PM Review

                               “Neech jati ki ladaki aur naam rakha diya Sujata”                                                                -Charu, foster mother of Sujata   As soon as I heard this dialogue from Bimal Roy’s cult-classic film Sujata [1959], I felt a butterfly has just whirling around my throat in the midst of dark night. It is one of the overstated punchlines we used to say during any gossips, debates and chatting but this one echoed a supple tone and mood that I can’t just deny but pause the laptop screen and thinking an analogous temperament in Rabindranath’s novel Gora written in 1910 on the backbiting caste rituals in Hinduism. The spiteful sequence of Sujata after the revelation of her identity as a Dalit [the untouchable...

Eisenstein’s  The General Line  [1929] is a series of intellectual montages consisting of stills which is more like a creative docufiction than feature narrative film. I think this one is a clean film following the principles and practices of Russian formalism in film.  Collage 1:  Eisenstein had an incredible artistic senses and skills to create a brief graphic narrative just by sequencing motion profiles and stills images. Collage 2:  Melting candles, slavering cattle, waving flags and weeping devotees composed one of the intellectual montages in the film. Collage 3:  The rebellious woman formed a cooperative to earn money and there was a conflict raised over profit distribution and followed a greedy and violent consequences. This is a prototype of collective operation. Collage 4: The woman in the slumber land dreaming of a herd of bovines at the beach and a god-like bovine appeared in the sky and poured milk on earth, this one so Dadaistic in nature...

Is Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin [1925] the first film I have ever watched where the narrative structure has been followed mechanically by the theatrical form of drama, [five acts structure]? Maybe it was his first step to be formalistic in film making before imposing artistic principles on firm technical elements of film. I sometimes fall into a muddle thinking that can any medium of art carry the innate meaning and create value only based on its form without the author’s intentions and cultural stimulations. Eisenstein attempted his highest to be focused deeply on the film's formal signature but the narrative structure could not get rid of from its critical basis, the mutiny in 1905 in a Russian naval battle ship that was worked as one of the catalysts for Russian revolution in 1917. The Bengal mutiny in 1857 had also been a significant catalyst for the independence around the Indian subcontinent in 1947.   Though I have no wide-ranging knowledge about Marxism except Hegel’s h...

  It’s an utter coincidence that I had watched 2023 Eisenstein’s Strike [1925] on 4rth May, just following Chaplin’s feature oeuvre. And I was immensely moved by the movie not only for its narrative style and formal structure but also mostly the themes of human dignity and labor rights and their eternal conflicts with the owners’ interests.   The following morning, I came across a post on my Facebook News Feed about the strike of Writers Guild of America held on 2 nd  May, 2023 just day after the International Labor Day. The disputes are very crucial and contemporary. One is about cutting short the residual payments for Streaming platforms, another is a more delicate one. It is about the threat of human creativity and engagement of the entertainment industry. Employing AI based technologies especially ChatGPT and automations on creative process is minimizing their rooms to work under stable conditions.   Previously I wrote a brief review on Chaplin’s Modern Times rel...