From dak at sarai.net Thu Jul 31 16:05:14 2003 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:05:14 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] NL - AUGUST 2003 Message-ID: <200307311605.14091.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: AUGUST 2003 FILM at SARAI: History and Film - Bernardo Bertolucci 1st August The Spider's Stratagem 8th August 1900 Part I 22nd August 1900 Part II TALK at SARAI 26th August Explorations in Audiophotography SARAI @ PARK FICTION, GERMANY FORTHCOMING ANNOUNCEMENTS: Call for Proposals for Sarai Independent Fellowships Call for Articles for Sarai Reader 04 ---------------------------------------------------------------- FILM at SARAI :History and Film - Bernardo Bertolucci Curated by Ravi Vasudevan Sarai starts a new film series devoted to the relationship between cinema and history. The cinema has, from its inception, taken the fabrication of the past as one its main attractions. From 'Birth of a Nation' (D W Griffith, 1915) to 'Gangs of New York' (Martin Scorsese, 2003), 'Napoleon' (Abel Gance, 1927) to 'La Reine Margot' (Patrice Cherau, 1993), 'Pukar' (Sohrab Modi, 1939) to 'Mughal-e-Azam' (K Asif, 1960), 'Alexander Nevsky' (Eisenstein, 1939) to 'Andrei Rublyov' (Tarkovsky, 1960), and so on, the historical film often relates to the history of nation-states. Variously hagiographic and critical, the genre combines a fascination for the intricate period setting with narratives that seek to fashion lineages for a politics of the contemporary. The historical as a mode of narrative construction in the cinema ranges from the licence-taking codes of the popular entertainment genre, the studios, researched reconstruction, as well as a self-reflective disposition highlighting the relationship between history, technologies of cinematic representation and the experience of the present. Narratives range from the ancient through to the very recent. As a genre, the historical film overlaps with war films, westerns, samurai epics, biographicals and biblical narratives, to the more intimate remembrances associated with personal narratives as they intersect with public and collective histories. The series will also explore the cinema as a form of contextual documentation and intervention. Here we hope to look at landmark documentaries such as the work of Leni Reifenstahl, as well as resonant fictions that capture the complexities of their time. To begin the series, we start with the work of the major filmmaker, Bernardo Bertolucci. A much touted young writer of distinguished literary lineage, Bertolucci emerged at a time when the French New Wave was investigating the language of film narrative, an environment noticeable in the Italian's work from the early 'Partner' through to 'Last Tango in Paris' (1972). Affliations with the Communist Party also saw him looking to Soviet epic traditions, perhaps most strikingly evident in a poetics of the image harking back to the work of Dovzhenko. Throughout his career Bertolucci was also concerned with the relations between personal subjectivity and historical experience and memory. We have chosen two films which take the issue of time, memory and history as central engagements, if in rather different ways. In 'The Spider's Strategem', (1970), inspired by a short story by Borges, the present generation grapples with the history which has formed them, as as a son undertakes a journey to uncover the politics of his father, a resistance fighter in 1940's Italy. Noted for its formal dexterity in building parallels and symmetries between past and present and in the delineation of subjectivity 'The Spider's Strategem' stands in contrast to the epic canvas and temporal sweep of '1900', (1976), where Bertolucci maps half a century of the history of the Italian countryside, the ties of lord and peasant, the conflicting forces of socialism and fascism, as these are worked out in the destiny of its main protagonists. Friday, August 1, 2003, 4:30 pm The Spider's Stratagem (1970), 100 minutes Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci 'The Spider's Stratagem' explores the connection between identity politics and fascist politics. In this film we view the story primarily through the eyes of Athos Magnani Jr, whose deceased father is memorialized by a small town as an anti-fascist hero. Athos Jr returns to his hometown, Tara, in search of the truth about his father's assassination. The further Athos plunges into his father's life, the more their identities become intertwined, until the boundaries between Senior and Junior are practically indistinguishable. Bertolucci makes this slippage in identity explicit by using the same actor for the role of both father and son and also employs various filmic devices including shooting style, use of mise-en-scene, and parallel editing to support this identity crisis. Bertolucci constructed 'The Spider's Stratagem' by intimately incorporating the imagery and ideology of Renè Magritte to further emphasize the feeling of an ambiguity of identity and loss of self. Bertolucci himself acknowledges, "...I bought a book on Magritte and studied it at length with Vittorio [Storaro, his cinematographer] ...Magritte was the inspiration for the lighting in Spider's Stratagem." Many shots in the film, including the first time we see Athos Jr in close-up and towards the end when he discovers the truth of his father's death, are recreations of Magritte - paintings where reality is not what it seems. Ultimately, Athos Jr discovers that his father's death was in fact staged; having betrayed his comrades' plot to assassinate Mussolini to the fascists, Magnani Sr decided to redeem himself by becoming an anti-fascist symbol for the people, a symbol of hope. The "staged" aspect of his death is underlined by the fact that his assassination occurs in an opera house. In this way, Bertolucci links the idea of cinema with that of historical memory. Memory, like cinema, is a social construct; although cinema can temporarily destabilize the viewer's identity, Bertolucci seems to be reminding us that maintaining one's identity is essential to the ability to view critically. Friday, August 8, 2003, 4:30 pm 1900 Part I (1976), 175 minutes Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci Friday, August 22, 2003, 4:30 pm 1900 Part II (1976), 165 minutes Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci Bernardo Bertolucci, flush with box office success after the release of 'Last Tango in Paris', put his new earnings into this panoramic vision of Italian political, social and cultural history from the beginning of the century to the present (The film ends in 1945, but Bertolucci has said that he "wanted to continue the story until the end of the century."). Events are filtered through the parallel and intersecting lives of a peasant (Gerard Depardieu) and a land-owner (Robert De Niro). Bertolucci indulges his love of spectacle while trying, at the same time, to balance it with his ideological concerns. It's a film that turns away from the introspection of Bertolucci's previous films and instead aims for a popular movie of the class struggle using the style of both American epics and the lyrical Soviet cinema of the 1930's. According to Bertolucci, '1900' is a "recollection, a collage of my childhood, my friends, and of my father." While he came from a middle-class family, he spent much of his childhood with the peasants in the Parma countryside where he was born in 1941 - and many of these experiences directly informed '1900'. The film is structured with the rhythm of the seasons; boyhood scenes are set in the warmth of summer, autumn and winter for the rise of Mussolini to power, and finally springtime for the resurgence of hope and freedom that followed the defeat of the fascists at the end of World War II. Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's cinematographer in many of his films says, "In '1900' we were trying to reproduce the entire life of a century through the visual representation of one year.... We started filming in summertime, then we had to wait six weeks for the autumn. We mainly did it on location..." Bertolucci covers the forty-five-year arc with deft characterization and arresting visuals, including an ear-cutting scene that puts Van Gogh and Quentin Tarantino to shame. We will screen the film in two parts on the 8th and the 22nd of August. TALK at SARAI Tuesday August 26, 4:00 pm Explorations in Audiophotography David Frohlich, HP Labs The convergence of digital cameras, camcorders and telephones raises new possibilities for multimedia memory capture. One such possibility is the combination of sound clips with still images. Ambient sounds could be captured on an audio-enabled camera, while spoken stories, music and conversation could be added or captured later during the life of the photograph. In this talk I show how Western families choose to use these facilities, by playing a variety of audiophotographs they created in field trials. The findings suggest that audiophotos are an attractive new media form lying somewhere between photographs and video, and that audiophotography could become a mass market practice with the right technological support. David Frohlich is a Senior Research Scientist working on the future of photography in Hewlett Packard Labs. He has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Sheffield, and post-doctoral training in Conversation Analysis from the University of York. David's interests in psychology, amateur photography and new media technology merge in his work on audiophotography, which he is now developing further as Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art in London. SARAI @ PARK FICTION, GERMANY June 19 - July 5, 2003 Mrityunjay Chatterjee and Shveta Sarda were invited by Park Fiction (http://www.parkfiction.org) to share their experiences in the Cybermohalla project with a group of youngsters in Hamburg, Germany. Park Fiction is a citizens' initiative in the harbor area of St. Pauli, the red-light district in Hamburg, and one of the city's poorest quarters. An audio work was developed from recordings made by the group and played during a conference, Unlikely Encounters, that followed. Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai joined them for the three day conference that also included groups from Argentina, Mexico, Italy and Hamburg. For details on the conference click on http://www.parkfiction.org/unlikelyencounters/koonsmann.php The trio also made the presentations in Dresden and Berlin. FORTHCOMING ANNOUNCEMENTS: We will shortly send out the call for Proposals for Sarai Independent Fellowships 2003-04, on the newsletter list. An announcement of the call for the Sarai Reader 04 will also be made on this list, as well as on several lists including the Reader List, Nettime, Spectre and Fibreculture. Do keep a lookout on the list and on our website (http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm) Cheers, Ranita The Sarai Programme Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054 Tel: (+91) 11 23960040, ext 20 (+91) 11 23942199, et 307 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net