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28, 29 and 30 April 2008 Hence, the festival aims to create a cinema space that celebrates the diverse nature of films in India today. The idea is to showcase the range of subjects and forms the films work with, and to interrogate the emerging aesthetics of political filmmaking. It is becoming clear that political films are no longer bound by the binaries of the past, perhaps developed during war filmmaking, and yet there is no one picture that is seen for the formal explorations are as vast as the diverse subjects. The festival will also carry a section on international documentaries that are difficult to access in India. And although these films deal with issues and themes that are unique and not very well known in India, there is indeed a common resonance or a common resistance. So the festival is also attempting to explore the notions of internationalism in the present scenario of neo-liberal globalisation. Simultaneously the festival will aim to present films in multiple ways of seeing, interacting and engaging by creating installations, outdoor screenings and small intimate screening spaces along with regular auditorium screenings. Nearly 100 films will be screened from the collection of films that are distributed through Under Construction, a non-broadcast, non-commercial, educational distribution initiative. Entry Free
The Vision
Marcel Duchamp’s abstraction of the Nude Descending the Stairs had two varied intentions. As a prelude to the movie camera, it provided a beginning to understand the idea of “persistence of vision” or why we see images in a continuous motion and not in flashes. But it also offered an antidote to the static nature of Cubist paintings, mocking its pretensions and offering vitality to the act of viewing that had not been seen before in the painting medium. What happens when art gets inextricably linked to the politics of subversion and resistance, not only of other art forms but the processes of human movement as well? What persists then, the art or values residing in resistance? In trying to address this vast jigsaw puzzle of the multiple meanings of the words persistence and resistance this festival was conceived. It is also an ode to the persistent vision of films, closely guarded by an ever-changing relationship between the film and the viewer. In the beginning, there was a sheer delight of man, in seeing something just “moving”… aided by the apparatus of the magic lantern and then the zoetrope and praxinoscope. But with the passage of time, this relationship has changed not only because film content has acquired a multiple personality, but also because the spectrum of viewing spaces has undergone paradigm shifts. The nickelodeon, the movie palace, the studio chain and the multiplexes have been the dominant exhibitor strategies in America in their respective eras. The movie palaces that flourished in the 1920s, found a remarkable coincidence with celluloid dreams, where the movie-going experience was an event to enter a cultural space full of grandeur and the excesses of materialism. The contemporary exhibition rationale of the multiplex is rarely that of titillating the imagination, but rather, comes close to that of manipulative buying complete with McDonalds and vinyl dreams. From the gaps of these so-called pleasure domes, have emerged certain crucial spaces of viewing, but they have been encountered on the sly. The trend started with the video parlours, then the cyber cafes, shifting to the dark lanes of Palika Bazaar which then magically opened up to a maddening world of pornography, Bergmans and Herzogs and yes, even Karan Johar. Today the BitTorrent has come to our rescue, creating a global collective force of cinephiles and cinema-collectors, empowering the viewer to exhibit films on their rooftops, and thus, redefining the constricted notions of the passive audience. Art as an emblem of cultural production, has been deeply engrossed in human movements, acquiring an inherently political nature. However, now the time has come to acknowledge that the audience is probably an equally resistive force, constructing ways of using and recycling images in an attempt to break out of the censorious trappings of the cinema hall, emerging as a powerful social agent in making meanings of cinema and thereby, culture. Persistence Resistance 2008, as a film festival resonates with a gesture not only towards the dynamic aesthetics of political filmmaking, the attempts to stretch the boundaries of imagination and confined terrains but also this new audience, trying to carve a niche for itself, waiting for filmmakers to take notice of them and create a space for dialogue. The festival attempts to create diverse spaces of viewing films, from the auditorium to the video parlours and video libraries. It offers a space for interacting with filmmakers as well as outdoor installations, and all of these aim to take account of the viewers’ sensory perceptions, as well as recognizing the viewer as having a self-identity. Persistence Resistance 2008, wishes to bring all the movements of the audiences and matters of films a little closer together, in a collective space to experience the diversity of films.
Venues of Festival Auditorium 1: IIC Auditorium Entry Free
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Additionally
... Video Library
Display of Under Construction Films.
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