Dasgupta, who would be conferred the Sergei Eisenstein award for his lifetime achievement at the inaugural day tomorrow of the 12th Calcutta International Film festival, feels creative inquiry should be made a rule in making films waging a war against empty social morality and greyness in life.Buddhadeb's national award winning film of last year, Lal Darja (The Red Door) seeks to portray this crisis of alienation in today's life where all family bonds disintegrate under the strain of bourgeois boredom. Lal Darja, drawn from my poem for Hasan, is a response to the sadness I had been feeling from the loss of innocence in our lives leaving us incapable of reacting spontaneously to anything in life,'' said the maker of this celluloid poetic odyssey.

The protagonist of the film, a successful dentist, is an unhappyperson who cannot react to his crumbling relationship with wife and son despite his love for them. ``A middle-class respectability, growing self-interest and emptiness have dulled the life of my protagonist who at last undertakes a journey of fantasy into the lost world of his mysterious childhood innocence when as a boy he believed that chanting of some magical lines would open a door for him,'' said the poet director who wanted to portray a man in a new version of reality where his insensitivity to other's joys and needs can still be reversed.

Obsessed with capturing the various journeys of life, this three-time national award winner's (only filmmaker after Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen) most recent documentary on famous painter Ganesh Pyne titled `Ganesh Pyne: The Painter of Eloquent Silence' tries to capture the same. ``The life to death journeys from innocent childhood to a more complex world of adulthood in Ganesh's paintings fascinate me,'' said the director. While restricting the biographical side ofthe great painter to bare minimum, Buddhadeb tried to capture the recurring images of death in Ganesh's paintings and the ``tragic bent in his psyche''. Even the portrayal of a young woman in the fullness of life is overshadowed by death in Ganesh's works in which Buddhadeb finds a lot of influence of the Hindu mythology, European cinema and puppet shows.

``I have let the images speak for themselves. Some of the images in the documentary are mine, some of Ganesh and some we share commonly,'' says Dasgupta.

Buddhadeb's love for paintings and images also egged him on to make a significant documentary on folk and tribal paintings. Financed by the Government of India on the occasion of 50 years of Indian Independence, the documentary `Colours and Lines of Freedom-Folk and Tribal Heritage Paintings' brings out the abysmal condition of the tribal painters in remote villages of Bihar and other places who continue to pursue their vocation despite their penury.

``Consciously or unconsciously, the influence ofthese half-starved painters in the works of our famous contemporary painters are immense,'' says the director who was overwhelmed by their tremendous creativity. ``During shooting we had to undertake a journey from Bilaspur to Raipur in Bihar and I was shocked by the poverty prevailing in the area. However, the tribal painters there continue to paint,'' he says.

Dasgupta, whose own celluloid journey began with Durotta (The Distance) in 1979, has made a place for himself in the international constellation of avant-garde filmmakers. While his Lal Darja has been selected as one of the six Asian films on a tour of america this year, in the country he is known to pioneer the style of non-narrative poetic cinema.

Buddhadeb in this regard is strongly influenced by late Soviet maestro Andrei Tarkovsky and French filmmaker of yesteryear Louis Brunnel. In a 1986 interview, the year Tarkovsky died, the great director had said of his last film The Sacrifice, ``the issue I raised in this film is of crucial importance.The absence in our culture of for a spiritual existence. Man is suffering but he does not know why. I wanted to show that a man can renew his ties to life by renewing his covenant with himself and the source of his soul''.

His creative crusade thus rages on as the filmmaker in the footsteps of his idol Tarkovsky wants to ``declare a war on mediocrity and make creative inquiry a rule in his cinema''.