From newsletter-admin at sarai.net Tue Dec 4 17:15:30 2001 From: newsletter-admin at sarai.net (newsletter-admin at sarai.net) Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 11:45:30 GMT Subject: Sarai Newsletter 08 Message-ID: <20011204.11453000@saumya.sarai.kit> Table of Contents 1.Film and Urban Cultures Workshop Report 2.Events @ Sarai Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series: William Mazarella Urban Culture and Politics Seminar Series: Peter van der Veer Rescheduled Documentary Film Screening: Delhi Diary 2001 3.Film @ Sarai: Asian Film Cultures: Hongkong Cinema 4.New @ Sarai Website 5.Residency @ Sarai ------------------------------------- Workshop Report Film and Urban Culture Workshop A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread A workshop entitled A cinema of Anxiety: The exhilaration of dread was organised at Sarai from November 29 till December 2001 . The workshop discussed issues of genre, narrative form, and film style in contemporary urban action films. Three recent Hindi films - Parinda (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989), Gardish (Priyadarshan, 1994) and Satya (Ramgopal Verma, 1998) were screened. The screenings was followed by paper presentations and discussion sessions. Papers were presented by Ranjani Majumdar (Cinematic terror and the uncanny in Parinda) and Shohini Ghosh (Streets of Terror: Mapping Genre in the 1990s). A panel discussion, chaired by Ravi Vasudevan took place on the final day of the workshop, where short presentations were made by Ravikant (Language and dialogue in popular hindi cinema), Ira Bhaskar (Melodrama in the urban action film) and Moinak Biswas (Realism and the reality effect in Indian cinema). The workshop itself was conceived around a series of shifts in modes of representation as manifested in the urban action film. Two of the presentations (Ghosh and Majumdar) negotiated this framework of urban space in interesting ways with reference to specific film texts. Majumdar analyzed the use of space in Parinda, both public/city and private/domestic, placing the film's narrative within larger coordinates - regimes of representing shock (film noir and other genres) through montage as also ideas of terror and the uncanny that Parinda invokes. Ghosh looked closely at three films (Vastava, Jeet and Yashvant) in order to develop the strand of city streets - anonymity and the crowd, and the gendered nature of certain narrative tropes and metaphors in contemporary Hindi Cinema. In a world of 'anxiety' and 'dread', one heartening factor was never in doubt - no one growing up in India can, strictly speaking, be called a 'non-film person'. The public discussions following each of the screenings and papers, dissolved to a large extent, the otherwise great conflict of democratic forums - expert vs. layman. The 'lay' audience, in particular the student and university community served to invigorate and liven up the proceedings. Many of the arguments put forward in the paper presentations were challenged, extended and on occasion, trashed. This workshop articulates two of Sarai's primary areas of interest - cinema practices and urban space, and the ways in which each impinges on the other, with an emphasis (in this seminar) on regimes of representation. Another interest emerges in the public discussions - the creation of a public culture wherein critical reflection does not remain solely in the domain of impermeable academic knowledge-systems. Such an endeavour is also part of a broader project of developing an analytical language capable of tracing epistemic shifts in the nature of contemporary social practices. Events @ Sarai All events and screenings are held at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road Delhi - 110054 i)Wednesday, December 5 2001, 3.30 p.m. Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series Critical Publicity / Public Criticism: Reflections on Fieldwork in the Bombay Advertising World A talk by William Mazzarella Department of Anthropology , University of Chicago ii)Monday, December 10 2001, 3.30 p.m. Urban Politics and Cultures Seminar Series Post-Modern India: Engineering a Communal Future A talk by Peter van der Veer University of Amsterdam iii)Thursday, December 13 2001, 4:30 pm Rescheduled Documentary Screening Delhi Diary 2001 Director: Ranjani Mazumdar 2001, Betacam SP, 60 minutes Delhi Diary 2001 is about the residue of urban memory linked to two crucial events in the history of Delhi. The events are the state of National Emergency (1975-77) when all civil rights were suspended and the anti Sikh pogroms of 1984 following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Instead of focusing on the 'facts' of the two events, the film moves from the immediacy of the events to the rhythms of daily life in the city to explore fragments of memory embedded beneath the spectacle of the contemporary city. Film @ Sarai Asian Film Cultures: Hongkong Cinema This month, film at sarai is pleased to present the work of the Hongkong auteur, Wong Kar Wai. Along with other directors of Honkong's `second wave' -Stanley Kwan, Eddie Fong and Ching Siu-tung -Wong Kar Wai's thematic concerns and stylistic engagements seem to inhabit an entirely different universe from that of the action film, with its compendium of special effects, intricate editing patterns, and action choreography. But Wong is an experimentalist: Chungking Express's minimalist use of sets to signal a crowded market place sees him using closeups, tight framing, and quick cuts to render cinema and city as a place of play, where the chance encounter amongst strangers is elaborated into a witty, intricately coded dialogue about romance; the irreverence of wit, and the rhythms of repartee suggest the lineage of American screwball comedy, but also something of the comic high jinx of Hongkong action. Fallen Angels, a night film par excellence, shifts registers between an abstract, stylized rendering of the femme fatale of film noir, and the manic world of a rootless urban youth. Later, In the Mood for Love revisits the scenario of the romance of fortuitous encounters but within a very different stylistic format: lighting, shot composition and duration focus our attention on the sensuality of being, refiguring the body as a form of gesture to the possibilities, and imponderables, of intimacy in the setting of densely crowded everyday life and marital obligations. Friday, December 7 2001, 4:30 pm Fallen Angels / Duoluo Tianshi Director: Wong Kar Wai 1995 Friday, December 14 2001, 4:30 pm Happy Together / Chunguang Zhaxie Director: Wong Kar Wai, 1997 Friday, December 21 2001, 4:30 pm In the Mood for Love Director: Wong Kar Wai 2000 New @ Sarai Website i) Diary of an Actress: New episodes of an actress's diary, available at http://www.sarai.net/crosstalk/Forum.php3?Fcode=Diary&Thread=5 ii) Infinite injustice/ensuring freedom: A topic for discussion available at http://www.sarai.net/crosstalk/Forum.php3?Fcode=General&Thread=10 iii) Please visit the sarai website www.sarai.net for a reworked Calender page, available at http://www.sarai.net/calendar/calendar.htm iv) The final list of the awardees of the Sarai print media fellowships and seed grants is also available at http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm Residency @ Sarai Syeda Farhana, a photojournalist from Dhaka, Bangaladesh is presently at Sarai for a month long joint Khoj -Sarai Residency. She will be in Delhi from November 20th to December 20th 2001. Syeda is a student at the Drik Pathshala: the South Asian Institute of Photography in Dhaka, and is working on a project on migration. Some of her earlier work has been published in the New Internationalist, and is available at http://www.oneworld.org/ni/index4.html Thanks Saumya Gupta The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054 Tel: 3960040, 3951190 Fax: 3928391, 3943450 www.sarai.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From newsletter-admin at sarai.net Wed Dec 5 22:29:22 2001 From: newsletter-admin at sarai.net (newsletter-admin at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 16:59:22 -0000 Subject: Clarification and an apology Message-ID: <200112051659.RAA19946@zelda.intra.waag.org> Dear subscribers, We would like to apologize to all the readers of the newsletter for an unfortunate editorial indiscretion in the reporting of the "Film and Urban Culture Workshop - A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread" - recently held at Sarai. The correspondent to the newsletter for the workshop has inadvertently used the words "... Many of the arguments put forward in the paper presentations were challenged, extended and on occasion, trashed." There has been strong exception to the expression "trashed" in this report. And we at Sarai are in complete agreement with the opinion that the usage of the word "trashed" - which, though it may have been used by the correspondent to signify a healthy liveliness of debate - was completely inappropriate. The discussions at the event were in fact marked by opennesss and dialouge in a lively environment in the best sense of the term. The correspondent has assured me that he did not mean to single out any presenters and that his comments were meant to reflect on the discussions of all the papers. Incorrect formatting which aligns this sentance to the previous paragraph suggests that the expression, (unfortunate as it is) is meant to reflect on two specific presentations. We regret the fact that this impression has occurred, the correspondent assures me that this was not intended. However, even if it were meant to be a general, non-specific remark, the expression remains inapporpriate in itself, and an error in formatting makes it doubly so - because it seems to suggest that specific presentations were being targetted for criticism. We also apologize that due to editorial oversight on my part in compiling the newsletter, such an expression went through, into the public domain. Clearly, when we at Sarai make a commitment to put things out into the Public Domain we are aware that it also carries with it a responsibility to ensure that the decorum and propreity that is an inalienable part of civilised discourse commensurate to the Public Domain is maintained at all costs. What has occurred is due to an error and an oversight and we accept the responsibility for this. We hope that our sincere apologies are accepted by all, especially by those who took such trouble to make the presentations at the event. We assure you all that we will make every effort to ensure that such slippages and errors do not happen in future. regards Saumya Gupta -- Saumya Gupta Sarai: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054 Ph: +91-11- 3960040, 3951190 Fax: +91-11- 3928391, 2943450 www.sarai.net