#indian parallel cinema

[juniper-girl]

"I want to live in freedom" "Let me be free"

Duvidha (Mani Kaul, 1973)

[kalakarsaab]

Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1992)

Dir. Shyam Benegal

[myluckyerror]

(via Canonizing Indian Parallel Cinema – Part 2: The Emergency (1975 – 1977))

[artfilmfan]

Uski Roti (Mani Kaul, 1970)

[khudgarzrooh]

ajantrik (1958) অযান্ত্রিক | dir. ritwik ghatak

[notesfromthebalcony]

okay but the story of how mrinal sen broke down in a hotel room and accidentally changed indian cinema is the most devastating thing

so i recently went down a rabbit hole about mrinal sen; one of the founders of indian parallel cinema and i found out something that nobody talks about enough

before he became the legendary director who won awards at cannes and berlin and venice. before bhuvan shome. before any of it.

he quit.

his first film, raat bhor (1955), came out and he hated it so much he just... stopped. left filmmaking entirely. became a pharmaceutical sales rep. got on trains. knocked on doctors' doors. carried a suitcase full of medicine samples around cities where no one knew his name.

this man had literally written essays about the aesthetics of eisenstein. and he couldn't make cinema work. and he had to live with that.

then one night on a work trip to jhansi he went back to his hotel room and stood in front of the mirror and just. fell apart.

he stripped naked. talked to his own reflection. shouted. cried like a child. the whole thing. alone in a room in jhansi.

he wrote about it himself in his memoir always being born and he doesn't try to make it sound cool or literary. it was just a man absolutely breaking down.

three days later he resigned. went back to calcutta. went back to cinema. never left again.

AND THEN — this is the part that gets me

he told nobody about the jhansi hotel room. for EIGHTEEN YEARS.

until 1969 when he was making bhuvan shome and needed utpal dutt (the great bengali theatre actor) to play a scene that he couldn't direct his way into. the scene needed something real. something that couldn't be explained.

so sen took dutt aside. and told him everything. the mirror. the nakedness. the crying. the telegram. all of it. the private humiliation he'd carried alone for eighteen years.

utpal dutt listened in silence. then he put his hand on sen's shoulder and said:

"give me ten minutes."

ten minutes later the camera rolled. and what they filmed is still considered one of the finest scenes in indian parallel cinema.

bhuvan shome went on to launch the entire indian new wave. the film finance corporation divided history into 'before' and 'after' it. also amitabh bachchan got his first ever paid film work doing the voiceover. just to complete the picture.

the full story is at artwistory and it's genuinely one of the most remarkable things i've read about any filmmaker:

Read the full story  Mrinal Sen's Hidden Breakdown That Changed Indian Cinema — Artwistory

[zurich-snows]

Canonizing Indian Parallel Cinema – Part 1: The foundational years/developmental phase (1968 – 1974)

There is a general consensus that Indian Parallel Cinema officially started in 1969 with the triptych of Bhuvan Shome, Uski Roti and Sara Akash. In 1968 B.K. Karanjia, former editor of Filmfare, wa…

[zurich-snows]

The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul

Published on the occasion of the program Soft Notes on A Sharp Scale — The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul, produced as part of the Courtisane Festival 2018 (28 March - 1 April), as well as the associated Mani Kaul program organized by the Essay Film Festival 2018 (21-29 March), in collaboration with Courtisane and the Otolith Group.