— Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist, influential thinker and founder of analytical psychology.

— Louis-Jean Lumiére, inventor of the Kinetoscope de projection, father of cinema.

‘Mon frére, en une nuit, avait inventé le cinématographe.’

[My brother, in one night, had invented the cinema].

Auguste Lumiére on Louis Lumiére (1864-1948) who had a flash of inspiration that resulted in the Kinetoscope de projection, patented in 1895.

“Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Alfred Hitchcock insisted that Hedren wear only blue or green clothes throughout the film. For the famous crows chase sequence, when costume designer Edith Head had to create a green dress, that allowed Hedren to run in it, she re-designed the green eau de nil suit she had done for Grace Kelly in Rear Window, taking inspiration from Chanel’s new suits at the time.”

—Gaurav Gupta is a Delhi based fashion designer.

“One turning point in Indian cinema was when Satyajit Ray made his debut in the 1950s. With a few exceptions the only kind of cinema prior to this was one that had adapted its form from the urban theatrical tradition. This clearly did not make use of the full potential of cinema and could not present life in the way that cinema was capable of presenting it. After Bengal, this new form of cinema, which took directly from life, found practitioners in Kerala and later in Karnataka and Orissa.

Finally, at the beginning of the 1970s, this new kind of cinema found favour among young filmmakers in Mumbai who were making films in Hindi. This whole process got considerable encouragement from State created institutions like the Film and Television Institute of India and the Film Finance Corporation. For instance, Uski Roti, made by Mani Kaul, was radically different from any Indian film made before that time. Soon other films followed, like M S Sathyu’s Garam Hawa.

Also, in 1971, the number of American films being imported into the country was reduced by the Indira Gandhi led Government, thereby creating space for this kind of cinema in a number of cinema screens in urban metros. This also led to several private producers funding this alternate kind of cinema. Several of my own films in the seventies and eighties were funded by such producers.”

—Shyam Benegal, 78, is one of India’s most acclaimed filmmakers. His early films Ankur, Nishant, Manthan, Bhumika and Mandi, played a key role in the pathbreaking new cinema movement that emerged in the sixties. Later Benegal went on to create classics like Junoon, Kalyug, Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda, Sardari Begum and The Making of the Mahatma. He has also written, directed and produced the 53 episode historical drama Bharat Ek Khoj. His last film was a political satire, released in 2009, called Well Done Abba. He is based out of Mumbai.

“The movie Unzipped, an artistic account of a fashion designer in Manhattan, is filled with superb fashion moments that a fashion designer goes through in the course of creating a fashion collection. (Isaac) Mizrahi at his best performance— perhaps the only well documented insider’s view of how fashion is created.”

—Raghavendra Rathore is a leading Indian fashion designer. His label, Rathore Jodhpur, is known for having reinvented traditional royal designs from Rajasthan for a modern, global aficionado.

Scene from Unzipped— Isaac Mizrahi on putting together the pieces of the fashion puzzle

Scene from Unzipped— Mizrahi outlines his creative vision for his 1994 Fall show 

Scene from Unzipped— On the ramp and backstage with supermodels at Mizrahi’s show

“A turning point in Indian cinema, as in the cinema of many countries, was the advent of dubbing and playback, beginning with India’s first talkie Alam Ara in 1931. A musical, this film established song and dance as the mainstay of Indian cinema— a tradition that continues till this day. But, more importantly, dubbing and playback changed the way performance was perceived. Performances no longer had to be loud and theatrical. A character could be portrayed through acting that was ‘minimal’. The words of American actor and method-acting teacher Sanford Meisner, “an ounce of behaviour is worth a pound of words”, found new relevance in Indian cinema. The introduction of dubbing and playback also meant we were no longer reliant on actors who could sing. Instead, attention shifted to nuances in actors’ dialogue delivery or his body language. Stars like Prithviraj Kapoor and then Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand were known for mannerisms and dialogue delivery specific to each of them. Later you had the phenomenon of the Angry Young Man, a character whose quiet brooding intensity would have been quite unimaginable if we didn’t have dubbing and playback. Today too, one associates an actor, such as Salman Khan or Aamir Khan, with their unique style of acting and dialogue delivery that either strikes a chord with the audience, or not.”

Salim Khan, 77, has been one of India’s best known scriptwriters. Along with Javed Akhtar he wrote some of the biggest hits of the seventies and the eighties, including Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Deewaar, Sholay and Don. Salim-Javed, as the duo came to be known, are credited with creating a new kind of protagonist—the angry young man—often played by superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

“My favourite style statement film is (Luchino) Visconti’s The Leopard. All through the film one is seduced by beauty… of the setting, the interiors, the vistas, the actors and the clothes. Though the film is in Italian, language does not matter at all. Style needs no language to make it understood.”

—Wendell Rodricks is one of India’s best-known fashion designers. He lives in the village of Colvale, in Goa.

“A Turning Point in Indian cinema according to me has been its corporatization that began with the opening up of the Indian economy in the early 1990s and finally boomed when Hindi film production was granted industry status by the Government in 2000. Today we can see the effect of that corporatization in the fact that multinationals, instead of nationals, are controlling chunks of our industry. So you have Disney taking over UTV and Viacom taking over Network 18. A ‘corporate culture’ has seeped into filmmaking which has made it more about money than anything else. This has seriously affected the creativity and freedom of ideas in our movies.”

—Kundan Shah, 64, is a Mumbai based filmmaker. He made his debut in 1983 with Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, a dark satire that has gone on to become a cult Hindi film.