Kalpana

Imagination

by Uday Shankar

India - 1948

Tuesday, June 4th • 6PM
At Chaktomuk

Feature Film – 160mn

B&W

Hindi with English subtitles

Screenplay Uday Shankar

CinematographyK. Ramnoth

Music Vishnudas Shirali

Cast Uday Shankar, Amala Shankar, Lakshmi Kanta

Format 35mm – Mono

Genre Dance-Drama

First Release 1948

Restored version 2009

Production Uday Shankar

Synopsis Autobiographical narrative of a dancer who dreams of establishing his own academy (starring Uday Shankar and his wife, the great Amala Shankar – the film also marks the debut of Padmini, who was 17 years old at the time).

About The plot is autobiographical. Uday Shankar ran his famous dance academy in the Himalayas. He closed the academy in late forties and started work on this film that took four years to complete. His assistants included Guru Dutt and sitar maestro Ravi Shankar while famous writer Amritlal Nagar wrote the Hindi dialogues. Uday Shankar plays the lead named Udayan while his wife Amala plays the leading lady Uma in the film.
The film has a very complex narrative structure held together by many stories within it – Udayan and Uma’s love story, Udayan’s dream to set up his dance academy. This narrative structure is quintessentially Indian where the story has other stories within it and flow of the narrative is deliberately broken to introduce characters and their stories. Kalpana was shot at Gemini Studios over five years and inspired the 1948 Tamil film, Chandralekha by S. S. Vasan, which was shot at the same studio and featured the song with dancers over large drum sequence; it was a major success unlike Kalpana which did not do well at the box office. In 2010, it was being restored by the World Cinema Foundation directed by Martin Scorsese.

Selected filmography of Uday Shankar (1900-1977)

1948 – Kalpana (Imagination)

With the courtesy of World Cinema Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna.