THE DELHI MANIFESTO Our cinema screen has become an ill-constructed, and conventional portal to a world we aspire of, rather than a mirror, which reflects us. Our emotions are guided by leitmotifs placed deftly, and religious beliefs exploited. Our spirit of inquiry has become dead and we have been reduced to mere receivers in the process. Cinema and television has replaced interaction with imposition of thought. Its thought. An artificial, fake and ill-created thought, a manifestation of our needs to escape ourselves. The medium has become a symbol of cheap entertainment, devoid of any examination of the form, and a victim of our collective need to create personalities, perfect alternate universes, and images of our aspiration. Our criticism has become trivial. Stories take precedent over the intrinsic qualities of the cinematic medium. Our film lovers are snobs, indulging in their wholehearted pseudo-intellectual diatribe, condemning the ignorant, and the ignorant have become so used...
Satyajit Ray Date of Publication: 2004-06-03 Language: English Author: Amitav Ghosh In 1989, during my first extended stay in New York, I was suddenly struck by a wave of Ray nostalgia. It was no coincidence perhaps that I had recently finished writing The Shadow Lines, which is, of all my novels, the one that more clearly shows the influence of Satyajit Ray. It struck me that Ray too had once been a stranger in this overwhelming city; that he too had walked the streets on Manhattan in Kolkata-bought shoes. One day, plucking up my courage, I made an appointment with the director James Ivory, who I knew to be a friend of Ray's. Later that week I went to interview Ivory, cassette recorder in hand. This is how Ivory described his first meeting with Ray, in the winter of 1960: 'I looked him up in Calcutta,' Ivory said. 'I had never met him. I had seen at that point, Pather Panchali ('Song of the Road') and Aparajito ('Undefeated'). I knew that Apur Sansar (...
Duvidha.( The Dilemma) Mani Kaul 1973 I sat across the street and observed a man in his early 60s standing outside the main entrance of the Osian Film Festival(2008) - perhaps lost in his thought; but somewhat, oblivious to the cacophony around him. People of all generations walked past; sometimes someone from the older lot smiled and nodded their head in reverence, but for most, he stood, just like any other man, no different from others. If, and only if, I could use even the basic layer of dissolves and freeze from his film that I saw the night before, then only, most of us, could understand the sheer greatness of the man. Mani Kaul, like his contemporary Kumar Shahaini are two of the most important filmmakers alive in today in India, and who were relegated to oblivion from film production for their sheer avant- gardism, nothing esoteric, but more of, exploring the depth of mise-en-scene in cinema, and what price they had to pay. How sad it is for a medium like ‘Cinema in India’, wh...
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