Ritwik ghatak biography of christopher walken
Ritwik Ghatak was a multifaceted artist who excelled as a film director, screenwriter, playwright, actor, and teacher. He was one of the most influential figures in the history of Indian cinema, whose works are celebrated for their realistic and poignant depiction of social issues, partition, and feminism. He was also a pioneer of the parallel cinema movement in India, which challenged the conventions of mainstream cinema with its artistic and experimental approach.
Ghatak was born in Dhaka, then in East Bengal, in 1925. He grew up in a family of intellectuals and writers and was exposed to various forms of art and literature from an early age. He was deeply affected by the partition of India in 1947, which divided Bengal into two parts and displaced millions of people. He witnessed the trauma and violence of partition firsthand, and it became a recurring theme in his films.
Ghatak entered the film industry in 1950 as an actor and assistant director in Nimai Ghosh's Chinnamul, a groundbreaking film that portrayed the plight of refugees from East Bengal. His first film as a director was Nagarik (1952), which explored the socio-economic problems of urban life in post-independence India. However, the film was not released until 1977, after his death.
Perhaps Ghatak's only major commercial success was Bimal Roy's "Madhumati (1958)," starring Dilip Kumarr and Vyjyanthimala, a Hindi film for which he wrote the story. It was one of the early ones to deal with the theme of reincarnation and is believed to have been the source of inspiration for many later works like The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975) and the Hindi film Karz (1980).
Ghatak's most acclaimed works are his partition trilogy: "Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960)," "Komal Gandhar (E-Flat, 1961)," and "Subarnarekha (The Golden Thread, 1962)." These films are considered masterpieces of Indian cinema for their powerful portra Angela Ndalianis is Research Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Swinburne University in Melbourne, and a member of the Senses of Cinema committee. Her research focuses on entertainment culture and the history of media technologies, and how they mediate our experience of the world. Her work has notably focused on the transhistorical nature of the baroque, and the existence of neo-baroque forms in the 21 century media landscape. Angela has published the monographs Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), Science Fiction Experiences (2010) and The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (2012), as well as the edited collections The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2009), Neo-baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster (2016) and Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (2017). * * * DF: You’ve recently moved to Swinburne University to pursue a new research project that looks not only at contemporary cinema, but also a wide range of other media technologies. Could you tell us about your current research? AN: There are a number of projects I’m working on at the moment. The thing that attracted me to Swinburne was its focus on technological innovation. In addition to working on traditional film studies, which I love, I also like to move beyond it. For example, I became obsessed with robots through watching science fiction films. I’ve always had a love of robots, and would devour film representations of them from the silent era up till today. One of the projects I’m working on is a museum exhibition that looks at how films are a kind of cultural membrane that explores the possibilities of robotics while also dealing with more outrageous robot speculations in earlier periods, the 1930s and 1940s. I love the idea of a cultural dialogue happening between cinema and what’s around it, and how science fiction With the evolution of the medium, almost naturally, came the creative departures from the theatrical unity of space and time in storytelling. Fragmented narratives became a favourite area of experimentation for many influential makers. Composite plots consisting of mildly connected vignettes and simultaneously occurring events, often with no evident central characters, can be found almost throughout the history of cinema. It is actually quite difficult to trace the origins. But it was not until a decade ago that this quality had a very specific label for it. Writer and journalist Alissa Quart coined the term “hyperlink cinema” in her review of Happy Endings (written and directed by Don Roos) for the journal Film Comment in the year 2005. Critic Roger Ebert popularized the word through a reference in his review of Syriana (Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan). Quoting from the Robert Ebert review- “The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another.” Though it was not an obvious comparison, but the style of jumping between interlocked parallel narratives does bear certain resemblance with the act of browsing the internet through hyperlinks. Though the beginnings of this form had very little to do with the World Wide Web, it became a noticeable popularity around the beginning of this century, when it was quite a phenomenon. The style is essentially independent, and has rarely shown signs of thematic stagnation, yet it has become a discipline in itself. Some associate it with the “network” nature of the society. The Journal Critical Studies in Media Communications made an inquiry into the style of narrative, perceiving them as a Global Network Films. This could be true for the more geographically and culturally explorative films like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s masterly landmark Babel (2006). However, the little known 1973 Bengali film A River C HE6822The Possibilities are Still to be Explored: Interview with Angela Ndalianis
Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia 9781838710262, 9780851709833
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To the memory of Serge Daney (1944–1992) and Raymond Durgnat (1932–2002)
This edition first published in 2003 by the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street London W1T 1LN The British Film Institute promotes greater understanding and appreciation of, and access to, film and moving image culture in the UK. Copyright this collection © British Film Institute, 2003 Copyright preface © Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, 2003 Copyright individual essays © the authors Reprinted 2009 Cover design: Squid Inc./Jethro Clunies-Ross Set by Fakenham Photosetting, Fakenham, Norfolk Printed in China British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 85170 984 2/978 0 85170 984 0 (pbk) ISBN 0 85170 983 4/978 0 85170 983 3 (hbk)
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Acknowledgments
In Chapter 1, Nicole Brenez’s letter is translated by Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum; Alex Horwath’s letter is translated by the author and Petra Metelko; and Raymond Bellour’s letter is translated by Lynne Kirby. In Chapter 13, Brenez’s letter is translated by Martin and Rosenbaum. Chapter 1 was first published, in French translation, in Trafic no. 24, Winter 1997; a list of subsequent translations appears within the text. It appeared in English in shorter form in Film Quarterly vol. 52 no. 1, Fall 1998. An earlier version of Chapter 3 first appeared in French translation in Trafic no. 25, Spring 1998. Chapter 4 appeared in French translation in Trafic no. 26, Summer 1998, and draws some material from ‘Remaking History’, Chicago Reader, 10 November 1998. Part of Chapter 5 appeared in French translation in Cinéma 03, 2002. An earlier version of Chapter 8 appeared in Senses of Cinema no. 12, February–March 2001. An earlier version of Chapter 10 appeared in