The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Mrinal Sen pens his memoirs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 04, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Mrinal Sen pens his memoirs

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, AUG. 3. Describing himself as "a film-maker by accident and an author by compulsion", renowned director Mrinal Sen on Monday said he wished he could live all over again. "But the greatest tragedy of life is that we get to live only once. If given another chance, I could have corrected whatever mistakes I had committed and accomplish whatever I have failed to do," said the founder of a new genre of "New Cinema" after the release of his memoirs titled "Always Being Born".

Narrating how he came into the world of film-making, Mr. Sen said while browsing through books at the Imperial Library (now the National Library) in Calcutta in 1940s, he stumbled upon an unknown book, "Film'', by Rudolf Arnheim, that attracted him towards the world of cinema. "This was how my journey began. My life as a film-maker has been a mix of success and failure. But I travelled across the globe and got to know the world," said the director of 28 feature films and four documentaries made in languages varying from Bengali to Oriya, Hindi and Telugu.

Talking about his forthcoming venture, the octogenarian film-maker said he was thinking of making a film on the myths of our times. "I want to break these myths. We have been fantasising and building myths because we are afraid of ourselves and tend to run away from reality. We know this, but are not ready to accept it. So I plan to expose ourselves and break our myths," he asserted.

Mr. Sen, a recipient of several national and international awards for film-making, said his book was neither history nor a chronology of his life. "For me, writing the book was like playing a game of connecting myself with my past and having a continuous dialogue with my past. It is about me and our own times," revealed the noted film-maker. Calling him a "phenomenon of the cine world", the Lok Sabha Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, who released the book published by Stellar Publishers Pvt. Ltd., said Mr. Sen had achieved his high stature because of his pan-Indian outlook, his world-view, artistic sensibility and sensitivity towards society.

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