From dak at sarai.net Tue Nov 4 11:16:37 2003 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 11:16:37 +0530 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] NOVEMBER 2003 Message-ID: <200311041116.40120.dak@sarai.net> CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2003 12th Delhi Seminar Series: Re-building and Re-theorising Colonial Delhi 19th CSDS Social and Political Seminar Series: Copyright Law, the Public Domain and the Indian Constitution 25th Media Art Presentation: Pan-O-Matic Film @ Sarai: US Counter Culture 7th To Sleep With Anger, Directed by Charles Burnett 14th Shortcuts, Directed by Robert Altman 28th Safe, Directed by Todd Haynes Installation 1st ? 19th Amodal Suspension ? Relational Architecture 8 Announcement: Call For Papers - Film and History Workshop 18th Deadline for Abstracts ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I. TALK @ SARAI Wednesday, November 12, 2003, 3:30 pm URBAN CULTURES AND POLITICS: THE DELHI SEMINAR SERIES Re-building and Re-theorising Colonial Delhi: Governmentality and the Delhi Improvement Trust by Stephen Legg, Cambridge University II. CSDS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY SEMINAR SERIES Wednesday, November 19, 2003, 4.00 pm Shifting The Goalposts: Copyright Law, the Public Domain and the Indian Constitution by Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Alternative Legal Forum, Bangalore III. MEDIA ART PRESENTATION @ SARAI Tuesday, November 25, 2003, 3:30 pm Pan-O-Matic by Stephanie Rothenberg, Video and Net Artist, New York A multimedia work consisting of a video, web site and performance centered around the mysterious disappearance of a fictitious female inventor. Her mission is the development of a cyber divining rod, a metaphor for a utopian device able to enhance all communities and lifestyles. The video serves as an infommercial introducing the character, her invention and disappearance whereas the web site, in progress, will enable users to participate in the investigation. The site will ultimately function as a space for the collective rethinking of technogadgetry and issues of technological colonization; who is this technology created for? How is it being implemented? IV. FILM @ SARAI: US Counter Culture Curated by Ravi S. Vasudevan Sarai introduces a new curatorial series devoted to filmmakers working at the margins of US cinema. Cultivating a critical outlook to reigning ideologies, narrative conventions and filmmaking protocols, these filmmakers range from independents working with minimum finance to others who, while working with mainstream finance and the star system, have nevertheless managed to generate a creative oeuvre which has rarely achieved adequate backing and distribution. We hope overtime to feature work from the American underground, but our initial series will focus on three directors who have by and large worked within the format of narrative cinema, if in innovative and destabilizing ways. November 7, 2003, 4:30 pm To Sleep With Anger (1990), 120 minutes Directed by Charles Burnett November 14, 2003, 4:30 pm Shortcuts (1993), 189 minutes Directed by Robert Altman November 28, 2003, 4:30 pm Safe (1995), 125 minutes Directed by Todd Haynes Charles Burnett is a key figure of the Black American cinema. His first film, a diploma piece for the UCLA Film School was subsequently fleshed out into a feature length film, 'The Killer of Sheep' (1977) and is considered a landmark work. Dispensing with linear causality, this first film generates a sense of the everyday life of a young black who moves between his job at a slaughter house and the rhythms of family life. His 1990 film, 'To Sleep With Anger', takes as its subject a black family which plummets into a strange, dark magical sense of past lives, irrational beliefs, existensial torpor and irrupting violence. The transformation is effected by the visit of an old acquaintance from the south, a seductive figure who lures the different members of the family into strange and unexpected dimensions of their personality. This is a great performance by Danny Glover, indicating skills far removed from the action heroics of the 'Lethal Weapon' movies. Burnett went on to direct television documentaries and series, including a documentary about the new generation of immigrants in the U.S., 'America Becoming' (1991) and an Oprah Winfrey-produced miniseries for ABC, 'The Wedding' (1998). Of this later work many critics have singled out 'Nightjohn' (1996). Made for the Disney Channel, the film adapts a novel for young adults by Gary Paulsen, and tells the story of Sarny (Allison Jones), a young house slave on a cotton plantation, who is taught to read by Nightjohn (Carl Lumbly), a slave who escaped to the north but returned to captivity to teach others what he knew. By the film's end, Sarny's surrogate family has been broken up and she is to be sold to another owner, but the lesson has been learned: she too will pass on what she knows. Critics pointed out that while Nightjohn is on the surface the family friendly fare typical of a PG-13 Disney movie, it doesn't shrink from showing slavery's horrors, and tells an adolescent's coming-of-age story with an adult's sense of historical reality and moral complexity. Amongst Burnett's other projects is his contribution to a television series on the blues that will feature work by Scorsese, Eastwood and Mike Figgis. At the age of 78, Robert Altman is a legendary figure who has consistently worked against the grain of mainstream genres, developing an irreverent, frequently carnivalesque tapestry of American society, its losers, dropouts and marginals. His career is dotted with landmark films, including 'MASH' (1970), starring Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, his scatological comedy about an army hospital and its bohemian surgeons at the Korean front, later to be developed into a long running television series. Other work includes his at once dreamlike and deconstructive western, 'MacCabe and Mrs. Miller' (1971), with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty; his affectionate send up of the hardboiled detective film, 'The Long Goodbye', transplanting Chandler's Philip Marlowe to contemporary Los Angeles and through the wryly bumbling, out-of-joint persona of Elliot Gould; the wonderful 'Nashville' (1975), his ensemble piece about the dreams and aspirations of a myriad hopefuls who descend on the American country western music capital; 'The Player' (1990), his clinical dissection of Hollywood business maneouvres; and the extraordinary 'Shortcuts' (1993), culled from several Raymond Carver short stories. 'Shortcuts' weaves together several narrative worlds, deploying a glancing structure which has characters touch, move away, intersect in a richly textured evocation of the cross currents which traverse a host of separated lives. From the beginning, Altman's engagement with the ensemble, and his capacity to weave together many stories and characters, was enhanced by innovations in film sound. His multi-track system, first used in 'MASH', captured layers of sound and speech as these are dispersed across and in the depth of the story world, conjuring up a sometimes hallucinatory acoustic environment. Todd Haynes, a key American independent, made a series of short films, which includes 'Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story' (1987), which comically, and darkly, mobilizes the Barbie Doll image to look at the tragic unraveling of the life of the pop star. Haynes made an impact with his first feature, 'Poison' (1991), winning top prize at the US independent film festival, Sundance. Inspired by the work of Jean Genet, the film is composed of three stories, Hero, Horror and Homo, and draws upon the conventions of horror movies, 1950s melodramas and the prison film to explore scenarios of violent transgression and illicit love. While a self-conscious voice of the gay community, his work does not always take gay experience as its subject, but, in his own account, seeks to use this to explore the lack of fit between subjectivity and environment. In the mesmerizing 'Safe' (1995), he gestures to a key issue for the community, the question of aids as metaphor and reality, but focuses on the travails faced by a young woman afflicted with a mysterious, and escalating reaction to the environment. Composed in long shot, and avoiding the conventions of the close up in its reflections on the plight of its female character, 'Safe' is a film of obsessive distance and cold tones. Julianne Moore's assailed housewife finds herself descending into a morbid and undiagnosable illness, where the very air seems fraught with danger. After this came the celebratory 'Velvet Goldmine' (1998), his film about the phenomenon of "glamrock" in the 1970s, and exploring the culture of bisexuality cultivated in the music scene. Recently, Haynes has taken over the heritage of Douglas Sirk, the German director who in 1950's Hollywood deployed domestic melodramas as vehicles of ironic reflection on familial norms and social expectations. In 'Far From Heaven' (2002), Haynes draws on Sirk's 'All That Heaven Allows' (1955), again starring the key contemporary actor Julianne Moore (who also features in Altman's 'Shortcuts'), this time inducting themes of interracial and gay sexuality into the scenario. V. INSTALLATION @ SARAI November 1 ? 19, 2003 "Amodal Suspension ? Relational Architecture 8" an interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer commissioned for the opening of the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan. This installation will receive text messages sent by people over the Internet or by cell phone and convert them into patterns of flashing lights in the sky, turning the Japanese city of Yamaguchi into a giant communication switchboard. While the actual piece is located in the public space around the new YCAM Center, people may participate remotely through the project website at www.amodal.net or through an access station in various centres across the world including Sarai. For a list of other access centres log on to www.amodal.net. All the programs in the site have been written in the Java language and can be run with the vast majority of web browsers and operating systems. Message Flow: Log on to the project website and visit the section labelled ?participate?. The browser will load a java applet that shows a real-time 3D visualization of the YCAM Center and park. The 3D window shows exactly what is happening in Yamaguchi at any given point in time. To send a message, simply enter it in the space provided with your name and location. If you would like to be notified when your message is caught, please enter your email address. If you would like to specify a particular recipient for the message please enter his or her information on the bottom right. When a message is received in Japan the system automatically encodes it as a unique sequence of flashes and sends it to the sky with a network of 20 robotically-controlled searchlights. The signaling is similar to Morse code or the flashing of fireflies, ?the lights will modulate their intensity to represent different text characters. Each message, once encoded, is ?suspended? in the sky of the city, bouncing around the YCAM center, relayed from one searchlight to another. An email is sent to the intended recipient to notify him or her that ?a message is waiting for them in the sky of Yamaguchi?. Each light sequence will continue to circulate until the recipient or somebody else ?catches? the message and reads it. To catch a message, you can select the ?catch tool? that is under the 3D window. As you roll over a light ray with the mouse cursor you can see the name and location of whoever sent that particular message. If you click on the light with the catch tool the message is revealed to you and the author and intended recipient are notified. Right after this, the message is removed from the sky, shown on a large projection in Yamaguchi, and finally placed in a 3D archive where it will remain in Brownian motion with the rest of the messages received by the project. To highlight the irony of globalization, the piece will use an automatic translation engine between Japanese and English, ?this will produce inaccurate but charming results. ?Amodal Suspension? creates an interactive mesh of light over the city, a floating cloud of data that can be written on and read. While visualizing the traffic of information on an urban scale, the piece is also intended as a deviation from the assumed transparency of electronic communication. Venue: YCAM and the central park in Yamaguchi City, in the South West of Japan. The searchlights will be visible from a 15 Km (10 Mile) radius. Credits: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ? Conception and Direction, Yukiko Shikata ? Curator VI. ANNOUNCEMENT: FILM AND HISTORY WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS A Sarai-CSDS Workshop December 11 - 13, 2003. Film constitutes a crucial archive of the twentieth century, and, despite the various changes which have taken place in its existence as a public form, it continues to exercise great influence, now dispersed from the domain of public cinema-going into a host of new circuits. Arguably, with the advent of new cheaper technologies, it is now available for wider social practice, in forms ranging from entertainment cinema to documentary formats. As an archive, it speaks to the importance of mediation in history: the way cognition and perception are crucially transformed by the intercession of new technologies of sound and image. From the annals of mass entertainment forms, through the variety of art works and documentary practices, film presents us with a huge resource to research the particular types of knowledge and forms of experience of the modern epoch in human history. Following on from our curation of the Film and History series over the last three months, the Sarai programme is planning a workshop on this theme. We would especially like to encourage students to make presentations, and are inviting paper proposals which should contain a one page abstract of the paper. Proposals must be submitted by 18th November. As the workshop is of limited duration, there will be a process of selection. We are particularly looking for postgraduates, research scholars and above, but can consider interesting proposals from younger students. Our call is primarily for Delhi based students. However, outstation candidates who can fund themselves are welcome to apply. Proposals may draw upon any national or international dimension of film for their focus. They may focus on the individual film, a film genre, a particular period of cinema. The idea is to present a rigorous argument which also highlights questions of method, whether in terms of formal analysis or empirical and contextual investigation. Those selected are encouraged to use video clips to illustrate their argument. The workshop focuses on a specific set of questions. These provide guidelines for the type of issues we would like to discuss, but other ways of posing the question are welcome. i. Film and Historical Perception: How does film ask us to think about history, about the relation of past and present? We would like to think about this in a differentiated way. For example, how does the genre of the historical film, often castigated for its fantastical and inaccurate scenarios, generate a discussion about history? Does the genre afford us with a sense of popular historical perception, outside the protocols of academic writing? How have questions of personal memory, senses of time and duration, intersected with the representation of the large historical event? The latter has often been a concern of art works and documentary practices, influencing the very rhythms of film form, but it has also been taken up by entertainment cinema as well, as for example in the case of Kamalahasan's Hey Ram! (1999). ii. The Filmic Past as a Discourse of History: Arguably, film does not allow us access to a historical or social referent directly. At a crucial level, films may refer primarily to films - the body of narrative codes, technical practices, generic parameters, star images and acting conventions that compose the history of the cinema. If film's past is the primary historical reference point for understanding the past-present logic of film, how do we position this in relation to a wider historical discourse? iii. History and the Technologies of Filmic Perception: Crucially, the past/present relationship is given a particular inflection by film. What functions does film technology, often driven by a will to display the novel and the spectacular, and thereby integral to an audio-visual here and now, have in the past-present dialectic of historical discourse? iv. Film and the Sense of Historical Time: We would like to explore different notions of historical time in the workshop. Historical discourse in the cinema can range from narratives about fairly remote time, including here the most ancient and the relatively recent (in the Indian context, this includes histories of nationalism and communalism). But there may also be a way in which contemporary history itself becomes the subject of the cinema. One rendering may have the past as very recent, but nevertheless distinguished from the present because of the cataclysmic event which divides time: this is the case, for example, with a number of films about the Partition of the subcontinent which emerged in the early 1960s. But in other instances history may emerge despite a sense of continuity, and without the pronounced rupture associated with major events. Can we explore this more fluid, more inchoate signaling of transformation within the orbit of ordinary lives (for example, in the documentary format), or even through genres of the everyday (as, say, in domestic melodramas and family socials). Even when the time is the present continuous, there may be intimations that the times are also historical, communicating a sense of the epochal significance of a period. There are suggestions of this, for example, in the cinema of the 1970s, and especially the films of Amitabh Bachchan. v. History and Film in the Digital Age: In many ways discourses about the relationship between cinema and history have been determined by a notion of the priviliged relationship of the photographic image to reality, the way it captures a real object by the imprint made by light and shadow on film stock. With the emergence of digital forms, there is an awareness that the image can be internally manipulated, without reference to an `external' reality. Such arguments often forget the variety of ways film has manufactured images, for example through stop motion editing, back projection and matte shots. But one of our explorations could focus on the question of whether the shift into digital forms has fundamentally upset perceptions about the relationship between image and object, film and history. vi. Film as Archive: Finally, how can film be thought of as a historical source that can tell us something about the times in which it was made, the function and imagination it served? We may consider here the ambitious film event, such as the work of a Leni Reifenstahl in Triumph of the Will (1935), where the cinema is akin to a historical monument, architecturally organized to solicit feelings of awe, a sense of a before and an after. But we would like to consider the more modest, everyday film as well. How can we access an Indian genre film, say a `social, a `family social, an action movie, to think about historical context? Apart from analyzing the film itself, what other resources, say in print, televisual, popular visual and musical culture, can we draw on to make the film talk about its context? Each evening will conclude with a full-length feature film presentation related to the themes of the workshop. This will be open to the general public. A CV and one page abstract indicating the scope, nature and approach of the proposed paper should be sent by email or post to Ranita Chatterjee Programme Coordinator, Sarai Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054. Ph: 23960040, 23942199 (ext 307) Email: ranita at sarai.net For enquiries contact Sadan (sadan at sarai.net) The applications must reach by 18th November, 2003. Selected candidates will be informed soon after submission of their applications. 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