Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures Awarded the Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Award for Best Writing on Cinema
Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures has been awarded the Chidananda Dasgupta Memorial Award for Best Writing on Cinema, 2023. The jury citation praises the book’s “fresh perspectives on ‘doing history through cinema’,” and states that it “contributes significantly to studies in Indian history and Indian cinema.”
Conversation with Pratyusha Chakrabarti on Indian Cinema
In an episode of the podcast Rewind, Prof. Majumdar discusses her third book, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony, cinema as a way of doing history in postcolonial Bengal, the “Indianness” of Indian New Wave Cinema, and the apparent divide between “art cinema” and “commercial cinema”.
New article: “Temporality, Travel and Gender Politics in Satyajit Ray’s 1960s Films”
The alienation and anger … provided fodder for powerful political art, such as Badal Sircar’s play Evam Indrajit and Ritwik Ghatal’s films Komal Gandhar and Meghe Dhaka Tara.
For more, see the new article on Critical Collective.
Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures Shortlisted for Modernist Studies Association Prize
Rochona Majumdar’s 2021 book, Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Post-Colony, was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Prize. The book is one of six on this year’s shortlist from which the winner will be selected. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures is her third book, following Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009) and Writing Postcolonial History (2010).
The association praises Majumdar’s new work as a “powerful and persuasive new study…[that] produces a richly nuanced account of the aesthetic, intellectual, and historiographic ambitions of the three directors [it explores], offering tour-de-force analyses of their films, including both the more familiar (Ghatak’s Cloud-Capped Star, Ray’s Apu trilogy) and the less studied (Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Ray’s city films).”
Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures Longlisted for 2022 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation
Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures was longlisted for the 2022 Moving Image Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation.
“Outside of Satyajit Ray, filmmakers crucial to developing a national Indian art cinema such as Mani Kaul, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, remain less visible in canons of post war modernist cinema, and Majumdar addresses their importance in establishing a national Indian cinema, post independence, whilst critiquing the nation building world cinema project, through a close reading of this fertile period of filmmaking.” – Matthew Barrington