Sarai Film Series IV

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Sarai Film Series IV: A Cinema of Anxiety

Amongst its many attractions, the cinema revels in precipitating film 
audiences into states of fear, disorientation and escalating paranoia. 
Rather than anchor the spectator to stable character perspective, 
coherent social mores and clear spatial and temporal orientations, 
this cinema thrusts us into a state of uncertainty, anxiety, and 
dread. We don't always know who's look the camera simulates, we don't 
know where we are, sometimes we don't even know when we are in the 
temporality of the narrative world.

Characters behave unpredictably, suspicion abounds, bodies mutate, new 
spaces and senses of space induce a perceptual vertigo. Thriller and 
horror genres mine this field as their mainstay, and the variegated 
field of urban experience provides us with one of its characteristic 
settings. 

With its concern for city experience and the radical transformations 
in perception effected by film form and media experience, the Sarai 
programme introduces an occasional film series devoted to the 
exploration of a cinema of anxiety. Interspersed and occasionally 
dovetailing with our Asian film cultures series, we hope to move 
towards a short retrospective and workshop on intimations of anxiety 
and dread in the contemporary Bombay cinema later this year. [We are 
thinking of the following films: Parinda/Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989, 
Darr/Yash Chopra, 1992, Gardish/Priyadarshan, 1993, Is Raat ka Subah 
Nahin/Sudhir Mishra, 1994, and Satya/Ram Gopal Varma, 1998]. 

Asian Film Cultures : This  series will continue from mid August with 
a set of Iranian films, in collaboration with the Iranian Cultural Centre.

The Schedule for Sarai Film Series IV follows. All films will be 
screened in the Seminar Room, Centre for the Study of Developing 
Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi, 110054, at 4: 30 pm.

1. Friday, July 27, 2001, 4:30 pm

After Hours
USA, 1985, 97 minutes
Director: Martin Scorsese, 

We are pleased to start the series with Martin Scorsese's After Hours 
(1985), a comedy about urban paranoia. A meek word-processing 
operative ventures forth to date a neurotic blonde in New York's Soho 
district, and is ensnared by a nightmare bohemian city in a cascading 
series of strange encounters, uncannily recurring visual motifs and a 
careening sexual paranoia. Catching the master of visceral cinema in 
an uncharacteristic comic mode, After Hours also showcases the 
arresting camera work and editing of long term collaborators Michael 
Ballhaus and Thelma Schoonmaker.


2. Friday, August 3, 2001, 4:30 pm

Don't Look Now, 
UK/Italy, 1973,  110 minutes
Director: Nicholas Roeg

Roeg's psychic thriller out of a Daphne du Maurier short story 
develops a tactile, intricate weave of associations amongst bodies, 
memories, imaginative projections, aural and visual textures. Its 
remarkable opening passage develops perceptual           linkages 
amongst the placid surfaces of a pond, shards of glass, reflections in 
a mirror, and the colour red as it seeps from an obscure figure on an 
architect's slide into the doom laden narrative world. Readable as a 
meditation on the folly of seeking to bring about order and ward off 
intimations of mortality through the linear sequencing of film 
narrative, it's also hauntingly effective taken straight up as an 
occult film.


3. Friday, August 10, 2001, 4:30 pm

Peeping Tom
UK 1960, 103 minutes
Director: Michael Powell

The great British director Powell became the object of a hate campaign 
in the British press with his last film, an essay on the relations 
between cinema, sexual aggression and the film spectator. Released 
just before Hitchcock's Psycho, Peeping Tom has a protagonist, Mark, 
who photographs nudes for the pornographic press and is focus puller 
on a film set. This marginal man had a traumatic childhood at the 
hands of a father whose clinical experiments with his son's emotions 
are captured in a   stunningly shot home movie; his subjectivity 
becomes inseparable from that of the
camera as vehicle of aggression and fear in a culture whose secret 
passion is the degraded female body. Strange dissonances abound, as 
when the English protagonist is played by the Austrian actor Karl 
Boehm, evoking associations across film history with Peter Lorre's 
tortured child murderer in Fritz Lang's M (1931). And some of the 
reaction against the director must have come from the portrait of 
British society, as the film penetrates the banal surfaces of everyday 
life to uncover a seedy underbelly of an under-the-counter dirty 
magazine trade supplied by murky soft porn studios.





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