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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
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.
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.
