Form, Structure and Agency in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71

Mrinal Sen called Calcutta 71 (1972) ‘a kind of collage, a collection of apparently unrelated events and objects’. But in fact, the film bears evidence of anxious and overtly articulate composition, both in the three ‘one-day’ stories, based on literary originals and set in successive historical decades, at its core, and with respect to the ‘immediacy’ of the frame structure through which a young man addresses the audience in agit-prop style. Sen saw both Calcutta 71 and Interview (1971) as non-linear films, by contrast with the ‘linear framework [and] complete narrative’ of Padatik (1973): three works making up Sen’s Calcutta trilogy in a sequence that lays claim both to historical accident and to careful thinking through, even to a process of ideological and cinematic self-education. This essay will examine the form of Calcutta 71 , linking its struggles with structure and composition to the larger historical questions of structure and agency for political actors within the social, economic and material conditions of Bengal in the 1970s.