In Black And White (seagull)

Born on 9 July 1925 into a Saraswat family of Mangalore and educated in the liberal climate of Calcutta, Guru Dutt started his own production company in 1954 with Aar, Paar, and never looked bakc till Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, 1962, his last film. On 9october 1964, he committed suicide. His oeuvre is now widely regarded as one of the most rich and significant legacies of Indian cinema, amongst the fines examples of the melodrama mode. This volume aims to lay before the reader the particular melodramatic tradition of the Hindu film that Guru Dutt typified. The critical fragments spread over the book's six chapters are taken from the body of work done by critics in elevating the Hollywood melodrama, primarily of the forties and fifties, to ciritical acceptability and respectability. Dutt's Indian melodramas, functioning around the same time, seen to be assembled in very similar ways and when examined under these rubrics, reveal a high level of vision and craftsmanship.
About Author :
Darius Cooper is Professor of Literature and Film in the English Departmet at San Diego Mesa College, USA. His first book, Between Tradition and Modernity. The Cinema of Satyajit Ray was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. His essasy on Indian cinema have appeared in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), East-West Film Journal (Hawaii), The Journal of Commonwealth and Post-colonial Studies (Georgia), Women's Studies (Claremont), The Toronto South Asian Review (Canada), Asian Cinema (Pennsylvania) and in the anthology Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Indiana). He has also been published widely as a poet and short fiction writer.
Contents :
Acknowledgements Introduction Nation and Family in Dutt's Melodramas The Tragic Trilogy and Audience Response: From the Moral to the Morbid A Melodramatic Imagination: Tyopical Features and Narrative Strategies The Emotional and Freudian Teleology of Dutt's Melodramtic Universe Thje Comic in Dutt's Melodrama Dutt's Aesthetics of the Hindi Film Songs