Marxists have come to power not always by the bullet; given the historical, political and social circumstances that they had to contend with, Lenin, Mao, Ho or Fidel had no choice but to pick up the gun in their quest for a new order. But the ballot has also come to the rescue of the occasional Marxist struggling for change.[Read More…]
It has been weeks since some of the country’s best-known and most successful wrestlers have been on ‘dharna’ at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, to voice their outrage against the highhandedness of the president of the Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who also happens to be a high-profile six-time BJP member of parliament with multiple criminal cases pending[Read More…]
This essay is a brief exploration of the life, times and legacy of one of the most distinguished cultural figures of modern Africa – the Senegalese trade unionist, writer and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene (1923-2007), whose birth centenary is being observed this year. Sembene made practically all his films out of his own writings, which were often autobiographical in character. Commonly[Read More…]
After so many years, I have forgotten his first name, but can readily recall in my mind’s eye the pint-sized lawyer with a clean, shaven face and a shining bald to match. Mr. Dasan – that is the way I used to address him. In the mid-eighties, Mr. Dasan had a fairly good practice at the Calcutta High Court, but[Read More…]
“I don’t understand why India looks up to the Oscars… Audience is my Oscar.” – Mira Nair, quoted in The Telegraph, Kolkata, December 1, 2012 On April 23, 1992, a man died. A tall man once blessed with broad shoulders, a headful of dark, well-set hair, and sharply chiseled features; a man who touched several art forms, enriching whatever he[Read More…]
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) would have been a centenarian this year had he not fell foul of an extreme-Right conspiracy at the age of 53. Murdered on the beaches of Ostia, near Rome, ostensibly for his homosexuality, Pasolini passed into a world where there is no death, only homages to creative subversion or heated controversies born more of social prejudice[Read More…]
Here is a sad news that Godard is no more.Veteran critic Vidyarthy Chatterjee wrote a letter to Godard after listening to an interview, where the master confessed that he doesn’t get any Indian films to watch.After Fifty years of pedestrian writing, Vidyarthy Chatterjee wrote his first book and he had sent it across by courier to Switzerland,only to hear back[Read More…]
Debiprosad Ghosh, the distinguished but undeservedly neglected Calcutta film scholar and historian, has painstakingly researched the life, times and achievements of an important but forgotten Bengali actress. The beautiful and gifted Begum Anwara Nahar had to take on the name of ‘Bonani Chaudhuri’ for the same reason that one Yousuf Khan of Peshawar had to transform himself into ‘Dilip Kumar’,[Read More…]
The death of the distinguished poet, writer, and teacher, Sankha Ghosh removes a huge, near-silent presence from the literary, intellectual, and moral landscape of Bengal. Sankha babu leaves behind a legacy of truth-telling to the very faces of wayward powers-that-be, which at least some of his students and admirers are likely to look up to with pride and joy for[Read More…]
On his first visit to Jamshedpur in 1925, Mahatma Gandhi did something that was unthinkable to large sections of the workers of Tisco. Not only did Gandhi agree to attend a grand reception arranged for him by the Tatas, he even accepted a steel casket containing a purse. What angered and saddened the workers the most was that Gandhi should[Read More…]
Contrary to what she is often made out to be, India is not a poor country. Rather, India is a rich country, the majority of whose people are so poor as to have a tough time securing two meals a day. India is a rich country with multitudes of starving and half-fed men, women and children because practically her entire[Read More…]
Writing in the March 26, 2012 issue of Outlook, Arundhati Roy talks of how since the middle of the first decade of this century, wherever Tisco has gone in search of an easy kill, whether in Chhattisgarh or in Orissa, violence against tribals whose lands the corporate giant sought to take over, has been the order of the day. Roy[Read More…]
Ritwik Ghatak was born in 1925 in Dhaka and died in 1976 in Calcutta. Almost his entire adult life was spent working for the stage or the screen in some capacity or the other. It is perhaps inevitable that success – as most of us understand it – should have refused to come to him, considering the kind of man[Read More…]
The idea of ‘return’ holds different meanings for different people caught in different circumstances. Calcutta-based Supriyo Sen’s Abar Ashibo Phirey (Way Back Home, Bangla with English sub-titles, video, colour, 120 mins, 2002) is a wrenching and liberating journey into the heart and soul of an elderly Bengali couple – the director’s parents – as they go back in time, space[Read More…]
In 2014, Joshy Joseph directed a long documentary called A Poet, A City & A Footballer which won him the Special Jury Prize at the national awards. The film is about juxtapositions, like night and day, abundant life and impending death, energy amidst decay, and silence that shouts to be heard. The film is a meditation on death, but it[Read More…]
In our student days a large part of the year was consumed by three long spells of holidays. The year started after the Christmas vacations which were long, but not as long as the summer vacations in May-June. The Puja vacations were the shortest but in many ways the most exciting. Durga or Kali Puja in the small towns of[Read More…]
Laal Juto (Red Shoes, Bangla, 23 minutes, 35 mm, colour), adapted from a short story by the iconic Bengali writer, artist and intellectual Kamal Kumar Majumdar, is about 15-year-old Nitish who goes to a shoe shop to buy shoes for himself. What Nitish had not bargained for is a self-discovery leading to a change in his feelings towards Gouri, his[Read More…]
This essay is dedicated to the example of Father Stan Swamy, S. J. Briefly and simply put, Liberation Theology is a school of thinking which proclaims that methods of direct action are at times necessary for the material and spiritual liberation of the poor and powerless; that prayer and persuasion have to be occasionally accompanied by frontal assault to produce[Read More…]
From the life and times of the State executioner, Nata Mullick (which was the subject of an earlier documentary, One Day From A Hangman’s Life), the Calcutta-based Films Division filmmaker, Joshy Joseph, transported us to the life and times of a young Manipuri named Tom Sharma, by means of Making The Face, a shorter film but which nonetheless took a[Read More…]
Diego Armando Maradona turns 60 on October 30. “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.” – Charles Baudelaire. It is with these words that the renowned filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s ninety-minute documentary on the one and only Maradona begins. Kusturica’s film, structured like a ‘musical’, does more than what a hundred newspaper[Read More…]
It has long been said that the best way to know a person is to know the company he or she keeps. The reasons for the recent persecution of the Jesuit activist-priest, Stan Swamy, can be better understood in relation to his comradeship with Sister Valsa, the Malayali nun murdered some nine years ago in the village of Pachwara in[Read More…]
Years ago there used to be a pleasant face on Doordarshan by the name of Appan Menon. He very ably and effectively anchored a popular programme called The World This Week. It was a visual diary that kept track of events and individuals at home and abroad. Menon did not have the flamboyance of his colleague, Pranoy Roy, but his[Read More…]
“I planned Thampu as a documentary feature. It was shot in Thirunnavaya on the banks of the Bharathapuzha. I came to this village with ten to fifteen circus artistes who had already left their circus company. We did not have a script and we shot the incidents as they happened. What we did on the first day was to call[Read More…]
Sairat(2016) was a huge commercial success that is still being much talked about. But, whichever way you look at it, Sairat is a far cry from Nagraj Manjule’s debut film, Fandry, which deservedly enjoyed much critical support. Sairat is tailor-made to seduce the younger generation of viewers, meaning roughly those in the age-bracket of 15 to 30. The film’s mounting[Read More…]
Scene One: Seated on the cool, polished steps leading to the main entrance of Kairali Theatre in Trivandrum, a small man with a melodious voice was singing with his eyes closed – to the visible appreciation of a group of young men and women come from different parts of Kerala for the ongoing international film festival. The singer was dressed[Read More…]
The mind is a winding river, its churning waters both cluttering and cleansing many shores and various ports of call. The broad outlines of the 1958 strike by the steel workers of Jamshedpur are still there in my memory; I was all of ten years of age at the time. The strike was a spontaneous uprising under the banner of[Read More…]
“Ritwik Ghatak’s stint as Vice-Principal of FTII left something of him in his students. A John Abraham would never have happened were it not for the tutelage of Ghatak. John did what he did because Ghatak validated his angst. Similar was the case with his other protégés, but besides these few men, the legacy of Ghatak seems to have terminated.[Read More…]
(This essay was written in 2015,but remained unpublished. The thing to note is that practically everything it says holds good five years later.) At least three subjects of continuing public interest are on many lips these days – namely, the 40th anniversary this year of the Emergency; the hurried initiatives shown by the Modi government to raise the height of[Read More…]
When I was a boy I once heard my father wondering to my mother why “a day did not have more than twenty-four hours”. I know it is difficult to believe, but it is a fact that my father spent several decades of his life working fourteen to sixteen hours a day. When he ate, slept or relaxed, only he[Read More…]
Mysore Shrinivas Sathyu, who turned ninety on July 6 this year, is an important figure in the annals of New Indian Cinema by virtue of just one film- Garam Hawa (Hot Winds, 1974), a scathing dissection of the diseased mentalities that caused the Partition of the country (read, Partition of Bengal and Punjab). Garam Hawa achieves its purpose by portraying[Read More…]
Each time, Saadat Hasan Manto changes position in his 65-year-old grave in Lahore, “wondering whether he is a better short story writer than God”, the subcontinent, more than any other part of the world that recognized his genius belatedly, goes into raptures. Some recent films, books, and stage adaptations to do with the great writer and liberal humanist provide[Read More…]
The 24th edition of the Kolkata international film festival, held in November 2018, showed a surprisingly large number of films from Australia, which has never been counted among the foremost film-making nations of the world; no less than two dozen in all. It is hard to tell whether the ‘focus’ had anything to do with an increasing interest in Down[Read More…]
In my personal calendar of gains and losses, September is a craven, cowardly month. It robbed me, born the same month, of my two closest relatives. I don’t expect everybody to be interested in this humble story of comings and goings, but, who knows, someone out there might read a useful metaphor here. Come late August/early September each year, and[Read More…]
The Tatas have all along been opposed to the idea of having a university in Jamshedpur. In fact, Tisco did not want even a college in the city. Which brings us to the saga of Medioma Dhanjishah Madan (1913 – 1962). Dissidents give a character to a place, as much as devotees do. But since, as a rule, dissidents are[Read More…]
Adoor Gopalakrishnan is, unfortunately, ‘at it’ again. Kerala’s best-known filmmaker was recently at his favourite pastime of hitting a contemporary below the belt; trying to belittle someone with whom he started out on his filmmaking journey almost half a century ago. Honestly, I have noted with a mixture of disappointment and disgust, Adoor’s venomous remarks against K.P. Kumaran, as made[Read More…]
Some time ago, another edition of International Women’s Day was observed with the right amount of feistiness. Among other things, women-related films were screened and discussed in some places in this or that city. Two early documentaries by Mira Nair could perhaps have been profitably included in such programmes. Unfortunately, her documentary films have been little seen and less discussed.[Read More…]
A hundred years ago, a silent film called Bilet Pherat (England-Returned) was made. That pioneering work placed its maker by the side of such greats of early Indian cinema as Dadasaheb Phalke and Hiralal Sen. The example and exploits of Dhirendranath Gangopadhyay, or DG, as he was popularly known, were been recalled on many occasions by Mrinal Sen or Dinen[Read More…]
In the days of my early manhood, a south Calcutta theatre called Menoka used to show Malayalam or Tamil films on Sunday mornings. Since the early years of the 20th century, Tamils have been in residence in south Calcutta, usually as office-workers, thereby giving to this area a second name – Chhota Madras (Madras in miniature). Malayalees are more recent[Read More…]
It is difficult not to miss the irony in the timing of Mrinal Sen’s passing on, roughly coinciding as it did with the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps his best-known film, BhuvanShome. It is generally agreed that it is with this film that the seminal movement called ‘New Indian Cinema’ began. The movement was an ideological/political body of work that questioned[Read More…]
Sivakasi is a curse, a blight, an abomination that India could do without. Here, workers, especially children, are routinely killed or scarred for life in fires and explosions while making crackers and bombs to feed the fireworks industry. A devastation in Sivakasi, 700 kilometres from Chennai, on September 5, 2012, claimed 54 lives. Between January 2011 and September 2012, there[Read More…]
W.H. Auden, the British poet, once wrote that many lives have been lived without love, but none without water – or words to that effect. Auden couldn’t possibly have written about the utter necessity of water without thinking of the billions and trillions of farming families who contributed since time immemorial to the making of human cultures and civilizations. If[Read More…]
Fifty two years ago, on 20th August, Russian tanks moved into Prague to suppress what has passed into history as the ‘Spring of 1968’ when artists, intellectuals, public personalities and reforms-minded politicians joined hands in an attempt to secure freedom of expression. Among the sufferers was the great long-distance runner, Emil Zatopek, who was dismissed from his senior position[Read More…]
Currently, the impression that things can be made to happen even without the participation of the working class is being sought to be furthered by employers and managements. What to speak of marginalization, it is the evaporization of the worker from public consciousness that is being attempted. Just visualize the surrealistic pilgrim’s progress that we have covered in the[Read More…]
(This essay is in commemoration of the birth centenary this year of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s Father of the Nation; and the fiftieth anniversary of the making of Zahir Raihan’s Stop Genocide, with which the history of short filmmaking in Bangladesh begins.) A road accident on August 19, 2011, robbed Bangladesh of its most exceptional filmmaker, and this writer[Read More…]
Not everyone with a family is destined to enjoy all the fruits that the family has to offer. Let us take the case of Kamlabai Raghunath Gokhale, or simply Kamlabai, who was a Marathi actress in the early decades of the twentieth century and the first woman to act in films in India. Reena Mohan, who trained in editing at[Read More…]
About 85 years ago, Spanish fascists murdered Federico Garcia Lorca (1898 – 1936), the most important Spanish dramatist of the twentieth century who said “Spain is the only country in the world where death is a national spectacle.” Some 35 years ago, a young woman named Roop Kanwar was burnt alive by her in-laws and village elders on her dead[Read More…]
K. P. Kumaran made his first film, Athithi (b/w, 35 mm., 112 mins.) in 1974. I was able to catch up with it in 2017, thanks to a retrospective devoted to the veteran director at the 22nd edition of the International Film Festival of Kerala. Athithi is a tense family drama that unfolds, for the most part, within the ghostly[Read More…]
One of the most widely-known and deeply-admired of all Indian nuns who gave up the habit after receiving the call of liberation theology, is a daughter of Kerala who goes by the name of Dayabai. When she left home at Pullattu Veedu in Poovarani, near Pala in Kottayam district, to become a missionary nun, she used to be called Mercy[Read More…]
The first edition of what began as the Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary & Short Films (there was no mention of animation in the naming then) was held between March 1 and 7, 1990. I had no place to stay in Bombay, yet the will to attend the festival was strong. One evening, over a cup of tea at[Read More…]
In 2006, I had an opportunity to visit Zanzibar, a fabled island in the Indian Ocean with which India has had commercial and cultural relations for hundreds of years. Zanzibar is a part of Tanzania where thousands of Indian Africans have lived since long. A few months before I landed in Zanzibar, an important book launch had taken place,[Read More…]
“Beyond the geographic and cultural identity that defines the Caribbean, is the more complex question of a Caribbean cinema aesthetic which has captured the imagination of some writers and critics. The search for the essence of Caribbean cinema has included theories of Créolité, diversity and Negritude from Martinique and Guadeloupe; Negrismo from Cuba; Indigenisme from Haiti; and Pan-Africanism from the[Read More…]
Writing some month ago in a Bengali daily about, among other things, his stint as a security adviser to the vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1999 to 2004 , Debanjan Chakraborty recalled an incident in April 1999 when a large mob was seen scouring the campus looking for the office-bearers of the university students union. From time to time,[Read More…]
In ways more than one, Quarter Number 4/11, a documentary about demolitions and displacements and resultant miseries to a defenseless but defiant working class family, is reminiscent of Anand Patwardhan’s epic Hamara Shahar, made a quarter century earlier. “Quarter Number 4/11 is a ground-zero perspective of urban real estate development, narrated through the plight of ex-factory worker Shambhu Prasad Singh,[Read More…]
Yilmaz Güney’s phenomenal many-sided genius made him a force to reckon with when he came to direction after a long stint as Turkey’s most popular film hero. But in the post-Second World War history of the Turkish State and society, Güney occupies a higher place than just that of a trail-blazing film personality. His strong sympathies for the inhabitants of[Read More…]
Forty-Five summers ago when Emergency was declared by Indira Gandhi, among those who welcomed it with open arms were many so-called captains of industry, notably J. R. D. Tata and K. K. Birla; they did it in the name of discipline, efficiency and good work culture. Talking to J. Anthony Lukacs of The New York Times, J. R. D. Tata[Read More…]
It has been said of Anand Patwardhan, who turned 70 on February 18 this year, that he is ‘a kind of phenomenon in that he has all along faced official apathy, disapproval and, at times, censorship and open discrimination’. Perhaps, this is the way it should be for any creative artist wanting to grapple with political abuses, social injustices and[Read More…]
The death of Jacques Chirac marked the physical disappearance of, arguably, the most intriguing French president of the past three decades or so. Chirac was conservative in his politics; an opportunist by nature; culture-conscious; and could be both defiant and corrupt. He showed character when he publicly acknowledged the fact of French complicity in the Holocaust, or chose not to[Read More…]
In 1963, Satyajit Ray directed Mahanagar, commonly considered to be his first ‘Calcutta film’. True, there is a little of the ‘Big City’ in Apur Sansar (1959). Equally true, Parash Pathar (1958) is about an elderly Calcutta clerk who comes into a sudden fortune, only to lose it in no time. But Parash Pathar is a fantasy film, can perhaps[Read More…]
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My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
