ombay Talkies In Now 85-years-old
Bombay Talkies, one of the oldest film company of the world is celebrating its 85th anniversary. At the nascent age of the cinema The Bombay Talkies Studios was born in India when other contemporary film companies of the world such as Warner Bros. Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures were born and brought up to create cinematic magic for the world audience, but Bombay Talkies is the only premiere film company which has made charismatic comeback and repeating its old pride and glory after sixty-three years of utter darkness.
1934 the historical year in the remarkable history of Indian Cinema The Bombay Talkies Studios, Bombay Talkies Pictures, Bombay Talkies Laboratories which were established by the pillar of Indian Cinema Rajnarayan Dube also he established The Bombay Talkies ltd., first public limited company of Indian Cinema, along with Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani. Bombay Talkies was the legendary film company, produced the creative geniuses of all the fields of cinematic creation. The company is remembered as the pioneer institution which had a futuristic approach to justify the compulsions of art. Under command Rajnarayan Dube, Bombay Talkies Produced 115 films, Distributed 259 films, Launched over 280 Legends, Constructed over 400 Cinema Halls and Financed more than 700 Films.
Bombay Talkies had introduced great talents like Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar, Madhubala, Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Mehmood, Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar and many more. It is to be noted that maintaining the same traditions culture and legacy Bombay Talkies in its new incarnation has introduced writer, actor and director Aazaad to create meaningful films and maintain the golden legacy founded by the pillar of Indian Cinema Rajnarayan Dube.
Rajnarayan Dube single-handedly architected the business angle of the entire industry which was yet to come. He supported various new theatres such as BN Sircar's New Theatres in Calcutta, V Shantaram's Prabhat Pictures, Homi Wadia's Wadia Movietone, Sohrab Modi's Minerva Movietone, LV Prasad's Prasad Labs and Pictures (Prasadwas an ex-technician from Bombay Talkies), SM Vasan's Gemini Pictures and Mehboob Khan's theatres, Tarachand Barjatya's Rajshri Productions (Barjatya served as a distribution manager for Bombay Talkies for the period of seven years). Dube financed these fledgling companies and made them stronger. In essence, he builds the entire movie ecosystem in the country. Everyone whom Shri. Dube supported went on to build a name for themselves in the industry. Rajnarayan Dube had a big vision for Indian Cinema. He wanted Indian film making to be a respectable profession. He thus stipulated that Bombay Talkies would only hire graduates. He hoped this move would legitimize the Indian film industry of the thirties and forties, and it certainly did. Besides this, Shri. Dube also wanted the Indian film industry to be inclusive of Indians from all states and sectors of life. Even though the movie company worked with European technicians, Shri. Dube would bring on Indian technicians and make sure that they learnt the art of movie making. He also brought a lot of Indian writers on-board so that movies could have an Indian cultural sensitivity and thus could appeal to a large number of people. This move gave rise to a whole new Indian profession, movie making.
In this 85th Anniversary event filmmaker, Aazaad said this is the high time to re-invent and restore the sanatan culture and values of Dev Bhasha Sanskrit to preserve our divine identity and existence. Aazaad roars in his baritone that India is not merely a piece of land but a divine entity, one should live and die for the motherland. We are the fortunate descendants of the great sages who had created Vedas, Upanishads and the ultimate wisdom when the whole world was living in primitive stages. We are Brahma in its true sense of meaning. For us, the whole world is our family. Our thoughts, actions, and voices represent and strengthen the world brotherhood, peace and wisdom. The greatest revolution is the self-revolution in the history of human evolution.
In this occasion writer, poet and head of the writing department of Bombay Talkies, Abhijit Ghatwari said in front of thousands of people gathered at the Bombay Talkies campus that the nationalism is the only life-saving energy for the survival of our great nation. Aham Brahmasmi, a masterpiece created by Aazaad is the ultimate answer to all the odds and re-establish the golden immortal Sanatan Bharat.
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In this atmosphere of great excitement and promise, the creative director of Bombay Talkies Mousumi Chatterjee addressed the thousands of invitees with great remembrance of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, creator of Vande Mataram. Mousumi shared her thoughts with guests and said that Bengal was the experimental lab of nationalism. Today the situation of Bengal is very depressing, but with the emergence of nationalism and the creation of nationalistic Sanskrit film Aham Brahmasmi created by Aazaad will change the scenario very soon and sure.
It's a great day for the cine lovers that after 63 years under the command of a military school student and nationalist filmmaker Aazaad. Bombay Talkies is revived in its full glamour and grandeur and made a splendid comeback with Rashtraputra. Rashtraputra was shown in the prestigious internationally acclaimed Cannes Film Festival on the past 21st May 2019. Aazaad is now ready with his another masterpiece Aham Brahmasmi, the first main stream film in Dev Bhasha Sanskrit. The mighty, traditionally and culturally immortal value based film Aham Brahmasmi is produced by Kamini Dube along with Bombay Talkies and in association with Bombay Talkies Foundation, World Literature Council, Vishwa Sahitya Parishad, and Aazaad Trust. Aham Brahmasmi is not merely a film, it's a call of the soul and the psyche of the immortal land of the gods i.e Bharat.
It is a matter of great hope that in this commercial world of movies and today's valueless society, a filmmaker and sensitive artiste like Aazaad has come forward with such an extra ordinary value packed subject of all time i.e Aham Brahmasmi.
Also Read: Aazaad created history with Aham Brahmasmi
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'Warrior Queen Of Jhansi' Biopic Lands At Roadside Attractions
MOVIES
Roadside Attractions has picked up U.S. distribution rights to Swati Bhise’s The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, a biopic about a revolutionary 19th century Indian feminist icon, and is planning a fall release.
The historical epic — which stars Devika Bhise, Rupert Everett, Ben Lamb, Derek Jacobi, Jodhi May and Hindi actors Yatin Karyekar, Milind Gunaji, Ajinkya Deo and Arif Zakaria — tells the true story of the Rani, or Queen of Jhansi, a freedom fighter and feminist icon who, as a 24-year-old military commander in 1857 India, led a battle against the British Empire. Her insurrection shifted the balance of power in the region and set in motion the demise of the notorious British East India Company and the beginning of the British Raj under Queen Victoria.
"The Warrior Queen of Jhansi is an inspirational and powerful true story of a great leader who so clearly demands big-screen treatment,” Roadside co-presidents Howard Cohen and Eric d’Arbeloff said Tuesday in a joint statement.
The film was directed, produced and co-written by Swati Bhise through her production company, Cayenne Pepper Productions. Devika Bhise, who also executive produced, and Olivia Emden are co-writers, as well.
The distribution deal with Roadside Attractions was brokered by CAA Media Finance.
Interview: Artist Chitra Ganesh Evokes 'Ghost Effect' Of Silent Cinema [Images]
When Asia Society Museum's 2006 group exhibition One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now toured to the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston after its New York run, the Houston Press singled out the contribution by artist Chitra Ganesh (a surreal mural that spilled into three dimensions) as "singular — simultaneously elegant and unsettling."
Those words could serve as an apt thumbnail introduction to Ganesh's art overall — paintings, drawings and installations that delve headlong into themes of female sexuality and aggression in ways that are equally playful and provocative, using imagery derived from Hindu mythology, Bollywood, comics and science fiction. What unites these disparate influences are the artist's formal gifts (her drawing ability in particular), which ensure that the work is as visually striking as it is conceptually freighted.
Ganesh's latest solo exhibition, The Ghost Effect in Real Time, on view at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City through June 23, finds her working through her themes in a new context, the world of silent movies. Her arresting wall-sized charcoal portraits of primordial screen icons like Theda Bara and Devika Rani have a spectral beauty that's ideal for evoking the long-lost world of the silents, and makes the exhibition's title seem only appropriate.
Reached via email, the New York-based artist (who just won a Fellowship in Fine Arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation) shared some insights into her new work with Asia Blog.
The Ghost Effect in Real Time seems to mark a new phase in your work. Are silent movies a recent interest of yours? What was the attraction of this imagery for you?
The works in The Ghost Effect in Real Time reflect a recent focus on charcoal drawings inspired by silent cinema, which has organically evolved from my drawing-based practice over the past several years. My work across media is unified by a keen interest in exploring intersections of mythic narratives, bodily excess, science fiction, and iconic representations of femininity.
I was initially drawn to the imagery and content of silent cinema last year, when I was preparing for an exhibition at Nature Morte Berlin. I became curious about historical/visual relationships that might have existed between Germany and India, and my research led me to assemble a body of images, largely derived from film stills, documenting a number of Indian-German silent cinema co-productions in the 1920s, between Himanshu Rai and Franz Osten, which culminated in a trilogy of films based on the life of the Buddha and scenes from the epic myth the Mahabharata.
I also learned that in this era, biologically female actresses were extremely difficult to come by, as acting in cinema threatened notions of appropriate middle-class femininity, and thus many of the earliest "actresses" were men playing female roles, young girls or children, and Desi (South Asian) actresses of Anglo-Indian femininity.
From this initial research, I was struck by salient narrative threads connecting a range of silent cinema across culture and continents. For example, narrative intersections among Orientalism, mythology and folklore, the passage of time, and science fiction/future cities simultaneously animated productions in India, Germany, Russia and the United States. Identifying the convergence of these narratives in what was then a cutting-edge shared technology, and seeing how silent cinema contributed to visualizing an iconic femininity that endures in contemporary visual culture today, gave me the momentum for creating a body of work that is a visual exploration of a historical/cultural moment.
One of the works refers to Raja Harishchandra, from 1913, which most scholars regard as the first Indian feature film. Is it just a coincidence that your new series coincides with the upcoming 100th anniversary of India's film industry?
The titles for the drawings based on silent film include specific information about the actresses, names of films referenced, and so forth, allowing the referential information to illuminate the context and content for the viewer. The drawing titled Raja Harishchandra presents a montage of stills from what has widely been considered India's first feature film, and one of the masterpieces of director Debashish Phalke, the "father of Indian cinema." It is just a coincidence that we happen to be coming upon the 100th anniversary of India's film industry.
However, in the midst of researching and executing this project I did begin to notice that there is a current surge of interest in explorations of early cinema within the contemporary film context itself. For example, Martin Scorsese's recent film Hugo (2011) invokes the work and imagines the disappointments of George Melies, while Paresh Mokashi's film Harishchandra Factory (2009) chronicles the personal and economic hardships Phalke faced. Both films explore the enduring legacy and often daunting challenges met by early pioneers of silent cinema, while films such as The Artist, and ongoing restorations of silent cinema classics such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis [right], also reveal a contemporary interest in exploring the silent period.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on the title The Ghost Effect in Real Time a little bit. There's something downright eerie about several of the images in this series — which the title seems to acknowledge…
The exhibition's title, The Ghost Effect in Real Time, on the one hand seeks to illuminate the haunting and emotionally evocative quality pulsing through early cinematic visions of femininity, exploration, bodily transformation, which move freely between breathtaking fantasy and the material constraints of quotidian existence.
It's also evocative of some key filmic techniques I observed as recurrent themes in the films I drew from, terms that shaped early cinema. The "ghost effect" refers to techniques of double exposure or in-camera superimposition, frequently deployed in early cinema to create the effect of a supernatural on-screen presence, a highly accelerated passage of time, or the appearance of visions or premonitions, often in circular vignettes. "Real time" refers to the the filmic technique of narrating actions or events that occur entirely within the span of time in which it is shown on screen.
In this way, the title also embodies the dialectic relationship in early cinema between fantastical, otherworldly narratives and the medium's reflection of early 20th-century modernity and the emergence of clock time.
Elements of the Haunted Documents section of this exhibition, like the large, disembodied eyes in #14, Althea [image #6, above], are immediately recognizable as your work, whereas in the silent movie series you seem to have effaced or sublimated your distinctive style. How conscious an artistic choice was that — did you deliberately try to "step out of the way" in these images?
Both the content and stylistic choices informing the charcoal drawings were the culmination of a few years of investigation and experimentation with the content and medium. I first used the large-scale charcoal drawing more when working on The Unknowns, a series of nine large mixed-media works on canvas that comprised a site-specific installation at the Travancore Palace in New Delhi for the Indian Art Summit in 2009. For this exhibition, I was interested in mapping the visual relationships between anonymity and iconic representations in producing narratives of femininity and female sexuality.
One work from the series was based on old black-and-white photographs of my partner's mother, which were rendered in charcoal and included sculptural elements [image #5, above]. I then created three charcoal portraits of iconic actresses from the Indian-German silent cinema period [such as Devika Rani, right], a series which has led to a full-scale exploration of both feminine icons as well as thematic aspects of these films.
The painterly style of these works is very much connected to the gesture and brushstroke that characterized my earlier paintings on canvas. In this instance, I was very interested in how both charcoal on paper, as well as black-and-white film, rely so strongly on light as a primary medium. I was interested in the potential of translating the notion of light as a primary medium, and what this translation between film and drawing would look like.
On the other hand, there is some thematic consistency here because powerful, even fearsome female figures have been a recurring subject for you. Is it too much to see icons like Devika Rani, Theda Bara and Fritz Lang's robot woman as spiritual cousins or descendants of the goddesses and demons you've painted in the past?
There is definitely a consistency in the themes and content explored across my works which is a pivotal part of this project as well — namely, my interest in exploring stories and icons of femininity or sexuality that remain at the edges of canonical understandings of history, literature and art.
I was haunted by the frequency of bodily transformations inherent in early cinema's depictions of femininity — with characters moving freely between corporeal matter, spirit, animal and automaton. These moments provided me with links across history and time to the kinds of iconographies I have been interested in developing and giving voice to in my drawing-based practice across media.