherings of human beings anywhere on the planet, “The Churning of Kalki” shares a deceptively simple premise that is similar to “Waiting for Godot”. We follow two men, like Vladimir and Estragon, as they search for their Godot: the tenth and final avatar of Lord Vishnu named Kalki. Our voyeuristic expectations are subverted as well, because the spaces they inhabit are desolate and empty, stripped of the carnivalesque elements that form a major part of the Kumbh experience. Avikunthak follows in Beckett's footsteps and takes us on a journey towards a revelation that is inevitably and retroactively empty.

The visual grammar employed by Avikunthak and cinematographer Basab Mullik is integral to the film's experiments, transitioning from grainy, black and white visions of bleak landscapes that evoke the memory of Béla Tarr to bursts of colour that are infused with political energy. We are presented with vignettes of the void, edited in such a way that they gain the ideological momentum as well as the disillusionment of Jean-Luc Godard's works. Theatrical performativity is used to deconstruct the human condition as Avikunthak launches an existential attack against mythological symbols, occasionally losing himself in self-reflexive examinations of the medium and of language itself in order to revive the ghost of Wittgenstein.

Oscillating between Godot and Godard, “The Churning of Kalki” ends up as a fascinating but esoteric effort to theorise the inaction of an illusory revolution. Chairman Mao's teachings whither and fade away when uttered within the void because there are no masses available for mobilisation. The revolution becomes the fever dream of two alienated individuals who are trapped in a unit of crystallised time, forever isolated from the dynamism of an indifferent world.

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