Sarai Newsletter 08

Tue Dec 4 17:15:30 IST 2001

Table of Contents

1.Film and Urban Cultures Workshop Report
2.Events @ Sarai
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series: William Mazarella
Urban Culture and Politics Seminar Series: Peter van der Veer
Rescheduled Documentary Film Screening: Delhi Diary 2001
3.Film @ Sarai: Asian Film Cultures: Hongkong Cinema
4.New @ Sarai Website
5.Residency @ Sarai
-------------------------------------

Workshop Report

Film and Urban Culture Workshop
A Cinema of Anxiety: The Exhilaration of Dread

A workshop entitled A cinema of Anxiety: The exhilaration of dread was 
organised at Sarai from November 29 till  December 2001 . The workshop 
discussed issues of genre, narrative form, and film style in 
contemporary urban action films. Three recent Hindi films - Parinda 
(Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 1989), Gardish (Priyadarshan, 1994) and Satya 
(Ramgopal Verma, 1998) were screened. The screenings was followed by 
paper presentations and discussion sessions. Papers were presented by 
Ranjani Majumdar (Cinematic terror and the uncanny in Parinda) and 
Shohini Ghosh (Streets of Terror: Mapping Genre in the 1990s). A panel 
discussion, chaired by Ravi Vasudevan took place on the final day of 
the workshop, where short presentations were made by Ravikant 
(Language and dialogue in popular hindi cinema), Ira Bhaskar 
(Melodrama in the urban action film) and Moinak Biswas (Realism and 
the reality effect in Indian cinema).

The workshop itself was conceived around a series of shifts in modes 
of representation as manifested in the urban action film. Two of the 
presentations (Ghosh and Majumdar) negotiated this framework of urban 
space in interesting ways with reference to specific film texts. 
Majumdar analyzed the use of space in Parinda, both public/city and 
private/domestic, placing the film's narrative within larger 
coordinates - regimes of representing shock (film noir and other 
genres) through montage as also ideas of terror and the uncanny that 
Parinda invokes. Ghosh looked closely at three films (Vastava, Jeet 
and Yashvant) in order to develop the strand of city streets - 
anonymity and the crowd, and the gendered nature of certain narrative 
tropes and metaphors in contemporary Hindi Cinema. 

In a world of 'anxiety' and 'dread', one heartening factor was never 
in doubt - no one growing up in India can, strictly speaking, be 
called a 'non-film person'. The public discussions following each of 
the screenings and papers, dissolved to a large extent, the otherwise 
great conflict of democratic forums - expert vs. layman. The 'lay' 
audience, in particular the student and university community served to 
invigorate and liven up the proceedings.  Many of the arguments put 
forward in the paper presentations were challenged, extended and on 
occasion, trashed.

This workshop articulates two of Sarai's primary areas of interest - 
cinema practices and urban space, and the ways in which each impinges 
on the other, with an emphasis (in this seminar) on regimes of 
representation. Another interest emerges in the public discussions - 
the creation of a public culture wherein critical reflection does not 
remain solely in the domain of impermeable academic knowledge-systems. 
Such an endeavour is also part of a broader project of developing an 
analytical language capable of tracing epistemic shifts in the nature 
of contemporary social practices.

Events @ Sarai
All events and screenings are held at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 
Rajpur Road Delhi - 110054

i)Wednesday,  December 5 2001, 3.30 p.m.
Media Publics and Practices Seminar Series

Critical Publicity / Public Criticism: Reflections on Fieldwork in the 
Bombay Advertising  World 
A talk by William Mazzarella 
Department of Anthropology , University of Chicago

ii)Monday, December 10 2001, 3.30 p.m.
Urban Politics and Cultures Seminar Series

Post-Modern India: Engineering a Communal Future 
A talk by Peter van der Veer
University of Amsterdam 

iii)Thursday, December 13 2001, 4:30 pm
Rescheduled Documentary Screening

Delhi Diary 2001
Director: Ranjani Mazumdar
2001, Betacam SP, 60 minutes 

Delhi Diary 2001 is about the residue of urban memory linked to two 
crucial events in the history of Delhi. The events are the state of 
National Emergency (1975-77) when all civil rights were suspended and 
the anti Sikh pogroms of 1984 following the assassination of the then 
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Instead of focusing on the 'facts' of 
the two events, the film moves from the immediacy of the events to the 
rhythms of daily life in the city to explore fragments of memory 
embedded beneath the spectacle of the contemporary city.

Film @ Sarai

Asian Film Cultures: Hongkong Cinema
This month, film at sarai is pleased to present the work of the Hongkong 
auteur, Wong  Kar Wai. Along with other directors of Honkong's `second 
wave' -Stanley Kwan, Eddie Fong and Ching Siu-tung -Wong Kar Wai's 
thematic concerns and stylistic engagements seem to inhabit an 
entirely different universe from that of the action film, with its 
compendium of special effects, intricate editing patterns, and action 
choreography. 

But Wong is an experimentalist: Chungking Express's minimalist use of 
sets to signal a crowded market place sees him using closeups, tight 
framing, and quick cuts to render cinema and city as a place of play, 
where the chance encounter amongst strangers is elaborated into a 
witty, intricately coded dialogue about romance; the irreverence of 
wit, and the rhythms of repartee suggest the lineage of American 
screwball comedy, but also something of the comic high jinx of 
Hongkong action. Fallen Angels, a night film par excellence, shifts 
registers between an abstract, stylized rendering of the femme fatale 
of film noir, and the manic world of a rootless urban youth. Later, In 
the Mood for Love revisits the scenario of the romance of fortuitous 
encounters but within a very different stylistic format: lighting, 
shot composition and duration focus our attention on the sensuality of 
being, refiguring the body as a form of gesture to the possibilities, 
and imponderables, of intimacy in the setting of densely crowded 
everyday life and marital obligations. 

Friday, December 7 2001, 4:30 pm
Fallen Angels / Duoluo Tianshi 
Director: Wong Kar Wai 
1995

Friday, December 14 2001, 4:30 pm
Happy Together / Chunguang Zhaxie
Director: Wong Kar Wai, 
1997

Friday, December 21 2001, 4:30 pm
In the Mood for Love
Director: Wong Kar Wai
2000

New @ Sarai Website
i) Diary of an Actress: New episodes of an actress's diary, available 
at http://www.sarai.net/crosstalk/Forum.php3?Fcode=Diary&Thread=5

ii) Infinite injustice/ensuring freedom: A topic for discussion 
available at 
http://www.sarai.net/crosstalk/Forum.php3?Fcode=General&Thread=10

iii) Please visit the sarai website www.sarai.net for a reworked 
Calender page, available at http://www.sarai.net/calendar/calendar.htm

iv) The final list of the awardees of the Sarai print media 
fellowships and seed grants is also available at 
http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm

Residency @ Sarai
Syeda Farhana, a photojournalist from Dhaka, Bangaladesh is presently 
at Sarai for a month long joint Khoj -Sarai Residency. She will be in 
Delhi from November 20th to December 20th 2001.  Syeda is a student at 
the Drik Pathshala: the South Asian Institute of Photography in Dhaka, 
and is working on a project on migration. Some of her earlier work has 
been published in the New Internationalist, and is available at 
http://www.oneworld.org/ni/index4.html

Thanks
Saumya Gupta

The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi - 110054
Tel: 3960040, 3951190
Fax: 3928391, 3943450
www.sarai.net

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