From the User’s Guide to Indian Films Intro

The movies described in the User’s Guide are the hit list of Indian cinema. They’re not only the best films of all time, but they give you the best glimpse of what Indians enjoy, their sense of tragedy and comedy, their aspirations, their regrets. In short, it’s a visual chronicle of Indian society in the last fifty years. Enjoy.

Week 4: Mughal-E-Azam (“The Great Mughal”)
1960, recently restored to color, Hindi.
Dir: K. Asif

Bollywood’s definitive historical film. The war of wills between the late 16th century Emperor Akbar and his son, Salim (the future Emperor Jahangir) over Salim’s love affair with a palace slave girl, Anarkali, is the source of endless fascination in Indian cultural history. Bazaars and streets in North India are even named after the lovers. Accuracy and truth plays a modest role here, with the story of a slave girl who sought the love of a prince and dared to defy the Emperor having an irresistible, romantic allure, like the love triangles of the Arthurian legends. Not mention, the Mughal court was a haven of such opulence that it couldn’t help but unlock the imagination. This is why many directors before Asif refused to even touch a story set in such an expensive period. Asif’s meticulous attention to detail cost the studio three million dollars at the end of 1960, a time when the average Indian film cost $200,000 to make. The awe surrounding the movie’s overextended budget persists even today.  In the Indian film industry, the joke goes that whenever a movie takes longer than six weeks, the producer berates the director by asking, “What the hell are you doing here? Shooting Mughal-E-Azam?” The movie’s name has become the code word for “epic.” And epic it is. Filled with bejeweled interiors, paradiscal gardens, and sprawling battle scenes with chain mail clad warriors astride elephants, Mughal-E-Azam almost seems like a comic book fantasy of Eastern exoticism, like Disney’s Aladdin. But the strength of the film lies in Asif’s respect for a bygone era and his direction of the three charismatic stars, Prithviraj Kapoor (Akbar), Dilip Kumar (Salim), and Madhubala (Anarkali). All three breathe humanity into the fabled characters.

From the User’s Guide to Indian Films Intro

The movies described in the User’s Guide are the hit list of Indian cinema. They’re not only the best films of all time, but they give you the best glimpse of what Indians enjoy, their sense of tragedy and comedy, their aspirations, their regrets. In short, it’s a visual chronicle of Indian society in the last fifty years. Enjoy.

Week 3: Mother India
1957, Color, Hindi.
Dir: Mehboob Khan

Mother India is Pather Panchali’s commercial counterpart: a sweeping epic about a poor, beautiful village woman struggling to raise her crops and feed her family. A box-office blockbuster in its day. Mother India is a mélange of Sounder and The Grapes of Wrath. The movie, an ode to the hordes of rural laborers who make up the backbone of the economy, was a matter of pride for post-Independence-Nehru India and became the first Indian film to be nominated for an Academy Award. The film’s socialist director, Mehboob Khan, used the narrative as a platform to advocate the central beliefs of his party. Forty years later, in an India fat with success, the leftist ideals of Mother India seem dated. But only ten years before its release, the partition of Pakistan sparked a series of devastating communal riots across the subcontinent, leading to the murder of thousands of Hindus and Muslims. It seemed that in a country obsessed with belief, the only way for its disparate peoples to survive alongside one another was without religion - organized religion, that is.  Faith as a primal vehicle for life and ritual is very much alive in Mother India, and the visual symbols and references to Hindu mythology and practice is what gives the film its raw, emotional power: the eternal wheel of life echoed in the roll of the plough from the beleaguered oxen, as well as the film’s title, the nation embodied as Mother, the pagan sacred goddess of life and death, articulated with quivering intensity by the film’s radiant star, Nargis.

From the User’s Guide to Indian Films Intro

The movies described in the User’s Guide are the hit list of Indian cinema. They’re not only the best films of all time, but they give you the best glimpse of what Indians enjoy, their sense of tragedy and comedy, their aspirations, their regrets. In short, it’s a visual chronicle of Indian society in the last fifty years. Enjoy.

Week 2: Pather Panchali (“Song of the Little Road”)
1955, B&W, Bengali.
Dir: Satyajit Ray

If Raj Kapoor is the master of Indian commercial cinema, India’s art-house maestro is Satyajit Ray.  Lionized in the last fifteen years by critics and filmmakers like Pauline Kael, Louis Malle and Martin Scorsese, Ray is India’s most well known director in the West.  See Pather Panchali, Ray’s first film, and you’ll understand why.  Ray takes the story of a young boy, Apu, and his family in a remote village and elevates it into an epic narrative of loss and survival.  The grainy realism of Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, served as an inspiration for Ray’s filmmaking style. But, his unique visual documentation of the character’s environment, the dense, sultry jungle of rural West Bengal, its tranquility, its rain, its heat, remains the most palpable experience of the film. The shot of Apu’s sister playing in the midst of the monsoon rains, twirling round and round in delirious excitement, her long hair flying across her face, her drenched sari clinging to her wiry body, is one of the most painterly visions ever put on film. But Pather Panchali is a story about poverty, and Ray understands that nature, for all its beauty, is equivocal. The Apu Trilogy—Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and The World of Apu—unfolds like a Greek saga, where each of the three phases of Apu’s life, boyhood, adolescence, adulthood, is marked by the death of a loved one, a woman.  After each stage we see him struggle, harden, and ultimately, accept what life has left him. In a country that clings to the concept of karma, Ray’s films resonate with haunting clarity and sadness.