Shabana Azmi Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety These lines from Antony and Cleopatra, originally woven by the Bard of Avon to sing a paean to the Egyptian queen, seem apt for Shabana Azmi. There is an unwritten norm that most celebrities much before they approach seventy opt for retirement […]
Read More
Pandemic pummels cinema into existential vortex Don’t open the pod bay doors, Hal. We need social distancing. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Nothing can be alarmingly apocryphal than the above lines from the nearly four decade old film. ‘Social Distancing’ has become the new lingua franca of human transaction in this pandemic times […]
Read More
Film: Tape 39 | presently streaming on Mubi Director: Amit Dutta The cinematograph can be defined as a writing with movements and sound. The essential problematic of the cinematograph lies precisely within this question—how can the cinematograph move beyond the manifest reality? This manifest reality is the apparent space and time represented before the […]
Read More
It has been almost half a century since Meena Kumari (1933- 1972) passed away, and yet her evocative silver screen images come back again and again to stir our emotions. In death, as in life, she remains the creator of many stories, exactly resembling Princess Scheherazade of the Arabian Nights. The Arabian Princess wove endless […]
Read More
When I was completing the edit of my film ‘Remembering Bimal Roy‘ on my father, my editor asked me who would do the final sound design. This was the first time I heard the term sound design and realised that my documentary would need one. Shajith By sheer serendipity a dear friend Meena Pillai mentioned that […]
Read More
Have you ever had the opportunity to observe an actor observing himself? Naseeruddin Shah: The Angel of Chaos Early Noughties, Mumbai. In a sultry Mumbai studio, poet extraordinaire Gulzar’s face flickers on a mounted screen. He’s paying a tribute to Naseeruddin Shah, today’s guest on the sets of Jeena Isi ka Naam Hai, one of […]
Read More
Throughout the history of cinema, the dominant ideology determined the content. It is predominantly capitalistic, male and heterosexual. Likewise, film criticism too established its territory. Malayalam cinema Tracing back to the fifties, film criticism popularised by the trio Cinic, Kozhikodan, and Nadhirsha was mostly engaged with the text, rarely exploring the sub-text, inner dynamics, or […]
Read More
To my sorrow I never really got to know my father. I sometimes feel that if he had lived longer, perhaps my brother, Joy Bimal Roy, or I could have worked with him and learnt the craft in a way that no school or textbook can teach. But my father did not really like us visiting […]
Read More
That reviewer Parthajit Baruah is well read, as professors of English (and cinema) should be, is clear from the number of references to literature as well as quotes from books that he uses in ‘Face to Face – The Cinema of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’ to illustrate his points. That he is completely cued in to the […]
Read More
In an interview during his television days, Sushant Singh Rajput was asked about his favourite book. He sheepishly replied that he wasn’t into reading, but if he were to pick one he’d pick his Physics text book, because he didn’t understand it at one go, and had to spend a lot of time with it. […]
Read More