Although the name "Merchant Ivory" typically conjures up skillful adaptations of canonical novels by E.M. Forster and Henry James, the company established its reputation for striking and intelligent filmmaking with a string of titles shot in India. And, in fact, it is India that brought together Merchant Ivory's three main partners: director James Ivory, producer (and sometime director) Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

American-born James Ivory (b. 1928) was a recent graduate of the film school of the University of Southern California when he made a short film of Indian miniature paintings, The Sword and the Flute (1959), which immediately caught the attention of Ismail Merchant (1936-2005), a young man from Mumbai living in New York and eager to make movies himself. The two formed a partnership and, for their first collaboration, contacted writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (b. 1927). Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Jhabvala grew up in London before moving to New Delhi in 1951.

The three continued to make films together until Merchant's death in 2005, with Ivory and Jhabvala's latest collaboration, The City of Your Final Destination, scheduled to open in theaters this spring. One other important contributor to the Indian films of Merchant Ivory is the actor Shashi Kapoor, a member of one of the dynastic families of the Indian film industry. (Kapoor's older brother was legendary actor-director Raj Kapoor.) After a few roles as a juvenile, Shashi Kapoor became a star in India in the early 1960s. His roles in the Merchant-Ivory films gave him an international profile.

Again and again in these films, the complex and dangerous ambivalences of colonialism and post-colonialism are explored through the experiences of Indians and Britons in both pre- and post-independence India, typically through fraught encounters between British women and Indian men. These encounters make personal and immediate the clash between desire and history. In both their production and their content, the films in this program remain models of transnational, cross-cultural filmmaking from a time before those words were fashionable. To pay tribute to this lesser-known chapter of his remarkable career, the HFA welcomes James Ivory for two evenings to discuss the work and world of Merchant Ivory.