From dak at sarai.net Wed Jul 6 14:33:25 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 11:03:25 +0200 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] JULY 2005 Message-ID: <70dcb2bdb8fd0adb74d57dc25cac7901@sarai.net> CONTENTS: JULY 2005 Film @ Sarai: Revenge 8th The Searchers, dir. John Ford 15th Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance OR Old Boy, dir. Park Chan-Wook 22nd Boiling Point, dir. Takeshi Kitano 29th 21 Grams, dir. Alejandro Innaritu Call for Applications: Digital Video Image Masterclass @ Sarai Forthcoming: Sarai txt 2.3 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Film @ Sarai: REVENGE This month’s Sarai curation looks at four films, set in geographically and culturally diverse spaces, in which revenge is a major thematic. At the heart of these films lies the obsessive protagonist, a life given over to one aim, where everything and everyone else is pushed to the margins. The films render this obsessive subjectivity in a variety of ways. With Ford's ‘The Searchers’, it as if the nobility and grandeur of the Western genre's protagonist, he who will not allow law or civilisation to rein in his romantic embrace of the space beyond the frontier, is turned inside out, the romance turned into a pathology fixated on revenge against a demonically portrayed native American. Takeshi Kitano's work brings a strange, lulling effect to its orchestration of the violence emerging from revenge scenarios. Distanced, ironic, the director's work seems to have no place for a moral point of view. Rather, his aesthetic, a series of exquisitely rendered static images stitched into the flow of narrative time, can often take quite horrific material and turn it into a whimsical, existentialist reflection on the male action hero. Contemporary Korea, on the other hand, takes recourse to shock tactics, a spectacular, visceral display of relentless savagery, showcasing an elaborate compendium of the violence you can visit on the human body. We have chosen a somewhat mild specimen here, Park Chan Wook's ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’, a tale of abduction and revenge that recalls Kurosawa's ‘High and Low’ (1962). ‘Sympathy...’ displays great story-telling virtuosity, where good intentions are neutralized by the cruel logic of chance to ensure that matters get out of hand and go horrifyingly wrong. Finally, ‘21 Grams’, Alejandro Innurita's follow up to Amores Perros (2001), concludes the curation on a meditative note. The film renders grief, pain, and the desire for revenge and restitution through the director's experiments with narrative time. Character lives criss-cross fatalistically, times past, present and future commingle, bodies are rendered fragile and mutable, and we come away with an eerie sense of how our lives only await a chance encounter to careen into a destabilizing involvement with the lives of others. July 8, 2005, 4:30 pm The Searchers (1956), 119 minutes Directed by John Ford ‘The Searchers’ is considered by many to be a true American masterpiece of filmmaking, and the best, most influential, and perhaps most-admired film of director John Ford; being admired by and influencing later directors including Godard, Scorcese, Wenders and Spielberg. It tells the emotionally complex story of a perilous, hate-ridden quest and Homeric-style odyssey of self-discovery after a Comanche massacre, while also exploring the themes of racial prejudice and sexism. The film examines the inner psychological turmoil of a fiercely independent, crusading man obsessed with revenge and hatred, who searches for his two nieces among the "savages" over a five-year period. July 15, 2005, 4:30 pm Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), 121 minutes Directed by Park Chan-Wook Ryu, a young deaf-mute, lives with his sister who is his only family. He works hard at a factory, but he gets fired for absenteeism because he’s been taking care of his sister who’s in urgent need of a kidney transplant. Ryu does his best with his limited means. His strong-minded girlfriend Yong-Mi, who is a social activist, is making love with him when she brazenly talks about kidnapping a girl belonging to a wealthy family. They randomly choose Dong-jin, a self-made business man with a young daughter. But who really becomes the victim? From this point on, the film is no longer about the kidnapping of a child. All of the characters’ lives are scrambled, diverging drastically from their simple existences they previously knew. OR July 15, 2005, 4:30 pm Old Boy (2003), 120 minutes Directed by Park Chan-Wook, “Like Shakespeare's ‘Titus Andronicus’ with chopsticks, this Korean thriller is a modern Asian answer to the Elizabethan revenge tragedy”, says reviewer Jamie Russell. Choi Min-sik stars as kidnap victim Dae-su, who's locked up for 15 years by an anonymous enemy, without any explanations. He then is released, equipped with money, a cell phone and expensive clothes. As he strives to explain his imprisonment and get his revenge, he soon finds out that not only does his kidnapper still have plans for him, but that those plans will serve as the even worse finale to 15 years of imprisonment. Filled with moments of visceral oral violence (eating a live octopus, dental extractions with a claw hammer, and snipping out a tongue with scissors), and dizzyingly outrageous plot twists, this film was winner of the Grand jury Prize at Cannes ­ not only because Quentin Tarantino was heading the jury - but also because it goes beyond its spectacular ultra violence into an exploration of love, loss, grief, remembrance and the breaching of taboos. July 22, 2005, 4:30 pm Boiling Point (1990), 96 minutes Directed by Takeshi Kitano Masaki is a passive gas station attendant and baseball team benchwarmer. His one moment of action is a badly timed attack on a rude customer who just happens to be Yakuza. When the gangsters start taking it out on both his coworkers and his teammates, Masaki sets out to buy a gun to take care of the problem. Perhaps Kitano's most oblique film, ‘Boiling Point’ is made up primarily of digressions, notably the rambling middle, where a disgraced mobster (played by Takeshi Kitano himself) takes Masaki and his pal on a tour of local nightlife, a sequence of pokerfaced gags and dry, ironic humor twisted around Takeshi's brutal, misogynist antics. July 29, 2005, 4:30 pm 21 Grams (2003), 124 minutes Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu The film will be introduced by film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar The lives of three people are drawn together when loving housewife Cristina Peck is forced to suffer the loss of her husband Michael and their two daughters, killed in a hit-and-run by born-again ex-con Jack Jordan. Paul Rivers, a college professor dying of heart failure, becomes the recipient of Michael's transplanted heart and is drawn to Cristina out of the debt of life owed to her husband. After Jack turns himself in, he is let off by the intervention of a lawyer, and Paul and Cristina set out to kill him. Inarritu and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shot almost the entire film with a hand-held camera. The colours are often desaturated, taking the tonal scale down to near black and white. Innaritu's trademark flash-back, flash forward editing style brings the three lives together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle, and ‘21 Grams’ emerges as a deeply disturbing meditation on death, repentance, religion and revenge. The curation is supported by the EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Call For Applications: DIGITAL VIDEO IMAGE MASTERCLASS @ Sarai Masterclass Tutor: Kabir Mohanty Kabir Mohanty works in film and in video. In the former as a film director of an ensemble form shooting in 35mm, working with actors in a tradition of filmmakers before him that thought of film as a serious art form. In video, he works more as a solo artist, bringing to video the hands-on, performative aspect of music or drawing. For Kabir Mohanty, the two are related in many ways and not mutually exclusive. His films and videos have been shown at many festivals and art venues in India and abroad. He has received support in the form of a number of international grants and awards. Kabir Mohanty studied economics at Presidency College, Calcutta and film and video at the University of Iowa in the United States. From September 2002 till June of 2004 he was a visiting artist in UCLA's art department. He is currently working on a number of digital video pieces, installations, single channel works and a feature length video essay towards two solo shows next year. The duration of the workshop is five weeks commencing from Wednesday, August 31 2005. The participants will meet every Wednesday and Saturday, thereafter from 3pm to 7pm. The workshop ends on Saturday October 1, 2005 with the submission of final works produced. Those interested may send a short resume with a one-page note on why they want to attend this workshop and a sample of creative work from any of the following mediums - photography, painting or sculpture (one can submit stills of work), a piece of music performed or composed, video, film or a piece of prose or poetry to : Iram Ghufran, Sarai Media Lab, Sarai- CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 54 iram at sarai.net Samples of work submitted shall not be returned. Last Date for applications: August 1, 2005 Selected participants will be informed on email by August 10, 2005 Masterclass Fee: Rs. 2000/- to be paid after confirmation of selection. The Digital Video Image: Kabir Mohanty “The video image is almost instantly generated. You could switch on the camera, take off the lens cap, and press auto exposure. There is an image, press record and you are shooting video. A child when given a pencil and a piece of paper does not hesitate to draw the first lines unless he is being punished. “It is this spontaneous, drawing-like gesture, this anybody-can, this there-is-nothing-technical-about-it core of video, this pencil-like beginning that I would like to make with this workshop. From this child-like start, begin to connect the camera to one's imagination, to composition. “Smaller cameras have allowed anybody to make images, the way Godard said ‘when film becomes as cheap as paper and pencil, great films will be made’. To my mind, these cameras have allowed the immediacy of drawing to be brought back. A particular kind of immediacy, and a contraction of time, a possible creation here and now. “In this ten-week workshop I would like to go back to video's basic parameters, exposure, focus, its horizontal axes movements, namely panning left and right, its vertical axes movements, namely tilting up and down. If one has a lot of prior experience in video, this workshop does not ask you to leave anything behind. On the contrary, to bring to the basics, all the compositional preparedness that one already has. “The workshop assumes that the practitioner is going to handle the camera herself. At times one may become a composer for a particular work and need an instrumentalist like Gary Hill in his beautiful 4-minute video, `Site Recite'. “These weeks are also preparing sight, preparing the self. What will one do if one is never able to raise money. Again, the eye as intuitive knowledge, in Stan Brakhage. “All the exercises or studies if you will are to be performed mos, with the rider that the camera mic is to be left on. A level should be set for sound for the camera mic and then not tampered with during shooting. “When one gives to an exercise it gives back. Hindustani musicians define a practice of the sargam or doing the scales. Then, the most minor deviations from this scale as a bend in the note towards the next note or the meend becomes the beginning of a profound musical expression. It is the beginning of movement. What is the basic scale of your shot? Do you think about it? “Am I laying down some essential characteristics of the medium? Is this the only way to think about the medium? “The answer to the second question is a definite `No'. The first question is harder to answer. One would like to address it through the quarter without being reductive. Here are certain ways of thinking about the medium from a practitioner’s point of view. These could be thought of as a series of yoga asanas. They could remain physical or a formal examination only or they can become artistic content, when we simply say yes there is something to this, this speaks, when the yoga asana connects mind and body and becomes simultaneously dance and self-knowledge. “This course is about attractions, and provocations, through doing.” ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Forthcoming: Sarai txt 2.3 THE STATE YOU ARE IN (July 15 - September 15, 2005) Through what registers can we try to articulate the matrices of anxiety that are part of everyday living? How does movement, space, design change because of fear, uncertainty, anxiety? This edition of Sarai.txt emerged as a response to the increasing levels of violence against women, escalating in two incidents of rape in the last month, in the city of Delhi. Sarai-txt is a bimonthly broadsheet of Sarai. Content: Does not include images and poster. Content subject to minor changes) - Diary Entry – Pages from a diary reflecting on changes in the city, through uncertainty and marking of space (rescensions of Reader-List postings) - The Day I Got Verified – Field notes, Taha Mahmood, Researcher, Information Society, Sarai - Locality Re-alignments – Aparajita, Sarai Independent Fellow 2004 - Urban Legend (News Report from Tanzania) - Perimeters of Familiarity (Notes on an art work) - The Clap – Shveta Sarda - Naked Roads (News report from urban design specialists) - Notes from Emma Tarlo's lecture (City Conference, Sarai) - Tasty Images, Inadequate Smells (Monya, Zurich) - Whose Hands Are Sullied – Lakshmi Kutty, Sarai Independent Fellow, current cycle - Late Night Show – Madhavi Tangella, Sarai Independent Fellow, current cycle - Missing persons - Review of 'Naukar Ki Kameez' – Hansa Thapliyal, Reader-List - Fearless Speech (sticker) - SARAI[S]: On the Daryaganj book market - Writing home: Ragging - Invitation to conversations over a broadsheet Text versions of previous txt issues can be accessed at: TXT 2.1: SHIFT https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-April/005449.html TXT 2.2: TRANSMIT https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2005-June/005796.html Write in to broadsheet at sarai.net for feedback on txt. and for copies of txt 2.2 and txt 2.3. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Programmes are held in the Seminar Room, CSDS, unless otherwise indicated. All programme subject to last minute changes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friends, I now bid goodbye to this list. The past three and a half years have been witness to an exhilarating period of growth and activity at Sarai - of expanding vistas, new beginnings and an ever-growing community of friends, online and offline. I thank you all for your engaged participation, ideas, responses and support in making this an animated and stimulating journey. Henceforth, my colleague, Aarti Sethi, will take you through Sarai's calendar of events and activities and she counts on your continued involvement. So do keep writing in to dak at sarai.net, or, better still, drop in at Sarai. With best wishes, Ranita ----- Ranita Chatterjee Programme Coordinator 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