Ritwik Ghatak and the Cinema of Praxis : Culture, Aesthetics and Vision

In a significant departure from other works on Ritwik Ghatak, this book establishes him as an auteur and a maestro on par with some of the great film directors, like Sergei Eisenstein, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Kenji Mizoguchi and Luis Bunuel. Based on in-depth research that follows Ghatak’s journey within the context of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, it fills an important gap in the scholarship around Ghatak by offering crucial insights into Ghatak’s unique vision of cinema embedded as it is in the cultural psychic configurations of the people. It analyses Ghatak’s practice by minutely tracing formal similarities across the language of his cinematic oeuvre in the domain of cinematography, lighting, music, and sound. The book develops the way in which cinematic technique enters the domain of conceptual constructs and abstractions. It moves on to chronicle Ghatak’s political odyssey as reflected in his cinema. Moreover, it charts the manner in which Ghatak, through his cinematic idiom, offers a polemic of cinema that further adds to his notion of praxis – a thoughtful Marxist paradigm organically associated with the culture and context of India. By locating Ghatak within the discourse of nationalism, the book brings to the surface Ghatak’s critical insights related to the independence of the nation and the trauma of the partition of Bengal. Ghatak’s cinema served the crucial function of chronicling the mass tragedy of partition and its impact on the human psyche. This book appeals to scholars of film studies and filmmaking as well as to researchers and general readers interested in debates pertaining to culture, politics, art, psychoanalysis, partition and refugee studies, cinema, theatre, and ideology. Front Matter ....Pages i-xix Introduction (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 1-10 Front Matter ....Pages 11-11 An Overview: Resonances, Influences and Moorings (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 13-25 A Search for a Personal Vision of Cinema (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 27-38 Front Matter ....Pages 39-46 An Embrace with the Epic Form (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 47-59 The Magnum Opus of the Bengal Partition and Its Aftermath: Motifs and Antinomies (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 61-78 The Angst of Exile: Being and Non- Being (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 79-90 Recasting the Contemporary in the Crucible of the Myth: Interventions and Interpretations (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 91-104 Front Matter ....Pages 105-105 Lighting: A Self-reflexive Discourse (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 107-117 Sound: A Contrapuntal Melody (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 119-138 Cinematography: A Search for a New Cinematic Aesthetics (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 139-152 Metaphor: The Abstract Conceptual Domain (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 153-159 Front Matter ....Pages 161-161 Marxism and the National Question (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 163-174 In Search of Praxis: A Political Odyssey (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 175-194 Film and Praxis: A Search for a Subversive Language of Cinema (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 195-202 Front Matter ....Pages 203-203 Marxism, Art, Culture and Praxis (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 205-218 The Angst of an Artist: In the Shadow of Death (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 219-233 Resilience and Survival (Diamond Oberoi Vahali)....Pages 235-242