12 maggio 2013

Yamla Pagla Deewana 2: presentazione colonna sonora

Il 7 maggio 2013 è stata presentata a Mumbai la colonna sonora di Yamla Pagla Deewana 2. All'evento hanno partecipato, fra gli altri, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, Hrithik e Rakesh Roshan, Juhi Chawla, Anupam Kher, Kunal Kohli, Riteish Deshmukh e Genelia D'Souza.








Dibakar Banerjee, the best director today

Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Dibakar Banerjee a Parul Khanna, pubblicata oggi da Brunch. Dibakar Banerjee, the best director today:

'Your filmmaking is influenced by...
My first influence is my family, which has consumed and created entertainment. We would read, listen to the radio, put up plays during Durga Puja in Delhi. Doordarshan is another influence, it gave me a chance to see regional and world cinema. I would also visit all the film festivals in Delhi. My non-Bengali friends, my life in Delhi have been a huge influences too. Mumbai, where I live now, my life here, it's transformation from a manufacturing city to a services city, all have had an impact on me. My days at National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad opened up an unknown western to me. My wife has been the deepest influence. She's very aesthetic and she has created this beautiful life full of arts, books, poetry and even plants.
You signed a three-films contract with Yash Raj. Is that a rite of passage into the elite club?
What rubbish! This is what I don't like. This bracketing of people. What is elite about working with YRF? I discovered that Aditya Chopra and I are very similar - we both are extremely professional, prefer our films to speak for themselves, don't give interview to be in newspapers every other week, and are passionate about films. We were very clear since the first meeting that I have the creative controls and YRF will be in-charge of marketing the film. It will be my vision. The alliance was based on the clear understanding that if YRF changes my way of filmmaking, it will lose out on what they set out looking for.
The industry is celebrating outsiders...
Yes, people from film families and outsiders are co-existing. The reason the audience watches a Dibakar or Anurag [Kashyap] film is same as Zoya [Akhtar] and Karan [Johar] films - good filmmaking. Karan made his first film when his father wasn't doing too well, he had to go through a number of hardships. And these people have to prove themselves much more. I have nothing to lose, it's like someone pointed out to me, 'Even if your film fails, you will be put on a pedestal and stories will be written about your edgy way of filmmaking'. But people are very harsh on these guys. So, everyone's working with some or other handicap. For one Karan Johar who has made it, there are five who haven't. The basics for survival are standard for everyone - a little more passion, a lot more hard work , a much better vision - than the other person.
Is your story of struggle very romantic?
Unfortunately, no (laughs). (...) When I was working in the advertising world in Delhi, it was at its peak. (...) I was this hotshot Ad guy, making a good amount of money. Even after I shifted to Mumbai, my wife, who's into the corporate world was making enough and while Anurag was struggling and making ends meet, I was living in a posh flat. And have never worked under anyone or struggled for money since I was 26.
So making your first movie, Khosla Ka Ghosla was a cakewalk? (...)
I came from an advertising background, I had shot 50 commercials, so I pretty much knew the mechanics of filmmaking. But the struggle started when I moved to Mumbai in 2004. There were no takers for the film. Every distributor had seen the film but no one wanted to take it. I was in wilderness then. I was sort of in a black hole. But when that two-year period ended, I knew I was invincible, I had learnt most things about life and films in that time. I had become negative and I was going to give up (a friend had told me that the moment you stop expecting, things happen), and just when I did, it got taken by UTV Motion Pictures.
You are one of those people who run away to the woods to write?
No, no, I grew up in a family of six, in three rooms. One room had my parents, one was the drawing room, in the third room, it was my grandmother, the TV, dining table, me, my sister, me and the cupboard full of books. I learnt study to study with the TV on. So I am capable of doing my shit, it doesn't matter where as long as the weather is good. Of course, I always co-write. I want to stay away from the trap of a director writing - scripts become too indulgent, directors have a bloated way of writing. So if I collaborate, we can just stick to good storytelling. I have co-written Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Shanghai. (...) I also (...) co-wrote Love Sex Aur Dhokha. (...) And I take inspiration from everything around me - books, music, normal people I meet, something someone said while we are rolling on the floor and drunk. Like Karan said something hilarious yesterday, and I was like, 'this as to make way into a film'.
Women are kind of non-existent in your films.
I haven't a clue. I think I need to get myself examined (laughs), because 60 to 70 per cent of my team - scriptwriter, assistant director, art director - comprises women. Maybe, because in my head I don't see men and women as separate entities, but again I feel women are more organized and structured than men'.

Graffiti and street art have arrived

Vi segnalo l'articolo Graffiti and street art have arrived, di Manit Moorjani, pubblicato oggi da Brunch:

'If you have to pick someone up from Delhi airport, and you start from Lajpat Nagar or Malviya Nagar, you will get to see nearly one-sixth of the city’s graffiti as you drive. (...) Graffiti artists started spamming our city walls more than five years ago, and today, you can’t miss their creative outbursts. Although provocative graffiti is often removed, it always seems to come back. (...) By now, our underground ‘public’ artists have already evolved into two separate sects - the graffiti artist and the street artist.

LPG fuel hike, Daku - Delhi

Not quite the same
Graffiti is a form of lettering. A graffiti artist spray paints his name or a symbol on a wall in the form of a stylised signature (which is often very colourful). In true graffiti spirit, especially in the Western sense of the term, this signifies ‘possession’ of the particular wall. However, in Indian cities, most artists are doing it to rid dirty walls of the eyesore that are paan stains! As Sun1, a popular artist from Mumbai, puts it, “India is full of colour, and what better way to showcase it than on the walls?” He uses a variety of fonts, characters and colours to beautify walls. “Now people even stand and watch me do it. They are always curious as to what colour I will use next and how.”
Street art, on the other hand, is any type of visual art created outdoors - whether it’s a spray-painted mural, stencil art, sticker art or even street poster art. It’s more than lettering. It represents an idea - a picture or a set of words. Whether it is the ‘There goes Mumbai nightlife’ stencil job in Versova by an artist who goes by the name of Tyler, or the signature ‘Daku’ emblazoned in Devnagari on a colourful wall in Okhla, in south Delhi, the impact is unmistakable. “Most graffiti artists want their name etched in the popular psyche. The charm of street art is when it is discovered in the morning - when bystanders wonder who’s done it,” says Daku, who first began doing graffiti in the Devnagari script. These days Daku, who prefers to use this assumed name, displays his wacky street art on the roadside too: stickers are stuck over ‘Stop’ road signs saying ‘Stop Pretending’, ‘Stop Promising’ and ‘Stop Shopping’. And then there is his celebrated LPG price hike piece showing an LPG cylinder shooting upwards in the form of a rocket.
However, both these guilds - the graffiti and street artists - could be working with or without legal sanction. They might take permission from owners or authorities to paint walls (although most graffiti artists seldom do), or they might go out hooded in the night with spray cans, wait for an opportune moment, do the deed and silently walk away. But both create art that reaches out to people, and in most cases has an underlying message.

Brainwash, Tyler - Mumbai

Let us spray
The heyday of graffiti was in the early 1980s, coinciding with the popularity of New York’s hip-hop culture, when gangs marked their territory with the spray can. That was also when it became a tool of protest in London and Berlin, around the time of the aerosol boom. Today, graffiti has become almost beautiful (even though it’s still illegal in most parts of the world). It has become a medium for artistic expression without restriction.
"My graffiti does not come out of any rebellion. For me it’s all about my own unique style of writing, which is different from how another graffiti artist does it," says Zine, one of Delhi’s most active graffiti artists, who has seen the scene grow from 2006, when there were just a few players, to the present when even school kids are involved. "In my graffiti, every letter that is painted is a letter that I have made. It’s about my own individuality. Graffiti is a form of calligraphy, but it is different in a way that it is much bigger than calligraphy. It is an art form that is out there on the streets. Many of the young kids who come for our graffiti workshops have their own styles. The idea is to have fun and not take it too seriously," he adds.
Most practitioners view graffiti and street art as a vibrant art form that livens up the landscape of our concrete jungles. But there are many others for whom it is a way to speak out. Mumbai’s Tyler, for instance, has made some of the most popular and revolutionary street art in the city, and believes that the spray can is the biggest weapon available to the common man. “People have stopped caring for each other. There is garbage on the streets and ugly political hoardings and advertisements everywhere. We need to wake up society with art or with words,” he says. “When I go out at night and spray what I think about the system, for those moments, I have beaten the system. With graffiti, there is no message. The medium itself is the message.” Tyler’s ‘Never forget the world is yours’ work (with the postscript ‘*Terms and Conditions apply’) in Mumbai won him worldwide acclaim. In the two years since he began working, he has clocked almost three artworks a month.

Brinda Project, Harsh Raman - Delhi

Hue and cry
For Delhi-based street artist Harsh Raman, painting on the city’s walls is a ticket to showcasing his art to the masses, who don’t have time to visit an art gallery. “The beauty of street art is that once I’ve finished my painting, it’s out there and does not belong to me. You can’t buy it either. But you can check it out anytime,” says Raman, whose stunning artwork of a Bharatanatyam dancer cosmetically transforming into a samba dancer on the outside walls of Hauz Khas Apartments, done in tandem with Brazilian street artist Sergio Cordeiro, is one of the city’s highlights. “Before I started painting on the Hauz Khas Apartments wall, all I could see around me were banners and advertisements - people selling things. But all I wanted to see was something interesting that could bring a smile to my face. The only purpose of drawing art on the streets is this engagement with the public,” says Raman, who was also the assistant art director in Prakash Jha’s films, Aarakshan and Chakravyuh.

Brinda Project, Harsh Raman e Sergio Cordeiro - Delhi

Almost legal
The majority of graffiti artists start young. Delhi’s Zine, while still in school, was inspired by the graffiti on the walls outside his school in Vasant Vihar. “Those walls spoke to me. While going to school, we’d suddenly find new artwork on the walls, and that felt amazing. And once I had done it myself, I had to do it again and again,” he says. Delhi-based teenager Slik, too, began by spray painting his alias at the Khan Market parking lot late at night. But he always made sure he was back at home in time for school. “My city is full of spit stains on the walls and I want to cover them with colourful artwork, without hurting other people’s sentiments. Of course, I do this on a student’s pocket money,” he says.
With the growing popularity of street art in our metros, acceptance is also growing. So artists such as Zine are abandoning their secret identities to produce even more elaborate and intricate designs. Zine recently sought permission from the Panchsheel Park taxi stand to paint their wall with his name - after showing them his earlier work. Shedding their apprehensions, the cabbies gave their assent and he painted the mural in front of them. It is now one of the coolest-looking cab stands in Delhi. “Painting at night gives you an adrenaline high. It’s for the kicks. But apart from the artists, everybody else now also seems to like street art and graffiti,” says Zine'.

Zine - Delhi, Panchsheel Park Taxi Stand

Bollywood Art Project, Ranjit Dahiya - Mumbai

Kolkata