Mrinal Sen : Sixty Years in Search of Cinema

Author: Dipankar Mukhopadhyay
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 316
ISBN/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 Edition
Preface to the First Edition

1. The Birth of a Film- Maker
2. 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 Winter

Postscript
Notes and References
Appendix
Filmography
Index
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgement