Description
From the early ’70s onwards, Indian cinematographer Navroze Contractor—who passed away last year at age 80—blazed a trail of radical image-making. Trained in fine arts, photography, and cinematography, Contractor wielded the camera as a weapon and a paintbrush, capturing both the thrills and the throes of popular uprisings in films that defined political documentary in India, and giving stunning form to the bold adventures in fiction undertaken by India’s Parallel Cinema filmmakers.
Last Monday, Film Comment presented a double-feature program of two films shot by the cinematographer—Mani Kaul’s rapturous Duvidha (1973), and Sanjiv Shah’s unique musical satire Love in the Time of Malaria (1992)—along with an extended conversation with Deepa Dhanraj, Contractor’s partner in life and work, with whom he founded the feminist Yugantar Film Collective in the 1980s.
The talk, available today on the podcast, delves into the challenging and low-budget conditions that Duvidha was shot under, the influence of Indian miniature painting and still photography on its look, and Contractor’s extraordinary visual felicity with both documentary and fiction.
During the 2024 New York Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish had the chance to chat with Julianne Moore, one of the great American actresses of the last three decades and more. She was at the festival for the premiere of The Room Next Door, the first English-language feature film by Pedro...
Published 11/19/24
When Payal Kapadia won a historic Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for her second feature, All We Imagine as Light (the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years), she paid homage to another Cannes prizewinner whose work has deeply influenced her: Miguel Gomes,...
Published 11/12/24