Cinema of Prayoga Indian experimental film and video 1913-2006

10 + 2.75 postage (within UK) 3.49 (E.U) 6.15 (U.S.A and the rest of the world) To purchase a copy please call no.w.here on: 0207 7294494 or email james.holcombe|at|no-w-here.org.uk

Online sales via Paypal will be enabled shortly.

Prayoga is a Sanskrit word, which loosely translates as 'experiment' in English but can also mean 'representation' and 'practice'. Thus Prayoga in this context refers to the challenge of expression that embodies much artists' film work. Edited by Brad Butler and Karen Mirza from the UK artist film and video lab no.w.here, this publication is an illustrated anthology of interviews and essays by curators, filmmakers, video artists and pioneers of 'Prayoga' in both Indian cinema and contemporary Indian art practice including Ashish Avikunthak, Elena Bernardini, Amitabh Chakraborty, Anuradha Chandra, Amit Dutta, Amrit Gangar, Shumona Goel, Shai Heredia, Mani Kaul, Kabir Mohanty, Navjot Altaf, Johan Pijnappel, Raqs Media Collective, Sanjiv Shah, Ashok Sukumaran, and Kamal Swaroop. These collected writings not only provide a unique insight into what it means to have a contemporary art practice in India today, but they also offer a significant reappraisal of the place of experimental film and video in India - as well as a non-western perspective on artists' practice to challenge the dominant US - and Euro-centric histories mainly known in the UK. The Cinema of Prayoga is edited by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

The Cinema of Prayoga by Amrit Ganger

"In 1949, Einstein pointed out to me during one of several long and highly involved private technical discussions that certain beautifully formulated theories of his would mean that the whole universe consisted of no more than two charged particles. Then he added with a rueful smile, Perhaps I have been working on the wrong lines, and nature does not obey differential equations after all. If a scientist of his rank could f ace the possibility that his entire lifework might have to be discarded, could I insist that the theorems whose inner beauty brought me so much pleasure after heavy toil must be of profound significance in natural philosophy? Fashions change quickly in physics where theory is so rapidly outstripped by experiment." D.D. Kosambi The late Prof D.D. Kosambi was perhaps one of those few Indians who had grasped the modern transformation of science and its implications, particularly for India. He was, perhaps, the only one who had endeavored to act on a wide canvas, to make the scientists of this country realize their tasks and catalyze their tradition-bound society. Through his studies and writings on Indian history, mythology and religion, literature and sociology, he not only applied scientific methods to these areas but also showed that new explanations to age-old beliefs were desirable and possible. Interestingly, Prof Kosambi has left a profound influence on some of our progressive, innovative filmmakers Kumar Shahani, in particular. Prof Kosambi lived in Poona (Pune), close to the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII). As Shahani told me once, Prof Kosambi had good insights into cinematography, too. As a great teacher he would take young Shahani to the surrounding areas; on the way he would pick up a pebble and start narrating history. History, for Prof Kosambi, was at ones doorstep. History at the Doorstep was his radical concept to study and understand the past. Some of his field works are extremely significant. Einsteins dilemma or self-doubt also reminds me of Stan Brakhage in an interview, regretting his underestimation of the historical flypaper he was stuck in. I didnt realize until much later how people in their daily living imita te the narrative-dramatic materials that infiltrate their lives through the radio, TV, newspapers and, certainly, the movies. He also felt that despite all the evolutions of his film grammar and his inclusion of hypnagogic and dream vision, they were still tied to the more traditional dramatic-narrative framework! It is, I think, a trial and error game that one keeps playing, always in pra-kriy, the process, creative or post-creative. But there is a difference between empirical sciences and the plastic arts such as cinematography. What, however, puzzles me is Brakhages

repeated use of the term film grammar, which is essentially rules-bound, whereas avant-garde, to my mind, is iconoclastic. It is interesting to note from Prof Kosambis comment that eve n in physics, fashions change quickly and theory is so rapidly outstripped by experiment. Does this, or has it, happen/d in the praxis of experimental cinematography? Later in this essay and in the context of Cinema of Prayga and the Euro -American avant-garde and underground cinema, I propose to refer to the kind of unsteady axes that these terms have always stood on, floundering. The Spirit of Experimentation It was during EXPERIMENTA 2005 in Mumbai that I thought of creating the term Cinema of Prayg a, as a prayya, an alternative to Experimental Film and its synonyms. [Prayga is pronounced as prayg, and paryya as paryy]. And I wrote briefly about it in the festival catalogue. Given that the first explorations into the so -called experimental / avant-garde / underground films started in Western Europe and North America, the relevant theories also naturally emerged from there. Why so? Isnt experimentation intrinsically universal in one form or another? In the times when the Euro-American establishment can only assimilate non-western art on manifestly ethnographic terms, while keeping the option open to reject it precisely on those terms, how do we recognize the avant-garde in India? Do experiments happen in isolation of local conditions? Do experiments rapidly outstrip theories across the spectrum? Or, in particular, how stable the theories or paradigms of these operative terms have been vis--vis developing cinematography and its technology? And does the experiment end once the artist has completed his work? If so, are we talking about just the process that the experimental film has gone through? These are some of the questions (and they are not actually new) that have been troubling my mind for quite some time, and in the context, I would like to check whether the idea of cinema of prayga could be put in currency in the global cinematographic vocabulary and discourse for better employment and use. Prayga includes both these applications. While examining and elaborating the term prayga, I would also like to explore and contextualize Indian film history in brief. It is also of interest to see the Indian political economy entering the realm of the experimental. In fact, the so-called experiment works in the form and with or without the form . Again the question what after all is not experimental? looms large. This essay would branch itself into multiple but integral streams, all finally

flowing into the mahsgar, ocean of prayga. Experimental Environmental Amit Dutta, the youngest artist in the Cinema of Prayga programme believes that everybody is born experimental. Or as Ritwik Ghatak said, experimentation is an ever-living and never dying thing. Experiment is part of life so why name it, why label it? To my mind at the moment, the three most experimental objects or organisms that we always live in are: food, architecture, and erotology. All these are experiments-in-perpetuation. Look at food and the way we experiment with it all the time, look at its history, it is nothing but the history of experimentation, underground or over-ground, inside the oven or outside it, front guard or rear guard, less spicy or more. The configurations keep on changing, even the way the vegetable or meat is cut and placed. The gastronomic aesthetics is a glocal experiment; it has its visuality and aurality, plus the smell. And the sound. But I havent yet found the term experimental gastronomy or avant-garde food except the explorations made in molecular gastronomy. Architecture has its own avant-garde and experimental history, but not without problems. The fact is, like the art of the culinary; the art of architecture affects us the most. Architecture was the first obvious sign of postmodernism, just around the corner of our living place, or across the street anywhere in the world. And thirdly, erotology, that fathoms the human body, mind and its deepest environs, in the realm of fantasy, pleasure and pain. One of the greatest experimental work of art, a grand prayga, in this realm is Vtsyyanas Kma Stra. It is a manual for erotic specialists, in the same sense that Kautilyas Arthashstra is one of the most open-ended manual for power specialists, and it drily lists the techniques of sex. There is a widespread notion among foreigners that every literate Indian reads the Kma Stra. I think if we contextualize experiment environmentally, or environment experimentally, we get a transcendental experience of the realm of cinematography. It is always in the process. The naming or labelling perhaps helps give it a push, to polemicize the thought that dies and takes birth again to die. The term prayga suggests the eternal quest, a continuing process in time and space. And it is not exclusivist. It, I think, would create an ecology of aesthetics. In its comprehensive sense, the word ecology is crucial in our context. According to French philosopher and mathematician, Michel Serres, the American philosopher Henri David Thoreau (1817-1862) must have invented this word in 1852. In the French language, it appeared for the first time around 1874, following the

German usage proposed by the biologist-philosopher Ernst Heinrich August Haeckel (1834-1919) in 1866. Since then ecology has generally acquired two meanings: as reference to a scientific discipline, dedicated to the study of more or less numerous sets of living beings interacting with their environment. And secondly, ecology also refers to the controversial ideological and political doctrine varying from author to author, or group to group, that aims at the protection of the environment through diverse means. Experimental or avant-garde theatre has happened all over the world, either on stage, or in streets. As Richard Schechner comments, Much of the post-war avant-garde is an attempt to overcome fragmentation by approaching performance as a part of rather than apart from the community. Sometimes this community is the community of the artists making the work; this has been the pattern in New York, London, Paris and other Western cities. Sometimes as in the general uprisings of 1968 the art is joined to large political movements. Sometimes, as in black and Chicano theatre, and more recently in other special interest theatres, the artists identify with even help to form a sense of ethnic, racial or political identity. This community-related avant-garde is not only a phenomenon of the industrialized West, but also of countries that are industrializing or undergoing great changes in social organization. Theatre makes it possible, because it is much more physical than the cinema? But I think here there is much more conceptual clarity, so it is perhaps in avant-garde music. In Indian classical music (both Hindustani and Carnatic) the prayga or praygam (both in the sense of experimentation a nd usage), is an integral part. The relationship between Yoga-Tantra and music is another wonderful area of pra-yga study to intensify its ecology. The Indian Environment: State Funding Spirit of Prayga Film Finance Corporation et al India is a peculiar case. On the one hand we have some of the craziest kinds of popular culture imagery or art works, breaking all the conservative or non-conservative rules, while on the other we see our cinematography feeling increasingly shy of bold prayga. At the initiative of independent Indias first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), later becoming the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) were set up in the 1960s. FFCs original objective was to promote and assist the mainstream film industry by providing, affording or procuring finance or other facilities for the production of films of good standard. Later, under the direct influence of then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, the FFC initiated the New Indian Cinema (the media dubbed it as Indian New Wave) with

Mrinal Sens Bhuvan Shome and Mani Kauls Uski Roti (A Days Bread), both made in 1969. This indeed was a national prayga in cultural-political economy. Kauls debut was an adaptation of a short story by the noted Hindi author Mohan Rakesh and was perhaps the first consistently formal experiment in Indian cinema. While this state funded film was violently attacked in the popular media, aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia defended it across the country. Paradoxically, this new movement was born of a governmental decision and not from the impetus of filmmakers rebelling against the existing commercial or popular cinema. The public institutional aid created its own problematic. In most cases, the financial aid was very meagre and that many a time became detrimental to the formal vision of the film. But eventually, the prizes and awards won by these small budget films led to the feeling that only small was artistic. Nevertheless, as the English proverb goes, Necessity is the mother of Invention, and innovative auteur filmmakers found creative ways to make films, the body of which was eventually called the parallel cinem a in India; parallel to the mainstream. In-between the parallel-mainstream poles also emerged the middle-roader cinema, the one that compromised between the two in order to attract more viewers. The scenario was noisy with loud rhetoric against the state-funded filmmakers who took initiatives to rigorously explore the potential of cinematography in their works. Many said it was waste of public money. In these times, filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani made some of their most serious films, beginning with Uski Roti and Maya Darpan (Mirror of Illusion, 1972), respectively. One of the most remarkable avant -garde films Ghasiram Kotwal (1976) was made by the Yukt Film Cooperative. It was co-directed by the Cooperatives founders, Mani Kaul, K. Hariharan, Saeed Mirza and Kamal Swaroop, and was shot by the cameramen Binod Pradhan, Rajesh Joshi, Manmohan Singh and Virendra Saini all FTII alumni. Interestingly a nationalised bank financed this film, in those days when the film industry was not recognized as such officially. Films Division Experiment of Government Made Experimental Films! It is quite interesting to see the category of Experimental Films in the Indian Government owned Films Divisions catalogue. However, as Jag Mohan, the author of a book on the Films Division said, Experimental films as understood in the West have made slow progress at the FD. From its inception, the FD has been concerned with information, educational and propaganda films. The utilitarian aspect of the film is primary consideration in the

selection of subjects. Besides, the Film Advisory Board, which approves films for public exhibition through the FD circuit, also keeps a watchful eye on the utilitarian value of the films. Thus films of the type popularised by Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Lotte Reiniger, Maya Deren and later by the American Underground filmmakers cannot be found here. Probably for hitherto underdeveloped and now a developing country like India, such films are a luxury. According to Marie Seton, some of the Films Division films had practical as well as artistic value. They make their impact, strikingly different as they are because they have a style of their own. They are mature films. Nevertheless, the Films Division did venture into this so-called luxury. The late Vijay B. Chandra, who was then FDs Chief Producer (later the first Director of the Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary, Short & Short Films launched in 1990) always talked about producing visually stimulating food for thought to nourish Indias millions of illiterate people. To whatever extent, it was the public sector Films Division that took the risk of making films such as Explorer (Pramod Pati, 1968), And I Make Short Films (S.N.S. Sastry, 1968), Trip (Pramod Pati, 1970), Child on a Chess Board (Vijay B. Chandra, 1979); all these filmmakers were the FD staffers. Mani Kaul has made several interesting documentaries for the Films Division, as an outside independent producer. And there are many other young and old leading filmmakers including Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Arvindan, Kamal Swaroop, Rajat Kapoor whose films are in the FDs collection. As the Founder Director of Datakino, I had the opportunity of setting up a comprehensive database of the entire FD output from its inception to the year 1995 over 8,000 newsreels, newsmagazines, documentary, short features, and animation films. We did it on a primitive PC286, without Windows; I would jocularly compare this project to the making of Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955), which Satyajit Ray was able to make without enough resources. Of late, the Films Division has updated the Database and made it Windows-based. It was in December 1947 (India attained independence on 15 August 1947) that the Standing Finance Committee of the Government India approved the scheme for the revival of a film producing and distributing organization, as a mass media unit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B). First christened the Film Unit of the Ministry of I&B and finally renamed as the Films Division in April 1948, it was described as the official organ of the Government of India for the production and distribution of information films and newsreels. The documentaries were to be released under the banner of Documentary Films of India while the newsreels under Indian News Reviews. It was mandatory for all the cinema houses (over 12,900 permanent and touring cinemas) in the country

to show the documentaries and newsreels produced by the Films Division. Produced in fourteen major Indian languages of the country, over 300 prints of each documentary and newsreel went for the first and second weeks to first-run theatres, and later-run halls over a period of up to nine months until this batch of prints was withdrawn. The cinemas paid the Films Division for the hire of these films on a contractual basis. The annual output of over 30,000 prints in 35mm and 16mm included not only the copies for theatres, but also prints supplied free of charge for use on the mobile units of the Central and State Governments, those selected by Indian diplomatic and trade missions abroad for their territories, those distributed for foreign television and theatrical hiring outlets, and films supplied for prestige and publicity to international festivals and other occasions. Over 15,83,654 prints of its films had been in circulation by 1987. Imagine millions of people watching the Films Divisions Experimental Films across the county. Historically, this is not very unique to India alone. The Soviet Union, under the dynamic leadership of Vladimir Lenin had marched far ahead in producing radical experimental cinematography. It was Lenin who supported Dziga Vertov (Denis Arkadievitch Kaufman) when, early in 1922, he told the Commissar of Education, Anatoli Lunacharsky, Of all the arts, for us, film is the most important. Indias first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had understood the potential of cinematography but his mentor Mahatma Gandhi had a different opinion. Indian Political Leadership Attitudes Towards Cinema Mahatma Gandhi was not well disposed towards cinema no matter if his work had influenced many a filmmaker in those early days of Indian cinema. Gandhis dislike for cinema is evident in his note to the Indian Cinematography Committee (the Rangachariyar Committee) in 1927-28. Again in 1938, on the occasion of the film industrys anniversary, a Bombay trade paper asked Gandhi for a congratulatory message; his secretary responded, As a rule Gandhiji gives messages only on rare occasions and those only for causes whose virtue is ever undoubtful. As for the cinema industry he has the least interest in it and one may not expect a word of appreciation from him. Journalist-turned-filmmaker K.A. Abbas wrote an open letter to Gandhi and, while greeting him on his 71st birth anniversary, said: I have no knowledge of how you came to such a poor opinion of the cinema. I dont know if you have ever cared to see a motion picture. I can on ly imagine that, rushing from one political meeting to another, you chanced to catch a glimpse of some lewd cinema posters that disfigure the city walls and concluded that all the films are evil and that the cinema is a playhouse of the devil. In his lett er, Abbas

also provided a list of Indian and foreign films which were unexceptionable even from the viewpoint of the strictest moralist. Had Gandhi and others taken interest in the budding filmmaking enterprise during 1930s and 1940s, would the Indian cinema have taken a different shape? Phalkes Pioneering Experiment With Form And Funds When Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (1870-1944) pioneered feature filmmaking in India in 1913, India was still a British colony. Dadasaheb (as he was popularly known) Phalke was a versatile artist; he learnt and pursued many arts and crafts including drawing, painting, printing, engraving, photography, moulding, architecture, music, magic and amateur acting. Thus he was a complete karmaygi (man of action) prayga person. After watching the film Life of Christ at the America-India cinema in Bombay during Christmas in 1910, he had decided to make a film featuring Hindu gods and goddesses. As he wrote, While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualising the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell. Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen? He was forty then, without any dependable source of incom e on which his family could fall back, and, since he was not prepared to do anything else except his experiments in filmmaking, the future was dark, insecure. Undaunted, he made a short film Growth of a Pea Plant to convince his potential financier. Incidentally, through this film, he introduced the concept of time-lapse photography as also the first indigenous or swadeshi instructional film. To get the first hand knowledge of necessary equipment, he went to London, pledging his insurance policies. There, Mr Carbourne, editor of the Bioscope weekly helped him to identify the right camera and other equipment as well as raw negative film. He also introduced Phalke to Cecil Hepworth who took him around his studio. Back home in April 1912, Phalke busied himself making his / Indias first silent feature film Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra). It was released on 13 May 1913 at Bombays Coronation Cinema. About the most upright and truthful king, the film was based on a story from the epic Mahabharata. The film was advertised as an entirely Indian production by Indians, indicating Phalkes resolve to establish a new swadeshi or Indias own industry in those colonial times. Gandhi was yet to return home from South Africa. Lanka Dahan (Lanka Aflame) was a big success and he could make a new version of Raja Harishchandra. Released in 1918, Shree Krishna Janma (Birth of Shree Krishna) was made by the new Hindustan Film Company of which Phalke was a working partner with other

five financing partners. Feeling bitter, due to internal differences, Phalke took voluntary retirement and went to the holy city of Benaras towards the end of 1919. However, convinced by several other producers, Phalke rejoined restructured Hindustan and remained there until it folded up in 1932, when Indian sound film was barely a year old. The last silent film directed by Phalke for Hindustan was Setu Bandhan but with the advent of sound, the film had to be post-synchronised. It flopped. On 16 February 1944, Phalke died a pauper at the age of 74 in Nasik, like those two other pioneers of early films, George Melies in France and Fraise Green in England. In our Indian prayga context, Phalke occupies a significant space because, besides being a pioneer, he personified the prayga spirit in those awkward times. It is an open secret that Melies had already made fantastic films such as A Trip to the Moon in 1902 and that Phalke took ten more years to produce his first feature film, which does not survive in totality, but we do get a definite idea about his insights into the art and its craft. He wanted to prove to the British that an Indian working under primitive conditions could make films too. On an aesthetic level, Phalkes tableaux remind us of Raja Ravi Varmas oleograph paintings. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha mentions, The painter Raja Ravi Varma was in many ways the direct cultural predecessor to Phalke, greatly influencing his themes, his images, his views on culture. Phalke mixed his patriotic swadeshi spirit with his cinematograp hic prayga experimental praxis in constructing the gaze, the frame, the space and time. Comparing Lumieres LArroseur arrose, Rajadhyaksha observes that in Phalke there is almost no definition of time; the contiguities are employed in the different states of seeing as they come together. The story, if there is one, is a continuous back-and-forth interaction between the viewers and the object viewed; we are shown the imaginary universe condensed into the object, our seeing is reciprocated. Apparently, Phalke was aware about the plastic potential of the medium he was working in. In nutshell, Phalke provides the earliest example of Indias private filmmaking enterprise as against the post-colonial public Films Division. Good Cinema Bad Cinema Art Film Commercial Film It was in the 1960s and 1970s that the divide between the so-called art and commercial film became rhetorically pronounced, often becoming acerbic. Thousands of national / mental hours were spent on deciding what was good cinema and its corollary bad. This obviously moralistic stand unfortunately took the toll of the prayga spirit. In retrospect when I look at this past, its ramifications seem to have been widespread and serious.

Gradually, the rhetoric impacted the FTII and its progressive, pryga outlook towards cinematography. And as we witnessed, it led cinematography to becoming part of mass communication and management studies curricula in colleges, depriving millions of youngsters the experience of facing creative challenges that cinematography potentially puts forward. A film magazine interviewed several thinker-filmmakers about what they thought of good cinema and whether it was viable commercially. The general tone amplified the Indian artists struggle to make self responsible to her/his art and at the same time to society at large. As film and theatre director Vijaya Mehta said, The filmmaker must have a sense of responsibility to the society at large. For Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, good cinema was one that re-sensitised the sensibility of the people who watch it. This Self -Social balancing becomes pivotal to art in a country like India, determining its very nature and its own essential self. And became the fertile terrain for rhetoric to mushroom. Nevertheless, beyond all this good-bad debate, what was significant in the prayga context was Mani Kauls persistent radical cinematographic / philosophical praxis in Indian cinema. In his film Naukar ki Kameez (Servants Shirt, 1999), he did not let his cameraman look through the camera while a shot was being taken. He believes, the moment the eye looks through the camera it appropriates the space it is filming by a dichotomous organization that splits the experience of that space into a fork: of being sacred and/or of being profane. Obviously it saves what it knows as sacred from an exposure to what it thinks is profane. This gives yet another dimension to the understanding prayga, if I may say so. His philosophy of abhed ksh or undivided sp ace and its application to cinematography is a part of his prayga. He has been resisting the idea of the European concept of Renaissance perspective since it splits space into object-horizon polarity. Today, the media has almost completely shunned that period in Indian film history that was pregnant with a certain youthful restlessness. But strangely it keeps using the word avant -garde even for the most old-fashioned stuff simply because it seems different from the crass commercial crap. Recently, a journalist wrote that the older generation of avant-gardes bridged the gap between masala and art cinema. Did avant-gardism in cinema in Europe play such a function? For Andrew Sarris, the avant-garde films pointed the way for commercial movies.

Avant-garde Indian Art New Formalism Cultural Difference Political Urgencies Early on, the label avant-garde was used especially for the films by filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani who, I presume, felt embarrassed since their cinema had attempted to rigorously revitalise Indian narrative traditions, including the epic. Interestingly, they could reconcile Ritwik Ghatak and Robert Bresson in their cinematographic worldview. For their films obvious visual or dialogic slow or static space and their p ublic praise of Bresson, the journalists dubbed them Bressonian, in the sense of imitating him. How do we recognize the avant-garde in India? While raising this pertinent question, Geeta Kapur, the eminent art critic and author, says: The Euro-American establishment can still only assimilate non-western art on manifestly ethnographic terms, keeping the option open to reject it precisely on those terms. On the other hand, Asia / Africa / Australia, not to speak of Latin America, look for a new formalism, an extension of language on the basis of cultural difference and political urgencies which, because of the shared history of the 20th century (via capitalism / imperialism), implicates the artists in global questions: of location and the appropriate forms of political redress from their vantage point. These artists, living in societies riven with contradictions, ask for synthesizing universals, for visionary and vanguard initiatives. Kapurs context is Indian fine arts and within the questions of cultural differences in a changing India. Experimental Avant-garde Old New Underground Unsteady Axes Doubts Watching from hindsight, we could feel how unsteady these nomenclatures or terms have been historically. I think one of the major problems with these labels was the womb they were born from; the womb was in movements outside it Dadaism, Surrealism, for instance, no matter how plastic. As Kumar Shahani commented, the avantgarde experiments, borrowing syntax from the other arts, have been attempts at achieving a kind of respectability for the cinema. Or as Janet Bergstrom argues, When avant-garde is used to describe an artistic movement, such as Cubism, it means that the movement is, for a time, ahead of critical acceptance. But when Cubism becomes absorbed into the mainstream of the tradition, it is no longer avant-garde. In connection with cinema, however, avant-garde does not mean in advance of a developing film tradition; it is taken to mean, rather, apart from the commercial cinema. Especially by its own historians, who almost always see the avant-garde cinema in terms of a

development completely separate from that of history of cinema. It is seen in terms of the art world (painting, graphics, music, poetry, sometimes architecture) rather than the entertainment industry. On the contrary, Andrew Sarris thinks that avant-garde films point the way for commercial movies. It is difficult to think of any technical or stylistic innovations contributed by the avant-garde. Avant-garde critics and filmmakers have had to be dragged screaming into the eras of sound, colour, and wide-screen. Avant-garde impulses seem to be channelled toward the shattering of content taboos, political, religious, and sexual. Luis Bunuel and Rene Claire have come out of the avant-garde, and some think that Cocteau never left it, but avant-garde mannerisms stand for long the withering gaze of the camera. Bergstrom also believes that the definitions of avant-garde or experimental cinema have always been controversial because they have always presupposed value judgments; even those offered in the most recent histories provoke the kinds of counter-examples, which imply conflicting opinions about what counts as avant-garde cinema. And with the historic shifts in these movements, the terms for the cinema also kept floundering with self-doubts around the exclusivist factions. Quite earlier on, the sudden advent of the 1929-depression shook up the dominating art-for-arts sake philosophy of the avant-gardes. And as Arthur Knight said, with panic, starvation and ruin all about them, they found it peculiarly inappropriate to be concerned solely with revolving starfish and swinging pendulums, with textures and prisms and the dream world of the subconscious. The penetrating works of Sovi et realism had been seen and discussed in the numerous avant-garde cine-clubs that spread through the Continent after 1925. For many they were a revelation, a proof that the problems relating the real world could be as intriguing, as challenging and as artistically valid as anything they had done before. After a decade of altering reality, kidding reality, ignoring reality, they suddenly found themselves concerned with reproducing reality, substituting social purpose for aesthetic experiment. The willingness to experiment, to try out new forms, new techniques and ideas, is as vital to the arts as it is to science. Today, through an unfortunate limiting of the word, experiment in film has come to be associated almost exclusively with the efforts of small avant-garde coteries working quite apart from the mainstream of motion-picture production. In fact, a lot of ground- or path-breaking work in cinematographic aesthetics and technology had already been done (without any labels). Quite early on, what was Griffith doing when he pushed his camera closer to the actors against the prevailing conventions? What was Ritwik Ghatak doing in his radical employment of the

archetypes? Or evolving strange but sweet love between man and machine in Ajantrik, for example? They were creating newer forms of narrating stories; they were at the vanguard. Most of the time the artists only reclaim the old to make it new, in newer contexts and environments. But it is all in a continuum. It was during the 1920s, when the avant-gardes were in full swing on the Continent, that the idea of experiment became identified exclusively with their peculiar kind of filmmaking. If a film were abstract, baffling or downright incomprehensible, it could always be described as experimental. And since these films came from Europe they were also considered artistic, an assumption based largely upon the native American tradition that anything European is necessarily more artistic than the native product. Thus experiment acquired a certain honorific connotation, a quality that has clung to it ever since. And because the men who were experimenting in the studios, never claimed that they were doing anything but making films as best they could, a certain preciousness and little cinema aura gathered about the word as well. Underground Film and Pop Art, as Parker Tyler has said, represent the only elites in human history which insist on the privileges of an elite without any visible means of earning or sustaining those privileges; that is, without any values that can be measured, or even, properly speaking, named except by its own labels. A distinct irony of the Underground is that here the film, the only complete time art of the theatre, exactly duplicating itself simply by staring the reel over again, declines to take seriously its own historical integrity. The Underground standpoint, thus, betrays the very lifeblood of the avant-garde. For Andrei Tarkovsky, the concept of avant-garde in art was meaningless. The whole question of avant-garde is peculiar to the twentieth century, to the time when art has steadily been losing its spirituality. He thinks the avant gardes were confused by the new aesthetic structures, lost in the face of the real discoveries and achievements, not capable of finding any criteria of their own, they included under the one head avant-garde anything that was not familiar and easily understood just in case, in order not to be wrong. Tarkovsky even questions the very notion of experimentation in art: How can you experiment in art? Can one talk of experiment in relation to the birth of a child? Experiment, according to Richard Schechner, is going beyond the boundaries, although he thinks experimentation in theatre is dead. Theres not much of that going on these days . As things have gotten desperate outside of theatre, theyve become more conservative within. The great period of experimentation that began in the fifties

ended by the mid-seventies. What is, however, interesting for him is the foundation of practice bestowed by the experimental period. This foundation is a performance art based on a post-modern consciousness. Experimental film or the avant-garde cinema doesnt seem to be sharing this experience with theatre, maybe because of its huge technological stake. Every technological change or shift affects it aesthetically, lately from analogue to digital, the new media, for instance. But still the connection with history cant be snapped. Applied Avant-gardism has often met with its death. It has also become like the chameleon, changing garbs and loyalties. The author of A History of Experimental Film and Video, A.L. Rees, thinks that, Using the terms avant garde, or even experimental, film at this late date may appear anachronistic or a provocation. F or a long time they have scarcely been used without some degree of embarrassment. It was applied loosely to artists filmmaking from the 1920s, but peaked in the 1970s when it ousted the term underground film as a seemingly more serious name for the then rising structural film movement. Lucie-Smith: Can you give a definition of avant-garde? Greenberg: You dont define it; you recognize it, as a historical phenomenon. Is Greenberg talking about historical avant-garde? INTERMISSION Once upon a time there was a Diary and Candy Andy [] I was in and out of the lunch because I was painting with the sponge mop in the back. I havent peed on any canvases this week. This is for the Piss paintings. I told Ronnie not to pee when he gets up in the morning to try to hold it until he gets to the office, because he takes lot of vitamin B so the canvas turns a really pretty color when its his piss [] Tuesday, June 28, 1977

Experiment, this? Maybe, maybe not. What then is an experiment? Or experimental, if you like? Questions the subconscious. [] He said that my idea of piss-painting was old-fashioned because itd been in the movie Teorema which (laughs) is true, it was. I knew that. And then he said something great he said that the punks are the Shit Children, because theyre descendents of the beatniks and the hippies, and hes right. Isnt that great? The Shit Children. He is smart. [] Sunday, March 19, 1978 What is new-fashioned? Is experiment new, novel? Asks the conscious. [] Im watching MTV right now. I dont know what else you can do to these videos to make them different. Theyre all the same. Theyre all like sixties underground movies, people running around. Like Stan Brakhage and all those kids used to make. [] Monday, May 21, 1984 All those kids?! Smiles history with marks ? and ! History is full of such marks, isnt she? Asks who? History. Some pre-and-post-pissing lines from Andy Warhols diary pages (in italics). [He = Salvador Dali.] How about prayga? Queries qualm. Experiment! 876543210 The Main Film Begins

Cinem of Prayga Part I The loosely equivalent word for the English experiment in Sanskrit is prayga which has several different connotations, including design, contrivance, device, plan; application, employment (esp. of drugs and magic); use, practice, experiment (opp. theory), exhibition (of dance), representation (of a drama), a piece to be represented, recitation, delivery; praygtisaya (in drama) is excess of representation while praygrtha means having a sense of prayga. If we deconstruct the word Prayga, we get Pra+Yoga, where the prefix pra in a way is an engine. As a prefix to verbs, it means forward, forth, in front, onward, before. In other words, it carries the sense of vanguard. With adjectives, it means very, excessively; and with nouns, whether derived from verbs or not, it is used in various senses including, commencement; power, intensity, source or origin, completion, perfectness, excellence, purity, etc., depending on what noun it is prefixed to. Among its many interpretations, yga also means uniting, combination, contact, touch, employment, application, use, charm, spell, incantation, magic, magical art, substance, deep and abstract meditation, concentration of mind, contemplation of the Supreme Spirit, which in Yga philosophy is defined as cittavritinirodha. Yga is the system of philosophy established by Patanjali, etc. As stated before; I would like to propose prayga as a better alternative to English experiment-al. Prayga is also practice or an experimental portion (of a subject); (opp. shstra, theory); Praygatisaya if one of the five kinds of prastvana or prologue, in which a part or performance is superseded by another in such a manner that a character is suddenly brought on the stage; i.e. where the Sutradhra goes out hinting the entrance of a character and thus performs a part superseding that which he has apparently intended for his own, viz. dancing; Shityadarpana thus defines it: [Sahityadarpana = A collection of materials for the production or performance of anything. Sutradhra = stage manager, a principal actor who arranges the cast of characters and instructs them, and takes a prominent part in the Prastvan or prelude. Unlike avant-garde, prayga is a non-military word; it is, in fact, artistic and meditative. The English laboratory becomes more connected as it is called praygamandir (temple of prayga) or praygashl (hall or saloon of prayga). The word finds place in all major Indian languages (northern or southern) and with some interesting derivatives. Prayogika, for example, is a new word in the Gujarati lexicon, which means a light essay. While in Hindi, praygavdi is an experimentalist or experimentalistic, while in Bengali it becomes pragmatic or pragmatist. The general meaning of use or application is found everywhere. In Malayalam, prayga also means,

manipulation, eagerness to fight, preliminary performance, adj. prayogbhinjan, an expert at ta ctical performance, praygthisayam (drama), mode of prologue in a drama, as explained earlier. Cinem of Prayga Part II In its meta-text, I would like to call Pramod Patis cinema, the cinema of prayga because it carries its creators own state, own svabhva, temperament. It has the quality of being intuitive and congenial, capable of achieving a certain bhvasandhi, a unity of emotions in its characteristic manner. Prayga was, I think, Patis svabhva (pronounced svabhv) and hence even on themes such as family planning he created narratives of sharp curiosities. Pati had learnt the art from Norman McLaren of the National Film Board of Canada. Then Pati was a 23year-old man full of youthful exuberance. He also studied animation filmmaking in Czechoslovakia for a couple of years and returned to India in 1960. Patis wasnt a conscious effort to make something different for its own sake, but to put his art at stake with his own artistic and idealistic endeavours. Obviously, within the Films Division constraints, Pati took a risk to make such films. Pati was a man of prayga, an artist who stuck his own anbhav (experience) and svabhva and integrity. Cinem of Prayga Part III So far, the concept Cinema of Prayga has been received very positively in India. Mani Kaul said, In my mind too the expression experimental evokes an uncomfortable feeling. It does nothing more than marginalize serious work in cinema. In its implications, as commonly understood, the word creates a narrow focus on some kind of isolated cinematic activity. The word prayga is wider and more relevant. For Ashish Avikunthak the cinema of prayga is defined as much by aesthetics as that followed by a theory of practice. Proyoga is a theory of experimentation that is not just limited to aesthetics but also the production aspect of cinema. Prayga for me is a practice of experiment. I believe, we have reached a juncture that needs a fusion (to clear the historical confusion), a term that captures the flux in its inner self; the integrative prayga would avoid dualistic paradigms of west versus east, traditional versus modern (or post-modern, or post-post-modern), etc. Let us explore the Cinema of Prayga. Amen.

This film has No End It is a prayga-in-perpetuation Amrit Ganger/no.w.here This essay is included in no.w.here's book: Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film & Video 1913 2006. 10, see the publications section for details.

Cinema Of Prayga by Tanya Singh Launched at Tate Modern, Cinema of Prayga is a UK tour of historical and contemporary Indian experimental film and video organised by artist film and video lab no.w.here. What follows is a free assembly of extracts from the accompanying catalogue of essays and interviews introducing and reflecting on the diverse forms of experiments in representation that defines Cinema of Prayga. Given that the first explorations into experimental, avant-garde and underground films started in Europe and North America, it seems natural that the relevant theories about experimental film have emerged from there. Why so? Isnt experimentation intrinsically universal? During Experimenta 2005 in Mumbai, film historian Amrit Gangar coined the term Cinema of Prayga as a prayya an alternative [improvement], to experimental film and its synonyms. [Prayga is pronounced as prayg, and paryya as paryy]. A Sanskrit word, prayga has several connotations, including design, contrivance, employment, practice, experiment (opp. theory), exhibition, recitation and representation. The root yga incorporates the meanings of use, touch, magic, substance, and concentration of mind, while the prefix pra carries the sense of vanguard. But unlike avant-garde, prayga is a non-military word; it is, in fact, artistic and meditative. The English laboratory becomes more connected as praygamandir (temple of prayga) or praygashl (hall or saloon of prayga). The word is found in all major Indian languages, northern or southern, with interesting derivatives. Prayogika, a new word in the Gujarati lexicon, means a light essay. In Hindi praygavdi is an experimentalist or experimentalistic,

while in Bengali it becomes pragmatic or pragmatist. Prayga in Malayalam means manipu lation, with prayogbhinjan referring to expertise in tactical performance. These are times when, as Geeta Kapur has noted, the Euro-American establishment can only assimilate nonwestern art on manifestly ethnographic terms, while keeping the option open to reject it precisely on those terms. A term that captures flux in its inner self, the integrative prayga avoids dualistic paradigms of west versus east, traditional versus modern (or post-modern, or post-post-modern). Let us explore the cinema of prayga The Main Film Begins Phalke was named the father, because I think he also fancied that title.In those days everyone wanted to be a father, because they realised that nationhood also means fatherhood. Gandhi too was called Bapu father. He was the father of politics, so that made Nehruji the uncle, Chacha Nehru! [] Everything is family oriented here. Kamal Swaroop When Dhundiraj Govind Phalke pioneered Indian feature filmmaking with Raja Harishchandra in 1913, India was still a British colony. The film, based on a story from the epic Mahabharata, was advertised as an entirely Indian production by Indians, indicating Phalkes resolve to establish a new swadeshi or Indias own industry in those colonial times. Gandhi was yet to return home from South Africa Phalke occupies a significant space in Indian cinema not only as a pioneer, but also because he personified the early prayga spirit in his construction of the gaze, the frame, space and time. In comparison with Lumire, Ashish Rajadhyaksha has observed that in Phalke there is almost no definition of time; the contiguities are employed in the different states of seeing as they come together. From Phalkes surviving incomplete films, though Mlis had already made fantastic films 10 years previously, we still get insights into the prayga that was in practice between the lithographic and oleographic iconographies, between folk theatre and puranik / epic literature, between the individual vision and national notion, and between myth and the machine of modernity. INTERTITLE: A national prayga New ideas, new approaches had to be found, encouraged, and put to work. - Jean Bhownagary

Paradoxically, the next major prayga movement in India was born of governmental decisions and not from the impetus of filmmakers rebelling against existing commercial or popular cinema. In 1947, just months after national independence, the Films Division (FD) was established, as a mass media unit of the governmental Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Later in the 60s, at the initiative of Indias first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the Film Finance Corporation, the Film & Television Institute and the National Film Archive were set up. Those were the times of cultural rejuvenation throughout an India that was still trying to build herself socially and economically after centuries of colonial oppression and loot. This Nehruvian socialist context, an experiment in itself, enabled a category of Experimental Films within this governmental organisation. Although bound to its role of producing and distributing information films and newsreels, Films Divisions Chief Producers (including Vijay B. Chandra and Jean Bhownagary) aimed to produce visually stimulating food for thought to nourish Indias millions of illiterate people, as well as films that would be free from the logic of capital and commerce. They took the risk of making films such as Explorer (Pramod Pati, 1968), And I Make Short Films (S.N.S. Sastry, 1968), Trip (Pramod Pati, 1970) and Child on a Chess Board (Vijay B. Chandra, 1979). In a similar way to the British GPO Film Unit, these filmmakers were given access to an infrastructure along with freedom to push the boundaries of filmmaking and experiment with ideas. INTERTITLE: We are born experimental We were taught Shakespearian classics, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and the Romantic poets. Simultaneously Doordarshan, the [government-run] Indian television channel, would bombard us with what the state considered classical, Hindustani classical music and Indian classical dance, from Odissi to Kathakali. - Ashish Avikunthak [] many of my friends who were really passionate film students have become farmers. Filmmaking is a means to an end. It is not an end in itself. - Amit Dutta Shai Heredia, director of the Experimenta festival in Mumbai and Delhi, argues that one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary Indian film is that it is free from the burden of the schools of the western avant -garde film and experimental film. Instead it draws on self-reflexive narrative traditions the thousands of ways of

storytelling in India. Recent works by filmmakers such as Ashish Avikunthak, Ashim Alhuwalia, Shumona Goel, and Amit Dutta reflect this by invoking music, poetry, ritual and documentary to examine the relationship between their status as filmic texts and the fictions-in-progress of their subjects. Situated in societies riven with gross contradictions, todays Indian film artists explore ideas around migration, caste, class, gender, sexuality and religion. They challenge conventional forms of representation not only by questioning larger social systems, but also by simultaneously exposing the complex cultural relationships that they share with filmmaking as an artistic practice. Considering the cultural heterogeneity of India, and the particular relationship between selves and the concepts of community and politicality in the discourse of Indian democracy, these personal films become auto-ethnographic documents of the filmmakers economic and socio-political contexts. INTERTITLE: Routes, not roots At one level [migration] takes place out of desire [] but at another level it results from compulsion and desperation, urgency, poverty and ultimately isolation. - Navjot Altaf They poured petrol into the mouth of a six-year-old and threw in a lit match he blew up like a bomb. Eyewitness account, Gujarat riots, 2002. - from Unity in Diversity, by Nalini Malani In the mid-1990s, as curator Johan Pijnappel notes, approximately 30 Indian artists (without a film background) broke out of the frame to expand their testimony to a wider public with installations and performances using video. Against a backdrop of horrific communal violence and rising Hindutva fascism, in a period when India opened up to the international market, the grand Nehruvian dream seemed to be finally crumbling. But, far from cynical Western postmodernism, these artists saw in video a medium par excellence, appreciated by the masses, appropriate for political engagement and consciousness-raising in a new context the gallery. With vigilance against historical amnesia, and passion for social transformation, contemporary video artists (including Valay Shende, Anita Dube, Pushpamala N and Surekha) are conscious of how subjective perceptions alter the process of remembering. [Re]inventing their own strategies, they develop narrative codes that inscribe the

role of the storyteller, thus displaying an effective inventiveness and countercultural commitment. A vast body of video/installation art has also grown out of the need to recognise and make visible those marginalised experiences (i.e. decolonised subjectivities, women, homosexuals, Dalits, etc.) written out of conventional histories. Thus, despite the obvious fact that nationalist discourses played a vital progressive role in the process of decolonisation, current explorations around the idea of location (e.g. by Raqs Media Collective) involve a rethinking of the relations between places and subjects. INTERTITLE: History is an experiment How does one deal with contemporary history? [] How does one tell a story about something which has no story in the conventional sense, only an unfolding? - Sanjiv Shah Over the past four years no.w.here has worked closely with its Indian partner organisation Filter to establish the Experimenta festival in India, providing a platform for Indian and international artists film and video work. During this period they have excavated a rich vein of visual-arts based work that, despite the huge popularity of Indian cinema internationally, remains relatively unknown. The touring exhibition and publication Cinema of Prayoga: Indian Experimental Film & Video 19132006 presents a comprehensive selection of these works to UK audiences, tracing a history of personal filmmaking outside of the Bollywood industry. Now joined by two artists residencies in London and Mumbai, this exploratory project is, necessarily, ongoing. As Ritwik Ghatak has said, experimentation is an ever-living and never-dying thing. Experiment is part of life so why name it, why label it? Naming or labelling perhaps helps to give it a push, to polemicise the thought that dies and takes birth again to die. So it is with the term prayga itself referring to the eternal quest, a continuing process in time and space THIS FILM HAS NO END It is a prayga-in-perpetuation

KurzSchluss - Das Magazin #480 - Amit Dutta im Interview Der indische Filmemacher AMIT DUTTA antwortet per email auf Fragen der Autorin Marita Loosen.

Experimenta 2003 Festival of experimental film, India

Wavelength, Michael Snow

19/20/21 February 2003

"Since its inception in 2003 Experimenta proudly showcases Indian Films that delight in eccentric form and abstract narrative. These are exciting films that

display an independence from the constraints of the generic western avant-garde. Experimenta ultimately seeks to explore a new visual world and is an invitation to explore and support a movement to break the boundaries of what constitutes film art in India". Shai Heredia, Festival director (from Experimenta 2005 catalogue) http://www.filterindia.com Co-curators Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, no.w.here

Light/Motion Mothlight Stan Brakhage, USA, 1963, 16mm, silent, colour, 4min Brakhage made Mothlight without a camera. He just pasted mothwings and flowers on a clear strip of film and ran it through the printing machine. Jonas Mekas. Brakhage's films challenge film conventions even by their extreme contrasts of length. They include intimate portraits of fr iends and family, film-poems, landscape films, autobiography and more recent collaborations with composers and writers. His personal creation myth centres on the act of shooting and editing. Equally, the objective side of his films their rhythms, metrics, camera style, subject matter make uncompromising demands on the viewer to elicit and construct meaning, thus shifting attention from the authors voice to the spectators eye. Viewing avant-garde film is here very close to the process of viewing modern painting. Al Rees Six films by Len Lye (all 16mm, New Zealand/USA): Tusalava 1929, 6min Colour Flight 1938, 4min Colour Cry 1952, 3min

Rhythm 1957, 1min Particles in Space 1979, 4min Tal Farlow 1980, 1.5min Len Lye (1901-1980) was a major figure in experimental film making as well as a leading kinetic sculptor and an innovative theorist, painter and writer. He pioneered 'direct film', film made without a camera by painting and scratching images directly onto celluloid and became one of the pioneers of the genre later known as the 'music video'. Berlin Horse Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm, sound, colour, 8min This film is largely filmed with the exploration of the film medium in certain aspects. It is also concerned with making cer tain conceptions about time in a more illusory way. The film is in two parts joined by a central superimposition of the material from both parts. The first part is made from a small section of film shot by me in 8mm colour, and later refilmed in various ways from the screen in 16mm b/w. The b/w material was then printed in a negative positive superimposition through colour filters creating a continually changing 'solarization' image, which works in its own time abstractly from the image. The second part is made by treating very early b/w newsreel of a similar subject in the same way. Malcolm le Grice. Room Film Peter Gidal, UK, 1973, 16mm, colour, silent, 55min I was particularly impressed with Gidal's film, which from what I've seen may be his best to date. Very subtly and very plastically it deals with light. The film is uncompromisingly rigid in its minimality of action. A very beautifully realised piece of work...it is definitely contemporary in feeling and substance. It is one of the best films to come out of the London School. Jonas Mekas, Village Voice 1973.

Thursday 20th February: Encounters/Collisions Unsere Afrikareise

Peter Kubelka, Austria, 1966, 16mm, sound, 12min Peter Kubelka's Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa), was commissioned by Austrian tourists, as a simple documentation of their safari to Africa. Kubelka then painstakingly edited this film over a period of 5 years and made one of cinema's few masterpieces and a work of such great perfection that it forces one to re-evaluate everything that one knows about cinema. The images are relatively conventional 'records' of a hunting-trip in Africa. The shooting records multiple 'systems' white hunters, natives, animals, natural objects, buildings in a manner that preserves the individuality of each. At the same time, the editing of sound and image brings these systems into comparison and collision, producing a complex of multiple meanings, statements, and ironies... The Doctors Dream Krn Jacobs, USA, 1978, 16mm, sound, 25min Jacobs has restructured an existing film, The Doctor into The Doctor's Dream. The new film starts with the shot, which was numerically the middle shot in the old film. It then proceeds to the shot that came before the middle shot, then skips over to the other side to the shot that middle shot and keeps skipping back and forth. Finally, at the end you see the beginning shot of the original film followed by the end shot. Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution catalogue 1988. To watch The Doctor's Dream is to witness a narrative unfolding forwards and backwards in turns a deconstructive Frankenste in of a film with new vitality in its borrowed parts. Tom Gunning, Millennium Film Journal Tractors Igor & Gleb Aleinikov, Russia, 1987, 16mm, 13min In 1980 the power of the Soviet tractor engines amounted to 497 million horse power. This industrial achievement induced the most important metaphor for Russia. Tractors, a found footage film from the Aleinikov brothers, uses Soviet propaganda material to both satirize and eroticize, the most sacred of socialist realist symbols, thus suggesting a tragic history behind this icon. Piece Touchee Martin Arnold, Austria, 16mm, 1989, sound, 16min An 18 second long take out of an American B picture, which was produced in the early 50's is reproduced picture by picture and revised as to its temporal and spatial progression. Given factors: him and her, the space and the time spent in there. Metropolen des Leichtsinns Thomas Draschan, Germany, 2000, 16mm, colour, 12min

Submerging, cell-sectioning, disk-shooting, curve-taking, light-dazzling, earth-shattering, motion-stopping. This film is constructed using a collection of about 500 different 16mm films , mostly educational shorts, some TV serials, some features, lots of advertising. It starts with a journey into film itself, followed by love-making, birth, suicide, and almost any humanly possible occupation. A devilish deconstruction of our pre-programmed lives as occidental individuals. Surface Noise Abigail Child, USA, 2001, 16mm, 13mins Cobbled from found footage that Child describes as "outtakes of outtakes", Surface Noise is a dense collage of images with an experimental soundtrack. Sometimes the images sync with the noise; the flailings of a salmon swimming upstream is coupled with a rimshot, and home movie footage of a man laughing is paired with a female opera singer. In most of Surface Noise, however, sound and image follow their own dialectical paths.

Friday 21st February: Space/Time The Girl Chewing Gum John Smith, UK, 1976, 16mm, sound, 12min In The Girl Chewing Gum the commanding voice over of a film director appears to control the traffic and people in a busy London street as if they were actors in a movie. But they are not: in fact the commentator is describing, not prescribing, a scene of daily life. A second and final sequence ambiguously locates the commentator in a distant field. By reversing the logical order of the drama film where the script and not the shot comes first Smith deconstructs its truth claims by exposing its fantasies of control and its illusionist bias. Later Smith embraced the 'spectre of narrative' (suppressed by structural film), to play word against picture and chance against order. This early work anticipates the more elaborate scenarios to come, and like them is ghosted by the narrative impulse which drives the film medium. Al Rees Non-Places Brad Butler-Karen Mirza, UK, 16m, 15mins, 1999 Non Places explores dark corners and empty spaces: the parts of the city which we pass through but don't even see, but where another's personal memories may reverberate and leave silent scars. Non Places triggers memories, causing the past, present and future to collide into a collapsed sense of time and space.

A&B in Ontario Joyce Wieland, Canada, 16mm, 1984, sound, 17min [HLB] 'A delightful tongue in cheek, cat and mouse cinema game in wh ich Wieland and Frampton stalk each other with handheld cameras The formal qualities of shooting, framing and editing are impeccable. A&B in Ontario shows Wieland at the top of her form and is a celebration of Canadian filmmaking. Gerald Perry Wavelength Michael Snow, Canada, 1966-67, 16mm, sound, colour, 45min One of the few truly original works of the current avant-garde, a perfect example of the cinema of stillness and poetic contemplation weaving its hypnotic charms so deviously that many who come to scoff remain transfixed. 'Wavelength' is one of those few films that compels the viewer regardless of his personal reactions to speculate on the very essence of the medium and inevitably of reality. Amos Vogel Described by its creator as a 'continuous zoom which takes 45 mins to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field' Wavelength is at once one of the most simplest yet complex films ever conceived. Literally oscillating between the conceptual and the immediately real, its four human occurrences interrupt yet remain in to the flow of continually metamorphosing variations on the unrelenting crescendo of its 'one shot' toward and into the four windows of a Canal Street Loft. Film Quarterly

Regisseur Amit Dutta KURZSCHLUSS #480

38,5, Grzegorz Debowski Dark Island, Jns Mellgren Electric Light Wonderland, Susanna Wallin Videogalerie

Please introduce yourself. Where you are staying while answering these questions?

I was born at Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir state on September 5th 1977. But my childhood and schooling were mostly done in Vijaypur, a small-town 30 km outside Jammu. In the year 2000, I got admission into the Film and Television Institute at Poona, where I learnt to look at Cinema from a completely new viewpoint. Whatever films I have made till now have been various experiments I had made at the institute. After 9 years I have come back to my native place to work on a film based on a miniature painter who belonged to these hills. This will be my first film completely outside film school.

Why do most of your films play in smaller villages or in the country side?

I believe that being is composed of two sorts of memories- the personal memories based on individual experience and the acquired memory which we gather from common pools of memory like folk-tales, folk songs or religious literature. My own films so far have been a mixture of imageries drawn from both these memories. And as space is as much part of that memory as time, certain spaces figure a lot as the ground for my films.

The story of Kramasha takes place in a beautiful Indian village. Where is this place located?

There is no such village. The film was shot in various corners of the city of Poona, mostly located in the thick of crowded markets and residences. If anyone would visit those places of my film, they would never recognize them. The village only existed in my head, as a film-maker I gleaned those spaces that had the potential to be transformed into the village of my imagination. It is very important for me, as cinema is not merely recording something beautiful, but a lot of work goes into identifying and constructing things as beautiful, within the given physical and aesthetic constrains.

Kramasha won the FIPRESCI in Oberhausen 2007. What is the main vision of this film?

I believe it is a pure way of looking back into my own history with imagination.

What are the main elements of your filmic language?

Whatever elements may be used to construct an image, I keep in mind that the image should not exhaust itself the moment it is seen. It should evoke new intrigues everytime it is revisited. The interaction of the various elements and their juxtaposition should also resonate variously each and every time the film is seen.

What are the main inspirations for your filmic imagery?

Whenever I make films, I tend to refer quite a bit to a self-invented pool or a sort of mental scrap book of imagery gathered from a lot of sources like temples, village advertisements, childhood textbooks, calendars, tinned boxes or any visual that has had a deep impact on me without revealing any definite functional meaning.

Could you explain the symbols and metaphors used in your films?

I cannot really help to make sense of individual imagery in my films so far, because of two things. Firstly the very form of those films is meant to evoke many stories. It would be self-defeating if I were to fix one story onto them and restrict imagination. Secondly, I would like to look upon these films as a body of work and so make sense through that pattern, sooner or later.

What are you main interests in story telling?

So far my interests with story-telling had been an urge to look at my history as a condition which pervades all sorts of events, as against a dramatic series of events which dictate conditions. And if through such conditions viewed from a distance, a story can evoke the same intensity of thought and emotion as through a dramatic narration, then it would be the ideal story.

How would you describe the relation of image and words in your films?

Suppose I am asked to explain the meaning of the imagery in my films then I will have to convey it through words. But I had already arrived at those images through words, i.e. through literature, songs etc. So my purpose for words has already been fulfilled, and it ends there. If I am to reverse the process, sort of back-translate, then it becomes self-defeating. That is why its very difficult for me to write synopses for my films; I dont think they convey anything regarding the film. But I like to use inter -titles in the film. The human mind has the tendency to perceive words and images interchangeably. This holds a very fascinating potential for playing with in cinema.

In your films you reveal a fascination for the dreaming state of mind.

There seems to be an interesting link between dream and truth. The way reality is reflected in dreams through the filter of individual perception and how very abstract feelings are experienced in concrete spaces or events in dreams hold my fascination.

How are space and light connected with the narration of your films?

When I go out to shoot, I have a specific idea of my story and the place where it will happen. But when I reach the location the changing light playing in the space sometimes has its own narrative that goes beyond mine. To recognize such moments is beauty for me. If film can capture even a bit of such instances of nature, its expense can be justified.

You often use nature sounds in your films. What does sound mean to you?

I am very much interested in the elements- fire, water, earth, air and ether. Sounds can suggestively evoke the elements and spaces much more efficiently.

Why do you often use filmic tricks like people appearing or disappearing, spinning images, etc.?

I am fascinated by the mystery of spaces, time lapses and the nature of each medium, film and stories in my case. That does not mean that I like to decode the mystery for everyone and create a kind of rationalized understanding of everyday things. Film tricks figure here as a tool to set me off from creating such understanding, while delighting in the mystery.

Have you been influenced by the experiments of Early Cinema?

Yes, very much!

How did your films change during the last 7 years? What is the main development?

I feel that with my first seven films I was enamoured with the mystery and sensitivity of the film form. But now I am trying to engage with a certain different form of cinema ( may be in reaction to myself ), a form which is a more minimal, essential one with extreme possibilities of emotional evocation, dealing with the problems of historical reality. But on a broader scale, I feel all my films so far had been only exercises and were made under extreme constraints. I am yet to make my real film, and when I get the opportunity for that, I will know about the real nature of the development.

Does the way you make films reveal an "Eastern" way of looking towards reality?

Brought up in a sub-urban environment, torn by migrations, in a post-colonial country, I cannot claim to be as close or as far from 'Eastern' tenets of thought any more than Western thought systems. But I do believe that I have inherited a different way of comprehending reality, though I cannot recognize its sources for the time being. Marita Loosen Erstellt: 26-04-10 Letzte nderung: 26-04-10

In conversation: Ashish Avikunthak with Amrit Gangar "Cinema Prayoga: Indian Experimental Films 1913-2006" eds., Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, 2006 (London: no.w.here). He was a regular and unique presence in Mumbai wherever there were film screenings. But I think he felt more comfortable in Screen Unit, the film club I headed then, maybe because of its craziness, because of its youthful and restless curiosities around. Screen Unit always supported the cinematography on the edge, the non-absolutist quests into its archaeology. A decade ago, I remember, I was on the selection panel of the Mumbai International Film Festival of Documentary, Short & Animation Films (MIFF) and a short film called Et cetera came for viewing, moments passed; some started yawning, some started scratching their heads, some craned their necks forwards holding their chins like perhaps Rodins Thinker, etc. etc. And the obvious happened; Et ceterawas put to vote and rejected. I was dejected. Not because it was a film by someone I knew but because it was a film that attempted to seriously explore the contours of time and human existence in its tetralogy of four separate films. I just conjecture how many such films might have been thrown out of broader festival audience viewing because of certain level of conservatism or resistance toprayagas oddity. Curiously, even in his lifestyle Ashish looked an odd man out -in his khadi dhoti, kurta, a black ribbon on his sleeve, metal-rimmed specs and black silky moustaches! He always wore black ribbon in support of the Save Narmada movement and protest against the big dam and massive human displacement. Though a Punjabi, Ashish Chadha (he changed to Avikunthak on the way) is a complete Bengali by spirit all this is part of his jeevan-prayoga (life-experiment). He grew up in Kolkata near the Kalighat temple. Filmmaking is not his full time profession. Academically, he is a student of archaeology at the Stanford University in the USA, where his dissertation is on the anthropology of Indian archaeology. This followed his undergraduate degrees in social work and archaeology in Mumbai and Pune Universities, respectively. He has worked as a folklorist among the Warli aborigines in Maharashtra. He is also a still photographer and his b&w photographs of Kolkatas iconic Howrah Bridge were exhibited at the NCPA in Bomb ay in 1999. Self-taught and financed, he is a prayaga filmmaker for over a decade. His works have been shown in film festivals around the world. This interview was held on the cyberspace, densely surrounded by serendipity. Amrit: Whenever I see your film Kalighat Fetish, I remember Mahatma Gandhi's visit to the Kalighat temple. He was quite disturbed by the killing of animals there. He asked his host, How is it that Bengal with all its knowledge, intelligence, sacrifice, and emot ion tolerates this slaughter? (Source: Gandhis autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth). In your film, you give so much time and space to the violent images. Is it your experiment with truth?

Ashish: Kalighat Fetish is contemplation on two ideas - transgression and morbidity. They are connected by the act of transformation, leading to death. Both the violence of sacrifice and the performance of transformation for me are transgressive acts performed as an engagement with morbidity. They are part of the same act of reverence and anguish. For me, Kalighat Fetish is an outcome of my own interaction with the memory of death and dying. The 'brutality' of the sacrifice is for me a meditation on the morbidity of death. Personally, the film is a cinematographic rendition of memory. The film has been shot in two spatial formations that are an integral part of my memoryscape - the house I was raised and the famous neighbourhood Kali temple in Kolkata - the Kalighat. My home has been an ambivalent space for me - I don't really have very fond memories, nor do I have any terrible memories of the space- it has always been, and very simply, the house where I spent eighteen years of my life from 1973-1991. My parents don't live in that house any more, but we still own it. Over time, it has virtually become an ossified memory space, where I have shot other films too, Dancing Othello and End Note. Whenever I go to Kolkata, I spend a lot of time in this house. Kalighat Fetish is a manifestation of these recollections - more an experiment with memories than with truth. And unlike Gandhi I do not claim to inhabit any moral universe. Gandhi's comment originated from the Vaishnava sectarian belief that he firmly held and was raised in. He was unable to appreciate the ritualistic necessity of the sacrifice within the domain of the Tantrik Shakta cult of Kalighat. Amrit: Were your parents religious?

Ashish: Yes, both my parents are religious but have a very different sense of practice. My mother comes from a Punjabi Hindu family and is a staunch believer of Krishna cult, so much so she now runs a community Krishna temple in Calcutta, which is now nearly her full time occupation. Where as my father came from a staunch Punjabi Arya Samaji family who had never entered any temple in his lifetime- a strict nonidol worshipper, however we would have the Vedic fire ritual (havan), regularly if not every week. My mother was a regular visitor to the Kalighat temple. For the first time, I saw a buffalo being sacrificed was during my visit to the temple during the Kali Puja festival. At the age of six or seven, I was simultaneously fascinated and abhorred by the event. Not really traumatized. Later when I started roaming on the streets of Kolkata alone, I would often go to Kalighat, just to see these daily sacrifices as part of the temple ritual.

Amrit: Tarpor?

And

then?

Ashish: And then, during my high school studies, I volunteered to work for about two years at "Nirmal Hirdaya" the home for the dying run my Mother Teresa's "Missionaries of Charity". Very close to Kalighat, this institution was transformed from a dharmashala. It was given to Mother Teresa to run her home for the dying, the first institution with which "Missionaries of Charity" was formed. It was here that I encountered death very closely when I saw inmates dying before my eyes. The film in a certain way a manifestation of these memories and experiences. Amrit: How come you turned atikatha into fetish? Atikatha in Sanskrit would mean an exaggerated tale or idle, meaningless talk. And why do you call it fetish? The Bengali title is Kalighat Atikatha. Which is not fetish! Is it because of fetish that it has found place in Anglo-Saxon gay and lesbian film events? Ashish: Atikatha as is used in the title is a Bengali word, which, as in Sanskrit, means an excessive tale, an intense tale (ati = intense / excessive / exceedingly, katha = tale). I usually try to play around with the English and the vernacular titles in all my films; it is mostly a response to the difference: a way of causing disjunction. And also I think there are different audiences that I am trying to woo with the titles, but eventually they are just titles, the impact has to emerge from the work itself. I feel the reason the film has got some positive response from the West has little to do with the title but rather it has to more with the intrinsic context, which is primarily a juxtaposition of cross-dressing as understood by the West and the ritualization in the context of Kali worship. Amrit: Your cinema makes me feel kaal, its temporality. Do you treat cinematography as a temporal art?

Ashish: In a certain sense I do look at filmmaking as 'sculpting in time' as Trakovsky puts it. And my foray into filmmaking was directly an attempt at playing with time- all the four films in Et cetera, are directly an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact that they are single shot, single take, unedited films. For me, as a temporal experience they are most linear cinematic narrative, most pure. These films, rather than sculpting in time, were slicing time. However I feel video art has been more successful as an engagement with real time. I look at my films as an attempt at invoking 'kaal' as a metaphysical entity, rather than 'kaal' as a temporal category; Et cetera and Kalighat Fetish being articulation of such an invocation. Amrit: Your body of work shows preference for the celluloid. Any special reason? What do you think of the video, the digital technology?

Ashish: I do not differentiate between celluloid and video within an aesthetic framework, as most filmmakers tend to do. I believe this distinction will not hold ground for long, as with growing possibilities of digital technology, it will be very difficult to differentiate between a cinematic image and a digital image aesthetically. My distinction between celluloid and video is within a framework of a "theory of work and practice" and my preferences are for the "aura" of the mechanical image rather than the digital one. Amrit: On one hand, the digital technology has made it easier and cheaper for anyone to make films or installation, while on the other this very phenomenon has thrown challenges at creativity. We dont really see many astounding works nowadays. The general tendency is t o take short cuts. Ashish: With the digital revolution, there has been an exponential increase in the realm of image production. Digital technology has democratised the possibility of image production and now virtually anyone with very little money, as also little expertise, can create a professional image. You can say that the digital technology has domesticated the visual image making process within the confines of its economic logic and portability. In a way what has actually happened with the rise of digital technology is that the "theory of work and practice" associated with filmmaking has been devalued. Now it is not necessary to spend endless years in a film school or as a trainee in the film industry to make moving images. The need to master a craft has given way to just the importance of the final product. What has changed with digital technology is a theory of work and practice; it has given rise to a new theory of work, which is driven by the ability to produce more images, faster, cheaper and in great numbers. This technology has made image making rampant and commonplace. The loss of the aura of image that Walter Benjamin laments about in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has further diminished and is nearly getting erased with the rise of the digital technology and its ability to produce images ubiquitously. Amrit: How do you differentiate the two images?

Ashish: I like making films on celluloid primarily because somewhere I am still wedded to the idea of the aura that is preserved in a cinematic image. For me the cinematic image is more sacred than the digital image, primarily because the image emerges from a theory of work, which values the aura of an image. Because the cinematic image is more expensive to make, its production is heavily depended on craftsmanship and I believe somewhere the aura of the image is retained. It is because of this that I enjoy the theory of work and practice that is associated with celluloid filmmaking. But let me tell you, it is not nostalgia. It is a preference for theory of work that does not allow for opulence (ability to shoot few hours rather than hundreds of hours in video); the image is not instantaneously produced; neither is there instant editing, and precisely because of that there is

room for contemplation. It is this process that I believe preserves the aura of the mechanical image. I would even go to the extent of making films on 8mm rather than on video. Amrit: You are archaeologist by your academic discipline and have also made an archaeological film. Somehow your films seem to me to be archaeology of human mind, of human psyche and relationships with themselves, with others, with spaces they inhabit, the absurdities they encounter. Ashish: The film you are talking about is called Rummaging for Pasts: Excavating Sicily, Digging Bombay. I had made it for an archaeology conference in Stanford (Narrative Pasts | Past Narratives, 2001). Let me reiterate, space is very important to me. I look at cinema as an exploration both in spatiality of our existence and temporal inconsistency. Mostly I use space as a metaphor for existential predicament and it recurs constantly in all my films. Technically I do that by using wide-angle lenses, hand held movements and high-speed film. The spatiality becomes an implicit way of exploring space between relationship as in End Note and way of investigating the self in Kalighat Fetish. In both the films, spaces become memory spaces, as metaphors for an inconceivable loss. The usage of b/w, hi-contrast stock and colour, edited in an inconcerted way is also a formal process through which I try to weave temporal and spatial disjunctions to produce a form of existential predicament that is located in a loss, a bereavement of past, that is not only nostalgic but is also traumatic. I tried this very consciously while making the short fiction End Note. Amrit: Any particular reason for selecting Samuel Beckett for End Note ?

Ashish: I discovered Beckett in my college days in Bombay, when I saw a Marathi rendition of Waiting for Godot there. Around that time I was also exploring Theatre of the Absurd, which I chanced upon while reading existential literature. I was very influenced by Beckett, not so much by his longer plays but by his short ones. His ability to produce philosophically profound dramatic works with a strong sense of brevity and sparseness awed me. So much so that in my college in Pune we performed his shortest piece ever - Scream. The choice to decide to make Beckett's Come & Go on which End Note is based is located during my engagement with Beckett in those days. The play haunts me because of its intricate formal structure, cyclical in nature. Within this formalization, Beckett produces a profound sense of trauma. It is this sense of melancholic trauma that I wanted to bring out in the film. This is a very personal film for me, incredibly personal, for not only has it been shot is my childhood house and neighbourhoods, but specifically because I decided to cast women dear to me in this film. It has my wife, her sister and my cousin. I always wanted to make a film that connected to me in a very intimate way hence I avoided professional actors. The film was shot in two schedules over two years, in December of 2000 and in the summer of 2002. Because of terrible

lack

of

money

and

technical

problems

it

took

another

two

years

to

finish.

Formally, the first part of the film is a deconstruction of Come & Go, and the second part a kind of reconstruction. This was done in order to destabilise Beckett's brevity and to simultaneously exacerbate the trauma. Amrit: Could you tell me something about your still-to-be completed feature film? Ashish: The feature film Nirakar Chhaya (Shadows Formless) is an 80-minute interpretation of a novella Pandavpuram written in Malayalam by Sethumadhvan. I read this book in English translation in 1998, during one of my fieldworks among Warli aborigines. I was fascinated by the story, which deals with a lonely, abandoned wife who conjures up a paramour in her imagination. The narrative in the book has been set in such a way that reader believes that the paramour is real and only in the end do we come to know that it was actually her fantasy. I take the kernel of this story and try to experiment with the idea of imagination as a movement between real and non-real and end the film unresolved, as we do not know if she was really imagining. Shot entirely in Kolkata, the film (both colour and b/w) is in Bengali. The narrative is embedded with a symbolic world that is designed to make the film into a deeply melancholic experience. The film has original score by a music composer who just completed her Doctorate in music composition at Stanford University. Amrit: And with Beckett your preference is also Shakespeare, in Dancing Othello, for example. Ashish: Dancing Othello is a political film, unlike the rest. It stands apart from rest of my work. The idea of the film took roots when I saw Arjun Raina perform in Stanford. I then decided that I would like to make a film on his Khelkali, which was juxtaposition between Kathakali performance and Shakespearian dramaturgy. The core concept of the film was to subvert both the traditions of classical art to bring out the irony of postcolonial situation. This is done throughout the film as the narrative moves between Kathakali, Shakespeare and the performance of postcolonial mimesis done by Arjun. The film ends with a self-reflexive turn with the last monologue that Arjun delivers, where he gesticulates and mocks the filmmaker for making a self-indulgent film. This film is most influenced by my academic training as a cultural anthropologist. Through this cinematic text I attempt to grapple with the irony of the postcolonial situation which cultural theorist such as Homi Bhaha and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak have tried to enunciate in their scholarly works. Amrit: I thought you were, in a way, dealing with the postcolonial fetish.

Ashish: True. It is a film that attempts to critique our postcolonial fetish with the idea of the classical, both native (Kathakali) and foreign (Shakespeare), through the usage of Khelkali's English usage that Arjun had developed. This was made during the incipient years of the call centre BPO revolution in India (2001). Arjun had just left his job as a professor at the National School of Drama in Delhi and was flirting with the emerging BPO industry as a voice culturist, teaching young Indian to speak in American English. He was at once amused and shocked at the political and financial valence of the English language in contemporary globalized India. On the other hand this film is also a product of my biography. I went to a very elitist English medium convent school in Kolkata, where we were fined one rupee if we spoke in "vernacular", Bengali or Hindi. We were taught Shakespearian classics, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and the romantic poets. Simultaneously Doordarshan, the Indian television, would bombard us with what the state considered classical, Hindustani classical music and Indian classical dance, from Odissi to Kathakali. So in effect Dancing Othello is a process of engaging with this idea of classical that I grew up. It is an attempt at questioning the symbolic and political meaning of such classical idiom in our postcolonial daily lives. The strategy that I used was to destabilize its symbolic universe and undermine their classical status that they have been endowed with. But eventually, I end the film with a self-reflexive turn where I subvert and destabilize my own authorial legitimacy; in a way transforming this film into an "ironical irony". This is also the most collaborative film that I have ever made, without a dialogue or a script. It is mostly a product of improvisation and collaboration as we were shooting. The narrative of the film was laid only when I started editing the film. Amrit. The 'archaeology' of Indian cinema has very few relics of 'independent' cinema in the context of the cinema of prayoga. How independent is independent cinema in India? Ashish: Historically once the studio system collapsed after the World War II, Indian films have been independent. That is, if you define independent cinema like the American Independent cinema. But I think this term 'independent' cinema, has no meaning in India. Indian cinema has always been part of capitalist modes of production, and therefore, very conservative. Politically, in the late 40s and early 50s, in the immediate wake of the countrys independence movement and freedom, some radical cinema happened but that was co -opted by the rising commerce. Then it was only the state funded cinema that offered possibility of producing radical cinema in the 70s, because perhaps they were beyond the logic of capital and commerce. Along with the political pessimism of the post-Naxalite India, the state funded cinema did produce some exceptional cinema, but I think that radicalism was only limited to the type of subject matter chosen. Like most of the commercial stuff, they just wrote different scripts, and attempted to tell a story which was not often seen on the screen in Indian cinema theatres. Other than Mani Kaul,

Kumar Shahani, G. Arvindan and John Abraham, I don't see any filmmaker attempting to experiment with narrative, form or content. In the Indian context, the genealogy of the cinema of prayoga only comes, according to me, from these four filmmakers, who were in some way indebted to Ritwik Ghatak for their cinematographic radicalism. The documentary short filmmakers who are part of Vikalp can be called the independent cinema in India, they come closest to the idea. However even with documentary cinema, the "genrification" has taken roots, and it has become a hybrid between television aesthetic and propaganda. Amrit: Do you miss India in North America? Ashish: I look my self as in exile in the US that I have condemned myself to. The reason is only one- cinema. I hope I could raise money to make the films that I could in India but as you know how impossible it is. With the rise of liberalization, traditional funding sources for the films have completely extinguished. I see the corporate academia in the US as the only way to get funding to make films. Not that Stanford University is funding my films, but the scholarship money that I have, if saved well, is enough for me to make films on a regular basis. As a friend of mine says, "it is the buying power of the dollar". And in my case it has worked. I have just finished a feature film solely on my own saving. Most of my peers have bought houses and cars with the money they save- I just made a film.

Glossary: Arya Samaj: A religious cult established by Swami Dayananda. It believes in the samhita of the Hindu Vedas and various prescribed rituals. Samhita is the matra section of all the four Vedas and their branches. Arya Samaji is the one who follows this religious belief. Dharmashala: A caravansary; a travellers lodge erected as a work of piety. Vaishnava: Pertaining to Lord Vishnu. A member of the sect, who regard Vishnu as the Supreme Deity. Tantrik Shakta: A cult that believes the world has been created by Kali, the mother goddess. Tantrik belongs to the Tantra philosophy. Naxalism: The ultra left movement started from a village called Naxalbari in Bengal. A Naxalite is the one who believes in this political thinking.

Vikalp: Started as a strong reaction against unprecedented censorship and rejection of films dealing with the genocide in Gujarat by the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short & Animation Films (MIFF) in 2004. Independent filmmakers started Vikalp as part of the movement against censorship. It organized a parallel festival against the MIFF.

Amrit Gangar Mumbai, 14 May 2006

Om Darbadar (1988) (aka Om-Dar-Ba-Dar) Kamal Swaroop Hindi To Prime Minister. Subject: The Googly. Dear Raju, Please ban googly in cricket and life in general. Thanks, A freedom fighter, Babuji B. Sankar.

If one is asked to describe briefly what Kamal Swaroops Om Darbadar (1988) is, some of the answers could be: carefully constructed non-sense, endless dream of a cinephile, a satire on everything, full stop to Indian parallel cinema, random footage, extremely challenging piece of filmmaking, the great Indian LSD trip, landmark Indian film that aims big. With all the ingredients required to make a cult classic, Om Darbadar is the kind of movie that can easily polarize critics and audiences alike. It is, in fact, surprising that the National Film Development Corporation consented to produce this film. Using image, sound and montage to the maximum extent (and often gratuitously) and dialog that seem like knitted from parts of different sentences, almost always making no meaning (written by Kuku, also the lyricist and the art director of the film), Swaroops film is an antithesis to whatever is recognized globally as Ind ian cinema a reason good enough to make Om Darbadar a must-see movie.

Heres the plot of the film: Horoscope, dead frog, cloudy sky, the moon, radio program, caste reservation, bicycle, Mount Eve rest, womens liberation, communism, sleeveless blouse, Yuri Gagarin, miniature book, Nitrogen fixation, man on moon, terrorist tadpoles, computer, biology class, turtles, Hema Malini, typewriter, sleazy magazines, hibernation, text inside nose, googly, James Bond, severed tongue, fish rain, shoes in a temple, World War, assassin creed, Gandhi, illicit trade, the lake, goggles, hopping currency, helium breath, counterfeit coins, underwater treasure, diamonds inside frogs, fireworks, the zoo, explosives, town at night, dead man, visit of God, the Panchsheel Pact, foreign tourists, Promise toothpaste, holy men, Fish keychain, Ram Rajya, food chain disruption, anti-cooperation movement, birth control, bagpipes, gecko, Jawaharlal Nehru, Aviation centers, Potassium Cyanide. And I guarantee you, this is as lucid as it can get.

Om Darbadar is, hands down, the most confusing movie I have ever seen and not many movies can come close to dethroning it. Some might propose Buuels first film, but one could at least find one pattern in that work of anti-narration. This one regularly tantalizes us with a somewhat coherent narrative and just when it seems to get steady, snap! Or Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which is, in fact, an incisive study of the human memory. Om Darbadar, on the other hand, overwhelms us with its utter irreverence for integrity of reality, unity of content and consistency of form. Or the very many avant-garde films of Brakhage, Warhol, Anger, Snow or Smith, which, I believe, have always had a strong theoretical basis. No, this film does not have any single, central factor as its theme or motivation. Of course, one can find shreds here and there in the film that do make it seem like dealing with the idea of identity crisis in suburban India, but thats strictly on a speculative level. Often we witness directors claiming to show the world what real India is a statement negated by the films themselves. Leave alone filming, it is to be accepted that even understanding the dynamics of such a largely diverse country is near impossibility. But, if there was ever a film that attempted to capture the workings of real India almost in its entirety, it has to be this one. Yes, it does bite much more than it can chew, but surely, digestion is not its intention. In a country where science, religion, mythology, arts, politics and philosophy seep into common lives trying to overpower each other, there is no single way to separate these threads so as to examine their influence on the way of life. This is a nation where the apparently inexplicable supernatural walks hand in hand with the most modern of scientific theories (In one scene in the film, Gayatri (Gopi Desai) asks Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) if women can really climb Mount Everest without the help of men, he tells her: Why not? After all, goddess Parvati did it), a culture that is exposed to all the isms of western thinking yet revels in having its own interpretations of them (wearing a sleeveless blouse is equated to emancipation of women) and a country whose emotions are largely dictated by cinema, television and pop culture ( Om Darbadar can be seen as a jab at just about every genre in Indian cinema).

Conventional (and good) cinema has relied on the fact that human psychology manifests itself in the form of their behaviour and speech and hence, an unhindered documentation of their lives would help us understand them better. But not many filmmakers seem to have embraced the reverse process an entry into the real via the surreal. Kolker fittingly cal ls Buuel the neo-realist of the unconscious and each one of his films testifies that. Likewise, the whole of Om Darbadar could well be the ultimate Freudian exercise that could help us (de)construct the actual world that Om lives in a world that is as much fuelled by a love for pulp novels and thriller movies as it is by an aversion to zoology. But all is not so simple and the film is far from an extended dream sequence. Swaroop could have easily had Om (or his father, who begins the films narration) wake up at the end of the film, thereby taking us back to our comfort zones. Instead, he seamlessly blends present reality, past reality and fantastical reality to create an elusive work of cinema that defies literature, science and rationality.

Om Darbadar is an utterly frustrating, endlessly irritating and supremely hilarious film. Is it nonsensical? Yes, that is precisely its function. Is it pretentious? No, that can happen only when a film attempts to be something. Is it a one-of-a-kind movie viewing experience? You bet. Whatever one calls it, you cannot deny one fact Om Darbadar is an indubitably addictive and thoroughly riveting piece of work that simultaneously repels a viewer by not pandering to his needs and yet, keeps him hooked on to the screen from frame one. Quarter hour into the film, I was completely disarmed and found myself laughing out loud through the rest of the film despite (rather, because of) the meaninglessness of it all. Om Darbadar is perhaps the kind of vision that flashes moments before ones death. Call it the birth of Indian cinema, call it its death, call it Dadaist, call it anti -art, but be sure to bask in its absurdity while it lasts. [Meri Jaan A A A...!]

23 RESPONSES TO FLA SHBACK #63

1.

Shubhajit Says:

July 12, 2009 at 1:42 am Wow! Never knew about this movie. Sounds darn interesting, more so given your passionately written review.

Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 13, 2009 at 9:07 am No write up can be as interesting as this movie itself Do, do see it. Reply

2.

Nitesh Says:

July 12, 2009 at 11:27 pm Great writeup as always Srikanth. When I first saw the film some of its style( for eg: Lateral overhead tracking reminded me of Mani Kaul) even they way how everything appears so detached. Yet, I do agree that this is an unique experience and everyone should at least give it a shot.

Lets hope we can get a print and show it sometime to the mass audience. Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 13, 2009 at 9:08 am Oh, Yes this is a film that has to be kept afloat Why isnt this out on DVDs yet? they should be celebrating it. And what ever happened to Swaroop after this film? Reply

2.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 13, 2009 at 9:55 am

Lets hope we can get a print and show it sometime to the mass audience. Really risky job People can easily turn violent Reply

3.

Christy Bharath Says:

July 14, 2009 at 9:40 am sounds like something out of Dalis daydream. Is it torrent-able? Oh and fantastic review Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 14, 2009 at 9:44 am Dalis daydream when high, I should say. Fortunately torrent-able. Reply 4. Movie reviews: Global hangovers, rising flames and remakes that dont suck footprints Says:

July 14, 2009 at 10:37 am [...] Srikanths fantastic review of Om Darbadar on Seventh Art I can safely say that the Venkat Prabhus version was leaps and bounds better. I had a gut feeling that the he had a firmer grasp on irony than Hopkins ever did (or ever intended), as was evidenced by the humour with which he treats the cowardly nature of the protagonists. In the English version, Stephen Dorffs fear and insecurities act as a balance to Cuba Goodings violent braggadocio and Emilio Estvezs sense of morality, and we, the audience, are almost told to judge these characters based on their traits. In Saroja, I guess the directors intention was just for us to point our fingers at the characters and laugh as loud as we can. [...] Reply

5.

Nitesh Says:

July 15, 2009 at 4:21 am No clue what happened to Swaroop. Perhaps, he made few docu works for Film Division and then dont know. Last year I asked Shahaini a similar question, What did you do after your first film Maya Darpan, after all, he never got funding for another 12 years? But his output is way better than Swaroop. The last I heard about Swaroop was from Anurag Kashyap who said people like Swaroop sit in his house and well spend time there only. I dont know whether I should believe this story. Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 15, 2009 at 9:18 am

Ooh What did Shahani say? BTW, it would be good if NFDC released DVDs of at least the films it financedI saw one such DVD here Arun Kauls Diksha Reply

6.

Nitesh Says:

July 17, 2009 at 1:04 am I dont recall what he exactly told me. But I regret missing out on the interview with him the next day. I wanted to know more about his works and especially when he was working with Bresson. I read somewhere that when Bresson saw Maya Darpan he said something like This is the slowest film hes ever seen. NFDC like always is in red, and god knows, i seriously reiterate again- God, fucking knows. Why they produce films and dont want to distribute them. Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 17, 2009 at 6:10 pm Its kind of funny that BRESSON found the film to be slow :) Reply

7.

kamal swaroop Says:

July 18, 2009 at 8:06 am i have been always omless aimless..even if i like sitting at home doing nothing..cant. may be in the year 2012.appear all over again..i wish to and will tospirits dont have bottoms..so far.floating around in digital appearencesthanks for reminding of om darbdar Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

July 18, 2009 at 9:34 am Mr. Swaroop, You have created a timeless masterpiece that perhaps no one can emulate. This film has to be celebrated. If only the film was out on DVDs instead of bootlegs (Id be the first one to get that), Im sure the blogosphere will quickly pick it up and spread the glory. All the best for your current(?) film. Hope we have a reboot to Indian parallel cinema. Cheers, Reply

1.

artviewblog Says:

September 5, 2012 at 11:07 pm It is 2012! Time to see through that camera again Mr. Swaroop. Reply

8.

hansa Says:

August 6, 2009 at 8:15 pm i think dvds are now available. check with kamal swaroop atthirdpoliceman007@gmail.com Reply

9.

Arthi V Says:

February 17, 2010 at 4:57 pm

Never thought Id find this movie referenced here. Is is floating around online still? Drew a blank hence. Reply

1.

Just Another Film Buff Says:

February 17, 2010 at 4:59 pm I guess so Reply

10.

anupam Says:

February 21, 2010 at 1:51 am Plz plz smbdy tell where can I find pankaj advanis Urf professor I searched through whole of net but couldnt find it.

Reply

1.

Vipul Pradhan Says:

June 26, 2010 at 11:49 am urf professor now available on dingora.com Reply

11.

Flashback #85 The Seventh Art Says:

May 28, 2011 at 5:12 pm [...] and undeveloped negatives). The Till I saw Patis film, Id thought Kamal Swaroops Om -Dar-Ba-Dar (1988) really had no precedent in Indian cinema. Exactly like Swaroops pice de rsistance, [...]

Reply

12.

K. Harish Singh Says:

November 15, 2011 at 11:55 pm This film deserves to be celebrated. It seems Mr. Swaroop took 3 yrs to write. Writing a normal script is somewhat easy, but writing nonsense with those nonsensical dialogues which make so much sense, is tough. Lovely edit and great sound design. Waiting for your next one (if there is one!) mr. Swaroop. Reply

13.

tirchhi spelling Says:

November 13, 2012 at 5:06 pm

Reblogged this on and commented: Om Darbadar (1988) (aka Om-Dar-Ba-Dar) Kamal Swaroop Hindi To Prime Minister. Subject: The Googly. Dear Raju, Please ban googly in cricket and life in general. Thanks, A freedom fighter, Babuji B. Sankar. If one is asked to describe briefly what Kamal Swaroops Om Darbadar (1988) is, some of the answers could be: carefully constructed non-sense, endless dream of a cinephile, a satire on everything, full stop to Indian parallel cinema, random footage, extremely challenging piece of filmmaking, the great Indian LSD trip, landmark Indian film that aims big. With all the ingredients required to make a cult classic, Om Darbadar is the kind of movie that can easily polarize critics and audiences alike. It is, in fact, surprising that the National Film Development Corporation consented to produce this film. Using image, sound and montage to the maximum extent (and often gratuitously) and dialog that seem like knitted from parts of different sentences, almost always making no meaning (written by Kuku, also the lyricist and the art director of the film), Swaroops film is an antithesis to whatever is recognized globally as I ndian cinema a reason good enough to make Om Darbadar a must-see movie. Heres the plot of the film: Horoscope, dead frog, cloudy sky, the moon, radio program, caste reservation, bicycle, Mount Everest, womens liberation, communism, sleeveless blouse, Yuri Gagarin, miniature book, Nitrogen fixation, man on moon, terrorist tadpoles, computer, biology class, turtles, Hema Malini, typewriter, sleazy magazines, hibernation, text inside nose, googly, James Bond, severed tongue, fish rain, shoes in a temple, World War, assassin creed, Gandhi, illicit trade, the lake, goggles, hopping currency, helium breath, counterfeit coins, underwater treasure, diamonds inside frogs,

fireworks, the zoo, explosives, town at night, dead man, visit of God, the Panchsheel Pact, foreign tourists, Promise toothpaste, holy men, Fish keychain, Ram Rajya, food chain disruption, anti-cooperation movement, birth control, bagpipes, gecko, Jawaharlal Nehru, Aviation centers, Potassium Cyanide. And I guarantee you, this is as lucid as it can get. Om Darbadar is, hands down, the most confusing movie I have ever seen and not many movies can come close to dethroning it. Some might propose Buuels first film, but one could at least find one pattern in that work of antinarration. This one regularly tantalizes us with a somewhat coherent narrative and just when it seems to get steady, snap! Or Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which is, in fact, an incisive study of the human memory. Om Darbadar, on the other hand, overwhelms us with its utter irreverence for integrity of reality, unity of content and consistency of form. Or the very many avant-garde films of Brakhage, Warhol, Anger, Snow or Smith, which, I believe, have always had a strong theoretical basis. No, this film does not have any single, central factor as its theme or motivation. Of course, one can find shreds here and there in the film that do make it seem like dealing with the idea of identity crisis in suburban India, but thats strictly on a speculative level. Often we witness directors claiming to show the world what real India is a statement negated by the films themselves. Leave alone filming, it is to be accepted that even understanding the dynamics of such a largely diverse country is near impossibility. But, if there was ever a film that attempted to capture the workings of real India almost in its entirety, it has to be this one. Yes, it does bite much more than it can chew, but surely, digestion is not its intention. In a country where science, religion, mythology, arts, politics and philosophy seep into common lives trying to overpower each other, there is no single way to separate these threads so as to examine their influence on the way of life. This is a nation where the apparently inexplicable supernatural walks hand in hand with the most modern of scientific theories (In one scene in the film, Gayatri (Gopi Desai) asks Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) if women can really climb Mount Everest without the help of

men, he tells her: Why not? After all, goddess Parvati did it), a cult ure that is exposed to all the isms of western thinking yet revels in having its own interpretations of them (wearing a sleeveless blouse is equated to emancipation of women) and a country whose emotions are largely dictated by cinema, television and pop culture (Om Darbadar can be seen as a jab at just about every genre in Indian cinema). Conventional (and good) cinema has relied on the fact that human psychology manifests itself in the form of their behaviour and speech and hence, an unhindered documentation of their lives would help us understand them better. But not many filmmakers seem to have embraced the reverse process an entry into the real via the surreal. Kolker fittingly calls Buuel the neo-realist of the unconscious and each one of his films testifies that. Likewise, the whole of Om Darbadar could well be the ultimate Freudian exercise that could help us (de)construct the actual world that Om lives in a world that is as much fuelled by a love for pulp novels and thriller movies as it is by an aversion to zoology. But all is not so simple and the film is far from an extended dream sequence. Swaroop could have easily had Om (or his father, who begins the films narration) wake up at the end of the film, thereby taking us back to our comfort z ones. Instead, he seamlessly blends present reality, past reality and fantastical reality to create an elusive work of cinema that defies literature, science and rationality. Om Darbadar is an utterly frustrating, endlessly irritating and supremely hilarious film. Is it nonsensical? Yes, that is precisely its function. Is it pretentious? No, that can happen only when a film attempts to be something. Is it a one-of-akind movie viewing experience? You bet. Whatever one calls it, you cannot deny one fact Om Darbadar is an indubitably addictive and thoroughly riveting piece of work that simultaneously repels a viewer by not pandering to his needs and yet, keeps him hooked on to the screen from frame one. Quarter hour into the film, I was completely disarmed and found myself laughing out loud through the rest of the film despite (rather, because of) the meaninglessness of it all. Om

Darbadar is perhaps the kind of vision that flashes moments before ones death. Call it the birth of Indian cinema, call it its death, call it Dadaist, call it anti-art, but be sure to bask in its absurdity while it lasts. [Meri Jaan A A A...!] Reply

Next1/25PrevFULLSCREEN TBIP asked Amrit Gangar to name 10 experimental Indian films you must watch and why. Here is what he had to say

I dont agree with the phrase experimental cinema, which is why I have attempted to develop a new conceptual phrase Cinema of Prayoga. The reason for this is that in art there cannot be experimentation the way we understand it to be, mainly because an artist knows what he is doing, and why he is doing it. Its not like he happens to discover water from two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen in a laboratory.

The acclaimed Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky also rejected the whole notion of experimental cinema. In fact, he thought it immoral to use this term for artistic endeavors. He elaborated on this thought by going on to ask whether you would call giving a birth to a child experimental. In India too, filmmaker Mani Kaul believed that there was no cinema that was experimental.

Also, the term experimental is a Euro-American term which is actually very exclusivist.

I would like to add that I dont accept the French term avant-garde, for a kind of cinema, either. Avant-garde, meaning advance guard, is a military word. It is used, very simply, to refer to those soldiers who make up the front ranks. I really dont know how a military word can be emp loyed where art is concerned.

Prayoga on the other hand, a Sanskrit word, is much richer. It could mean experiment or use or put together or design or cause or effect or performance or play or representation or practice. So the Cinema of Prayoga can be a much wider, much deeper, notion than experimental cinema.

The idea of Prayoga (and therefore that of the Cinema of Prayoga) emerges from an intrinsically Indian perception or sense of time and space.

Our sense of time, for instance, is very different from Occidental or Western notions of the same. This makes it important for us to try and find an alternative understanding of time in our narratives, especially our cinematographic narratives. For this, we need to move away from the idea of perspective that was born out of the European Renaissance. Perspective, as understood by the Renaissance, leads to a convergence and then a climax, a narrative climax, so to say.

But we have traditions that dont subscribe to this. Our miniature paintings, to cite one example, have m any points of convergence and, consequently, many points of departure. Also, our epics, such as the Mahabharata and the RamayanatheMahabharata particularlyhave so many points of departure in

narrative, which often dont lead to a climax or catharsis at all. So the whole question of a narrative which is linear and which leads to a final point, a catharsis, and a resolutionstemming from the European Renaissancedoesnt hold. We dont necessarily have such a resolution in our art, our literature or in our music for that matter.

Today, the media uses phrases like experimental cinema and avant-garde cinema, recklessly, for anything. As a result, several of our popular or not -sopopular filmmakers become avant-garde. Yet they dont really deviate from the norms or the narrative conventions. On the surface they seem to be doing so, but intrinsically I dont think theyre so radical. The media also calls Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani avant-garde. But they are not and they have said so themselves, because they are still drawing from our own traditions.

Yet we continue to employ these terms or phrases without even understanding the history of European art, and the specific context in which they were used. Also, finally, even if these terms or phrases were held to be applicable to the artistic field, ourcinema is still convention bound and most of our cinema is theatre really. It is dialogue. Or as filmmaker Robert Bresson writes in one his diaries, we possess a terrible habit of theatre. We are not actually watching cinema most of the time its theatre that were watching. Even the contemporary films are mostly theatre, no matter the moving image apparatus they h ave been created by.

***

And so, I would like to propose 10 films that are at one with the idea of the Cinema ofPrayoga for me, more so than with the notion of experimental cinema. There are more such as these, of course, but here are 10 films you must watch.

Time And A Serpent

The first film I wish to talk about is Kaliya Mardan, a 1919 film by Dadasaheb Phalke on the Hindu god Krishnas mythical battle with a demon snake called Kaliya. Phalke was a pioneer in what we recognize today as the Prayoga spirit. This film was made six years after Raja Harishchandra (1913), which was more spatial, more tableaux like, whereas in Kaliya Mardan Phalke is more temporal. And still, one has to appreciate here the way Phalke uses space in the composition of his frames, in conjunction with temporality. For example, there is a scene where Krishna, only a child, has gone underwater to overcome the demon snake Kaliya. The men and women, who worship and adore Krishna, are waiting on the banks. The bottom axis of the frame only has the heads of the devotees otherwise the whole space is empty. You cant imagine this kind of framing, this kind of spatial distribution, even in the so-called modern cinema.

The purpose to this is that Phalke wants the viewer to be incorporated within this space, to become one with the devotees of Krishna.

And then, because Krishna is underwater for a while, there is anxiety among these devotees. This is where the temporality comes in. Phalke creates anxiety through time. He develops this anxiety through temporal space (the large section of the frame, above the heads of the devotees along its bottom axis, that is left empty (waiting to be filled), as well as through temporal intercutting while the underwater battle between Krishna and Kaliya is on.

Finally, Krishna vanquishes Kaliya and he rises triumphant with the slain demo n snakes tail on his shoulder. He is garlanded by the liberated wives of the demon snake (these wives were under the control of the demon snake and they were not happy with that, so they are grateful to Krishna now and they honour him).

The role of the child Krishna was played by Phalkes own daughter, Mandakini, who was seven years old then, and the first female child actor in Indian cinema. The well-known filmmaker Basu Bhattacharya and I met her at her Nasik home when she was 70 almost, and she narrated stories about how this film was shot. It was shot in Nasik itself, at her fathers bungalow, and at a lake just beside the bungalow. She told us how the special effects were created, how she jumped from the tree into the water. It was quite fascinating. This film is so innocent actually, and there is no contrivance, as such, that you find. There is none of the smartness that you find now in the creation of special effects, or SFX, in cinema.

Eyes Full Of Sky

The second film is Pawan Putra Hanuman, also a mythological film, on the life of the Hindu god Hanuman who is a devotee of the god Ram . Its actually a B grade film. I feel that the B and C grade films can be very exciting for a cineaste, more so than the A grade films, even today.

Released in 1957, the film was directed by Babubhai Mistri, whom I had met once for a long interview. He was called the kaala dhaaga man, or black thread man, because he used black thread for special effects in his films. Most of the films he directed were myth ological films.

This film stands out because it gives us so much of ksa or sky, or, once again, space, if you will. You see so much of ksa in the frame when the god Hanuman flies.

Aksa is one the five elements of the cosmos, called the Panchamahabhuta in Sanskrit. One of Indias greatest contributions to world philosophy was the idea of five elements in the cosmos. Western philosophy (Aristotle, to be specific) could imagine only four elements: air, fire, water and earth, although Aristotle did think of aether later. Simply speaking, aether is ksa. Our ancient perception of the cosmos had already comprehended aether or ksa as one of the panchamahabhuta (the five elements of the cosmos).

This is what interested me in this B-grade film. No A-grade film, or a film with big stars, would allow me to see so much ksa in a frame. Thats why I see this as a Prayogafilm, even though Mistri and his team had no intention of creating the cinema of Prayoga. Yet the idea of ksa, or space, or sky, came to them naturally, probably because of their instinctive understanding of our myths.

The Nyaya Vaisheshika system of Hindu philosophy states that ksa, or aether, the fifth physical substance, is a substratum of the quality of sound, or dhvani. However, according to the Jain interpretation, ksa is space which falls into the ajiva (non-living) category. It is divided into lokksa which is occupied by the material world andalokksa, which is not material, but the space beyond the material world which is an absolute void.

It may be difficult to conceive how a B-grade film like Pawan Putra Hanuman can provoke such an acute understanding of space. But I would like to maintain that our B and C grade films had always been quite Prayoga in spirit. I am using the past tense because, today, globalization and corporatization have mostly

marginalized or eliminated such minor traditions of our cinema. If you study Indian cinema over the last 10 or 15 years, you will find that most of the smaller cinematographic traditions have been deserted, as if the big fish have swallowed up all the small fish. This is a pity because the B and C grade films could indeed experimentor run wild with their imagination and craziness given that they were not controlled by capital. Big films with big stars, on the other hand, have crores of rupees invested in them and this capital does not allow them the space to breathe as freely as they would desire to.

The Nature Of Man

Kanchana Sita (1977), by G. Aravindan, was made 20 years after Pawan Putra Hanuman and its also from the Ramayana. Aravindan was one of the finest minds in Indian or even world cinema, and this film is his interpretation of the Uttara Kanda, the last segment, of the Ramayana, where the Lord Ram after defeating Ravana and returning with his wife Sita from Lanka, banishes her from his kingdom, unknowingly wages a war on his twin sons, and finally surrenders himself to the waters of the river Sarayu.

The film opens with Ram and his brother Lakshman travelling through the Dandaka Forest to attend a religious feast, and Ram is acutely conscious of Sitas presence, even though shes not there. In fact, in Kanchana Sita, the titular character is physically absent from the film throughout. Instead, Aravindan portrays the mythical Sita of flesh and blood through ripples on a river, through a breeze, through rustling leaves, or through prakriti (nature). Sita is suggested here, not shown. She is suggested through what, in Sanskrit, is called vyanjana, or the suggestive aesthetics of the film.

From this seed of an ideaexploring vyanjana through prakritiAravindan goes on to explore the ancient philosophy of purush (man) and prakriti, twin concepts that form the basis of our understanding of our selves. Also, he explores the idea of the relationship of the male, purush, with the female, prakriti. This latter thought is one Aravindan might have gotten from the Sankhya Yog, one of our oldest scriptures.

Kanchana Sita creates a spatial as well as temporal environment which envelops the viewer in prakriti, via the wind, the movements of trees and leaves and the river. Spatially, you see Sita who is pristine as nature, as a gentle breeze, as a bhav (a feeling or thought) of being and becoming. Also, you see her temporally, because you feel her presence all the more in time that she is absent. This feeling is intensified by the fact that there are few words in the film. It has hardly any dialogues, which is another one of its strengths: Kanchana Sita doesnt need the theatricality of dialogues to create cinema.

To shoot this, Aravindan went to Andhra Pradesh in the tribal areas where the Chechu tribals who believe they are the direct descendants of Ram live. He didnt use the conventional imagery, such as regal headgear, to portray Ram and Laxman. Instead, he portrayed them as tribals, something which is unusual for our cinema, and a political statement of sorts.

This is how we retrieve from our traditions an understanding of modernity what I call Prayoga.

The Cinema of Prayoga also requires that an artists work be in natural or sahajaharmony with his or her svabhva, or temperament. Here we find Aravindans cinematography to be very close to, very congenial with, his svabhva, like Phalkes work had been with his svabhva.

The advantage of this is that it imbues the film with an uncanny sense of intuition. The result is an intensely poetic and profoundly contemplative work that is felt like abandish of a raag especially the strong sensuality that Aravindan explores in the film through prakriti. In the end, Ram submerges himself in the river Sarayu, to be withprakriti, or to be with Sita. This, I would say, is a Prayoga interpretation of the epic.

Cinephilosophy

Unmathbudham Jagath, or Egotic World, is a diploma film made by Malayali filmmaker Vipin Vijay in 2000, while he was studying at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata. It is a film based on the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which emerges from the profoundly non-narrative scripture, the Yoga Vasishtha. This book is divided into six prakaranas or chapters: Vairagya Prakarna (Dispassion),Mumuksha-vyavahara Prakarna (Qualifications of a Seeker), Utpatti Prakarna(Creation), Sthiti Prakarna (Existence), Upasama Prakarna (Dissolution) and Nirvana Prakarna (Liberation, the last and longest chapter, which is further divided into purv ardha or pre and utar ardha or post, a sort of prologue and epilogue). The Yoga Vasishtha is the longest text in Sanskrit after the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Vipin contemporizes and secularizes this great text, weaving it into the narrative of a 17-year-old boy who is entrapped inside an abode, inside a hole in the earth that is actually located in an industrial belt. He escapes from this zone for three days of perfect freedom and bliss and goes back on the fourth day. Now he finds himself above worldly pleasures. He rejects the idea of liberation. He attains sushupti avastha(deep sleep) and merges into the black hole he is in, bearing the sorrow of the future. He sacrifices himself in an agitation within this industrial zone.

The rest of the characters in the film, create an extraordinary space-time orientation. To appreciate how this space-time orientation is created, one must treat cinematography with patience. One must view it as a temporal, and not merely a visual, medium. The moment you do this, your relationship with the medium of cinema will change. Your relationship with it will then be like one with music. For instance, sometimes, even if yo u dont understand what raag is being playedsay its Raag Bhairavi, and you dont know what it isyou will respond to it at a subtle and a very deep level. Sometimes I have seen people crying, tears flowing from their eyes, listening to this raag. It creates melancholy and sadness.

The Cinema of Prayoga presumes such a relationship with, and consequent response to, a work of cinematographic art. Do note that Im using the term cinematography the Bressonian term. Im not using the word movie at all. A movie (the term comes from America) denotes a film theatre, according to filmmaker Robert Bresson. Cinematography, on the other hand, is creative filmmaking, to put it simply. Let me reiterate her e that our vocabulary for cinema, the words we choose to use, is extremely important.

And again, this film is deeply within the svabhva (temperament) of Vipin Vijays cinematography. Vipin explores the leela (the play) in duree (a Bergsonian term that conveys duration in time) and this is what makes his works so significantly interesting and engaging. Though a short diploma film shot on 35mm, Egotic World seems monumental for its locational choices as well as for the way Vipin films each scene.

Remembrance Of Things Past

Kramasha (2007), by Amit Dutta, is the next film. Kramasha means to be continued in English. This is a film about an ascetic who walks through the narrow lanes of his village every morning while his family lies asleep. In his drowsy state he dreams about the history of the village, mixing up myths, folklore and facts with what he remembers of all of these.

This film weaves memory in with time and space. It also creates, along with a play in duree, a refreshing spatial environment by playing with the idea of the conscious and the unconscious. Much of the film deals with the ideas of micro and macro memory. The filmmaker Dutta is interested in the conc ept of purity of memory. He had said to me once: Like (Marcel) Proust, one may suddenly remember ones childhood and the memory of it is more accurate and pure than the actual (experience of) childhood. We always remember our days in school, for example. Yet, about yesterday, we wont remember so much. Thats what Im really interested in. So, along with pure memory, acquired memory, for Dutta, is equally important. In his film, he creates a conflict between these two kinds of memories the acquired and the actual, so to say.

He tries to examine duree of the playing out of these memories, which offers his cinematography an exciting temporality because memories always play out, in time, like dreams. (A dream is a very temporally exciting experience because whether it lasts for two hours, or half a second, you cannot tell the length of time it subsisted for). Also, Kramasha merges documentary with fiction producing a certain mysterious quality. You dont know what is real and what is not. This mystery is key to art, which should surprise us all the time, and avoid predictability. Such mystery evokes the essence of the Cinema of Prayoga conscience.

History at the Doorstep.

The films mentioned so far have been shot on 35 mm. Song for an Ancient Land, directed by Kabir Mohanty, was shot on video over six years, between 2006 and 2012. The film is in four parts, of roughly an hour each.

For this work, Mohanty draws substantially from the historian and mathematician D.D. Kosambi, who had a very radical view of the history that lives all around us.

Kosambi would call this History at the Doorstep. Unlike other academic historians, Kosambi always said: Step out of your house, and you will find history there. He was a remarkable person. He lived very close to the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), in Pune, and fi lmmaker Kumar Shahani has some interesting memories of him. When Kosambi would go to the Film Institute, some of the students would gather around him, and he would take them to the hills close by. Hed pick up a stone and, from there, begin to recount the history of what it may have possibly been a par t of. He would take the students to meet people living in huts, and connect their histories to the primitive histories of the world, and in India. He was a friend of Albert Einstein. He also taught Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay, and so would travel between Bombay to Pune everyday on the Deccan Queen. Some people would actually write him letters addressed to Professor D.D. Kosambi, Deccan Queen, and he would get tho se letters on the train. I think one of his books was released on the train too. For more of his ideas on history read his book Myth and Reality.

Mohantys film is dedicated to Kosambi and another philosopher called J.N. Mohanty. Kabir Mohanty, like Kosambi, finds histor y at the doorstep, in the Pali area of Mumbais suburb Bandra, where he lives. History in Mohantys film is there in the fruit sellers, in the cobblers, in the roads, in the trees, in time. In duree again, this rigorously shot video transcends the obvious. The film shows us traders, roads, sea shores, photographs illuminated by torchlight, the Makhdoom Baba Dargah at Mahim The video appears to have been sculpted almost, with very refined touches. The film has some v ery long takes. The video provides the experience of seamless time. He creates a certain plasticity in his work, which is extremely difficult in video (the digital medium is quite different from celluloid, where you can process the material as per your needs in a laboratory). Plasticity, not in a negat ive or static sense, but in a way that has a spatial and temporal flexibility and tactility, in the way that great architecture does.

Interestingly, duree is what Mohanty calls a section of time. For him, this section of time is not a shot in the conventional sense, becaus e it accepts dysfunctionality. As he puts it: Something accumulates in this time; something unfolds. Nothing is left out you are not editing, you are not putting things together later, you feel a great sense of lightness. And at the same time, it doesnt feel light because a phenomenal amount of energy has already gone into it.

Slicing Time

Et Cetera was also made over a long time, four years, from 1994 to 1998, by Ashish Avikunthak. Shot on 16 mm, it is Avikunthaks first film.

It is a tetralogy of four separate films that are thematically coherent only because each of them has a consciously wandering and exploratory nature. Together, they seek to examine the various levels of reality in human existence. Et Cetera is Avikunthaks attempt at engaging with real time. Each film is an unedited single take.

As a temporal experience the films are absolutely linear cinematographic narratives. But it is not linear in the way a linear narrative is constructed in our conventional films. Its a completely new linear experience that Avikunthak evokes. In fact, this tetralogy seems to be slicing time. Avikunthak often quotes Tarkovskys Sculpting Time. But here, in Et Cetera, the way he slices time is quite interesting.

Even after Et Cetera Avikunthak has dealt increasingly with optics, thereby continuing the tradition of 16 mm Prayoga filmmaking.

What is important is the way in which he temporalizes the haptic (that which can be touched, felt). Haptic cinema, is a phr ase that denotes a cinema using physical space to this end. The term haptic is used in psychology to indicate the tactile, proprioceptive and kinesthetic senses . In a sense, it refers to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called smooth space, a space that must be moved through by cons tant reference to the immediate environment. The way Avinkunthak temporalizes the haptic, the physical space, is interesting. He retains his engagement with duree in all his works. Et Cetera has a raw energy but it also has, like some of the other films Ive mentioned, a very interesting engagement with duree, something that probably became more emphatic in his later work: Kalighat Fetish or Kalighat Athikatha (1999),Dancing Othello (2002), Endnote (2005) or Katho Upanishad (2011).

The Moon Has A Twisted Face: Presenting, A Rambling Figure

Satah Se Uthata Aadmi was made in 1980 by Mani Kaul. It is based on the literary works of a legendary poet and essayist of Hindi literature, Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (in fact, it takes its title from a short story by Muktibodh). It is made on 35 mm and is a colour film.

Kaul never wrote a script for this film; he didnt believe in writing a script. Instead, he photocopied all the works of Mukt ibodh and distributed them to crew members, and asked them to read them. Sometimes Kaul also read them aloud to the crew members. They tried to internalize the universe of Muktibodhs thinking, his poetry, his diary and his letters. Then they began making the film.

In one his lectures, Kaul talks about rambling figures in art. This rambling figure is present in Indian classical music. Its a beautiful experience, where there is rambling and yet, within that rambling, you have composition. Can cinematographers do the same? Can they create a composition out of a rambling figure?

Kaul tried to achieve this. In Naukar Ki Kameez (Servants Shirt), a later film of his, he did not allow his cameraman, K.U. Mohanan, to look through the camera lens while shooting some of the scenes because he wanted to capture the randomness of time. I think Satah Se Uthata Aadmi achieved this too. It captures that kind of randomness, through a great amount of improvisation, while retaining the sensuality of its texture.

Satah Se Uthata Aadmi also allows you to experience the person that is Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh. In the film, Muktibodh has been played extremely well by the Malayalam actor Bharath Gopi. Gopis Muktibodh is not a direct representation of the poet but a vyanajana; a suggestion that is created in our minds via the aesthetic of his performance. The greatness of artcinematography or any artis that it is not representational. Kaul always questioned this aspect of representation. You see this in his film Siddheshwari (1989) where instead of trying to represent Siddheshwari, he actually presents Siddheshwari through actress Mita Vasisht. In the end, he shows us the real Siddheshwari on television where Vasisht herself is looking at Siddhes hwari and saying to us: Look, this is the real Siddheshwari and, so far, I was only playing her part . I was only presenting her, not representing her.

So, in this context, of capturing randomness, and in terms of presentation and representation, Satah Se Uthata Aadmi is an extremely important Prayoga film.

Kitsch And The Story Of Om

Om-Dar-Ba-Dar (1988), made by Kamal Swaroop, is a well-known film. It tells the story of a young boy Om, growing up in a small town. It explores his adolescent years, his interactions with his family and his evolving relationship with concepts such as science, religion, magic and astrology.

Many have labeled it an avant-garde film, but I would disagree with that. The film retrieves so many aspects of narrative structure from our own traditions that this notion of avant-garde, in its context, becomes quite redundant. Much of Indian cinematography has re-energized itself by drawing from Indias own traditions of narratives and storytelling that are quite non-linear, quite spontaneous. For example most of our folk theatre: the dance forms of Kerala or the Bhavai folk theatre in Gujarat, or the Tamasha in Maharashtra. In Om-Dar-Ba-Dar, Kamal Swaroop has put all these traditions together very nicely, as if in an evocative collage.

We always have celebrated kitsch in our cultural traditions and it has remained a part of our experience, over the centuries. It has been a part of our cinematographic traditions too, especially in B and C grade films like Pawan Putra Hanuman. In Om-Dar-Ba-Dar too Swaroop celebrates kitsch, and very playfully retrieves the traditions of B and C grade cinema in Indian filmmaking.

Hinduism has an interesting history of iconography. Om-Dar-Ba-Dar uses this iconographic cultural tradition. Also, the sound of the title, the phonic quality that Om-Dar-Ba-Dar has, is very spontaneous.

An Obsession With Time

Kaal Abhirati (1989), made by Amitabh Chakraborty, is a Bengali film which is another important film in terms of its temporality. In fact, Kaal Abhirati literally means an obsession with, or addiction to, time.

The film takes duree to the edge, right from its inaugural shot, which is more than eight minutes long (Chakraborty once told me that the first shot could be a film in itself). This makes it seem as if it would be static, but its very dynamic within th e shot. Bare-bodied young boys enter and exit the frame, at periodic intervals, emptying buckets of water in a garden. There are long gaps between the appearances. As you watch the film you begin to anticipate the next appearance and consequently construct time for the shot yourself. This makes the duree of the shot a live experience.

The film externalizes the internal space of a person who is scared of death, who withdraws from life. That is the core of the story. The film avoids characterization in terms of names or places. Also, there is no dramatic confrontation to propel the narrative, and no resolution, which is unavoidable in so many of our films. Temporally, what is interesting is the tenacity with which the filmmaker holds the present, the instant moment. This is possible because there is no strict dramatic plot. The Cinema of Prayoga is not particularly in favour of plotting. The film is minimal, while setting up rigorous formal codes at the same time (it is simple, without being simplistic). This element of rigour is also one of the key planks of the Cinema of Prayoga.

While making Kaal Abhirati, Chakraborty was conscious of the fact that it was a film that emerged from an extremely personal space, and he could not imagine how he could trade it (how the film could be conducive to a wider, more social, appeal), and therefore, he tried to side -step the product-consumer equation. Almost a quarter of a century has passed since Kaal Abhirati was made, and as the filmmaker tells me, in retrospect he feels that he was trying to get to the Nirkr (the formless) through moving images. The multiplicity of what was physical got bludgeoned into many absences.

And so, as you can see, the Indian Cinema of Prayoga has had its brilliant moments, over one hundred years of fortitude
SHARE | VIEW IN READER

1 comment 2 people listening

Sign in

Post comment as + Follow conversation

Post to

vinayak1988 5 pts Hi, This is a very interesting, informative article. Lead me to search for the mentioned movies and I couldn't find where I could buy them. If the writer or anyone has information to where I can get all of them from, it would be such an awesome set to watch, and own. Thank you, Vinayak P Menon vinayak1988@gmail.com
5 DAYS AGOREPLYLIKE