Journal of Indian Cinema

Vol. 1. Iss. 17 | September – October 2021

Film Critics Circle of India

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Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay — vagabond messiah

Amborish Roychoudhury | Sep 15

 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was discovered in the guise of a sanyasi, standing in the Muzaffarpur office of a popular magazine those days, called Bharatvarsha. In flawless Hindi, he requested to be furnished with writing materials. He was out of pen and paper. He was carrying a notebook, and the pages of that notebook were filled with countless stories. He was shipped back to his hometown…

… Sarat Chandra stands tall in the Indian literary pantheon. He wrote only in Bengali, but his translated works are so native to North India that many of his works are considered a part of Hindi literature.

read HOMAGE

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Dogged intensity — the biopics of Richard Attenborough

Amborish Roychoudhury | Oct 02

Nehru, who Attenborough was counting on to help with the film on Gandhi, passed away in 1964. Within a span of just 6 years, Motilal Kothari also breathed his last. Under the circumstances, it might have been prudent to give up on the biopic altogether. But Richard Attenborough kept at it, and was more determined than ever to realise his dream project… Warner Brothers and MGM Studios had agreed to back the project, but eventually backed out. The newly-formed National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) stepped up… By the time Attenborough was ready to roll cameras, it was November 1980… Attenborough’s doggedness which kept him attached to the project regardless of the setbacks, also reflected in his storytelling and approach to directing.

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Relook at Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire

Babu Subramanian | Sep 4

Ray displayed his mastery of filmmaking right from his early films reaching a highpoint in ‘Charulata’.  In ‘Ghare Baire’ he goes even beyond that peak.

read FILM ANALYSIS

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The Mahatma abhorred cinema, but films celebrated Gandhi

S Viswanath | Oct 02

While film makers may per se not have ingrained Gandhian thoughts or philosophies themselves, the Mahatma’s influence on cinema has been pervasive.

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Shabana Azmi

Darshana Goswami | Sep 18

Shabana Azmi belongs to the clan of those handful of artists whose performance, even within the limited space allotted to an actor (for it is commonly believed that cinema is the director’s space), asserts the unlimited possibilities that cinema can explore—cinema as art, as philosophy, as an intellectual movement or a weapon for social change, as entertainment, or cinema as life is—unchanging and unchangeable.

read FEATURE