I have always felt an indefinable kinship towards Chris Marker’s films that were not particularly related to the overt intellectuality of his work or his espousal of left-leaning ideals. However, it was not until the first chapter in Catherine Lupton’s book on the filmmaker, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future that this gravitation took on […]
In the BFI Modern Classics publication, A City of Sadness, Bérénice Reynaud provides a comprehensive, articulate, and insightful critical analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s seminal and artistically groundbreaking film on the once-taboo subject of the ‘hidden’ history of Taiwan, providing a compelling examination of the film through the intrinsic social context of a culturally broader Chinese […]
Claire Denis’ personal history as the oldest child of a colonial official stationed throughout outposts in French equatorial Africa is a biographical detail that is often only referenced within the context of her debut feature, Chocolat – a domestic situation that mirrored the filmmaker’s young life (that, as author Judith Mayne accurately points out, often […]
An intrinsic aspect of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s cinema is her particularity of observation from a perspective that is neither of enlightened privilege nor indigenous intimacy, but rather, suspended between elements of objectivity and subjectivity, a gaze belonging to neither cultural insider nor curious outsider. By filming in this state of cultural hybridity, Trinh reassesses not […]
Childhood Days: A Memoir is a compilation of a series of articles for the children’s publication, Sandesh, and best serves as a supplement to his autobiography, My Years With Apu or the Introspections interview by K. Bikram Singh. The book flows like a contemplative, familiar, and accessible stream of consciousness of Satyajit Ray’s fond memories […]
In the book Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen, author John W. Hood provides an insightful examination of the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that have shaped filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s personal and creative ideology. Born into a middle-class Bengali family in Faridpur in 1923, Hood provides a contextual frame of reference to the independence […]