As recent films like "Slumdog Millionaire" attest, India on film is quickly growing beyond the images of Bollywood that used to come to mind. In the 1980s the idea of film theory arrived in the Indian scholarly community, stirring anew a fascination...

Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Sartre's "Typhus" centres on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nig...

Born in Tehran in 1957, filmmaker Mohsen Ostad Ali Makhmalbaf grew up in the religious and politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, and the June 1963 uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini constitutes one of his earliest memories. In 1972, Makhmalbaf for...

Brahmins named Iftikar, Buddhist rites in Hindu Shiva temples, Indian maidens dressed like Arabian harem girls – right from the birth of cinema, international movies have been wildly inventive in their fantastical imagining of India. In fact, images...

The relationship between cinema and modernity in the Indian context is both complex and multifaceted. In this volume, some of the leading names in film and cultural studies explore its many dimensions. The essays range from discussions of urbanity...

Satyajit Ray's very first film, "Pather Panchali", established him as a leading presence in Indian cinema, and fifty years later he is still a major icon for filmmakers, viewers and scholars. This collection takes a fresh look at the major films of R...

Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953) was one of the leading Soviet film directors in the "golden age" of silent cinema in the 1920s. His films – especially "The Mother", "The End of St Petersburg" and "Storm over Asia" – are classics of silent cinema. Li...