Edition # 05

FD Zone Delhi screenings

on Friday, February 7, 2014 at 7 pm

Casuarina Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

In the 5^th edition of the FD Zone Delhi screenings, we bring you three films on music and the city. In all these films, classical Hindustani and Sufi qawwali forms – typically considered “high art” or confined to religious bastions – break out of their predefined worlds to form the basis for an exploration of unknown worlds within the city.

 In Amir Khan, a maestro’s musical journey is woven with his personal life to create an intimate biography of the person and soul behind the music. The home becomes the space through which music rises above the din of the everyday; the fabric of relationships between the musician and his family become the pivot through which the city turns into a canvas for his musical exploration.

The city and its rhythms are also explored in Tabla Calcutta – the beats of the tabla keep time with the beats of the city through music that looks for its expression in the invisible pulses and patterns of life in the metropolis of Calcutta. Lives that find their meaning and sustenance in the city through spaces of work, leisure, time and money are reflected in a rhythmic interplay of music and movement.

In Nusrat Has Left The Building But When?, a musician’s imprint on the city is explored through fragmented spaces that still resonate with the artist’s voice and hold the legacy of his musical genius, long after he is gone.

 Programme:

1] Amir Khan

Dir.S.N.S Sastry (Hindi/1970/18 min)

The film portrays the personality and family life of Ustad Amir Khan, the famous vocalist and his music.

2] Tabla Calcutta

Dir. Jorn Thiel (1969/14 min)

The documentary brings to the screen the glimpses of life in Calcutta. The film has no commentary but the rhythm of tabla has been imaginatively used to the rhythm of life in

3] Nusrat Has Left The Building But When?

Dir. Farjad Nabi (1997/20 min)

This is a film made about the metamorphic career of late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the famous Sufi qawwali singer from Pakistan. The film departs from the popular version of Nusrat and goes back to his early roots in pure Sufi music, before and after he exploded on the international scene. Nusrat’s metamorphosis from a genuine popular artiste to mass produced exotica of the east left behind many disillusioned listeners and devotees in its wake. Perhaps for the first time this film gives voice to the other side of the song.

Farjad Nabi is a Lahore-based filmmaker whose recent work includes the feature film “Zinda Bhaag”. His previous works include a music video “Kari Jo Geet” (Song of the Kari) and documentation of the last remaining poster artist of Lollywood, S. Iqbal, in “The Final Touch.” His other films are “No One Believes the Professor” (1999, joint winner of the Best Documentary at Himal Film Festival, Kathmandu), “Cricket Lives in Lahore” (2000) and “Nusrat has Left the Building…But When?” (1997, winner of the Best Documentary at the 1st KaraFilm Festival).

Filmmaker Saba Dewan will be joining the post-screening discussion. Saba studied film making at the Mass Communication and Research Center, Jamia. Saba’s films have focussed on communalism, gender and sexuality. Her recent film, The Other Song, narrates the story of a lost song sung in 1935 by Rasoolan Bai, a courtesan and an exponent of Thumri from Varanasi.

FD Zone Delhi/ BioScope screenings

FD Zone Delhi and BioScope

invite you to a screening of documentaries

On Tuesday, 7th January 2014

At India Islamic Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

The programme is presented by FD Zone, Delhi Chapter; Sarai-CSDS; BioScope: the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, as part of the events leading up to The Many Lives of Indian Cinema and beyond Disciplines, Histories, Technologies, FuturesConference at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies from 9-11 January 2014, Delhi.

[I]

PEDAGOGIC STATES AND LESSONS ‘LEARNT’

‘Nation and Integration: A moving image travelogue though Independent India’

FD Zone Delhi presents a curation of films, produced by the Films Division in the first 30 years of Independent India. Films Division, established in 1948 by the Government of India, was the main film-making and film-producing body committed to maintaining ‘a record of the social, political and cultural imaginations and realities of the country’. Before the advent of television, these films were shown in private cinema theaters and in government organizations, and later broadcast on the State owned television network.

 

While most of the films produced in the first few decades after Independence, were ‘educative’ tools to push forward socio-political agendas of a pedagogic State, there emerged, by the mid 1960s, a generation of filmmakers who brought in subtleties to the cinematic craft by pushing aesthetic boundaries, while producing a critique of the Nation-State. The films in this curation are open to multiple readings – as cultural artifacts; as historical documents; as State propaganda and its subversion; as an account of the birth of a nation and of “nation-building”; and as documentary film texts which created formal and aesthetic innovations.

 

While films like Freedom Marches On, 1949 and Hamara Rashtragaan or Our National Anthem, 1964 are pedagogic in their ambition, documentaries likeNaya Daur or New Era, 1975 and Face to Face, 1967, while furthering the State project of nation-building, also seem to question the very idea of ‘India’. A more formal experimentation with image and sound can be seen in films likeThis Bit of That India, 1975 and Explorer, 1968, while Flashback, 1974, is a reflection on the documentary film movement, and explores the relationship between cinema and the Nation-State, and what it meant to make films ‘back then’.

 

The screenings will be followed by a discussion moderated by Avijit Mukul Kishore.

 

[II]

‘The Act of Killing: Looking back at Indonesia’

In the second segment, we bring you Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, 2012, a documentary set in Indonesia, which looks back at Indonesia’s violent past in the mid-‘60s. Released in 2012, The Act of Killing revisits a time following the overthrowing of the Government by the military in 1965. Within one year of this event, more than a million communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals had been killed by the State run death squads.

Oppenheimer’s chilling documentary is about killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike ageing Nazis or Rwandan genocides, the perpetrators in Indonesia have not been forced by history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of young paramilitaries.

The film is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass killers, and presents a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease and grace of a soft shoe dance number.

 

The will be followed by a Skype conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer, moderated by Rosie Thomas.

 

PROGRAMME**

[I]

3:00 pm to 4:30 pm 

Films from the Films Division archive

 

1. Freedom Marches On

Director: Unknown (11:18 min/ 1949/ B&W/ English)

Synopsis: This is a review of the various events that took place in India during the two eventful years following Independence.

 

2. Hamara Rashtragaan

Director: Pramod Pati (09:35 min/ 1964/ B&W/ Hindi)

Synopsis: The film aims at helping children to learn the correct way to sing India’s National Anthem.

 

3. Face to Face

Director: KS Chari and TA Abraham (18 min/ 1967/ B&W)

Synopsis: This film examines the meaning of democracy 20 years after independence by talking to people on the street.

 

4. Naya Daur

Director: S. N. S. Sastry (9 min/1975/ B&W/ Hindi – English)

Synopsis: A backgrounder showing the state of affairs which eventually led to the proclamation of Emergency by the Government of India in 1975.

 

5. Explorer

Director: Pramod Pati (07:00 min/ 1968/ B&W)

Synopsis: A film based on the theme – Mission of Youth. In this film, the youth explore, probe, question and analyse everything that they find around them. With no commentary, the film focuses the attention of the audience through symbols and expressions.

 

6. This Bit of That India

Director: SNS Sastry (15:00 min/1975/B&W)

Synopsis: A experimental journey through sound and images of the youth of the country, and their thoughts in the ‘70s.

 

7. FlashBack

Director: SNS Sastry (21 min/ 1974/ B&W)

Synopsis: The film is a survey of the documentary film movement in India . We hear views of Films Division filmmakers S. Sukhdev and S N S Sastry before the Emergency and close to the end of their lives talking about documentary.

 

4:30 pm to 5:15 pm

Discussion with Avijit Mukul Kishore

 

5:15 pm to 6:00 pm

BREAK

 

[II]

6:00 pm to 9:00 pm: The Act of Killing (Director’s cut)

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer

(180 min/ 2012/ COLOUR)

Synopsis: Set in present day Indonesia, The Act of Killing is a journey into the memories and imaginations of the perpetrators of mass killings in the mid 1960s.

9:00 pm to 9:30 pm

Skype conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer, moderated by Rosie Thomas

 

 

Avijit Mukul Kishore is a filmmaker and cinematographer based in Mumbai, India. His areas of interest and specialisation have been the documentary film and collaborations with visual artists on video and film based installations. He is actively involved in art, cinema and cultural pedagogy. He has directed the films To Let The World In, Vertical City, Certified Universal and Snapshots From a Family Album. He has shot several documentary films and the feature film Kali Salwaar.

 

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies is a blind peer-reviewed journal published biannually by Sage. BioScope is supported by the Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, India, and the India Media Centre, School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, UK.

FD Zone is a collaborative effort of Films Division with independent film-makers to organize regular curated screenings of documentaries, short films, animation, experimental works and meaningful cinema. The Delhi Chapter of FD Zone comprises of filmmakers Amit Mahanti, Aparna Sanyal, Iram Ghufran, Ruchika Negi and Subasri Krishnan. To know more about FD Zone Delhi screenings, please visit – https://fdzonedelhi.wordpress.com/

 

Joshua Oppenheimer has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public imagination. Educated at Harvard and Central St Martins, London, his award-winning films include The Globalization Tapes (2003, co-directed with Christine Cynn), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase  (1998, Gold Hugo, Chicago Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival), These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home  (1996, Gold Spire, San Francisco Film Festival) and numerous shorts. Oppenheimer is Senior Researcher on the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Genocide and Genre project and has published widely on these themes.

 

Rosie Thomas is Professor of Film and Director of CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media) at the University of Westminster.  She began research on the Bombay film industry as a social anthropologist in the early 1980s and, since 1985, has published widely on Indian cinema.  Her current research interests focus on pre-independence popular Indian cinema and her book Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies has just been published by Orient Blackswan. Throughout the 1990s she worked as a television producer making documentaries, arts and current affairs programmes for Channel Four UK. She is a co-founder and co-editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

 

** Please note that FD Zone monthly screening at India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, Delhi is in Casuarina Hall at 7 pm. For details of the programme, see – https://fdzonedelhi.wordpress.com/2013/12/08/edition-04/