Bengali Cinema
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Sunrise / Arunoday (Dir. Partho Sen-Gupta, 2014, France/India)
Director Partho Sen-Gupta talks about the oneirophrenic space, a space that is both hallucinatory and metaphysical, realised in his latest film Sunrise with an audio-visual clarity, hauntingly rendering grief as eternal. I can’t remember the last time I saw a film that used rain with such cinematic dexterity, enveloping the screen as not only an Continue reading
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KOMAL GANDHAR aka E-Flat / Soft Note on a Sharp Scale (1961, Dir. Ritwik Ghatak)
Komal Gandhar is the film Ghatak made after Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star, 1960) in what was the most unremitting productive phase in his career. It is also an ignored work. This stems from the film’s inclusion in Ghatak’s partition/exile trilogy and in which much of the critical dialogue has balanced on Meghe Continue reading
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NAGARIK / THE CITIZEN (Dir. Ritwik Ghatak, 1952, India) ‘Film-making is not an esoteric thing to me…’
The film is about an unemployed youth named Ramu, who comes from a middle-class family that has been turned refugee overnight by the Partition, but which nevertheless refuses to abandon its petty- bourgeois aspirations. Ramu gets saddled with the responsibilities of running the household, tending to his aged parents, getting his younger brother an education, Continue reading
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KAPURUSH / THE COWARD (Dir. Satyajit Ray, 1965, India) – The choices we make
It seems a little miscalculated that Criterion have packaged Kapurush with Mahanagar. The apparent logic may appear related with the presence of actress Madhabi Mukherjee in both films. Charulata has been released separately yet thematically Kapurush has much more in common with this film than Mahanagar. Firstly, Kapurush was the film Ray made after Charulata. Continue reading
Movie Mahal 