Duncan Fallowell at the Film festival in New Delhi

This rgport almost did not reach You. So many times. That, one gathers, is how things are done out here. From the very beginning, While Conrad Rooks's genderless epicenity was being shown on the inaugural film, the total liquor grant for the following knees-up (India's most lavish since the princes were dismissed) was placed under sequestration by Delhi Town Hall for not having the proper ticky-tacky permits. Grateful hangovers were salvaged only by a private act of the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. Quite apart from India's love of bureaucracy riding headlong into its concomitant need for corruption if anything whatsoever is to happen, a wish to engage foreign guests by entertaining them to death very nearly succeeded with a concussive onslaught of celluloid, accompanied by a rearguard action from banquetry. With an unwieldy daily proigramme of screenings, parties,, tours, unsolicited visitations bringng anything from a bouquet of flowers on New Year's Day to a declaration of undying love, latenight fetes twitching until breakfast, and all the surprises, one was always finding that essentials had turned into options from which it Was often not far to oblivion. One

moved in a state of waking forgetfulness and intense pleasure. The surprises were legion from the word go and that word was 'Falliwell', roneo-ed in billions. Only Mrs Gandhi had it right and one is still wondering how.

Example: awfully sorry unable to attend Mukti in Kannada ("one of the prominent languages in the southern part of India") at Armed Forces Cinema because clashes with major statement from Indonesian nouvelle vogue in the competition — Where Are You, Mother? ("the search of a shoeshine boy for his mother"), an .underbuffed optional it turned out — or was it a loud remark from Gina Lollobrigida at the Paris-Asia do about how hungry she was? Miss Gina was always described in print as "actress-turned-photographer" except in one paper-turnedhobbledehoy which preferred "sexpot-turned-camerawoman." For this occasion her function was guest of honour-turned-hostess. Anyway, however pitiful that indigenous curiosities should be pole-axed to nowhere by outsiders, the festival included 'international' In its title at every opportunity.

A day or two into the second week therapeutic bitchiness began to precipitate in the unlikeliest quarters like squirts of hot rain, rather thrillingly after a week of coy politesse which prevented anyone who was anyone leaving the lift first so that the doors impatiently closed and we were all whisked back up to the top floor and had to start over again. Some were so polite that they can never have extricated themselves until everyone else was in bed when presumably they collapsed on to the ground floor with a chronic bladder problem. Jagat Murari, the festival director, had to be in ten places at once and rather cleverly combined politeness with paranormal duties by using yoga, but while he abstractedly crossed his legs in the small hours, bowels elsewhere dripped and ran, eyeballs fell out at the wrong moment and had to be teased back with soup spoons to avert an accident. There was a small group of Wives, too, and popular among them were the vapours, accompanied by moaning and symptom-swopping 'phone calls, an affliction brought about by having a great deal to do with no apparent reason for doing it. Thus hubby was liberated for business. Not that much business was done. One Indian writer thought this a bad thing, failing to see that though one might commit oneself to gestures while drunk and distracted one could not honourably commit oneself to a signature. The Indian press seemed to regard the entire operation as a bad thing and hardly ever stopped saying so. Perhaps, unlike us, they were not in a position to put it down to culture shock. There was reason to boohoo the disappearance of tickets by the cinema, absorbed by the vora ciously throbbing gorge of the black market, especially if yours were among them. Yet the papers were mewling how dreadful a film was long after everyone else had forgotten the next one, were rant ing at organisers and apologising piously to foreign delegates on behalf of the people of India long after the delegates themselves had discovered the awe, goodwill and opening of doors which the presentation of a 'delegate card' uncannily effected.

Some cock-ups were pretty disjunctive, temperamentally speak ing, until one got the hang of it and realised that chaotic generosity was the most typical and attractive feature of the festival. The Indians are not adept at organisation. You might just as well blame the Empire State Building for being tall. How ever if you assume that it has all been taken care of and let your assumption show, you do find that it will be, in an embarrassed attempt to disguise the fact that it hasn't been. All the same, 'Festival Control' was to be avoided if possible, a room of booby traps and alive with the skuffle of passing bucks. Advice to the neophyte: for a visit there it is wise to take some kind of sedative. But do not forget to pack a punch. Failure to do so can delay your departure indefinitely.

And then there was the 'Jury', chaired by Satyajit Ray who, as India's most filleted 'director, is on intimate terms with God hereabouts and frequently not in when He calls. His eight underlings comprised many names one had not heard of, being no veteran festival hopper, such as Mr Merjhui from Persia. He only materialised for the concluding ceremony and so was replaced by Michael Relph from Tring and the NFPA. Frank Capra was also a juror. You could remember him for making the original Lost Horizon. Strangely the Lost Horizon shown during the vestival was the more recent musical version which the spread of the hesitant dollar now makes it impossible to out-camp.

There was also a UNICRIT jury of five. This set-up first came to the notice of your own correspondent when he found himself announced a member of it one morning.

It never quite rang as the august critical assembly one might have expected. Betty Denby from The Film-makers' Newsletter in New York had not run across it before either. Likewise Karena Niehoff who criticises in West Berlin and appears on the official list as Karen Kitchoff. (Mismanagement has its sublime breaks.) Fourthly Mr Das gupta, a writer on cinema from

Calcutta. His daughter-turned--actress was a member of the official Jury and knew English idioms such as "it takes guts to". We even had a

secretary who secretaried like nobody's business. The prospect of a judgement

cathedra does pull together what

would otherwise become a random agglomeration of shows and, more importantly, a point at which a stop

can be put to the proceedings. Alas

when the awards were announced it became clear that the official

Jury was a body plausibly more eccentric even than our own. The 'Golden Peacock' went to Dreaming Youth from Hungary.. Set in 1906, it is a modest film, pleasantly narrow-chested, which, had it not received this bizarre glare of light; would have been happy to slip in unnoticed between the soup and the fish. Zelito Viana was chosen as best director for his film Alma, the tale of a Brazilian prostitute set• in the 'twenties in Sao Paulo before it became 'Shock City'. Best actress was Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were, a woman of nasal talent who, in one interview, "hates singing". Best actor was Behruz Vousoghi in Tangsir. This excellent picture is presently memorable for breaking a rule about sub-titles. It was sub-titled in French, construed into English via loudspeakers, on top of the original Persian. It was claimed by some that this all but rendered the actual, spoken dialogue incomprehensible and therelore the quality of Mr Vousoghi's acting a matter for dispute. That his flair for expressions of bewildered melancholy came across nonetheless, against mighty mechanical odds, probably swung the day. The British entry was Stardust which, among the heavy-weather social 'consciousness that is now the only kind of artistic respectability in the 'Third World, was at least a highly .watchable diversion.

It is interesting to. see that the kitchen sinkage we associate with the 'fifties has just become the rage in Third World cinema circles. 'Entertainment' is a dirty word and 'escapism' is used in its stead. India's most expensive film came out fifteen years ago, eastern Busby Berkeley with a hundred belliferous tarts dancing on drums against exotic architectural backdrops. It is called Chandra Lehha and one is considered dodgy for wanting to see it. The official Indian entry was Kaadu, also in Kannada, locally much awarded. Compared to other essays in social realism it contains a great deal. Usually what one gets is a single Fitzrovian cliche battered to nullity over several hours, Indian films being considerably longer than ours and without intervals.

But unless the message thumping is refined by imagination into something more seductive, these film makers and the government departments which support them will make no significant erosion into the huge ritz machine of Bombay, home of lonely hearts and tinsel idols, the film capital of South Asia, fed by hundreds of fan gossip' magazines and the nearest thing to Hollywood since Hollywood died.

The Brutafisation of Franz Blain (West Germany, director: Reinhard Hauff) was given the critics' award. Set in a German prison, its energy, action, tautness of a top-class thriller, and intellectual subtlety has everything to teach the realists of the emergent countries. In a festival which all but excluded entertainment from its competitive section, Hauff virtually sends all the others back to school. Perhaps this is why it was pointedly ignored in the 'Peacock' awards from judges obviously discomforted by the realisation that they have so much more to learn. Unless you like Clint Eastwood, conveyor-built Westerns, in which case Russia did a passable cover job with At Home Among Strangers, pseudo-rock music included (where did they get it from?), there is only one more picture to mention, France's The Empty Chair.

What was this bathetic whey doing in the competition at all? The audience whistled it out of court in the first twenty minutes. When the Jury voted it best film on behalf of the Cine Club of Calcutta, the only stunning decision they made, and presented it with a Bengal tiger, one went way beyond logical impossibility and into the realms of , faery.

If the artistic outcome of the festival was inconsequential, India could profit elsewhere, indeed can only profit since the government outlay was recouped the day the box offices opened, sold out and shut to the public. Cromwellian censorship laws, forbidding even The Legendary Screen Kiss, advance publicity which empasised erotic content, and the knowledge that this would be the first and last time opportunity for India to see in complete form many illustrious films from abroad, had the citizens of Delhi in a prurient frenzy.

Life savings were exhumed for a ticket. One to The Godfather had the cachet of a knighthood for, inscrutably, the book is an Indian cult, even among illiterate classes. Although fingers were burned because newspapers consistently illustrated their articles on the same principle as cheap paperbacks choose their covers, many top grade pictures like Clockwork Orange, Amarcord, and Savages, were shown to the public uncensored as part of a wider programme sponsored by the festival in commercial town cinemas. To my• knowledge no one has run irredeemably amok as a result.

A personal gripe is that the foreign delegations were given no manageable guide to the Indian cinema shows, when clearly there ' was so little free time for them to explore the subject themselves. But however cocooned and exclusively air-conditioned life was made for us, it is a new experience to have an elephant drop pats the size of Lake Chard below one's balcony each afternoon, it is a new experience to see cows wander into the most international, un-Indian spot in town and make hay with the rosebeds until shooed away by large peacock fans. So there were times when one took the leafy view across the Diplomatic Enclave to where flaps the Union Jack and floodlight is played on the Royal Arms a considerable time before sunset just in case there are clouds, and found an extra comfort.

Postscript. These last words are being written at 7 a.m. in a large, leaky colonial house at the corner where Aurangzeb Road and Mansingh Road meet. A band is rehearsing up and down the Rajpath for Republic Day. From where I sit in a long terrace room with absolutely no post-war fittings and a few huge sticks of furniture left to the management of a giggly Sikkh, it is the only sound and muffled by trees. It could be 1928. So I wonder who used to live here, what went on. If any reader can recall, however little, please write. It is more than curious, for the ghosts are very charming. In contrast to the synopsis of the 'Newsreel for 1974' now showing in Delhi picture houses which includes the paragraph, "The year also marked the first underground nuclear implosion carried out in Rajasthan which put India on the nuclear map of the globe."