There is a spectacular political trice at the end of Swaroop’s participatory documentary. At night, on the banks of the river Ganges, which is teeming with euphoric revellers and a swathe of India’s police, Modi emerges victorious, returning to Banaras, where he had stood for election as a BJP candidate. As he makes his way […]
Tag: Political Cinema
HIGH-RISE (Dir. Ben Wheatley, 2015, UK)
Class devours itself. And the politics of class creates an indescribable antagonism that often spills over into violence, and in the case of Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, class is explicated through the prism of satire in which modernism is a debauched, sulking creature. Intrinsic to Wheatley’s treatment of Ballard’s writing is an abandonment of logical narrative […]
BHUVAN SHOME (Dir. Mrinal Sen, 1969, India) – ‘Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle’
I’ve only really started to look at Bhuvan Shome so here are some tentative thoughts about the film, which I hope to return to at a later date. Bhuvan Shome is often cited as having initiated the New Indian Cinema movement. Released in 1969, along with Sara Akash and Uski Roti, as a triptych, the films […]
SONG OF LAHORE (Dir. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Andy Schocken, Pakistan/US, 2015)
The incandescent documentary Song of Lahore narrates a hopeful story about culture and the arts in Pakistan which has witnessed since the 1970s a steady decline and erosion of both. Directors Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Andy Schocken frame the recent emergence of Sachal Studios, set up to try and bring together some of Pakistan and Lahore’s best […]
