Category — Film History

I’m sharing an essay I read on the Bachchan film posters. It has been written by Ranjani Mazumdar, Associate Professor of cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Ranjani has previously written on the Bombay film poster, but this paper works specifically on Amitabh Bachchan, and it creates a visual map of how cinema responded to societal changes in the 1970s, and also traces Bachchan’s rise to stardom through the film poster.

The essay is four-pages long, and you have to go to the bottom right corner of the page and click on ‘next’, a link that isn’t very visible on the page.

Click here to access the essay.

After demolishing the “established fact” that Electric theatre was the first permanent theatre in India in his May 2003 Seminar article “Pride of Place,” Stephen Hughes, a well known SOAS (University of London) scholar working on early Indian cinema history, came down heavily on the damage caused by the wrong “chronology of firsts” in Indian film historiography at a seminar entitled “Searching for the Origins of Cinema in Colonial Madras” on Feb.03,2010 at University of Madras. [Read more →]

Despite several volumes on the varied dimensions of Indian cinemas by numerous Indian, non-resident Indian and foreign scholars, film historiography remains a patchy area of study in India. In the absence of dependable archival sources on the early attempts by film pioneers in different parts of the country and their silent films, what circulates are accounts woven around the mainstreaming practices of the histories woven by inaccurate and ethnocentric accounts of film historians taking a peek at the fairly distant past and its fluid and unverified circumstances, particularly of the first four decades of India’s tryst with the moving images. [Read more →]

Just over thirty years after it came into existence, Miramax  studio that gave the world films like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Chicago to name a few, was shut down by Disney. Click here to access the entire report.

The last few months have seen much frenetic activity around Paresh Mokashi’s Marathi film Harishchandrachi Factory, primarily because it was picked as India’s official entry to the Oscars. While a lot of dinnertime conversation seems to revolve around this film and its supposed uniqueness, it is likely that most of this excitement in the air is based on some reviews about this film and its supposed archival value, because very few people have actually seen it. The question therefore is, is the film really the right choice to send to an international forum as our selection of the best film made in India this year. The answer, is, no. [Read more →]

Many of the accepted notions of the history of Dravidian Political CInema remain on a plane of contestations borne of divergent views of the yesteryears stars and their associates (who collaborated in the making of the Dravidian political cinema) about how it all started. [Read more →]