As the train pulls into Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus, dozens of people, keen to gain a headstartover their fellow travellers, begin to spill out from its doors, like seeds bursting from a pod. Theyare followed by more people – and more – and still more, till they flood the entire frame, a sea ofbodies pulsing in the same direction. Beautiful in their togetherness, rendered both anonymousand archetypal by the black and white image, they remind the viewer of the massed audience in amovie theatre. Except that here they face not the screen, but the camera, in a shot that runs for 55seconds. 
And that camera, watching them through a broken windowpane in VT station, was held byApurba Kishore (“AK”) Bir, the cinematographer of Awtar Krishna Kaul’s iconic black andwhite film 27 Down (1973). Backed by a sitar that runs everfaster as though keeping pace with a thousand footfalls, that unforgettable shot still brings tearsto the eyes, capturing as it does the rhythm and speed of Bombay, the romance of train travel,and the unconscious urges seeded in the human body by modernity.And it immediately marked out Bir, a debutant cinematographer fresh from FTII, as a true artistof cinema. 
More than half a century later, Bir, a member of the Technical Committee at IFFI, sits in his chambers, reminiscing in a quavering voice about his youth in Bombay.“70 per cent of the shots in 27 Down are handheld,” he says. “When AK Kaul came to me withthe script – the story of a young ticket collector on the train who is seeking to find a meaning tohis life as a drifter – I said that the only way to establish the authenticity and immediacy of thestory was to use a handheld camera and to shoot really close to the actors using block lenses.” 
“But of course if you shoot in that style in India, crowds immediately gather around the sceneand you lose the sense of naturalness. So for much of the shoot, we would cover the camera witha black cloth and only uncover it at the last moment. Often the crowd emerging from a traindoesn’t see what’s right in front of them.” 
In the film, the hero, played by MK Raina, falls in love with a woman he meets on the train. Therole, of a middle-class girl working for the Life Insurance Corporation of India, was played byRaakhee. What was it to shoot a low-budget movie with a rising star of Bengali cinema andBollywood? “I said to Awtar, ‘Please tell Raakhee not to wear false eyelashes or makeup for herscenes. She is a middle-class girl in the film, and we want the camera to capture her naturalbeauty. He said, ‘Bir, why don’t you go tell her that!’”
“Raakhee was already a bit suspicious of me because of my unusual shooting methods. She said,‘Who is this boy who shoots a feature film with a handheld, and shoots in low light?’ One day,she wanted to see the rushes we had shot. Although this is usually not done, I said to Kaul we shouldlet her see them. After that, she completely understood what we were doing and became achanged person.” 
After 27 Down, for which he received the Best Cinematographer Award at the National FilmAwards, Bir worked on a number of other, usually non-mainstream projects. He was a first-unitcameraman on Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), and went on to win another NationalAward for cinematography for his debut feature as a director, Adi Mimamsa (1991), made in hismother tongue Odia. “I never worked with directors of conventional films,” he says, “becauseour respective visions of cinema would not match.”
Film cinematography has been transformed in our own century by digital. “It’s very convenientto shoot with a digital camera. Almost too convenient,” Bir says. “For me, the flow of images indigital has a somewhat synthetic quality.”“In black and white filmmaking, the subtle tonal qualities and gradations of the image generatean enhanced sense of aesthetic pleasure, because the brain is interpreting all the visualinformation on a much deeper level and the viewer participates in the story in a much richer way." 
"Yes, I miss black and white.”
This piece was first published in The Peacock, the official newspaper of the International Film Festival of India. The portrait of AK Bir is by Assavri Kulkarni and copyright belongs to the photographer.