Bette Davis Black and White by Julia A. Stern (review)

Abstract

213 “Ray transitioned from a historian working with the cinematic medium to an ethnographer who registered his bafflement with the present by documenting the contemporary as deadlock in the nation’s history” (190). Majumdar also locates a crisis of masculinity within the city films. Whereas some of Ray’s previous films, such as Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963), which is also set in an urban environment, imagined the woman as the modern postcolonial subject, his later trilogy is almost solely focused on male protagonists as central figures within the milieu of urban conflict. The epilogue reflects on the possible reasons for the decline of art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. Majumdar finds two major developments as causes for this decline: one, the reconfiguration of National Film Development Corporation from a funding entity to a one focused on procuring modernized equipment for film production and, two, the growth of the televisual sector in India that began in the 1980s and reached its full-blown potential in the 1990s post-liberalization. Majumdar concludes her book with this insightful sentence about the significance of art cinema across time: “In this, art films offer us resources with which to inhabit our own disorienting times—wracked by a global pandemic, authoritarian politics, and the tremendous might of neoliberal states challenging the conditions of being citizens and humans the world over” (229). Although Majumdar’s book as a whole is a rich secondary source of the ideas and opinions of those at the forefront of the Indian cinematic avant-garde, it is the second part of the book that proves to be the most accessible and engaging to read. Quoted extracts from archives, letters, biographies, newspaper articles, and essays in film magazines—presented in collated form in the first three chapters—function as a retelling, yet certain pertinent ideas remain unexamined or are mentioned only in passing. Questions such as the relationship of class and caste elitism to “good cinema” (a term never quite defined by the author), for instance, remain in the background even as large sections of written archives are reproduced verbatim in the book. Most important, is perhaps the question of why Majumdar’s interrogation of art cinema remains Bengal-centric and ignores the work of filmmakers such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Gulzar, Mani Kaul, and Sai Paranjpye, among others, who were also at the forefront of the Indian New Wave. Despite some of its thematic lacunae, Majumdar’s book is painstakingly researched and well-documented and provides a useful starting point to any researcher interested in the origins and history of the Indian New Wave.