With Rajkumar Hirani as editor, Shiv Subramaniam as the lead and Nana Patekar in a knife-wielding cameo, this short won the National Award for Best Short Fiction Film.
A conversation with the Andhadhun director about his diploma film, which explores the idea of news “coming alive” when an athlete featured on the front page of a newspaper falls for a model-pretty tennis player featured on the last page. He has to cross through various newspaper headline-hurdles to get to the girl.
‘The Eight Column Affair’ is one of the best illustrations of the race-against-time concept I’ve seen. Because a newspaper literally “expires” at the end of the day and a new edition takes its place. So our hero’s “race against time” becomes literal. I had no idea Shiv Subramaniam had acted in something so long ago. It was fun to see him as the athlete.
We were doing our diploma films. I had to think of a story in a month. So I was just sitting there reading, and I came across an article about a short film written by Wendy Toye. In the interview, she was saying she wanted to do something like the newspapers and all that. So the basic, kind of kick-off point was that: what if we do a front page/last page kind of thing!
Read the rest of this article here: https://www.filmcompanion.in/interviews/bollywood-interview/sriram-raghavan-looks-back-at-his-wacky-ftii-diploma-film-the-eight-column-affair-1987-baradwaj-rangan/
Copyright ©2020 Film Companion.
Baradwaj Rangan 
Devarsi Ghosh
July 4, 2020
“Unfortunately newspapers have also changed a lot. I mean, now we have three pages of ads and half a page in the beginning. It won’t be so easy.”
Haha, what a lovely man. He is one filmmaker I’m too intimidated to speak to, although I met him once at FTII, and just got a selfie, as both of us had to quickly move to other work. Lovely interview. Lovely movie…
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Madan
July 4, 2020
Wonderful interview. Will watch this short soon. Also need to catch up with Johnny Gadar sometime. One of the very few ‘name’ filmmakers in recent years in Bolly who has been awesomely subversive.
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karthik299
July 4, 2020
Can someone help me find Sriram Raghavan’s short film on Raman Raghav? Have searched for it a lot but could never find anywhere online.
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ravenus1
July 5, 2020
I remember coming across The Eight Column affair in a DVD collection of diploma shorts. A lovely concept brilliantly realized, it was for me the best of that lot (and considering it included works by Vinod Chopra, Girish Kasaravalli and Kundan Shah, that’s saying something). It prompted me to go for a first day (night) show of “Johnny Gaddaar”, a film that might otherwise have completely escaped my horizon. I was thrilled to bits through every moment. The very next day I was hounding all my friends to come along for a film whose title they found contemptuously weird (“Johnny Gaddaar? Seriously?”), with the promise of giving them lunch if they didn’t like the film. By the interval they were as much on tenterhooks as I had been, and I knew my wallet was saved.
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ravenus1
July 5, 2020
@karthik299: The Raman Raghav film is in a weird space. Sriram does not own the copyright to it, and it cannot be monetized by him. I saw it a few years ago at a special free screening conducted by Drishyam films and I was lucky enough to actually meet Sriram there and get my DVD’s of JG and Badlapur signed.
I do hope you get to see it because it is a terrific film. Raman Raghav is a testament that a talented director will shine regardless of the budget (3.5L, he said) and format (videotape). Even in his maiden feature, Sriram shows the trademarks of his better known films – the long meticulous tracking shots, the careful scene transitions, the jolts of brutal action to punctuate the intensity of the scene than revel in the gratuitous overkill, the ability to introduce sly humor in the midst of suspense, surgically precise editing, astounding attention to detail and almost symphonic arrangement of “movements” in the sound design. The other strong point of the film is of course Raghubir Yadav’s portrayal of the killer. The film being based on true events and recorded testimonies, Raman Raghav is not presented as some ultra-genius Hannibal playing cat-and-mouse with the cops, but a morose and simple-minded but highly disturbed individual who killed without any consideration to human life and got away for as long as he did on sheer luck.
After the screening there was a Q&A with Sriram and a wonderful surprise in the form of Raghubir Yadav. It was one of the memorable evenings of my life.
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ravenus1
July 5, 2020
Great interview BR. All the questions I would have wanted to ask, and many others I hadn’t thought of.
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Madan
July 5, 2020
Watched it. Was a wonderful watch.
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