Bengali cinema
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Chokh / The Eyes (Dir. Utpalendu Chakraborty, 1982, India/Bengali)
The eyes speak, harbouring and chronicling histories, emotional sentiments and even memories. Chokh, a stark political exercise in neorealist aesthetics, opens with the petrified eyes of Jadunath (Om Puri in blistering form) who looks directly at us with a totalizing gaze of defiance. Jadunath, a union leader, has been convicted of murder, and waits impatiently 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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NEEM ANNAPURNA / BITTER MORSEL (Dir. Buddhadev Dasgupta, 1979, India)
Before Buddhadev Dasgupta became a filmmaker he was a university teacher, lecturing on economics. His association with the Calcutta Film Society in the 1960s led to Dasgupta recognising the function cinema could play as an agent of wider social agitation and potential change. Neem Annapurna was one of first films he directed. In fact, it Continue reading
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CALCUTTA 71 (Dir. Mrinal Sen, 1972, India) – ‘Calcutta was passing through a terrible time…’
Conviction is a virtual necessity of any kind of political cinema especially the one that claims to magnify the ills and sickness of society. Out of the Bengali triumvirate including Ray and Ghatak, Mrinal Sen was by far the most radical, advocating a leftist Naxalite inspired ideology whilst borrowing liberally from European modernists like Godard Continue reading
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KANCHENJUNGHA (Dir. Satyajit Ray, 1962, India) – ‘Why accept a life of endless submission?’
The title to Ray’s first film in colour shares its name with the third highest mountain in the world. It is perhaps the least seen of his films and the original negative has unfortunately been damaged beyond repair. However, in 2008, The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the digital restoration of the Continue reading
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