From dak at sarai.net Sat Aug 30 20:00:14 2003 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 20:00:14 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] September 2003 Message-ID: <200308302000.14201.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: September 2003 Talk @ Sarai 2nd Urban Cultures & Politics Seminar The Place of Mumbai: Circles of Urban Identity in the 19th and 20th Century, by Jim Masselos 29th Media Publics & Practices Seminar Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age, by Laura Mulvey Film @ Sarai: History & Film: Spectacle and Subjectivity in the Epoch of Fascism 5th Lacombe Lucien, Directed by Louis Malle 12th Hiroshima Mon Amour, Directed by Alain Resnais 19th Triumph of the Will, Directed by Leni Riefenstahl 26th Olympia, Directed by Leni Riefenstahl Online link for 'Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Friends, In September we return to our Occasional Seminar Series with lectures by a historian and a film theorist. We also continue the History and Film Series focussing on the French and German experiences of Fascism. TALK @ SARAI September 2, 2003, 4:00 pm Urban Cultures & Politics Seminar Series 'The Place of Mumbai: Circles of Urban Identity in the 19th and 20th Century' by Jim Masselos, Department of History, University of Sydney Organised in collaboration with the Australian High Commission. September 29, 2003, 4:00 pm Media Publics & Practices Seminar Series 'Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age' by Laura Mulvey, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London This will be followed by a screening of the film Disgraced Monuments (1993), 48 minutes, Directed by Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis. In 'Disgraced Monuments', Mulvey uses rare archival footage and interviews with sculptors, art historians, gallery and museum directors to examine the fate of monuments of Lenin, Stalin and other leaders of the former Soviet Union after the collapse of communism. Organised in collaboration with The British Council and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, as part of the 'Talking Films' series. FILM @ SARAI History and Film: Spectacle and Subjectivity in the Epoch of Fascism Continuing our series on History and Film, Sarai's September curation builds on Bertolucci's reflections on Italian fascism and history by looking at the German and French experiences. As with Bertolucci, the work of Louis Malle and Alain Resnais look back at a traumatic time as it unravels through individual perception and experience. Malle's 'Lacombe Lucien' (1974) mines a history that has often been particularly difficult to deal with in the post-fascist context: that of the theme of collaboration rather than resistance. The film's focus on a peasant youth draws out the amorality of the individual uncultivated in ethical sensibilities. In 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' (1959), Resnais, working with a script by Marguerite Duras, draws on memories of a French woman's love affair with a German soldier under the Nazi occupation of France, the resulting ostracization and trauma. But he then builds on this to explore a shifting field of engagements, between the dissonant experiences of individual trauma and the mass tragedy of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima. The intimate associations released by a montage of sensual body traces generates a moving flow of sensory, non-rational attachments to different historical experiences. Entirely different in status is the work of Leni Reifenstahl. This is film as historical event rather than contextual document or retrospective engagement. Her major works on behalf of the national socialist party, 'Triumph of the Will' (1934) and 'Olympia' (1938) mapped a new ambition for the so-called documentary work, complicating the relations between representation and event in distinctive ways. In accounts of 'Triumph of the Will', Riefenstahl's film on the 1934 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party, architectural layout and repetition of apparently live action speeches facilitate the event's capture, indeed its production, as a film. State and society become a gargantuan film set. With 'Olympia', while the large scale set of the 1936 Olympic stadium reiterates the method of the earlier film, new, mythic resonances are generated around an aesthetics of the human body in its physical striving. Like the genre of the mountain films in which Riefenstahl starred in the 1920s, 'Olympia' composes a thematic of sublime transcendance. Bodies soar in space, their motion slowed down, figures dot the frame in coordinated activity, and a tryst appears to be fashioned around the body as heavenly abode. Critics have looked at the lure of this aesthetic with suspicion, arguing for the fertile way it ties aesthetics to racist politics in disturbing ways. Whether as technology of the aestheticized and racialized body, or, more mundanely, as template for the subsequent conventions of sports television, 'Olympia' is a critical work in the history of the cinema. September 5, 2003, 4:30 pm Lacombe Lucien (1974), 133 minutes Directed by Louis Malle The location is a small provincial town in south-west France, during the Nazi occupation in the summer of 1944. Tired of his life as a hospital cleaner, 18-year old Lucien Lacombe tries to join the French Resistance, but is turned down on account of his age. All too easily he is recruited by the German police and works as a Gestapo agent, arresting his fellow countrymen and generally tyrannising his former friends and relations. Whilst initially revelling in his new-found position of power, Lucien begins to have second thoughts when he meets and falls in love with a young woman, who is the daughter of a Jewish tailor he has been persecuting. 'Lacombe Lucien' is a study of the corruption of innocence and the realisation of guilt in a young impressionable adult. The central message underpinning the film is that there are no absolutes in evil. This is achieved in a number of ways. For example, at the start of the film, Lucien appears cruel when killing animals for the dinner table. Then, when the film ends, Lucien is seen killing animals for the same reason, but now in an environment of idyllic innocence. The same act, seen from two different perspectives. September 12, 2003, 4:30 pm Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), 91 minutes Directed by Alain Resnais The film is set in the late fifties and involves a French film actress and a Japanese architect who embark on a brief affair in Hiroshima. The intimacy of the encounter makes them reflect on the painful history of the city and the tragedy and humiliation that befell her during a disastrous affair with a German soldier in her hometown in wartime France. Using silent flashbacks and actual documentary footage Resnais begins to draw their different past experiences together as one in the lovers' minds to dramatic effect. In tracing her emotional devastation, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' is less about memory itself, more about the burdensome act of remembering. As Susan Sontag says, "The memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of feeling". At the time of its release the film was hailed as a cinematic watershed, a truly "modern" film by the editors of the influential French magazine 'Cahiers du Cinema'. Jean luc Godard called it the first film without any cinematic references. The film's modernity derives from its representation of a specific fragmentation and anguish, central to the post-War moment - a representation of subjective time, of experience through memory that Resnais and his screenwriter, French novelist Marguerite Duras, borrowed from Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henri Bergson, and others. In joining these elements into a visual composition, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' stands outside the French New Wave, which mostly reworked cinematic conventions. September 19, 2003, 4:30 pm Triumph of the Will (1934), 110 minutes Directed by Leni Riefenstahl 'Triumph of the Will' commences with Hitler's arrival in Nuremberg by plane. Parallels can be made between Hitler's arrival through the skies, and the descent of a God, coming to meet his people - this is heightened by the endless views of clouds, the plane's shadow moving relentlessly over the sunlit streets of Nuremberg, shots of the town's people in the streets staring up with a look of awed expectation on their faces. The Wagnerian music played as Hitler's plane lands, the bands and singing, the beauty of Nuremberg, the hysteria of the crowds with their arms outstretched to greet him, combine to make up a display of Nazi passion and obsession. It is this emotional response of the people in the film and the emotional response the audience gains from these majestic shots that are at once inspirational, seductive and horrifying. It cannot be denied that the film is a record of an event - an actuality - and happened where and when and in the order that the film says it did. It has generally been accepted that the Nuremberg Rally was staged for the cameras, rather than the cameras having to accommodate the action. The film was financed by the Nazi Government, completed with the full co-operation of all involved, with huge resources at Riefenstahl's disposal - an unlimited budget, crew of 120 and between 30 and 40 cameras. Leni Riefenstahl, in an interview in 1964, said that 'Triumph Of The Will' was a recording of an event, not a propaganda film: "If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history." However, over the years 'Triumph Of The Will' has been described as "an impressive spectacle of Germany's adherence to Hitler", a "Nazi masterpiece" and "a masterpiece of romanticised propaganda". Susan Sontag in her essay 'Fascinating Fascism' claims that 'Triumph of the Will' is the "most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the film-makers having an aesthetic or visual concept independent of propaganda". September 26, 2003, 4:30 pm Olympia (1938), 225 minutes Directed by Leni Riefenstahl Amid ovations for 'Triumph of the Will', Riefenstahl proposed a new project: a long film on the Olympic games to be held in Berlin in 1936. She negotiated with the International Olympic Committee, not mentioning her plan to Hitler; she wanted to avoid official sponsorship. The Olympic officials were cautious. Riefenstahl wished to prepare pits beside jumping areas, camera rails along running tracks, towers at the diving sites. Fearing that the outcome of contests might eventually be challenged on the ground of distraction, officials required her to obtain approvals from all national committees and from all contestants individually. At enormous effort, over many months, she secured these approvals. 'Olympia' eventually became two feature-Iength films, and another organizational achievement of amazing virtuosity. She was restricted to six camera positions on the stadium field. but supplemented these with cameras in grandstands and many elsewhere. Automatic cameras were sent aloft via free balloons, with attached instructions for returning the film to Leni Riefenstahl. The most startling photographic innovation involved diving; dives were followed through the air and then under water without a break. The start of the dive was photographed from the surface of the water; at the moment of impact the cameraman went under water with his special camera while changing focus and aperture. It took months to perfect the procedure. 'Olympia' is considered by some to be one of the best documentaries ever made - a brilliant record of the human spirit and athletic excellence, documenting the achievements of men and women of all races and colors. Other theorists have criticiqued it on the grounds that Riefenstahl focuses more on the glorification of the human form rather than the sporting events. ----------- 'Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies' is now available in the US with Autonomedia. To buy online click on http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/FMPro?-db=products.fp5&-format=detail.htm&-lay=cgi&-sortfield=name&-sortorder=descend&keyword=sarai&-max=250&-recid=33093&-token.0=12592577&-find= Cheers, Ranita The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040 (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net