In Kagez Ke Phool, Guru Dutt comes to meet the Producers who want him to make movies their way – and refuses; the scene, the light, the camera, the emotion and the acting lifts and arrest a person to an enchanted level, not only the emotions can be felt in the throat, but also in the mind and soul, this is the power which Indian Cinema once possessed – and now lacks. Turn on any movie from last year, and sit through them, and not one image would be enchanting as it used to be, they will appear ordinary, like…
Author: Nitesh Rohit
How I wish we all had teachers like Aamir khan to shape our lives. Taare Zameen Par is a movie about a young boy battling not only with a condition, but against certain principles and dichotomy of the society. I guess, all of us, who have grown up in such milieu understand the problems and moments tied together in the film. The sheer burden of competition, the inevitable comparison with your sibling are few things which does ring true to how the society generally functions on the large, especially, the middle and the upper middle class belt of our society;…
I sat across the street and observed a man in his early 60s standing outside the main entrance of the Osian Film Festival – perhaps lost in his thought; but somewhat, oblivious to the cacophony around him. People of all generations walked past; sometimes someone from the older lot smiled and nodded their head in reverence, but for most, he stood, just like any other man, no different from others. If, and only if, I could use even the basic layer of dissolves and freeze from his film that I saw the night before, then only, most of us, could…
Jean Luc Godard the French cineaste abandoned commercial filmmaking, in pure Godardian terms to become an active participant in formulating a direct passage between the essence of art and its reactionary functions- to create a base for political cinema. In the span of few years Godard’s activism dried up. This raises an important question of, the role of art in our loves today. A question which we all should ask ourselves; especially for cinema which is ubiquitous as a commercial form of art, but has the power to touch the masses unlike any other form of art. Hence the possibility…
Gulabi is no pin-up model, yet her smile still lingers in my memory even after the movie and the Osian film festival long ended. She seemed so rooted in the ethos of her culture that almost all her gestures in the film are universal in their portrayal and reflection on life. The way she ate, the way she talked, the way she walked and the way she behaved formed a ritual play of gestures and expression unlike any other. The foundation on which the film explores the duality of human behavior- setting a story of an individual against a large…
We often went to the movies. The screen lit up and we trembled…But more often than not Madeleine and I were disappointed. The pictures were dated, they flickered. And Marilyn Monroe had aged terribly. It made us sad. This wasn’t the film we’d dreamed of. This wasn’t the total film that each of us had carried within himself…the film we wanted to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, that we wanted to live. Paul, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin fémininJaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is a film of the 21st century, born under the eyes of the producers, marketed viciously under…
Ram Gopal Verma had a fascination for the bullies of his class; their ideology to terrorize, control (by use of force and power) and have an arsenal of followers- has remained an important part of his oeuvre. The way his character behave, the way they are presented, and the “position” they hold in the world of Ram Gopal Verma film’s reflects his childhood enchantment with people who crossed the law or who considered themselves above the law. He belongs to the special group of “Video Generation filmmakers” the likes of whom include luminaries such as Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson.…
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the veteran Malayalam director grew up reading the short stories of T. S. Pillai, one of the towering figures of Malayalam literature, his short stories were a stark portrayal of the society he lived in. Since everything he saw, he felt, he witnessed became a part of his stories. As T.S. Pillai presented the realities of life, as it stood, from the day to day vagrants, to the complexity of social feudalism. Everything in the fictitious world felt just like living and breathing the atmosphere he talked about, and his stories achieved the status quo of social –realism.The…