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An Intimate Glimpse of Guruji – Richard Jonas
from Yoga Samachar FW2014
by IYNAUS
An Intimate Glimpse of Guruji
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FILMMAKERS JAKE AND LINDSEY CLENNELL CAPTURE UNIQUE AND INSPIRING FOOTAGE OF B.K.S IYENGAR—AN ELECTRIFYING TEACHER IN HIS MID-90S—AND SHOW HIS INFLUENCE ON COMMUNITIES AROUND THE GLOBE.
Photo by Lindsey Clennell
By Richard Jonas
The movie Jake Clennell is editing is not the one
he started shooting. First, the project made a 180-degree turnaround from his original intention; later, the movie—taking on a life of its own—circled around again, ending just where it began.
For years, Jake Clennell, director of Sadhaka: The Yoga of B. K. S. Iyengar, and his father Lindsey Clennell, senior teacher and the film’s executive producer, contemplated a movie about their shared teacher and guru.
Now these two lives devoted to telling stories on film, two lives devoted to Iyengar Yoga—practice, study and, in Lindsey’s case, teaching—come together in Sadhaka. More than five years in production, a year in the shooting alone, crafted by two awardwinning documentary filmmakers, and drawing on unparalleled access to the originating voices of the method, it is the most incisive, accurate, and comprehensive film view of Guruji and his method we’re likely to see.
The story begins almost 40 years ago when Lindsey Clennell, a young filmmaker with music videos for the Rolling Stones and Elton John under his belt and a documentary about Muhammad Ali in his future, made his first trip to the Iyengar Yoga Institute in Pune. The following year, he and his wife Bobby returned to India, with five-year-old Jake and his brother Miles, 10, making their debuts at RIMYI.
Through the years, as Jake grew up and shaped a successful career as film director and cinematographer, and as Lindsey moved into full-time yoga teaching, the two often returned to their dream of making a film about Guruji. Finally they asked his permission. Mr. Iyengar gave his wholehearted approval— while pointing them in a different direction. So much has been done about me, he said; why not focus on my students instead? “It wasn’t what I wanted to hear,” Jake concedes, “but knowing enough about Guruji to pay extremely close attention to what he says, one did it. And it bore amazing fruit!”
Jake recorded the stories of some of the students who had studied longest with Guruji, now longtime senior teachers themselves. Over three prolonged stays in India, Jake filmed Father Joe Pereira, the Roman Catholic priest, in his centers for recovering addicts. He also visited the orphanage run by Miriam “Mimi” Batliwala, where girls rescued from a Mumbai slum study Iyengar Yoga.
These stories highlight the 22-minute Sadhaka preview shown at the IYNAUS convention and conference in San Diego last spring. Another 20,000 people have screened the trailer online at www.sadhakafilm.com. Initial funding for the film came from the Clennells and some of their students. Fifty-thousand dollars in donations to help complete the film have come in from 34 countries via an online funding campaign; donor names are listed at the Sadhaka website. Another $120,000 is still needed for editing, post-production, and distribution. The target release date is spring 2014.
But colorful and moving as it is, the early footage will only make up a small part of the completed feature-length documentary.
Photo by Lindsey Clennell
Jake, engaging and enthusiastic, is an old friend who shows you corners of Pune you never knew existed and talks esoteric yoga philosophy throughout a thali dinner. Cinematographer on dozens of commercials, music videos, and films, including the award-winning The Great Happiness Space, which he also directed, he has collaborated with his father on many documentaries filmed in Africa and the Middle East and on Addiction, Recovery and Yoga (filmed in the U.S.). Jake, 43, lives with his partner Tzu-li Liu in New York City and upstate New York.
It was on his fourth filming trip to India, when he believed the movie was nearing completion, that everything changed.
For months, Jake had focused on the reflections of Guruji as seen in his senior teachers and their students, and the students’ students. Suddenly he turned back to the original source of light, and “Guruji let us in close,” Jake says. He was permitted to film the RIMYI medical classes. Geeta, Prashant, and Abhijata Iyengar allowed themselves to be filmed talking and as they practiced. “These people who have the spiritual underpinnings of decades of practice gave so graciously and generously of their time,” Jake remembers. “And everything came together when I talked to Abhi, who has the freshness of learning it all right now, and is at the very center of the Iyengar world right now.” Finally, thinking the shooting complete, Jake returned to Pune in March 2013. A group of Chinese students had gathered for the first international intensive in years. It was another aboutface for the filmmaker and for Sadhaka. “I brought a camera along just in case, and suddenly Guruji gave the nod. I was in!”
The heart of the completed film will be this footage, “a substantial historical document of him teaching in this incredibly vibrant way.” Jake shakes his head in wonder. “It was as though Iyengar was channeling a younger version of himself. He gave 100 percent to these new students. The energy was amazing! He taught the medical class with the same power: holding people up, jumping from student to student, throwing people up into inversions. The whole place was on fire!
“It’s extremely intimate footage,” Jake says. It is “not a how-to” of therapeutic applications. Instead, “my hope was to show the people and the moments, not try to explain why this rope was here or what this person’s ailment was. Looking at those medical classes, seeing those bodies—old and young, fat and thin, healthy and broken, seeing the chaos and the spontaneous nature of the healing—I just wanted to capture this magical moment.”
Letting the film change direction, then change again, letting it find its own story and its own way to tell it was “sort of a meander,” Jake says. “Finally, it all came down to Guruji, to what he did. That’s what will separate this film from others. It’s not a biography of B.K.S. Iyengar; it’s a somewhat cinema verité look at him.”
To capture that meant “trying to be a little bit casual, to be a fly on the wall to that experience of Pune. What is it like to be with him when he’s three feet away from you? I wanted to give a candid look at that.”
In spite of the game-changing Chinese intensive when the movie’s focus shifted to Guruji, segments filmed earlier remain precious to Jake. “It was a profound privilege to spend time with Father Joe and the people surrounding him—addicts in recovery, people who had committed terrible crimes and found a path back. When you watch an alcoholic in Father Joe’s rehab clinic go through teachers’ training, then teach other alcoholics, you realize how effective Guruji’s method is, down to the third generation.” Mimi Batliwala’s orphanage shelters girls rescued from Darvi, the largest slum in Mumbai. “Life there, particularly for a girl, is utterly horrific,” Jakes says. But the orphanage is “an oasis within the madness of Bombay: calm, safe, sane.”
In the film’s most shocking segments, a former alcoholic confesses to a brutal murder. In another, deeply emotional moment, a girl talks about feeling lost and hopeless at the death of her father. For both, yoga is their pathway back. “I was overwhelmed by all the people who have been significantly changed by this practice,” Jake says. “They all felt this profound connection to Iyengar, even if they hadn’t met him.”
The two segments are among the most moving and revealing in the film. “People don’t always let you in like that,” Jake says. But vouched for by Guruji, he “floated” through the months of shooting “on a cushion of goodwill.”
This entry also led him to Shri Padmanabachari, the 86-year-old patriarch of the Shilpi caste of sculptors, whom Guruji asked to create the first icon of Patanjali in the modern era. “To be embraced by someone like that, to have him say, ‘I will give you my most sincere opinion about the correlations between asana and iconography’—that never could have happened without Guruji’s intervention,” Jake says.
Every day for a month, Jake made the six-hour trek from Bangalore to interview Guruji’s personal idol-maker and to film the majestic figure of Hanuman as it emerged from the
Photo by Jake Clennell
“That kind of practice, continuously over a number decades, the commitment and the profundity of it, is awe-inspiring.” —Jake Clennell
mammoth block of stone that Shri Padmanabachari and his assistants were sculpting.
Over time, the film found its own theme, through its circuitous turns and doubling-backs, and “came to be about people’s struggle with afflictions. And that seemed much more interesting.”
Jake concedes the film was overshot “on a massive scale,” yielding much more footage than can be used. “The core of the movie will be that last trip, when you see Iyengar so dynamic, so amazing and absolutely magnetic, so transformative of people and their lives. When he’s on screen, you don’t want to watch anyone but him. If the film succeeds in contextualizing bits of him, if you can understand a bit of him, that’s a once-ina-thousand-years moment.”
As he often does, Jake screened some favorite footage on the day we spoke. After months and years of unpaid work on the film, he’s returned to regular work; but he and a small group of assistants continue to watch and edit the film, transcribe speeches and the like. In the segment he watched, Jake says, Guruji had just finished teaching the intensive. “Then he did Savasana over a mountain of props in the middle of the asana hall. He didn’t do his usual practice; he just laid there. He did not flinch, did not move a muscle for the best part of an hour. It was so indicative of what he had put out.” And what Guruji gave to the Chinese students that day, Jake says, was—like what he gave to the film about him— “overwhelming.”
Richard Jonas (Introductory II) is on the faculty of the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York. Richard is a former IYNAUS vice president, and he was a film reviewer and wrote TV commercials before becoming a fulltime Iyengar Yoga teacher in 2001.
