To think of a time without the existence of art would be to imagine a world without beauty. But then you have cinema, termed to be the seventh art form (after architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry and dance), which has been around for more than a decade.
When competing with the ageless legacy of its peers, this powerful medium can be termed, for lack of a better word, new. “It’s a nice provocation,” says Shaina Anand about her curated section at the Jio MAMI 18th Mumbai Film Festival with Star, which has been deliberately named the New Medium to reflect this ethos. It’s ironical because, to the uninitiated, its name would evoke allusions to perhaps digital and technological permeation in film. And in fact, it’s anything but.
Where everything meets
“It’s interesting because then [cinema] is the one art form that is spatial as well temporal: where everything meets: dance, poetry, literature, etc.” Besides, she continues, that cinema’s rules are unknown. For instance, “who established 35mm, or Dolby, or stereoscope?” After all, these are industry-driven standards and by no means a formula for a filmmaker. “So I want to expand the reading of cinema and do it in its inaugural avatar; in chronology,” says Anand about the section which made its debut at the festival this year.
Since 2001, Anand has devoted her life to film: first with the Chitrakarkhana (literally translating to an image factory) that dealt with experimental media. In 2007, she established CAMP, a studio with Sanjay Bhangar and Ashok Sukumaran, “in which ideas and energies gather and become interests and forms”.
She says, “We run something called the Indiancine.ma and the Pad.ma [Public Access Digital Media Archive].” The former has been Anand and her collaborators’ gift to the Indian cinema’s centennial: 1913 to 2013. “We took Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s encyclopaedia on Indian cinema and used the Pad.ma framework,” says Anand. The archival endeavours have been an initiative of CAMP, which according to its website can be an acronym for more than a lakh combinations ranging from Comfort After Minor Possibilities to Critical Art and Metaphorical Publics.
“CAMP is a collaborative studio and we have 36,000 films in our drives,” says Anand. She adds, “We approach the film form quite radically, especially the documentary. For us, it’s the process and who speaks for whom, where and how.”
Rich dose of history
It’s this relentless and unique involvement with Indian cinema that made festival chairperson Kiran Rao to get Anand onboard to curate a section that would not just be long-standing, but also offer a rich dose of history. The 14 titles (chosen from a period of 1929 to 2014) have been carefully chosen by Anand for their craft and representation of a socio-political and cultural milieu. “It’s very personal,” she says. “Every film you’re looking at has a formal invention.” For instance, Kalpana pushes the medium through dance. It was made in 1948, at the birth of our nation, supposedly free from colonialism. The curator of New Medium says there’s something incremental in her selected films, however they’re powerful each on their own too.
Take Now!, the 1965 film by Santiago Alvarez that preceded the music video genre. It signifies, the lighting of the spark of the Latin American Third Cinema Movement while simultaneously drawing attention to racial brutality in the U.S. Then you have the Vietnam War and a post-colonial critique where six New Wave directors come together for an uncredited collaborative effort: Far from Vietnam (1967) by Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. “You have to respond,” says Anand, talking about film as a response to reality. “You can withdraw and look at your navel, but you have to be cognisant,” she says.
The real challenge
Curating New Medium was easy, says Anand. “The challenge was getting access to the films, but that’s when very happy things happened.” Seven of the 14 films being showcased this year — in a matter of happenstance — got restored. Both Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and then the cult blaxploitation film, Space is the Place (1974) — widely available on VHS — were restored in 2014. “This is not the section where people were submitting their films, and it was a deep hunt to get them, and a deep hunt against time,” she says. “But they came through on very tight budgets and we want to push it to wider audiences.”
Where else would you get to see an 11-hour film that not only traces an intimate look at human life but also documents technological innovation? If there’s one film that festival-goers ought to check out, it should be Lav Diaz’s Evolution of a Filipino Family (2004). “It’s black-and-white and started in 16 mm and ends in MiniDV,” says Anand.
Cinema may be new, but with 125 years of constant innovation, there’s perhaps more to learn about this form than any other. And the inclusion of the New Medium section at MAMI takes us one step closer to it.
For more information see mumbaifilmfestival.com
