Individual culture
By SHAI HEREDIA The Hindu | May 29, 2005 http://www.hindu.com/mag/2005/05/29/stories/2005052900310500.htm "The Fallen Curtain" at the The International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, showcased avant-garde films that represented shifting socio-political contexts in the Soviet Bloc and the Western world. New direction: Kolga explores the quest for personal happiness. SHORT films have been referred to as "small forms of great art" or "splendid experiments of only a few minutes duration". For the past 51 years, this marginalised film form has been celebrated at The International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen in Germany. In May, the small town of Oberhausen transforms itself into the cutting edge focal point of the global short film scene. Considered too experimental for some, and too conventional for others, the festival is essentially defined by its commitment to discovering innovation with the moving image and for its distinctive and uncompromising nature. Discussions "This year, we are looking to create discussion on the changes in the meaning of political film: whether it exists and what it achieves... and to highlight how independent and individual artistic approaches can often be the most political," states Lars Henrik Gass, the Festival Director. As the curator of "Experimenta" � the International festival of experimental film in India � I was invited this year to preview and select films. Ironically, it was not the new works, or the contemporary artist films', but the special programme, 'The Fallen Curtain' that was most engaging and exciting. Curated by eminent German filmmaker and academic Marcel Schwierin, this was a showcase of avant garde films that represented shifting socio political contexts in the Soviet Bloc and the Western world. As harbingers of the rise of individualism, I find the themes in these films intriguingly related to the changing identity of post-globalised India. At the start of the 20th Century, the West saw the widespread fear of the mysterious phenomenon of the individual psyche. An early insight into this was seen in the silent black and white short film "Dr. Turner's Mental Home" (1929) made by British artist Dora Carrington and B. Penrose. Filmed with friends over a weekend, the film depicts a wicked doctor experimenting on the inmates in his mental home and reducing them to animals. As a reflection of the power dynamics between the state and the individual, the film uses humour and absurdly costumed actors to depict psychiatrists not as healers, but the owners of a threatening secret knowledge that gives them power over ordinary people. Three decades later in the U.S., Stan Brakhage filmed the birth of his child in "Window Water Baby Moving" (1959). This was a landmark avant garde film that heralded the breakdown of family structure and consequently the new morality of 1960s America. By cinematically representing the physical separation of the baby from the mother, this beautifully filmed silent film was in every respect a radical departure from the moral concepts of the 1950s: the open depiction of sexuality, using one's own family as a film subject and turning away from clinical medicine. Due to this, and its graphic nature the film led to Stan Brakhage not only being insulted, but even being shot at. Offering a new direction to Soviet film in 1966, Mikhail Kobakhidze's film "Kolga" � "The Umbrella" (Georgia/USSR) chose to explore the quest for individual happiness, rather than celebrate the collective structure of communism. A railway controller and his sweetheart live in peace next to the railway tracks. Out of nowhere, an umbrella flies into their life. They try to catch it, and finally do manage to grasp it for a short moment, but it slips away and then disappears. The film uses a satirical approach, not so much to criticise, but more to sophisticatedly ignore socialist realism. By blending the symbolic visual language of the USSR, with influences of the French New Wave, this love comedy met with little official approval and Kobakhidze was soon forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union. As curator Marcel Schwierin points out, "The Soviet and post-Soviet short film is of interest as the expression of a revolutionary utopia, as a productive area of conflict between central and regional culture, and in its representation of perestroika as a radical turning point of global import." New meanings A clear representation of the latter was seen in the late 1980s, when brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov founded the "Parallel Cinema" movement of the Soviet Union, and became the first generation of independent filmmakers to no longer work within the studio system. In their film "Traktora" (1987) the image of the tractor � one of the most powerful symbols of working and living happily in the Soviet Union � is destroyed and reborn by projecting new meaning onto old stock footage. As the ironic voiceover grows in intensity from objective newsreel style descriptions, to individual almost obsessive poetry, the film succeeds in dismantling the collective ideology of socialist propaganda, and draws attention to an emerging individualisation. Like Western experimental films of the 1960s, these films deliberately refused to conform to professional standards, and were thus rejected both officially and by many filmmakers. Common themes Ultimately, "The Fallen Curtain" attempted to read the history of short films in the East and West from within a joint context. In the process, what became apparent through all 15 packages within this programme was that, despite the great differences between political systems and their fundamentally different histories, the thematic commonalities in avant garde film were much bigger than the disparities. In lieu of this, it is interesting to re-look at the history and development of short avant garde films in India, especially now at the start of the Third Millennium, where we find ourselves experiencing the development of a new alternative culture ie. a culture of individualism. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/pkgkPB/SOnJAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
