The Films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan
A Cinema of Emancipation
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Book Presentation:
The first comprehensive study of the feature films of India’s most distinguished contemporary filmmaker. This work offers a compelling analysis of the director’s treatment of guilt, redemption and hope within their socio-historical contexts.
Adoor Gopalakrishnan, India’s most distinguished contemporary filmmaker, has made eleven award-winning films and over forty documentaries, most of which are set in his native state of Kerala, in southern India. A 1965 graduate of the Film and Television Institute of Pune, his first film, “Swayamvaram” (1972), heralded the New Wave in Kerala. The region’s displacement from a princely feudal state into twentieth-century modernity forms the backdrop to most of his complex narratives about identity, selfhood and otherness, in which innocence is often at stake and characters grapple with their consciences. The films deal with eviction and dislocation, with the precarious nature of space, and the search for home. They are also about power and its abuse within a destructive patriarchy and the abject conditions of servility it breeds. At the same time, these narratives are usually placed within the larger frameworks of guilt and redemption where hope of emancipation—moral, spiritual, and creative—is a real one. This first comprehensive study of Gopalakrishnan’s feature films offers a compelling analysis of these issues within their socio-historical contexts.
About the Author:
Suranjan Ganguly teaches European and Asian cinema at the University of Colorado, Boulder and has also written a book on filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
Press Reviews:
"All along this critical study, Suranjan has made interesting observations. […] Suranjan Ganguly’s marvellous book promises to incubate interest in the maverick filmmaker and his great films." —"Outlook"
See the publisher website: Anthem Press
See the complete filmography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan on the website: IMDB ...
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