“You Don't Belong” is a season of films, showcasing a range of recent Indian cinema to make an argument about the moving image in India. The film festival includes documentaries, experimental videos and is accompanied by a reader that includes a selection of over 30 years of essays on Indian cinema which have recently been translated into Chinese.
Programme (screening in loops):
FLOTAGE
2008, 8 minutes, colour, silent
Director: Vivan Sundaram
Ashish Rajadhyaksha: Four oarsmen row, in stately manner, a raft over a river: it could have been a scene from a colonial etching. However, the raft is made from used plastic mineral water bottles, and the river is the polluted Yamuna that runs through Delhi. Flotage is a video forming a part of a public art work that Sundaram had done around Delhi’s major river, as a part of an urban arts project (48°C Public.Art.Ecology, see http://www.48c.org/index.html), and is a video document of that project. The video, a stately journey across the river set to full-throated choral music, continues Sundaram’s fascination with throwaway waste converted into architectural objects. An explicit invocation to the tradition of the objet trouvé in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, Sundaram’s plastic bottles of minéral water also evoke his own long interest in trash objects. Art critic Chaitanya Sambrani writes, of Sundaram’s Trash work, that Sundaram’s trash-city is now caught at moments of fundamental transition where it is simultaneously all cities and none. ‘Constituted through bricks, cans, transistors, wire, stone, bottles, pipes, tins, mud, tape, cardboard and glass, this is a reconstitution that parallels other global artefacts’. Sambrani sees echoes of the work of Chinese artists Xing Danwen and Liu Jianhua, particularly Xing Danwen’s photographic series disCONNEXION (2002-03) which presents intricate accumulations of discarded electronic devices, and Liu Jianhua’s installation Yiwu Investigation (2006), which concentrates on the import of vast tonnages of post-consumer scrap into cities like Yiwu in China where it is recycled.
HISTORY IS A SILENT FILM
2006, 18 minutes, black-and-white, English
Director: K.M. Madhusudhanan
Camera: M.J. Radhakrishnan
Ashish Rajadyaksha: This inquiry into the era of celluloid film, memory, and the idea of eternal memory, is told through the story of a man who repairs film projectors. Usmanbhai lives in old Delhi, where his father, Kaderbhai, too worked to repair celluloid projectors. They knew well the old Pathes and Bell & Howells, but now these have become obsolete, and the new ones don’t break down too often, and anyway are more complicated to repair. With the disappearing images of celluloid is also disappearing the neighbourhood of the Jama Masjid, old Delhi, which is now getting cleaned up. The film links this disappearance of Usmanbhai’s profession with the loss of cinema, and thence the loss of near and dear ones. Can individuals too reappear like the ghosts of celluloid? What if a wave of a million people were to march towards us? As the images move randomly across history, and the film speculates on memory, forgetting, and the politics of lost homelands along with lost people, it also tries to link such losses with the demise of celluloid film. Madhusudhanan’s film is also set alongside Sundaram’s Trash work in that both seek their material histories on the streets and bazaars of old Delhi.
RAZOR, BLOOD AND OTHER TALES
2009, 7 minutes, colour, silent
Script/Director: K.M. Madhusudhanan
Camera: M.J. Radhakrishnan
Sound/Music: Rajeevan Ayyappan
Editing: Manoj
Cast: Babji Surabhi, Ravi Kumar, Vasanth Rao, Chenna Keshava
Filmmaker and visual artist, and former radical activist Madhusudhanan’s wordless vignette of a barber, a once-upon-a-time revolutionary, attempting in a phantasy moment to reprise – or bury – the ghosts of the past here sits with Pushpamala’s own exploration of ghosts. Sadasivan, a barber, was born 45 years ago. His political saga repeatedly comes alive as Inspector Narayanan visits the shop. The Inspector’s body, and his imagined slashing of a customer’s neck, becomes the site of the entire saga of failed revolution and of revenge. Memory, refusing to die, rising through incomplete and unfinished stories, becomes a curious phenomenon disrupting settled history. This kind of unsettling – literally of scores unsettled, so you cannot die in peace – is well known, but here it links to another phenomenon, that of celluloid film, itself a creator of ghosts that refuse to die.
SAA
1991, 25 minutes, colour, silent
Director/Camera: R.V. Ramani
Sound: Vikram Joglekar
Pioneering major work by a man whom many would consider the founder of experimental video in India. Here he explores the world of urban sound: a man sings in the local train, in Bombay; men and women dance celebrating the Holi festival in the village Salona, in Maharashtra; the Ganesha festival celebrations reach their peak on the streets.
Ramani is a formalist and as such has put the properties of video to use as no other filmmaker in India has. These properties, of mute and non-confrontational observation, and of allegory, he has been able to extend to a great deal of the independent Indian documentary, in his capacity as a professional cinematographer. Saa, Ramani’s first major film, is a collaboration with the well known sound recordist Vikram Joglekar, and it is significant that they train their attention to what is all around them in the city of Mumbai. People sing on trains, people dance on pavements and in the city’s shanty towns, and the film records everything. What is astonishing is how a near- civilizational saga unfolds on the streets of the city. In many ways it is a dark film, sometimes depicting an explosive urban popular culture bursting at the seams.
