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BHUBANESWAR: At the ongoing film festival an interesting discussion was organised where Subhajit Chatterjee, Assistant Professor of Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, spoke about ‘Printed Text to Moving Image: and its vitality for Indian regional films today’. Chatterjee highlighted cinema’s long standing relationship with literary adaptations, and how it has helped in shaping a regional sensibility towards stories and characters over the years. It does so while looking at templates across linguistic spaces in and outside India, he added.
Chatterjee has been in the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University for more than 15 years now. He specialises in film historiography, Bengali cinema, Indian films and popular culture, cult and exploitative cinema.
He told Orissa POST that the session is about relationship between literature and cinema and how it is exploiting the former for artistic extravaganza. Popular examples which come to my mind are Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello which have been used many times, or Devdas by Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay.
When asked if he felt that the filmmakers are doing justice to the literary works when translating to the silver screens he said that this is not a simple yes or no question.
“Devdas is a story about a drunkard. It deals with his unrequited love, touches upon the Zamindari system and prostitution of that era. It’s the essence, if you keep up with it then you would render justice to it,” he answered.
He also referred to the popular TV series Game of Thrones which is adapted from the books of the same name penned by George RR Martin. “It makes sense as they have tried to capture the essence in not a three-hour movie but in TV series,” he pointed out.