Tag Archives: Cinema Studies

When his daughter Chanda is born to Rao Mahar Sahadev, her beauty is extolled far and wide and at the age of four she is betrothed by her father to another chieftain’s son named Bavan. When she arrives at her husband’s home at the age of 12, she finds Bavan to be one-eyed and impotent. Her virtue thus intact, she returns to her father’s home where she whiles away her time sighing from balconies, where she is thus espied by a passing bard who now sings passionately of her beauty, his stirring verses reaching the ears of Rao Rupchand in Rajpur.

On the face of it, this absence of reference material hinders any serious study of cinema in Odisha. However, the ‘black hole’ in Odia cinema’s history throws up uncanny silver threads. Patnaik turns to personal memories of men and women who literally embodied Odia cinema from its halcyon days in the 1960s and ‘70s to its present.

A long introduction sets out the contour of the work in which the ‘endeavour is to map the varied formations of the modern that the Suchitra-Uttam films articulated and to trace these responses to these formations in the reception circuits and journalistic discourses’.