Upcoming Arts Events
Spring 2012
March 28, 2012
EXPERIMENTA India: A Festival of Experimental Cinema from India
Co-Sponsored by the University of Chicago's South Asia Language and Area Center, The Committee on Southern Asian Studies & the Film Studies Center
WHEN: Wednesday March 28th
TIME: 4:00pm-6:30pm
WHERE: Doc Films, Max Palevsky Cinema, Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL
What are possible cinematic entry points to addressing the context of experimental filmmaking in India?
From experiments in animation, found footage and stylised montage in the late 60's and early 70's to the most recent innovations in experimental narrative and documentary, this selection of films and videos offer a peek into the aesthetic and socio political complexities of experimental filmmaking in India.
Curated by Shai Heredia who will be present to introduce the programs
Opening Remarks by Professor Rochona Majumdar, Associate Professor, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
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PROGRAM 1 (34mins)
1. 'And I Make Short Films' S.N.S.Sastry 1968 B&W sound 16 mins 35mm on dvd
An impressionistic portrayal of short film making by a short film maker. The film explores the process, ideas and context of documentary filmmaking in India at the time - art or documentation of reality. The views expressed in the film are sometimes bitter, often humorous, at times satirical but seldom complimentary.
2. 'Trip' Pramod Pati 1970 B&W sound 4 mins 35mm on dvd
A film on Bombay, which uses pixilation to depict the transitoriness of daily life in an urban context. This spectacular film with its abstract soundtrack of tweaked city sounds is the quintessential urban Indian experimental film.
3. 'Abid' Pramod Pati 1972 colour sound 5 mins 35mm on dvd
"Unlike a cartoon film, which is a rapidly moving series of photographed drawings, in pixilation, a moving object is shot frame by frame, and then through clever editing made to appear in motion. By its nature, this movement is agile, energetic and unpredictable just like the pop art movement." [Pramod Pati]
4. 'Claxplosion' Pramod Pati India 1968 B&W sound 2mins 35mm on dvd
Using pixilation and electronic music, this is an experimental family planning film
5. 'Explorer' Pramod Pati India 1968 B&W sound 7 mins 35mm on dvd
Pati attempts to portray a country caught between a number of opposing and diverging tendencies – between war and celebration, rock-and-roll and Bhajan, science and religion – in all its richness, convolutedness and madness.
PROGRAM 2 (70mins)
1. 'Jan Villa' Natasha Mendonca, India 2011 16mm on dvd colour & b&w sound 20mins
After the monsoon floods of 2005 that submerged Bombay, the filmmaker returns to her city to examine the personal impact of the devastating event. The result is Jan Villa, a tapestry of images that studies the space of a post-colonial metropolis but in a way that deeply implicates the personal. The destruction wreaked by the floods becomes a telling and a dismantling of other devastations and the sanctuaries of family and home. In its structure, Jan Villa is a vortex, drawing to its center all that surrounds it.
2. 'City Beyond' Shreyasi Kar India 2011 DV colour sound 10mins
City Beyond is a film that speculates about the lives led by the inhabitants of a submerged civilisation. The superstructure has been recently discovered in the crevices of the ocean floor. The film moves through the submerged landscape, gathering glimpses of life, times and the end of the civilisation.
3. 'Bare' Santana Issar, India 2006 colour sound 11mins
A poignant short in which the filmmaker uses home-movie footage and recorded telephone conversations to reach out to her alcoholic father.
4. 'There is Something In the Air' Iram Ghufran, India 2011 DV colour sound 29mins
There is Something In the Air is a call from the periphery of sanity. A series of dream narratives, and accounts of spiritual possession as experienced by women 'petitioners' at the shrine of a Sufi saint in north India. Drama unfolds via dreams, and appearances of djinns and disappearances of women. The shrine becomes a space of expressions of longing and transgression. The film invites the viewer to a fantastical world, where fear and desire is experienced through dreams and 'afflictions of air'. The shrine is a space where performance becomes the only rule of engagement, and one can begin to think of the possibilities that 'insanity' produces.
March 30, 2012
COSAS Spring Quarter Art Exhibition: "Creative Impulse... from Bengal"
featuring the paintings of fine artist and classical instrumentalist Shubhankar Adhikari
Join us as we kick off the Spring Quarter with an exhibition showcasing the watercolor prints of new and upcoming artist, Shubhankar Adhikari.
Based in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, Shubhankar Adhikari "considers his painting as visual music - or music for the eyes. He is a self-taught artist dedicated to creativity in different aspects of the arts. Shubhankar believes that our mind could be better nourished and more productive if our painting works are given birth with musical notes flying through the air". For Shubhankar painting and music are the spontaneous expression of the creative impulse within him. In addition to being a painter, Shubhankar is a sitarist, and much of his artwork is influenced by his background as a classical instrumentalist.
A reception will accompany the exhibition
Refreshments will be served
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Opening Reception Friday March 30th 3:00pm-5:00pm Foster Hall, Room 103 |
Viewing Hours March 30-June 15 Fridays, 3:00-5:00PM Foster Hall, Room 103 |
April 9, 2012
Film Screening: "The Truth that Wasn't There"
The award-winning feature documentary about the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war
WHEN: Monday, April 9th
TIME: 4:00pm
WHERE: Foster Hall 103, 1130 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL
Opening remarks and introduction by Professor Sascha Ebeling, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
Comments by filmmakers Guy Gunaratne and Heidi Lindvall and Jim McDonald, Sri Lanka Country Specialist, Amnesty International USA
The film is a real-time capture of post-war blood-drenched Sri Lanka that witnessed the ethnic conflict for 26 long years and came to a bitter end in May 2009.Student journalists, Guy Gunaratne and photographer Heidi Lindvall were given special access into the media-forbidden pockets of Sri Lanka, especially to the reduced-to-rubble Kilinochchi. Towards the end of their poignant journey, they also became the first overseas journalists to become the witnesses of the horrific aftermath of the final civil war in Mullaitivu and Chalai,thereby eliminating the danger of a horrendous conflict going unrecorded without witnesses.
Sponsored by The South Asia Language and Area Center, The Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and Amnesty International, USA
April 13, 2012
Lecture Demonstration: "Between Bhakti and Rakti: Emotion, Affect and the Self in Indian Classical Dance"
Sponsored by The Department of Music, COSAS, and presented with Apsara
with Rumya S. Putcha, PhD (The University of Chicago)
WHEN: Friday April 13th
TIME: 12:30pm-1:30pm
WHERE: Fulton Recital Hall, 5845 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL
This workshop examines the ways in which dancers working in multiple and diasporic settings engage with rasa, abhinaya and conventional modes of representation in Indian classical dance. As a historically-informed performance practice, Indian classical dance often focuses on two tropes of feminine expression, bhakti (devotion to God) and rakti (devotion to a lover). In the workshop we will explore how, as female dancers working in a time and space vastly different from that of our contemporaries in India, we engage with our ideas of womanhood as bhakti, rakti or something else entirely through rasa and abhinaya and, in doing so, bring our own deeply personal emotions to bear on an evocation of the self in dance.
