Cinemas of India in Post

Independence Moment:
Many Voices and Multiple
Styles, Tropes and Idioms
• Melodramatic imagination: binary
between western and Indian, city and
countryside, traditional and modern,
technology and mankind

• Filmic realism and concerns for a

national modern
A different idea of a “national modern cinema”, a cinema that
would fashion “a rational, democratic language” free of the
“pre-modern, non-secular compulsions” of the popular film

• ‘Lettered city’ and outside the lettered city.

The painted
• First international film festival held in
face : studies
Bombay 24 January to 1 February 1952. This is in India's
the festival where a body of neo-realist films popular
from Italy was shown (Bicycle Thieves;
Miracle in Milan; Rome, Open City). cinema by
Chidananda
Das Gupta
The question of ‘ideal national modern cinema’ figured prominently
in the new criticism that arrived in the wake of the several film
societies in Calcutta, Bombay and other cities.

The dominant mode of address of Indian popular cinema, where blocks

of spectacle are often combined through a logic of interruption, was the
target of this critical discourse; but there was also an older practice of the
Studio- Social that was confronted.
This was a kind of cinema dominated by literary practitioners,
where screenplays and films were often judged on the basis of the
literary value of dialogue and characters.
By new film enthusiasts major writer-filmmakers were seen to have
failed to develop a cinematic language because of their inability to
conceive such language in its autonomy.
Ray and his Criticism of Indian Cinema

“Often by a queer process of reasoning,

movement was equated with action and
action with melodrama”. Our Films, Their
Films/ Satyajit Ray
Ray and Indian Modernity
• Apu Trilogy
• Women’s question