Features

His devilishly handsome looks only added charisma to the chiseled visage. His burning, azure eyes only made the penetrating gaze pierce right through you. And when all this came with that immaculate accent and flamboyant dialogue delivery, he did not have to be that gaunt 6'2'' to tower over anyone else. But that Peter O'Toole did, portraying the relatively diminutive TE Lawrence, the British archaeologist, soldier and adventurer who led Arab tribesmen against the Ottoman Turks during World War...

Some fifty years ago, a relatively unknown Italian filmmaker, Sergio Leone, was egged on by a well-meaning friend to go and see Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Leone did so, and immediately recognised the potential for remaking it as a Western. He had his own good reasons. Leone had already been taken in by the success of German Westerns that had been running to packed houses across Europe, and believed that he too could make one. Yojimbo only made his resolve more resolute. Leone first approached...

Every industry has its own singular set of problems. So has the animation industry, fledgling as it is as yet in Bangalore. The animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (or, AVGC for short as it is popularly known in the industry) sector in the city is roughly 10 years old, though the first players had probably started tricking in some 18-20 years back. It took a while for the early explorers to grope around and get a feel of things. It was only around six years ago that industry leaders...

When someone organises a retrospective of as many as 71 young artists, that too from the state, you are likely to do a double take. And when you are told about the sheer scale of the project, of which the said exhibition is only a launch, you are going to sit up and be all ears. And that’s what it will be like when KalaRasa’s inaugural art exhibition Rendezvous with 71 opens for the public come Sunday. Simply put, KalaRasa is an art studio – complete with a gallery, workshop space, resident...

At the turn of the millennium, if 5000 copies of your book were sold, you would be a best-selling author. Then, in the next few years, the Indian publishing industry expanded by leaps and bounds. As the industry burgeoned, there was this author whose re-print runs usually exceeded 500,000. He was described by the New York Times as “the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history” and many others ascribed to him the “phenomenon” tag. The man in question, Chetan Bhagat, changed...

Sometime in the early 1990s, a young Ashoka fellow set about shaking off the archetypal lethargy of old Kolkata. This man, Debashsis Nayak, formed an organisation called the Foundation for the Conservation and Research of Urban Traditional Architecture (CRUTA), and went out taking both tourists and residents of old Calcutta on guided tours through an intricate maze of lanes and bylanes of the cold city. The heritage walks soon found takers among oldtimers of the city, and when Kolkata celebrated...

When a marriage proposal comes from someone you can only think of as a god, it can be more than overwhelming. You wonder whether you are dreaming, and your life thereafter is just a trance. You don’t think of yourself as a dance; for, dance is life. It was during a chance trip to Paris in the summer of 1931 with her father Akhoy Kumar Nandy, when the 11-year-old Amala met a few young men at the Exposition Coloniale where a group of Indian artists were said to be performing. One of the older of...

The rise of the Hollywood system started with companies which developed a way of manufacturing films on a large scale. It went on to be so successful that European companies sent over people to study and, if possible copy, it. Among these American companies was Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, created in 1916 after the merger of Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company -- originally formed by Zukor as Famous Players in Famous Plays -- and Jesse L Lasky's Feature Play Company...

Before Hollywood had come an abject failure – that of the Motion Pictures Patent Company (MPPC) to monopolise the film business. This was a cartel of 11 leading American and European producers of films and manufacturers of cameras and projectors. In December 1908, a “trust” was formed by major American film companies (Edison, Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, Kalem, American Star, American Pathé), the leading film distributor (George Kleine) and the biggest supplier of raw film stock...

In the early years of film production, cinema as a medium did not threaten the cultural status quo. Non-fiction films had dominated and films were always exhibited in “respectable” venues like vaudeville and opera houses, churches, and lecture halls. Films started making an impact on the cultural landscape with the story films becoming gradually popular, and exhibition of films gradually shifting to the nickelodeons. Film historian Roberta Pearson writes of the early critics, “The industry’s...