T.G. Vaidyanathan has been the reviewer most film-makers, critics and movie-goers have always paid attention to. This collection of essays covers nearly three decades of film criticism by him. The book gathers together his essays on individual films in several languages, both Indian and foreign. The essays are energetic and acerbic, often partisan, but never dull. Written in an approachable style, they bring alive years of movie-watching in a manner neither entirely journalistic nor academic. The films discussed range from the Taviani brothers’ Padre Padrone to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Benegal’s Trikaal. There is a special section on Satyajit Ray, general pieces on the concerns of modern cinema in India, as well as accounts of Vaidyanathan’s encounters with directors such as Roman Polanski and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. The book includes an annotated bibliography with suggestions for further reading.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR T.G. Vaidyanathan
T.G. Vaidyanathan was the author of Hours in the Dark, a collection of film essays. He co-edited An Indian Cricket Omnibus with Ramachandra Guha and Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in Hinduism and Psychoanalysis with Jeffrey Kripal. He also guest-edited the Sunil Gavaskar biography by Dom Moraes. TGV was born on 21 October 1929 in a village in Tanjore district. When his family moved to Madras, he was sent to Madras Christian College High School and then to college at Loyola. He took a law degree but did not use it, choosing instead to take an MA in English literature, privately. He did short teaching stints in Assam, Hyderabad (Osmania University, where he edited the prestigious Shakespeare number of the Osmania Journal of English Studies) before settling in at Bangalore University in June 1967, from where he retired in 1991. He wrote on cinema, literature, cricket and culture for the Deccan Herald, Gentleman and the Hindu. He died on 26 March 2002.
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