Director Achal Mishra’s impressive debut film is a semi-formalist work, resorting to a succession of absorbing vignettes and framed as tableau in which the historical spatial and temporal configurations of an ancestral family house acts as more than just a pivot, fashioning a sense of the ephemeral and conjuring a steady yet absorbing rhythm. Choosing […]
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AAKROSH / Cry of the Wounded [Dir. Govind Nihalani, 1980, India] – ‘I burn from within…’
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 […]
Genre, Iconography & Ideology: Imaginings of the Train in Indian Cinema – Conclusion: New Filmic Spaces
This series has tried to examine the role of the train as an iconographic component in the lexicon of Indian cinema, pausing to analyse sequences to detail the aesthetic and thematic significance of the train. Hutchings (1995: 69) argues ‘a film genre’s outer form was its iconography and its inner form its thematic identity’. If […]
Genre, Iconography & Ideology: Imaginings of the Train in Indian Cinema – Part 6: Stardom and the Train – Shahrukh Khan
Two fathers, two lovers, and of course, a train. This is the ending to Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) (1995), a ‘seminal text about diasporic representation and consumption of Indian popular culture’ (Mishra, 2002: 250). The choice of setting, a train station, is critical though, and so is the train that arrives to carry away […]
