Seminar on Indian Cinema with Dr. Parichay Patra
Seminar on Indian Cinema with Dr. Parichay Patra
Imagined Encounters and the Absence of History: A Journey into the Apocalypse
A film historian exploring the transnational associations of the Indian New Wave cinemas of the long 1960s can easily become troubled by the explicit absence of an organized history of film-pedagogy that formed an important part of this cinematic movement. Most filmmakers associated with the Indian New Wave, which remains one of the most underexplored global movements of the post-1968 period, received their training at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the state-sponsored film school that was modeled after its counterparts in the Soviet Bloc and as such indicated India’s alignment during the Cold War. This seminar will explore the pedagogical role of Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976), the internationally celebrated Indian auteur and the most influential film-educator at FTII in the 1960s. Through a look at his film society activism, politics of programming, engagement with European cinema and film theory, and his interest in an impending global apocalypse, we will discuss Ghatak’s real and imagined transnational encounters with his contemporaries and their ideas.
The seminar discussion will be based on a chapter draft from Dr. Patra’s upcoming book, Nostalgia for the Light: Post-May, Global Waves, and the Indian New Wave. If you wish to participate in the seminar and receive a copy of the chapter, please email Luka Arsenjuk at arsenjuk@umd.edu.
Parichay Patra works as Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur. He received an MA in English literature from Jadavpur University (2008), an MA in Film Studies from Jadavpur University (2011), and a PhD in Film & Screen Studies from Monash University, Australia (2016). His areas of interest include Global South cinemas, transnational cinema, histories and aesthetics of Indian and other new wave cinemas during the long 1960s. He is currently working on his first book, a transnational history of the Indian New Wave cinema, Nostalgia for the Light: Post-May, Global Waves, and the Indian New Wave. He is the co-editor of Sine ni Lav Diaz: A Long Take on the Filipino Auteur (Intellect & University of Chicago Press, 2021), Salaam Bollywood: Representations and Interpretations (Routledge, 2016), and Bollywood and Its Other(s): Towards New Configurations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). His writings have appeared in Transnational Screens, Senses of Cinema, Journal of the Moving Image, and Synoptique. Previously, Dr. Patra has served as an assistant professor at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani Goa Campus (2017-19), and as a visiting researcher at the Instituto Investigciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the Summer of 2018.