As the 69th Cannes Film Festival progresses, an attempt at revisiting the only Indian film to have won Grand Prix there
In a year when no film from India has made it to the competition section at Cannes, it is interesting to note that the only time an Indian entry won the top honours there was a year before the country was born. Almost 70 years back, in 1946, Neecha Nagar by Chetan Anand shared the Grand Prix with 10 other films.
Among the very first films to follow the approach of social realism -- where issues were highlighted from a subaltern perspective, shooting done on location and with untrained actors -- the film’s success acted as an appropriate precursor to international recognition won by efforts like Pather Panchali and Do Bigha …show more content…
Filmmakers like Baburao Painter and V. Shantaram had brought content that could be considered much more radical through films like Savkaari Paash (1925), Duniya Na Maane (1937), and Aadmi (1939). However, what made Chetan Anand’s debut unique was both its immediacy and its universality. Though Painter and Shantaram dealt with rebellion at a domestic level -- like an ambitious young woman revolting against a marriage forced on her -- they stopped short of advocating solutions that could have a broader impact. Further, the 1920s and the 1930s were a period of incremental change. However, the freedom struggle of the 1940s, especially after the horror of the World War-II, had acquired a certain urgency. It was natural that filmmakers would want to bring this exigency to the …show more content…
Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), started in 1942 an intellectual wave of progressive, left-leaning thinkers and artists, was evolving a new cultural grammar to express ideas like political transformation. The names involved with Neecha Nagar -- like Chetan Anand, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas,Pandit Ravi Shankar and Zohra Sehgal -- were all part of this wave. The references to freedom struggle in the film -- through leitmotifs like the Gandhian cap, the charkha and the mashaals (torch-lights) in the climax carried by the inhabitants of the shantytown which congeal into an image of India -- were all a result of this radical thinking. It was this wave that produced Dharti Ke Laal, dealing with Bengal famine, in the same
In a year when no film from India has made it to the competition section at Cannes, it is interesting to note that the only time an Indian entry won the top honours there was a year before the country was born. Almost 70 years back, in 1946, Neecha Nagar by Chetan Anand shared the Grand Prix with 10 other films.
Among the very first films to follow the approach of social realism -- where issues were highlighted from a subaltern perspective, shooting done on location and with untrained actors -- the film’s success acted as an appropriate precursor to international recognition won by efforts like Pather Panchali and Do Bigha …show more content…
Filmmakers like Baburao Painter and V. Shantaram had brought content that could be considered much more radical through films like Savkaari Paash (1925), Duniya Na Maane (1937), and Aadmi (1939). However, what made Chetan Anand’s debut unique was both its immediacy and its universality. Though Painter and Shantaram dealt with rebellion at a domestic level -- like an ambitious young woman revolting against a marriage forced on her -- they stopped short of advocating solutions that could have a broader impact. Further, the 1920s and the 1930s were a period of incremental change. However, the freedom struggle of the 1940s, especially after the horror of the World War-II, had acquired a certain urgency. It was natural that filmmakers would want to bring this exigency to the …show more content…
Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), started in 1942 an intellectual wave of progressive, left-leaning thinkers and artists, was evolving a new cultural grammar to express ideas like political transformation. The names involved with Neecha Nagar -- like Chetan Anand, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas,Pandit Ravi Shankar and Zohra Sehgal -- were all part of this wave. The references to freedom struggle in the film -- through leitmotifs like the Gandhian cap, the charkha and the mashaals (torch-lights) in the climax carried by the inhabitants of the shantytown which congeal into an image of India -- were all a result of this radical thinking. It was this wave that produced Dharti Ke Laal, dealing with Bengal famine, in the same