Newsletter- October 2001


Curated Film Series III: Restless Days

Curated by St. Stephen's College Cine Club


St. Stephens College Cine Club is curating a festival of films from October
17th to 19th 2001. A total of five films will be screened, two each on the
17th and the 18th of October, and one on the 19th of October. Put together
under the broad theme of Restless Days, the series revolves around the
youth, anger and urban struggles. There will be a discussion after the
screening on Friday, the 19th,  coordinated by Ravi Vasudevan. The
screenings will be held at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -
54.

Clarification: Wages of Fear, which was earlier scheduled for October 19th,
2001 will not be screened, and Hate, which was earlier scheduled for the
October 26th, 2001 has been preponed to October 19th, as part of the St.
Stephen's Film Festival.
There will be no screening on October 26th 2001, on account of the Dusshera
holiday.


The Films in the order of screening are listed below. Please note that not
all the films are screened at the usual time of 4:30 pm.

1. October 17, 2001
i)Time: 2:00 pm
War Games, 1983, 116 minutes
Director: John Badham
ii)Time: 4:30 pm
La Chinoise, 1967, 15 minutes
Director:  Jean-Luc Godard



2. October 18th, 2001
i)Time: 2:00 pm
The 400 Blows, 1959, 95 minutes
Director: Francois Truffaut

ii)Time: 4:30 pm
Trainspotting, 1995, 94 minutes
Director: Danny Boyle



3. October 19th, 2001
Time: 4:30 pm
Hate, 1995, 95 minutes
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz

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Focus on the Documentary Film

This month we devote attention to the documentary film. Each screening
will be introduced by the film-maker, and followed by a discussion in
the Sarai café. Please await announcements about the rest of the
series, presently scheduled for 15, 16, 22 and 23 October.

Friday, 2 November 2001, 4:30 pm
House of Memory
video; 79 min; 2001
Director: Christopher Mitchell

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. Since 1988
he has worked as an independent TV producer/director, with a
particular interest in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.

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.

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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, 4:30pm
The Wages of Fear
France, 1953, 145 minutes
Director: Henri Georges Clouzot

Four men undertake a suicide mission to earn $2,000 apiece by driving
two trucks loaded with dangerously unstable nitroglycerine 300 miles
across the rugged terrain of South America to the site of a ferocious
oil-well fire. The movie's first hour, before the perilous nitro trek
even begins, unfolds like Apocalypse Now in reverse. Clouzot filmed
The Wages of Fear entirely in France, primarily on sets he
convincingly constructed to resemble the squalid South American town
of the initial setting. The stultifying rhythms of impoverishment and
casual cruelty pervades the day to day life of these lower depths. A
stench of hopelessness and economic deprivation seems bred into the
dirt of the streets. The townspeople live in the shadow of an
exploitative U.S. oil company that employs its own strong-arm security
force to patrol the company's miles of snaking pipeline. In addition
to oppressed natives and arrogant oil workers, the town is comprised
of outcasts and fugitives - thieves, confidence men, murderers,
ex-Nazis. No one in this assortment of losers has arrived in town by
choice. And none of
them is looking to stay. It is from this cesspool of humanity that the
story's four protagonists emerge to seek a fast fortune as nitro
haulers. Clouzot was a few years ahead of his time in combining the 
excitement of a genre film with philosophical exegesis, a style that
would come to fruition with the next generation of New Wave filmmakers
like François Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard.

All screenings at 4:30pm, in the Seminar Room, New Building, Centre
for Studies of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 54

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