OP Srivastava is a banker-turned-filmmaker. He is known for pioneering the use of technology in Indian banking. His journey in films began with the production of a fiction film, Missed Call, in 2005. The film went on to win four national and international awards, including the Best International Film Award at the Israel Film Festival, 2008. It was the opening film at IFFI, Goa in 2006 and was also selected as India's official entry under 'Cinema Du Monde' at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. His first feature documentary, Life in Metaphors: A Portrait of Girish Kasaravalli, won the National Film Award for the Best Biopic for 2015. In 2019, he published his first book, Life in Metaphors: Portraits of Girish Kasaravalli. His second book, Banking on Technology: The Changing Face of Indian Banking, was released in March 2020. His third book, Krishna Calling: Travelogue of a Teenager, was released in November 2021. He has also made award-winning documentaries on subjects like brain cancer, Alzheimer's, yakshagana and indie cinema.
Indian cinema's true renaissance arrived with the train in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955). Apu and Durga, lost in a field, hear a distant rumbling and see a train chugging along for the first time, whistling and with a cloud of black smoke emanating from its engine. The train bridged the distance between a village and city in a way it brought the magic of rural India to the theatre screens of urban India.
'New wave' or 'parallel cinema' also arrived in India with a train, this time in Mrinal Sen's first Hindi film Bhutan Shome (1969). The film begins with shots of railway tracks speeding by, backed by the metallic sound of the undulating locomotion. Keeping pace with the engine's rhythm is a flurry of vocalisations (taan) accompanied by percussion and a rendition of the seven fundamental musical notes; they keep pace with the tempo of the train and stir up anticipation for what is to follow the railway officer Utpal Dutt's life- changing experience of duck-shooting in a remote village in Gujarat. A new phase of India's cinematic journey had begun.
History
The terms 'new wave cinema', 'alternate cinema' or 'parallel cinema' imply a connection to the idea of a new stage or step, a distinct movement in a nation's cinematic journey that seeks to be different, in some way, from the mainstream, possibly re-inventing or re-defining what cinema might be The most famous new wave arose in France in the late 1950s and was partly responsible for the development of film studios in Western Europe and North America. British and German new wave cinema emerged in the same period, and the films made in the 1960s and 70s re-defined the possibilities of cinema, especially in terms of more political and socially conscious filmmaking.
India's new wave was arguably inspired by Italian neo. realism (1942-1951), which inspired filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak in Bengal (later, West Bengal). Some critics also see the echo of neo-realism in films like Dharati Ke Lal (1946), a film about the Bengal famine written and directed by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas; Neecha Nagar (1946), directed by Chetan Anand and written by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (won the Grand Prize at the first Cannes Festival in 1946); and Do Bigha Zamin (1953), directed by Bimal Roy and inspired by Vittorio De Sica's neo-realistic Bicycle Thief (1948), which was known for its socialistic theme.
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