Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar Lakshmi Padmanabhan (bio) Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony by Rochona Majumdar. Columbia University Press. 2021. 320 pages. $140.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback; also available in e-book. Rochona Majumdar's Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony is a history of the art cinema movement in India in the immediate aftermath of decolonization and an argument for reading Indian art cinema, particularly the work of Bengali filmmakers Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and Satyajit Ray, as forms of historiographic thinking, which provide conceptual insights into the postcolonial present. Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures charts the cultural history of the art cinema movement in India, focusing on the 1950s to the 1980s, a period that saw the rise of state support for independent filmmaking fueled by an optimistic vision of the newly formed nation-state's role in cultural life and the subsequent decline of these institutions and the disillusionment that followed the intense political upheavals of the 1970s. The book, which is divided into two parts, is structured by the historical break between the optimistic political atmosphere of the early decades following Indian independence and the political disillusionment of the 1970s and after. Majumdar opens by connecting the rise of art cinema or "good films" with the pedagogical project of the newly formed nation-state to produce "good citizens."1 It is worth noting here that throughout the text, Majumdar [End Page 213] highlights the difficulty of limiting the boundary or unifying characteristics of art cinema as a category, precisely because of the ongoing disagreements about what constituted "good films" and "good citizens." Across the first section of the text, she utilizes the term interchangeably with quality films (chapter 1), new cinema (chapter 2), radical cinema (chapter 3), and several other terms emerging from the archival sources, including parallel cinema and the Indian New Wave. Rather than providing art cinema with a specific aesthetic or political approach, Majumdar isolates the aspirational quality of the category. In Majumdar's narration, art cinema emerged through the productive intersection of elite interests in advocating for cinema as a medium of art (in contrast to the commercial cinema emerging from the well-funded studios in Mumbai and Chennai, for example) and the pedagogical aim of the national bureaucracy to transcend social divisions and educate a universal Indian citizen.2 Majumdar locates the rise of the film society movement, and the investment by educated elites in fostering a popular film culture, as intellectually aligned with the broader task of educating the newly postcolonial citizen-subject, who was understood to be inexperienced in the practice of democracy. Art cinema was viewed as a pedagogical tool, one that utilized an industrial medium (which aligned it with the broader Nehruvian economic development model centered on industrialization and investment in modern technology) to foster popular sovereignty, educating the masses about their role in a secular democratic society. Between 1959 and 1964, several of the most important institutions of film education and preservation were inaugurated, including the Federation of Film Societies of India (1959), Film Finance Corporation (1960), the Film Institute of India (1960), and the National Film Archive of India (1964).3 The first section provides us with a cultural history of these institutions and examines the role of key figures such as Marie Seton, a British film critic and evangelist for independent film and art cinema. Through this section, Majumdar tracks the underlying faith that these institutions and figures cultivated in the pedagogical possibilities of art cinema as a form of aesthetic education in a country where the sheer plurality of linguistic communities and rates of illiteracy made developing a shared public sphere through written text an ongoing concern for the political elite and artists alike. Their aspiration for cinema to transcend regional and linguistic boundaries and speak in a universal humanist language was also a measure of its aesthetic value and sociological importance. As Majumdar explains, the idealistic view of art cinema's pedagogical function crumbles in the 1970s with the increasingly authoritarian...