Cover reveal - Art Cinema And India's Forgotten Futures by Rochona Majumdar

 

Through careful archival research, the book presents, how art films  emerged out of a particular relationship between ordinary people and  the arts.   Rochona Majumdar analyzes the aspirations, films, and writings of a small  but significant group of passionate cinephiles - Satyajit Ray, Ritwik  Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen, among them. These filmmakers worked with a new  medium—films—to craft unique readings of India’s postcolonial history.  In this, they were pioneers who anticipated many of the themes that  academic postcolonial, feminist, and other radical historiographies  developed in later years.   THE FIRST COMPREHENSIVE AND CRITICAL  HISTORY OF INDIAN ART CINEMA

October 2021

Non-fiction | Columbia University Press | 304 Pages | 35 B&W Film Stills Paperback | INR 699/- Distributed by Penguin Random House India

Art films gave Indian cinema international recognition in Cannes, Venice,  and scores of international festivals. Art filmmakers were among the first to see the problems with the  developmental state. The films spoke both thematically and  cinematographically of the many ills that beset the new nation-state. Certain such as the "angry young man" arose first in art films before they  reappeared in Bombay films in the star persona of Amitabh Bachchan. The novel use of songs, location shooting, melodrama, poster art, graffiti,  found footage, and sound camera techniques marked unprecedented breaks in  Indian  cinema.  Why then has the INDIAN ART CINEMA gone into  oblivion?    ABOUT THE BOOK   The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence  in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and  speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering  book, Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to  demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so  doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought.  Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies  and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new  nation, fueled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art  cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning  individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During  the 1960s, however, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak―the leading  figures of Indian art cinema―became disillusioned with the belief that  film was integral to national development. Instead, Majumdar contends,  their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial  present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures. Analyzing  the films of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical  reinterpretation of Indian film history. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten  Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition  and its role in decolonial imaginations of the  future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR   Rochona Majumdar is an associate professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies at the University  of Chicago. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal  (2009) and Writing Postcolonial History (2010). If you are a book lover, join our Outset Book Club and be with other book lovers. We also   the Outset Books Facebook Group.