BioScope South Asian Screen Studies· 2026Q1
Form, Structure and Agency in Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71
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- 2026year
Short summary
Mrinal Sen's Calcutta 71, far from being a random collage, exhibits deliberate composition through its three 'one-day' stories and agit-prop frame structure, linking cinematic form to the historical struggles of political agency in 1970s Bengal.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Calcutta 71 employs deliberate composition, not random collage, through its three historical 'one-day' stories.
- The film utilizes an agit-prop frame structure where a young man directly addresses the audience.
- Sen viewed Calcutta 71, alongside Interview, as non-linear, contrasting with the linear Padatik.
- The essay connects the film's formal struggles with structure to the historical challenges of political agency in 1970s Bengal.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Mrinal Sen called Calcutta 71 (1972) ‘a kind of collage, a collection of apparently unrelated events and objects’. But in fact, the film bears evidence of anxious and overtly articulate composition, both in the three ‘one-day’ stories, based on literary originals and set in successive historical decades, at its core, and with respect to the ‘immediacy’ of the frame structure through which a young man addresses the audience in agit-prop style. Sen saw both Calcutta 71 and Interview (1971) as non-linear films, by contrast with the ‘linear framework [and] complete narrative’ of Padatik (1973): three works making up Sen’s Calcutta trilogy in a sequence that lays claim both to historical accident and to careful thinking through, even to a process of ideological and cinematic self-education. This essay will examine the form of Calcutta 71 , linking its struggles with structure and composition to the larger historical questions of structure and agency for political actors within the social, economic and material conditions of Bengal in the 1970s.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. BioScope South Asian Screen Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗
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