This article revisits the sensational Nanavati case that captured public imagination half a century ago, examining its creation as an iconic media event through photographic images in the tabloid Blitz and its immediate after life in a film, Yeh Raaste Hain Pyar Ke (The Roads that Lead to Love, R.K. Nayyar, 1963). Examining the proliferation of detail around this sudden and unexpected event, the article argues that even though the tabloid pushed the borders of photographic representation toward the realm of speculation and even fantasy, there were registers of affect that an evidential form could not express. This is where cinema made an entry, to explore the subjectivity and inner worlds of the protagonists of this human drama and to contain its scandalous excess through narrative resolution. The article explores how both forms of media allowed for the articulation of regimes of public fantasy through melodrama, if in rather different ways.
This essay explores the rich archive of photographer Nemai Ghosh whose production stills on the sets of Satyajit Ray kept his cinema alive in popular memory. While it might appear that Ghosh was overwhelmed by the vision of Satyajit Ray, the essay explores how the documentary impulse in his work created continuity as well as rupture with the cinema of Ray and others in Bengal. Nemai Ghosh’s forte lay in capturing candid moments of actors just before and after filming on the sets. These interstitial moments caught between the vision of the director and the photographer shooting a production still could be used to tease out other deeper meanings about star personas. As we look through Nemai Ghosh’s larger body of work, particularly at images which may not have found public circulation as film stills, we see other kinds of mediations between the photographer, the camera and his subjects. By extricating still frames out of motion, Ghosh’s photographs invite us to contemplate certain tensions between female actors, their roles and their extra cinematic lives. Recollections of these stars are layered by stories, anecdotes and popular myths. In this essay, I explore what it might mean to look back at Nemai Ghosh’s images through the prism of these overlapping memories.
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