 |
| The NYT obituary photograph of Girish Bhargava. (Photo by Sara Krulwich) |
... Mr. Bhargava mixed the various shots and techniques available to a film editor in a way that both made for engaging viewing and earned the confidence of the great choreographers whose work he was depicting. ...=====
Mr. Bhargava edited films that captured the work of Balanchine, Peter Martins, Bob Fosse, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and many other prominent choreographers, in the process creating an archival record of a genre that had historically been difficult to preserve. And through Dance in America and other television work, he spread the art form to people who might not have been able to get to a theater.
“Girish is responsible for editing some of the most important and brilliant dance programs of our time,” Jodee Nimerichter, who worked under him as an associate producer and is now executive director of the American Dance Festival, said by email. “He brought dance into the homes of hundreds of thousands of people, including many young dancers who were inspired to grow up and pursue a career as a choreographer, dancer or administrator.”
Girish Kumar Bhargava (pronounced BAR-gah-vuh) was born on Aug. 17, 1941, in Delhi, India. His father, Jagat, was a lawyer and judge, and his mother, Shanti, was a homemaker.
After graduating from the Birla Institute of Technology with a degree in engineering, he took a job at All India Radio, and then, at age 24, was offered an internship at the German television broadcaster ZDF. Two years later he came to the United States for a job at CBS. ...
In 1971 he moved to the New York public television station WNET to work as an editor on The Great American Dream Machine, a satirical variety show that featured performers like Chevy Chase and Albert Brooks.
Then came his first dance assignment, a documentary with the choreographer Antony Tudor and American Ballet Theater, and in 1976 he was delegated to work with the directors and producers Merrill Brockway and Emile Ardolino on Dance in America, a new show being produced by WNET. ...
“What he brought was a musicality,” said Virginia Kassel, a longtime friend who worked with Mr. Bhargava on another WNET series from the 1970s, The Adams Chronicles, which she created. “His sense of movement and feeling was unbelievable. Martha Graham wouldn’t work with anybody else. And she was not the most flexible person in the world.”
Dance in America became part of the Great Performances series on PBS, and Mr. Bhargava’s work was seen nationally. His dance work came to be so well regarded that Mr. Ardolino brought him in to help edit some crucial scenes in a low-budget movie he was directing. The film, released in 1987, was Dirty Dancing ....
Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and co-producer of that movie, said it is Mr. Bhargava’s work that viewers see in the “Time of My Life” finale. But, she said in an email, he was also responsible for a memorable scene earlier in the film, built around the song “Hungry Eyes” and some uncontrolled laughter by Ms. Grey.
“It was Girish’s idea to create the ‘tickling sequence,’ ” she said, “by combining a shot of Patrick running his hand down Jennifer’s side, Jennifer giggling, Patrick scowling, into an erotic sequence of shots ending with Patrick spinning Jennifer out.” ...
Last year the Huffington Post published an article titled Girish Bhargava: A Beloved Dance Film Editor Shares His Story, by Alexandra Villarreal. The article includes the following passages.
.... For four decades, Bhargava has edited dance on film. The iconic scenes from Dirty Dancing are his doing.There is much more to read about editing dance films in Villarreal's entire article.
Dance in America was once his main stomping ground. He has cut choreography by some of the biggest names in the United States. Twyla Tharp is the only woman to ever have sent him flowers — a bouquet of roses three feet long. ...
Editing is an art, just like dance. As director Emile Ardolino wrote in 1987, at the start of his career, he had made “the assumption that videotape editors were merely technicians.” After meeting Bhargava in 1974, he realized “I was working with an artist of the first rank — one whose precision, talent, and passion have given me the gift of an ever-deepening collaboration.”
You could call Bhargava a collagist. His mastery comes from the ability to take raw footage and fuse it with the music for an ideal compilation of takes.
“I’ll screen all the shots,” he said. “I have like four hours worth of shots. And I listen to this music 10 times. And I’ll say, ‘Ah, I like that,’ so I take that shot and stick it where it belongs. I’ve filled up the music with the most beautiful pictures that I like. Now the only thing left is these tiny segments, so now I’m looking for accents. Someone throwing a hand up.”
Dance is an especially tricky medium to edit, as one mistake can ruin an entire shot. If a corps member turns a second too late, or the soloist falls off her pointe in a pirouette, the frame is not “very perfect,” a phrase Brockway associated with Bhargava. “I will take the best take of the main dancer and somehow put it into the shot, if I can, and take the good part of the other dancers, and merge it together,” Bhargava said.
This is the benefit of dance on film: it allows editors and directors to clean the chaos of live performance for the most pleasing visuals. ...
No comments:
Post a Comment