Bae Chang-Ho’s My Heart shall be screened today at the Max Mueller Bhavan at 1830 hours i. e. 6:30 in the evening. The director is considered the foremost exponent of the Korean New Wave cinema. In a stark departure from his usual style of film-making, My Heart is set in the Korea of 1920’s.

The movie is shot amidst the beautiful scenery of Korea. It tells the story of Sun-Yi (played by Kim Yoo-Mi, the director’s wife), who is married off to a ten-year old spoiled brat. When her husband grows past adolescence, he brings home a mistress much to the petrifaction of Sun-Yi. The movie tells the story of how Sun-Yi leaves home and searches for an identity of her own. In a way, the movie mirrors the struggle of Korea to find its identity in a shrinking world. (Click here to read the whole post)

Two of the gems of experimental cinema - Manhatta and The Man With The Movie-Camera - were screened at the Gallery Beyond yesterday. Since I missed the first one (I watched it on the internet anyway), I shall review only The Man With The Movie-Camera.

Made in 1929 by Dziga Vertov with cinematography by his brother Mikhail Khaufman, The Man With The Movie-Camera captures the Russian life in all its avatars. The movie has no story as such, yet one could call it the story of a people and a time.

The movie shows the Russian way of life in minute detail, and not often in the sad way that directors of art movies are wont to perceive. The camera captures in a most natural way the beautifully uncertain smiles, the lips that make unheard whispers, basking ladies, the victories and the excitement, the routine and the indifference - all captured with the devouring eye of a greedy voyeur and the detailed panache of a keen observer. The result is a movie which speaks of life without judgment and the consequent pitfalls that a jaundiced eye brings to the task of film-making. (Click here to read the whole post)

The third session of Experimental Cinema screenings (and my second), Gallery Beyond showcased the last four of Avant-Garde movies they had chosen to screen. I say chosen to screen because the Avant-Garde Collection (from which the movies are being shown) is a much wider collection comprising many more movies than time would have allowed them to show.

The four movies screened were:

• Regen (Rain) (Netherlands, 1929) directed by Joris Ivens, 14 minutes: This is a movie every Bombayite would love to watch, especially if you’ve grown up watching the rain and what gentle poetry it can create on the streets and in the minds of men. If you can catch this short film anytime, please do so. It is a lovely evocation of rain in Amsterdam and how people react to it. Perhaps the most lyrical of all Avant-Garde movies, it is for the best that it is a silent movie. The gentle strumming of the guitar throughout the movie is the only sound the movie has. It is the director’s best documentary before he moved on to doing political documentaries. It is now my favorite documentary; when you have watched it, it will be yours too.
• H2O (US, 1929) directed by Ralph Steiner, 12 minutes: This movie demonstrates what light can do with surfaces, especially with water. An intensive exploration of the play between light and water, it soon delves into abstractions leaving the consciousness of the existence of water behind. Recommended only if you love the sort of cinema that academics can argue and debate over.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Thanks to the innovative organizers of this play, I don’t have to think of a title for this post. ;-)

Organized by Nitin Das and the Sheikh brothers, Chana Chai Nukkad Natak featured two plays enacted wholly by kids from the Akanksha NGO (with some prodding from Nitin who sat at the back of the stage directing the kids and correcting their cute faux pases).

The first play was about a man saddled with an ailing mother, and two brothers - one mad, and the other given to drinking a lot. He wishes to get his mother to a good hospital, to get his mad brother married, and to gift his drinking brother a career. To that end, he forges fake banknotes. The man gives a fake 500 rupees note to his mother, who buys groceries (or ration as it is called out of habit in India, thanks to the Raj’s and then the government’s policy of rationing food). The shopkeeper later recognizes the fake and adulterates food in order to compensate for the loss. The adulterated ration is bought by a lady whose jobless husband eats it, and goes to an interview with a sick stomach. Rejected in the interview, he becomes a nakli doctor. Finally the drinking brother of the man who had forged the note falls ill and is killed by the fake medicine administered by the fake doctor. The play was aptly titled Nakli Duniya.
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The Avant-Garde movie screenings at Gallery Beyond ended twenty minutes early in spite of the organizers thankfully repeating the first two movies by Man Ray which I’d missed on account of being late. I rushed to Eros to catch Bow Barracks Forever; expectedly I was told that the Preview Theatre was filled to capacity. I took a ride back to Kala Ghoda thinking I might have missed the Kathak performance, but might as well drink in on the later performances.

I arrived halfway through the Odissi performance by Ms. Sujata Mohapatra. It was the first classical performance I saw being held in an open-air theatre, so I had my reservations. But Mohapatra’s excellent performance soon dispelled all of them.

Wearing the white raiment and adornments of an Odissi dancer, she might as well have personified the quality of purity. Her dance was one energetic, controlled expression of sublime artistry; her countenance and hands in perfect tandem with the moods of the song being sung.

The music too was splendid, especially the mellifluous vocals (I think it was Bengali/Oriya folk though I’m not quite sure) and the mesmerizing violin and flute whose flourishes were as brilliant as the lithe movements of the dancer’s hands.
(Click here to read the whole post)

I was lazing around in the afternoon and almost on a whim, I decided to attend the Avant-Garde movie screenings held at the Gallery Beyond. And it was so good that at the end of it, I cursed myself for being lazy and not attending on previous days.

The map for the festival does not pinpoint the location of the Gallery. And nobody except the a man standing outside Max Mueller could tell me where Gallery was. As a result, I arrived at the Gallery a full one hour late. To add to my woes, the watchman there told me that games were being played at the Gallery (Yahaan toh khel khila rahein hain).

Just as I was about to leave thinking that the event had been shifted to some other venue at the last minute for which notifications could not be put up on the website, a man told me that movies were indeed being screened at the Gallery and directed me to a door. I entered a darkened hall where the movies were being screened. It was only when my eyes adjusted to the light and I spotted paintings hanging on the walls around me that I realized I’d been ushered into the gallery itself.
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In the one hour I had between the two writing workshops An Introduction To Freelance Writing and The Art Of Translation yesterday, I wandered the corridors of Elphinstone College and its narrow dark staircases that looked as if they belonged to a cold time-forgotten castle more than a college.

I even happened to venture unnoticed into their staff room which has six larger-than-life portraits hung across its walls. And guess what I found!!! One of the portraits was of William Wordsworth (eponymous grandson of the great poet William Wordsworth), who was a principal of the college at one time. Another portrait was that of Peter Peterson, who had been a Professor of Oriental Languages in the college. It might be history to those who know Elphinstone, but it is certainly news to me.

As for The Art Of Translation workshop that followed, it soon regressed into The Craft Of Translation workshop. It is very necessary to have an agenda or at least a purpose which implicitly sets some sort of tacit agenda, especially if the workshop session is going to be as long as three hours. The discussion was often punctuated with silences that hovered in the air of Elphinstone’s Seminar Hall which hosted the poorly attended workshop.

(Click here to read the whole post)

Braving the inclement weather in the morning (I do not do this even for the most important of my college lectures, preferring to amble into the lecture hall only after noon), I managed to reach Elphinstone College well on time. The trains were empty on account of the weekend, and minus the effort that one needs to exercise in the daunting crowds of Bombay locals, the faces of commuters looked sadly careworn and unoccupied.

Held in Elphinstone’s Seminar Hall, Kavitha Rao’s workshop was quite a success - in addition to the twenty people already registered for the event, there were others who dropped by and had to be accommodated. (It would have been that wee bit better if all of them had showed up on time and not trickled in one by one throughout the duration of the workshop.)

A quick note on Kavitha Rao:

Kavitha Rao has lived and worked in London, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Tokyo, and reported from Cairo, Beijing, Seoul and various cities in India. She currently lives in Bombay.

I came across her website just a few months back while researching an article on the internet. I think it was her review of Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled in South China Morning Post that caught my eye. I remember thinking that it must take a gritty freelancer to sell such a story to SCMP.

And her website is another lesson in making the right first impressions, especially in a profession where first impressions can often also be the last. Though her website is clean, free of frills, and minimalistic, it exudes a quiet authority, is regularly updated and never undersells her strengths as a freelancer. In short, just the sort of online portfolio that can make an editor sit up and take notice.

(Click here to read the whole post)