Movieac!

  The Auteur and the influence of his own life The system has made them hopeless and left them helpless. There is only so much that an individual can do to mend the age-old, bourgeois mechanical system in place. And even with the changes taking place [1] , will the conservative Indian society support the roaring ambitions of the ever-so high strung youth? The 90’s was a tough time for India- t he poor had found another way to retain their poverty and the rich were getting even richer  [2] .  40 years into its independence and the country was tasting its first real wave of modernization. The youth, the carriers of raw-energy, were eager to make a mark. But not everyone gets the same opportunities.  What about their dreams then? Released in the wake of this situation, Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch forms an apt social commentary about the extent of destruction these unsatisfied kids can cause. Luke (Kay Kay Menon) has this excruciating rage within him, this ...

Introduction Inspiration  is pivotal to transforming a young musician from a mere instrumentalist to a true  artist expressing a unique voice. And where do these roots stem? The central unequivocal source of rejuvenating and endlessly contributing inspiration and ideas is what we see around us: the people, the society. Having said that, cinema unlike the other arts like poetry, painting etc. is a collective art and includes contributions from other artists to make it a completed film and is not the work of a sole artist. Surely however, there are oppositions to this postulate. Francoise Truffaut (one of the fathers of French New Wave) argues that ‘there is one prime force that leads to the creation of the film and that individual guides all the processes of filmmaking’ [1] . This creates a central demand of respect for the director who is to be treated as an independent artist, thus enabling her/him to create a body of work and developing her/his own style. When...

Culture can be defined as those social practices whose prime aim is signification [1] , i.e. making orders of "sense" for the world we live in. History is the cognitive, unfinished account of the happenings of the past. In this discourse, which aims to define a common vein between history and culture, we attempt to discover - the meaning, the representation for this relationship. Semiotics [2] demands to bring to the foreground a signifier to proceed with the analysis. What really, is the visible metric or academic evidence that we have to prosper our understanding? Art! The temporariness and impermanence of history as well as the idea of differential natural selection in culture find themselves imbibed in the various art forms over the years. Citing [3] , The "culture concept" in England has much to do with the organization of historical knowledge for adolescents in the British school system, here particular theories of the child-mind and application of P...

When I was a kid, participating in elocution competitions was kinda cool. You had to speak about global warming and India after independence, which thanks to my competitive parents, wasn’t a tough thing to conceptualize about. I just had to mug up those long pages. My teachers were very appreciative of my efforts, but it didn’t take them a while in recognizing who had stayed up late to prepare for my words. I used to wonder how they’d catch me, considering the fact that I’d stage the speeches so well. Today after watching Jagga Jasoos, I understood why. I might sound too harsh, because for once I do accept that this is a comic book superhero, imperfect, bumbling and yet one who has tremendous stamina when jumping off running trains and tall walls to defy its super villain. And that Ranbir pulls off brilliantly (except the overdone stammering, yes). The movie asks you to not take itself very seriously, right from the “pictureshuru” (Oh yeah, Barfi again!). The first half ...

I’m aged 19 years, 4 months and 8 days old when I’m writing this, and I cannot argue with the fact that I still am not aware about what LOVE actually means. Infatuation for me is like cold and cough, something that repeats so frequently and recovers so easily, that I doubt my understanding of the actual differences that exist between love, and sexual attraction, if there are any. The sad reality is that sometimes I feel too exposed to certain brutalities breathing around me, things that are too complex for me to comprehend, questions whose shallow answers I’m constantly reminded of when I dig them out again. One such issue did linger in my mind for quite a while after I watched Aligarh. Directed by Hansal Mehta and written by Apurva Asrani, the biographical drama stars Manoj Vajpayee and Rajkumar Rao, both legendary artists. This piece isn’t about the plot of the movie, or the narrative structure or the character graphs; rather I want to speak about what I thought the movie had...