Tag: Cinema

Two of Tagore’s numerous endorsements. Rabindranath was not just pen and ink, but as Sayandeb Chowdhury finds out from a set of new exhibitions, a regular endorser of indigenous enterprise and a great believer in the potential of the moving images One problem with the traditional appraisal of Rabindranath Tagore, in which the Bengali community, the chief benefactor of the great man’s infinite genius, has usually regaled, is that such a disposition obliterates larger spheres of reception and cognition. Tagore,…

Yuri Gagarin, who walked the space sixty years ago this week, gave the world, among other things, an intergalactic imagination, which auteurs have managed to convert into astonishing specimens of cinema — meditations which spawn not just the Great Dark but also dystopianism, psychography, alienism and most importantly, the unending search for a soul like ours. Here is a possible list of sci-fi hall of fame. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Arguably the greatest sci-fi film ever made, 2001: A Space…

The arm-stretched tree-man at the Republic of Nandan. Photo by author. It is difficult to believe that there was a time when CPI(M) did not resemble a felled behemoth that was howling away on its way to dusty death. In those days it did many other things. And it also did Kaalture, so to say. It had aspired to be a party that stood erect for the working classes while sitting down to sip tea and discuss cinema with the…

The much-discussed Peepli (Live) has garnered attention to the logic of employing satire to a case (or a cause) that is hopelessly tragic. The film’s veracity, depicting one of the biggest agrarian crises to have precipitated in Independent India, is unquestionable. The makers have rightly targeted the assorted symbolisms of what we call the ‘establishment’ — the administration, the government, agencies of policymaking and the favourite butt which everybody kicks these days — the 24X7 television media. The critical value of the…

Poster of The Japanese Wife, 2010 Indian indie favourite Aparna Sen’s new film The Japanese Wife, about love through letters, lacks style and diction. THE phonetic possibility of her surname Sen makes Indian indie filmmaker Aparna Sen’s films a fine fodder for all sorts of rhetorical puns in English, most obviously for a word, like say, sensational. But sadly her latest outing The Japanese Wife does not lend itself to the word because the film is anything but an…

Three films that examine communism in a revisionist light that leaves the past with nowhere to hide “I would go on to cover the more punitive mood towards East Germany’s Stasi oppressors; the unending saga of complicity and blame; the arrival of the deutsche mark and the transition from “We are the people”, to “We are one people”, as unification became inevitable. It was the birth of a different Europe, free of old divisions and shackles, the one still coming…

Chidananda Das Gupta is an old-school film critic and thanks god for that. In Seeing is Believing, he brings into his analyses of cinema a rare rigour, without letting his scholarly text collapse into set-piece jargon. His ways of looking at Indian cinema are infused with the confidence of someone who knows his art well and can render it with unfailing insight. In this selected compilation of his writings over the decades, Dasgupta discusses Indian and Western modernity, Jungian…

There is a new graphic novel in town – Sarnath Banerjee’s The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, Steven Spielberg is producing a Tintin film, and noir director Anurag Kashyap is directing Hanuman 2. Suddenly, animation is threatening to grow up and rival adult live-action entertainment in a big way. Disney, Chandamama, and Superman creators Siegel and Shuster are in danger of being left behind for SFX, CGI, 3D, ‘comix’, manga, anime, graphic novel, and video games, as visual narratives ramify into widely varied,…