Ebook: The Cloud-Capped Star: [Meghe Dhaka Tara]

Ritwik Ghatak's 1960 film The Cloud-Capped Star (Meghe Dhaka Tara) has been hailed as “a modern masterpiece” and “one of the great classics of world cinema”, “an extraordinary, revelatory work” (Adrian Martin), and “one of the five or six greatest melodramas in cinema history” (Serge Daney). It is arguably the best-known of Ghatak's films, and its striking blend of modernist aesthetics and melodramatic force has intrigued audiences for decades. Its focus on a family uprooted by the Partition of India and its powerful exploration of displacement and historical trauma give it a renewed relevance in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Manishita Dass's study of the film situates it within Ghatak's film-making career and in its historical and cultural contexts: the Indian Partition of 1947 and its corrosive effects on everyday life in Bengal; the influence of Calcutta?s incipient film society movement and the Indian left cultural movement of the 1940s on Ghatak; and the shaping of his cosmopolitan cinematic sensibility through eclectic encounters with world cinema, film theory, Marxism, and Indian music. Dass offers a close reading of the film, locating its emotional and intellectual force in what she describes as its “cinematic theatricality,” bringing into focus Ghatak's modernist experiments with melodramatic devices, and his deliberate jettisoning of cinematic realism, as well as discusssing the film?s unconventional use of music and its distinctive soundtrack. Her detailed textual analysis draws on archival research and connects the film to Ghatak?s work in the theatre and his writings on film and theatre.
Lastly, Dass provides an overview of the film?s reception, internationally and in India, at the time of its release and afterwards. It also points to the relevance of the film for debates about melodrama, cinematic modernism, and global art cinema, and its haunting resonance for the present period of mass displacements.