CONTENTS: AUGUST 2003

FILM at SARAI:
History and Film - Bernardo Bertolucci
1st August        The Spider's Stratagem
8th  August    1900 Part I
22nd August    1900 Part II

TALK at SARAI
26th August     Explorations in Audiophotography

SARAI @ PARK FICTION, GERMANY

FORTHCOMING ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Call for Proposals for Sarai Independent Fellowships
Call for Articles for Sarai Reader 04

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FILM at SARAI :History and Film - Bernardo Bertolucci
Curated by Ravi Vasudevan

Sarai starts a new film series devoted to the relationship between cinema and
history. The cinema has, from its inception, taken the fabrication of the
past as one its main attractions. From 'Birth of a Nation' (D W Griffith,
1915) to 'Gangs of New York' (Martin Scorsese, 2003), 'Napoleon' (Abel Gance,
1927) to 'La Reine Margot' (Patrice Cherau, 1993), 'Pukar' (Sohrab Modi,
1939) to 'Mughal-e-Azam' (K Asif, 1960), 'Alexander Nevsky' (Eisenstein,
1939) to 'Andrei Rublyov' (Tarkovsky, 1960), and so on, the historical film
often relates to the history of nation-states. Variously hagiographic and
critical, the genre combines a fascination for the intricate period setting
with narratives that seek to fashion lineages for a politics of the
contemporary. The historical as a mode of narrative construction in the
cinema ranges from the licence-taking codes of the popular entertainment
genre, the studios, researched reconstruction, as well as a self-reflective
disposition highlighting the relationship between history, technologies of
cinematic representation and the experience of the present. Narratives range
from the ancient through to the very recent. As a genre, the historical film
overlaps with war films, westerns, samurai epics, biographicals and biblical
narratives, to the more intimate remembrances associated with personal
narratives as they intersect with public and collective histories. The series
will also explore the cinema as a form of contextual documentation and
intervention. Here we hope to look at landmark documentaries such as the
work of Leni Reifenstahl, as well as resonant fictions that capture the
complexities of their time.

To begin the series, we start with the work of the major filmmaker, Bernardo
Bertolucci. A much touted young writer of distinguished literary lineage,
Bertolucci emerged at a time when the French New Wave was investigating the
language of film narrative, an environment noticeable in the Italian's work
from the early 'Partner' through to 'Last Tango in Paris' (1972). Affliations
with the Communist Party also saw him looking to Soviet epic traditions,
perhaps most strikingly evident in a poetics of the image harking back to the
work of Dovzhenko. Throughout his career Bertolucci was also concerned with
the relations between personal subjectivity and historical experience and
memory. We have chosen two films which take the issue of time, memory and
history as central engagements, if in rather different ways. In 'The Spider's
Strategem', (1970), inspired by a short story by Borges, the present
generation grapples with the history which has formed them, as as a son
undertakes a journey to uncover the politics of his father, a resistance
fighter in 1940's Italy. Noted for its formal dexterity in building parallels
and symmetries between past and present and in the delineation of
subjectivity 'The Spider's Strategem' stands in contrast to the epic canvas
and temporal sweep of '1900', (1976), where Bertolucci maps half a century of
the history of the Italian countryside, the ties of lord and peasant, the
conflicting forces of socialism and fascism, as these are worked out in the
destiny of its main protagonists.

        Friday, August 1, 2003, 4:30 pm
        The Spider's Stratagem (1970), 100 minutes
        Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

'The Spider's Stratagem' explores the connection between identity politics and
fascist politics. In this film we view the story primarily through the eyes
of Athos Magnani Jr, whose deceased father is memorialized by a small town as
an anti-fascist hero.  Athos Jr returns to his hometown, Tara, in search of
the truth about his father's assassination. The further Athos plunges into
his father's life, the more their identities become intertwined, until the
boundaries between Senior and Junior are practically indistinguishable.
Bertolucci makes this slippage in identity explicit by using the same actor
for the role of both father and son and also employs various filmic devices
including shooting style, use of mise-en-scene, and parallel editing to
support this identity crisis.

Bertolucci constructed 'The Spider's Stratagem' by intimately incorporating
the imagery and ideology of Renè Magritte to further emphasize the feeling of
an ambiguity of identity and loss of self. Bertolucci himself acknowledges,
"...I bought a book on Magritte and studied it at length with Vittorio
[Storaro, his cinematographer] ...Magritte was the inspiration for the
lighting in Spider's Stratagem." Many shots in the film, including the first
time we see Athos Jr in close-up and towards the end when he discovers the
truth of his father's death, are recreations of Magritte - paintings where
reality is not what it seems.

Ultimately, Athos Jr discovers that his father's death was in fact staged;
having betrayed his comrades' plot to assassinate Mussolini to the fascists,
Magnani Sr decided to redeem himself by becoming an anti-fascist symbol for
the people, a symbol of hope. The "staged" aspect of his death is underlined
by the fact that his assassination occurs in an opera house.

In this way, Bertolucci links the idea of cinema with that of historical
memory. Memory, like cinema, is a social construct; although cinema can
temporarily destabilize the viewer's identity, Bertolucci seems to be
reminding us that maintaining one's identity is essential to the ability to
view critically.


        Friday, August 8, 2003, 4:30 pm
        1900 Part I (1976), 175 minutes
        Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

        Friday, August 22, 2003, 4:30 pm
        1900 Part II (1976),  165 minutes
        Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci, flush with box office success after the release of 'Last
Tango in Paris', put his new earnings into this panoramic vision of Italian
political, social and cultural history from the beginning of the century to
the present (The film ends in 1945, but Bertolucci has said that he "wanted
to continue the story until the end of the century."). Events are filtered
through the parallel and intersecting lives of a peasant (Gerard Depardieu)
and a land-owner (Robert De Niro). Bertolucci indulges his love of spectacle
while trying, at the same time, to balance it with his ideological concerns.
It's a film that turns away from the introspection of Bertolucci's previous
films and instead aims for a popular movie of the class struggle using the
style of both American epics and the lyrical Soviet cinema of the 1930's.

According to Bertolucci, '1900' is a "recollection, a collage of my childhood,
my friends, and of my father." While he came from a middle-class family, he
spent much of his childhood with the peasants in the Parma countryside where
he was born in 1941 - and many of these experiences directly informed '1900'.
The film is structured with the rhythm of the seasons; boyhood scenes are set
in the warmth of summer, autumn and winter for the rise of Mussolini to
power, and finally springtime for the resurgence of hope and freedom that
followed the defeat of the fascists at the end of World War II.

Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's cinematographer in many of his films says, "In
'1900' we were trying to reproduce the entire life of a century through the
visual representation of one year.... We started filming in summertime, then
we had to wait six weeks for the autumn. We mainly did it on location..."

Bertolucci covers the forty-five-year arc with deft characterization and
arresting visuals, including an ear-cutting scene that puts Van Gogh and
Quentin Tarantino to shame.

We will screen the film in two parts on the 8th and the 22nd of August.


        TALK at SARAI
        Tuesday August 26, 4:00 pm
        Explorations in Audiophotography
        David Frohlich, HP Labs

The convergence of digital cameras, camcorders and telephones raises new
possibilities for multimedia memory capture. One such possibility is the
combination of sound clips with still images. Ambient sounds could be
captured on an audio-enabled camera, while spoken stories, music and
conversation could be added or captured later during the life of the
photograph. In this talk I show how Western families choose to use these
facilities, by playing a variety of audiophotographs they created in field
trials. The findings suggest that audiophotos are an attractive new media
form lying somewhere between photographs and video, and that audiophotography
could become a mass market practice with the right technological support.

David Frohlich is a Senior Research Scientist working on the future of
photography in Hewlett Packard Labs.  He has a PhD in Psychology from the
University of Sheffield, and post-doctoral training in Conversation Analysis
from the University of York.  David's interests in psychology, amateur
photography and new media technology merge in his work on audiophotography,
which he is now developing further as Visiting Research Fellow at the Royal
College of Art in London.


SARAI @ PARK FICTION, GERMANY
June 19 - July 5, 2003

Mrityunjay Chatterjee and Shveta Sarda were invited by Park Fiction
(http://www.parkfiction.org) to share their experiences in the Cybermohalla
project with a group of  youngsters in Hamburg, Germany. Park Fiction is a
citizens' initiative in the harbor area of St. Pauli, the red-light district
in Hamburg, and one of the city's poorest quarters.

An audio work was developed from recordings made by the group and played
during a conference, Unlikely Encounters, that followed. Shuddhabrata
Sengupta from Sarai joined them for the three day conference that also
included groups from Argentina, Mexico, Italy and Hamburg. For details on the
conference click on
http://www.parkfiction.org/unlikelyencounters/koonsmann.php

The trio also made the presentations in Dresden and Berlin.


FORTHCOMING ANNOUNCEMENTS:
We will shortly send out the call for Proposals for Sarai Independent
Fellowships 2003-04, on the newsletter list. An announcement of the call for
the Sarai Reader 04 will also be made on this list, as well as on several
lists including the Reader List, Nettime, Spectre and Fibreculture.
Do keep a lookout on the list and on our website
(http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm)


Cheers,

Ranita
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net