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Chokh

aka The Eyes 1982 108’ col Bengali d/s/m Utpalendu Chakraborty pc West Bengal Govt dial Akhya Upadhyay c Shakti Bannerjee lp Om Puri, Shyamanand Jalan, Anil Chatterjee, Sreela Majumdar, Asit Mukherjee, Dipak Sarkar, Madhabi Chakraborty

When in 1975, during the Emergency, a union leader, Jadunath (Puri), is falsely accused of murder and hanged, he bequeaths his eyes to a blind worker. The surgeon Dr Mukherjee (Chatterjee), who has to perform the operation, is put under severe pressure by the factory owner who instigated the judicial killing of Jadunath and who now wants an eye donor for his own son. When the factory owner (Jalan) learns who the eyes belonged to, he orders them to be destroyed in the hope that the revolutionary fire that burned in them may be extinguished forever. The surgeon resists the order but eventually has to comply while outside the hospital, Jadunath’s widow (Majumdar) and demonstrating workers advance on the police cordon surrounding the surgery. The demagogic film by-passes the cinematic potential of the motif of ‘vision’ in favour of low-angle shots with wide-angle lenses together with a high-volume expressionist soundtrack.

Film