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Author: Madhuja Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000448924
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Madhuja Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000448924
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book Here
Book Description
Popular Cinema in Bengal marks a decisive turn in studies of Bengali language cinema by shifting the focus from auteur and text-based studies to exhaustive readings of the film industry. The book covers a wide range of themes and issues, including: generic tropes (like comedy and action); iconic figurations (of the detective and the city); (female) stars such as Kanan Bala, Sadhana Bose and Aparna Sen; intensities of public debates (subjects of high and low cultures, taste, viewership, gender and sexuality); print cultures (including posters, magazines and song-booklets); cinematic spaces; and trans-media and trans-cultural traffic. By locating cinema within the crosscurrents of geo-political transformations, the book highlights the new and persuasive research that has materialised over the last decade. The authors raise pertinent questions regarding 'regional' cinema as a category, in relation to 'national' cinema models, and trace the non-linear journey of the popular via multiple (media) trajectories. They address subjects of physicality, sexuality and its representations, industrial change, spaces of consumption, and cinema’s meandering directions through global circuits and low-end networks. Highlighting the ever-changing contours of cinema in Bengal in all its popular forms and proposing a new historiography, Popular Cinema in Bengal will be of great interest to scholars of film studies and South-Asian popular culture. The chapters were originally published in the journal South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Sharmistha Gooptu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136912177
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Covering the years spanning cinema’s emergence as a popular form in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century, this book examines the main genres and trends produced by this cinema, and leads up to Bengali cinema’s last phase of transition in the 1980s. Arguing that Bengali cinema has been a key economic and social institution, the author highlights that the Bengali filmic imaginary existed over and above the imaginary of the Indian nation. This book argues that a definitive history of Bengali cinema presents an alternative understanding to the currently influential notion of the Hindi film as the ‘Indian’ or ‘national’ cinema. It suggests that the Bengali cinema presents a history which brings to the fore the deeply contested terrain of ‘national’ cinema, and shows the creation of the ‘alternative imaginary’ of the Bengali film. The author indicates that the case of the Bengali cinema demonstrates the emergence of a public domain that set up a definitive discourse of difference with respect to the ‘all-India’ Hindi film, popularly classified as Bollywood cinema, and which pre-empted its subsumption within the more pervasive culture of the Bombay Hindi cinema. As the first comprehensive historical work on Bengali cinema, this book makes a significant contribution to both Film and Cultural Studies and South Asian Studies in general.
Author: Rochona Majumdar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231553900
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak—the leading figures of Indian art cinema—became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends, their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.
Author: Srimati Mukherjee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131730991X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 173
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Book Description
Historically, Indian cinema has positioned women at the intersection of tradition and a more evolving culture, portraying contradictory attitudes which affect women’s roles in public and private spheres. Examining the work of three directors from West Bengal, this book addresses the juxtaposition of tradition and culture regarding women in Bengali cinema. It argues the antithesis of women’s roles, particularly in terms of ideas of resistance, revolution, change, and autonomy, by suggesting they convey resistance to hegemonic structures, encouraging a re-envisioning of women’s positions within the familial-social matrix. Along with presenting a perception of culture as dynamic and evolving, the book discusses how some directors show that with this rupturing of the traditionally prohibitive, and a notion of unmaking and making in women, a traditional inclination is exposed to align women with ideas of absence, substitution, and disposability. The author goes on to show how selected auteurs in contemporary Bengali cinema break with certain traditional representations of women, gesturing towards a culture that is more liberating for women. Presenting the first full-length study of women’s changing roles over the last twenty years of Bengali cinema, this book will be a useful contribution for students and scholars of South Asian Culture, Film Studies and Gender Studies.
Author: Satyajit Ray
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231535473
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Satyajit Ray, one of the greatest auteurs of twentieth century cinema, was a Bengali motion-picture director, writer, and illustrator who set a new standard for Indian cinema with his Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) (1956), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959). His work was admired for its humanism, versatility, attention to detail, and skilled use of music. He was also widely praised for his critical and intellectual writings, which mirror his filmmaking in their precision and wide-ranging grasp of history, culture, and aesthetics. Spanning forty years of Ray's career, these essays, for the first time collected in one volume, present the filmmaker's reflections on the art and craft of the cinematic medium and include his thoughts on sentimentalism, mass culture, silent films, the influence of the French New Wave, and the experience of being a successful director. Ray speaks on the difficulty of adapting literary works to screen, the nature of the modern film festival, and the phenomenal contributions of Jean-Luc Godard and the Indian actor, director, producer, and singer Uttam Kumar. The collection also features an excerpt from Ray's diaries and reproduces his sketches of famous film personalities, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, and Akira Kurosawa, in addition to film posters, photographs by and of the artist, film stills, and a filmography. Altogether, the volume relays the full extent of Ray's engagement with film and offers extensive access to the thought of one of the twentieth-century's leading Indian intellectuals.
Author: Sayandeb Chowdhury
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354352715
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
'There is none like Uttam and there will be no one to ever replace him. He was and he is unparalleled in Bengali, even Indian cinema.'-Satyajit Ray, Oscar-winning Indian film-maker Actor and screen icon Uttam Kumar (1926–1980) is a talismanic figure in Bengali public life. Breaking away from established codes of onscreen performance, he came to anchor an entire industry and led the efforts to reimagine popular cinema in mid-20th-century Bengal. But there is pitifully less knowledge about Uttam Kumar in the learned circles-be it about his range of style and performance; the attractions and problems of his cinema; his roles as a producer and patriarch of the industry; or his persona, stardom and legacy. The first definitive cultural and critical biography of this larger-than-life figure engages meaningfully with his life and cinema, revealing the man, hero and actor from various, often competing, vantages. The conceptual aim is to locate a star figure within a larger historical and cultural context, and to enquire into how a towering image was mobilised for an ever-greater, wholesome, popular and even, at times, radical and progressive entertainment. A complimentary métier of this work is to explore why and how this star persona would go on to reconstitute the bhadrolok Bengali visual and cultural world in the post-Partition period. But above all, this is the story of a clerk who became an actor, an actor who became a star, a star who became an icon and an icon who became a legend.
Author: Sangeeta Datta
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131735608X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.
Author: Sharmistha Gooptu
Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited
ISBN: 8193704959
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Sharmistha Gooptu is a founder and managing trustee of the South Asia Research Foundation (SARF), a not-for-profit research body based in India. SARF’s current project SAG (South Asian Gateway) is in partnership with Taylor and Francis, and involves the creation of what will be the largest South Asian digital database of historical materials. She is also the joint editor of the journal South Asian History and Culture (Routledge) and the Routledge South Asian History and Culture book series.
Author: Urmimala Sarkar Munsi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040119875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This book, with its focus on the dancing body, is the first of its kind within the larger context of dance in India. The Dancing Body is a body that exists, survives, inhabits and performs in multiple space and time, by moving, laboring, migrating and straddling across geographic, cultural and emotional borders, writing different cultural meanings at different moments of time. In India, discourses around the body in dance have long been trapped within hagiographic histories in and around dancers and their dance. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. This book brings together emerging discourses around dance and the body that have become central in the Indian nation-state. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, moral policing, politics of exclusion, and neo-liberal dispossessions vis a vis sexual labour, means of survival, pleasure and agency of dancers have helped frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the everyday existence of the body in dance. This volume will be of great value to students, researchers and scholars in dance, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, with a particular interest in Asian and South Asian Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Monika Mehta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000293319
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
This volume points to the limits of models such as regional, national, and transnational, and develops ‘network’ as a conceptual category to study cinemas of India. Through grounded and interdisciplinary research, it shows how film industries located in disparate territories have not functioned as isolated units and draws attention to the industrial traffic – of filmic material, actors, performers, authors, technicians, genres, styles, sounds, expertise, languages, and capital, across trans-regional contexts -- since the inception of cinema. It excavates histories of film production, distribution and exhibition, and their connections beyond regional and national boundaries, and between places, industrial practices, and multiple media. The chapters in this volume address a range of themes such as transgressive female figures; networks of authors and technicians; trans-regional production links and changing technologies, and new media geographies. By tracking manifold changes in the contexts of transforming media, and inter-connections between diverse industrial nodal points, this book expands the critical vocabulary in media and production studies and foregrounds new methods for examining cinema. A generative account of industrial networks, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, production studies, media sociology, gender studies, South Asian studies, and cultural studies.
