Date: 20 March 2012 (Tue)
Time: 3:45 pm - 5:45 pm
Venue: MB G19, Patrick Lee Wan Keung Academic Building, Lingnan University
Language: English
Co-organizers: Centre for Cinema Studies and Kwan Fong Cultural Research & Development Programme, Lingnan University
ILP unit(s): 2 (Aesthetic Development)
CRN: 2236
Description
The Indian cinema is much-regarded as the world's largest filmmaking country, but the truth perhaps is somewhat more modest. India makes an enormously large number of films at very, very low budgets, making it financially a fairly small industry, if we take overall turnover. But it is an immensely diverse industry, which was one of the first instances of modern cultural production percolating through almost all of Indian society in ways that may be unique in the 'underdeveloped' world. This situation is changing in two ways: first, the rise of a Bollywood culture industry, similar to say the Korean Wave or other blockbuster film cultures in East Asia, which makes films with world-class technology and, importantly, world-class budgets, and the low-end sector, which does not work in celluloid any more. And second, growing experimentation, within the low-end popular cultures but also in the areas of experimental video, and in documentary, enabled precisely by the cheapness of the technology and new avenues for dissemination.
Speaker
Ashish Rajadhyaksha (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, India)
Film excerpts to be shown
No Smoking by Anuraag Kashyap
Perhaps the single most vanguard of the new
independent cinemas, and Anurag Kashyap’s most experimental film, No
Smoking is a hallucinatory saga about totalitarianism and the new economy.
The advertising executive K, played by movie star John Abraham, is addicted
to cigarettes, but in order to give up smoking he comes up against a totalitarian
underground infrastructure from which he cannot exit. He sets himself up at a
rehabilitation centre known as ‘prayogshala’ or the ‘laboratory’, where he finds
himself going down a path from where any desire to smoke has the totalitarian
guru Shri Shri Prakash Guru Ghantal Baba Bengali Sealdahwale instantly
exercise a series of extreme measures, including the killing of a loved one
through asphyxiation through all the smoke created by the person in his life.
The film continues Kashyap’s fascination with institutionalized terrorism and its
own inner victims (e.g. Black Friday, 2004), and an exploration of a story too
large in all its ramifications for its protagonist to comprehend.
Siddheshwari by Mani Kaul
Kaul’s exploration of cinema between fiction and
documentary tracks the life of Siddheshwari Devi (1903-77), a classical
thumri singer of the Benares school. The actress Mita Vasisth performs
Siddheshwari, who started singing at the age of 16. The narrative is itself
structured like a thumri piece: it presents key motifs (of Siddhi’s life as well
as of myths and locations) and elaborates on and around them with different
songs, moods, camera movements, etc., until the whole becomes a moving
tapestry celebrating the transfiguration of life into music. Shot in colour and
monochrome, the film proceeds by means of metaphors, evoked rather than
named: an ultramarine boat floats on the Ganges, a dropped metal utensil
produces musical overtones, etc. The intoxicants mandatory to the euphoria of
a (sexual) meeting are contrasted with the labour that went into practicing the
difficult art of music. Towards the end, archive footage of Siddheshwari’s sole
TV appearance offers a glimpse of the singer, an image which seems to recede
into the technology of the recording until only the eerily intense voice remains.
Nainsukh by Amit Dutta
Biopic on the 18th Century Pahari miniaturist
Nainsukh, derived mainly from art historian B.N. Goswami’s famous
1997 book on the subject (Nainsukh of Guler, A Great Indian Painter from
a Small Hill-State). The book itself covers nearly a hundred paintings,
extrapolating from them the extraordinary life of this 18th Century
miniaturist. The film, a collaboration between Goswami, who personally
reads out from Nainsukh’s own autobiographical jottings, and a young
avant-garde filmmaker, works from the paintings themselves to carve out
a life of a painter, a courtier and an observer of life in the Pahari court of
Raja Balwant Singh.
Turning by Vivan Sundaram's experimental video
Single channel video, usually shown as an installation, Turning is part of a larger body of work that Sundaram has done over some years now with urban waste. The larger show, titled Trash, has included large amounts of waste material built almost like a cityscape, and then worked upon in both still image and moving-image video. This video comes alongside two other works, Tracking, a two channel installation where the camera tracks slowly over a massive miniaturized urban landscape that gradually catches fire, and The Brief Ascension of Marian Hussein.
Jahaji Music by Surabhi Sharma
From the mid-nineteenth century Indian labourers
arrived in the Caribbean on boats, bringing a few belongings and their
music – the beginnings of a remarkable cultural practice. More than 150
years later, Indian musician Remo Fernandes travelled to these islands to
explore potential collaborations and create new work.
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