Ashim Ahluwalia's latest seeks to 'recreate' Akbar Padamsee's lost film 'Events in a Cloud Chamber'

Events in a Cloud Chamber, a short film by Ashim Ahluwalia (of Miss Lovely acclaim) that will premiere at the Venice Film Festival from August 31-September 10, reclaims a little-known, much-neglected aspect of modern Indian art history –the experiments with cinema by some of the leading artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ahluwalia's film is about, and takes its name from, one such film, a landmark one by painter Akbar Padamsee that was "lost" soon after it was made in 1969. How that happened is not very clear, but like a legend which grows with its enduring mystery, Padamsee is said to have sent the only copy of Events in a Cloud Chamber to an art expo in Delhi where it was "misplaced". Few knew what it was about because it had been shown very few times – until now. Ahluwalia gets the 89-year-old artist to not just speak about the film but also "recreate" it from fading, failing memory.

It gives to the film a ghost-like quality, reinforced by the dim, shadowy light through which the wheelchair-bound artist is pictured, moving about his Mumbai apartment, painting, and playing with a ball with his caregiver. The quaint, sepia-tinted footage from the 1940s and 1950s, and Padamsee's voiceover, quivering with age but wry, insightful and poignant as he reminisces about his life and career, adds to the feel. Padamsee speaks about his father who died when he was 11 and encouraged him to draw on account ledgers and also about Andre Breton, the French writer and surrealist who was responsible for an award he won early on in his sojourn in Paris in the 1950s.

Here's the octogenarian painter's account of how Jean Bhownagary, who headed Films Division at the time, introduced his 11-minute film Szygyzy (also made during this time, but which thankfully survives) to the audience at its first screening: "This film was made by Akbar Padamsee and he is a painter. I don't know why he has made such a film. I promised him that I would show this film to you. But I have to protect myself. So I would like you to take an aspirin before you see this film. Everybody walked out. Nobody liked it."

Ahluwalia, of course, feels very differently. "(Events in a Cloud Chamber) could have been the start of an entirely different kind of cinema," he says. That wasn't to be, but the revelation of Padamsee's abstract practice, common to both his paintings and cinema, may unveil to viewers the many narratives that get ignored by our Bollywood-dominated consciousness.

Perhaps, it will lead us to look up more of the avant-garde films made by artists during this time. MF Husain's Through the Eyes of a Painter is well known, but there are many others like Tyeb Mehta and Nalini Malani whose cinematic output is rarely seen.