Parallel Cinema
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Swayamvaram / One’s Own Choice (Dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan, 1972, Malayalam)
Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s debut feature Swayamvaram (1972) is a stark melodrama that marked the beginning of the Malayalam New Wave, an adjunct of India’s Parallel Cinema movement. The film opens with an extraordinary six-minute, dialogue-free sequence aboard a moving bus in Kerala. Shot in a verité style, the camera roves among passengers before settling on the protagonist, Viswam Continue reading
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Grihajuddha / Crossroads(1982, Dir. Buddhadev Dasgupta, India)
Bengali director Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Grihajuddha is a stark and unflinching entry in India’s third phase of Parallel Cinema, which I have titled ‘the high point’, and which often thrived on perceptive socio-political critique. Funded by the West Bengal government, this early work from Dasgupta is a tautly scripted political thriller that takes a searing look Continue reading
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PALTADACHO MUNIS / The Man Beyond the Bridge (Dir. Laxmikant Shetgaonkar, 2009, India) – Severing the now
* * * Released in 2009, director Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s Paltadacho Munis could arguably be situated as part of a post-Parallel Cinema cycle of films, a sort of hangover from the mid to late 90s era, since it is a work that explores caste, gender and religion in a rural milieu with a brilliantly sharp eye Continue reading
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GODAM / WAREHOUSE (Dir. Dilip Chitre, 1983, India)
* * * A NFDC production and accomplished Marathi poet Dilip Chitre’s only directorial feature film, Godam opens with a ritual, the sacrifice of an animal, auspiciously preceding the marriage of Yesu (Trupti), a teenage bride to a mentally challenged boy. The boy’s father, a perverted manifestation of the patriarchal system in which Yesu finds Continue reading
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Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho! (Dir. Saeed Mirza, India, 1984) – ‘So, who says there is no happiness here?’
A cursory search of the term ‘chawl’ offers a definition of ‘low quality housing’, which can’t be any further from the truth regarding the abject state of housing for the lower and underclass in India. What chawl actually equates to is poor sanitation, overcrowding, cramped living conditions and squalor. Saeed Mirza’s 1984 work Mohan Joshi Continue reading
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