The surrealism of a non sequitur world: Un Chien Andalou (1929)

This post first appeared as "The real and the surreal" in The Hindu on February 15, 2012.

A sharp blade slices through an eyeball just as a cloud slices through a full moon. This perhaps is the singularly most unforgettable scene from one of the most intriguing films ever made—Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), which, at just 17 minutes duration, packs in bizarreness on such a mammoth scale that it leaves the viewer desperate for any sort of meaning. Bunuel made this silent film, his first, in collaboration with fellow Spaniard, the famous surrealist painter Salvador Dali, after the two exchanged notes on their dreams—the dream world being central to their surrealist imagination, according to which the unseen powerful reality of life lies in the darkness of sleep, or in the subconscious, and not in the rationality of daylight.

A page from Indian film history: Dharti ke Lal (1946)

A shorter version of this post first appeared as "Life, the way it was" in The Hindu on November 28, 2011. (A note: The accompanying photo in The Hindu is not from Dharti ke Lal as the caption mistakenly says, but from Do Bigha Zameen to which the article refers.)

The "Bhookha hai Bengal" chorus song in Dharti ke Lal

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s directorial debut film Dharti ke Lal (1946) begins and ends on an idyllic note, with a sailboat gently wafting across the water in rural Bengal. But what happens in between is the epic ugliness of hunger, poverty, and human suffering. Set against the backdrop of 1943’s Bengal famine in which nearly 5 million people perished, the film documents the anguish suffered by the family of a farmer and his two sons.

The eternal and the transient: Jean Renoir’s The River (1951)

A shorter version of this post first appeared as "The River sutra" in The Hindu on November 6, 2011.

Watching Jean Renoir’s film The River (1951), made in Technicolor, is like watching a picture book come to life—a picture book of the young English girl Harriet’s girlhood days, spent in Bengal in the early years of the twentieth century. Growing up by the river that is punctuated with rice fields and jute fields, Harriet and her siblings lead a carefree life that is splendidly caught by Renoir’s camera in a way that is reminiscent of a series of Impressionist paintings. Indeed, the film could be described as one long painting that captures life’s fleeting moments and faithfully records the flow of life. As the flow of the mighty river mingles with the flow of life, the film places events—small and big—in perspective.

Dev Anand's first film: Hum Ek Hain (1946) and its rhetoric of nation

This post first appeared in the PassionForCinema blog on 
September 26, 2010.

Kamala Kotnis & Dev Anand

Dev Anand—of the lithe frame and the tilted gait; the impish turn of the head and the quick nod; the doffing of the cap and the dreamy gaze—will be 87 years old this September 26th. When it comes to an Indian film legend who is so deeply rooted in the public imagination as Dev Anand is, and about whom information is galore, I had rather not add to the redundancy of information—information redundancy (or regurgitation) being the bane of today’s Internet world. Instead, I take this occasion to remember his first film.

Copycat blogger rouses my righteous indignation

A screenshot of sunheriyaadein's blog page

The last one day has been a colossal waste of time for me—courtesy a blogger called sunheriyaadein whom I consider more a copycat than a blogger of any standard. I felt I must record this rather unpleasant experience—that of being plagiarized from, which I accidentally discovered—loudly and clearly with everyone out there. Putting this in writing clearly on my blog, will, I hope, in some measure, deter the copycats prowling on the Internet, who just copy and paste text.

Remembering Jairaj and Renuka Devi in Bhabhi (1938)

This post first appeared in the PassionForCinema blog on
September 1, 2010.

In Awara (1951), Raj Kapoor famously tells Nargis that it is not her fault that she initially mistakes him for a vagabond—actually, there is something about his face that makes him look like one: "Is mein tumhara kasoor nahin, meri soorat hi aisi hai." This memorable apology followed by Nargis warming up to Raj is quite the staple of the Raj-Nargis romance.

More than a decade earlier, in Bhabhi (1938), P. Jairaj (1909-2000) makes the exact same apology about his visage to Renuka Devi (1918-1989), who early on in the film thinks he is a goonda: "Aapka dosh nahin, meri soorat hi aisi hai."

A page from Indian film history: Karma (1933)

This post first appeared in the PassionForCinema blog on March 19, 2010.

“… it [Karma] marks a beginning, and a very successful one, to break away from the general run of Indian films and to produce something entitling India to a place in screencraft among other countries in the world.”
                                    -The Times of India, 16 March 1934

The husband-wife team of Himansu Rai (1892-1940) and Devika Rani (1908-1994) appeared together only once on the silver screen—in Karma (1933), described as the “first Indian talkie with English dialogue which set all London talking.” In India too, when the film released, there was a lot of talking—tongues wagging, rather. The reason? A kiss between Devika Rani and an unconscious Himansu Rai that is today still as famous as it was shocking then: sure enough, when I start typing in “Devika Rani” on that know-it-all entity called Google, the first suggestion that crops up is “Devika Rani kissing scene,” followed by other keyword combinations—all in search of that kiss from 1933.