In today’s class sir gave us a brief explanation about our next project. Initially sir just told us what all had to be done and then he assigned us groups for the project. Each group was assigned an era. The era which my group got was from 1961 – 1980.
Post this discussion we watched a movie “Harishchandrachi Factory” is a Marathi movie which shows us the story of Dadasaheb Phalke . He was an Indian producer ,screenwriter and director and was known as the Father of Indian cinema. In this movie Dadasaheb Phalke accidentally discovers a tent screening a silent movie and is amazed by the idea of storytelling. He brings together a team of technicians to produce India’s first feature film . I already knew the story line of the movie as i had watched it before.
While watching the movie we wrote down a few points or had a few scenes which struck our mind. We had a discussion about the entire movie on different aspects like story, characters, song, music, theme, opinions, poems, understandings, cultural aspect, lenses, reflections , ideas.
I personally found the movie very interesting as it showed how did they manage to make an entire movie in that era without having any form of technology. Harishchandrachi Factory is a movie about a man from a lower-middle class family who starts the trend of movie-making and establishes the movie industry in India.The movie also projects the initial unwillingness of the people to accept anything that is new and different from the conventional things. Thus, Phalke’s initiative to shoot his films is treated with a lot of suspicion and hostility, so much so that he is soon termed as a ‘madman’. People had associate his craze for shooting with the impact of British influence on the people.The movie also brings out the Indian belief of having a deep sense of belonging towards one’s family. It brings out the fact that even a nuclear family can have a strong sense of togetherness. It also acts as an encouragement for parents to support the girl child and be happy for the birth of a baby girl. The movie does not project any bias towards the male child, but gives enough prominence to the baby girl. But the film does explore the then practice of branding women who acted in front of the camera, as inferior.Culture was one of the important aspects of the movie. These were a few points we discussed
After having the discussion on the basis of our era which was 1961-1980 we were told to watch 5 movies :- Griha Pravesh, Sholay, Chitchor, Manthan and Mrigaya. We were supposed to watch the movies together as a group. We were also instructed to write down points while watching the movie and to click pictures and video for our documentation.
Drishti Doshi 