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A West Heavens project, in partnership with Magic Lantern Foundation, New Delhi
November 25th to December 25th, 2011,
Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou-Kunming

Curated by: Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Hosted by: Hanart TZ Gallery / Embassy Of India, Beijing / School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art

in collaboration with: Magic Lantern Foundation, New Delhi / Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore / Consulate General of India, Shanghai / Consulate General of India, Guangzhou / Wenhui Daily / Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University

Sponsored by: Moonchu Foundation / Pinnacle Group / ZEE TV

This film season showcases a range of recent Indian films, specially selected, assembled and subtitled, to make an argument about the moving image in India. It includes feature-length fiction films, documentaries and experimental video, alongside a reader, titled Persisting Visions: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema, that includes newly translated writings of a selection of over 30 years of writing on the Indian cinema.

Opening at 3:00 pm on Friday, November 25th at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Screenings of over 30 Indian independent films and a series of forums on film and social thought will take place at the Iberia Center, the Beijing Film Academy, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Upcoming screenings in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Kunming to follow.

Opening time and venue:
3:00 pm, November 25, Friday, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art,Beijing (Zone E06, 798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road)

Curatorial Statement by Ashish Rajadhyaksha

You Don’t Belong: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema

Season of 30 film titles of experimental Indian Cinema

Curator: Ashish Rajadhyaksha

You Don’t Belong is a season of recent films, specially selected, assembled and subtitled, to make an argument about the moving image in India. It includes feature-length fiction films, documentaries and experimental video, alongside a reader, titled Persisting Visions: Pasts and Futures of Indian Cinema, that includes newly translated writings of a selection of over 30 years of writing on the Indian cinema.

Both the film season and the Reader explore, through its Independent cinema, the role of the moving image in the world’s ‘largest filmmaking country’ in the world. The films shown here will track a hindsight view of the transition that has taken place in the cinema from the era of celluloid – and from an era of developmental ideologies, wars between nations, political action and of citizenship – into a new globalized era, of the digital moving image, of transnational flows and leakages, the domestication of mechanical movement, of ‘streaming’, and of digital governance. A new kind of cinematic protagonist has emerged, sometimes a filmmaker, sometimes a video activist, sometimes a fictional protagonist: at different times a hypervisible presence, with a camera that is ‘everywhere’, and also an invisible, all-seeing figure one. The claim to ‘belonging’ somewhere, to a neighborhood, a city or even a country, is set against a non-belonging, absent voyeur.

Part of the reason for this new subject is the free availability of digital technology, allowing people at large to become filmmakers, and to also make the camera into a ubiquitous presence.

Part 1: Experiments with the Moving Image

We explore three decades of major experiments with the moving image, covering both celluloid and digital platforms. ‘Experiments with the Moving Image’ moves from landmark celluloid work in the 1980s and 90s to the digital experimental video of the early 21^st century.

The event sets up its iconic experiment as Mani Kaul’s 1989 film Siddheshwari, in which a contemporary documentary sets out to excavate the persona of a legendary Thumri singer and courtesan. The film is set against a very recent documentary, You Don’t Belong by Spandan Banerjee, about how even very contemporary practices can become orientalized and ‘ancientized’ as they enter the public domain. The selection goes back and forth in time, over three sections. Long-term legacies and the Independent Indian Cinema explores a consistent claim that a tradition of the independent cinema has made: around the civilizational possibilities of the moving image, particularly in its ability to reinvigorate practices, and ways of living, that could otherwise die out. We see Amit Dutta’s major 2010 film Nainsukh, on the legendary 18^th Century Kashmiri painter, juxtaposed with R.V. Ramani’s classic Saa, Arghya Basu’s Death, Life Etc… and end with Kumar Shahani’s epic work on the dancer Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra, Bhavantarana. In Landscape/History, the 1960s of Sukhdev’s India 67 is contrasted with a very different idea of the historical landscape, a legacy of the Partition of India in Monica Bhasin’s Temporary Loss of Consciousness, followed by the polluted and yet historically replete landscapes of Vivan Sundaram’s experimental videos. India: Cinema, Apparatus, Debris takes us back to the apparatus of celluloid, of suspense, of the silent movie, and of radio, in Pushpamala’s ghost-movie, K.M. Madhusudhanan and Vipin Vijay’s shorts about the cinema and radio, and Ashish Avikunthak’s ritual re-enactment of the immersion of the elephant god Ganesha amid the pollution of the city, and Surabhi Sharma’s retracing of the musical journey of indentured immigrants.

Part 2: The Documentary: Testimony, Home, City

The resurfacing of several conventions of classic documentary in the era of digital technology, and its interface with new crises in state governance provide the context for this section. The first part, titled The Documentary As Testimony, addresses the idea of testimony: the interface between the documentary cinema and a language of social rights. Deepa Dhanraj’s Something Like A War, often considered a landmark in the modern Indian documentary cinema Sanjay Kak’s noted film on everyday life in Kashmir, Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate our Freedom) remains the canonical work.

We then move into the Privacy of the Home. The domestication of the documentary apparatus with Avijit Mukul Kishore’s Snapshots from a Family Album works alongside Shyamal Karmakar’s painful autobiographical film about a bar dancer, I’m the Very Beautiful!.

The third and final section, on the city, titled New Urban Cultures – on crassness, on performance and on grime – begins with Saba Dewan’s Naach/The Dance, about bar-dancers from Delhi going to the village and feeling strangely enabled by their sexuality even as they encounter the raucously lewd gaze of an ocean of men. Two other documentary classics, Rahul Roy’s The City Beautiful, on Delhi’s working people, and Shohini Ghosh’s Tales of the Night Fairies on Kolkata’s sex workers, are included.

Part 3: Telling Stories

The major section of the You Don’t Belong programme: a series of fiction films. The Season explores a change in the Indian cinema, moving away from the certitudes of nationalism, the village and agenda of reform, and into the city, a chaotic, even anarchist space of subjective exploration. It proposes Ritwik Ghatak’s canonical early 1960s film Komal Gandhar, with its relentless move both to and out of the city, as figureheading the change of which we can only now see the consequences. Komal Gandhar is juxtaposed with the art video of Vivan Sundaram, Structures of Memory, that actually quotes this film in its own exploration into the Bengal renaissance. Two other films, also from Bengal, Sthaniya Sangbaad (Spring in the Colony), and Herbert open up further the saga about Kolkata, urban space and dismemberment.

Anuraag Kashyap’s No Smoking sets up the dilemma: a man from the city, suffering by an inner addiction, externalizes that addiction into an extraordinary nether world of terrorist experiment. Gandu, the new enfant terrible of the Indian cinema, stands alongside video artist Kiran Subbaiah’s performance Suicide Note.

Love, Sex aur Dhokha, Dibakar Bannerjee’s fictional exploration into the world of pornography, experimental video, multimedia messaging and the spycam, is set alongside Paromita Vohra’s Morality TV, where videotaped police surveillance of public spaces coincides with the move of the domain of popular pornography and gossip journalism into the era of television.