No subject

nightmare, including the difficult keeping of a secret, and a magical journey 
to safety - all told from a child's point of view. It also accentuates the 
contrasting, elemental dualities within the film: heaven and earth (or 
under-the-earth), male and female, light and dark, good and evil, knowingness 
and innocence, and other polarizations including equating the Preacher with 
the devil. Told with inventive, stylized and dark film noirish images, 
symbolism and visual poetry, it blends both a pastoral setting with 
dream-like creatures and fanatical characters. In Laughton's words, it was "a 
nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale."

A commercial, if not a critical failure, the film got such a poor public 
reception that Laughton was never asked to direct again. 

	Monday May 19, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Sansho the Bailiff (1954), 125 minutes
	Directed by Kenzi Mizoguchi, Japan

This visually-stunning epic filled with tragic loss and chilling cruelty is 
one of Mizoguchi's most heart-wrenching films. 

Set in 11th century Japan, the film focuses on a mother who sets off with her 
two children to find her husband, a former deputy governor, who has been in 
exile. The family is broken up by a priestess who sells all three to 
kidnappers: the mother is sold as a courtesan, and the children are sent to a 
remote  province as slaves. When the son reaches maturity, he manages to 
assume his rightful post as a provincial governor and sets about avenging his 
family's suffering. 

Mizoguchi has created a powerful work with strong humanistic overtones. 
Focusing on the influence the two women in the story have on the hero, the 
film alternates the idyllic atmosphere of some scenes with the violent 
cruelty of others.

The sense of secret treachery revealed when the camera suddenly and 
unexpectedly begins to move is one of the most frightening moments in cinema. 
Kazu Miyagawa's cinematography, with its long takes and complex use of 
background and off-screen space, lends even the most harrowing sequences an 
extraordinary elegance.

	Tuesday May 20, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Imitation of Life (1959), 125 minutes
	Directed by Douglas Sirk, USA

In Douglas Sirk's emotionally and visually extravagant final film 'Imitation 
of Life', subverted melodrama and razor-sharp social commentary are brought 
to a resounding and baroque climax. Lora Meredith, an aspiring actress and 
single mother meets Annie Johnson, a black and similarly single and 
struggling mother. When they move in together, Annie assumes the role of 
domestic servant and the two women struggle together to raise their two 
daughters. Annie's daughter, Sarah Jane, favors her father whose skin tone 
resembles her own extremely light skin, and she slowly comes to resent her 
mother's black identity. 

Vulnerable to feminist critique for its prescription of female happiness, the 
film freely mixes Meredith's rags to riches (with a hefty moral price tag) 
tale with Annie's scarring struggles to teach her daughter to accept her 
identity. As Meredith climbs higher and higher in her glamorous rise to stage 
and screen stardom, she ignores her vulnerable daughter Susie and creates a 
devastating contrast for the racial and social tragedy that transpires in her 
own household. 

With a mixture of icy detachment and morose sentimentality Sirk leads the film 
onto a crescendo of highly adorned emotion and tragedy.

	Thursday May 22, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Vivre Sa Vie (1962), 85 minutes 
	Directed by Jean Luc Godard, France

'Dedicated to B-movies', the film shows, in 12 episodes, how Nana goes from 
shop-girl to prostitute, finally ending up caught in a B-movie shootout.

When she separates from her husband, Nana finds herself unable to make ends 
meet and slips into prostitution in order to pay her rent. After being taken 
on by the pimp, Raoul, she falls in love with a young man and hopes to start 
a new life with him, but Raoul has other plans for her...

Filmed in the streets, hotel rooms and cafés of Paris and suburbs, 'Vivre sa 
Vie' is a portrait of the city and a case-study of the life of a prostitute, 
using contemporary documentation and statistics. But the film is not a dry 
sociological analysis. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard produces a stark, flat 
image that pastiches the styles of Rossellini and Bresson, while remaining 
entirely original. Michel Legrand's minimal soundtrack achieves in one simple 
phrase all the pathos of the most elaborate orchestration. Godard's script 
and direction result in an innovative and intensely moving narrative, which 
takes the informal liberties of the New Wave and produces a formal manifesto 
of unique visual style. 

	Friday May 23, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), 75 mins 
	Directed by Harun Farocki, Germany 

A meditation on vision and power inspired by photos of Auschwitz taken by 
American bomber pilots during World War II, this film is a powerful 
assemblage of images that connect in a striking, deeply meaningful manner. 
"I've never seen a movie exactly like 'Images of the World...'. It is half a 
revelation on the Auschwitz material, one you will not soon forget, and half 
a philosophical treatise on photography, vision, image, measurement...” New 
York Post Review

Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser says, “After becoming every student film-club's 
favourite meditation on the media and modern warfare in the age of smart 
bombs and Operation Desert Storm, 'Images of the World...' quickly advanced 
to something of a classic: the reference film, the anchoring point for 
seminars on Paul Virilio, on the essay-film as a hybrid documentary but 
politically subversive film genre, on the 'limits of representation'... this 
needs to be rediscovered after September 11th the definitive film about 
terrorism.” 

	Saturday May 24, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Jagte Raho (1957), 149 minutes
	Directed by Shombhu Mitra and Amit Maitra, India

'Jagte Raho' is an allegoric film about darkness and light, where darkness is 
the cloak of respectability under which a city supposedly sleeps but in 
effect thrashes around in the throes of crime and evil. Mohan is a simple 
villager who comes to the city one night, searching for water to drink. He is 
mistaken for a thief and stumbles into a building in his search for a hiding 
place. Running from one flat to another, he finds himself the unwitting 
witness to a number of crimes... It seems a night without end, but there is 
an end, the coming of a dawn at which Mohan discovers that the terrible 
darkness of the night is only half the truth... the other half is the 
beautiful day...

'Jagte Raho' became one of Raj Kapoor's best remembered films, and Nargis' 
last role with him. 

	Sunday May 25, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Subarnarekha (1962), 125 minutes
	Directed by Ritwik Ghatak, India

'Subarnarekha', made in 1962 but released in 1965 is the last in a trilogy 
examining the socio-economic implications of partition, the other two being 
'Meghe Dhaka Tara' (1960) and 'Komal Gandhar' (1961). Ghatak depicts the 
great economic and socio-political crisis eating up the very entrails of the 
existence of Bengal from 1948 – 1962.

In 'Subarnarekha', Ghatak takes the stuff of melodrama and turns it into a 
piercing political cry. Set in Calcutta after the partition of Bengal, the 
film focuses on two Bengali refugees, Ishwar and his younger sister Seeta, 
who are reduced to living in dire poverty on the banks of the river 
Subarnarekha. Amidst a floating population of refugees building temporary 
homes, they are joined by many other uprooted Bengalis, including an 
abandoned boy they attempt to educate and an idealistic school teacher and 
his family. Ghatak's characters are emblematic of the trail of human debris 
left by colonialism in an increasingly industrialized, post-independence 
society. 

In the film, the problem of homelessness or rootlessness no more remains 
confined to the refugees from the partition. Ghatak extends it further as an 
important concept for the modern man, uprooted from his traditional moorings. 
The geographical sphere is thus merged into a wider generality.

	Monday May 26, 2003, 5:30 pm
	Amores Perros (2000),  153 minutes  
	Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Innurita, Mexico

Three interconnected stories about the different strata of life in Mexico City 
all resolve with a fatal car accident. Octavio is trying to raise enough 
money to run away with his sister-in-law, and decides to enter his dog Cofi 
into the world of dogfighting. After a dogfight goes bad, Octavio flees in 
his car, running a red light and causing the accident. Daniel and Valeria's 
new-found bliss is prematurely ended when she loses her leg in the accident. 
El Chivo an ex-revolutionary-turned-assassin who cares for stray dogs is 
there to witness the collision. These lives and the fates of two dogs get 
inextricably entangled in a triptych recounting the stories of a disparate 
group of Mexico City residents who deal with love, jealousy, revenge, regret, 
and the lust for money. 

'Amores Perros' (Love's a Bitch) integrates the elements of sound, editing, 
camera movement and character development, and creates narrative techniques 
which address some of the most profoundly human conflicts that inhabit the 
largest and most populated city in the world.

Central to the film's plots are the participation of dogs, particularly as 
shown in the dog fight scenes. Carefully edited, these shots create the 
illusion of animal brutality and become essential in establishing the cruel 
realism of 'Amores Perros'. 


FIRST NATIONAL INDIC FONT WORKSHOP
March 28 – 30, 2003, Bangalore 

Ravikant and T. Meyarivan from Sarai participated in the First National 
Indic-Font workshop, organized by Indic-Computing Consortium, held on March 
28 – 30, 2003, at PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore. 

The Indic-Computing Consortium is an initiative of software developers, 
businesses and academic institutions to evolve appropriate standards, 
resources and technologies for the Indic-Computing community. The 
Indic-Computing Consortium is designed as a national-level participatory 
organisation that serves as a common forum for discussion, information 
exchange and advocacy on behalf of all parties interested in the development 
of Indic Language Computing. (http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net)

The workshop, second in the series, was attended by 36 participants from 
various languages & technology groups across India, Nepal & Bangladesh. This 
workshop was an outcome of discussions in the first Indic-Computing workshop 
held in September 2002 at Bangalore. One of the working groups formed at the 
first Indic-Computing workshop was for development of OTF (OpenType Fonts) & 
other font related issues, encoding, language standardization and 
representation in international
consortium. One of the action points and agenda for the group was to Hold OTF 
training workshops for developing major Indic language OTF fonts.

The idea was to get the community together for:
i.  Developing good look fonts
ii. Development of open source tools for rendering and hinting of OTF fonts 
(currently OTF development uses proprietary tools)
iii. Finding font developers for all Indian languages and coordinating group 
for each language
iv. Making available fonts to be converted to OTF

At the end of the workshop it was proposed to take up the issues that have 
emerged at  depth through regional consultations on each language to allow 
focused attention and for local & regional groups to participate and discuss 
everyday issues. We propose to take up these Regional Language Workshops in 
future across different parts of India, Nepal & Bangladesh and other regions 
with languages of Indic origin. These workshops will be coordinated by 
regional language groups and include training programs, technology 
demonstration sessions and get the language community together.

------------------------------------------------------------

That's the news from Sarai this month. Before you go please note our new phone 
numbers:
Sarai -  23960040 (Direct) 
CSDS - 23942199 and then dial the following extensions at Sarai:
Programmes  ext 307
Media Lab    ext 305
Archive        ext 306


Cheers,
Ranita
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
Tel:  (+91) 11 23960040
       (+91) 11 23942199
Fax: (+91) 11 23943450
www.sarai.net