Category — Film and Society

What triggers moral panics in Tamil Nadu and who triggers them for what can possibly be taken up as a good PhD level dissertation. There are so many interesting variables and so many hidden variables. This week’s moral panic story concerns the beatings one Tamil film director, Mr Samy, got along with his friends while going to watch his new release, Sindhu Samaveli (The Plains of Sindhu). [Read more →]

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.

I recently read a piece by a friend that bemoaned our fraught relationship with our own cinema; I immediately thought of all the usual elements that have brought us notoriety — the melodrama, the song and dance, and of course Bollywood’s miserable attempts at making ‘social films’. Issues from dyslexia to terrorism have all taken massive beatings in the hands of our filmmakers who barely manage to get facts (symptoms?) right and parade their hysteria in the form of films that people love to love because they give us a warm, gooey, we-have-done-our-bit-for-society feeling.

Perhaps this is why Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli [Live] came as something of a shock, something that successfully turned the trajectory of the very texture of popular Bombay cinema. [Read more →]

The popular Hindi film industry is often accused of recycling material, rehashing old stories, copying Hollywood and generally not generating any new innovative material. We can argue over the validity of these claims, but there is something new and wildly interesting that has been brewing in Bollywood for some years now, and that is the manufacturing of stars.

With the internet, social networking and myriad other options, the mapping of stardom has changed over the last few years. Namrata Joshi of Outlook has written about the role of marketing in selling stars and their films. Have a look here.

Last year the Cannes Film Festival had proposed a mini-retrospective of the work of celebrated Indian director Mrinal Sen, but because the prints of most of his films were in ‘poor condition’, it never came through.

This year, Sen’s film Khandar has been selected as one of the films that will be screened in the Cannes Classics section of the festival. Films of directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel and Volker Schlondroff are part of this selection. Sen is expected to be present for this screening.

The National Film Archive in Pune was given a directive by the Prime Minister last year to restore each of Sen’s films. The screening at Cannes has reportedly been made possible because of the successful restoration.

Khandar was made in 1983 and starred Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Kapur and Annu Kapur. I had written a retrospective piece on the film on the occasion of Mrinal Sen getting the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival in 2008 in New Delhi. Click here to access it.

And while the Indian press seems just thrilled at this recognition India has got at Cannes, not one of them has got the name of the film right. All sites have picked up an agency copy which refers to the film as ‘Kandahar’. They have all retained the English title The Ruins, but no one has managed to put two and two together.

Celebrated Iranian film director, Jafar Panahi who had made films like The White Balloon, The Circle, Offside among others, was placed under arrest by the Iranian authorities in April 2010.  Despite international pressure to release him, and his wife Tahereh Saeedi’s fear for his health, he continues to be in jail, and according to recent reports has been moved to a smaller cell.

It is a case of life imitating art. There is as yet absolutely no clarity over the reasons for this arrest. It began in February  when Panahi was not given permission to leave the country to attend the Berlinale Film Festival. No reason was quoted officially at the time of the arrest. There have been muffled reasons like he was making an ‘anti-regime’ film which spoke about the events following the controversial re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. His wife has denied these claims.

Following growing international pressure, another garbled reason was leaked, claiming that his arrest wasn’t political but he had been “accused of some crimes and arrested with another person following an order by a judge,” (quote from an AFP report). Others have simply stated that he has been arrested because he poses a threat to the country’s security.

The film community from across the world has raised its voice against this unfair arrest. At the moment, support pouring in from Hollywood actors and directors like Martin Scorcese, Ethan and Joel Coen, Robert DeNiro, Michael Moore etc is making the headlines, even though there seems to be no move towards releasing Panahi.

There are also various online petitions doing the rounds. The one endorsed by the family is http://www.petitiononline.com/FJP2310/petition.html

A recent report by the Press Trust of India claims that the first quarter of 2010 has seen Marathi films grossing higher than most mainstream Hindi films produced by the Bombay film industry. Notwithstanding the likes of 3 Idiots and My Name is Khan, an upsurge has been noticed in the returns of films like Harishchandrachi Factory, Natrang to name a few.

Click here to access the full report.

In 2008, when I reviewed Oye Lucky Lucky Oye I referred to the director Dibakar Banerjee as a new dawn in Indian cinema. It was well-deserved then, but not so much any more. Certainly not with his latest venture Love, Sex aur Dhokha.

Love, Sex aur Dhokha or LSD as it is quirkily called, is a bunch of three stories that are not shot but rather captured – one on a digi-cam, one on CCTV and one with spy cameras. The first story is of a young man in film school who falls in love with his leading lady. Since her conservative father (who also features in the film) wants to marry her off to an NRI, the two decide to run away and get married secretly. All this and their tragic end is captured on his digi-cam. The second, and the longest story is of a store manager who needs to pay off his debt to some suspect, obviously dangerous characters. He seduces a store girl and captures their lovemaking on one of the store cameras and then sells it off. The final story is of a sting operation where a small town girl tries to avenge herself and expose a pop star with the help of the media. [Read more →]

Saba Naqvi of Outlook asserts:

My more earnest/ideological friends and relatives grumble that Shahrukh inhabits a no-man’s bubble gum land on celluloid and has played a role in divesting movies of all social context. I say, hey, get a life! Movies are for fun and there are others who make gritty realistic movies (that are no fun for kids). My own sociological research of tiny tots at birthday parties has led me to conclude that little girls in particular are die-hard Shahrukh fans because most of his films are free of violence and even the romance is so unrealistic that it could be straight out of a fairy tale. Little boys on the other hand are often fans of action heroes like Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan (must be the muscles). (link)

Groan, cringe!

An appropriately dramatic beginning for this would be, ‘There was once an actor who embodied rebellion, middle-class anger and anguish in popular Hindi cinema.’ Amitabh Bachchan who made the unlawful, illegitimate rogue figure so attractive in the cinema of the 1970s has turned his face away from anything even remotely oblique. [Read more →]