Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94.  As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock.  It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

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Two years from now, America will mark the anniversary of the shooting of students at Kent State by National Guardsmen.  It was a pivotal moment in the anti-war movement, and it marked, for many, the exact point at which it was no longer possible to pretend what kind of country they lived in.  There will be a lot of nostalgia, a lot of hand-wringing, and if we're lucky, a certain degree of self-examination.  What probably won't be discussed quite as much, if at all, is the fact that it wasn't the first killing of students on campus by members of the armed forces. 

That dubious distinction belongs to the so-called "Orangeburg Massacre", where, in 1968, National Guard soldiers opened fire on a crowd of 100 students at South Carolina State College.  Three of the students were killed, and dozens were wounded;  today, two separate films -- one, Orangeburg, by a pair of independent documentarians, set to debut on PBS this fall, and the other, Black Magic, by a more mainstream filmmaker, airing on ESPN of all places -- ask why America's memory of this outrage doesn't echo the way Kent State did.  There are plenty of good reasons, of course:  the SC State shooting wasn't as well documented (only a few photographs were taken at the time, and most were destroyed in a fire); it fell during an off news cycle and wasn't picked up by the major newspapers until it had largely died down; initial reports of the massacre falsely described it as an exchange of gunfire, rather than the shooting of unarmed students by soldiers; and it happened at night, when no television crews were available to cover the event.

But the biggest reason of all is that the victims were all black.  The shooting was triggered by protests in reaction to white citizens who objected to the desegregation of a local bowling alley, and instead of being a response to the Vietnam War, the Orangeburg Massacre was part of the ongoing struggle for civil rights.

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