Umbra, issue 2 by Suraj Prasad Mahato

umbra DECEMBER 2013 | ISSUE 2

4/ SYMPOSIUM

8/ FESTIVAL

Umbra is a journal of screen culture published by Lightcube Film Society. The present edition carries essays, opinion pieces, a symposium on documentary filmmaking and a festival report.

A TABLOID OF SCREEN CULTURE

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EXCLUSIVE

Image Courtesy: Satyajit Ray Society, who also permitted the publication of the below piece

In 2013, various cinephile institutions around the world launched a serious effort to rediscover and reevaluate the work of the late Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. This effort included premieres of freshly restored films, extensive retrospectives, boxset releases of restored titles for home-viewing and as part of what evokes Ray’s considerable ability as a polymath, various exhibitions of his work as an illustrator. Isabel Stevens, one of the curators primarily responsible for the massive Ray Retrospective at BFI, Southbank this August, writes in detail about the various famous Ray posters featured at the exhibition.

irectors such as Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock may have collaborated closely with their film poster designers; other filmmakers may have had a background in graphic design (Abbas Kiarostami) or started their careers illustrating posters (Polish surrealist Walerian Borowczyk); some have even occasionally designed their own (Akira Kurosawa). But none have authored such an imaginative collection of posters for their own films as Indian director Satyajit Ray.

for popular Bollywood releases of the time. As an exhibition of Ray’s posters (drawing on the collections of the BFI National Archive and the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives and Ray Estate, Kolkata) opens at BFI Southbank, London to accompany a retrospective of Ray’s films there, here are a selection of some of his most innovative compositions.

The celebrated and prolific Bengali filmmaker made over 30 films throughout his career, his lyrical style and humanistic approach changing the face of Indian cinema while introducing the nation onscreen to audiences worldwide. However it’s often not known that before Ray embarked on his feature debut Pather Panchali in 1955, he spent ten years working as a graphic designer for a British advertising company in Kolkata, where he rebelled against dominant Western styles, making his creations feel and look wholly Indian. Even after he left that behind for a career in cinema, the filmmaker could always be found sketching – and he took the definition of auteur to a new level with his own set and costume designs, credit sequences and logos. In his poster designs, he distilled the themes and moods of his films into one image, a paper trailer posted all over India’s streets. Such bold, poetic, occasionally even surreal, graphic experiments that fused Western and Indian design influences and which sometimes even dared to leave off actors’ names and faces, were a far cry from the busy, star-laden advertisements

Created from drawings and notes rather than a script, by a filmmaker, crew and cast with little on-set experience, Ray’s debut Pather Panchali offered a child’s-eye portrait of impoverished rural life. Realist, lyrical and ever so human, the film’s antithesis to Bollywood and its extravaganzas is signposted in this delicate and personal folkart-tinged design which incorporates handdrawn motifs, as if Apu, the film’s six-yearold protagonist had scribbled them himself.

PATHER PANCHALI

DEVI Ray often turned his camera on the dilemmas of women and their position in society. Here his hallucinatory design illustrates a pivotal scene in his 19th-Century period study of religious superstition, when an elderly man dreams his daughter-in-law is the embodiment of the Hindu Goddess Kali. Here his use of light and shade in his division of the young girl’s face references her split identity. Meanwhile the film’s intricate and dramatic logo has been said to resemble the

arch of a temple or a crown, but also recalls the candelabra used to worship her in the film, the spikes reminiscent of flames. CHARULATA Ray’s command of portraiture can be observed everywhere, from the faces of characters he sketched for children’s stories to his charming depictions of directors he met or admired such as John Ford and Akira Kurosawa. Here his fragile, minimal brushstrokes bring alive the longing of the film’s lonely housewife for her husband’s cousin. The ornate style of the title’s calligraphy Ray borrowed from his hero, the poet and author Rabindranath Tagore whose short story the film was based on. MAHAPURUSH This rather surreal creation showcases Ray’s unusual treatment of photography at a time when most Indian film posters were handpainted (photographic images only took over Bollywood designs from the mid 80s). Perhaps influenced by the contemporary photomontages of Pop art, such floating, cut-out heads are a recurring motif in Ray’s designs and here introduce a light, comical note that hints at the film’s satirical tone. ARANYER DIN RATRI In this mysterious, nocturnal scene, Ray shows the film’s true protagonist: the forest

Original posters Courtesy BFI National Archive Facsimiles Courtesy the Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives and Ray Estate, Kolkata

which transforms the four rich and arrogant Calcutta bachelors that stay there during a weekend road trip in Ray’s still-timely fable about India’s urban/rural divide. The monochrome tree silhouettes are not only rather lyrical, but echo the delirious manner in which Ray captures the forest with his camera. designs and here introduce a light, comical note that hints at the film’s satirical tone. PRATIDWANDI Ray was often accused of ignoring politics. The Adversary – set amidst the upheaval and violence of 1970s Calcutta, then in the grip of Naxalite radicalism – was his retort. He draws attention to this with the handdrawn figure of a gunman at the centre of the film’s fractured title in his poster design. Ray would often design a number of different posters for each film. One intrepid version for The Adversary sees Ray experimenting further with the logo, splintering it as a bullet would, and daringly pitting the action and characters against a bright pink backdrop. SONAR KELLA In addition to his beautiful wood-cut illustrations for children’s stories, Ray also wrote and sketched his own detective and sci-fi tales. This adaptation of one of his own novels is told through the eyes of a six-year-old boy and continuing a trend he started with his Pather Panchali poster, Ray made sure that the loud, playful lettering and drawings on the poster could have been his character’s creations. u

DECEMBER 2013 | ISSUE 2

umbra CAMPUS Society for Visual Culture at Ambedkar University, Delhi is a group of visual culture enthusiasts who are passionate about film and photography, coming together to share their knowledge and work with each other.

Purti Purwar & Kartikeya Jain

inema – for some is a reflection of society, for others it can be a path to introspection and for most, it can be just another form of entertainment; regardless, one simply cannot escape the influence of cinema in today’s world. Cinema has become omnipresent in our lives.As Alfred Hitchcock had rightly said: “For me, cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

FILMTECH

Holy Motors:

‘Technology and Cinema in Bengal’

T R A N S M I S S I O N2 S

Sudipto Basu reports from an exhibition that reveals the material constructs behind the illusory realms of various significant films - an ode to the makeshift, immediate solutions that propel a permanent art.

Society for Visual Culture was founded on August 31, 2012 with a small group of students based in The School of Undergraduate Studies and has eventually gained more members as time has gone by. However, SVC (a commonly used name for the society) is not just a society for film appreciation or filmmaking; it covers under its umbrella all manners of visual arts including photography, installations, exhibitions of old movie posters to sophisticated art galleries, graffiti, paintings etc. Through its activities, SVC tries to explore the genre of visual art beyond the boundaries of photography and films. At SVC we believe in giving a platform to students to present their own ideas. Student films, photographs are generally shared with fellow artists and a larger audience regularly. SVC aims at bringing world cinema - not only in terms of the canonised and renowned features but documentaries, marginalised cinema as well - to interested audiences. This gives audience as well as members of the society an opportunity to experience different types of cinema and to build their own opinions about them. SVC started its journey with an event on Documenting the Transient Archiving the Contemporary, where a high profile panel discussion featuring performance artist Pushpamala N, Contemporary artist Vivan Sundaram, film historian Kaushik Bhaumik, and film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar was organised. Short films such as Sincity by Srikant Agwane and Certified Universal by Avijit Mukul Kishore were screened. We also organised screening of documentaries – Laxmi and Me & City of Photos directed by Nishtha Jain. Students asked the director questions about the artistic intent behind certain scenes within the film, as well as the technicalities involved in the actual production process. There were alsother screenings, including one by film scholar Moinak Biswas of Jadavpur University. In the month of September, SVC organised screenings of Modern Times, City Lights and The Kid, Charlie Chaplin’s widely known and admired films. In keeping with its mandate of reaching out to students within a variety of film and cinema making settings, SVC attempts to not only advocate culture of film around the campus but also aspires to create a difference in the traditional styles of exhibiting it as well. This ambition was followed through in particular during the AUD student fest AUD@CITY. We organised Exposed: a photography competition, Reels: a short film competition and Delhi Unplugged: an exhibition by SVC. Uniquely, the event was held in an under-construction building with bare brickwork. This meant a significant departure from the typical exhibition space. The film room was given a look of a village road show with posters of old movies hanging on walls in mosaic pattern providing a very distinctive aura to the whole place. Moreover, the place was fitted with workstation lights to give it a deliberately eerie feel. u

ilm society An oft-repeated anecdote about Ritwik Ghatak’s days as a teacher in FTII is that he and (his pupil) Kumar Shahani joked about Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat: a machine ‘seeing’ a machine was an amusing idea, a sort of man-machine duality present in both the moving train and the camera which ‘saw’ it. Going to an exhibition called TECHNOLOGY AND CINEMA IN BENGAL: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW – organized by The Media Lab, Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University at ICCR Kolkata from 13th to 20th August – was curiously like seeing old fossils in a museum. Giant cameras, sound recorders, editing tables, projectors lay arranged – quite dead now, almost unimaginable amidst today’s consumer-end digital cameras (quite a few of which were capturing these ghosts) and yet suggestive of nascent ‘life’. Part of The Media Lab’s ongoing documentation and archival projects on the film technologies (an archival of the now-defunct National Instruments Limited complex and Rupayan post-production lab among them), the exhibition packed in video interviews with veteran technicians, blowups of an astounding number of articles written by film professionals in such journals as Chitrabhas, Chitrabani, Film Fair etc. (all of which are also archived by TML) as well as vintage equipment sourced from private collectors (filmmaker Goutam Ghose among them), old theatres and studios like Aurora Film Corporation. Cinema exists in the collective (un) consciousness as coherent continuous ‘live’ installations – inspite of all our knowledge about filmmaking we still imagine somewhere that a film ‘made’ itself. So it is both illuminating and amusing to read how this very sense of wholeness is carefully constructed – Bansi Chandragupta explains in an article that he made only one first class coop in Ray’s Nayak, which slightly modified gives the illusion of being separate spaces when occupied by different characters. For Pratidwandi’s memorable last interview scene, Ray’s crew had to improvise with plaster-of-paris skeletons because they did not find more than ten real ones in the whole city. Ajoy Kar writes

on the pioneering use of Nujol spray to create a surreal foggy atmosphere in Jighangsha, an innovation that we now know as a slightly old-fashioned trope thanks to the distance afforded by time. Subrata Mitra describes how he hit upon the idea of ‘bounce lighting’ while shooting the interiors in Aparajito (accompanied by a startling triptych of stills from the film – among them Harihar frozen in motion as Sarbajaya does household chores by the tap, a very uncharacteristic off-balance frame for Ray). KK Mahajan recounts how the then newly-introduced lightweight Arriflex cameras (on display) afforded him to shoot Mrinal Sen’s Interview handheld, imparting a sense of immediacy; and Dilip Mukhopadhyay tells us of his almost futile experiments in shooting with Kodak Double X stock for Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (new and untested in the Indian market at the time) which gives the film its distinctive real-and-yet-unreal texture. Subarnarekha is incidentally my biggest takeaway from this exhibition – in a still, a very young Abhiram runs towards the camera with his arms thrown wide on an abandoned airstrip while Sita is framed towards the right moving outwards – her body tense – as if she’s clearing the way for the ‘flight’ to take off. It’s a delirious, distinctive moment that makes me see Ghatak with newfound enthusiasm: as in Ajantrik he fuses man-machine identity effortlessly. The eye is a camera, the camera an eye.

UMBRA. Umbra is published by Lightcube Film Society, a New Delhi based organisation. In the pages of this tabloid, we intend to cover, through journalistic reportage as well as subjective commentary, various aspects of screen culture. Its pages will feature details of major developments in the sectors of film preservation, film archiving, film society activism and film literature. Our focus will be to establish a broad lineage between the state of these areas in the past and their condition in the present. To this aim, Umbra will feature a number of interviews, essays, program notes, festival coverages, listings and director filmographies in the coming issues. To submit, subscribe or to advertise on its pages, write to umbra@lightcube.in

14 - 18 NOV u

A TABLOID OF SCREEN CULTURE

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SYMPOSIUM

LOOK! Conversations with a few practioners of the documentary form

When it comes to contemporary Indian cinema, the documentary is where all the action is at. The sector is constituted by brief but significant bodies of work that establish their own peculiar engagements with the world at large, and yet, a similar spirit of inquiry, generosity and earnest subversion is coherent in all of them. The documentary sector is composed of cinephiles too; contemplative and insightful, these practioners often work in close-knit groups, in solidarity with each other and with the grander cause, that of the act of seeing itself. Ishan Banerjee and Anuj Malhotra put forth four broad, rather general questions to various leading documentary filmmakers to further understand the field and understand it in its aesthetic, ethical as well as socio-economic realities.

one. Is the lack of widescale audience apathy to documentary film a corporate-house created myth to sustain their fiction (fantasy) worlds? If not, and if this apathy is true, do you think it is because Indians in a postliberalised world are afraid of looking inwards? PAROMITA VOHRA: Iv wish I could say that

were entirely true. But unfortunately it’s not. Despite the presence of more funding and exhibition for documentaries in some other parts of the world, on the whole, one cannot pretend that documentary is a beloved form. No matter how simplified its content and entertaining its form, documentaries thus far have been a niche form and even when released, a limited commercial success. That said, the approach to commercial success does of course also, often, work in a circular fashion. Simply put it tends to promote what is already ‘working’ rather than find ways to make what is potentially exciting to audiences, ‘work’ commercially. If it were liberalization that were the issue, then documentaries would have been successful pre-liberalisation, and it is a documented fact that they were not precisely because they were strongly controlled by government rules and agendas. Distribution is the mediation of the relationship between audiences and (in the case of this discussion) films. Post the late

1930s this relationship has been regularly mediated, first by the government (through Films Division documentaries and the enforced screening model of distribution). Subsequently it has been mediated by political organisations of various kinds who have used the documentary form for various purposes from propaganda to consciousness raising to discursive tools. Essentially this made it hard for audiences to form an independent relationship with documentaries as films. The idea of ‘usefulness’ and therefore ‘significance’ enjoined on the documentary film has made it a remote film object to audiences. This is most notable within the limited press coverage documentaries get, which is almost never by the film writer in a paper/ journal but often by a features writer. Film critics it feels have not got the tools to understand documentary as film with a very few notable exceptions. So the idea of documentary as a film does not take root easily for audiences yet, although I believe it is changing. Are audiences today hesitant to look inwards? Perhaps no more or less than others. It certainly feels true that a large number of fiction films, often flatter a middle class audience – and we are seeing a time when a reflective film has a harder journey. I would say this is true of fiction and non-fiction, for one can be non-reflective on any side of the political spectrum really. SHYAMAL KARMAKAR: Actually the corporate world desires this apathy for their fictional world, and the audience, well, they suffer from the ‘entertainment

in the evening’ syndrome. In the case of various documentary films, the story is not usual, the narratives do not offer much in terms of individual missions or goals worth fulfilling – this means these are not easy films to watch if a viewer is not prepared to abandon his comfort zone. Corporates who own and control distribution in cinema halls claim that the audience do not want to see the film, so it’s a vis-à-vis thing. In the postliberalization world, it is getting increasingly difficult to reach out, to communicate. We thought of it as a dream, but the dream is over. AMLAN DUTTA: It is indeed true that Indians have become apathetic to introspection. Post economic liberalization we have become apparently richer in our pockets but poorer in our minds. So we love to glorify mediocrity to hide our insecurities and ethical shifts. We look for cheap immediate solution to meets our mental needs and avoid substance. But in a social evolution that’s what is expected of the populace. Why put the blame on the audience for lack of documentary culture? How many relevant, honest, compelling documentaries have we made in India where we can demand an audience loyalty! AVIJIT MUKUL KISHORE: I don’t think there is any apathy towards documentary among the audience, which is always open and receptive. People may not be aware of the potential, the different genres and the power of the documentary, for lack of exposure. The perception of the documentary has been shaped by the dominant use it is put to. This could be state propaganda or political

activism, both of which have signified the documentary film for the longest time in history. Of late people’s perceptions of the documentary are shaped by the television documentary. There are incredible films in all these genres. But there is also an enormous body of work which rests between many of these known genres. These could be the personal film, the experimental documentary and many other genre-bending films. It is interesting and important to study these movements historically. We are not afraid of looking inwards at all. In fact, there was a huge rise in the number of personal and self-reflexive documentaries post the arrival of independent news television in India in the late 1990s, as the onus of having a critical voice shifted from the activist film maker to the news people. That supposedly critical voice on television is now a babble. But meanwhile the genre of independent personal narratives came to be respected. This was nothing new, these films always existed, but got a new visibility with a newfound global interest in the mundane, the domestic and the personal, which was also political. AMBARIEN ALQADAR: Well, the need of the hour for documentary filmmakers is to locate a contemporary, accessible language. If the documentary form is losing audiences and the other forms are gaining it, it may also be a reflection of the outdated idiom that we employ in our films. It’s not a circumstance created by corporate or by the general apathy of audiences – the onus of reviving interest in the documentary form lies solely upon those who practice it. u

DECEMBER 2013 | ISSUE 2

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PAROMITA

VOHRA

2 SHYAMAL

KARMAKAR

A.K.BIR: No! That is not true. Most of

India is concerned – people here live very suppressed lives. Because of the staunchly feudal character of the Indian life, the sense of true independence in our thought, or say, even in the way we live our lives is still an alien concept. Therefore, there might exist a resistance to the openness, to the urge to question that the documentary form encourages. Any good documentary film is an opportunity to introspect and then react.

two What are the resources available for a documentary filmmaker to first conceive, then secure funding, and then exhibit his films? Is it possible for a documentary filmmaker in India to have a sustained professional career within this sector? VOHRA: Resources vary – foundations, NGOs, sometimes small art funds, bodies like PSBT. There are international broadcasters and funders also. I think if you are not planning to be rich then possibly you can have a sustained career. For myself, I can say I’ve managed to sustain it through working on smaller budgets in order to make films the way I like – and more importantly, what I hope is in an Indian idiom, what I hope will help make an Indian audience relate to, full of references and local questions.There are several filmmakers in India who have had sustained documentary careers – although we do not see a culture where they become universally known in the way of Wiseman or Errol Morris. But I believe this can and will change – in fact has been changing because in the 23 years of my work life I have seen the numbers of filmmakers grow, the approaches to filmmaking expand, audiences diversify

AMLAN

AVIJIT MUKUL

DUTTA

and a greater openness. This much fertility and vibrancy is potential for change. However I think it is important at such moments to think of ways we can locally support these endeavours and not impose existing norms of commercial marketing, but be equally inventive in how we think of distributing these films to ever wider audiences as also, deepening the critical culture around documentary film. KARMAKAR: There are platforms and networks to assist the documentary film maker. Starting with DocAge at SRFTI, The documentary network with support of the EDN (European Documentary network). So, there are a few documentary filmmakers in India who are actively attempting to tell their stories – and then, they come up against this massive monolithic taste that dictates the need for a ‘particular Indian story’ – they are told that their ideas aren’t important; many filmmakers have failed in this manner. DUTTA: For the past 7 years I have tried to

live as an independent documentary maker and I have no shame to admit that I’ve failed to sustain. Even with 4 international coproductions, 3 National awards, a national theatrical release of my last film Bom, I finally ended up neck deep in debts. Yet, the fact that I’ve survived is because there is an audience who has supported me wholeheartedly. And to increase their number perhaps I have to give more focused efforts to reach out. I don’t expect a miracle to happen but I am hopeful…

MUKUL KISHORE: This is a very vibrant

time for documentary film making in India and there is an enormous and ever-growing group of independent film makers, who have very sustained careers! The hows and whys of it are another discourse altogether, but what needs to be done is to make this a more remunerative profession. This can only happen with better exhibition and distribution of documentaries. We want

KISHORE

AMBARIEN

AL-QADR

our films to be seen widely, but the mode of exhibition has largely been through free screenings. While this should continue and films should be widely accessible to people, we also need to cultivate the culture of paying for documentary, as we pay to watch feature films. This can happen through a set of small theatres dedicated to screening art-house and documentary films. At present, this model is not working well, as such films are getting limited releases in mainstream theatres that have very high operation costs. ALQADAR: There is PSBT, which is the

main funding body for documentary filmmakers in the country. They also have Open Frame, a festival where the films

‘

...a need to make it a more remunerative profession. This can be only be done with better exhibition and distribution of documentaries.

‘

they produce are exhibited. The important idea behind PSBT’s selection procedure is that they are ready to consider films of all viewpoints and sensibilities – films that offer alternative perspectives are also welcome. The responsibility, therefore, is again with the film makers themselves to help documentary film evolve into a singular, unified, coherent profession that a youngster may take up. BIR: The whole process of funding documentary films should be made simpler by nature rather than the complex series of procedures that it is now. I think the process could be perhaps made easier if there was an active network in the country of the intelligentsia. So the process of securing resources to produce films could be simplified – and the people who want to genuinely assist can contribute their services or money, whatever the need be.

6 A.K.

BIR

three How is state-funding useful to documentary filmmakers? Are there cliques and groups as may appear to an outsider? If so, is their cohesiveness because of political, regional or economic factors? VOHRA: vWe can surely ask this question, or rather, make this statement about almost anything, no?

PAROMITA

KARMAKAR: State should fund documentary film makers, since cinema is still an evolving, new language. But there is another important question. What about films that are not really favourable towards the state? Think of Haobam Paban Kumar’s AFSPA:1958, which depicted the conditions under the draconian AFSPA 1958 law; and was not allowed to be shown publicly.

SHYAMAL

AMLAN DUTTA: State is ideally the best patron for any art not just documentary. But in reality mobilizing state funding means manipulation and sycophancy, which is detrimental if your purpose is honest and critical. There are cliques or associations based on mutual political, regional and economic interests but rarely for artistic collaboration. We all have too much to say and very little to hear, so we need a little more time to revive our self esteem to build a collaborative platform. AVIJIT MUKUL KISHORE: The good thing about state funding is that it is a grant that they do not expect to recover or profit from after the film is made. But, this is also the bad thing, as there might be less answerability because of that very reason. However, it is still a boon that state funding, however small it may be, exists.

A TABLOID OF SCREEN CULTURE

umbra be the correct word to describe it – instead, you could call it a community. And as all communities go, this too is bound by the internal logic(s) of regional, political and social preferences. But I do not see this as a disadvantage at all – infact, it’s a good thing. A filmmaker needs to be able to find ways around a system, around these hurdles. I trust individuals to be smart enough to locate and identify their own audiences and consequently, their own methods of engaging with them.

A.K.BIR: Well, it is true. Whenever a state

organ allocates resources to a filmmaker, they want to first be able to confirm their own dividends in the process. At the same time, if any filmmaker wants to make a film which features a point that is political or against the state, the onus is on him to present it in a manner that is mature and reasoned.

four Are these interesting times where anyone and everyone can pick up a prosumer camera and film the images of his life? Document them, essentially, for a museum of personal narratives? PAROMITA VOHRA: vYes of course it is and

it is what people around us are doing all the time. We have never lived in a time when the meaning of documentary has been challenged, widened, deepened and democratized in the most unexpected times, as much. The desire that documentary be a form of and for the people may perhaps have come true in a way no one anticipated.

A still from Nanook of the North (1924)

Sure, these narratives may not come in politically correct forms but they contain an expressiveness that is perhaps quite important for us to reclaim as a society before we move back towards the reflectiveness that we feel has been lost. Different types of people creating narratives for audiences of one or many like themselves or entirely unknown audiences render the world itself into a museum of narratives. In fact every documentary filmmaker should try it – just to see how it feels to have one’s life on film, from time to time and so, to be closer and constantly reassessing the meanings we wish to generate which is the closest we can get to truth.

‘

...any good documentary film is an opportunity to introspect and then react.

‘

AMBARIEN ALQADAR: ‘Clique’ may not

SHYAMAL KARMAKAR: Does the medium

influence quality? Not everyone who has a pen or paper can write. There is documentation and then there are personal narratives, but that does not mean that anything recorded on a prosumer camera is a film.

AMLAN DUTTA: Random recording is not documentation. People had still cameras even a century back but how many museums have you seen even of personal narratives? We are in the realm of virtual garbage of audio-visual material. But I’m sure it’ll be interesting to turn some of these into potential fertilizer for future growth.

AVIJIT MUKUL KISHORE: These are indeed

very interesting times, as anyone and everyone can pick up a device that has a camera attached to it and record images of his or her life. We carry cameras in our pockets in the form of cellphones; in our bags in the form of I-Pads; or on our belt in the form of the point and shoot camera. We might even have a fullfledged camera and accessories with us to make images. It is an interesting time and also a challenging one, to be original in the wake of the images all around us. Instant images that are made, processed and shared effortlessly on the web for people to consume. There is innate visual literacy among people, due to access to these image-making devices, where you can see the exact image that you record as you shoot it, unlike earlier, when there was a waiting period between filming and viewing. There is also a glut of images all around which inform our visual culture and people’s sense of composition and scene construction. So, we have a huge repertoire of reasonably watchable imitations of mainstream images and narratives available to us online. To be original in this context is a challenge.

AMBARIEN ALQADAR: I definitely think that the personal story is also a kind of documentation. But in regards to this, even before the era of the digital, people would always document their own life, and for sure, this is a manner of filmmaker as valid as any other. But then the question arises: why should I be the spectator to someone else’s life? A.K.BIR: I believe that when

your sensibility is cultured and your mind is educated, your perception of different realities has a different character – then, you aren’t merely recording an event, but imbuing it with your own ideas and with a value. Regardless, film is a democratic medium and anyone should be able to contribute to it. u

VIEWPOINT

A significant example within the documentary sector is that of Biju Toppo, a filmmaker from the tribal background, circumstances that were never very influential, and yet,

Ramesh Hembram someone who is actively making his documentary films, supporting himself on the side by shooting wedding videos in his village (another form of documentation). There is no denying that documentary filmmaking as a career does not have the peripheral benefits that a lot of the other filmmaking in the county does, namely, in the form of the associated gifts of money, fame and glamour. The question of funding is ofcourse, a contentious one - you see, a lot of times, the topics that independent documentary filmmakers choose to make their films on, specifically the tenor of our productions, it is not very favourable for the image of the government. If we aren’t showing them in a favourable light, why will they fund us? Suppose I bust the ‘development’ myth - state on film how all progress is for the middleclass, none for the tribals who live in backward areas, will the state really like to fund such a film? The author is an independent documentary filmmaker. Pictured here: Biju Toppo.

DECEMBER 2013 | ISSUE 2

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COVERAGE

The second part of the two-part transcript of a panel on Film Restoration, which was hosted as an Open Forum at NCPA’s Experimental Theatre in October 2012. The editor of Projectorhead, Sudarshan Ramani covers it.

The panel comprises of Mike Pogorzelski (Academy Film Archives), Schawn Belston (Twentieth Century Fox), Margaret Bodde (Film Foundation), Davide Pozzi (Cineteca Bologna), Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (Director of documentary Celluloid Man), Kimball Thurston (Reliance MediaWorks). The panel was moderated by Ian Birnie, programmer of American independent films at the Mumbai Film Festival.

THE REVIVALISTS

2 The Chess Players

(This is Part-II of the transcript. Part I appeared in Umbra, Issue I) IAN BIRNIE: We could speak about the technology involved in restoration. Is technology going to get cheaper, or better or more expensive? What does it look like, the landscape over the next ten years? KIMBALL THURSTON: From a technology

standpoint, software is constantly improving. One of things we do is look at frames and find information surrounding it, here and there. We can remove scratches. We can go from the beginning of the shot to the end of the shot. This wasn’t possible when I started ten years ago. With modern computers we can look at the entire length of the shot and that adds to more information.

IAN BIRNIE: What about storage facilities?

Are there new technologies to keep the original materials in the best possible shape?

MIKE POGORZELSKI: The short answer is no. Film is happiest when it’s cool and somewhat dry. And air conditioning technology hasn’t changed much. IAN BIRNIE: And what about deterioration, has there been any changes to help with that? MIKE POGORZELSKI: There have been more and more studies have been made. Though I have to say they’ve been made by non-archivists. Archivists don’t have the education and background to do the experiments. Experiments which benefit their work but archivists lack the expertise to understand what really happens on a molecular level when a piece of nitrate decomposes or when a piece of acetate decomposes. We benefit from this research in great ways. This is a moment of transition that we, the archival field, have not seen before, when it comes to motion pictures. And we see that in India, the same issues as elsewhere. Whether in Italy, the US, India, there’s always the questions of politics, the budget, and the hard decisions that have to be made. About which films to preserve first and how best we can do that but now

we have to add all the technological changes that are upending the traditional models.

ray.

IAN BIRNIE: I know that the Academy Archive is involved in this Project to restore Satyajit Ray’s films. I was wondering if you can talk about that. Because it is to the Academ’y credit that the they came forward and took the initiative to preserve these films. MIKE POGORZELSKI: Yeah, it was the

first of its kind. In 1992, Satyajit Ray was awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar for his contributions to World Cinema. The producers of the show were preparing an assembly of clips of his work for the telecast but they were completely surprised at the condition of the prints and the small number of clips that could actually be used for the show. So after the show, instead of moving on, they said that it could be a serious issue. This film-maker who received a lifetime award for significant work and that work could be in danger of disappearing, so the Academy sent an archivist along with my predecessor, the director of the Film Archive, Michael Friend, to inspect the elements of his prints and prepared a report on the condition of his films. There were several films in danger of deteriorating. In 1995-1996 we started with the first group of eight titles, thanks in part to support from the film Foundation as well as support from the Merchant-Ivory Foundation and since that time, the project has been preserving one film every year. Ray made 28 features and we’ve preserved 19 of them and he made 8 short films of which we’ve preserved five. Our latest restoration is the 1977 film The Chess Players.

q/a

The panel was attended by film-makers and archivists who posed a number of important questions pertaining to the topic and relating to their experiences, including

Dev Benegal (English August, Road Movie), archivist P. K. Nair and V. S. Kundu, director of Films Division, Mumbai. It was attended by journalists and restoration experts from around the world bringing the issues of film preservation to a wider pan-South East Asian level. QUESTION(P.K NAIR): There is the question of damages on the print that happens due to long storage but there are some damages however that were part of the original production of the film. For instance in Pather Panchali, one of the scenes has a mike appearing in the frame. So I checked up with Ray himself because normally a mike coming into the frame is an NG shot - and he admitted that these mistakes were part of the original shoot because they did not have money to fix these mistakes in time. Now somebody could restore the film after all these years could remove these and other “defects”. Is that really preserving the memory of the film? MARGARET BODDE: That’s such a great

point to be made. I completely agree with you. Mike, I remember when you were working on Rashomon and you were looking at the restoration in progress. And there was this scene where a woman was talking to the judge and there’s a bird that flies behind her. The automated dirt scratch processor of the software picked up the bird as a defect, and it erased the bird. [Laughs]. And someone in Japan was looking at it and they asked what happened to the bird. So they put it back. This is something you have to be aware of all the time. What’s in the film and what should come out and what shouldn’t come out.

SCHAWN BELSTON: It’s interesting, because at times you perhaps have to do both. Mike and I were working on a film called In Old Arizona (1928). That film had the first sound recorded on location. The result was that every time there was an edit, a dialogue edit, there was a stub sound which was authentic to the way the film would have been seen at first release. When we restored the soundtrack, we kept all the stubs in it and we made two versions. And this is the point,

we wanted to get a sense of how the film had been seen originally. MARGARET BODDE: You want to make the

film accessible and yet honor the film and the conditions and limitations of the time of its production.

QUESTION: How much of open-source software is being used in film restoration? KIMBALL THURSTON: Speaking on behalf of the Academy Council, we’re currently looking at providing an open source standard for cloud format storage facilities. But the thing that doesn’t get paid for is the software that is actually used in the restoration itself. It’s such a small market in terms of the global economy that it’s very hard to get, on the global level, the open source community, to produce software for the purposes of restoration.

QUESTION(V.S KUNDU): We have about 8000 titles in film, in addition to the 11000 titles we have at Films Division, so the question is, as part of preservation, should we scan these titles whether at 2K to 4K, in order to make them viewable when the film prints can no longer function? There is also the problem of the digital format updating itself after every ten years, hence the increased expenditure. KIMBALL THURSTON: If you look at the optics from way back, they really didn’t have more information than 2K. It depends on the condition of the original print. So you may or may not need more than 2K. So you have to make a value judgment. SCHAWN BELSTON: From our perspective,

we feel it’s important to preserve both the digital scans and the photochemical copies.

MARGARET BODDE: It’s equally important

to keep them accessible so that people can use them in documentary films or screen them for books and research and scholarship. u

A TABLOID OF SCREEN CULTURE

umbra

FESTIVALS

NEW DELHI | SEPTEMBER 2013

How to Become a Member of the Emancipation Club This year’s edition of PSBT’s annually held Open Frame Film Festival, was sincere, well-intentioned and earnest - too much, perhaps, for its own good. Ishan Banerjee covers it.

SHORTLIST A round up of the best films played at this year’s edition of the Open Frame. INDIA MY SACRED GLASS BOWL

Priya Thuvassery | 26mins, 2013 The film looks at the concept of virginity as it is perceived by different communities,from the vantage point of the film maker and two mothers bringing up their daughters in contemporary times. MADE IN INDIA

Rebecca Haimowitz, Vaishali Sinha | 52mins, 2010 A film about human experiences behind the phenomenon of ‘outsourcing’ surrogacy to India. The film follows the journey of an infertile American couple, an Indian surrogate mother and the business of reproductive tourism that brings them together.

AND YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ME

Pramada Menon | 52 mins, 2013 When visualising the ‘other’ , there are constant assumptions made about who these people are,what they look like , what they must think. The film brings 5 women into focus. The first film of queer feminist Pramada Menon.

WORLD IT WAS RAPE

Jennifer Baumgardner |60min, USA, 2013 A film the prevalent wrong , illegal ,reprehensible point of view of rape. In this film, eight women tell their diverse personal stories of sexual assault. NO JOB FOR A WOMAN: THE WOMEN WHO FOUGHT TO REPORT WW2

Michelle Midori Fillion | 61mins, USA, 2011

arima Zoubir’s Camera Woman is the story of a professional videographer who covers weddings in Casablanca, its subject being Khadija Harrad, a Moroccan woman who seeks to use the camera to realise her desire for freedom and individuality, while also honouring the wishes of her family. Mother to an 11year old son and the primary breadwinner for her parents and her siblings as well, her existence oscillates on a daily basis between the elaborate fantasy world(s) of the parties she films and the very real, abject harassment she faces from her orthodox family. Predictably, they disapprove of her vocation and demand remariage of her.

Fun fact: In 2012-2013: six out of the one hundred and twenty-five films released by the mainstream Hindi film industry (called, very aptly, Bollywood) were directed by women. The 13th iteration of the annually held Open Frame film festival (organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust, or PSBT) placed on its programming the onus to place a renewed focus on ‘narratives from(of) women’ - an idea which foregrounds the female experience and embodies a wide range of related issues that require critical engagement Held at the renowned yet very exclusive India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi, during mid-September, forty-two titles that conformed to the above notion were screened to semi-packed houses. Films of various lengths were exhibited demonstrating not only the robustness of female participation, but also the diversity of styles a lot of these films undertook. A major feature of the festival was Under the Red Umbrella, the film by Julia Ostertag,

Under the Red Umbrella

a film-bizarre artist. The entry is a visually lush and politically confronting portrait of an independent sex worker and her struggle to stamp her individuality through her (cliche-destroying) declaration of sex-work as a creative outlet. Documentarian Nisha Pahuja’s ironicallytitled The World Before Her, on the other hand, talks of confinement - it describes the scene of Miss India prelims: a quasibootcamp where twenty young women from across the nation arrive for an intense, month-long rigmarole to get recruited as contestants for the main show. Winning the coveted title is equated with instant stardom, a lucrative career in the show business and subsequent freedom from the constraints of a patriarchal society. Scenes from this camp are intercut with those from within a camp where a militant fundamentalist organisation indoctrinates young women. Through lectures and physical combat training, the girls learn what it means to be ‘good Hindu women’. The ambition behind transferring the film’s focus between two these two enclosures is, as per the director of the film, to create ‘... [a] lively, proactive portrait of India as a democracy...’ - good enough, but does it? W H O D O W E T R U S T . Cynicism as a running themes; suspicion; doubt; the idea inherent to various titles in the sixday long festival was essentially, ‘who do we trust?’ But this active, sinister emotion was also replaced by a distinct feeling that one had just sat through a festival guided by a very rigid theoretical framework – that of the emancipation (not of women), but of the idea of emancipation of women. It wouldn’t be far fetched to actually compare the atmosphere within the festival venue to one within a South Delhi University

women hostel – wherein rigid mechanisms are put in place to seemingly protect and safeguard the ‘inmates’, while the ‘warden’ is on the managing committee, and hence, her word is the final. The festival brochure reads: “This is not a festival on women’s issues. It is a festival about the world we live in and one in which we must take responsibility for our own thoughts and actions”. a posit, at best - but even after this grand announcement, did the titles at the festival do enough to make audiences aware of great, challenging cinema from around the world that seriously discusses gender issues? The jury’s out. One would expect that a festival with such a specific agenda would organise its programming with a great deal of caution, in a manner that not only befits, but also emphasises the purpose of its very being. Too many irrelevant films, however, neutralised the focus on the issue at hand, resulting instead in an atmosphere where the audience felt pressurised to infer, deduct and then somehow associate every single film to the cause-at-hand. It is not difficult to admire PSBT’s effort, and yet, their very nature as a government-subsidised organisation means that they are compelled to screen all the films they produce, resulting in programming that varies from the excellent to the mediocre. This self-oppressive, self-dulling manoeuver was counteracted by a few genuinely engaging ideas – the ones in particular being Culture of Sexual Violence and Inscriptions on my Body, both presented in the form of a forwarded note that preceded the screening of The World Before Her. As an example of focussed programming more interested in the depth, instead of u the width of the programme-on-offer,

A historical document that tells the colourful stories of how Martha Gellhorn,Ruth Cowan, Dickey Chapple – three tencious war correspondents – forged their legendary reputations during the war - when conventional wisdom states that the battlefield is no place for woman.

IN THE SHADOW OF A MAN

Hanan Abdalla | 60mins, Egypt, 2011 Produced in the wake of the Egyptian revolution , four women speak of their fight for the future and what it means to be a woman in Egypt.

Synopses taken from the festival catalogue. To bring a screening to our notice or submit a report on a festival, write to: umbra@lightcube.in

one could cite the case of the film festival organised at the same venue by the International Association of Women in Radio and Television (IAWRT). Twelve Iranian titles of various durations were exhibited – all of them tied together by a very conscious decision to defy the censors in specific and the censorious in general. The festival roster featured films like 20 Fingers by Mania Akbari, 21 Days and Me by Shirin Barghnavard and Where do I belong by Mahvash Sheikholeslami - entries which did not just merely defy the restrictions imposed on Iranian women in day-to-day life, but also attempted to engage an entirely new section of viewers and make them a part of their debate. These qualities of inclusiveness, openness and generosity - features of any festival that help foster larger debates around culture and the society that cultivates it seemed rather amiss from this edition of Open Frame. By trying to straitjacket not only their own programme, but also the discussions that followed these films into a simplistic, not very ambitious agenda, the festival may have alienated more viewers instead of the opposite – an exclusive club where entry is through affirmation.