Freeze Frames

For his first black-and-white exhibition artist Atul Dodiya pays homage to the legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, paints scenes from the 1929 movie Blackmail

- Riddhi Doshi

Only a keen observer, a looker, a seeker would pause a movie, photograph its different frames to look and relook at the nuances of the movie’s setting, the actor’s expression and body language. And only a creative genius like Atul Dodiya could recreate that drama, that tension and the riveting stories of a classic motion picture on his canvas.

Dodiya, who turned 60 in January, opened his first-ever, all black and white show Seven Minutes of Blackmail, at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, last month. The master storyteller brings alive the sensorial seven minutes from a rape scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 movie Blackmail. “I like the way the entire seven-minute sequence has been picturised – gripping, yet subtle,” says Dodiya.