The trailer for Eagoler Chokh by Arindam Sil is clocked at 1 minute 48 seconds on youtube. Barring the animated logo on the production house and the list of credits at the end followed by various website links, the actual trailer begins at 0:05 seconds and the last image begins to fade at 1:28 seconds as the film title appears. That’s 1 minute 23 seconds or 83 seconds. And the number of shots stuffed within that runtime is 77! That’s an average of 0.92 shots per second. How is one supposed to figure out what is happening at all under such circumstances?
Although the fundamental idea is the same, the shift from analog to digital has given rise to a certain practice in editing where the pace of the action on screen is increased manifold by cutting it off into shots of smaller duration and joining them together. The effect is an artificial rise in the kinetic energy and the sheer frequency of transitions, be it cuts or fades, has a dizzying an disorienting effect on the viewer’s central nervous system and thus the body experiences a sense thrill which has absolutely got nothing to do with the content.
The trailer in discussion can be considered to be among the worst examples of such a practice. Shamelessly cashing in on the success of his earlier film featuring the character played by Saswata Chatterjee, it throws an array of superficial, generic and cliché information to the audience about a lonely detective, a murder in a posh neighbourhood, lustful characters, a couple of gunshots and lots of people running around. One is just supposed to weave a plotline around that. Really? And added to that a suffocating verbosity which makes the set of images totally pointless. Producing an audio visual of such low standards and shallow intellect is a total disgrace to the great tradition of detective fiction. It is a fraud in the name of cinema. It is a despicable attempt to hoodwink the audience and it shows in every frame!
Arup Ratan Samajdar
