CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2003

12th        Delhi Seminar Series: Re-building and Re-theorising Colonial Delhi
19th        CSDS Social and Political Seminar Series: Copyright Law, the Public                
        Domain and the Indian Constitution
25th        Media Art Presentation: Pan-O-Matic
     
Film @ Sarai: US Counter Culture
7th        To Sleep With Anger, Directed by Charles Burnett
14th        Shortcuts, Directed by Robert Altman
28th        Safe, Directed by Todd Haynes

Installation
1st  ? 19th      Amodal Suspension ? Relational Architecture 8
     
Announcement: Call For Papers - Film and History Workshop
18th        Deadline for Abstracts

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I. TALK @ SARAI
Wednesday, November 12, 2003, 3:30 pm
URBAN CULTURES AND POLITICS: THE DELHI SEMINAR SERIES
Re-building and Re-theorising Colonial Delhi: Governmentality and the Delhi
Improvement Trust
by Stephen Legg, Cambridge University

II. CSDS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY SEMINAR SERIES
Wednesday, November 19, 2003, 4.00 pm 
Shifting The Goalposts: Copyright Law, the Public Domain and the Indian
Constitution
by Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Alternative Legal Forum, Bangalore

III. MEDIA ART PRESENTATION @ SARAI
Tuesday, November 25, 2003, 3:30 pm
Pan-O-Matic
by Stephanie Rothenberg, Video and Net Artist, New York

A multimedia work consisting of a video, web site and performance centered
around the mysterious disappearance of a fictitious female inventor. Her
mission is the development of a cyber divining rod, a metaphor for a utopian
device able to enhance all communities and lifestyles. The video serves as an
infommercial introducing the character, her invention and disappearance
whereas the web site, in progress, will enable users to participate in the
investigation. The site will ultimately function as a space for the
collective rethinking of technogadgetry and issues of technological
colonization; who is this technology created for? How is it being
implemented?

IV. FILM @ SARAI: US Counter Culture
Curated by Ravi S. Vasudevan

Sarai introduces a new curatorial series devoted to filmmakers working at the
margins of US cinema. Cultivating a critical outlook to reigning ideologies,
narrative conventions and filmmaking protocols, these filmmakers range from
independents working with minimum finance to others who, while working with
mainstream finance and the star system, have nevertheless managed to generate
a creative oeuvre which has rarely achieved adequate backing and
distribution. We hope overtime to feature work from the American underground,
but our initial series will focus on three directors who have by and large
worked within the format of narrative cinema, if in innovative and
destabilizing ways.

November 7, 2003, 4:30 pm
To Sleep With Anger (1990), 120 minutes
Directed by Charles Burnett

November 14, 2003, 4:30 pm
Shortcuts (1993), 189 minutes
Directed by Robert Altman

November 28, 2003, 4:30 pm
Safe (1995), 125 minutes
Directed by Todd Haynes

Charles Burnett is a key figure of the Black American cinema. His first film,
a diploma piece for the UCLA Film School was subsequently fleshed out into a
feature length film, 'The Killer of Sheep' (1977) and is considered a
landmark work. Dispensing with linear causality, this first film generates a
sense of the everyday life of a young black who moves between his job at a
slaughter house and the rhythms of family life. His 1990 film, 'To Sleep With
Anger', takes as its subject a black family which plummets into a strange,
dark magical sense of past lives, irrational beliefs, existensial torpor and
irrupting violence. The transformation is effected by the visit of an old
acquaintance from the south, a seductive figure who lures the different
members of the family into strange and unexpected dimensions of their
personality. This is a great performance by Danny Glover, indicating skills
far removed from the action heroics of the 'Lethal Weapon' movies. Burnett
went on to direct television documentaries and series, including a
documentary about the new generation of immigrants in the U.S., 'America
Becoming' (1991) and an Oprah Winfrey-produced miniseries for ABC, 'The
Wedding' (1998). Of this later work many critics have singled out 'Nightjohn'
(1996). Made for the Disney Channel, the film adapts a novel for young adults
by Gary Paulsen, and tells the story of Sarny (Allison Jones), a young house
slave on a cotton plantation, who is taught to read by Nightjohn (Carl
Lumbly), a slave who escaped to the north but returned to captivity to teach
others what he knew. By the film's end, Sarny's surrogate family has been
broken up and she is to be sold to another owner, but the lesson has been
learned: she too will pass on what she knows. Critics pointed out that while
Nightjohn is on the surface the family friendly fare typical of a PG-13
Disney movie, it doesn't shrink from showing slavery's horrors, and tells an
adolescent's coming-of-age story with an adult's sense of historical reality
and moral complexity. Amongst Burnett's other projects is his contribution to
a television series on the blues that will feature work by Scorsese, Eastwood
and Mike Figgis.

At the age of 78, Robert Altman is a legendary figure who has consistently
worked against the grain of mainstream genres, developing an irreverent,
frequently carnivalesque tapestry of American society, its losers, dropouts
and marginals. His career is dotted with landmark films, including 'MASH'
(1970), starring Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, his scatological comedy
about an army hospital and its bohemian surgeons at the Korean front, later
to be developed into a long running television series. Other work includes
his at once dreamlike and deconstructive western, 'MacCabe and Mrs. Miller'
(1971), with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty; his affectionate send up of
the hardboiled detective film, 'The Long Goodbye', transplanting Chandler's
Philip Marlowe to contemporary Los Angeles and through the wryly bumbling,
out-of-joint persona of Elliot Gould; the wonderful 'Nashville' (1975), his
ensemble piece about the dreams and aspirations of a myriad hopefuls who
descend on the American country western music capital; 'The Player' (1990),
his clinical dissection of Hollywood business maneouvres; and the
extraordinary 'Shortcuts' (1993), culled from several Raymond Carver short
stories. 'Shortcuts' weaves together several narrative worlds, deploying a
glancing structure which has characters touch, move away, intersect in a
richly textured evocation of the cross currents which traverse a host of
separated lives. From the beginning, Altman's engagement with the ensemble,
and his capacity to weave together many stories and characters, was enhanced
by innovations in film sound. His multi-track system, first used in 'MASH',
captured layers of sound and speech as these are dispersed across and in the
depth of the story world, conjuring up a sometimes hallucinatory acoustic
environment.

Todd Haynes, a key American independent, made a series of short films, which
includes 'Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story' (1987), which comically, and
darkly, mobilizes the Barbie Doll image to look at the tragic unraveling of
the life of the pop star. Haynes made an impact with his first feature,
'Poison' (1991), winning top prize at the US independent film festival,
Sundance. Inspired by the work of Jean Genet, the film is composed of three
stories, Hero, Horror and Homo, and draws upon the conventions of horror
movies, 1950s melodramas and the prison film to explore scenarios of violent
transgression and illicit love. While a self-conscious voice of the gay
community, his work does not always take gay experience as its subject, but,
in his own account, seeks to use this to explore the lack of fit between
subjectivity and environment. In the mesmerizing 'Safe' (1995), he gestures
to a key issue for the community, the question of aids as metaphor and
reality, but focuses on the travails faced by a young woman afflicted with a
mysterious, and escalating reaction to the environment. Composed in long
shot, and avoiding the conventions of the close up in its reflections on the
plight of its female character, 'Safe' is a film of obsessive distance and
cold tones. Julianne Moore's assailed housewife finds herself descending into
a morbid and undiagnosable illness, where the very air seems fraught with
danger. After this came the celebratory 'Velvet Goldmine' (1998), his film
about the phenomenon of "glamrock" in the 1970s, and exploring the culture of
bisexuality cultivated in the music scene. Recently, Haynes has taken over
the heritage of Douglas Sirk, the German director who in 1950's Hollywood
deployed domestic melodramas as vehicles of ironic reflection on familial
norms and social expectations. In 'Far From Heaven' (2002), Haynes draws on
Sirk's 'All That Heaven Allows' (1955),  again starring the key contemporary
actor Julianne Moore (who also features in Altman's 'Shortcuts'), this time
inducting themes of interracial and gay sexuality into the scenario.


V. INSTALLATION @ SARAI
November 1 ? 19, 2003

"Amodal Suspension ? Relational Architecture 8"
an interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer commissioned for the
opening of the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan.

This installation will receive text messages sent by people over the Internet
or by cell phone and convert them into patterns of flashing lights in the
sky, turning the Japanese city of Yamaguchi into a giant communication
switchboard. While the actual piece is located in the public space around the
new YCAM Center, people may participate remotely through the project website
at www.amodal.net or through an access station in various centres across the
world including Sarai. For a list of other access centres log on to
www.amodal.net. All the programs in the site have been written in the Java
language and can be run with the vast majority of web browsers and operating
systems. 

Message Flow:
Log on to the project website and visit the section labelled ?participate?.
The browser will load a java applet that shows a real-time 3D visualization
of the YCAM Center and park. The 3D window shows exactly what is happening in
Yamaguchi at any given point in time.

To send a message, simply enter it in the space provided with your name and
location. If you would like to be notified when your message is caught,
please enter your email address. If you would like to specify a particular
recipient for the message please enter his or her information on the bottom
right.

When a message is received in Japan the system automatically encodes it as a
unique sequence of flashes and sends it to the sky with a network of 20
robotically-controlled searchlights. The signaling is similar to Morse code
or the flashing of fireflies, ?the lights will modulate their intensity to
represent different text characters. Each message, once encoded, is
?suspended? in the sky of the city, bouncing around the YCAM center, relayed
from one searchlight to another. An email is sent to the intended recipient
to notify him or her that ?a message is waiting for them in the sky of
Yamaguchi?. Each light sequence will continue to circulate until the
recipient or somebody else ?catches? the message and reads it.

To catch a message, you can select the ?catch tool? that is under the 3D
window. As you roll over a light ray with the mouse cursor you can see the
name and location of whoever sent that particular message. If you click on
the light with the catch tool the message is revealed to you and the author
and intended recipient are notified. Right after this, the message is removed
from the sky, shown on a large projection in Yamaguchi, and finally placed in
a 3D archive where it will remain in Brownian motion with the rest of the
messages received by the project. To highlight the irony of globalization,
the piece will use an automatic translation engine between Japanese and
English, ?this will produce inaccurate but charming results.

?Amodal Suspension? creates an interactive mesh of light over the city, a
floating cloud of data that can be written on and read. While visualizing the
traffic of information on an urban scale, the piece is also intended as a
deviation from the assumed transparency of electronic communication.

Venue:  YCAM and the central park in Yamaguchi City, in the South West of
Japan. The searchlights will be visible from a 15 Km (10 Mile) radius.

Credits: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ? Conception and Direction, Yukiko Shikata ?
Curator


VI. ANNOUNCEMENT: FILM AND HISTORY WORKSHOP

CALL FOR PAPERS
A Sarai-CSDS Workshop
December 11 - 13, 2003.

Film constitutes a crucial archive of the twentieth century, and, despite the
various changes which have taken place in its existence as a public form, it
continues to exercise great influence, now dispersed from the domain of
public cinema-going into a host of new circuits. Arguably, with the advent of
new cheaper technologies, it is now available for wider social practice, in
forms ranging from entertainment cinema to documentary formats. As an
archive, it speaks to the importance of mediation in  history: the way
cognition and perception are crucially transformed by the intercession of new
technologies of sound and image. From the annals of mass entertainment forms,
through the variety of art works and documentary practices, film presents us
with a huge resource to research the particular types of knowledge and forms
of experience of the modern epoch in human history.

Following on from our curation of the Film and History series over the last
three months, the Sarai programme is planning a workshop on this theme. We
would especially like to encourage students to make presentations, and are
inviting paper proposals which should contain a one page abstract of the
paper. Proposals must be submitted by 18th November. As the workshop is of
limited duration, there will be a process of selection. We are particularly
looking for postgraduates, research scholars and above, but can consider
interesting proposals from younger students. Our call is primarily for Delhi
based students. However, outstation candidates who can fund themselves are
welcome to apply.
 
Proposals may draw upon any national or international dimension of film for
their focus. They may focus on the individual film, a film genre, a
particular period of cinema. The idea is to present a rigorous argument which
also highlights questions of method, whether in terms of formal analysis or
empirical and contextual investigation. Those selected are encouraged to use
video clips to illustrate their argument.

The workshop focuses on a specific set of questions. These provide guidelines
for the type of issues we would like to discuss, but other ways of posing the
question are welcome.
i. Film and Historical Perception:
How does film ask us to think about history, about the relation of past and
present? We would like to think about this in a differentiated way. For
example, how does the genre of the historical film, often castigated for its
fantastical and inaccurate scenarios, generate a discussion about history?
Does the genre afford us with a sense of popular historical perception,
outside the protocols of academic writing? How have questions of personal
memory, senses of time and duration, intersected with the  representation of
the large historical event? The latter has often been a concern of art works
and documentary practices, influencing the very rhythms of film form, but it
has also been taken up by entertainment cinema as well, as for example in the
case of Kamalahasan's Hey Ram! (1999).
 
ii. The Filmic Past as a Discourse of History:
Arguably, film does not allow us access to a historical or social referent
directly. At a crucial level, films may refer primarily to films - the body
of narrative codes, technical practices, generic parameters, star images and
acting conventions that compose the history of the cinema. If film's past is
the primary historical reference point for understanding the past-present
logic of film, how do we position this in relation to a wider historical
discourse?

iii. History and the Technologies of Filmic Perception:
Crucially, the past/present relationship is given a particular inflection by
film. What functions does film technology, often driven by a will to display
the novel and the spectacular, and thereby integral to an audio-visual here
and now, have in the  past-present dialectic of historical discourse?

iv. Film and the Sense of Historical Time:
We would like to explore different notions of historical time in the workshop.
Historical discourse in the cinema can range from narratives about fairly
remote time, including here the most ancient and the relatively recent (in
the Indian context, this includes histories of nationalism and communalism).
But there may also be a way in which contemporary history itself becomes the
subject of the cinema. One  rendering may have the past as very recent, but
nevertheless distinguished from the present because of the cataclysmic event
which divides time: this is the case, for example, with a number of films
about the Partition of the subcontinent which emerged in the early 1960s. But
in other instances history may emerge despite a sense of continuity, and
without the pronounced rupture associated with major events. Can we explore
this more fluid, more inchoate signaling of transformation within the orbit
of  ordinary lives (for example, in the documentary format), or even through
genres of the everyday (as, say, in domestic melodramas and family socials).
Even when the time is the present continuous, there may be intimations that
the times are also historical, communicating a sense of the epochal
significance of a period. There are suggestions of this, for example, in the
cinema of the 1970s, and especially the films of Amitabh Bachchan.

v. History and Film in the Digital Age:
In many ways discourses about the relationship between cinema and history have
been determined by a notion of the priviliged relationship of the
photographic image to reality, the way it captures a real object by the
imprint made by light and shadow on film stock. With the emergence of digital
forms, there is an awareness that the image can be internally manipulated,
without reference to an `external' reality. Such arguments often forget the
variety of ways film has manufactured images, for example through stop motion
editing, back projection and matte shots. But one of our explorations could
focus on the question of whether the shift into digital forms has
fundamentally upset perceptions about the relationship between image and
object, film and history.

vi. Film as Archive:
Finally, how can film be thought of as a historical source that can tell us
something about the times in which it was made, the function and imagination
it served? We may consider here the ambitious film event, such as the work of
a Leni Reifenstahl in Triumph of the Will (1935), where the cinema is akin to
a historical monument, architecturally organized to solicit feelings of awe,
a sense of a before and an after. But we would like to consider the more
modest, everyday film as well. How can we access an Indian genre film, say a
`social, a `family social, an action movie, to think about historical
context? Apart from analyzing the film itself, what other resources, say in
print, televisual, popular visual and musical culture, can we draw on to make
the film talk about its context?

Each evening will conclude with a full-length feature film presentation
related to the themes of the workshop. This will be open to the general
public.

A CV and one page abstract indicating the scope, nature and approach of the
proposed paper should be sent by email or post to
Ranita Chatterjee
Programme Coordinator,
Sarai
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054.
Ph: 23960040, 23942199 (ext 307)
Email: ranita at sarai.net
For enquiries contact Sadan (sadan at sarai.net)

The applications must reach by 18th November, 2003. Selected candidates will
be informed soon after submission of their applications.

Cheers,

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