In the dialogue-less opening to Aakrosh, Bhiku (Om Puri), the Adivasi labourer looks on in chains as the body of his dead wife (Smita Patil in a cameo) is cremated before he is led away by the police to jail. The pot marked face, protruding eyes, leathery skin of Bhiku amount to an image of […]
Category: Indian CInema
THE SEVENTH WALK (Dir. Amit Dutta, 2013, India) – Modulations of Light & Space
In Amit Dutta’s The Seventh Walk (2013) the camera meanders, weaves and glides through a forest, replicating and distorting the gaze of New Delhi based Indian artist, Paramjit Singh. The dolly shots, evocatively staged, depict the spaces of the forest as oneiric and mysterious. There is sensuality at work in Dutta’s ghostly imagining of the forest, […]
Genre, Iconography & Ideology: Imaginings of the Train in Indian Cinema – Introduction
Introduction ‘Come children, let’s play a game, Someone comes and someone goes, This is a game of this world, Bell rings at every station, Signal will be given and the flag will wave, Then the train starts moving, Chuk chuk chuk chuk goes the train!’ — Train Song from 27 Down (1974) A cursory glance […]
VAMSHA VRIKSHA / The Family Tree (1971, India, Dir. B. V. Karanth & Girish Karnad)
In Parallel Cinema the co existence of creative streams accommodated divergent aesthetic reckonings. The initial films of the Kannada new wave spearheaded by the likes of Girish Karnad and B. V. Karanth adopted a largely neo realist approach that was more in line with Ray’s cinema and which was later exemplified by Benegal. The realist […]
