Bangladesh Film Archive, under the Ministry of Information, conducted a three week long seminar on the archive’s research works during the 2017-2018 financial year. After many absences and rescheduling, the seminar finally concluded on Tuesday.
The 14 research topics at the seminar were delightfully varied with mix of social, biographical, historical and technical fields. Each researcher was assigned a supervisor; one third of them were distinguished academicians and the rest were top professionals in the film industry.
Dhaka University professor Dr. Fahmidul Haq, who supervised one of the research projects, raised concerns regarding the standards and the methods of the research. He also mentioned there were a few exceptions to the otherwise unimpressive research papers.
He told Showtime: “I’m concerned about the quality of the research here. A lot of the supervisors did not have research backgrounds.”
The project Dr. Haq supervised was titled “The memorialization of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 through Bengali cinema.”
“It was within my area of interest. So, I supervised this research,” he said. “There aren’t many Bangladeshi movies made on the subject, so I advised to include both Bengals.”
He helped the researcher Fatima Amin, lecturer at the Film and Television Department at Jagannath University, to select movies relevant to her research. The four movies that were chosen as the case studies in the end were Ritwik Ghatak’s “Subarnarekha” (1965), Akram Khan’s “Khacha” (2017), Tanvir Mokammel’s “Chitra Nodir Pare” (1998) and Srijit Mukherji’s “Rajkahini” (2015). All four of these films have the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan at the centre of the plots. Dr. Haq said, other films where the partition appeared indirectly, were left out of the scope of the research.
Other research papers at the seminar were “The representation of the middle class in Bangladeshi films,” “The life and work of Syed Muhammad Parvez,” “Violence in Bangledeshi cinema in the first decade of the 21st century,” “Rawshan Jamil: Artist of simplicity,” “Rivers in Bangladeshi films,” “The influence of existentialism and Jean Paul Sartre on Alamgir Kabir’s work,” “Technical mastery in Zahir Raihan films,” “The life and work of folk artist Durbin Shah,” “The use of sound in Bangladeshi films,” “Producing Bangladeshi cinema (1956-2017),” “Advertising in Bangladesh after liberation,” “10 Playback singers of Bangladeshi films” and “Unlawful killing in Bangladeshi cinema: An analysis based on social reciprocity.”
Thursday, April 25, 2024
