Dear Readers,
This November, Sarai welcomes all to presentations, talks and a film screening followed by invigorating discussions over hot cups of chai and coffee. Raqs Media Collective will discuss their involvement as curators by describing at length their curation at Manifesta 7- The European Biennial of Contemporary Art. Our film screening this month is “Naach” by Saba Dewan, a film that raises concerns about existing gender roles entwined with issues of sexuality, performance, work, etc. The month ends with talks: one by Gail Omvedt on the social visions of Dalits, which seek to alter/challenge the dominant order. The second talk is by Mark Betz where he posits a parametric “tradition” that has, since the 1980s, moved largely away from Western Europe and towards East Central Europe, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.  He will examine the issues and implications of both the “world cinema” programming phenomenon that has paralleled the growth of the international film festival market and the eclipsing of “art cinema” as an institutional classification during this period.

Best,
Mitoo Das
Programme Coordinator
Sarai, CSDS
Email me at: mitoo@sarai.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Audiovisual presentation by Raqs Media Collective
(Of their curation at Manifesta 7)
Date: 7th November, 2008
Venue: SAA Auditorium (JNU)
Time: 5:00 pm

Jawaharlal Nehru University
Presents Raqs Media Collective
(Jeebesh Bagchi, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Monica Narula)

Raqs Media Collective presents their curation for the 7th Edition of MANIFESTA: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art at School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU
School of Arts and Aesthetics (SAA). 

A Discussion with the Collective will follow the Presentation
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Film@Sarai
Naach (The Dance)
Director: Saba Dewan
Length: 84 minutes
Date: 7th November, 2008
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS
Time: 4:30 pm

About the film:
The Sonpur cattle fair in rural Bihar comes alive every evening when more than fifty girls take to the stage and dance for an all male audience. A barbed wire fence separates the performers from the spectators.
 Originally part of the nautanki, a popular folk theatre genre of north India, the dance of the female performer today has become a replay of Bombay films and music videos that span rural and metropolitan landscape. It is a performance charged with sexual energy. The girls dance, make eye contact, beckon, gesticulate and even abuse a highly responsive all male audience.
What meanings related to contemporary construction and practice of gender, sexuality, labour and popular culture can we read in the dance of the female performer?

About Saba Dewan:
Saba Dewan is a film maker based in Delhi, India. She did her masters in film and TV production from the Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi in 1987 and since then has been making independent documentaries. Her work has focused on gender, labour and sexuality. For the past few years she has been working on a trilogy of films focusing on women performers. Naach (The Dance) is  the second film of the trilogy, the first being Delhi –Mumbai –Delhi, that explored the lives of women bar dancers. The third and final film of the trilogy is about the art and lifestyle of the courtesans and is in progress.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talk@Sarai 1
Dalits and Social Vision by Gail Omvedt
Date: 20th November 2008
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS
Time: 3:30 pm

Gail Omvedt's talk is the first of a series of events (formal and informal) planned in collaboration between The Sarai Programme at CSDS and Navayana Publications.

Gail Omvedt was born in Minneapolis, and studied at the Carleton College, and at UC Berkeley where she earned her PhD in Sociology in 1973. She has been an Indian citizen since 1983. Omvedt's dissertation was on Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873-1930.
Omvedt's academic writing includes numerous books and articles on class, caste and gender issues, most notably:
    * We Shall Smash This Prison: Indian Women in Struggle (1979),
    * Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements in India (1993),
    * Gender and Technology: Emerging Asian Visions (1994),
    * Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994),
    * Dalit Visions: the Anticaste movement and Indian Cultural Identity (1994)

Her more recent works are:
    * Buddhism in India : Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (2003)
    * Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India (2004)
    * Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals (2008).

She is currently a Fellow-In-Residence at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Talk@Sarai 2
Beyond Europe: The Parametric Tradition by Mark Betz
Date: 27th November, 2008
Venue: Seminar Room, CSDS
Time: 3:00 pm

Although “art cinema” is no longer a category with institutional currency that is deployed to describe a coherent body of contemporary film practice—“world cinema” is now the term of choice, albeit one with a more encompassing range of stylistic possibilities—challenging films continue to be made and celebrated on the international stage, particularly through film festival premieres, screenings, and awards. And while art cinema can also refer to many types of films and film aesthetics, the high water mark of it in its most “difficult” formal guise is arguably parametric narration, David Bordwell’s term (via Noël Burch) to describe a mode of filmmaking that emphasizes style at least equally as much as narration, often more so. Whether aligned with the transcendental (Ozu, Dreyer, Bresson), serialism (Resnais, Bresson again, Godard on occasion, Akerman), or long takes, often combined with camera movement (Jancso, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Angelopolous), a special place has been reserved for parametric filmmaking from the 1950s through 1970s among art film cognoscenti. But in the near quarter century since Bordwell's formal analysis of this style, little has been made of the shared aesthetics of contemporary parametric filmmakers practicing usually outside of Western Europe, such as Aleksandr Sokurov, Béla Tarr, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhangke, Bruno Dumont, Jafar Panahi, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Might these aesthetics constitute one strand of an “international style” for contemporary world cinema, indeed contemporary art cinema? To what degree is this international style recognised and promoted via the international film festival circuit—less visibly and concretely articulated than Dogme95, for example, but perhaps equally programmatically? What is the relation of the global to the local in this style? And in what ways do these aesthetics complicate received wisdom concerning the end of modernism in the postmodern era?

Mark Betz is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the School of Humanities, King’s College, London. He earned his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Rochester in1999. His research interests include Post-World War II European cinema (especially art cinema), non-Western and alternative cinemas (especially Third cinema and Southeast Asian cinema), national cinemas and transnationalism, exploitation cinemas, film theory and historiography, the history of film studies, the archive.

Some of his publications are
*“Co-productions,” in the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Volume 1, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Schirmer Reference/Thomson Gale, 2007), 369-373.

*“Dubbing and Subtitling,” in the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, Volume 2, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Schirmer Reference/Thomson Gale, 2007), 101-104.

*Co-author, Instructor’s Resource Manual with Test Item File for Understanding Movies, by Louis Giannetti and Jim Leach, 2nd Canadian edition (Toronto: Prentice Hall, 2001), 1-76.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[[END OF NEWSLETTER]]





_____________________________________
The Newsletter of the Sarai Programme,
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054, www.sarai.net
Info: dak@sarai.net.To subscribe: send a blank email to
newsletter-request@sarai.net with subscribe in the subject header.
Directions to Sarai: We are 10 minutes from Delhi University, and 5 mins. from the Civil Lines Metro Station.