In July of this year, II Cinema Ritrovato ran a strand on Indian Parallel Cinema (curated by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Cecilia Cenciarelli, and Omar Ahmed) featuring some of the finest works from this important movement, which dates roughly from the late ’60s to the ’80s. Although its inception was first proclaimed, in appropriately revolutionary terms, in that fateful year of 1968 with the publication of Manifesto of the New Cinema Movement (authored by filmmakers Arun Kaul and Mrinal Sen), Parallel Cinema’s orientation toward a realism that spotlighted the lives of those peoples generally excluded from mainstream cinema made it a natural heir to the groundbreaking Bengali-language art cinema of the ’50s and ’60s—Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy (1955-59), Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition Trilogy (1960-65)—as well as socially committed works by mainstream Hindi-language filmmakers such as Bimal Roy or Guru Dutt.
The year after the appearance of Kaul and Sen’s , the Hindi-language triptych of Sen’s playful , Mani Kaul’s spare, experimental (), and Basu Chatterjee’s kitchen-sink drama () marked the true beginning of, I wanted to completely destroy any semblance of a realistic development, so that I could construct the film almost in the manner of a painter,” Kaul later declared.) From this auspicious yet controversial beginning, Kaul went on to establish himself as the country’s foremost experimental filmmaker with avant-garde classics such as (, 1971) and (, 1973). The formal adventurousness of Kaul’s cinema can also be seen in the work of Kumar Shahini, Kaul’s classmate at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), who in his 1972 debut () combined an investigation of pressing social issues with a search for a new aesthetic in Indian cinema.
