It is nine months now since the curtains were called on a thriving Sandalwood industry that had to shut shop when Corona came calling. The pandemic has had the entire world under its virulent tentacles, spreading dread and death, virtually putting an end to public entertainment in its conventional and traditional sense; theatres and multiplexes […]
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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 […]
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Hindi Film world is a huge store house of love stories i.e films. But only a few films, especially love stories, had made lasting impression upon the viewers and one fine day they receive the title of cult film. Love Story, released on February 26, 1981, is a movie without a director’s name. Hindi films […]
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‘I would never say such an unfeeling, rude thing such as that all actors are cattle. What I probably said was that all actors should be treated like cattle.’ actor -Alfred Hitchcock, on the Dick Cavett show ‘Most enjoyable screen performances have been produced by nothing more than a typage, and it is commonplace […]
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The encyclopaedia of art is conspicuous by the absence of even a passing mention to several notable women artists. ‘Far too often, women’s achievements have been ignored, underreported, or simply erased from the historical record… While this erasure is frustrating and harmful, creating a false myth that women’s history lacks great creative and intellectual achievement, […]
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Realistic cinema, it used to be said, reflects reality. Right now, that seems to be reversed: reality has turned into the reflection of a horrific apocalyptic film. As the daily tally of the infected and dead all around rise dramatically, the images and live drama of COVID-19 gives the feel of a reality fiction, with […]
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The universal language of the seventh art, cinema, unites us all together as one human race. Cinema has brought us closer. Sitting here in Guwahati, watching films, we can feel the agonies and ecstasies of the people by the Caribbean. We can feel the depth of the Mediterranean from the banks of the Brahmaputra. Set […]
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The basement of the Grand Café, Paris, in 1895, served as the pioneer film screening hall; ten short films were exhibited by the Lumière brothers. Long, long before that historic moment, the tea rooms and cafés of Europe attracted artists and thinkers, who would gather to read out their ideas, and engage in long, often […]
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Early Bollywood movies were famous for their idealistic, flawless central characters. Audiences loved them. Classic examples are the simpleton Raju in Raj Kapoor’s Jis Desh Me Ganga Behti Hai, the upright Satyapriya Acharya in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam, the righteous Bharat in Manoj Kumar’s Upkar, and the patient jail warden Adinath in V Shantaram’s Do Aankhen […]
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In the Indian subcontinent, the tradition of film festivals goes back to 1952, when the first International Film Festival of India (IFFI) took place, in Mumbai. It gave birth to a new league of Indian filmmakers, such as the Bengali trio Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, who would revolutionize Indian cinema, in the […]
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