7th Chennai Film Festival 2019 : Artists' Cinema - CS Venkiteswaran

7th Chennai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2019
6-10 Feb; jointly organised by MARUPAKKAM & Goethe-Institut, Chennai 

Artists’ Cinema : Curated and presented by CS Venkiteswaran

(Screening Schedule)

Moving image practices, especially since the advent of digital technologies, are expanding and enveloping every field. Today the State and Capital constitute the two biggest image producers and users in the world, for their panoptic surveillance cameras, fixed in every public and open spaces – streets, malls, parks, pubs, offices, transport stations, public transports etc - are constantly at work recording and collating images of everything and everyone passing in front of them. What does this torrent of images amount to and do to us? Today, how does an image-artist work with, through and in this flood of visual information and narratives? How does and can the artist capture Life from the Flow?

These films by artists working in various mediums try to grapple with the very texture, tone, flux and flow of images; they ponder and meditate, interrogate and excavate, counterpose and juxtapose visuals to invite the viewer to enter into certain kinds of intensities of interaction with images: it could be their profound concern with nature, interrogations about hegemonic notions that rule our lives and dreams, explorations into other modes of sexual orientations and experiences, excavations into and through time, reinvention of space etc.

Free from the dictates of conventional narratives, beginning-middle-end structures, meaning-making compulsions and the market impositions about audience expectations, these image essays invite the viewers into exciting journeys into other realms of perception and experiences of the visual.

C S Venkiteswaran is a critic, columnist, curator and documentary filmmaker from Trivandrum, Kerala.





Artists and their films:

Gigi Scaria -

Disclaimer
9 min; 2018

Disclaimer addresses the political reality of contemporary India through a set of tricks performed by a magician. Cups and balls is a famous attraction for any magic show. In this case, the magician takes us for a ride where we witness the transformation from a poor rural reality to a material success story that finally leads to the lynching and scattered dead bodies on the streets. We as citizens willingly give away the realities we possess/address in the hands of magicians who wipe out our realities with their dirty tricks and make us believe we are entertained throughout the show.

Lata Mani / Nicholas Grandi

De Sidere 7
38 min; HD; 2014
De Sidere 7 is an experimental work that interweaves performance, dance, poetry, storytelling and text to reflect upon aspects of desire. Shot in Bangalore and Delhi, the film scripts the work of five performing artists into a sensorially rich meditation on desire’s vexed status as at once, animating force, object of suspicion and ground of contention. De Sidere 7 is conceived as a videocontemplation: a formally plural, multilayered composition intended to be experienced as an integrated whole. The artist book plays with image, frame, text, process notes & artist-critic responses to stage an encounter with the film in print duration.

Nocturne I & Nocturne II
5 min; HD; 2013
The Nocturnes were made in context of the Cross Pollination Lab of the Peaking Duck Arts Network, an interdisciplinary group active in Bangalore, 2012-2013.

Vipin Vijay 

Small Scale Societies; 27 min 

Two living bodies have been installed and improvised within a museum space, scattered with archaeological artifacts, terracotta pots and shreds. The idea of archaeological imagination has been extended from the organized and tagged space of museum with the sense of linear historical time, to various evocative, yet less visited prehistoric sites in India – from the site of survival of human ancestors confronting the catastrophe of volcanic ash, deep down in the past in Andhra, painted rock shelters and megalithic sites of Chattisgarh, to excavation sites and neolithic burial grounds in Kerala, where the interplay of life and death, dream and reality, embodied sense of the ground and hallucinatory perceptions in altered states of consciousness, seem to merge together. As a concept and working principle, the digital visual images have been treated here often as a thin surface of reality with an unknown abyss beneath, where supposedly a plethora of unseen images remain frozen into darkness. At times layers of images have been thrust together using multiple digital tools, to suggest a way of illuminating and digging through that invisibility of the frozen images, an ambivalent effort towards the notion of digital rock art.

Aman Wadhan

Letter From Korlai ; 22 mins

“We’ve inherited hope – the gift of forgetting.

You’ll see how we give birth among the ruins.”

-Wisława Szymborska

Of the cattle that come to graze on the slopes leading to the fort of Korlai, I would ask, why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me? Their eyes appear to say, the reason is I always forget what I was going to say—but then they forget this answer, too, and stay silent so that the human being was left wondering before the sea, in the time of yellow grass.

I had first visited Korlai in 2009. A very dear friend of mine had also been there, separately, unbeknownst to me, around the same time. We were both haunted by something mysterious at work over there. We used to write each other about life, about cinema and languages, but we had never mentioned Korlai and its secret indifference, or our desire to return there. It wasn’t until a few years later, when an assignment brought me back to Korlai, that I could begin to speak about it. By then, my friend had disappeared from my life.

It was the walk to the fort I remembered most—following cattle trails, not the dirt road to the lighthouse, finding pockets along the hill which seem to put the whole world into perspective by revealing that the world is blue at its edges and in its depths; from these pockets one can see that this blue is the light that is lost, the colour of where you are not, where you can never go. These nameless places awaken a desire to be lost, to be far away, yet they can also become anechoic chambers where the silence of the Self becomes audible. You take a deep breath, and unto the dust bequeath yourself, to grow from the grass you love.

In the year and a half it took to make this film, to retrace my footsteps and start over again, Korlai, for all its endurance, kept on changing. I have not returned to Korlai ever since, though some of my friends have recently been there and sent me souvenirs. The continuity of memory falls short to measure the abyss between what it once was and what will remain of it in the near future. Though when I think of my long-lost friend, I feel how little some things change—the last stretch of white sand, the three trees, the cattle trails—even if I be not there—it would always be the same. May the grass make it known that wherever you are my friend, if you want to find me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

Film Synopsis

On India's Konkan coast, in the village of Korlai, a sense of quaintness pervades its Portuguese heritage, the Creole, the faces, and the fort. The filmmaker had visited this place once, as did his friend, of whom nothing is ever said. Years later, an assignment brings the filmmaker back to Korlai. Memories revive but what compels his wayward excursion this time is the elemental and the immemorial wherein his solitude finds refuge. In the time of yellow grass, with steps receding and prayers unanswered, a desire for oblivion forks the search for images of exile and belongingness. This experience surfaces through grainy 16mm images and an elegiac voice-over, which retrace a sense of remembrance, loss, perception, and time intersecting with an inner self and with history. A letter for Korlai also becomes a letter to a dear departed; and in reading this letter, in seeking a new way of inhabiting the world, a vision of Korlai emerges that is both attentive and phantasmagoric, a series of possible angles and tributaries that the viewer and traveller might possibly take.

direction, production: Aman Wadhan

cinematography: Niraj Samad

editing: Nachiket Waikar

sound: Bhanu Dhande

production company: Film and Television Institute of India

PARVATHI NAIR

Bubble 3.08 min

By the Mouth of the River 12.49 min

Ice Boil 6.00 min

Order 3.30 min 

Parvathi’s oeuvre has been called a philosophy of space and ways of inhabiting the spaces in which we live, often using science as a viewing prism. Parvathi uses the moving image as an extension of her drawing hand, and the camera becomes an inscriptive tool in such cinematic explorations as the trilogy Of Time and Space. Water as a continuing engagement is a through-thread in many of the films such as Freeze Boil and Bubble which are part of the “An Ocean in Every Kitchen ‘ series, or Haunted by Waters and By the Mouth of the River. Parvathi explores different aspects of this mysterious life-affirming substance that is created when stars are born. Nature needs to be treated as a stakeholder in her own right, in the age of the anthropocene, and the videos give voice to her many aspects– the poetics of water, its essence as the stuff of life, its magical transmutability, and its threatened status in today’s world. The work captures moving pictures through focussed and minimalist – but not reductive – detail, and how relationships between part and the whole are negotiated through the observation of such particulars.

Murali Cheeroth

Pledge; 3. 30 min

Through my work , I am trying to explore and understand the meaning of social pledge, through my memoire of childhood experiences. The idea of pledge has been developed through my conscious participation in political activities, for long. Idea develops over a long period of time, before it finds a political activity and humanitarian thoughts, so to speak…….

A sacred unity,

desire to engage the notion of the modern multi cultural nation.

Current political situation since leads the threads to do the reality check, understanding and how nation offer common man to take the fake pledge, which infected everyone. No single object remains unaffected.

Meaning: A thing that is given as security for the fulfillment of contract or the payment of debit and is liable to forfeiture in the event of a failure.

Sahej Rahel

Barricada

Barricadia begins in the year 2017 – with a group of protesters huddled inside a parabolic structure, learning and rehearsing songs together. Singing an ubiquitous CND campaign refrain, they rebuke the UK, USA, Israel, India, Pakistan, China and Russia for their failure to commit to global nuclear disarmament, repeating together in fugue: “Where were you? Where were you? Why weren’t you there?” The song has no audience except for the participants of the group, who are clearly not the intended target of the questioning.

The group begin to produce vocal harmonies then gently fall apart before joining together again, each individual now confidently knowing their part. This cloistered preparation of song is an important part of their resistance – not simply a production of propaganda for the cause but a process of creating affect, community and conviviality. This is resistance. Beginning with this strange scene, this exhibition explores how we encounter resistance, protest and the end of the world in culture, to question what might be blinding us to reality.

In Rahal’s film, we begin to witness that Barricadia is no more than a document of our world’s already-collapse, by means of various cultural and political episodes occurring throughout 2016. The documentary merges footage of modern and historic rituals and familiar yet unstable landscapes, composed across two parallel images, which occasionally shift and pull away from one another. In one scene we witness a right-wing rally filmed in Mumbai in 2016, sound-tracked loudly with Bollywood dance music. In recent years, this genre has been adopted by Indian Nationalists to bolster the popularity of far-right movements. Throughout this exhibition, the affect of music is key. Across charcoal and ink drawings, text and film narrative Rahal mocks the assumed authority of the male DJ, bringing to life a mythology where the DJ has the power to change the world, to cast away spirits and to protect. His depiction of the legends of the DJ, and elsewhere: the architect, the artist and the writer shows us we can’t escape from the paradox that culture also remains a structure of control.

Elsewhere, the tropes of apocalypse appear in their droves – proud monuments consumed by the soil, ruined buildings, darkness and decay, a ghostly ship leaving a shadowy harbour, a fenced neighbourhood, a strange procession, a forest refuge, caped figures, water rushing in. These tropes are so well-worn that we forget they also represent reality. Rahal’s work explores this apocalypse-aesthetic as a blinker for action - the end of the world is so abstract now that we can only continue to watch it unfold.