Ten

  • Tenth Time is the Charm
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  • Notes on an Uncontrolled Cinema
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  • On Becoming Machine: James Cameron's The Terminator
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  • Memory, Photography and performing the ‘human’ in Blade Runner
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  • That Beautiful Treacherous Thing: An Interview with Ashim Ahluwalia
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  • Gulzar's Mirza Ghalib: Reality, Realism and Allegorical Liberty
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  • General Review
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  • An Absence of Ritual – A Report on Mumbai Film Festival 2014
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Tenth Time is the Charm

 | Editorial |

  BY Sudarshan Ramani

Projectorhead has reached ten issues at last. This might normally call for a period of looking back and reasserting our commitment and priorities. The trouble is you can only look back after a period of forgetting and as an editor I remember every article and writer that has published for us until now. The long wait in collating articles, author’s pieces and editing and publishing, even in the four issues that I have edited so far, so long as I remember that, I cannot look back. I am bound to look forward, towards the coming issue, the next article, the newest writer, the editorial for Issue 11 that I am already thinking up titles for.

Issue 10 is, on the face of it, a short issue - four articles, one of which is a reprint from a previous publication and one long interview. Yet each in length and depth constitute an enormity, stretching wide and narrow in range, digressing on a general theme so as to place particular themes in relation to a larger whole. We deal here with neglected areas of Indian film history – the C-Grade Indian films which in Ashim Ahluwalia’s view constitutes the only real underground cinema in our film history. He expounds on his measured romanticism for the same in his film Miss Lovely at great length in the interview he so graciously offered for this issue. Sumit Chaturvedi looks at a forgotten patch in Indian Television through the prism of Gulzar’s biopic of Mirza Ghalib.

We round it off with a nice double bill, a look back at two 80s classics – Blade Runner and The Terminator where two different writers, an old hand (Ankan Kazi) and a newcomer (C. S. Bhagya) arrive from separate positions to regard their respective films through the parallel filters of film noir, literary science fiction and Edvard Munch’s Scream.

Issue 10 is about going forward, following a host of new directions that might take us in any direction in the months to come.