In 1979, Basu Chatterjee made Baaton Baaton Mein and unobtrusively brought to us the dating and courtship rituals of a community that was till then either caricatured or just overlooked in Hindi cinema. Nancy Perreira and Tony Braganza…
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Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti). The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters…
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“Start with hope..always start with hope. We went from being a shitty team to become one of the biggest dynasties in the sport and all it needed was one match to light this fire,” says Michael Jordan at…
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In 1947, my grandparents brought three children and the remains of an uprooted life from Pakistan to India in a train. One of those children was my mother. I grew up hearing a lot of stories about the…
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Three documentaries streaming right now show the ultimate culmination of the Bois Locker Room culture. And what happens when one gender is taught to mistrust its instincts of self-preservation and the other does not even learn something as…
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In Sudip Sharma’s Paatal Lok (Now streaming on Amazon. Co written by Sharma, Sagar Haveli, Hardik Mehta and Gunjit Chopra. Directed by Avinash Arun and Prosit Roy), India’s disowned inhabit the headlines we turn away from. A young…
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Decades before Article 15, a certain film delivered a stunning cinematic punch line against oppression. A woman of privilege who lives in the “upper” regions of a fictional city, appears in front of men who have gathered to decide whether a nullah running through the “lower” parts of the city is dirty or not. The […]
Soumendu Roy played an invaluable part in the cinema of Satyajit Ray … it is great to have a book chronicling his contribution to cinema-’ Sandip Ray/film-maker Soumendu Roy today is widely known for his long association with Satyajit Ray. He was Ray’s cinematographer for a generation of films that is celebrated the world over even […]
Actor, author, columnist, passionate aesthete, Padma Shri Tom Alter has just arrived in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore to deliver a lecture on ‘Sports & Arts in Modern India’. If he is tired, it doesn’t show because Tom is used to being many things all at once. Over the last few days, he has […]
Very rarely does a film become a visual sock in the gut like Pather Panchali or irrevocably changes the way we think of cinema. The images linger. An unloved old woman trapped in her impoverished life, singing a wedding song, longing for human contact, and then one day deciding that she has had enough. She […]
Pandit Ravi Shankar passed away today. Rajinikanth turned 62. Dilip Kumar turned 90 yesterday. Smita Patil passed away almost 26 years ago on December 13. Births, deaths. Years counted, measured, emptied out. filled up. This whole idea of time and that somehow it should be accounted for in terms of achievements, milestones, awards, body of […]
In the film industry, the transition is not that clear. We have had good cinema, off and on, more dependent on the directors- so Satyajit Ray (who along with masters from Bengal and South India influenced world cinema and not just Indian cinema and was active in years 1955-1991), Guru Dutt (1950s), Raj Kapoor (1950s,60s,70s even […]
Ray devised an innovative way to work around Apu’s stiffness and awkward gait. Like much of his journey into making the film, this also is a lesson for wannabe filmmakers: “I had learnt a lesson. All my preparations over the years… had finally produced this one shot and it was difficult to imagine anything more […]
It’s a well known fact that Ray was a master film maker who was revered, practically worshipped, in the West – especially Hollywood (list of his admirers include Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, James Ivory, Elia Kazan, Danny Boyle, Wes Anderson…). What’s little known is the fact that this man (arguably) had a hand in the making […]
Satyajit Ray, as a rule, visited the movies every Saturday afternoon. In this he was accompanied by a handful of like-minded ‘film-buffs’ he met and befriended. One of them was Bansi Chandragupta, who was destined to be Ray’s Art Director [a relationship that went on to collaborate on the most remarkable of Ray’s works upto Pratidwandi/The Adversary […]
Like all great endeavours, the timeless Pather Panchali by the legendary Satyajit Ray faced many obstacles on the way to immortality.Well, how this excellent story by Bibhutibhushan Bannerjee made its way onto the celluloid is an engrossing, fascinating tale in itself. Here goes…. As most of us know, Ray started off as an advertising professional. In June, 1943, he joined D.J. Keymer & Co. as a Junior […]
From soft watercolours to pencil drawings, from the sensuous figurative portraits of Tagore’s Charulata to metaphorical abstracts, from a tribute to Leonardo Da Vinci to the memories of Old Bengal school masters, Sudip Roy has captured it all. Titled Time Past is Present, this is an expansive show of over 70 odd works – on view […]
As he, almost silently, glided into the living room, it was as if the curtains had lifted and the show had begun. Cinemar manush (the man from the films) was how I would refer to him whenever I saw a picture of his anywhere, as a five-year-old. The man I had loved and loathed in […]