It is half a century since you made your debut on the Hindi film screen with Shyam Benegal’s Nishant. And 39 years since you are gone. Was it only 11 years that you worked in film? Why does it feel like you have been here with us ever since? That you see us, and show us what we are and…
Tag: Mrinal Sen
Ritwik Ghatak at 100: The Many Re-incarnations of Ritwik in Bollywood
From Subhash Ghai to “Bidhu” Vinod Chopra to Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the unlikely ‘filmi’ students of the Film and Television Institute of India where Ghatak taught for all of two years, keep his legacy alive in unmissable ways. There is also Payal Kapadia, as non-Bollywood as it can get, who mentions his influence on her work The film lovers’ conventional…
Palan: A filmic tribute to Mrinal Sen gets everything wrong
National Award-winning filmmaker Kaushik Ganguly’s Palan is a sequel to Mrinal Sen’s Kharij, the story of a Bhadralok couple whose apathy is responsible for the death of a “servant” boy. The film won the jury prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. Aside from plain silliness, Palan is bloated with misdirected sympathy for the Bhadralok Palan is billed as a sequel…
100 Years of Mrinal Sen
From using real footage to voice-overs by Amitabh Bachchan, the legendary middle name in the Ray-Sen-Ghatak trinity set many trends
Neel Akasher Neechey: When it was possible to make a hit film about the friendship between a Chinese vendor and a Bengali activist
This Mrinal Sen work became the first film to be banned in independent India in 1962 The Bengali film Neel Akasher Neeche, the second film directed by Mrinal Sen, is a marker of a time when it was considered unproblematic to cast a Bengali as a Chinese man and use make-up to pull his eyes into slits. But it is…
Kharij: The Killing of a ‘Servant Boy’
Mrinal Sen’s clear-eyed unpeeling of the cruelty of the great Indian middle class A young, upper-middle class family, Anjan and Mamata Sen, hire a boy ‘servant’ not much older than their own son in 1980s Calcutta, administered by a Communist government, in the film Kharij. The ‘servant’ boy dies one night, possibly due to a gas leak in the kitchen,…