Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Susman

Timestamp:

Jul 17, 2012, 8:10:40 PM (12 years ago)

Author:

Trupti

Comment:

--

Susman

@@ +1 @@
+'''Susman'''
+
+
+aka The Essence
+1986 140’ col Hindi
+d/p Shyam Benegal pc Association of Cooperatives
+and Apex Society of Handloom,
+Sahyadri Films sc Shama Zaidi c Ashok Mehta
+m Sharang Dev, Vanraj Bhatia
+lp Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Neena Gupta,
+Kulbhushan Kharbanda, K.K. Raina, Annu
+Kapoor, Harish Patel, Mohan Agashe, Ila Arun
+
+
+A tribute to the ‘Ikat’ handloom weavers of
+Pochampally in AP. The film tells of Ramulu
+(Puri), a master of silk weaving, his family and
+their tribulations with the co-operative they
+work in. The drama is sparked off by internal
+rivalries and the arrival of a government
+official, a woman (Gupta) looking for items to
+send to an exhibition in Paris. Complications
+are provided by Ramulu, who secretly uses
+some of his allotted silk to make a wedding sari
+for his daughter, leading to his temporary
+disgrace. The contrast between artisanal
+craftsmanship and mass-production techniques
+is illustrated by the life of Ramulu’s son-in-law,
+who moves away from the family and finds
+work in a textile factory. The moral of the story
+is underlined in an interview between a French
+journalist and Ramulu, the latter trying to
+explain that a craftsman pours the essence of
+his soul into his craft. Unlike e.g. Mani Kaul
+(cf. Mati Manas, 1984) whose 80s work is also
+animated by similar concerns for dying craft
+traditions, Benegal’s cinema makes no effort to
+mediate, demystify or even understand the
+nature of that ‘essence’. Produced, like his
+earlier Manthan (1976), by a marketing cooperative,
+the film also capitalised on a
+specifically 80s orientalism brought about by
+the several Festivals of India and trade fairs of
+traditional craft in Europe and the USSR.
+
+[[Film]]