| The Park’s
The Other Festival - 2004
Music. Dance. Drama. Art. You. The Chinmaya
Heritage Centre, Chennai
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An avant-garde film festival
December 2 - 7, 2004, 10.00am-12.30pm
Film Chamber of Commerce, Chennai
In association with The British Council
Curated by Shai Heredia
| EXPERIMENTA
- The International festival of experimental
film in India is designed for the growing community of filmmakers, artists,
film/art students and cinephiles. In its first two years itself, EXPERIMENTA
has showcased some radical contemporary experimental films, alongside seminal
avant garde classics.
The most outstanding feature of EXPERIMENTA is the meticulousness with which its program is compiled. The works are selected for their positions vis-à-vis social reality, cultural differences and aesthetic innovation, allowing cutting edge ideas and trends to be elaborated. By creating a cultural dialogue on moving image aesthetics, EXPERIMENTA seeks to significantly challenge, and extend current artistic practice in the Indian cinematic form. As the only
platform for uncompromising, fresh, compelling and critically urgent experimental
films, EXPERIMENTA provides a public profile and support to a marginalised
community in India that is concerned with film as a medium
Experimenta
at The Park's THE OTHER FESTIVAL is curated by Bombay-based SHAI HEREDIA
who has for the last 2 years organised this cutting edge festival in Bombay
and Delhi. This year, EXPERIMENTA showcases the experimental works of visionary
Indian filmmakers from the 60's and 70's, and contemporary Indian films
that explore ideas around experimental film ethnography. In association
with The British Council, EXPERIMENTA also offers Chennai film
Schedule
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| INDIAN
FILMS
FILM ETHNOGRAPHY
1
In the late
60's and early 70's, a small group of radical film artists made use of
found footage, animation and stylised montage to develop an alternative
syntax for the state funded documentary films of Films Division India.
These films were referred to as, short experimental documentaries. By recontextualising
these films into a more befitting genre, EXPERIMENTA celebrates these visionary
filmmakers and the experimental new syntax of Indian film that they created.
This package attempts to rediscover these lost experimental films by presenting
them within a context that looks to explore ideas around experimental film
ethnography
1. Pramod
Pati 'Trip'
A film,
which uses pixilation to depict the transitoriness of daily life in an
urban context.
2. S.N.S.Sastry
'And I Make Short Films'
An impressionistic
portrayal of short film making by a short film maker. The views expressed
in the film are sometimes bitter, often humorous, at times satirical but
seldom complimentary.
3. Biren
Das 'Expression'
Set in Bombay
in 1969, this is an experimental film about city life the activities occurring
around a busy city square. Narrated through abstract images, this film
is created from the perspective of the statue at the centre of the square.
4. Vijay
B.Chandra 'Child on a Chess Board'
An experimental
film that explores nationhood, industrial progress and scientific development
through the eyes of a child.
FILM ETHNOGRAPHY
2
As Indian
filmmakers are increasingly exposed to alternative visual forms and styles,
new relationships have developed to the aesthetic of film. These path breaking
personal films are experimental ethnographic documents of the filmmakers'
urban contexts. By exposing the complex cultural relationship that these
filmmakers' share with the medium and process of filmmaking, these films
attempt to explore ideas around migration, gender, sexuality and religion.
This showcase of films by young emerging filmmakers based in India is an
exciting reflection of changing relationships towards the moving image.
1. Anuradha
Chandra '18 (+2) Blinks of an Eye'
Measurement
is a symptom of humanity's attempt to tame the chaotic universe and subjugate
it to our control. 12 months in a year, 365 days in a year, 24 hours in
a day. In film the smallest unit is the frame, in time it is the
The film
takes images and sounds from the filmmaker's immediate environment (at
the time- Chicago) and tempered by process and chance, weaves them together
to create a perceptual world of the filmmaker. The interiority of
2. Shumona
Goel 'Atreyee'
Atreyee,
a young Bengali woman leaves Calcutta in search of a new life in Bombay.
She finds paying guest accommodation in the suburbs. In a series
of still photographs, the film records her establishing daily routines.
3. Ashish
Avikunthak 'Kalighat Fetish'
The film
attempts to negotiate with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial
veneration of the Mother Goddess Kali. It ruminates on the nuanced transsexuality
that is prevalent in the ceremonial performance of
(Please
be advised that the film contains images of animal sacrifice).
FICTION
The films
in this package have been selected for their eccentric style of breaking
down the conventions of Indian narrative fiction and the Bollywood formula.
These rarely seen films have been responsible for developing avant garde
visual and intellectual perspectives on narrative fiction filmmaking in
India.
1. Xav Leplae
'I'm Bobby'
Shot directly to the sound track of 'Bobby', Raj Kapoor's 1973 Bollywood classic, 'I'm Bobby' casts street children, child laborers and drawn puppet figures in place of Rishi, the grown up superstars of the 1970s original. While Kapoor's Bobby was loosely based on 'Romeo and Juliet', set in modern India 'I'm Bobby' newly relays it own messages about society and culture. Having won
the Special Jury Prize for Defying Categories at The Chicago Underground
Film Festival and in selection this year for the Sundance Film Festival,
this is 'I'm Bobby's premiere screening in India.
2. Kamal
Swaroop 'Om Dar-B-Dar'
Om-Dar-Ba-Dar is a fantastical portrait of life in a mythical small town. The film tells the story of a young boy called Om in the period of his carefree adolescence and its harsh disillusionments. Om has a rather strange family. His father quits his government job to dedicate himself to astrology, and his older sister is dating a good-for-nothing. Om is involved in science, but is also attracted to magic and religion. Above all it seems as if his only outstanding skill is his ability to hold his breath underwater for a long time. 'Om-Dar-Ba-Dar'
has been referred to as an anomaly or accident by the few who have seen
it from within the mainstream Indian film history because of its progressive
cinematic nature. By recontextualising this rarely seen film
UK FILMS
Shot in
a bathroom, the film is a continuous unbroken image which fluctuates and
alters as the camera encounters irregularities and interruptions in the
grid system of tiles. The composition of the image is dictated by the
Winner of
the Chris Coppola prize at the San Francisco Art Institute Film and Video
Festival 2004.
MALCOLM
LE GRICE
"Threshold,
made five years later, aptly offers points of comparison with LITTLE DOG
FOR ROGER. Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism,
but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery
as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity. The initial
use of pure red and green filters gives way to a broad variety of colours
and the introductionof strips of coloured/celluloid which are drawn through
the printer begins to build an image which becomes graphically and spatially
complex - if still abstract - and which evokes the paintings of, say, Clifford
Still or Morris Louis. With the film's culmination in representational,
photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating 'richness' of
image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition
of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition
of filtered loops all reiterate (as in LITTLE DOG) the work which is necessary
to decipher that cinematic image." - Deke Dusinberre.
JOHN SMITH
In The Black
Tower we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower which, he believes,
is following him around London. While the character of the central protagonist
is indicated only by a narrative voice-over which takes us from unease
to breakdown to mysterious death, the images, meticulously controlled and
articulated, deliver a series of colour coded puzzles, games, jokes and
puns which pull the viewer into a mind-teasing engagement. Smith's assurance
and skill as a filmmaker undercuts the notion of the avant-garde as dry,
unprofessional and dull and in Tower we have an example of a film which
plays with the emotions as well as the language of film.' - Nik Houghton,
'The Black Tower expands the core of Smith's interests: chiefly, the image as a filmic fact which is constantly questioned and often undermined by language and soundtrack. Like his earlier films, The Black Tower is concerned with description, but this time framed by a story whose undertow of melancholy balances its wit and wry humour, and which is a remarkable fiction in its own right.' - A.L. Rees. 'The hilarious
and slightly menacing The Black Tower is one of the most accomplished films
to come from the British avant-garde for years.' - Michael O'Pray, Independent
Media.
MICHAEL
SNOW
..It is an odd film: a text-film, a silent black and white talky in colour, a self-reflexive document and a fictive construct, a non-movie that paradoxically fulfils and subverts the implications in the titles of such books as'The Language of Cinema' and 'How to Read a Film'.' - Michael Ethan Brodzky: Arts Canada Nov 1982. 'The brilliance of So Is This is that it challenges apparently obvious truths about discourse. Snow's film addresses all the issues which Socrates' condemnation (in Plato's 'Phaedrus' quoted in the film) of written languageraises.-R.Bruce Elder: Parachute Feb 1983. 'Snow creates
a visual dynamo that loses nothing to motion for its absenceof pictures.
If you let it Snow's film stretches your definition of what film is.' -
J.Hoberman: Village Voice Sept 28th 1982.
GUY SHERWIN
It is literally
impossible to offer a definitive description of GuySherwin's Short Film
Series, since the film has no beginning, middle or end. It is instead
composed of a series of three minute (100ft.) sections which
GUY SHERWIN
One of a
series of films that uses soundtracks generated directly from their own
imagery. I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of
sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position
at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number
of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included
the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical
scale (in eleven steps which is based on the laws of visual perspective.
A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the
image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical
Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact
that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean
one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means
that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonies. - G.S.
KAREN MIRZA
& BRAD BUTLER
Where a
straight line meets a curve is a durational sculpture, of real and imagined
activity shot entirely in one room. It is a film concerned with the objective
reduction of space, a film 'about' the recording and representation of
space and the politics of the viewing space of film itself. Projected onto
two adjacent screens, the visual material is
The work
questions the usual strategies of the viewer, mediating between the mental
image, the dimension of physical space, and the illusionistic space of
cinema. The sound is constructed from the speech of the filmakers within
the space broken down by a process of re-amplification and re-recording
to a point where the resonant frequencies of the space have an equal value
to any spoken content. A structure of loops and phase patterns internally
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