Reason, Arguments and Stories (1974)
with Debkamal Ganguly
On 24th and 25th September 2022;
14:30 to 18:30 IST;
Online
What might be the self-chosen destiny of a modernist artist in a post-colonial condition, who over the decades of his creative endeavours always remained as an anarchic, yet ‘subjunctive’ critic of the seemingly naturalized affair of the post-coloniality itself? The artist finds his thoughts and the pulsations embedded in his works, at odds at every levels of almost every possible institutions of the surrounding society, be those at the center or margins, or wherever placed in the network of hierarchies in the domains of social, political or aesthetic. The artist with the burning state of unrest and paramount passion for expression and communication may not left with too many choices, except scratching the artefact itself with marks of internal agony, ecstatic melancholy and epiphanic vision by bringing the state of becoming of the artistic self and the that of the artefact itself, as close as possible.
In Indian cinema Ritwik Ghatak created that crucial self-annihilating cinematic gesture by positing his burning artistic conscience in front of camera in his last elegiac offering ‘Jukti Takko aar Gappo’ (Arguments and Stories, 1974), with a hauntingly wishful projection of his own ‘artistic martyrdom’, which materializes in the year 1975, almost immediately after realization of the film.
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RITWIK GHATAK : CINEMA OF RUPTURE & EPIC IMAGINATION
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filminstitute.auroville.org 