The works of Agatha Christie, like many other best-sellers in the English language, have been successfully translated into mainstream Indian cinema.* Gumnaam (1965) moves the stage version of And Then There Were None on a jungle- and ruin-covered island somewhere off the coast of India (and if you’ve […]
The title Junoon—”obsession”—can refer to a passionate, elegant 1970s film about India’s 1857 rebellion against British rule, starring an internationally famous cast under one of Hindi cinema’s most highly regarded directors. Or it can refer to a 1992 creature-ish feature about the deranged spirit of a jungle cat […]
Friend of the Gutter Kimberly Lindbergs has put together a collection of of her pieces on Asian film artists at Cinebeats! “May is Asian Heritage Month or to be more exact, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. To celebrate I decided to collect links to some of […]
This week Guest Star Aditi Sen writes about ghosts and plagues. ~~~ When a galley ship docked in Messina with all its crew members dead, the villagers quickly decided to take the crew’s belongings, either for themselves or to barter. The year was 1347; within a year, the […]
[Content warning: suicide.] While flipping through the new options on an Indian streaming service I subscribe to*, I discovered Shakeela, a film that actually managed to release in cinemas in December 2020. Almost all of the Indian films that I heard discussed with any vigor in 2020 were […]
On Twitter, @samjawed65 has shared letters and autographed photographs from Indian film stars in the 1950s and 1960s that her aunt solicited and kept in a photo album. Look at them all together here and/or read the Twitter thread, which includes translations of the 1962 letter in Urdu […]
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The Cultural Gutter 