Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray [Hardcover]

Although revered as one of the worlds great filmmakers, the Indian director Satyajit Ray is described either in narrowly nationalistic terms or as an artist whose critique of modernity is largely derived from European ideas. Rarely is he seen as an influential modernist in his own right whose contributions to world cinema remain unsurpassed. In this benchmark study, Keya Ganguly situates Rays work within the internationalist spirit of the twentieth century, arguing that his film experiments revive the category of political or committed art. She suggests that in their depictions of Indian life, Rays films intimate the sense of a radical future and document the capacity of the image to conceptualize a different world glimpsed in the remnants of a disappearing past.

Keya Gangulyis Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and author ofStates of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Romanization

Introduction: The Light of the New Moon

1. Catastrophe and Utopia: Ghare Baire, or the Household Goddess
2. The (Un)moving Image: Visuality and the Modern in Charulata
3. Devi: Documenting the Decadent, Incarnating the Modern
4. The Music Room Revisited: Jalsaghar, Attraction, Perception
5. Take Two: Mahanagar and Cinematic Imperfection
6. Cinema and Universality: Apur Sansar

Conclusion: Lateness and Cinema

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

This is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and organic study. Keya Ganguly's intellectual tour de force in this analysis of the great Indian film maker Satyajit Ray will provide a benchmark for future studies of the subject.Partha Mitter, author ofThe Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947

What distinguishes Gangulys book from the more l#,