Tributaries in Indian Cinema

“Dutt created films that blend poetic storytelling with visual innovation, tackling themes of love, identity, societal disillusionment, and artistic struggle,” writes Arun A. K. for the BFI. “His signature cinematic style, marked by chiaroscuro lighting, intricate mise-en-scène, and heart-wrenching music, left an indelible impact on Indian and global filmmaking, influencing auteurs worldwide, from Satyajit Ray to Martin Scorsese.”

While Dutt is often listed among the forerunners of Parallel Cinema, he was gone just a few years before the movement well and truly took off. “A triptych of films—Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome, Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti, and Basu Chatterjee’s Sara Akash—inaugurated Parallel Cinema in 1969, each of them based on the works of prominent Hindi writers, representing a major break from traditional Hindi films that drew on a repertory of formulaic potboilers for their stories,” writes Arun A. K. in his Notebook review of Omar Ahmed’s The Revolution of Indian Parallel Cinema in the Global South (1968–1995). “The book traces the early influences on the movement, the effect of the Emergency years in the mid-1970s—during which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ruled by decree, censored the media, and imprisoned political enemies—and, finally, the movement’s decline in the face of right-wing majoritarianism.”

Omar Ahmed, we should note, has recently teamed up with fellow programmer Ranjit S. Ruprai to launch The Cloud Door, “the first boutique home video label dedicated to South Asian cinema.” They are currently raising funds to finance their first release, Kamal Swaroop’s 1988 cult favorite Om Dar-B-Dar.

To return to Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome, one of the three films commonly cited as initiators of Parallel Cinema, it “heralds the (unseen, narrational) screen debut of Amitabh Bachan (credited here simply as Amitabh), whose Bollywood superstardom would soon eclipse his early connection to the Parallel movement,” as Inney Prakash points out in his notes on a series he’s curated, Parallel Days/Bollywood Nights.

Presented in New York by Asia Society, the series opens on Friday with Yash Chopra’s Kaala Patthar (1979), a Bollywood spectacle inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and starring Bachan as a disgraced Merchant Navy captain who takes a job as coal miner. Sen’s Bhuvan Shome screens on Saturday, and so it goes over the course of four consecutive weekends.

“Often framed in antagonistic terms,” writes Prakash, Bollywood and Parallel Cinema “each offer their own distinct pleasures and rewards, and the connections between them—figures, influences, source material, themes—can’t be ignored.” The final weekend in July offers Raj Kapoor’s 1955 crowd-pleaser Shree 420 and Girish Kasaravalli’s The Ritual (1977), regarded as one of the best Indian films of all time, and after skipping a week, the pairings pick up again on Friday, August 8.