Collector's Item

Edited by Nandan's first CEO Prabodh Maitra, who is now curator of the Satyajit Ray Archives, 100 Years of Cinema reflects the entire complex of questions that confront lovers of cinema the world over. What precisely are we celebrating: cinema as represented by Pasolini and Tarkovsky masterworks or movies as merchandise, which Hollywood has perfected and perpetuated over the years with assembly-line clinicality? Or is it a combination of both? Are we indeed doffing our hats to the first century of cinema? Or is this merely a farewell to films as we know them?

These and numerous other doubts are dispelled or confirmed in essays and interviews by supremos like Shyam Bengal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Kumar Shahani, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Miguel Littin, Krzysztof Zanussi, Chidananda Dasgupta, Arun Khopkar and Sandip Ray. The 390-page tome includes a "brilliantly idiosyncratic" cinematic exploration of the history of the medium by Mrinal Sen; a rare reprint of a 1924 D.W. Griffith essay which had predicted, among other things, that "it will never be possible to synchronise" sound with pictures; extracts from stage actor Shombhu Mitra's diaries during the shoot of K.A. Abbas's Dharti Ke Lal in 1945-46, and a transcript of Louis Lumiere's last interview granted to Georges Sadoul on French television.

So, despite some glaring typos that threaten to take the sheen off the otherwise marvellously insightful anthology-Kumar Shahani's byline is misspelt, as is Amitabh Bachchan's first name in a photo caption--100 Years of Cinema is a veritable collector's item.