Newsletter- December 2001


Table of Contents

1.Film and Urban Cultures Workshop Report
2.Events @ Sarai
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series: William Mazarella
Urban Culture and Politics Seminar Series: Peter van der Veer
Rescheduled Documentary Film Screening: Delhi Diary 2001
3.Film @ Sarai: Asian Film Cultures: Hongkong Cinema
4.New @ Sarai Website
5.Residency @ Sarai
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Workshop Report

Film and Urban Culture Workshop
A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread

A workshop entitled A cinema of Anxiety: The exhilaration of dread was
organised at Sarai from November 29 till  December 2001 . The workshop
discussed issues of genre, narrative form, and film style in
contemporary urban action films. Three recent Hindi films - Parinda
(Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989), Gardish (Priyadarshan, 1994) and Satya
(Ramgopal Verma, 1998) were screened. The screenings was followed by
paper presentations and discussion sessions. Papers were presented by
Ranjani Majumdar (Cinematic terror and the uncanny in Parinda) and
Shohini Ghosh (Streets of Terror: Mapping Genre in the 1990s). A panel
discussion, chaired by Ravi Vasudevan took place on the final day of
the workshop, where short presentations were made by Ravikant
(Language and dialogue in popular hindi cinema), Ira Bhaskar
(Melodrama in the urban action film) and Moinak Biswas (Realism and
the reality effect in Indian cinema).

The workshop itself was conceived around a series of shifts in modes
of representation as manifested in the urban action film. Two of the
presentations (Ghosh and Majumdar) negotiated this framework of urban
space in interesting ways with reference to specific film texts.
Majumdar analyzed the use of space in Parinda, both public/city and
private/domestic, placing the film's narrative within larger
coordinates - regimes of representing shock (film noir and other
genres) through montage as also ideas of terror and the uncanny that
Parinda invokes. Ghosh looked closely at three films (Vastava, Jeet
and Yashvant) in order to develop the strand of city streets -
anonymity and the crowd, and the gendered nature of certain narrative
tropes and metaphors in contemporary Hindi Cinema.

In a world of 'anxiety' and 'dread', one heartening factor was never
in doubt - no one growing up in India can, strictly speaking, be
called a 'non-film person'. The public discussions following each of
the screenings and papers, dissolved to a large extent, the otherwise
great conflict of democratic forums - expert vs. layman. The 'lay'
audience, in particular the student and university community served to
invigorate and liven up the proceedings.  Many of the arguments put
forward in the paper presentations were challenged, extended and on
occasion, trashed.

This workshop articulates two of Sarai's primary areas of interest -
cinema practices and urban space, and the ways in which each impinges
on the other, with an emphasis (in this seminar) on regimes of
representation. Another interest emerges in the public discussions -
the creation of a public culture wherein critical reflection does not
remain solely in the domain of impermeable academic knowledge-systems.
Such an endeavour is also part of a broader project of developing an
analytical language capable of tracing epistemic shifts in the nature
of contemporary social practices.


Events @ Sarai
All events and screenings are held at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29
Rajpur Road Delhi - 110054

i)Wednesday,  December 5 2001, 3.30 p.m.
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series

Critical Publicity / Public Criticism: Reflections on Fieldwork
in the Bombay Advertising  World
A talk by William Mazzarella
Department of Anthropology , University of Chicago


ii)Monday, December 10 2001, 3.30 p.m.
Urban Politics and Cultures Seminar Series

Post-Modern India: Engineering a Communal Future
A talk by Peter van der Veer
University of Amsterdam


iii)Thursday, December 13 2001, 4:30 pm
Rescheduled Documentary Screening

Delhi Diary 2001
Director: Ranjani Mazumdar
2001, 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.
 

Film @ Sarai

Asian Film Cultures: Hongkong Cinema
This month, film at sarai is pleased to present the work of the Hongkong
auteur, Wong  Kar Wai. Along with other directors of Honkong's `second
wave' -Stanley Kwan, Eddie Fong and Ching Siu-tung -Wong Kar Wai's
thematic concerns and stylistic engagements seem to inhabit an
entirely different universe from that of the action film, with its
compendium of special effects, intricate editing patterns, and action
choreography.

But Wong is an experimentalist: Chungking Express's minimalist use of
sets to signal a crowded market place sees him using closeups, tight
framing, and quick cuts to render cinema and city as a place of play,
where the chance encounter amongst strangers is elaborated into a
witty, intricately coded dialogue about romance; the irreverence of
wit, and the rhythms of repartee suggest the lineage of American
screwball comedy, but also something of the comic high jinx of
Hongkong action. Fallen Angels, a night film par excellence, shifts
registers between an abstract, stylized rendering of the femme fatale
of film noir, and the manic world of a rootless urban youth. Later, In
the Mood for Love revisits the scenario of the romance of fortuitous
encounters but within a very different stylistic format: lighting,
shot composition and duration focus our attention on the sensuality of
being, refiguring the body as a form of gesture to the possibilities,
and imponderables, of intimacy in the setting of densely crowded
everyday life and marital obligations.


Friday, December 7 2001, 4:30 pm
Fallen Angels / Duoluo Tianshi
Director: Wong Kar Wai
1995

Friday, December 14 2001, 4:30 pm
Happy Together / Chunguang Zhaxie
Director: Wong Kar Wai,
1997

Friday, December 21 2001, 4:30 pm
In the Mood for Love
Director: Wong Kar Wai
2000


New @ Sarai Website
i) Diary of an Actress: New episodes of an actress's diary, available
at http://www.sarai.net/crosstalk/Forum.php3?Fcode=Diary&Thread=5

ii) Infinite injustice/ensuring freedom: A topic for discussion
available at
http://www.sarai.net/crosstalk/Forum.php3?Fcode=General&Thread=10

iii) Please visit the sarai website www.sarai.net for a reworked
Calender page, available at http://www.sarai.net/calendar/calendar.htm

iv) The final list of the awardees of the Sarai print media
fellowships and seed grants is also available at
http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm


Residency @ Sarai
Syeda Farhana, a photojournalist from Dhaka, Bangaladesh is presently
at Sarai for a month long joint Khoj -Sarai Residency. She will be in
Delhi from November 20th to December 20th 2001.  Syeda is a student at
the Drik Pathshala: the South Asian Institute of Photography in Dhaka,
and is working on a project on migration. Some of her earlier work has
been published in the New Internationalist, and is available at
http://www.oneworld.org/ni/index4.html



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Clarification and an apology:


Dear subscribers,

We would like to apologize to all the readers of the newsletter for an
unfortunate editorial indiscretion in the reporting of  the "Film and Urban
Culture Workshop - A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread" -
recently held at Sarai.

The correspondent to the newsletter for the workshop has inadvertently used
the words "... Many of the arguments put forward in the paper presentations
were challenged, extended and on occasion, trashed."

There has been strong exception to the expression "trashed" in this report.
And we at Sarai are in complete agreement with the opinion that the usage of
the word "trashed" - which, though it may have been used by the correspondent
to signify a healthy liveliness of debate - was completely inappropriate.

The discussions at the event were in fact marked by opennesss and dialouge
in a lively environment in the best sense of the term.

The correspondent has assured me that he did not mean to single out any
presenters and that his comments were meant to reflect on the discussions of
all the papers. Incorrect formatting which aligns this sentance to the
previous paragraph suggests that the expression, (unfortunate as it is) is
meant to reflect on two specific presentations. We regret the fact that this
impression has occurred, the correspondent assures me that this was not
intended.

However, even if it were meant to be a general, non-specific remark, the
expression remains inapporpriate in itself, and an error in formatting makes
it doubly so - because it seems to suggest that specific presentations were
being targetted for criticism.

We also apologize that due to editorial oversight on my part in compiling the
newsletter, such an expression went through, into the public domain.

Clearly, when we at Sarai make a commitment to put things out into the Public
Domain we are aware that it also carries with it a responsibility to ensure
that the decorum and propreity that is an inalienable part of  civilised
discourse  commensurate to the Public Domain is maintained at all costs. What
has occurred is due to an error and an oversight and we accept the
responsibility for this.

We hope that our sincere apologies are accepted by all, especially by those
who took such trouble to make the presentations at the event.

We assure you all that we will make every effort to ensure that such
slippages and errors do not happen in future.


regards
Saumya Gupta

The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054
www.sarai.net