Film Screenings
Seemabaddha (by Satyajit Ray)- 1971
Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Madhuja Mukherjee
In collaboration with Bangalore Film Forum (BFF), MAP is excited to announce the screening of Satyajit Ray’s Seemabaddha, followed by a conversation between Ashish Rajadhyaksha and film studies professor, Madhuja Mukherjee.
The film is centred around Shyamlal, who is from a small village but is entirely immersed in the comforts of his well paid corporate job. His young sister-in-law Tutul, on her first visit to Calcutta, is dismayed by his boastful displays of accumulated perks and privileges. However his façade cracks when a lucrative export order faces cancellation. Faced with the possibility of losing everything he has built, Shyamlal concocts a plot of feigned industrial sabotage to save face.
Satyajit Ray’s Seemabaddha (Company Limited in English) is an epochal portrait of the rise of the educated urban middle-class. Shyamlal’s ironic ascendancy up the corporate ladder, a rise in statute simultaneously accompanied by a fall in character, is the director’s starkest reflection on modern India.
This screening is the fifth installment of ‘The Radical Seventies,’ a six-month series curated by Ashish Rajadhyaksha.A collaboration between MAP and Bangalore Film Forum, the series is specially crafted for youth to engage with older classics that resonate with our contemporary times, in familiar and unexpected ways. The Radical Seventies is part of our youth engagement programming for AUD/VID.
In collaboration with:
NFDC-National Film Archive of India (NFAI)
Image Credits : NFDC – National Film Archive of India
Madhuja Mukherjee
Madhuja Mukherjee is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her first monograph (2009) is on New Theatres, and film studios in Bengal (1931-55); she has edited the readers: Aural Films, Oral Cultures (2012), Voices of the Talking Stars (2017). She coedited: Popular Cinema in Bengal (2020), Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India (2020), Wondrous Screens in India (forthcoming 2025).
Mukherjee wrote the screenplay of the internationally-acclaimed film Qissa (2013); her feature-films, as director, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Carnival, 2012), and Busan International Film Festival (Deep6, 2021). Mukherjee is currently working on the industrial history of Bombay cinema (1947-72), through the lens of kinship, industrial ecology and ‘slowness’ of film production.
Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a film historian, and an occasional art curator. He is the author of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (with Paul Willemen, 1994/1999), Indian Cinema from the Time of Celluolid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009) and John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky: Citizens, Filmmakers, Hackers (2023).
