Story, Synopsis, Trivia, Dialogues for Kagaz Ke Phool (1959)

Kagaz Ke Phool is a 1959 Indian Bollywood film released on 1959. The commercial failure of this film on its initial release prompted Guru Dutt, by some accounts, to stop taking directorial credit for his films. The baroque. quasi-autobiographical fantasy has over time become his best-known film next to Pyaasa (1957) and couple be regarded as Indias equivalent of Citizen Kane (1941). It tells, in flashback, the story of Suresh Sinha (Dutt), a famous film director. His marriage to Bina (Veena), the daughter of a wealthy parvene (Mahesh Kaul), is wrecked bacause film directing is a job lacking in social status. Sinha is denied access to his beloved daughter Pammi (Baby Naaz) who is sent to a private boarding school. On a rainy night Sinha meets Shanit (Rehman) who turns out to be ideally suited to act the part of Paro in Sinhas film Devdas. Shanti because a star and gossip columns link her with Sinha. The distraught Pammi pleads with Shanti to quit films, which she does, and her withdrawal leads to a rapid decline in Sinhas fortunes. Soon he is forgotten and destitute man. Eventually, after some painful adventures (reminiscent of Emil Janningss fate in Sternbergs The Last Command, 1928) Sinha is found dead in the directors chair in an empty studio. With a more complex narrative structure that Pyaasa, the film can be seen as a meditation on the control of space, itself an eminently cinematic concern and brilliantly rendered by Murthys astonishing Cinema Scope camerawork. The film dramatises the conflict between spaces controlled by the director and spaces contraining him, spaces he can enter and those from which he is excluded. Eventually these tensions are resloved in the enclosed and womblike but huge and free-seeming space of a deserted film studio. The tragic refrain Waqt hai meherbaan of the song Dekhi zamaane ki yaari, written by Azmi, repeated by throughout the film, endows the narrative with an epic dimension enchanced by Burmans music. The original Cinema Scope negative has been damaged and few scope prints survive (two are at European tv stations). [Source: Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema] Check out this page for more updates on Kagaz Ke Phool.