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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. She analyzes the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak as well as a host of film society publications.
List of contents
Introduction
Part I: The History of Art Cinema
1. Art Cinema: The Indian Career of a Global Category
2. The “New” Indian Cinema: Journeys of the Art Film
3. Debating Radical Cinema: A History of the Film Society Movement
Part II: Art Films as History
4. Ritwik Ghatak and the Overcoming of History
5. “Anger and After”: History, Political Cinema, and Mrinal Sen
6. The Untimely Filmmaker: Ray’s City Trilogy and a Crisis of Historicism
Epilogue: Art Cinema and Our Present
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
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).
Summary
Co-Winner, 2023 Chidananda Dasgupta Award for the Best Writing on Cinema, Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Trust
Shortlisted, 2022 MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association
Longlisted, 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation
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.
Additional text
In this engaging book, Majumdar has brought art cinema alive in a carefully contextualized study of Ray, Sen, and Ghatak—three Bengali directors who, she argues, anticipated critical historians. Her writing is evocative, thoughtful and illuminating.
