Shot in a vertical aspect ratio, Yudhajit Basu’s Kalsubai attempts a layering of consciousness that is, at base, hierarchical. The shot, which is between the ‘On’ and ‘Off’, gestures on the recording button on the camera and is a rhizomatic construct i.e., it connects one middle to the next middle. Basu’s attempt however is to challenge this […]
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Set in the location-space that is the village of Arittapatti in Tamil Nadu, Pebbles (Koozhangal) immediately establishes the Oedipal relationship between the chain smoking, drunk Ganpathy and his son. The two take a bus ride together, the view of the window of which emphasises the cinematographic screen that is between the love-hate relationship between director, audience and […]
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Utpal Datta converses with Supratim Bhol, the cinematographer of Avijatrik, lit., the wanderlust of Apu, purportedly the concluding part of Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy based on the remaining portions of the novel Aparajito by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. A film is a sort of a dream, a combination of imaginary images in the mind of the […]
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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 […]
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Why do you need a film critic? Christian Metz, the French scholar once so famously opined “A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand.” Metz was trying to draw Freud and Lacan into cinema and its aesthetics. No doubt, he required to formulate theories to save his money. And like all […]
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Film festivalas — a platform for gender parity Discriminated, underrepresented, misrepresented with that proverbial male gaze syndrome on screen, and subjugated and suppressed to the point of stoic silence off screen, women in the film industry have had to face a Sisyphean struggle to come into their own and wrest their due from an otherwise […]
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We have had countless guests in Godiwala Bungalow but the memory of one stands out above the rest. Ritwik Ghatak Sometime in the early ’70s a Bengali gentleman landed up unannounced at home. He looked like he had seen better days. His entire demeanour was one of defeat, someone at the end of his tether. […]
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Society Man is a political animal. So reflected Aristotle. He went a step further to see politics and culture as by-products of nature. Man is given speech and moral reason as natural, inborn, gifts. So, any further device, or design, such as politics, must be natural, Aristotle thought. History is an interesting play of power […]
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Ever since the Venice International Film Festival, the oldest in the world, blew the bugle in late 2020, announcing with much bravado that it would be held on time, cineastes all over the world have breathed a ray of hope. Roberto Cicutto, President of La Biennale di Venezia, said on the eve of the festival, […]
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The influence of media on people is unexplainable. It starts from simple mundane things as buying a pen, but extends to extremes of life changing decision making and so on. When we speak of media it includes every aspect of it, beginning from the newspapers to the cyber world that we are in right now. […]
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