Document Actions
September 2003
CONTENTS: September 2003
Talk @ Sarai
2nd Urban Cultures & Politics Seminar
The Place of Mumbai: Circles of Urban Identity in the 19th and 20th
Century, by Jim Masselos
29th Media Publics & Practices Seminar
Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age,
by Laura Mulvey
Film @ Sarai: History & Film: Spectacle and Subjectivity in the Epoch of
Fascism
5th Lacombe Lucien, Directed by Louis Malle
12th Hiroshima Mon Amour, Directed by Alain Resnais
19th Triumph of the Will, Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
26th Olympia, Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Online link for 'Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies'
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,
In September we return to our Occasional Seminar Series with lectures by a
historian and a film theorist. We also continue the History and Film Series
focussing on the French and German experiences of Fascism.
TALK @ SARAI
September 2, 2003, 4:00 pm
Urban Cultures & Politics Seminar Series
'The Place of Mumbai: Circles of Urban Identity in the 19th and 20th
Century'
by Jim Masselos, Department of History, University of Sydney
Organised in collaboration with the Australian High Commission.
September 29, 2003, 4:00 pm
Media Publics & Practices Seminar Series
'Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age'
by Laura Mulvey, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media,
Birkbeck College, University of London
This will be followed by a screening of the film Disgraced Monuments (1993),
48 minutes, Directed by Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis.
In 'Disgraced Monuments', Mulvey uses rare archival footage and interviews
with sculptors, art historians, gallery and museum directors to examine the
fate of monuments of Lenin, Stalin and other leaders of the former Soviet
Union after the collapse of communism.
Organised in collaboration with The British Council and Centre for the Study
of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, as part of the 'Talking Films'
series.
FILM @ SARAI
History and Film: Spectacle and Subjectivity in the Epoch of Fascism
Continuing our series on History and Film, Sarai's September curation builds
on Bertolucci's reflections on Italian fascism and history by looking at the
German and French experiences. As with Bertolucci, the work of Louis Malle
and Alain Resnais look back at a traumatic time as it unravels through
individual perception and experience. Malle's 'Lacombe Lucien' (1974) mines a
history that has often been particularly difficult to deal with in the
post-fascist context: that of the theme of collaboration rather than
resistance. The film's focus on a peasant youth draws out the amorality of
the individual uncultivated in ethical sensibilities.
In 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' (1959), Resnais, working with a script by Marguerite
Duras, draws on memories of a French woman's love affair with a German
soldier under the Nazi occupation of France, the resulting ostracization and
trauma. But he then builds on this to explore a shifting field of
engagements, between the dissonant experiences of individual trauma and the
mass tragedy of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima. The intimate associations
released by a montage of sensual body traces generates a moving flow of
sensory, non-rational attachments to different historical experiences.
Entirely different in status is the work of Leni Reifenstahl. This is film as
historical event rather than contextual document or retrospective engagement.
Her major works on behalf of the national socialist party, 'Triumph of the
Will' (1934) and 'Olympia' (1938) mapped a new ambition for the so-called
documentary work, complicating the relations between representation and event
in distinctive ways. In accounts of 'Triumph of the Will', Riefenstahl's film
on the 1934 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party, architectural layout and
repetition of apparently live action speeches facilitate the event's capture,
indeed its production, as a film. State and society become a gargantuan film
set.
With 'Olympia', while the large scale set of the 1936 Olympic stadium
reiterates the method of the earlier film, new, mythic resonances are
generated around an aesthetics of the human body in its physical striving.
Like the genre of the mountain films in which Riefenstahl starred in the
1920s, 'Olympia' composes a thematic of sublime transcendance. Bodies soar in
space, their motion slowed down, figures dot the frame in coordinated
activity, and a tryst appears to be fashioned around the body as heavenly
abode. Critics have looked at the lure of this aesthetic with suspicion,
arguing for the fertile way it ties aesthetics to racist politics in
disturbing ways. Whether as technology of the aestheticized and racialized
body, or, more mundanely, as template for the subsequent conventions of
sports television, 'Olympia' is a critical work in the history of the cinema.
September 5, 2003, 4:30 pm
Lacombe Lucien (1974), 133 minutes
Directed by Louis Malle
The location is a small provincial town in south-west France, during the Nazi
occupation in the summer of 1944. Tired of his life as a hospital cleaner,
18-year old Lucien Lacombe tries to join the French Resistance, but is turned
down on account of his age. All too easily he is recruited by the German
police and works as a Gestapo agent, arresting his fellow countrymen and
generally tyrannising his former friends and relations. Whilst initially
revelling in his new-found position of power, Lucien begins to have second
thoughts when he meets and falls in love with a young woman, who is the
daughter of a Jewish tailor he has been persecuting. 'Lacombe Lucien' is a
study of the corruption of innocence and the realisation of guilt in a young
impressionable adult.
The central message underpinning the film is that there are no absolutes in
evil. This is achieved in a number of ways. For example, at the start of
the film, Lucien appears cruel when killing animals for the dinner table.
Then, when the film ends, Lucien is seen killing animals for the same reason,
but now in an environment of idyllic innocence. The same act, seen from two
different perspectives.
September 12, 2003, 4:30 pm
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), 91 minutes
Directed by Alain Resnais
The film is set in the late fifties and involves a French film actress and a
Japanese architect who embark on a brief affair in Hiroshima. The intimacy of
the encounter makes them reflect on the painful history of the city and the
tragedy and humiliation that befell her during a disastrous affair with a
German soldier in her hometown in wartime France. Using silent flashbacks and
actual documentary footage Resnais begins to draw their different past
experiences together as one in the lovers' minds to dramatic effect.
In tracing her emotional devastation, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' is less about
memory itself, more about the burdensome act of remembering. As Susan Sontag
says, "The memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of
feeling".
At the time of its release the film was hailed as a cinematic watershed, a
truly "modern" film by the editors of the influential French magazine
'Cahiers du Cinema'. Jean luc Godard called it the first film without any
cinematic references. The film's modernity derives from its representation of
a specific fragmentation and anguish, central to the post-War moment - a
representation of subjective time, of experience through memory that Resnais
and his screenwriter, French novelist Marguerite Duras, borrowed from Marcel
Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henri Bergson, and others. In joining
these elements into a visual composition, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' stands
outside the French New Wave, which mostly reworked cinematic conventions.
September 19, 2003, 4:30 pm
Triumph of the Will (1934), 110 minutes
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
'Triumph of the Will' commences with Hitler's arrival in Nuremberg by plane.
Parallels can be made between Hitler's arrival through the skies, and the
descent of a God, coming to meet his people - this is heightened by the
endless views of clouds, the plane's shadow moving relentlessly over the
sunlit streets of Nuremberg, shots of the town's people in the streets
staring up with a look of awed expectation on their faces. The Wagnerian
music played as Hitler's plane lands, the bands and singing, the beauty of
Nuremberg, the hysteria of the crowds with their arms outstretched to greet
him, combine to make up a display of Nazi passion and obsession. It is this
emotional response of the people in the film and the emotional response the
audience gains from these majestic shots that are at once inspirational,
seductive and horrifying.
It cannot be denied that the film is a record of an event - an actuality - and
happened where and when and in the order that the film says it did. It has
generally been accepted that the Nuremberg Rally was staged for the cameras,
rather than the cameras having to accommodate the action. The film was
financed by the Nazi Government, completed with the full co-operation of all
involved, with huge resources at Riefenstahl's disposal - an unlimited
budget, crew of 120 and between 30 and 40 cameras.
Leni Riefenstahl, in an interview in 1964, said that 'Triumph Of The Will' was
a recording of an event, not a propaganda film: "If you see this film again
today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene.
Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all.
It is history."
However, over the years 'Triumph Of The Will' has been described as "an
impressive spectacle of Germany's adherence to Hitler", a "Nazi masterpiece"
and "a masterpiece of romanticised propaganda". Susan Sontag in her essay
'Fascinating Fascism' claims that 'Triumph of the Will' is the "most
successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception
negates the possibility of the film-makers having an aesthetic or visual
concept independent of propaganda".
September 26, 2003, 4:30 pm
Olympia (1938), 225 minutes
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Amid ovations for 'Triumph of the Will', Riefenstahl proposed a new project: a
long film on the Olympic games to be held in Berlin in 1936. She negotiated
with the International Olympic Committee, not mentioning her plan to Hitler;
she wanted to avoid official sponsorship.
The Olympic officials were cautious. Riefenstahl wished to prepare pits beside
jumping areas, camera rails along running tracks, towers at the diving sites.
Fearing that the outcome of contests might eventually be challenged on the
ground of distraction, officials required her to obtain approvals from all
national committees and from all contestants individually. At enormous
effort, over many months, she secured these approvals.
'Olympia' eventually became two feature-Iength films, and another
organizational achievement of amazing virtuosity. She was restricted to six
camera positions on the stadium field. but supplemented these with cameras in
grandstands and many elsewhere. Automatic cameras were sent aloft via free
balloons, with attached instructions for returning the film to Leni
Riefenstahl. The most startling photographic innovation involved diving;
dives were followed through the air and then under water without a break. The
start of the dive was photographed from the surface of the water; at the
moment of impact the cameraman went under water with his special camera while
changing focus and aperture. It took months to perfect the procedure.
'Olympia' is considered by some to be one of the best documentaries ever made
- a brilliant record of the human spirit and athletic excellence, documenting
the achievements of men and women of all races and colors. Other theorists
have criticiqued it on the grounds that Riefenstahl focuses more on the
glorification of the human form rather than the sporting events.
-----------
'Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies' is now available in the US with
Autonomedia. To buy online click on
http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/FMPro?-db=products.fp5&-format=detail.htm&-lay=cgi&-sortfield=name&-sortorder=descend&keyword=sarai&-max=250&-recid=33093&-token.0=12592577&-find=
Cheers,
Ranita
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net
Talk @ Sarai
2nd Urban Cultures & Politics Seminar
The Place of Mumbai: Circles of Urban Identity in the 19th and 20th
Century, by Jim Masselos
29th Media Publics & Practices Seminar
Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age,
by Laura Mulvey
Film @ Sarai: History & Film: Spectacle and Subjectivity in the Epoch of
Fascism
5th Lacombe Lucien, Directed by Louis Malle
12th Hiroshima Mon Amour, Directed by Alain Resnais
19th Triumph of the Will, Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
26th Olympia, Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Online link for 'Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies'
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,
In September we return to our Occasional Seminar Series with lectures by a
historian and a film theorist. We also continue the History and Film Series
focussing on the French and German experiences of Fascism.
TALK @ SARAI
September 2, 2003, 4:00 pm
Urban Cultures & Politics Seminar Series
'The Place of Mumbai: Circles of Urban Identity in the 19th and 20th
Century'
by Jim Masselos, Department of History, University of Sydney
Organised in collaboration with the Australian High Commission.
September 29, 2003, 4:00 pm
Media Publics & Practices Seminar Series
'Passing Time: Reflections on the Cinema from a New Technological Age'
by Laura Mulvey, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media,
Birkbeck College, University of London
This will be followed by a screening of the film Disgraced Monuments (1993),
48 minutes, Directed by Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis.
In 'Disgraced Monuments', Mulvey uses rare archival footage and interviews
with sculptors, art historians, gallery and museum directors to examine the
fate of monuments of Lenin, Stalin and other leaders of the former Soviet
Union after the collapse of communism.
Organised in collaboration with The British Council and Centre for the Study
of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, as part of the 'Talking Films'
series.
FILM @ SARAI
History and Film: Spectacle and Subjectivity in the Epoch of Fascism
Continuing our series on History and Film, Sarai's September curation builds
on Bertolucci's reflections on Italian fascism and history by looking at the
German and French experiences. As with Bertolucci, the work of Louis Malle
and Alain Resnais look back at a traumatic time as it unravels through
individual perception and experience. Malle's 'Lacombe Lucien' (1974) mines a
history that has often been particularly difficult to deal with in the
post-fascist context: that of the theme of collaboration rather than
resistance. The film's focus on a peasant youth draws out the amorality of
the individual uncultivated in ethical sensibilities.
In 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' (1959), Resnais, working with a script by Marguerite
Duras, draws on memories of a French woman's love affair with a German
soldier under the Nazi occupation of France, the resulting ostracization and
trauma. But he then builds on this to explore a shifting field of
engagements, between the dissonant experiences of individual trauma and the
mass tragedy of the atomic explosions at Hiroshima. The intimate associations
released by a montage of sensual body traces generates a moving flow of
sensory, non-rational attachments to different historical experiences.
Entirely different in status is the work of Leni Reifenstahl. This is film as
historical event rather than contextual document or retrospective engagement.
Her major works on behalf of the national socialist party, 'Triumph of the
Will' (1934) and 'Olympia' (1938) mapped a new ambition for the so-called
documentary work, complicating the relations between representation and event
in distinctive ways. In accounts of 'Triumph of the Will', Riefenstahl's film
on the 1934 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party, architectural layout and
repetition of apparently live action speeches facilitate the event's capture,
indeed its production, as a film. State and society become a gargantuan film
set.
With 'Olympia', while the large scale set of the 1936 Olympic stadium
reiterates the method of the earlier film, new, mythic resonances are
generated around an aesthetics of the human body in its physical striving.
Like the genre of the mountain films in which Riefenstahl starred in the
1920s, 'Olympia' composes a thematic of sublime transcendance. Bodies soar in
space, their motion slowed down, figures dot the frame in coordinated
activity, and a tryst appears to be fashioned around the body as heavenly
abode. Critics have looked at the lure of this aesthetic with suspicion,
arguing for the fertile way it ties aesthetics to racist politics in
disturbing ways. Whether as technology of the aestheticized and racialized
body, or, more mundanely, as template for the subsequent conventions of
sports television, 'Olympia' is a critical work in the history of the cinema.
September 5, 2003, 4:30 pm
Lacombe Lucien (1974), 133 minutes
Directed by Louis Malle
The location is a small provincial town in south-west France, during the Nazi
occupation in the summer of 1944. Tired of his life as a hospital cleaner,
18-year old Lucien Lacombe tries to join the French Resistance, but is turned
down on account of his age. All too easily he is recruited by the German
police and works as a Gestapo agent, arresting his fellow countrymen and
generally tyrannising his former friends and relations. Whilst initially
revelling in his new-found position of power, Lucien begins to have second
thoughts when he meets and falls in love with a young woman, who is the
daughter of a Jewish tailor he has been persecuting. 'Lacombe Lucien' is a
study of the corruption of innocence and the realisation of guilt in a young
impressionable adult.
The central message underpinning the film is that there are no absolutes in
evil. This is achieved in a number of ways. For example, at the start of
the film, Lucien appears cruel when killing animals for the dinner table.
Then, when the film ends, Lucien is seen killing animals for the same reason,
but now in an environment of idyllic innocence. The same act, seen from two
different perspectives.
September 12, 2003, 4:30 pm
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), 91 minutes
Directed by Alain Resnais
The film is set in the late fifties and involves a French film actress and a
Japanese architect who embark on a brief affair in Hiroshima. The intimacy of
the encounter makes them reflect on the painful history of the city and the
tragedy and humiliation that befell her during a disastrous affair with a
German soldier in her hometown in wartime France. Using silent flashbacks and
actual documentary footage Resnais begins to draw their different past
experiences together as one in the lovers' minds to dramatic effect.
In tracing her emotional devastation, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' is less about
memory itself, more about the burdensome act of remembering. As Susan Sontag
says, "The memory of an unrecapturable feeling becomes the subject of
feeling".
At the time of its release the film was hailed as a cinematic watershed, a
truly "modern" film by the editors of the influential French magazine
'Cahiers du Cinema'. Jean luc Godard called it the first film without any
cinematic references. The film's modernity derives from its representation of
a specific fragmentation and anguish, central to the post-War moment - a
representation of subjective time, of experience through memory that Resnais
and his screenwriter, French novelist Marguerite Duras, borrowed from Marcel
Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henri Bergson, and others. In joining
these elements into a visual composition, 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' stands
outside the French New Wave, which mostly reworked cinematic conventions.
September 19, 2003, 4:30 pm
Triumph of the Will (1934), 110 minutes
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
'Triumph of the Will' commences with Hitler's arrival in Nuremberg by plane.
Parallels can be made between Hitler's arrival through the skies, and the
descent of a God, coming to meet his people - this is heightened by the
endless views of clouds, the plane's shadow moving relentlessly over the
sunlit streets of Nuremberg, shots of the town's people in the streets
staring up with a look of awed expectation on their faces. The Wagnerian
music played as Hitler's plane lands, the bands and singing, the beauty of
Nuremberg, the hysteria of the crowds with their arms outstretched to greet
him, combine to make up a display of Nazi passion and obsession. It is this
emotional response of the people in the film and the emotional response the
audience gains from these majestic shots that are at once inspirational,
seductive and horrifying.
It cannot be denied that the film is a record of an event - an actuality - and
happened where and when and in the order that the film says it did. It has
generally been accepted that the Nuremberg Rally was staged for the cameras,
rather than the cameras having to accommodate the action. The film was
financed by the Nazi Government, completed with the full co-operation of all
involved, with huge resources at Riefenstahl's disposal - an unlimited
budget, crew of 120 and between 30 and 40 cameras.
Leni Riefenstahl, in an interview in 1964, said that 'Triumph Of The Will' was
a recording of an event, not a propaganda film: "If you see this film again
today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene.
Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all.
It is history."
However, over the years 'Triumph Of The Will' has been described as "an
impressive spectacle of Germany's adherence to Hitler", a "Nazi masterpiece"
and "a masterpiece of romanticised propaganda". Susan Sontag in her essay
'Fascinating Fascism' claims that 'Triumph of the Will' is the "most
successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception
negates the possibility of the film-makers having an aesthetic or visual
concept independent of propaganda".
September 26, 2003, 4:30 pm
Olympia (1938), 225 minutes
Directed by Leni Riefenstahl
Amid ovations for 'Triumph of the Will', Riefenstahl proposed a new project: a
long film on the Olympic games to be held in Berlin in 1936. She negotiated
with the International Olympic Committee, not mentioning her plan to Hitler;
she wanted to avoid official sponsorship.
The Olympic officials were cautious. Riefenstahl wished to prepare pits beside
jumping areas, camera rails along running tracks, towers at the diving sites.
Fearing that the outcome of contests might eventually be challenged on the
ground of distraction, officials required her to obtain approvals from all
national committees and from all contestants individually. At enormous
effort, over many months, she secured these approvals.
'Olympia' eventually became two feature-Iength films, and another
organizational achievement of amazing virtuosity. She was restricted to six
camera positions on the stadium field. but supplemented these with cameras in
grandstands and many elsewhere. Automatic cameras were sent aloft via free
balloons, with attached instructions for returning the film to Leni
Riefenstahl. The most startling photographic innovation involved diving;
dives were followed through the air and then under water without a break. The
start of the dive was photographed from the surface of the water; at the
moment of impact the cameraman went under water with his special camera while
changing focus and aperture. It took months to perfect the procedure.
'Olympia' is considered by some to be one of the best documentaries ever made
- a brilliant record of the human spirit and athletic excellence, documenting
the achievements of men and women of all races and colors. Other theorists
have criticiqued it on the grounds that Riefenstahl focuses more on the
glorification of the human form rather than the sporting events.
-----------
'Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies' is now available in the US with
Autonomedia. To buy online click on
http://bookstore.autonomedia.org/FMPro?-db=products.fp5&-format=detail.htm&-lay=cgi&-sortfield=name&-sortorder=descend&keyword=sarai&-max=250&-recid=33093&-token.0=12592577&-find=
Cheers,
Ranita
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net