A dark, brooding masterpiece, Kaagaz ke Phool explores the make-believe world of the movies. Quasi-autobiographical in nature, it portrays the life and times of a filmmaker, depicting failure, oblivion and death as the inevitable outcomes of his journey. The theme proved to be somewhat prescient, since Kaagaz ke Phool was a commercial failure, and Guru Dutt never put his name to a film again, hurtling into a state of depression which led ultimately to his tragic suicide in 1964. The plot concerns Suresh Sinha, a famous film director whose marriage is on the rocks. When he grooms a young woman named Shanti to fame and stardom, the gossip about their love affair troubles Suresh’s daughter. For her sake, Shanti withdraws from films. Suresh’s fortunes begin to decline and he takes to drink, slowly losing his grip on himself.

The Realm of Shadows
Guru Dutt, who died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, is today recognised as one of the masters of the world cinema, and as a creator of haunting images on the big screen.
Many historians and critics see the film song, the sine qua non of the Indian cinema, as a deviation from a realistic idiom or as a concession to the box-office. But some of the greatest Indian directors have been able to lift the song to great lyrical heights and dramatic intensity. Guru Dutt was certainly a leading exponent of the form. Throughout his short but dazzling career, he moved with great ease from the spoken word of the dia- logue to the measured words of the lyric, merging them seamlessly with the help of skilful editing.
Kaagaz Ke Phool provides several examples of his mastery. In the first ten minutes of the film,  intensely  powerful images move smoothly into a flashback. Preferring powerful montage to a straightforward narrative, Guru Dutt creates a daring sequence, stunning in its beauty and lyricism. The vast spaces of a film studio – with its lights, its dark corners, its high ceilings, catwalks, cranes and trolleys, all engulfed in complex patterns of light and shadow – are stretched to their expressive limits by the Cinemascope format of the film.
Kaagaz Ke Phool was the first Indian film made in Cinemascope. Guru Dutt, however, was a seer of cinema who realized the potential of Cinemascope for his self-reflexive film about the film industry and the struggle of an artist to retain his own creativity. He used the format to express the loneliness of a man surrounded by vast spaces mute to his suffering. This was in 1959, a year before the masters of European cinema explored the artistic (as against the merely spectacular) potential of Cinemascope with films such as L’avventura (1960), La dolce vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1962).
Guru Dutt used lighting to pick up the glint in an eye and the flicker of a facial muscle, making them speak with rare eloquence and grace. He and his cameraman V. K. Murthy created brooding, introverted images with rich velvety blacks, casting a mood of foreboding and gloom. The world they take you into is oneiric, with its own laws of light and shade.

Arun Khopkar