Suranjan Ganguly - Böcker

Satyajit Ray is usually credited with ushering modernity into the tradition-bound Indian Cinema. Suranjan Ganguly's book examines six of Ray's major films focusing on issues such as human subjectivity, the importance of education, the emancipation of women, the rise of the new middle class, and the crisis of identity in post-Independence India. He provides close readings of the following films: Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), Apur Sansar (1959), Charulata (1964), Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), and Pratidwandi (1970). All six films relate to Ray's interest in how a culture acquires a composite, hybrid shape through the fusion of history and modernity. By placing Ray's films within the socio-historical and cultural contexts of Indian modernity, Ganguly offers a radically different approach, which will enable Western readers to engage more fully with the filmmaker's work.

In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects eight of Stan Brakhage’s most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks, his theoriesof vision and sound, the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in relation to his work, his concept of the muse, and the key influences on his art-making. In doing so, Brakhage (1933–2003) discusses some of his iconic films, such as Anticipation of the Night, Dog Star Man, Scenes from Under Childhood, Mothlight, and Text of Light.One of the most innovative filmmakers in the history of experimental cinema, Brakhage made almost 350 films in his fifty-two year- long career. These films include psychodramas, autobiography, Freudian trance films, birth films, song cycles, meditations on light, and hand-painted films, some of which range from nine seconds to over four hours in duration. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived most of his life in the mountains of Colorado, teaching for twenty-one years in the film studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.As a filmmaker, Brakhage’s life-long obsession with what he called an “adventure in perception” made him focus on the act of seeing itself, which he tried to capture on film in multiple ways both with and without his camera and by scratching and painting on film. Convinced that there is a primary level of cognition that precedes language, he wrote of the “untutored eye” with which children can access ineffable visual realities. Adults, who have lostsuch primal sight, can “retrain” their eyes by becoming conscious of what constitutes true vision and the different ways in which they daily perceive the world. Brakhage’s films experiment with such perceptions, manipulating visual and auditory experience in ways that continue to influence film today.

In this volume, editor Suranjan Ganguly collects eight of Stan Brakhage's most important interviews in which the filmmaker describes his conceptual frameworks; his theories of vision and sound; the importance of poetry, music, and the visual arts in relation to his work; his concept of the muse; and the key influences on his art-making. In doing so, Brakhage (1933–2003) discusses some of his iconic films, such as Anticipation of the Night, Dog Star Man, Scenes from Under Childhood, Mothlight, and The Text of Light.One of the most innovative filmmakers in the history of experimental cinema, Brakhage made almost 350 films in his fifty-two-year-long career. These films include psychodramas, autobiography, Freudian trance films, birth films, song cycles, meditations on light, and hand-painted films, which range from nine seconds to over four hours in duration. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he lived most of his life in the mountains of Colorado, teaching for twenty-one years in the film studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.As a filmmaker, Brakhage's life-long obsession with what he called an “adventure in perception” made him focus on the act of seeing itself, which he tried to capture on film in multiple ways both with and without his camera and by scratching and painting on film. Convinced that there is a primary level of cognition that precedes language, he wrote of the “untutored eye” with which children can access ineffable visual realities. Adults, who have lost such primal sight, can “retrain” their eyes by becoming conscious of what constitutes true vision and the different ways in which they daily perceive the world. Brakhage's films experiment with such perceptions, manipulating visual and auditory experience in ways that continue to influence film today.

This first study of Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s feature films offers a compelling analysis of the socio-historical contexts of his work. Suranjan Ganguly examines how Kerala’s abrupt displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity has shaped Gopalakrishnan’s complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake, and characters struggle with their consciences. Ganguly places the films within their larger frameworks of guilt and redemption in which the hope of emancipation – moral, spiritual and creative – is real and tangible.