Bengali Film Research Articles

Rocking in Kasba: “band” music, contemporary Bengali cinema, and Anjan Dutta’s lost Kolkatas

ABSTRACT With the gradual obsolescence of the lip-synched romantic duet, the sonic texture of Bengali popular cinema has transformed radically in the new millennium. One of the most remarkable components of the rise of the Original Soundtrack in Bengali film specifically has been the incorporation of local pop, folk, and rock bands, whose lyrics are written in Bengali but whose music retains a decidedly western flavour. This paper situates this relationship between cinema and what has traditionally been understood as ‘band’ music in Kolkata in a longer history of the city and its colonial and postcolonial musical cultures. With the incorporation of the pop/rock stars into the diegesis, the productive tensions between star and singer, visible and invisible bodies and voices have been overturned in recent years. Conversely, the music that is commissioned by these films now contribute to the bands’ larger discography and bring their music to a wider listening audience. In some of these films, musicians and bands appear as themselves, bringing together multi-modal sites of fandom and entertainment. Finally, this essay demonstrates that singer/songwriter/filmmaker/actor, Anjan Dutta’s oeuvre emerges as the canvas on which many of these developments come to be visible.

Book review: Anugyan Nag and Spandan Bhattacharya, Tollygunge to Tollywood: The Bengali Film Industry Reimagined

Anugyan Nag and Spandan Bhattacharya, Tollygunge to Tollywood: The Bengali Film Industry Reimagined (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2021), 214 pp. ₹760, ISBN 978-93-5442-034-4(Paperback).

Rabindranath Tagore’s Works in Cinema: A Review of Selected Critical Works

Locating the platitude of perspectives and arguments in the existing critical works on Bengali film adaptations, this critical review article examines some of the significant academic writings on Rabindranath Tagore’s works on screen. Since the vast filmography based on Tagore’s works, commonly known as ‘Tagore films’, has not received adequate critical and theoretical attention in South Asian academia, let alone in the adaptation studies in global academia, the number of critical works on them is relatively small. The main significance of this essay lies in focusing on the commonality of assessment of Bengali film adaptations (based on Tagore’s works) from a moralistic position of fidelity criticism – not from the theoretical lens of diverse adaptation theories – and on addressing the difficulty in fitting the existing assessments in the critical spectrum of adaptation scholarship. It has become an academic dismay for aspiring researchers to find materials on the annals of the filmography, given that there are so few scholarly publications spread across the internet's vast ocean and the interstices of libraries. Considering this context and realising the dire necessity for review articles on Tagore films, this article bears immense academic and theoretical value. By examining selected critical works analytically from the premise of the auteur theory that underpins creative adaptations, this study has the potential to ease the extraordinary burden of academic enquiries in the growing body of writings on film adaptations. More importantly, the paper will unveil, in the existing critical works, some glaring lacunas that may be addressed by future critical endeavours.

Tomar naam, amar naam, Vietnam Vietnam! Folk styles and solidarity in the Bengali new wave cinema

ABSTRACT The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and long-standing anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers’ associations. In 1968, the Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak published a short speculation for the Bengal Youth Festival explaining the scenario for “A Film I want to make about Vietnam.” The film was not made, but the imagined detail is very much in the style of the Bengali new wave. Also important—and made, so we can see it—is Satyajit Ray’s short film “on” Vietnam, Two: A Film Fable (1964). The two films express, in different ways, the enthusiasm among Bengali intellectuals for Vietnam at the time when revolutionary youth solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle was strong. What were Ghatak and Ray thinking with these films “on” Vietnam? Can they tell us anything of the times, the engaged role of film, the director as intellectual agitator, the politics of solidarity from afar? By evaluating the reception of historically focussed film from the perspective of the Bengali New Wave, I show how that cinema’s fascination with Vietnam evokes both much older folk traditions, yet now leads to a more worrying contemporary coda with the adaptation in 2019 of the old slogan by the Hindutva right to include Jai Ram.

Queer creative Indian city: queer film festivals, precarious cultural work and community making in Kolkata

ABSTRACT In this article, we offer a new concept of the “queer creative city”, through a critical examination of how a regional queer Bengali film culture has emerged in Kolkata as a result of the convergence of certain urban policies, queer political organising and cultural activism. We explore two queer film festivals in Kolkata – the Siddharth Gautam Film Festival and Dialogues, both having a very significant impact in transforming LGBTQ + lives in Kolkata. Through archival research, autoethnography and conducting extensive interviews with organising committees, venue sponsors and owners, and viewers, we show how these film festivals and a pre-existing Bengali film culture engendered the emergence of a prolific creative queer city, which became a site of resistance, and community building that created a solid base for queer counterpublics. Queer film festivals, we argue, are critical sites for charting the dynamics of the public sphere in contemporary India.

The unique universe of Satyajit Ray

Andrew Robinson delves into the life and work of the famed Bengali film director, who blended art and science, and uncovers the story behind his sci-fi film that didn’t make it to the screen, but nevertheless influenced Hollywood.

Disco flamboyance, performative masculinities and dancer heroes of Bengali cinema

ABSTRACT In this paper, I attempt to study the different determinants of cinematic masculinities, the gendered bodies of male performer figures and their changing patterns with reference to film dance from the 1980s-1990s period of Bengali popular cinema. This paper explores how the inclusion of performative male bodies in the dance numbers brought a distinct imagination of masculinity and flamboyance, thereby disrupting the established idea of the bhadra (the polished and gentle class of Bengal) hero of Bengali cinema. In the first section of my article, I focus on how the disco sensation and its cinematic registers took a new form with Mithun Chakraborty’s figuration in Bengali film dances. The second section studies how this pattern of dancing male bodies and its flamboyance changed in the later period when the imagination of a working class male protagonist intervened in film dance in the 1990s. In brief, I try to read the shifting imaginations of masculinities in Bengali film dance from the disco flamboyance and ‘global-national-popular model’ of Mithun Chakraborty’s star persona in the 1980s to the more localized and hybrid form of dance idioms in Prosenjit’s iconic film roles in a later period.

From Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side to Rituparno Ghosh’s Shubho Muharat: Film Authorship and Transcultural Adaptation

In her book A Theory of Adaptation Linda Hutcheon uses the term “transcultural adaptation” to illustrate different context in which literary or other cultural texts are adapted. This relocation of text through adaptation often adds multiple interpretations or alters textual politics. Hutcheon further argues that transcultural adaptation can transform the text in unpredictable direction. The paper seeks to explicate eminent Bengali film director Rituparno Ghosh’s (1961-2013) Shubho Muharat (The First Day of the Shoot, 2003) which is influenced by Agatha Christie’s (1890-1976) novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962). The essay untangles Ghosh’s strategy to add Indian socio-cultural background in the western text. He expresses authorial intensions when he re-narrates of the novel on screen. The paper argues that the transcultural adaptation creates a “Third Space of enunciation” where the auteur uses the traits of detective film and repeats authorial intention. Following Janet Staiger’s reinterpretation of auteurism the essay argues that duplication of authorial impulse is Ghosh’s “technique of the self”.

The accentual dialogized heteroglossia of Shakespeare in India: Utpal Dutt’s legacy in Shakespeare Wallah and The Last Lear

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a key figure of Shakespearean performance in pre- and post-independence India: the Bengali stage and film actor, director, playwright, and theater activist Utpal Dutt (1929–1993). I trace Dutt’s impact from his tours in the aftermath of independence with the Shakespeareana Company and his re-playing of Shakespeare in the Bengali Jatra tradition, through Rituparno Ghosh’s 2007 The Last Lear. This focus on Dutt’s influence is set against the backdrop of the politics of performing-adapting Shakespeare in Indian English accents, considering the accentual dialogized heteroglossia of Shakespearean performance in India after independence from British rule.

Infidelity to True Story and Novel: Locating the Auteur in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dahan

Rituparno Ghosh (1961-2013), a celebrated Bengali film director who started making films in 90s, often borrows plots from literary and other cultural narratives. The essay aims to explicate Ghosh’s early film Dahan (1997) which is an adaptation of distinguished Bengali novelist Suchitra Bhattacharya’s novel with the same title. Bhattacharya’s novel is influenced by the real incident in which a couple was harassed by four youths at Tollygunge Metro Station in Kolkata on 27th November, 1992. The film also acknowledges that it is indebted to the true story. The essay explicates the adaptation of the two sources by the auteur. It examines the duplication of authorial concerns in this adaptation while following the narratives of two texts. Ghosh remains unfaithful to the literary text and the cultural memory of the true story to establish his authorship. As Ghosh’s films portray the middle-class women in a patriarchal society, following Janet Staiger’s reconsideration of the theory of auteur in the context of queer movement and identity politics in the 1970s, the essay argues that the performance of infidelity to the literary and true story to establish authorship is auteur’s “technique of the self”.

Commercial Films in Bangladesh: Impact Analysis (2009-2019)

After the independence of Bangladesh (1971), new generation film development making take a place. Bangla commercial films can be divided before liberation, post liberation and modern era. Before liberation era; A. J. Kardar, Zahir Raihan, Khan Ataur Rahman, were the commercial Bengali film makers. During the Post liberation time, we have some extra ordinary movies like Sareng Bou (1978), Surjo Dighal Bari (1979) and so on. But in the modern era definition of commercial film has got a change. From 2009 to 2019 Bangladeshi audience got difference in commercial films. But having DT (Digital Technology) and other advancement given a development of Bangladeshi commercial film. But story making, acting, making, socialization and other things are gradually developing in Bangladeshi commercial films. This research will evaluate prospects and challenges of Bangladeshi commercial films from 2009 to 2019. However further research is recommended to develop making of Bangladeshi commercial films in respect of lifelike story, cultural dissemination and so on.

Author–Screenwriter– Director (1930s–1950s): Articulating Authorship Through Self-Adaptations and Film Novelisations in Bengali

During the 1930s, one of the significant factors that strengthened the connection between Bengali literature and film was the emergence of certain key figures who straddled overlapping roles as author–screenwriter–director, frequently adapting their own literary works and reframing the contentious ‘authorship issue’ that arises between writer and filmmaker. By focusing on three such figures—Premankur Atorthy (1890–1964), Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay (1901–1976) and Premendra Mitra (1904–1988)—this essay examines the manner in which self-adaptations served to transfer the power of the literary author to the nascent cinematic auteur, particularly through the intermediary process of screenwriting. The essay also draws attention to the practice of film novelisations that was mobilised since the mid-1940s by Mitra and others like Jyotirmoy Roy and Panchugopal Mukhopadhyay, where novels were written based on cinematic works, akin to French cinéromans and contrary to ‘authorless’ novelisations by ghostwriters. In subsequent years, film novels were written by director Hemen Gupta, writers Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Shaktipada Rajguru and Kalkut, which brings to light a largely unexplored dimension of the relationship between Bengali film and literature.

Gerontological Issues in Bengali Film Dekha

In the Indian context modernization, industrialization, urbanization, and westernization—‘the four horsemen of the modern apocalypse’ (Laurence Cohen, 1998:p.17) have a significant predicament in recent dimensions of gerontology. The problem relates to population ageing, controlled fertility, mortality rates and eventually the increase of life expectancy. The proliferation of old age home, extensive overseas migration, transnational dispersal of families, dissociation of the traditional multigenerational joint family, and simultaneous rise up of the nuclear family etc., are also some major causes behind the problems. These multidimensional interrelated challenges have been artistically shown in case of some old characters in Gautam Ghosh’s national award-winning Bengali film Dekha (2001). Particularly in the life of the protagonist, Sashibhusan Sanyal the problems have found differently added significance because of his disability (blindness).But his positive attitude to fight against the oddities of life contextualizes the film with a projection to highlight the old age problems from three main foci—biological, psychological, and social, to justify the relevance of the problematic. This paper argues the necessity of a consolidated progressive action by social scientists, policy makers and the elderly community to promote healthy and fruitful ageing at all spheres to counter the old age hazards.

Africa in the Bengali literary and cinematic imagination: Kamaleshwar Mukherjee’s 2013 film adaptation of Bibhutibhusan Bandapadhyay’s African adventure novel, Chander Pahar (1937)

ABSTRACTAs part of the recent worldwide cinematographic trend in adapting children’s fantasy and adventure stories into films, this article offers critical insight into contemporary West Bengali film industry’s reworking of this trend in its 2013 cinematic adaptation of Chander Pahar (1937) by the Bengali novelist Bibhutibhusan Bandapadhyay (1894–1950). I argue that in this adaptation the filmmaker deliberately expands on the author’s original vision of the intricacies of race relations. The film’s staging of the fateful encounter of Bengal with Africa is grounded on a common history of the past between India and Africa linked by migration and settlement and of more contemporary large-scale ventures in commerce and investment. A comparative analysis of Chander Pahar from fiction to film will shed light on the strategic shifts in Indian-African relations. The film’s updated vision of the growing affiliations between Africa and India is not only influenced by the impact of the Indian diaspora on the Indian economy but also by India’s changing role as an aspiring economic and political powerhouse.

Filmfare and the question of Bengali cinema (1955–65)

ABSTRACTThis essay is a critical genealogy of Bengali cinema roughly between 1955 and 1965, as the story unfolded in the pages of Filmfare, the preeminent mainstream cinema periodical in India. It locates the question of Bengali cinema in a greater textualization of a burgeoning Indian film in the world. The account covers three lines of vision, in terms of how Bombay, as film capital, was looking to Calcutta to supply a literary-reformist guidance to an emerging national form, how Calcutta was conversing with Europe and America in a manner that almost totally bypassed the pan-Indian scenario, and how the west was also frequently looking at the cinematic universe of Satyajit Ray and his peers without any necessary refractive mediation by an all-India prism. Along the way, the essay also revisits crucial moments in the history of the Bengali film industry, both in terms of its commercial and artistic accomplishments as well as its failures to set up regular lines of exchange with other major industries like Bombay and Madras, as well as neighbours like Orissa, Assam, Burma, and what eventually became the independent country of Bangladesh.

Theorising rupture in the foundational years of Indian Parallel Cinema

In this article, I will conceptualise and elucidate the idea of rupture as an alternative method with which to read the ideological shifts in the politics of Indian Parallel Cinema. For the purposes of this article, I will use the 1968 Bengali film Apanjan (Near and dear), directed by Tapan Sinha, as the basis for textual analysis. The first section will map the framework for reading rupture, identifying what I call the signifiers of rupture, including the political, iconoclasm and trauma. This will be followed with a textual analysis of Apanjan, applying the framework of rupture, focusing predominately on the iconology of the mother, trauma theory and wound culture.

Determinants of Watching a Film: A Case Study on Dhallywood Film Industry, Bangladesh

The purpose of the study is to classify the different factors influencing the success of a Bengali film, and in this regard, a total sample of 296 respondents has been interviewed through a structured questionnaire. To test the study, Pearson’s product moment correlation, ANOVA and KMO statistic has been used and factor analysis is used to group the factors needed to develop for producing a successful film. The study reveals that the first factor (named convenient factor) is the most important factor for producing a film as well as to grab the attention of the audiences by 92% and competitive advantage by 71%, uniqueness by 81%, supports by 64%, features by 53%, quality of the film by 77% are next consideration consecutively according to the general people perception. The implication of the study is that the film makers and promoters should consider the factors properly for watching more films of the Dhallywood industry in relation to the foreign films especially Hindi, Tamil and English. The government can also take the initiative for the betterment of the industry through proper governance and subsidize if possible.

The action heroes of Bengali cinema: industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of popular film culture, 1980s–1990s

ABSTRACT​In this article, I attempt to understand the emergence of a new form of masculinity, class character and gendered bodies of Bengali film heroes during the1980s and 1990s. The article reads the industrial, technological and aesthetic determinants of this figuration of action heroes in the 1980s–1990s and demonstrates how through this figuration, the representations of class in popular Bengali cinema attained a complex phase. A study of these figures reveals how the masculinity and gendered bodies of Bengali action heroes are indicative of broader changes in sociopolitical conditions of West Bengal and changes in the Bengali film industry. But since films like any other cultural texts are not overdetermined by history, the figuration of action heroes of Bengali cinema also accommodated the materiality of the filmic medium. Furthermore, several extra filmic texts and efforts brought newer imaginations of masculinity which functioned as important determinants in the constructs of film heroes. The article will demonstrate how the figuration of heroes in Bengali popular cinema during this period brought a new filmic language and formulated new film aesthetics.

Performing the region: Sadhona Bose and the modern Bengali film dance

ABSTRACTThe first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of popular cultural practices that would define the sub-national differential of ‘Bengal’ within the larger Indian nation. One of the constituents of this differential was 1930s modern screen dance, performed by stars from the ‘cultured’ society. The most notable of them was Sadhona Bose – granddaughter of the social reformer Keshub Chandra Sen – who went on to become one of the first known dancing stars of Bengal. Bose’s Bengali Modern Dance – which claimed distinction from previous dances performed on the stage, dance-forms of silent cinema (both of which were considered undignified) and the neo-classical dances of the national-revivalist project – was central to her stardom. Through a study of Bose’s personal history and dance choreographies on screen, this article underscores the differential ‘Bengali-ness’ of Bose’s dancer persona. The article argues that the modern eclecticism of film dance created a space for Bose to negotiate her regional/Bengali subjectivity even while fulfilling the historicist demands of a hegemonic nationalism. It goes beyond the scope of the respectability discourse that often mires a female star and instead focuses on the nuances of dance forms and choreographies to locate her within the larger framework of dance culture and a regional modernism.

Structural Changes in Bengali–English Bilingual Verbs through the Exploration of Bengali Films

This paper investigates structural changes in the use of Bengali–English bilingual verbs through the exploration of Bengali film scripts from three decades: the 1970s, 1990s and post-2010. Previous research has shown that the increase in use of bilingual verbs, especially involving embedded language lexical verbs with matrix language helping verbs possibly results from increased bilingual proficiency. Over the past years, the use of English, including code-switching between Indian languages and English has increased dramatically in Indian society. Given this development, this paper explores film data to ascertain the extent to which the use of bilingual verbs, closely connected to code-switching and bilingual speech, has also changed diachronically in Bengali–English speech and if these changes occur from increased levels of bilingual proficiency. In connection with structural change, this paper also discusses the sociolinguistic factors that may be related to bilingual verb use. Results show a massive increase in bilingual verbs in the films post-2010, especially the ones involving English lexical verbs. Increased use of code-switching may have played a role in these changes and sociolinguistic factors related to the use of bilingual verbs seem to be less relevant now as compared to the earlier decades.