Movies
Does Germany indeed welcome you?
To watch Almanya : Willkommen in Deutschland is quite fitting in this time. In translation, it is ‘welcome to Germany.’ We wake up every morning to the gory news reports about Syria and the nightmarish reveries of people dying in droves. Juxtaposed with this is Pope Francis’ benevolent appeal to Christendom to open its gates for refugees […]
A Black Friday in Bombay: Film Review
A critical appraisal of Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2007) in the aftermath of Yaqoob Memon’s execution for his alleged involvement in the Bombay blasts, which the film purports to narrate. An adaptation of the book by author/journalist S. Hussain Zaidi, Black Friday, released in 2007 took three years to see the light of day. It […]
Is this the end of Iranian cinema?
I have had occasions to reflect on the fate of what we can now call a post-national cinema, a proposition not so outlandish in the heightened age of transnational globalisation. The idea is based on a conception of national cinemas, or any other national cultural movement, as predicated on national traumas. The leading Iranian film-maker […]
Prophet’s Childhood: Majidi’s Take the Talk of Tinseltown
The cinema world is waiting with bated breath to see MajidMajidi’s take on the Prophet Muhammad’s eventful life. The film had hogged limelight mainly for two reasons: first, the focus of his film is on the Prophet’s childhood; so it would be the first attempt to bring the childhood of the Prophet on screen. Also, […]
Big Screen 2014
Interstellar, Christopher Nolan Christopher Nolan is a name synonymous with super-realism or sci-fi surrealism. The Nolanisation of cinema was inaugurated by his Inception,a film about dreams and a dystopian condition in which dreams could be manipulated. The gloomy streets of Gotham-a bridge between the fantastical and the commonplace-are now grounds of countless fancies within the […]
Prisoners of Conscience
Denis Vilenueve’s forte is in making family dramas with strong political and ethical undercurrents. His Incendies and Politechnique can be read as being ripostes to this statement, as the former is sprinkled with political references and the latter is centred on misogyny and feminism. But setting does not allow you to escape from politics to […]
Hur Adam: Tale of a Stoic Fortitude
BediuzzamanSaid Nursi (1877-1960), the Turkish mystic, can be considered as the spiritual founder of modern Turkey. At a time when scorn for tradition and faith was considered as the founding principle of Turkish nationalism in the country’s embrace of authoritarian modernity and secularism under Ataturk, Nursi revived faith in the tradition by leadinng people to […]
Hamlet and his Kashmirian Odyssey
Touchstones by which a Hamlet adaptation is measured are the ghost and the play within the play. Though these two appear only minimally on the stage, they drive the tempo of the play. Ghost is nothing but Hamlet’s subconscious which brings his hidden fears and oedipal angst out into his (as well as ours) conscious, […]
Movie Review: Dedh Ishqiya
“Dedh Ishqiya”, one of the most probable, unconventional new-age sequels from Bollywood, is a hard movie to categorize: it is a lumpy, sharp-tasting mix of emotions that’s immaculately written, directed and acted – and yet isn’t remarkable. The opening, with the black screen voice over story about a female parrot that corrupts a pair of […]
What is Eating Our Frames?
What happens when we watch food on screen? There may not be a unanimous feedback to this question, as eating and watching movies are deeply related to our varying subjective moods. But Maharshi Bhasa, the ancient theatre theorist from India, has said to the effect that food and sex need only be alluded on stage. […]
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