Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures: Film And History In The Postcolony

The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947 at once evoking the global reach of the term “art film” and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. In this pioneering book Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that in so doing it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought.Majumdar details how filmmakers as well as a host of film societies and publications sought to foster a new cinematic culture for the new nation fuelled by enthusiasm for a future of progress and development. Good films would help make good citizens: art cinema would not only earn global prestige but also shape discerning individuals capable of exercising aesthetic and political judgment. During the 1960s however Satyajit Ray Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak―the leading figures of Indian art cinema―became disillusioned with the belief that film was integral to national development. Instead Majumdar contends their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present which pointed toward possible yet unrealized futures. Analysing the films of Ray Sen and Ghatak and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history.Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future. About the Author Rochona Majumdar is an associate professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author ofMarriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009) andWriting Postcolonial History (2010).