Author: Dipankar MukhopadhyayPublisher: HarperCollinsYear: 2009Language: EnglishPages: 316ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788172238353
Description
The stormy petrel of India cinema, the maverick maestro, Mrinal Sen is one of India’s finest film-makers and one of its most renowned in international circles. Beginning his career as an audio technician in a Calcutta studio, Sen made a rather inauspicious feature debut with Raatbhore (1955), a film he prefers to forget. He found his feet with critically acclaimed features Baishey Shravana (1960) and Akash Kusum (1965). The unprecedented success of Bhuvan Shome (1969) marked a turning point in Sen’s career, inspiring a whole new generation of film-makers and heralding the ‘New Cinema’ movement in India.In this classic biography, originally published as The Maverick Maestro, Dipankar Mukhopadhyay recounts the life and times of an iconic film-maker, from his association with the Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association, which shaped his world view, to his early experience and frustrations as a film-maker. He also charts the development of Mrinal Sen from an overtly political film-maker in the early 1970s, whose works reflected the unrest of the era, to a more contemplative one, intimately concerned with the moral dilemmas of the Indian middle class.Warm and insightful, Mrinal Sen: Sixty Years in Search of Cinema is an invaluable portrait of an uncompromising artist who broke established norms of film-making and freely experimented with new styles and techniques of creative expression.
Contents
Preface to the Revised EditionPreface to the First Edition1. The Birth of a Film- Maker2. Early Films (1960-64)3. The Years of Controversy (1965-66)4. The Breakthrough (1969)5. Years of anger and Turbulence (1970-74)6. The Period of transition (1976-78)7. The Return of the Prodigal (1979-83)8. The Attempted Masterpiece (1986)9. The Flight to Nowhere (1989-93)10. My Beautiful World (2002)11. The Lion in WinterPostscriptNotes and ReferencesAppendixFilmographyIndexSelect BibliographyAcknowledgement