TWO events on Indian cinema in NYC on December 2

These are unusual, rare and non-Bollywood-centered.

"Film as Madness: D. G. Phalke, Indian Cinema, and the Dream Factory"
Professor Anupama Kapse (Media Studies/Queens-CUNY)

December 2, 3:00-5:00PM, CUNY Graduate Center, Room C-419

Professor Kapse's talk will examine the representation of a foundational moment in Indian cinema: the birth of the movies. Focusing in particular on D. G. Phalke's pioneering documentary, How Movies are Made (1917), Kapse examines the transgressive nature of the camera's original appearance in Indian film. In order to educate his audience through this film, Phalke trained his camera on the apparatus, isolating the tripod, the actors, and his impassioned instructions as director. Through this careful revelation of the filmmaking process, Phalke emphasizes the cinema's acute alteration of reality, treating it as a phenomenon that provokes hysteria and madness. By contrast, recent films and exhibitions on Phalke employ a distinctly comic, irreverent mode, emphasizing Phalke's witty iconoclasm.

Seating is limited; please drop a note to Heather Hendershot (hshot@earthlink.net) if you plan to attend. Sponsored by the Film Studies Certificate Program

This should be of special interest to Darshana who liked Harischandrachi Factory (the Marathi film based on Phalke).

If you rush after this event, you can catch

Priya Jaikumar: The Spatial Imagination of Geographical Films,

Event Date and Time:
December 2, 2011
6:00pm

Location:
NYU Cinema Studies, Michelson Theater
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, Department of Critical Studies. Her book Cinema at the End of Empire (Duke, 2006) details the intertwined histories of British and Indian film from 1927-47. Other writings on cultural regulation, transnational feminism, postcolonial cinema and film/media form appear in Cinema Journal, The Moving Image, Post Script, Screen, World Literature Today, Velvet Light Trap, and anthologies like Hollywood Abroad, Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, Outsider Films, Postcolonial Cinema Studies, Empire and Film. Currently, she is working on a book titled Where Histories Reside: Filming India as Location.

About the talk:
A commonplace hermeneutic of postcolonial scholarship has been to expose affiliations between territorial power and modes of knowing and recording the world. How is this question of a politics of location relevant to film history? Scrutinizing a set of British geographical films about Indian towns occasions my interrogative turn, because understanding how imperial geography utilized films about colonial place, and defined itself through that utilization, illustrates the spatial affiliations of knowledge necessary to the formalization of disciplinary practices like geography and, in my extended analysis, film studies. Geographical films from the colonial period further our understanding of visuality in geography, and reveal links between geography and geopolitics. They also compel us, I argue, to spatialize our understanding of film historiography. Situating such films in the cross-section between the disciplines of geography and film studies displays our potential to transcend those formative confines, particularly when we treat space as an analytic optic, to account for the asynchronies between the formal specificities of cinema’s screen space and the diversities of social space.

This event is free and open to the public.

http://web.gc.cuny.edu/filmstudies/events/index.htm

http://www.tisch.nyu.edu/object/Atalkb11162011144301.html