{"id":2260,"date":"2015-09-30T06:12:53","date_gmt":"2015-09-30T00:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=2260"},"modified":"2017-09-30T06:20:14","modified_gmt":"2017-09-30T00:50:14","slug":"hrishikesh-mukherjee-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/hrishikesh-mukherjee-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Hrishikesh Mukherjee: Giving Cinema a New Definition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Hrishikesh

Hrishikesh Mukherjee<\/p><\/div>\n

Hrishikesh Mukherjee gave Hindi cinema a new definition when he graduated from editing to direction without having given up his first love \u2013 editing. He defined Hindi mainstream cinema in terms of wholesome family entertainment richly interwoven with a strong storyline, good music, solid, full-blooded characterizations and a probing, dissecting look into human inter-relationships.<\/p>\n

In essence, honesty has been the hallmark of his films which neither pretended to be of the arty-intellectual kind nor compromised to the demands of the box office. Yet, they grew in popularity in terms of the box office taking veterans by surprise. . Hrishi-da belonged to an era where film people did not wear that imaginary halo of stardom around their heads that alienated them from the mainstream. It was easy to draw him out and make him talk about his long experience in cinema.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I am the only director to have directed the triumvirate of Hindi cinema \u2013 Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor,\u201d he says proudly.<\/p>\n

Mukherjee began his career in 1945, where he learnt editing on the job at New Theatres in Calcutta. \u201cThere was no FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) then and we learnt mostly through observing others at work, or while working ourselves. Those who could have taught us did not. World War II brought a slump in film production and then, those who were willing to teach, could not.\u201d<\/p>\n

His first independent work as editor was for the Bengali film Tathapi<\/em>. \u201cI then came down to Bombay in 1951 to team up with Bimal Roy who too, had just migrated.\u201d He edited films like Maa<\/em>, Do Bigha Zamin, Parineeta<\/em>, etc. By then, he was bent upon getting into direction seriously and his first effort at producing and directing his own film was Musafir,<\/em> composed of three short stories conceived by Mukherjee himself while Ritwik Ghatak collaborated on the script.<\/p>\n

Sa re ga ma<\/strong><\/em> (Chupke Chupke<\/em>, 1975)<\/span><\/p>\n