Human and social sciences
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
John–Ghatak–Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers
In 2015, students of the Film and Television Institute of India took cinema to the streets on strike. The right to make and show film became central to defining freedom on the campus, and the names Eisenstein, Pudovkin, John Abraham, Tarkovsky, and Ghatak were recited in slogans and displayed on banners. John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky shows how the protest evoked a history of political cinema to set itself against the might of India's political establishment. The book speaks of the technologies of digitization that altered governance, redefined the public domain, transformed citizenship through new modes of surveillance alongside a ‘targeted’ delivery of services to ‘beneficiaries’. It also speaks of the transfiguration of the filmmaker into an increasingly invisible hacker, of cinema turning into low-resolution moving images, and of how all of this redefined student protest.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is an independent scholar and curator. He is the author of Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) and Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen) (1994).