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Posts under ‘Craft’

PIFF 2010: Crazy Pete

Around the same time that Alain Resnais portrayed the innovative use of flashbacks in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Jean-Luc Godard discovered jump cuts with Breathless. I haven’t watched Breathless, but his Crazy Pete serves as a good enough example for understanding jump cuts. Other than that nugget there is not much I can write about the [...]

My Unique Movie Watching Experience

The first time I heard about The Man From Earth was a few months ago. The movie is an hour-long discussion of sorts that ensues when a pedagogue presents to his colleagues the hypothesis of a man who has been alive for the past 14000 years. We can imagine how this could go on. My [...]

Very Much Without Verisimilitude

First posted on Desicritics. Last week, I pondered about the director’s need to research about a subject that is an important aspect of his or her movie. Extending that thought process, I feel that verisimilitude is a quality that lacks in most of our movies. Everyone is doing a good job with railway stations. But [...]

A Director’s Limited Knowledge

Unlike in the Indian film industries, many famous novelists of today had been working in a day job, and started writing in their free time. With growing success and interest, they changed lanes. John Grisham, e.g., had been practicing law when he started with law thrillers, and is now slowly dabbling with other kinds. Moreover, [...]

Challenges in Editing

As I was reading my previous post yesterday, it occurred to me that I had written about something that I understood little. Through years of experience watching movies I might be able to comment on various departments of cinema, but areas like editing remain vague. Stunt men and even costume or set designers are visible [...]