‘An American in Madras’ Traces Career of Unlikely Pioneer in Tamil-Language Films : India Ink : VISI TILAK FEBRUARY 6, 2014 2:11 AM .

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American director Ellis R. Dungan, left, with actors on the sets of the film "Ponmudi."

American director Ellis R. Dungan, left, with actors on the sets of the film "Ponmudi."Credit West Virginia State Archives, USA

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As a college student in what is now known as Mumbai, the Indian filmmaker Karan Bali watched the 1947 Hindi classic “Meera,” a remake of the 1945 Tamil-language film of the same name, and loved it. However, it was not until in 2004, while researching an article for his portal on Indian cinema, Upperstall, that he discovered the director of both films was an American, Ellis R. Dungan.

He ended up writing an article about the director for the website, but thoughts about Mr. Dungan’s adventures kept recurring as he puzzled over why an American would spend 15 years in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu to make movies during the 1930s and1940s.

Around 2009-10, Mr. Bali had the idea of making a documentary of Mr. Dungan’s life in India, but it was only after he watched several of Mr. Dungan’s films — including “Ambikapathy (1937), regarded one of the greatest hits of pre-independence Tamil cinema, and “Ponmudi” (1949), which was a commercial failure but was notable for its extremely intimate scenes, a novelty in Tamil cinema at the time — that he decided to make the documentary “An American in Madras.”

“I didn’t want the documentary to simply be a curio piece about a gora or vellaikaran (white man) making Tamil films,” said Mr. Bali, 45, in an email interview from Mumbai. “The films showed me that while he didn’t deviate from the themes of the films being made then, it was his cinematic treatment in several sequences that made Dungan stand out from the theatrical quality of many of the films I had seen of the period.”

The documentary, which is screening at the Mumbai International Film Festival on Thursday, traces Mr. Dungan’s career in the Tamil-language film industry, whose center was in Madras, now known as Chennai. He ended up making 13 feature films, 11 in Tamil and one each in Telugu and Hindi, of which only five prints survive.

“His story was never really known except maybe to a few film historians, film scholars and lovers of old Tamil cinema,” Mr. Bali said. “It had to be brought to light, and I’m glad I was able to do so.”

Mr. Dungan visited Madras in 1935 at the invitation of a classmate from the University of Southern California, where Mr. Dungan had studied filmmaking. Intending to stay six months, he spent almost 15 years in India, revolutionizing the Tamil-language film industry in the process.

“I definitely felt he played an important role in helping to technically develop the then fledgling Tamil film industry and that had to be acknowledged and documented,” says Mr. Bali. “For example, sequences like visually showing Ambikapathy’s life flashing before his eyes as he is about to be executed, or the transition of the young Meera to a grown-up Meera during the song ‘Nandabala,’ or even using the day-for-night technique to make the sun a moon in ‘Manthiri Kumari’ – all these were great technical achievements for their time.”

Mr. Dungan’s visual treatment, mobility of his camera, his frequent use of outdoor locales, his proper blocking of scenes and his strong female characters also made his films stand out, Mr. Bali said, even if the plots were nothing new.

Mr. Dungan managed to carve out a special place for himself within the insular Tamil film industry. “While there were other foreign directors working at the same time in India like German, Franz Osten, who made films at Bombay Talkies, Osten worked with his own familiar crew of German technicians while Dungan had to make do with the locals. In that sense, I rate Dungan’s achievements higher,” said Mr. Bali.

Mr. Bali’s research led him to Mr. Dungan’s 2001 autobiography, “A Guide to Adventure,” co-written with Barbara Smik. “The book opened up for me not just details about Dungan’s filmmaking in the Tamil industry, but also his other work in India like his working as the official photographer for the British government or photographing some of India’s most historic events around the period of her independence,” he said.

After researching for a couple of years, Mr. Bali started making the documentary in April 2012, with the help of a school friend who helped finance it. (Mr. Bali declined to reveal how much it cost to make the film.)

*A still from "Manthiri Kumari," a Tamil film directed by Ellis R. Dungan.

-A still from "Manthiri Kumari," a Tamil film directed by Ellis R. Dungan.Credit West Virginia State Archives, USA

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One of the biggest challenges was finding archival footage from the works of Mr. Dungan, who died in Wheeling, W.Va, in 2001. Among his feature films, only “Ambikapathy,” “Sakuntalai,” made in 1940, “Meera,” both in Tamil and Hindi, and “Manthiri Kumari” are preserved at the National Film Archive of India in Pune.

Through Google, Mr. Bali found the email address for Ms. Smik, Mr. Dungan’s co-author. She directed Mr. Bali to the West Virginia State Archives in the United States, where Mr. Dungan had donated all his archival material.

“They were most helpful in providing me with the material they had. Most of the photographs and Dungan’s documentary films, ‘In a South Indian Village’ and ‘Tiger Shikar in India,’ have come from there,” said Mr. Bali. “It’s ironic. These are films made by Dungan in India about India, but we don’t have their prints.”

Another major challenge was finding anything with ties to the American director. All of the studios that employed Mr. Dungan had disappeared, and only a handful of people who had direct connections to Mr. Dungan were still alive.

Among these people, Mr. Bali and his crew interviewed C.M. Muthu, the makeup assistant in “Sakuntalai” and “Meera,” and Radha Viswanathan, an actor who played the young Meera in “Meera” and was also in “Sakuntalai.” The popular Tamil actor Kamal Hassan and the Tamil film historian S. Theodore Baskaran provided historical context. Mr. Bali also tracked down some extremely rare footage of Mr. Dungan on the sets of his first three films in 1935 and 1936.

The film had its premiere at the LV Prasad Film and TV Academy auditorium in Chennai on Dec. 1, the anniversary of Mr. Dungan’s death. Then it was screened at the Chennai International Film Festival on Dec. 14 and at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore in January.

Mr. Bali is taking his film on the festival circuit to drum up more interest so he can get a distribution deal.

“I’m trying to see if we can screen the film in Wheeling, U.S.A., where Dungan lived, on May 11th, his birthday,” Mr. Bali said. “That would be really special.”

Visi Tilak is a freelance journalist based in Boston.

*MGR IN MANTRIKUMARI

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