CHAPTER ONE
ADAPTING, INTERPRETING AND TRANSCREATING RABINDRANATH TAGORE'S WORKS ON SCREEN
SOMDATTA MANDAL
A minor work has no claim to act as more than a springboard when adapted for another medium, but a major work deserves, that any approach is made with respect to its essence. The scenario must express the quintessence of the book. It must emerge as clearly as possible, an honour to the original, to our process of transportation, and to cinematic art.
One of the most interesting things about the early twentieth century is that the arts of literature, painting and cinema went through the modernist crisis at approximately the same time, despite the fact that the cinema was a fledgling art and the others were well into their maturity.
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Nitin Basu reminiscences how in 1917 Prashanta Mahalanobis and Rabindranath Tagore took him to Bolpur requesting him to film a dance performance accompanied by Tagore’s songs in Uttarayan one evening. He took pictures, processed them in Mahalanobis’s laboratory at Presidency College, developed the print at home, again processed it in the laboratory and projected it for Gurudev. He liked this 17 minute film so much that he saw it again and again. Unfortunately the film is now lost and if available it would have been the first film in which Rabindranath had also performed a role. After this, in 1920 there was an attempt by Madan Company, which got permission to film Tagore’s play Biswarjan, but the project was aborted due to lack of female …show more content…
Incidentally, in Calcutta during that time people had already started cinematic ventures based on his stories. In 1923, the first ever silent film Manbhanjan based on Tagore’s story of the same name was made by Naresh Chandra Mitra. From Madhu Basu’s autobiography, it is also known that he had interacted with Tagore in making a film on the same short story, and after Madan Company signed the bond with Visva-Bharati, Tagore had even revised Basu’s film script, added some dialogues to it and advised a name to it, Giribala. All these events make it clear that Tagore was already aware of the immense possibilities of the new medium of the cinema and by 1929 his relationship with it became quite strong. The same year, in a letter to Murari Bhaduri (brother of theatre legend Sisir Kumar Bhaduri) written on 26 November 1929, he stated that the flow of images constitutes cinema. This flow, he wrote, should be used so that it can communicate without the help of words. “The cinema (chhayachitra, in his words) is still enslaved to literature,” and he attributed this ‘dependence’ to the general ignorance of the masses to which cinema caters. He added that a time will come, when cinema will cease to depend on literature for inspiration and
An Oxford University graduate, Jonathan Swift, in his article, A Modest Proposal, proposes a solution to Irelands growing poverty in the 18th century by proposing the selling and eating of innocent babies. Swift’s purpose is to state the benefits that the poor would gain from selling their one year old children to the wealthy to eat them. He takes on a concerning tone in order to convince the people of Ireland to consider and adopts his obscene plan.
Since the beginning of the 19th century, America has had to deal with the on going
Cinema has been represented in numerous ways, however classical Hollywood cinema truly had an independent grasp since its debut in the 1910’s. The style created by the large producers of the time including Warner Brothers, MGM, RKO, Fox and Paramount shaped the genre not only during its birth but also through its Golden Age and into the present. As a style it has many characteristics that make it unique and poplar among viewers. The most salient of these aspects is the classical films plot structure and construction; unlike other styles including the art film the classical film creates a consistent and coherent plot for its viewers as David Bordwell states in his article, The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice “The view...
In relation to “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures”, David Bordwell presents the analysis of the how the cultural text can be of significance for formalism in controlling the film. He states, “the classical film respects the canonic pattern of establishing an initial state of affairs which gets violated and which must then be set right.” (Bordwell. 1986, p. 78. 19.) The 'Standard' of the 'Standard'.
In the article “The Modest Proposal” the credible author known as, Johnathan Swift informs us readers on the starving families in Ireland. Swift’s total purpose of the article is to educate the article readers on how these families struggle for survival from the problem of starvation. Swift adopts an emotional and relatable feeling in his readers. Swift further conveys his explanation later on in the article.
Jonathan Swift in his “Modest Proposal” introduces a problem of poverty to his audience. The purpose of writing this piece is to warn the audience about some major problems. This piece is generally directed towards the general people because he doesn’t specifically direct it towards anyone in particular.
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
Globalization is often misrepresented as the growing influence of the western culture in the world and so we tend to state that Hollywood is influencing Bollywood to a great extent. An argument can be made to justify the validity of that statement. However, this paper aims at presenting the influence of Bollywood on Hollywood in terms of music, dance and visual representation. This paper deals with a specific part of globalization, providing evidence that it is not only related to the spreading influence of the western culture but also of eastern culture. Feature film produced in 2009 Courtesy: UNESCO Indian movies began production in the beginning of the 20th century and were, much like American films, in black and white.
The movie Barsaat was directed by Raj Kapoor, who was also an actor of Hollywood industry. This Indian movie combines dual
The essay will address the statement through intermediality of literature and film, in particular, avant-garde film and poetry. Even though, Robert Stam analyses film adaptation in his influential books on literature and film, his statement can be engaged in from a slightly different perspective. The statement deals with the notion of medium and intermediality in a broader sense. It is exactly what the juxtaposition gives to the medium. It broadens and opens expressive possibilities or provides a new lens for analysis of the medium. Poetry is going to be used for exploring the medium of film because films are constantly prescribed with the “poetic” quality. It is an ambiguous term which implies the relationship between poetry and film. In this essay I will explore the cinematic medium in terms of poetic form and try to argue the features of
The way Tagore presents life as vignettes and not in its totality or as a whole is enough to show the humanity in the characters. Tagore believes in humanity and champions this beyond race, colour, caste or gender in his short stories. In this essay, three of his short stories will be used to dissect how Tagore champions humanity beyond race, colour, caste or gender and the short stories are Kabuliwala, The Postmaster and Ruined Nest. Kabuliwala is a simple story about a man who sells trinkets. He befriends a young girl named Mini.
Before each of these conventions is defined and analysed the process of making a Classical Hollywood film must first be described; it begins with either the completion of a script or the hiring of a scr...
The significantly unique scholar, whose rich exposition and supernatural verse Bengali bookworms know well, is not the sermonizing otherworldly master respected and afterward dismisses in London. Tagore was not just a gigantically flexible writer; he was likewise an incredible short story scholar, author, dramatist, writer, and arranger of tunes, and a capable painter whose pictures, with their mixture of representation and reflection, are just now starting to accept the approval that they have as far back as anyone can remember merited. His expositions, besides, extended over written works, governmental issues, society, social change, religious convictions, philosophical examination, worldwide
‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.