Document Actions
November 2001
Newsletter- November 2001
Table of Contents:
1. List of Sarai Grantees
2. Workshop/Conference/Symposium Reports
i) Orai: Possibility of Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, October 28, 2001,
ii) Latex Workshop
iii) Wizards of OS 2
iv) Make World Festival
v) Writing the City
vi)‘Restless Days’, Curated Film Series
3. New@ Sarai Website
4. Documentary Film Series
-------------------------
1. List of Sarai Print Media Fellowships and Seed Grant Awardees, 2001
We are pleased to announce the final award list for the Sarai Print Media and
Seed grants. Out of the one hundred and thirty proposals in English and Hindi
that we received from all over the country, thirty-seven proposals were
short-listed and a total of nineteen proposals have finally been selected for
support. The selected proposals will be shortly uploaded on to our website -
www.sarai.net
The process of making a choice or a selection out of a large number of
interesting and deserving proposals for the Sarai seed grants and print media
fellowships for 2001 has not been easy for us. However much we would have
liked
to award every proposal that attracted our attention we did have to make a
final choice. We would also like to impress that our choices are no way a
reflection of our evaluation of the quality of the rest of the proposals.
The proposals that have made it to the final list bear a relationship with the
areas of research, enquiry and practice already underway at Sarai. We feel
that these were the ones that could complement the work that we are doing at
present.
Best wishes to all of our new associates. Here is the list of the awardees and
the projects they are going to work on.
PRINT MEDIA FELLOWSHIPS
1. Manglesh Dabral: Shahar aur Media: Mukhyabhumi aur Hashiye
(The City and Media: Mainstream and the Margins)
Reportage/Esssays on Delhi.
2. Anjali Mody: Whose City is It Anyway
Reportage on Education, Law and Transport in select localities in Delhi.
3. Frederick Noronha: GNU/Linux in India
Reportage on the Free Software/Open Source Movement in India.
4. Akshay Mukul: Changing Identities?
Reportage on Urban neighbourhoods and caste formations in Delhi.
SEED GRANTS
1. Naveen Chander: Visthapiton Ka Shahar (The City of the Dislocated)
A study of urban transformations related to the Metro in Delhi.
2. Harini Narayanan: Slums in Delhi - Demolitions & Relocation
Housing policy and land relations in Delhi.
3. Jagan Shah: On the Possibility of A Democratic Character for Public
Space in New Delhi- A Study of architectural forms along Parliament Street, Delhi.
4. Hansa Thapliyal & Vipin Bhatti: Sahibabad Sounds
A media project concerned with performative gang cultures.
5. Priya Prakash: Project MilJul: Alternative Interfaces for Mobile Phones
Interface design concerned with vernacular visual idiom for mobile phone
and pager interfaces.
6. Saranth Bannerjee: Graphic Novel (Comic-Manga) on a City
A proposal to create a graphic novel on the city life.
7. Sharmila Rege: Dalit & Public Culture in Maharashtra
Study of popular song and dance traditions, especially Lavani, in Mumbai.
8. Achal Prabhala: Local Hero: David Dhawan's Govinda
Concerned with the mofussil aesthetic and ideology of Bollywood's
enduring popular cast.
9. Sadan Jha & Prabhas Ranjan: Shahar ke Nishan: Politics of Visual Spaces in
Delhi- Reading everyday signs of the city to decipher urban micro-politics.
10. Vandana Khare: Built Environment and Women
Study of the gendered logic of housing structures, work and public spaces.
11. Yasmeen Arif: Urban Landscapes: Publics & Public Time/Space Composites
Examining the layered spatiality and temporality of the city's old and new
landmarks.
12. Ranjana Sengupta: Changing Face of Chiragh Delhi
A study of the morphology of an urban village
13. Avishek Ganguly: Bangla Urban Folk Songs
Exploration of the Bangla urban folk/rock/pop music in contemporary
Calcutta.
14. Rajendra Ravi: Rickshaw Wale ki Jeevan Yatra: Shahar Tak, Shahar Mein
Study of the specific migrant experience of rickshaw pullers in Delhi.
15. Jamia Sociology Department: Urban Maps of Zakir Nagar, Okhla and New
Friends Colony.
A detailed ethnography of the area.
2. Workshop/Conference/Symposium Reports
i) Orai: Possibility of Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, October 28, 2001,
Sarai was invited to present its perspective on New Media in a pre-symposium
Orai: Possibility of Electronic Art, Nagoya Japan, organized by Inter Society
for Electronic Arts. The participants were curators, artists, art critics
micro-radio activists from South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Jeebesh
Bagchi made a presentation on old and new media constellations in Delhi.
ii) LaTex Workshop: Sarai Interface Zone, Delhi, October 24, 2001
Sarai, in collaboration with Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University,
held the first in a series of workshops on LaTex on 24th October 2001, at the
Interface Zone. The participants learned the basics of the theory and practice
of this wonderful free software programme, which is the traditionally
preferred
mode of writing science. LaTex's Devnag package is a Hindi writing device,
which enables the user to include all the desired symbols, including
nuqtas
under unusual letters. Dr. Wagish Shukla (whose commentary on Ram kI Shakti
Puja - written entirely on this package- has just been published) and Amitabh
Trehan from the Mahatma Gandhi University conducted the workshops with inputs
from KK Tripathi, Reetesh, Supeet and Pankaj and Joy.
We plan to hold more such workshops. Those interested may write to
ravikant at sarai.net
iii) Wizards of OS 2: Open Cultures & Free Knowledge, October 11-13, 2001
http://www.buug.de/wos/frames/index.html, organized by mikro e.v, Berlin
(http://mikro.org/)
The second Wizard of Os conference held at the House of World Cultures, Berlin
looked at the various constituents of an ‘open knowledge system’ for societies
and the various issues that are connected to it. The debates and discussions at
the conference reflected the ferment that has emerged within diverse areas
like software production, bio-technology, library access, public broadcasting,
internet standards and protocols, search engines and online archives,
education and art practice around the conflict between the dominant ‘economies of
control’ / ‘knowledge as commodity’ paradigms and the counter practices to
create and expand the domain of ‘free knowledge’/ ‘open production’/ ‘digital
commons’ etc. Monica Narula presented the OPUS project initiated by the Raqs
Media Collective and being developed at the Sarai Media Lab.
iv) Make World Festival, Munich, Germany, October 18 21, 2001
The first ‘Make World’ festival took place between 18th and 21st October, with
the theme “border=Ø location=YES” in the Muffathalle, Munich, Germany. The
festival, that brought together new media practitioners, activists and
theorists to reflect on borders, immaterial labour and the state of the world
today was unique in that it was the first major international new media
related platform to offer concrete reflections in the wake of the events of
September 11 and concurrent with the war in Afghanistan. The panels and the
presentations reflected on new realities for global labour, and discussed strategies to
effectively imagine a world without borders and barriers for working people,
and the role that new media practices can play in helping to communicate and
articulate this vision. The festival included an exhibition- “Everyone is an
Expert” and also featured performances, lectures and activist workshops. A
‘YES’ broadsheet presented the major themes and concerns of the festival with
an array of texts contributed by the participants.
The festival also coincided with the launch of the ‘Volksbad Manifesto’ -
which offered a perspective on the current world situation.
For the text of the Volksbad Manifesto please see www.nettime.org
Key speakers included Saskia Sassen, Ghassan Hage, Lev Manovich, Kodwo Eshun,
Geert Lovink and Pit Schutz. Shuddhabrata Sengupta represented Sarai at the
festival. Also present at the Festival was Prabhu Mahapatra, (IndianAssociation of
Labour History) a labour historian and close associate of the Sarai initiative.
Shuddhabrata spoke on the theme of 'Digital Commons' and presented the OPUS
project initiated by the Raqs Media Collective and being developed at the
Media Lab at Sarai. Prabhu Mahapatra made a presentation on identity, migration,
mobility and labour in the old and new economies in the panel on
'Representations of Labour'.
For detailed reports and video streams of the different panels go to
www.make-world.org
v) Writing the City: Electronic Workshop on Hypertextual Writing on the City
Sarai Iunterface Zone, Delhi, October 1- 5, 2001
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/texts/works/writing_city.htm
The Writing the City Workshop, was held at the Sarai Interface Zone from
October 1-5 2001, and was coordinated by Beatrice Gibson and Vishal Rawlley
from www.nungu.com, (an online space for artists and writers, Mumbai) and
Monica
Narula from the Sarai Media Lab. There were fifteen participants who worked
upon ways to render urban experience into bodies of online text through
collaborative writing sessions, using basic html based writing techniques.
“Writing the city was an exercise in viewing / writing the city through the
hypertextual lens, in the sense of formal construction of text/z/.com, + in
approach to the [p]/[m]uddle of urban data itself, + in sense of
reinscrip[ac]tion.”
A report on the workshop is available on the Compositions page of the Sarai
website. Please go the url
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/texts/works/writing_city.htm
A Workshop list was started three weeks prior to the event, which laid the
grounds for the workshop through online discussions and collaboration among
the
participants. The work that will come out from the discussions and
collaborations resulting from this workshop will be published on the Sarai
website in February.
vi) Restless Days: Film Series organized By Sarai and Cine Club, St. Stephen’s
College, University of Delhi, October 17-19, 2001
Between the 17th and the 19th of October, Sarai and the Cine Club
(St.Stephen's
College) organized a film series titled ‘Restless Days’, dealing with the
experiences of young people in different historical and cultural contexts. On
the 17th, the Series started with the screening of War Games, a Hollywood
anti-war film directed by John Badham, a movie using the idiom of popular
Hollywood adventure cinema to illustrate the grim and very real possibilities
of accidental nuclear conflict. This was followed by Jean-Luc Godard's La
Chinoise, made in 1967, which dealt with the ferment of left-wing radical
ideology and practice among students in Paris, a film remarkable because it
was actually made a year before the events of May 1968. On the 18th, two films
both by Francois Truffaut were screened. The first, a short 17-minute film
titled Les Mistons (The Kids) depicted the beginnings of sexual consciousness
among a group of pre-adolescent boys. The second, Les Quatre Cent Coups
(The 400 Blows), made in 1959, was about the alienation of a schoolboy from
his social environment and his slide into delinquency. Finally, on the 19th, we
showed the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspottin’(1995), a morbid,
darkly funny look at drug addiction, followed by what many considered the high
point of the series, Mathieu Kasovitz's Hate (1995), a grim and deeply disturbing
film about the alienated, violent subcultures of contemporary Parisian youth.
3. New @ Sarai website
i) Opus
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/opus/opus.htm
Raqs Media Collective, in collaboration with Bauke Freiburg, Mrityunjoy
Chatterjee, Pankaj Kaushal & Supreet Sethi amongst others, announce the
starting of the OPUS project, which will become an online collaborative media
project that will work on the basis of free code principles. We invite
participation in Project Zero, the initial building block of OPUS.
ii) Multimedia work by Renu Swaminathan Iyer
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/multimedia/multimedia.htm
New multimedia work by Renu Swaminathan Iyer
iii) Announcement
http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm
New announcement for media art stipends in Germany.
4. Films at Sarai
Focus on the Documentary
As part of Sarai's commitment to providing forums for a media culture that
actively seeks to generate critical discussion on the institutions and
practices of film making, we inaugurate a special focus on the documentary
film. Filmmakers will introduce their films, focusing on issues such as
funding, institutional constraints and possibilities, film technologies and
techniques, narrative structures and formal strategies, and the broader
questions of the politics and ethics of documentary filmmaking. Each screening
will be followed by a public discussion in the Sarai café. All films will be
screened at the Seminar Room Sarai/CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 54.
Friday, 2 November 2001, 430pm
House of Memory
Directed by Christopher Mitchell
Video; 79 min; 2001
House of Memory is a feature-length documentary about the Lebanese civil war.
The film focuses on living through the civil war in Lebanon and what happens
when war ends and people struggle to rebuild their shattered lives. The film
uses the Barakat building as a metaphor for Lebanon's gracious past, its
troubled present and its uncertain future.
Christopher Mitchell is a writer, producer and director of documentaries.
He is currently Head of Documentary at the production company ORTV. As a
Director he has made documentaries for BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4, for such
series as Inside Story, Panorama, Omnibus, and Dispatches, in the fields of
culture, history, politics and current affairs. Mr. Mitchell will be
present to
introduce and discuss House of Memory.
Yasmeen Arif, who has been working on the reconstruction of Beirut for her
doctoral dissertation at the Delhi School of Economics, will initiate a
discussion of the film.
Thursday, November 15, 2001 4:30 pm
Delhi Diary 2001
Directed by Ranjani Mazumdar
Betacam SP, 60 minutes
Delhi Diary 2001 is about the residue of urban memory linked to two crucial
events in the history of Delhi. The events are the state of National Emergency
(1975-77) when all civil rights were suspended and the anti Sikh pogroms of
1984 following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Instead of focusing on the 'facts' of the two events, the film moves from the
immediacy of the events to the rhythms of daily life in the city to explore
fragments of memory embedded beneath the spectacle of the contemporary city.
Camera: Sabeena Gadihoke, Syed Nooh Nizami
Editing: Vinod Kaul
Sound: Surinder Prasad
Friday, November 16, 2001, 4:30 pm
Jari Mari : Of Cloth and Other Stories
Directed by: Surabhi Sharma
Mini DV, 75 minutes
Modern Mumbai was built on the economic foundations laid by its textile mills.
Of late the city, or so it seems, is being almost seamlessly transformed
from a
manufacturing centre to being a significant node for finance capital,
driven by
the service economy. The closure of textile mills and the conversion of their
real estate into palatial high-rises or luxurious offices, we are told, herald
the birth of the new global-city. This film seeks to interrogate this public
profile of contemporary Mumbai by listening to the experiences of an almost
invisible but crucial and expansive labour force.
Camera: Setu Pande
Audiography: Gissy Michael
Editor: Jabeen Merchant
Sound Design: D Wood, Vipin Bhati
Thursday, November 22, 2001, 4:30 pm
When Four Friends Meet
Directed by Rahul Roy
Dvcam, 43 minutes
When four friends meet they share with the camera their secrets, sex and
girls;
youthful dreams and failures; frustrations and triumphs.
Bunty, Kamal, Sanjay and Sanju, best of friends and residents of Jehangirpuri,
a working class colony on the outskirts of Delhi are young and trying to make
their lives in an environment which is changing rapidly girls seem to be very
bold stable jobs are not easy to come by sex is a strange mix of guilt and
pleasure families are claustrophobic and the blur of television the only
sounding board
Editor: Reena Mohan
Sound: Asheesh Pandiya
Script: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy
Camera: Rahul Roy
Friday, 23 November 2001, 4:30 pm
My Friend Su
Directed by Neeraj Bhasin
Duration: 55minutes
My Friend Su is an anecdote about two friends, one of them is transsexual and
he strongly feels like a female from the inside, while on the outside he is a
normal male.
`This film is about a relationship which we had built over the
period of shooting. One of the reasons of having comfortable relationship with
the protagonist was the absence of big cameras, heavy lights and all the other
technical jargons of conventional shoots. On our shoot we were blessed with
digital format, which gave us enough freedom to work without our
pre-psychological pressures of camera fear, unnecessary permissions and above
all the fear of budget'
A Cinema of Anxiety
As part of our continuing focus on a cinema of anxiety, Sarai will screen
Clouzot's Wages of Fear, earlier scheduled for October 26.
Friday, 9 November 2001, 430pm
The Wages of Fear
Director: Henri Georges Clouzot
France, 1953, 145 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Film Seminar at Sarai Wednesday, 28th November 2001
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series @ Sarai
'Re-Thinking the Realism Question : Indian Cinema 1940-1955'.
Moinak Biswas, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University
CSDS Seminar room, 330pm, Wednesday, 28 November 2001
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Film and Urban Culture Workshop @ Sarai
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series
Film and Urban Culture Workshop
29 November - 1 December 2001
A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread
Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in Contemporary Urban Action
Films
How does an aesthetic of astonishment come together with narratives
whose main focus is violence, paranoia, sensations of shock and a
vertiginous sense of disequlibrium? The contemporary urban action film
highlights the paradoxical combination of fear and fascination in a
particularly vivid form. What is perhaps striking is the international
resonance of the contemporary. We have a checkered lineage here,
stretching back to Kurosawa's samurai films of the 1950s, the Hongkong
kungfu film of auteurs such as King Hu, the generic distention and
excesses of Leone in Italy, and
the visceral US cinema stemming from Peckinpah and Arthur Penn. In the
contemporary era, films such as Matthieu Kassovitz's Hate, Luc
Besson's Leon the Assassin, Scorsese's Goodfellas, John Woo's The
Killer, Innurita's Amores Perros, David Fincher's The Fight Club and
Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine operate with a new sense of exhilaration with
the capacity of film techniques to immerse the spectator in the tactility of
the image, in cinematic movement and rhythm, colour and density. The
spectator is immersed in the headlong movement of the body as it
acquires speed, is fragmented by short shots, threatens and is threatened
with disintegration.
The fascination, however, is not merely with speed and movement, but
also with a sense of the uncanny, the ornate revelation of spaces, of
interiorities and of shocking moments that threaten our grasp on moral
coordinates and mechanisms of identification and empathy. The
exhilaration here is not only with the technical capacities and their
braiding into a wondrous formal organization of materials, but also with
the very process of enhanced perception, new forms of knowledge, and the
threat these carry with them. Here we may think also about the radical
effects brought about by abrupt subversion of generic expectation, and the
particular ways in which narrative form is reorganized to invite a different
kind of spectatorial attention and investment.
This workshop aims to address some of these issues of transformation
in the context of the Bombay film of urban action and revenge.
Arguably, from the late 1980s, in the work of directors such as N.
Chandra, J. P. Dutta, Mukul Sharma, Priyadarshan, Ramgopal Verma,
Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Raj Kumar Santoshi, there emerged a type of
engagement with film form and narrative strategy that marked out a
special departure from earlier narrative traditions. This work was
marked by an investment in the sensorium of cinematic effects quite
independent of, if not displacing, regimes of dialogue, melodramatic
relationships and affective ties, suggesting a new universe of
cinematic allure. Simultaneously, there emerged new performative
dimensions, noticeable in the emergence of a Nana Patekar, the early
Shahrukh Khan, Sunny Deol, Manoj Bajpai and the transformation of
actors such as Jackie Shroff and Anil Kapoor, Dharmendra and Aamir
Khan.
One of our concerns would be how to define these distinctions in more
specific ways, say in the history of narrative form and genre, film
technology and techniques, industrial organization and audience
address.
However, at the same time we would like very strongly to address the
linkages between this new sensory organization in the cinema with
transformations in the referent and in the contexts these films
emerged from. Does the global impinge on the universe of cinematic
reference in new ways? What status does this dynamic have in the
constitution of place and space, of specific location and a more abstracted
and metaphorical positioning for the spectator? We would be particularly
interested to look at the relationship between the urban sensorium and the
cinematic sensorium, and the broader regime of shock and sensation retailed
in the repertoire of journalistic reportage in the press and on television.
We could also consider how to place the cinema in transformations of urban
experience: of visual and auditory environments, of anonymity and the
crowd, of state terror, marginality and secrecy, and also of the
contorted intertwining of urban emancipation and community and
inter-community formation in the circumstances of duress and cruelty.
Apart from questions of departure and distinction, there is also an
issue here of the persistence of narrative form, the way in which
issues of romance andfamilial ties, of melodrama and regimes of affect,
continue to structure the terms of filmic discourse, but perhaps in different
ways.
While only four films are being screened, the focus will be much
broader, inviting reflection on a variety of film traditions, and on
films from other Indian film industries. Participants are also invited
to screen video-clips.
Thursday, 29 November 2001
4:00 pm:
Introduction to the Workshop
Ravi Vasudevan
4:30 - 7:15:
Screening of Parinda
Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Bombay, 1989
Friday, 30 November 2001
2:00 - 3:15:
Ruin and the Uncanny City: Space, Terror
and the
Aesthetics of Violence in Parinda
Ranjani Mazumdar
3:15 - 3:45:
Tea
3:45 - 6:30:
Screening of Gardish
Priyadarshan, Bombay, 1994
6:30 - 7:30:
Discussion in the cafe
Saturday, 1 December 2001 (10:00 am - 7:45 pm)
10:00 - 2:45:
Screening of Satya
Ramgopal Varma, Bombay, 1998
12:45 - 1:30:
Lunch
1:30 - 2:00:
Discussion on Satya
2:00 - 3:15:
Streets of Terror: Urban Anxieties in
the Bombay Cinema of the 1990s
Shohini Ghosh
3:15 - 3:30:
Tea
3:30 - 4:30:
Panel Discussion
Orality, Melodrama and Spectacle in the Cinema of Urban
Anxiety
(Ravikant, Ira Bhaskar, Ravi Vasudevan)
4:30 - 5:30:
Concluding public discussion
5:30 - 6:00:
Discussion in the cafe
6:00 pm
Screening of The Killer
John Woo, Hongkong, 1989
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saumya Gupta
Coordinator, Research and Programmes
Sarai: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054
www.sarai.net
Table of Contents:
1. List of Sarai Grantees
2. Workshop/Conference/Symposium Reports
i) Orai: Possibility of Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, October 28, 2001,
ii) Latex Workshop
iii) Wizards of OS 2
iv) Make World Festival
v) Writing the City
vi)‘Restless Days’, Curated Film Series
3. New@ Sarai Website
4. Documentary Film Series
-------------------------
1. List of Sarai Print Media Fellowships and Seed Grant Awardees, 2001
We are pleased to announce the final award list for the Sarai Print Media and
Seed grants. Out of the one hundred and thirty proposals in English and Hindi
that we received from all over the country, thirty-seven proposals were
short-listed and a total of nineteen proposals have finally been selected for
support. The selected proposals will be shortly uploaded on to our website -
www.sarai.net
The process of making a choice or a selection out of a large number of
interesting and deserving proposals for the Sarai seed grants and print media
fellowships for 2001 has not been easy for us. However much we would have
liked
to award every proposal that attracted our attention we did have to make a
final choice. We would also like to impress that our choices are no way a
reflection of our evaluation of the quality of the rest of the proposals.
The proposals that have made it to the final list bear a relationship with the
areas of research, enquiry and practice already underway at Sarai. We feel
that these were the ones that could complement the work that we are doing at
present.
Best wishes to all of our new associates. Here is the list of the awardees and
the projects they are going to work on.
PRINT MEDIA FELLOWSHIPS
1. Manglesh Dabral: Shahar aur Media: Mukhyabhumi aur Hashiye
(The City and Media: Mainstream and the Margins)
Reportage/Esssays on Delhi.
2. Anjali Mody: Whose City is It Anyway
Reportage on Education, Law and Transport in select localities in Delhi.
3. Frederick Noronha: GNU/Linux in India
Reportage on the Free Software/Open Source Movement in India.
4. Akshay Mukul: Changing Identities?
Reportage on Urban neighbourhoods and caste formations in Delhi.
SEED GRANTS
1. Naveen Chander: Visthapiton Ka Shahar (The City of the Dislocated)
A study of urban transformations related to the Metro in Delhi.
2. Harini Narayanan: Slums in Delhi - Demolitions & Relocation
Housing policy and land relations in Delhi.
3. Jagan Shah: On the Possibility of A Democratic Character for Public
Space in New Delhi- A Study of architectural forms along Parliament Street, Delhi.
4. Hansa Thapliyal & Vipin Bhatti: Sahibabad Sounds
A media project concerned with performative gang cultures.
5. Priya Prakash: Project MilJul: Alternative Interfaces for Mobile Phones
Interface design concerned with vernacular visual idiom for mobile phone
and pager interfaces.
6. Saranth Bannerjee: Graphic Novel (Comic-Manga) on a City
A proposal to create a graphic novel on the city life.
7. Sharmila Rege: Dalit & Public Culture in Maharashtra
Study of popular song and dance traditions, especially Lavani, in Mumbai.
8. Achal Prabhala: Local Hero: David Dhawan's Govinda
Concerned with the mofussil aesthetic and ideology of Bollywood's
enduring popular cast.
9. Sadan Jha & Prabhas Ranjan: Shahar ke Nishan: Politics of Visual Spaces in
Delhi- Reading everyday signs of the city to decipher urban micro-politics.
10. Vandana Khare: Built Environment and Women
Study of the gendered logic of housing structures, work and public spaces.
11. Yasmeen Arif: Urban Landscapes: Publics & Public Time/Space Composites
Examining the layered spatiality and temporality of the city's old and new
landmarks.
12. Ranjana Sengupta: Changing Face of Chiragh Delhi
A study of the morphology of an urban village
13. Avishek Ganguly: Bangla Urban Folk Songs
Exploration of the Bangla urban folk/rock/pop music in contemporary
Calcutta.
14. Rajendra Ravi: Rickshaw Wale ki Jeevan Yatra: Shahar Tak, Shahar Mein
Study of the specific migrant experience of rickshaw pullers in Delhi.
15. Jamia Sociology Department: Urban Maps of Zakir Nagar, Okhla and New
Friends Colony.
A detailed ethnography of the area.
2. Workshop/Conference/Symposium Reports
i) Orai: Possibility of Electronic Art, Nagoya, Japan, October 28, 2001,
Sarai was invited to present its perspective on New Media in a pre-symposium
Orai: Possibility of Electronic Art, Nagoya Japan, organized by Inter Society
for Electronic Arts. The participants were curators, artists, art critics
micro-radio activists from South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Jeebesh
Bagchi made a presentation on old and new media constellations in Delhi.
ii) LaTex Workshop: Sarai Interface Zone, Delhi, October 24, 2001
Sarai, in collaboration with Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University,
held the first in a series of workshops on LaTex on 24th October 2001, at the
Interface Zone. The participants learned the basics of the theory and practice
of this wonderful free software programme, which is the traditionally
preferred
mode of writing science. LaTex's Devnag package is a Hindi writing device,
which enables the user to include all the desired symbols, including
nuqtas
under unusual letters. Dr. Wagish Shukla (whose commentary on Ram kI Shakti
Puja - written entirely on this package- has just been published) and Amitabh
Trehan from the Mahatma Gandhi University conducted the workshops with inputs
from KK Tripathi, Reetesh, Supeet and Pankaj and Joy.
We plan to hold more such workshops. Those interested may write to
ravikant at sarai.net
iii) Wizards of OS 2: Open Cultures & Free Knowledge, October 11-13, 2001
http://www.buug.de/wos/frames/index.html, organized by mikro e.v, Berlin
(http://mikro.org/)
The second Wizard of Os conference held at the House of World Cultures, Berlin
looked at the various constituents of an ‘open knowledge system’ for societies
and the various issues that are connected to it. The debates and discussions at
the conference reflected the ferment that has emerged within diverse areas
like software production, bio-technology, library access, public broadcasting,
internet standards and protocols, search engines and online archives,
education and art practice around the conflict between the dominant ‘economies of
control’ / ‘knowledge as commodity’ paradigms and the counter practices to
create and expand the domain of ‘free knowledge’/ ‘open production’/ ‘digital
commons’ etc. Monica Narula presented the OPUS project initiated by the Raqs
Media Collective and being developed at the Sarai Media Lab.
iv) Make World Festival, Munich, Germany, October 18 21, 2001
The first ‘Make World’ festival took place between 18th and 21st October, with
the theme “border=Ø location=YES” in the Muffathalle, Munich, Germany. The
festival, that brought together new media practitioners, activists and
theorists to reflect on borders, immaterial labour and the state of the world
today was unique in that it was the first major international new media
related platform to offer concrete reflections in the wake of the events of
September 11 and concurrent with the war in Afghanistan. The panels and the
presentations reflected on new realities for global labour, and discussed strategies to
effectively imagine a world without borders and barriers for working people,
and the role that new media practices can play in helping to communicate and
articulate this vision. The festival included an exhibition- “Everyone is an
Expert” and also featured performances, lectures and activist workshops. A
‘YES’ broadsheet presented the major themes and concerns of the festival with
an array of texts contributed by the participants.
The festival also coincided with the launch of the ‘Volksbad Manifesto’ -
which offered a perspective on the current world situation.
For the text of the Volksbad Manifesto please see www.nettime.org
Key speakers included Saskia Sassen, Ghassan Hage, Lev Manovich, Kodwo Eshun,
Geert Lovink and Pit Schutz. Shuddhabrata Sengupta represented Sarai at the
festival. Also present at the Festival was Prabhu Mahapatra, (IndianAssociation of
Labour History) a labour historian and close associate of the Sarai initiative.
Shuddhabrata spoke on the theme of 'Digital Commons' and presented the OPUS
project initiated by the Raqs Media Collective and being developed at the
Media Lab at Sarai. Prabhu Mahapatra made a presentation on identity, migration,
mobility and labour in the old and new economies in the panel on
'Representations of Labour'.
For detailed reports and video streams of the different panels go to
www.make-world.org
v) Writing the City: Electronic Workshop on Hypertextual Writing on the City
Sarai Iunterface Zone, Delhi, October 1- 5, 2001
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/texts/works/writing_city.htm
The Writing the City Workshop, was held at the Sarai Interface Zone from
October 1-5 2001, and was coordinated by Beatrice Gibson and Vishal Rawlley
from www.nungu.com, (an online space for artists and writers, Mumbai) and
Monica
Narula from the Sarai Media Lab. There were fifteen participants who worked
upon ways to render urban experience into bodies of online text through
collaborative writing sessions, using basic html based writing techniques.
“Writing the city was an exercise in viewing / writing the city through the
hypertextual lens, in the sense of formal construction of text/z/.com, + in
approach to the [p]/[m]uddle of urban data itself, + in sense of
reinscrip[ac]tion.”
A report on the workshop is available on the Compositions page of the Sarai
website. Please go the url
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/texts/works/writing_city.htm
A Workshop list was started three weeks prior to the event, which laid the
grounds for the workshop through online discussions and collaboration among
the
participants. The work that will come out from the discussions and
collaborations resulting from this workshop will be published on the Sarai
website in February.
vi) Restless Days: Film Series organized By Sarai and Cine Club, St. Stephen’s
College, University of Delhi, October 17-19, 2001
Between the 17th and the 19th of October, Sarai and the Cine Club
(St.Stephen's
College) organized a film series titled ‘Restless Days’, dealing with the
experiences of young people in different historical and cultural contexts. On
the 17th, the Series started with the screening of War Games, a Hollywood
anti-war film directed by John Badham, a movie using the idiom of popular
Hollywood adventure cinema to illustrate the grim and very real possibilities
of accidental nuclear conflict. This was followed by Jean-Luc Godard's La
Chinoise, made in 1967, which dealt with the ferment of left-wing radical
ideology and practice among students in Paris, a film remarkable because it
was actually made a year before the events of May 1968. On the 18th, two films
both by Francois Truffaut were screened. The first, a short 17-minute film
titled Les Mistons (The Kids) depicted the beginnings of sexual consciousness
among a group of pre-adolescent boys. The second, Les Quatre Cent Coups
(The 400 Blows), made in 1959, was about the alienation of a schoolboy from
his social environment and his slide into delinquency. Finally, on the 19th, we
showed the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspottin’(1995), a morbid,
darkly funny look at drug addiction, followed by what many considered the high
point of the series, Mathieu Kasovitz's Hate (1995), a grim and deeply disturbing
film about the alienated, violent subcultures of contemporary Parisian youth.
3. New @ Sarai website
i) Opus
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/opus/opus.htm
Raqs Media Collective, in collaboration with Bauke Freiburg, Mrityunjoy
Chatterjee, Pankaj Kaushal & Supreet Sethi amongst others, announce the
starting of the OPUS project, which will become an online collaborative media
project that will work on the basis of free code principles. We invite
participation in Project Zero, the initial building block of OPUS.
ii) Multimedia work by Renu Swaminathan Iyer
http://www.sarai.net/compositions/multimedia/multimedia.htm
New multimedia work by Renu Swaminathan Iyer
iii) Announcement
http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm
New announcement for media art stipends in Germany.
4. Films at Sarai
Focus on the Documentary
As part of Sarai's commitment to providing forums for a media culture that
actively seeks to generate critical discussion on the institutions and
practices of film making, we inaugurate a special focus on the documentary
film. Filmmakers will introduce their films, focusing on issues such as
funding, institutional constraints and possibilities, film technologies and
techniques, narrative structures and formal strategies, and the broader
questions of the politics and ethics of documentary filmmaking. Each screening
will be followed by a public discussion in the Sarai café. All films will be
screened at the Seminar Room Sarai/CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road Delhi 54.
Friday, 2 November 2001, 430pm
House of Memory
Directed by Christopher Mitchell
Video; 79 min; 2001
House of Memory is a feature-length documentary about the Lebanese civil war.
The film focuses on living through the civil war in Lebanon and what happens
when war ends and people struggle to rebuild their shattered lives. The film
uses the Barakat building as a metaphor for Lebanon's gracious past, its
troubled present and its uncertain future.
Christopher Mitchell is a writer, producer and director of documentaries.
He is currently Head of Documentary at the production company ORTV. As a
Director he has made documentaries for BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4, for such
series as Inside Story, Panorama, Omnibus, and Dispatches, in the fields of
culture, history, politics and current affairs. Mr. Mitchell will be
present to
introduce and discuss House of Memory.
Yasmeen Arif, who has been working on the reconstruction of Beirut for her
doctoral dissertation at the Delhi School of Economics, will initiate a
discussion of the film.
Thursday, November 15, 2001 4:30 pm
Delhi Diary 2001
Directed by Ranjani Mazumdar
Betacam SP, 60 minutes
Delhi Diary 2001 is about the residue of urban memory linked to two crucial
events in the history of Delhi. The events are the state of National Emergency
(1975-77) when all civil rights were suspended and the anti Sikh pogroms of
1984 following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Instead of focusing on the 'facts' of the two events, the film moves from the
immediacy of the events to the rhythms of daily life in the city to explore
fragments of memory embedded beneath the spectacle of the contemporary city.
Camera: Sabeena Gadihoke, Syed Nooh Nizami
Editing: Vinod Kaul
Sound: Surinder Prasad
Friday, November 16, 2001, 4:30 pm
Jari Mari : Of Cloth and Other Stories
Directed by: Surabhi Sharma
Mini DV, 75 minutes
Modern Mumbai was built on the economic foundations laid by its textile mills.
Of late the city, or so it seems, is being almost seamlessly transformed
from a
manufacturing centre to being a significant node for finance capital,
driven by
the service economy. The closure of textile mills and the conversion of their
real estate into palatial high-rises or luxurious offices, we are told, herald
the birth of the new global-city. This film seeks to interrogate this public
profile of contemporary Mumbai by listening to the experiences of an almost
invisible but crucial and expansive labour force.
Camera: Setu Pande
Audiography: Gissy Michael
Editor: Jabeen Merchant
Sound Design: D Wood, Vipin Bhati
Thursday, November 22, 2001, 4:30 pm
When Four Friends Meet
Directed by Rahul Roy
Dvcam, 43 minutes
When four friends meet they share with the camera their secrets, sex and
girls;
youthful dreams and failures; frustrations and triumphs.
Bunty, Kamal, Sanjay and Sanju, best of friends and residents of Jehangirpuri,
a working class colony on the outskirts of Delhi are young and trying to make
their lives in an environment which is changing rapidly girls seem to be very
bold stable jobs are not easy to come by sex is a strange mix of guilt and
pleasure families are claustrophobic and the blur of television the only
sounding board
Editor: Reena Mohan
Sound: Asheesh Pandiya
Script: Saba Dewan/Rahul Roy
Camera: Rahul Roy
Friday, 23 November 2001, 4:30 pm
My Friend Su
Directed by Neeraj Bhasin
Duration: 55minutes
My Friend Su is an anecdote about two friends, one of them is transsexual and
he strongly feels like a female from the inside, while on the outside he is a
normal male.
`This film is about a relationship which we had built over the
period of shooting. One of the reasons of having comfortable relationship with
the protagonist was the absence of big cameras, heavy lights and all the other
technical jargons of conventional shoots. On our shoot we were blessed with
digital format, which gave us enough freedom to work without our
pre-psychological pressures of camera fear, unnecessary permissions and above
all the fear of budget'
A Cinema of Anxiety
As part of our continuing focus on a cinema of anxiety, Sarai will screen
Clouzot's Wages of Fear, earlier scheduled for October 26.
Friday, 9 November 2001, 430pm
The Wages of Fear
Director: Henri Georges Clouzot
France, 1953, 145 minutes
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Film Seminar at Sarai Wednesday, 28th November 2001
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series @ Sarai
'Re-Thinking the Realism Question : Indian Cinema 1940-1955'.
Moinak Biswas, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University
CSDS Seminar room, 330pm, Wednesday, 28 November 2001
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Film and Urban Culture Workshop @ Sarai
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series
Film and Urban Culture Workshop
29 November - 1 December 2001
A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread
Genre, Narrative Form and Film Style in Contemporary Urban Action
Films
How does an aesthetic of astonishment come together with narratives
whose main focus is violence, paranoia, sensations of shock and a
vertiginous sense of disequlibrium? The contemporary urban action film
highlights the paradoxical combination of fear and fascination in a
particularly vivid form. What is perhaps striking is the international
resonance of the contemporary. We have a checkered lineage here,
stretching back to Kurosawa's samurai films of the 1950s, the Hongkong
kungfu film of auteurs such as King Hu, the generic distention and
excesses of Leone in Italy, and
the visceral US cinema stemming from Peckinpah and Arthur Penn. In the
contemporary era, films such as Matthieu Kassovitz's Hate, Luc
Besson's Leon the Assassin, Scorsese's Goodfellas, John Woo's The
Killer, Innurita's Amores Perros, David Fincher's The Fight Club and
Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine operate with a new sense of exhilaration with
the capacity of film techniques to immerse the spectator in the tactility of
the image, in cinematic movement and rhythm, colour and density. The
spectator is immersed in the headlong movement of the body as it
acquires speed, is fragmented by short shots, threatens and is threatened
with disintegration.
The fascination, however, is not merely with speed and movement, but
also with a sense of the uncanny, the ornate revelation of spaces, of
interiorities and of shocking moments that threaten our grasp on moral
coordinates and mechanisms of identification and empathy. The
exhilaration here is not only with the technical capacities and their
braiding into a wondrous formal organization of materials, but also with
the very process of enhanced perception, new forms of knowledge, and the
threat these carry with them. Here we may think also about the radical
effects brought about by abrupt subversion of generic expectation, and the
particular ways in which narrative form is reorganized to invite a different
kind of spectatorial attention and investment.
This workshop aims to address some of these issues of transformation
in the context of the Bombay film of urban action and revenge.
Arguably, from the late 1980s, in the work of directors such as N.
Chandra, J. P. Dutta, Mukul Sharma, Priyadarshan, Ramgopal Verma,
Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Raj Kumar Santoshi, there emerged a type of
engagement with film form and narrative strategy that marked out a
special departure from earlier narrative traditions. This work was
marked by an investment in the sensorium of cinematic effects quite
independent of, if not displacing, regimes of dialogue, melodramatic
relationships and affective ties, suggesting a new universe of
cinematic allure. Simultaneously, there emerged new performative
dimensions, noticeable in the emergence of a Nana Patekar, the early
Shahrukh Khan, Sunny Deol, Manoj Bajpai and the transformation of
actors such as Jackie Shroff and Anil Kapoor, Dharmendra and Aamir
Khan.
One of our concerns would be how to define these distinctions in more
specific ways, say in the history of narrative form and genre, film
technology and techniques, industrial organization and audience
address.
However, at the same time we would like very strongly to address the
linkages between this new sensory organization in the cinema with
transformations in the referent and in the contexts these films
emerged from. Does the global impinge on the universe of cinematic
reference in new ways? What status does this dynamic have in the
constitution of place and space, of specific location and a more abstracted
and metaphorical positioning for the spectator? We would be particularly
interested to look at the relationship between the urban sensorium and the
cinematic sensorium, and the broader regime of shock and sensation retailed
in the repertoire of journalistic reportage in the press and on television.
We could also consider how to place the cinema in transformations of urban
experience: of visual and auditory environments, of anonymity and the
crowd, of state terror, marginality and secrecy, and also of the
contorted intertwining of urban emancipation and community and
inter-community formation in the circumstances of duress and cruelty.
Apart from questions of departure and distinction, there is also an
issue here of the persistence of narrative form, the way in which
issues of romance andfamilial ties, of melodrama and regimes of affect,
continue to structure the terms of filmic discourse, but perhaps in different
ways.
While only four films are being screened, the focus will be much
broader, inviting reflection on a variety of film traditions, and on
films from other Indian film industries. Participants are also invited
to screen video-clips.
Thursday, 29 November 2001
4:00 pm:
Introduction to the Workshop
Ravi Vasudevan
4:30 - 7:15:
Screening of Parinda
Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Bombay, 1989
Friday, 30 November 2001
2:00 - 3:15:
Ruin and the Uncanny City: Space, Terror
and the
Aesthetics of Violence in Parinda
Ranjani Mazumdar
3:15 - 3:45:
Tea
3:45 - 6:30:
Screening of Gardish
Priyadarshan, Bombay, 1994
6:30 - 7:30:
Discussion in the cafe
Saturday, 1 December 2001 (10:00 am - 7:45 pm)
10:00 - 2:45:
Screening of Satya
Ramgopal Varma, Bombay, 1998
12:45 - 1:30:
Lunch
1:30 - 2:00:
Discussion on Satya
2:00 - 3:15:
Streets of Terror: Urban Anxieties in
the Bombay Cinema of the 1990s
Shohini Ghosh
3:15 - 3:30:
Tea
3:30 - 4:30:
Panel Discussion
Orality, Melodrama and Spectacle in the Cinema of Urban
Anxiety
(Ravikant, Ira Bhaskar, Ravi Vasudevan)
4:30 - 5:30:
Concluding public discussion
5:30 - 6:00:
Discussion in the cafe
6:00 pm
Screening of The Killer
John Woo, Hongkong, 1989
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Saumya Gupta
Coordinator, Research and Programmes
Sarai: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054
www.sarai.net