Paper Details

Name: Spandan Bhattacharya
Country: India

Year: 2014
Volume: Volume-1, Issue-2 (July-December)
Page Number: 64-74

The post-liberalization film culture in West Bengal experienced a group of filmmakers who generated a sense of nostalgia for a lost tradition of a glorious past of Bengali literary cinema of the previous decades valued by the suave, middleclass, Bengali intelligentsia. Amidst the overall monopoly of contemporary popular cinema some films like Unishe April (Rituparno Ghosh, 1996), Asukh (Rituparno Ghosh, 1999), Paromitar Ekdin (Aparna Sen, 2000) Ek Je Achhe Kanya (Subrata Sen, 2001), Shanjhbatir Roopkathara (Anjan Das, 2002 ) etc that emerged in the mid 90s constructed the paradigm of the post 1990s Bengali literary film culture, not only in terms of their use of particular style elements or narrative devices or their cinematic appeal but also their imagination of a ‘class’ of audience. The discourse of literary-ness became a primary concern of this post-1990s Bengali film practice and literary-ness of Bengali cinema has been seen as a marker of ‘good taste’ amongst a section of Bengali intelligentsia. The discourse of literary-ness got reflected not only in the film form, but also in the production-distribution system, the strategies of exhibition, and the media discourses generated around these films. This film culture which aims to bring out Bengali cinema from the commercialized model of the mainstream circuit was often referred as the ‘parallel’ cinema. This paper is an attempt to read how literary aesthetics functions as the politics and poetics of this ‘parallel’ film culture and aims to address the question of ‘taste’ associated with this film practice mapping it on broader terrain of Bengal’s film history.
Keywords: Good taste; bhadralok; literary-ness; intelligentsia; parallel; Bengali cinema