This essay examines Mrinal Sen’s cinema through the concept of the ‘choral city’, arguing that cinematic modernity exceeds the filmic apparatus to become a mode of urban perception itself. Drawing on Sen’s writings and films, it conceptualises the modern city as metacinematic: a plane on which reality, memory, fantasy, technological mediation and political struggle continually enter into critical assemblages of convergence and dispersal. The spectator consequently becomes a citizen with subject–subject and subject-state visual contracts whose cinematic habits of framing, focalisation and editing participate in contests over who can see, represent and authorise reality. Focusing particularly on Sen’s Calcutta quartet— Interview , Kolkata 71 , Padatik and Chorus along with Bhuvan Shome —the essay argues that Sen’s political cinema produces ‘arrested allegories’ in which revolutionary collectivities remain heterogeneous and incomplete rather than consolidating into a unified people. In these films, Sen’s experimental practice negotiates the unstable relations between city and village, document and fiction, anthropology and revolution, producing a vernacular third-world modernism in which the political ‘people’ remains perpetually in formation.
This article focuses on two of Mrinal Sen’s later films, Khandhar (1983) and Antareen (1993), to argue that a ‘ruin aesthetic’ coalesces in his oeuvre in response to the political transformations of his time. While most scholars read Sen’s family dramas as a retreat from the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s, I suggest, instead, that, going beyond discourses of disappointment and despair often associated with the collapse of the global Left, Sen’s late films reorient us to a new articulation of political via his figuration of ruins. Sen imbues the debris of monumental physical structures with a different conceptualisation of history and the past. In the spatiotemporal configuration of the ruin, history is palpable only as fragments, but these shards potentiate a different future. The figure of the woman – aligned with the ruin – is a key vector through which old certitudes are abandoned and new possibilities imagined in the films in question.
The article discusses the conceptualisation, execution and reception of the exhibition that was curated to celebrate the birth centenary of Mrinal Sen at The University of Chicago in November 2023. This article addresses the archival and curatorial work that went into the making of the exhibition by bringing together a host of print and other visual media. Divided into three segments – understanding the cataloguing and classificatory logic of the Mrinal Sen archive located at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center in the Regenstein Library, the politics and rationale of selecting the objects for display and negotiating the logistics of creating an exhibition space out of an otherwise ordinary lecture hall – the presentation unpacks the constitutive elements of exhibition making. What are the choices that go into (re)presenting a film director from the Global South in the context of a private University in the Global North? What is the work that objects preserved in an archive are made to do individually as well as in relation to other displayed objects? How do logistical considerations of display cases, lighting, dimensions of the allotted space and infrastructural facilities become constitutive of the very logic of the exhibition? By working at the intersection of archival research, aesthetics and politics of curation, and improvisational practices, the article not only delves into aspects of exhibiting the craftsmanship of Mrinal Sen to an un/initiated audience but also highlights how knowledge on postcolonial India is produced across media – scripts, photographs, magazine articles, personal letters, awards – through the very process of designing an exhibition.
In his first film made outside Bengal, Mrinal Sen adapts Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s most well-known novel, Matira Manisha , into a film of the same name in 1966. He makes potent and unapologetic use of melodrama to reinvent the story of two brothers’ familial strife over inherited land. Through the narrative of a fight between two brothers – one striving to preserve the joint family structure and traditional values, while the other yearns to embrace ‘modernity’ – Sen brilliantly harnesses the connection of the personal with the political. However, the politics and aesthetics in Matira Manisha , the novel and its film adaptation, exhibit ideological contradictions. The film was never properly released in Odisha, although it garnered appreciation at film festivals. Ironically, the cultural gatekeepers of film and literary magazines have alleged that the film portrays an anti-naturalistic narrative vis-à-vis the novel. And this film remains marginal within Indian film academia as well. Its conditions of production and reception reveal many facets of the history of Odia cinema, and they also inform a broader understanding of Mrinal Sen’s corpus.
This double photo-essay brings into conversation two sets of photographs taken in 2004–2005 in the film industries of Bombay and Dhaka, alongside reflective texts emerging from long-term scholarly and embodied engagements with these sites. Rather than documenting cinema as a finished image, the essays foreground the dense, everyday labour through which film worlds are assembled: waiting, improvisation, repetition and the coordination of bodies, tools and infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, Lotte Hoek and Debashree Mukherjee trace how their early encounters with media work unfolded alongside a broader ‘urban turn’ in South Asian scholarship and experiments in media anthropology in the early 2000s that centred mediated environments, circulation and public culture. Across distinct yet historically entangled industries, the photographs reveal striking visual resonances pointing to shared practices of craft, aspiration and precarious labour. Together, the essays conceptualise cinema as a relational field shaped by technological systems, industrial rhythms and uneven social worlds. Returning to these images two decades later, the authors reflect on transformation and continuity in media labour under neoliberal and platform capitalism.
