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Beth Watkins

Dancing Queen: Amrapali

Did I choose to write about this film because it is currently on Netflix with subtitles and thus more available than hundreds of other things I might have selected? Yes. Does it have something to offer the Gutter reader other than availability? Absolutely.  Amrapali (1966) is one of […]

Kohraa

Rummaging around for a spooky film for my Gutter submission for October, I decided upon Kohraa, (“The Fog”), a 1964 Hindi adaptation of Rebecca. Rewatching Kohraa and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) back to back, I’m struck by how much more isolated the Indian protagonist is. Kohraa spends most of […]

Absolute Beginners

Absolute Beginners first crossed my radar last week when a friend showed me a clip of David Bowie dancing on a typewriter. “Big deal,” scoffed I, a connoisseur of Indian cinema. “Merchant and Ivory did that with Hindi superstars ages ago.”* Discovering that David Bowie could tap dance […]