Indian Cinema

Shivajee Chandrabhushan's black-and-white cinematic canvas succeeds in revealing the myriad hues of film making. "Frozen" is a live, accessible and pronounced manifestation of the effect and importance of the camera as a story teller. Shanker Raman makes the audience enter into the cocoon of Karma (Danny Denzogpa), Lasya (Gauri) and Chomo (Sklzang Angchuk) through the silent and frozen shots of snow laden Ladakh. The atmosphere of self engulfing tranquility is effectively translated. However, this stillness is set into motion keeping pace with the progress of the plot and narration. The excessive wide shots capturing nature's bare naked beauty has a photographic feel to it, almost like travel postcards. Only the movement here makes it more delectable....

K. M. Madhusudhanan's Bioscope (2008) is a film about the early days of cinema in India. Set in 1921, loosely following the story of Varunni Joseph, who appears to have run a bioscope show in the Southern State in 1907. At once a studied look into the history of early cinema in India, the film is a fictional treatise on the nature of cinema and its incursions into a culture that was so deeply supportive, curious and yet entirely wondrous about the new medium. Judging from what it has become in the country as an art form, a commercial success over the past hundred years, this film offers an indispensable and indelible image of the early days. For to understand the present is to understand how that past has shaped it....

Made at a time when India's large labour force is under a frightening debt trap and suicidal mode, the film takes us back to the 1920s when the handloom silk weavers of Tamil Nadu's temple town of Kanchivaram, despite their brilliant craftsmanship, lived as bonded labourers. While the exploiting middlemen amassed huge wealth out of the weavers' art, these toiling men barely survived, and one of the movie's early scenes shows dramatically how there is not even a piece of silk to place on the dead body of an old master worker who had produced exquisite weaves and warps all his life...

Reviewing Goutam Ghosh's Kaalbela(2009) becomes an excruciating effort for a young man from Kolkata even with a fleeting connection to Bengali literature; who grew up with the novel through his late teens - buoyed by the spirit of rebellion, swayed by the resilience called Madhabilata (the lead female protagonist) and crushed by the disillusionment that always follows. How can you possibly imbibe the essence of film and literature as separate art forms with your entire upbringing so swayed by one?

When you pack cinematographer-turned-auteur Santosh Sivan, the leading figures of Indian art house cinema-Rahul Bose and Nandita Das-and the universal story of the clash of cultures, you expect nothing less than sublimely executed, incinerating drama on screen.

Sivan's English language directorial debut, Before the Rains, is set in pre-independence Kerala. An ambitious young Indian, TK Neelan (Rahul Bose), is torn between the promise of prosperity, offered by his boss, British spice baron, Henry Moores (Linus Roache), and loyalty to his own people at a time when the Indian nationalist movement is gathering momentum.

Often hailed as the successor to Satyajit Ray, Adoor Gopalakrishnan may not agree with this label. But the fact is that he is one of the very few auteur-directors in India, a tribe which is shrinking. Creating cinema out of conviction rather than any compulsion, and at a pace that is more than leisurely, he was one of the earliest helmers to take cinema away from the formula-driven song-and-dance fare. Three years after Mrinal Sen's "Bhuvan Shome" (Mr Shome) caused a cinematic revolution of sorts in 1969, Adoor's "Swayamvaram" (One's Own Choice, 1972) reaffirmed that the Indian New Wave was here to stay and grow...

Kaalbela is Samaresh Majumdar's second of his famous trilogy. The three novels are Uttaradhikar, Kaalbela and Kaalpurush. Director Gautam Ghose picked Kaalbela. He made structural changes in the narrative from literature to film, but has remained loyal to the framework of the original novel. The trilogy is an epic-like reflection of a young boy, Animesh, who grows up in Jalpaiguri, comes to Kolkata and gets involved in student politics of CPI (M), then gets into the Naxalite uprising that leads to disillusionment and disappointment...

Master director Girish Kasaravalli uses the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan as a backdrop in his "Gulabi Talkies" to analyse how a small peace-loving fishing community in the southern coastal State of Karnataka loses its inter-religious harmony. The conflict on the Kargil Heights is never shown, and the tension that builds up between Hindus and Muslims in the fishing village is handled with exemplary restraint....

Buddhadeb Dasgupta's Swapner Din explores not just the road that forms the platform for a journey in some form of transport, but reaches far beyond its materialist and geographic implications, bringing about a change in ideology. In Western road movies, when men leave the comfort of their lives to reach out for the unexplored, there is a change in their philosophy of life.

But Paresh (Prosenjit), the protagonist in Swapner Din, cannot afford the luxury of reaching out for the unexplored...

Only women understand women. Or, do they? Aparna Sen's Paramitar Ekdin (1996) opens with such a question, although implied. The story can't be simpler. Paramita (played by Rituparna Sengupta), an ambitious, sensitive young girl from South Calcutta, comes to a North Calcutta business family, after marriage. People who know Calcutta, its culture, its history through partition, can easily understand what happens next. Incompatibility everwhere -- value systems, relations, even her husband's approach in bed -- all lead to a final disaster....