From dak at sarai.net Wed Jun 1 13:09:37 2005 From: dak at sarai.net (dak at sarai.net) Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 09:39:37 +0200 Subject: [Sarai Newsletter] JUNE 2005 Message-ID: JUNE 2005 Contents: FILM @ SARAI: Information - Panic 3rd The Manchurian Candidate, dir. John Frankenheimer 10th 16 December, dir. Mani Shankar 17th The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, dir. Volker Schloendorff & Margarethe von Trotta 24th Brazil, dir. Terry Gilliam ------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILM @ SARAI: INFORMATION - PANIC Curated by Anand V. Taneja ‘Information Panic’ succinctly characterises one aspect of the British Empire’s relationship to India. British administrators constantly tried to penetrate and discipline indigenous flows and networks of knowledge and information, but constantly felt vulnerable. The ‘mystery’ of the chapatis, seen as an immediate prelude to the Rebellion of 1857, is a good example. In our age of ‘Empire and Information’ with the means of information gathering and dissemination becoming increasingly more sophisticated, Information Panic is also far more prevalent, and wide ranging – among states, media and individuals. From public anger at being fed with lies about the WMDs to moves by the Indian government to install a Tsunami Early Warning System, from the obsessive desire to know the details of media celebrities’ personal lives to the constant spectre of ‘intelligence failures’ in the ‘War against Terror’, not ever knowing enough is the paradoxical malaise of living in an Information Society. This month’s Sarai curation looks at four geographically, chronologically and thematically diverse films which represent various aspects of Information Panic. With a classic Cold War Paranoia, media and police persecution, a ‘hacker’ twist to the India Pakistan conflict, and among the most beautiful depictions of dystopia ever filmed, it’s quite the paranoid, twist-filled ride. Don’t panic. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, June 3, 2005, 4:30 pm The Manchurian Candidate (1962), 126 minutes Directed by John Frankenheimer “The first film to really take on Senator Joseph Mc Carthy”, in director John Frankenheimer’s words, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ is a Cold War thriller, a political satire, and the mother of all conspiracy theories. The film was withdrawn from public circulation for twenty five years after President Kennedy’s assassination. The story is that of Raymond Shaw, a Medal of Honor winner who, along with his platoon, was subjected to elaborate mind-control techniques by Soviet and Red Chinese officials after they were captured in Korea, and sent back to the States to do their captors' bidding. Frank Sinatra plays Bennett Marco, a member of the platoon who's plagued by recurring nightmares in which the brainwashing sessions are replayed, and who eventually exposes the fiendish Red scheme. What the film suggests, in the most offhandedly outrageous manner, is that it is possible for a Red-controlled stooge to reach high office while niftily avoiding detection by presenting himself as a rabid anticommunist. Everything in the movie seems to carry with it layers of subtext, of double meanings and hidden codes. With Lionel Lindon's archly composed black-and-white cinematography, the movie's jagged, emphatic visual style is perfectly matched to its Chinese puzzle-box structure. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Friday, June 10, 2005, 4:30 pm 16 December (2002), 158 minutes Directed by Mani Shankar It is December 3, a normal day in Mumbai, except that a Dalal Street broker is trying to spend a crore of rupees a day on fancy cars and women. This ties into a mysterious high-tech killer on the loose, which then ties into banking fraud, ‘havala’ transactions, an Afghani terrorist group, and a Soviet nuclear bomb. One of the first few movies in India to be produced with international studio financing, the movie is remarkable, apart from its special effects, for its reliance on high tech surveillance gadgetry, a fourteen year old hacker on the ‘good side’, and Revenue Intelligence (!!!) unearthing a plot to nuke Indian cities on the thirtieth anniversary of Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war. Produced in the immediate aftermath of the Tehelka spy camera sting operations and the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament, the film offers an interesting view of the Indian state’s investment into surveillance and information gathering technologies. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, June 17, 2005, 4:30 pm The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), 106 minutes Directed by Volker Schloendorff and Margarethe von Trotta Angela Winkler plays Katharina Blum, a quiet, incidental German citizen with no ties to any inappropriate people or associations. Then she falls in love at a carnival party with a young radical lawbreaker (read ‘terrorist’) on the run from the police. Her brief association with a hunted man brings her under police surveillance and makes her the cruelly exploited subject of cheap newspaper sensationalism. Paraded across the front pages of a big-city daily newspaper, portrayed as a whore, an atheist, a Communist sympathizer, she becomes the target of anonymous phone calls and letters, sexual advances and threats. Her reaction to this persecution has deadly consequences… Based on the Heinrich Boll novel of the same name, the film has been seen by many commentators as a chillingly prescient parallel to American society’s reaction to terror and ‘terrorists’ post 9/11. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, June 24, 2005, 4:30 pm Brazil (1985) 142 minutes Directed by Terry Gilliam ‘Brazil’ is a film, as Salman Rushdie would have it, located in a song. It revolves around Jonathan Pryce's character, an everyman at the Ministry of Information, Records Division. He is called on to rectify a typographical error that led to the accidental death of a humble shoemaker at the hands of the torturers. The film is set in a futuristic world in which government branches and the people who run them wholeheartedly pursue goals of questionable use. "Information Retrieval", for example, collects information but does not dispense it or act on it. This is a world where a notorious rogue is a wanted man because he fixes people's plumbing without authorization. This is a world where a man tries to correct an administrative error, but becomes a fugitive from justice because he is in a system that does not allow for errors and it is illegal to fix them. This is an “Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali”. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The curation is supported by the EU-India Economic Cross Cultural Programme. ----- 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 Mob: (+91) 9810217963 Fax: (+91) 11 23943450 www.sarai.net