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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Joji — a comparative study of four Macbeth inspirations Literary works provide off-the-shelf fast food in the pecking order for film makers to ply their trade when writers’ block bite them. However, a majority of these “inspired” adaptations by filmmakers have always been a tricky and tacky proposition. Only a very few stay true to […]
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Reminiscence of how REQUIEM came to be I dreamt that Ma and I were stranded in a rocky barren landscape in the dead of night. It was pitch dark with no humans or illumination in sight. We were completely isolated from the world. Ma was whimpering in pain and crying for help. In my dream […]
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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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Cinema has the ability to transform subject into object and object into energy, so that desire can be withdrawn. Desire and resultant pleasure must wait through delay, or so states the cinema. Prantik Basu’s Bela uses this relationship to desire through the location-space i.e., the village of Bela, which literally means “time.” Basu’s approach is to transform time […]
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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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Pioneering Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson’s principles of documentary were that cinema’s potential for observing life could be exploited in a new art form; that the original actor and original scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts for interpreting the modern world; and that materials “thus taken from the raw” can be more real […]
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