[Sarai Newsletter] NOVEMBER 2004

[The Sarai Programme]

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2004

Urban Tangent: Exhibition of Cartoons by Rustam Vania

Film @ Sarai: Sense Perception and Knowledge in the Modern City
5th 		Sweet Smell of Success, Dir. Alexander Mackendrick
19th 		High and Low, Dir. Akira Kurosawa

Workshop Report: Emerging Urbanism 
Cybermohalla Residency @ Bootle
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URBAN TANGENT
An Exhibition of Cartoons by Rustam Vania, CSE
November 3 - 17, 2004
Sarai Interface Zone

Globally threatened, locally ignored, with dirty air and even dirtier water,
a government reduced to shooting in the dark and a population more concerned
with consuming than sustaining: sounds familiar?  Welcome to Rustam Vania's
darkly comic take on the state of our urban environment.
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FILM @ SARAI: 
A Cinema of Anxiety: Sense Perception and Knowledge in the Modern City
Curated by Ravi S. Vasudevan

Friday, November 5, 2004, 4:30 pm
SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957), 98 minutes
Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, USA

Friday, November 19, 2004, 4:30 pm
HIGH AND LOW (1962), 143 minutes
Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Japan

Sarai returns to a curatorial focus on "A Cinema of Anxiety". In the 
current series, we look at how feelings of uncertainty and anxiety emerge from 
the way sensory perception and information are organized in the modern city. 
Do we know what it is that we see and hear? Does it conceal something or 
someone else? Are there spaces underlying visible spaces? Is someone 
else listening or looking at us as part of a design we aren't aware of? 
Here, we explore how sense perception is intimately, and sometimes 
duplicitously, related to the conditions of knowing the world. The city 
provides us with a particularly charged space for the drama of the senses and 
knowledge. Its networks in law enforcement, professional expertise and the 
criminal underground (in turn 'departmentalised' into a division of skills) 
provide the circuit through which information is converted into knowledge. 
Telegraph and telephones, fax machines and Internet, motorcars, buses and 
subway relay messages and messengers into a web of meaning. Cutting from 
space to space, criss-crossing narrative tracks, calibrating knowledge for 
the spectator through its manipulation of sound and image, the cinema 
overlaps with these circuits and technologies, condensing in its stories 
crucial dimensions of modern experience.

Fritz Lang, the celebrated German filmmaker whose career straddled five 
decades of cinema in Germany, France and the USA, is a key figure in the 
exploration of these issues. His early work in Germany - the Dr. Mabuse 
trilogy, 'Metropolis' and 'M - The City Hunts for a Murderer', are amongst 
the great essays on the modern city. Both witness to the contemporary and, 
with 'Metropolis', a dystopian vision of the future, Lang unleashed an 
extraordinarily detailed sense of modern technologies of perception and 
communication. His famed opening sequence from 'Dr. Mabuse, the Great 
Gambler' (1922) constructs a rigorously edited theft involving a chase, train 
travel, telegraph transmission, all synchronised by the criminal mastermind 
Mabuse who sits in his sepulchral chambers. Lang's industrial magnate Freder 
who rules Metropolis from his lofty perch, foreshadows the technocrat Tyrell, 
whose Tyrell Corporation looms over the futurist Los Angeles of 'Blade 
Runner' (Ridley Scott, 1983). But Mabuse is more complicated, capturing in 
his persona a demonic power, but also, strangely, the power of anonymity. 
Thus he is a disguise artist who often plays the ordinary street character, 
but also moves in high society. Again, he is an expert in modern hypnosis, 
but also a practitioner of the mystical arts. There are suggestions here of 
an intricate scenario for the imagination of a transcendent evil in post-war 
Gemany, a society mired in inflation, unemployment and excess.

The world of Mabuse is one of rigorous hierarchy and task delegation, in which 
subordinates tremble at the very voice of the diabolical master. We enter a 
different universe of power in 'Sweet Smell of Success', (Alexander 
Mackendrick, USA, 1957), where the malevolent newspaper columnist JJ 
Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) commands fearful allegiance through a virulent pen 
that can wreck public lives and aspiring careers. Here again, voice and 
presence command attention, as Hunsecker lords over the incandescent New York 
of James Wong Howe's glittering camera work. Modern media forms are accessed 
here through the complicated ties of master and toady. The manipulative 
publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) will do anything for his master and to 
get a line in his column. He weaves his way through jazz bars and high 
society spots, scouring for scurrilous material. Words function to rip and 
cut, as a sensorium of stylized dialogue delivery and musical atmospherics 
capture the tenor of the night city, its brute hierarchies and amoral 
manoeuvres.

Akira Kurosawa's work, on the other hand, is animated by a purposeful moral 
and social vision. It is this orientation which organizes the architecture, 
literal and metaphorical, of Tokyo in 'High and Low' (1962). We get a view on 
the city from the high-rise apartment of a well-to-do businessman (Toshiro 
Mifune). Business partners and police descend on his home to work out the 
logistics of dealing with a kidnapper. The likelihood of mistaken identity in 
a city of strangers provides a twist. Instead of the industrialist's son, it 
is the chauffeur's child who has been spirited away. The hero chooses the 
ethical route and will pay ransom for his employee's son, courting financial 
disaster in the process. From the statically conceived, carefully framed 
upper reaches of the city, we are plunged into a different sensory world, 
capturing high speed trains and the underbelly of the city as the police go 
in search of the criminal. Out of an Ed Mcbain crime novel, Kurosawa remains 
true to the genre of the police procedural, mapping zones of likely 
habitation, house searches, and the investigation of criminal networks. At 
the climax, however, the procedural pursuit of knowledge is supplanted. The 
morally calibrated protagonist encounters the imponderable psychology of the 
assailant, a figure whose alienation and resentment achieves an angry aria of 
denunciation that lifts us into a different level of perception about the 
city of darkness.

The curation is supported by the EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme.
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WORKSHOP REPORT: 
Emerging Urbanism
October 27-28, 2004
School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi 

A two-day workshop, 'Emerging Urbanism', was jointly organised by 
Sarai-CSDS and the Department of Urban Design, School of Planning and 
Architecture (SPA), Delhi, on 27-28 October, 2004. Covering a wide range of 
issues and disciplines on urban experiences, the workshop provided a 
cross-disciplinary platform for urban designers, planners, social scientists 
and film makers to share their research and experience. The workshop included 
scholars and practitioners from Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Cochin, Kolkata 
and Delhi. Altogether fourteen papers were presented spread over six sessions 
focusing on 'Cybercity', 'Mumbai', 'Delhi', 'Neighbourhood', 'Media and 
City', and 'Identity Politics in the City'. A film, 'Ladies Special', 
directed by Nidhi Tuli, was also screened during the workshop.

'Emerging Urbanism' was an attempt to critically engage with the past 
decade of urban transformations in India commonly summarised under the 
term, 'globalisation.' The workshop discussions explored the complicated 
nature of locality, legal regimes, the politics of urban planning, dynamics 
of market and questions of publics and public spaces.

During the workshop, various speakers stressed a strong need to set up 
collaborative partnerships in the area of urban research. Hence, a need for 
more similar platforms to share cross-disciplinary thinking on urban 
experiences was realised. Students of Urban Design at the School of Planning 
and Architecture, Delhi, ran the workshop at the SPA premises. The students 
will soon make a detailed report on the workshop available on the Sarai 
website.
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NOTES FROM THE BOOTLE RESIDENCY 
October 10 - 14, 2004

For two weeks in October Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Neelofar and Shveta Sarda from 
the Cybermohalla Labs spent time with a group of eight young women and one 
young man in Bootle (Liverpool) to participate in the processes of their lab 
and to share some of the practices from the Cybermohalla Labs in Delhi.

Bootle is a large part of the city of Liverpool, a locality of the dock 
workers of the city, which has a history of being a port central to global 
trade and transactions for over 300 years. The Bootle Lab is a room in the 
locality, situated in the Venus office. Venus is a non-government 
organisation that has worked with young women - single mothers, with 
unpredictable sources of income - in Bootle for the last twelve years. 

In the two weeks spent at the lab, stories of the everyday, soft evocations of 
relations with strangers, and precise observations about specificities of 
daily living emerged. A blog was set up to create a publicness around the 
narratives. Responses to the texts, on the blog, generated a warmth and 
excitement in the lab of being in conversation, and building a relationship 
of reciprocity with a world outside of the immediate context. A booklet, 
hear at bootle, was also created towards the end of the residency. You can 
access the blog at http://cm-bootle-diary.var.cc  

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Ranita Chatterjee
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