465 books
Once upon a time a girl said, ‘In India, real people don’t become movie stars.’ The same girl became the biggest crossover star. That very girl can’t walk around in New York City now ‘without being mobbed’. That’s Priyanka Chopra for you. The quintessential ‘Girl Uninterrupted’. She came from a small-town middle-class family in North India. During the Miss India contest, she was grilled by none other than Shah Rukh Khan. She prevailed and won the hearts of ...
While 'Indian popular cinema', as if by default, has come to mean Bollywood, there are other cinemas in India which are at least as rewarding to study, the largest and perhaps most intriguing among them coming from South India. Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada cinemas have their own colourful histories, megastars and political trajectories.
This anthology is an attempt to do justice to the bewildering variety there is in the body as a whole and addresses this ...
Cinematic Adaptation of Literature and Enigma of Aesthetics is an analytical treatise on the discourse of kinship between literature and cinema. It is an interesting, informative and useful commentary on acutely pertinent and immensely contemporary issues and challenges in literary discourse about cinematic adaptations.The book is a corroborative effort by contributors to liberate adaptation studies from hierarchal structure and set it free from the hegemony of ...
Everyone knows about the Ramsays – even those who have never watched a Ramsay film. But who were they really? Where did they come from? Why did they make the films they did? And how? How, really, did they pull it off? In India, the Ramsay name remains synonymous with horror movies. Still, all these decades later. Don’t Disturb the Dead is the story of their cinema, their methods and madnesses, the people and the processes, arguments and agreements, ...
Hindi commercial cinema has been invested in the supernatural since its earliest days. However, only a small segment of these films has been adequately explored in scholarly work. Haunting Bollywood addresses this gap.
From Gothic ghost films of the 1950s to snake films of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s globally influenced zombie and vampire films, Meheli Sen explores what the supernatural is and the questions it raises about film form, history, modernity, ...
Level Crossing: Railway Journeys in Hindi Cinema is a study of the representation of the railways as a cultural, perceptual, temporal and metaphoric paradigm of modern life in Hindi cinema. It examines the relationship of movement and stasis in late nineteenth century literary accounts and in Hindi cinema from 1935 to 1974 and asks how the three most important coordinates of the modern: machine, speed and vision shaped literary and film discourses.
As railways ...
From his childhood in the borderlands of what is now Pakistan, to his position today as the foremost teacher of acting – guru of acting – in India, the saga of Shri Roshan Taneja is not only the story of this remarkable man, but of India herself – vision, grit, struggle, and a never ending search for perfection.
From his 13 years of teaching at the Film Institute of India, Pune, to today, the list of Taneja-sahib's students reads like a list of ...
For those who know their Indian cinema, Shatranj Ke Khilari is film-maker Satyajit Ray’s only feature film in Hindi/Urdu and also his most expensive film, employing lavish stage design and stars of both Mumbai and Western cinema. A period piece set in nineteenth-century Lucknow, capital of the state of Oudh, the film revolves around the court of the flamboyant artist-king Wajid Ali Shah against the backdrop of the East India Company’s avaricious ...
Seldom has a contemporary film’s dialogues fired the general imagination the way Pink’s did. Seldom has a film challenged ‘Bollywood’s popular misogynistic tropes’ like Pink did. Released in September 2016, the film began to trend immediately. Over the next few months, as it became a phenomenal box-office success, it also became the subject of social and cultural debates – on the rights of women, and the justice and penal ...
Raj Kapoor, the creator of some of Hindi cinema’s most enduring classics, is one of the greatest film-makers India has ever produced. As producer, director, actor, editor, storyteller, he blazed a trail for subsequent generations of film-makers to follow and aspire to. He was also known to the world as an extraordinary and controversial showman, an entertainer par excellence, someone who created the template for Hindi cinema. Raj Kapoor: The One and Only ...
Digital media offers many opportunities for civic and cultural participation. This technology is not equally easy for everyone to use. Often, people with disabilities require accommodation, assistive technologies, or other forms of aid to make digital media accessible for them, but are unable to obtain them.
Restricted Access investigates digital media accessibility—the processes by which media is made usable by people with specific needs—and argues ...
One of the great thinkers of Indian cinema, Javed Akhtar needs no introduction. As a screenplay writer, he and Salim Khan wrote the dialogue for blockbusters like Zanjeer, Deewar, and Sholay; as a songwriter, he has composed a huge variety of songs including, ‘Yeh kahaan aa gaye hum’, ‘Kuchh na kaho’, and ‘Kal ha na ho’.
Talking Films and Songs showcases both these aspects of Javed Akhtar’s versatile genius, through ...
Representations of women in Indian cinema are often warped and twisted. They are subjected to a series of gazes – voyeuristic, investigative and titillating. The controlling look is always with the male. One film-maker who consistently steered clear of this right through his career was Satyajit Ray. None of Ray’s women on celluloid can be reduced to a cliche. They defy every imaginable stereotyping. This is particularly true of the women in his ...
Is kahani mein drama hai, emotion hai, tragedy hai…
A non-linear, light-hearted rollercoaster ride of a book, Bioscope presents a quirky history of Hindi cinema through unconventional, curated ‘lists’ that will delight die-hard fans and novices alike.
Highlighting 10 aspects that give Hindi films their distinctive flavour, the selections - of villainous types and hit pairs, genius compositions and unforgettable lyrics, memorable scripts and ...
Ruskin Bond, the renowned author who has been living in and writing from Mussoorie for the past six decades, has been a great favourite with people across the country. His works, written against the backdrop of the Doon valley and Mussoorie, have most endearingly, brought alive this region. This book highlights various aspects of Bond’s writings in a well-defined way. It explores his writings and throws light on the films and the television series based on ...
Relive the golden era of Hindi cinema with Mahesh Bhatt as he recounts the Khwaabon Ka Safar (the journey of dreams) of iconic film studios in India.
Did you know that German filmmaker Franz Osten partnered with an Indian studio on some of India’s earliest blockbuster films in the 1930s? Do you know which production house invented the Hindi ‘formula filmmaking’ style in the 1950s that still drives big budget Bollywood films?
Khwaabon Ka Safar ...
Aamir Khan is an icon and an iconoclast. In contemporary Indian cinema, Aamir Khan has more often than not, taken the less-trodden path, and also delivered box-office hits. Known for his meticulous selection of films, the actor has constantly re-invented himself, and re-defined the approach to film-making within the Hindi film industry. I’ll Do it My Way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan is a filmography that presents Aamir’s evolution as an ...
