Chidananda Dasgupta
Chidananda Dasgupta ( Bengali: চিদানন্দ দাসগুপ্ত, Cidānanda Dasgupta; born November 20, 1921 in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, † 22 May, 2011 Calcutta, West Bengal, India) was an Indian film critic, film historian, author and filmmaker of Bengali descent. He is considered a pioneer of serious film journalism in India.
Life
Chidananda Dasgupta was born into a conservative Brahmin family home. He studied in Patna, but the school had to leave in 1942 for participating in the Quit India movement and was in Kolkata postgraduate student. In 1944 he married Supriya Das, a niece of the poet Jibanananda Das. In the following years he worked as a lecturer at a college in Hazaribag, as Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis personal assistant at the Indian Statistical Institute and taught at City College in Kolkata English literature.
In 1947 he founded together with Satyajit Ray, Harisadhan Dasgupta and others, the Calcutta Film Society in 1960 and the Federation of Film Societies of India, whose secretary he was until 1967. He was editor of the film magazines Indian Film Review and Indian Film Culture and has published numerous essays on art and film, including for the British film magazine Sight & Sound.
Chidananda Dasgupta was a director of two Bengali movies: Bilet Pherat (1972 ) - a film adaptation of three separate short stories about returning from overseas young Indians whose idealism is disillusioned in India - with whom he took up the subject of Dhiren Ganguly's film of the same from the year 1921 and the comedy Amodini (1994). Dasgupta's other films are documentaries: Portrait of a City (1961 ) about the city of Kolkata, The Dance of Shiva ( 1968) Ananda Coomaraswamy on, The Stuff of Steel ( 1969), Birju Maharaj (1972) and Ki Zaroorat Purti (1979). For Aparna Sen film Sati (1989 ), he wrote the music.
He received a National Film Award for best film critic. At the 6th Osian 's Cinefan Film Festival in July 2004, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Best Writing on Cinema.
His daughter is actress and director Aparna Sen, his granddaughter, the actress Konkona Sen Sharma.
Books (selection)
- The Cinema of Satyajit Ray (1980 )
- Film India: Satyajit Ray (1981 )
- Talking About Films ( 1981)