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Aag
(Fire)

Screening on Film
Directed by Raj Kapoor.
With Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Premnath.
India, 1948, 35mm, black & white, 138 min.
Hindi with English subtitles.

After an apprenticeship at the important studio Bombay Talkies, Kapoor took the remarkable step of beginning his own production company at the age of twenty-four. His first film as director and producer starred himself as a young man haunted by a lost childhood love and willing to risk disinheritance by becoming a stage actor instead of becoming a lawyer like his father. Aag finds Kapoor already employing the baroque shadows that would become the signature style of his black-and-white films as a director. This use of chiaroscuro reveals his apprenticeship at Bombay Talkies, whose leaders had received training at Germany’s fabled Ufa studio before the war.

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