Pedagogic Innovations at the Film and Television Institute of India

By the late 1960s, India’s economic aspirations seemed to be crumbling, indicating the decline of the Nehruvian utopia. This period marked a pivotal moment, influencing the emergence of a new social realist genre. In 1960, Shri B. V. Keskar, the information and broadcasting minister, purchased the property of Prabhat Studio and established the Film Institute in India, which later on became popular as the Film and Television Institute of India. From the beginning, the film institute was led by a group of experts. Eminent filmmakers and alumni of the Film Institute, such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, John Abraham and others, acknowledged Ritwik Ghatak, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, George Sadoul, Werner Herzog and Alexander Kluge as real inspirations in their student lives. By using memoirs, interviews, archival documents and government reports, this article envisages how the pedagogy of the Film Institute of India encouraged a group of young filmmakers to experiment with film theory and praxis, serving as a stepping stone towards a new cinema movement in the 1970s.