Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures

How does cinema apprehend its historical moment? With characteristic eloquence and insight, Majumdar gives us a vivid account of India's art cinema and film societies to take the shifting pulse of a nation in the early decades of its independence. In Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures, a rigorous interrogation into the category of radical art extends archivally-rich readings of works by Ray, Sen and Ghatak, to ground a powerful vision of films that put the specious terms of India's democracy under scrutiny. This book changes how we will think about histories of, and histories within, art cinema. -- Priya Jaikumar, author of <i>Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space</i> Like the incisive art cinema she unsheathes, Rochona Majumdar probes India in its painful passage beyond partition, staggering into modernity. Cinema has never been more 'critical' than in Bengal from 1960 to 1974 as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen exposed the innards of an immense ailing culture of which the brightness of Bollywood is but a fever symptom. Majumdar, to use her fertile word, apprehends the absolute necessity not just of art films like those she deftly analyses, but of the fragile film society movement that let them breathe. It's an inspiring if tragic history, one she carefully remembers for a future that may still be possible. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University