Indian cinema without songs is perhaps unthinkable. Indians love their films with hummable songs, much to the amusement of the western audience, and this tradition (some critics consider it as a carry-over influence of the folk theatres such as “nautanki” or “jatra”) has continued ever since the advent of the talkies. Film songs have been the best vehicle of conveying romance and passion in a society where on-screen permissiveness was considered a taboo till recently.

In the ’70s starrer Sanjog, there is an elaborate song sequence where Mala Sinha and Aroona Irani (both married to Amitabh Bachchan) recall mythological tales. It is said that Krishna’s second wife Satyabhama once in an arrogant mood decided to weigh her husband in gold but the scales did not swing. In response, Rukmini, Krishna’s first wife, placed merely two leaves of Tulsi on the scale and the balance tilted. It was Krishna’s way of telling his wives that Tulsi occupies a place in his heart that nobody can take away.

In the ’80s Raj Khosla changed her interpretation from the pious to the pariah on the big screen forever. With just one film Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki ….

It is only when you begin to write about the festival of lights that you realise that the image has become almost invisible in our current films. There was a time, when our films could not do without a mention of the festival but slowly like Holi, Diwali disappeared from the big screen.

The only significant moment I can recall in last decades is the climax sequence in Zanjeer where the hero accidentally discovers the murderer of his parents beautifully portrayed through the fireworks in the sky. It has always baffled me why our lyricists were not able to come up with any memorable songs portraying the spirit of the festival. Beginning with Ghar ghar mein Diwali Hamare ghar mein andhera../ Kismet.

When Lumieres took their new invention , the Cinematograph camera to the railway station and photographed the train entering the station and later projected in a Paris café , the audience shouted ” this is life itself “. Film historians have recorded that the first experience was so “realistic”, that some members present in the front row, virtually ran out of the café, as they felt the train was coming towards them. Before Cinema came on the scene, mankind had never experienced something similar. So there could be some logic in what the film historians say.

Guru Dutt, who virtually tortured himself to a self-inflicted death, was a tragic victim of his own heightened vision of romance and drama, of life and creatively, of despair and death, writes Vidyarthy Chatterjee
Guru Dutt in Pyaasa (1957), Photo Courtesy: Wikipedia.comThe lives and lifestyle of the mentor (Uday Shankar) and the protégé (Guru Dutt) were […]

In his seminal book The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Christian Metz remarked ‘…film is like a mirror… although… everything comes to be projected, there is one thing, and one thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body…the mirror suddenly becomes a clear glass’. We will here, try to understand and expand the validity of the above statement taking Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) as our reference. This courtroom drama is unfortunately, one of his least discussed films.

What is the matter with the way we write our films? The major problem that I find with most Hindi movies that I watch these days is the laziness in building a character. Or working hard to explain a sequence of events that lead to certain emotions. We are comfortable with taking shortcuts like using voice overs, or narrations from friends for this. And in some cases, even a representation from the media comes in handy.

Filmmakers openly acknowledge the contribution to world cinema by Russian directors as monumental. Eisenstein, along with his peers, introduced the concept of “montage” in film editing, where two or more scenes in sequence provide symbiotic intellectual value for the viewer. Today this is the grammar that makes all our film viewing interesting.

One would expect Eisenstein to have been lionized in his own country. Unfortunately, in Stalin’s USSR, even Eisenstein had to face the brunt of state censorship.