Outsider Films on India, 1950-1990

For scholars and cinephiles, Indophiles and travellers, this book is a revelation.

Cinema has always provided a special lens for viewing India and, when combined with an outsiders perspective, reveals new and often refreshingly significant facets of its culture and society. Beautifully designed with 100 illustrations in color and b/w, this book presents a varied interpretation of the country as well as its relationship with the West through a discussion of ten distinctive films, some documentary and some fictional, spanning 40 years from Indias independence. International critics, artists and scholars have delved deep into this carefully assembled list, from Renoirs The River and Langs The Tiger of Eschnapur to Pasolinis Notes for a Film on India and Corneaus Nocturne Indien. Their conversations, reflections and polemics trace the evolution of ideas about India as viewed onscreen, re-assess its cultural development, and, simultaneously, lay bare a meditation on foreignness. Hidden aspects of the films are also brought into unprecedented focus.    

Shanay Jhaveri is writer and film-maker, and recently graduated from Brown University.

* Introduction: Wanting to be a Rememberer -- Shanay Jhaveri * A Dialogue on 'The River' with Shanay Jhaveri -- Priya Jaikumar * The Creation of the World:  Rossellini's 'India Matri Bhumi' -- Jonathan Rosenbaum * The Indian Tomb of the Dinosaur of Eschnapur -- Tom Gunning * Being Ferried Around Trees in Merchant-Ivory's 'Shakespeare Wallah' -- Shanay Jhaveri * Haunted by Impossibility: Louis Malle's 'Phantom India' -- Erika Balsom * All is Burning: A Pasolinian Encounter with Indian Modernity as Seen in 'Notes on a Film on India' -- Kaunteya Shah * "I Moved Everything to Calcutta": The Radical Strangeness of ' India Song' -- Adrian Martin * In Search of a Shadow:  Alain Corneau's 'Nocturne Indien' -- James Quandt * On Translation in an Older Sense:  Notations on India, Cinema & Certain Problematics of Representation -- Thomas Zummer * The Extent of My Ignorance So Far -- Leslie Ann Thornton * A Possibility of Being in the World: Alain Tanner's 'Une Ville a Chandigarh' -- Kaunteya Shah & Shanay Jhaveri * Contributor Biographies * Photo Credits * Acknowledgments * Index