The Moving Picture First Came to India a mere few months after the Lumiere brothers screened their first 'films' in Paris in December 1895. Writhin a decades, film-making had caught the imagination of artisis, photographers and busibnessmen the world over. Tragically, an overwhelming majority of those silent-era films are lost forever. In India, the situation is truly dismal. of the approximately 1,300 silent films produced between 1913 and 1931, barely 1 per ...
As a film-maker and film historian B.D. Garga has closely witnessed and participated in the growth of Indian cinema from the early 1940s. With more than fifty years' experience as a film journalist, and having served on various national and international film festival juries, he is probably India's foremost authority on the subject of cinema. In this extraordinary collection of essays, Garga delves into the vast repertoire of his scholarship and experience to ...
The screening of six films of the Lumiere brothers at Watson's Hotel, Bombay, on 7 July 1896 marked the beginning of India's engagement with the moving picture. It also laid the foundation of a remarkable body of non-fiction cinematic work. B.D. Garga's From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-Fiction Film in India traces the century-old history of newsreels and documentaries in the country. Beginning with an account of the early works of people like Hiralal Sen, J.F. Madan ...