Cinema

Actress Tisca Chopa was born into a Punjabi family of educationists, but a career in academics were not for her. Tisca chose theatre instead, and not without reason or precedent. The very school where her parents taught were one day caught in a bind — they couldn't find anyone to enact the role of little Krishna for a play. It was left to the two-year-old Tisca to salvage the situation. Theatre (officially) happened soon after college, and she moved on subsequently to cinema and television. Her...

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...

Life for Amol Palekar may soon come a full circle. The actor-filmmaker is contemplating returning to the profession he had started from — that of painting. Interacting with journalists at an informal gathering here on Monday, Palekar announced, "I am seriously thinking of going back to painting. I started my creative journey as a painter (in the late 1960s). I have had seven one-man shows to my credit. But that aspect of my life had been put on the back-burner. Now I am very serious about...

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...

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...