Features

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...

The first blockbuster in film history was argubaly the fallout of Hollywood’s first major ego clash. David Wark Griffith, better known as as a shorter DW Griffith, who had failed to make it big in theatre and had subsequently written scnarios and acted in films of Edison Studios, produced and directed the Biograph film Judith of Bethulia in 1914. This was one of the earliest feature films to be produced in the United States. But Biograph thought that longer films were not viable. They believed...

Once the early filmmakers got over the fact that a film could be made of more than one shot, the multi-shot film became the norm of the day. Films of the 1902/3-07 period were no longer treating the individual shot as a self-contained unit of meaning. One shot was now linked to another. It was like putting words together to form a meaningful sentence. The grammar, in any, of course, was far from evolving. Filmmakers used succession of shots to capture ane emphasise the highpoints of the action...

The shot, as the smallest unit in a film, developed in the pre-1907 period, also known in cinema history as Early Cinema. Film historians, in fact, break up even this period into two segments: 1894-1902/3, when the majority of films consisted of one shot and were what we would today call documentary films, known at that time as actualities (based on the way the French described them); and 1903-07, when the multi-shot, fiction film gradually emerged, with simple narratives structuring the...