Filming

Tabish Khair

Made up of reels rather than chapters, this novel projects a flickering, fragmentary story; a story about the early days of cinema and the partition of India. But most of all, it is a story about dreams and the lengths some are prepared to go to realise them. A deeply affecting read.

Extract

I know you are a scholar of cinema, but I will tell you a secret about motion films. They do not happen in the projector or on the screen in front of you. They are happening in your head. Your eye connects the thousands of still photographs; your eye makes them move. Your mind turns the figures the right way up. No one knows why it does so. No one. But it does. You see, there is a lot in common between the magical darkness inside our sculls in which dreams fester and memories ripen, and the magical darkness of film theatres.

Parallels