With the Influence of World Cinema Movement, the pioneers of indian parallel cinema always held the view that if one has to make a realist film, one's foremost duty was to take into account the reality in all its detalls and analyse society in terms of sufferings of common people, setting aside the concerns of an individual.
Indian parallel filmmakers Incorporated elements, like Avant-Garde, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Neorealism as their creative outputs and tried to develop a new parallel language in Indian as well as in the aspect of Bengali cinema. Many of the pioneers presented rudimentary and essentially unified concepts of illustrative art forms which were based on Marxist praxis. The basic objective of this monograph is to be an attempt to go beyond with pure aesthetic deconstruction as well as the socio-historical analysis of post-independence Indian Parallel cinema.
Dr. Debjani Halder is a national and international award-winning documentary film maker and a film historian. Currently, she is the Film Research Officer in the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. She is a former Fellow of Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Niwas. She has 9 years of post-doctoral research experience in the field of film, gender and sociology. She has received several national and international research fellowships in India and abroad. She received a PhD degree in 2011 in Film Studies, Jadavpur University, India.
Dr. Debjani is also a former European Excellence Fellow in Central European University, Budapest. She is a former Charles Wallace Fellow. As a Dr. Radhakrishnan Fellow, she was Faculty of Women's Studies Research Centre in University of Calcutta. She is a former post-doctoral Fellow of Indian Council of Social Science Research.
Dr. Debjani Halder's monograph ""Art-Artist and Social Life: Trajectories of Indian Parallel Cinema"" is a commendable and important treatise on the history of parallel cinema in India, from the time when our country became free from colonial rule and then the tumultuous journey that it had to traverse as it rapidly tried to bridge the yawning gap between feudalism, ritual and tradition and the dream of creating a modern, scientific republic that believed in the age of reason. This monograph is a tribute to all the artists, writers, film-makers and thinkers who played a pivotal role in capturing all the nuances, contradictions, idiosyncrasies and upheavals that the nation went through on this journey. These were the artists who held up a mirror so that we, as Indians, could view ourselves dispassionately. The book not only has carried scholarly efforts of writer, but also it has explored to the world of parallel Indian films in a post-partition socio-historical juncture along with aesthetics and technical overview. I hope the book will be a mirror that would tell us who we were, where we came from and where we were going.
Ritwik, Salil, Tapas Sen, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Banshi Chandragupta, NripenGanguly, and me, it was our group. We all were connected through an undying initiate of thoughts and ideas of the contemporary time. Filmmaking was then such a demanding process, that directors-especially those who kept up a steady output, had rarely get time to express their ideas. The name of the place was the Paradise Cafe, where our sessions would start in the morning at eight, and it was continued uninterrupted till on in the afternoon. What did we talk about? At every moment, we were completely engrossed in our debates and dissections, but despite our wide range of interests, the all questions, arguments, topics that we discussed, was cinema. That was the time when our notions of cinema were inexorably entangled with the notion of politics. Soviet socialism, Italian neo-realism, German Expressionism, enthralled to our cinematic overview. Due to the lack of funds and insufficient equipment, it was almost impossible for us to get enter in the realm of cinema. We decided to set up an active trade union. The studio workers, and technicians who were not financially well off, we started to gather them as part of our cinematic expedition. It was the end of the 1940s when film society movement was strengthening to the parallel concept of filmmaking, and the few among us like me, Manik Babu, Ritwik, Harishadhan Dasgupta, we were rather dedicated to explore film as the mechanism of society and used it as cultural documentations of contemporary times. The inspiration has certainly come from West....""- (Sen Mrinal: 2012)
The relationships between art and social life and its multifarious manifestations have had a major impact on the world of aesthetics. The Prolong debate whether 'Society made for an artist or the artist made for society', has been relevant throughout the entire history of art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the innovations of alternative modern art forms ascertained that art must endorse the expansion of human consciousness and enrichment of the social order. The social, political and economic factors which led to the First World War, inspired many artists to go beyond the Concept of 'Realism' which was derived from a literary and art movement of 19th century which sought to portray 'life as it really was' - and invented newer forms of expression which was anti-establishment.
From the carly years of the twentieth century to the mid-forties of the last century, Indian cinema was primarily based on epics and mythological tales or novels. The pioneers of Indian cinema Dada Saheb Phalke, Kanjibhai Rathor, Damle, Phatelal, and others tried to express their Swadeshi emotions through their cinematic gaze. In the 1930s to 1940s with the influence of nationalism, filmmakers used the image of the mother as part of 'Desh or Nation' for expressing their nationalist aspiration, but those films had a specific language, they neglected formal experimentation due to the preoccupation with content. In 1929, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a letter to Murari Bhaduri in favour of establishing cinema as an art form. Tagore advocated the rejection of slavish imitation of literature and pleaded in favour of cinema based on reality. In 1942 with the formation of the Indian People's Theatre Association, it was not only embraced participation in the endeavour of leftist cultural movement; it was also enthralled to a group of art practitioners, to entering the greater world of consciousness to express the aesthetic cognizance. In 1947 after the formation of Calcutta Film Society, there was the paucity of cross-influences between the literature -Avant-Grade-Neo-realistic and Soviet Cinema', both media shared enough common source materials to present them as 'parallel manifestation of the same aesthetic and ideological impulses, which was given birth of a new genre of Indian cinema.
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