shweta kishore | RMIT University (original) (raw)
Books by shweta kishore
Independent documentary is enjoying a resurgence in post-reform India. But in contemporary cinema... more Independent documentary is enjoying a resurgence in post-reform India. But in contemporary cinema and media cultures, where ‘independent’ operates as an industry genre or critical category, how do we understand the significance of this mode of cultural production?
Based on detailed onsite observation of documentary production, circulation practices and the analysis of film texts, this book identifies independence as a 'tactical practice’, contesting the normative definitions and functions assigned to culture, cultural production and producers in a neoliberal economic system. Focusing on selected filmmakers, the book establishes how they have reorganised the dominance of industrial media, technology and social relations to develop practices that build upon principles of de-economisation, artisanship and interdependence.
Papers by shweta kishore
Quarterly Review of Film and Video , 2023
In Trinh Thi’s Nguyen's Letters from Panduranga (2015), an epistolary narrative unfolds between a... more In Trinh Thi’s Nguyen's Letters from Panduranga (2015), an epistolary narrative unfolds between an unidentified man and a woman as they search for a language to talk about representing the ‘other’, in this case, the Cham people whose history, culture and identity has undergone centuries of obliteration in Vietnam. The woman echoes the filmmaker’s own discomfort, “I’m trying to avoid speaking on behalf of the other.” she writes in one of her letters. The well-intentioned spokesperson, who speaks for the oppressed other, is the focus of ongoing interrogation in documentary studies spurred by ethnographic, feminist, and postcolonial inquiry, all of which intersect in Nguyen’s practice. Nguyen’s essay films interrogate hierarchies of speech, inextricably tied up with documentary’s institutional and didactic histories in post-independent Asian nations. The subjective address and associational lateral form of the essay film are, for Nguyen, a method to re-examine unequal relations of speaking and listening authorised in historical narratives and representation.
Nguyen works with materials sourced from Vietnamese state archives, Hollywood cinema, the internet, home movies, and still photographs. Conceptual audio-visual arguments are constructed using juxtaposition, repetition, jump cuts, textual layering and often disjunctive and contrapuntal arrangement of sound and image that allows distant images to reveal overlapping ideologies on themes that Nguyen continually returns to; constructions of nation, historiography, ecology, representation, gender, colonisation, and the gaze of the artist herself. In this interview, I discuss the cultural, and historical concerns that motivate Nguyen’s artistic style and address; her ethical concern with the interrogation of gaze; use of montage and found footage filmmaking as a form of ‘critique’; and the speculative and ethical possibilities of the essay film form.
Studies in Documentary Film, 2021
What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities a... more What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities adapt documentary filmmaking to revise their historical conditions? The use of documentary filmmaking...
Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers, 2018
Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripher... more Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripheral modes and spaces of cultural circulation, I demonstrate the operation of an idea critical to independence, that of resistance to the commercially reified roles of consumer–producer assigned to the artist–audience relationship. Circulation I contend, is re-framed as a forum for dialogue that creates “involved” publics rather than limited to frameworks of cultural dissemination marked by logics of quantity, profit and markets. I argue that the construction of participant-publics and the re-evaluation of cultural ownership or ‘copyright’, repurpose both technological and historical norms, giving shape to Geert Lovink’s (1997) proposition of tactical media through which filmmakers create alternative systems of exhibition containing the vital potential to disrupt a highly regulated public domain.
Studies in Documentary Film
in Contemporary Radical Film Culture : Networks, Organisations and Activists ed. Steve Presence , Mike Wayne , Jack Newsinger 89-99. Routledge, 2020
Chapter 8 also discusses issues of distribution but in a very different context, as Shweta Kishor... more Chapter 8 also discusses issues of distribution but in a very different context, as Shweta Kishore explores the circulation of radical documentaries in India and the ways in which different kinds of regulation – from censorship and vigilante forces to gate-keeping NGOs – impact on the films, the audiences they reach, and how they reach them. Developing the notion of ‘tactical circulation’ to examine how some of the country’s leading radical filmmakers and organisations are countering these regulatory forces, Kishore provides a valuable analysis of con- temporary radical film practice and culture in India.
in Activist Film Festivals: Towards a Political Subject. Ed. Tyson Wils and Sonia Tascón. Intellect. (2017). 259-279, 2017
Kishore, S., “Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema ... more Kishore, S., “Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema of Resistance” Activist Film Festivals: Towards a Political Subject. Ed. Tyson Wils and Sonia Tascón. Intellect. (2017). 259-279
Thus I make three arguments, first, that in the context of the present study, COR creates a set of conditions with an objective to establish a critical relationship between cinema and the spectator, where films are not only presented as objects of consumption, scopophilia or
narrative identification but also historicized and contextualized to permit numerous ways of viewing and interpretation. Next, I argue that attention to the historical positioning of its regional and non-metropolitan audiences in relation to commercial and state cinema
production and circulation regimes permits COR to create practices and events that counter these historically exclusionary processes. Finally, I contend that the philosophy and forms of audience relations authorized at this festival provoke consideration about how regional audiences may take active roles in viewing and creating cultural structures that offer genuine forms of cultural participation and expression of subjective and collective concerns.
Feminist Media Studies, 2018
In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban expe... more In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain’s documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become “out of place” in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women’s subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation’s capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as “emplacement” which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of “becoming” allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments.
Bioscope, 2017
Video in the form of " little media " arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schr... more Video in the form of " little media " arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of " little media " were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of " little media " and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.
Camera Obscura , 2017
In her films, Paromita Vohra is the trickster, the bahurupiya who entertains, unsettles, and ulti... more In her films, Paromita Vohra is the trickster, the bahurupiya who entertains, unsettles, and ultimately encourages the spectator to think, reflect, and reconsider. Always penetrating in her analysis, Vohra is interested in the ways power is exercised through history and discourse. Her films are aesthetically distinct in the context of the formal histories of social documentary in India, which emerged at a moment of political crisis and subsequently came to be associated with instrumental use in education, advocacy, and public address. For Vohra, the textual stability of documentary address, representational regimes, and cinematic and verbal language are important areas of political interrogation. Each film is a complex construction in which the “real” is only one element in an affective and reflexive architecture of performance, fiction, poetry, and the intuitive. In this interview, Vohra and the author discuss the filmmaker's discomfort with the historical conventions of social documentary and how she reworks documentary's aesthetic terms through the prisms of the personal.
Jump Cut, 2016
Examining the cultural exchange between New Latin American Cinema and Indian documentary with a f... more Examining the cultural exchange between New Latin American Cinema and Indian documentary with a focus on the films and practice of Anand Patwardhan.
Read free online <http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/-KishoreIndiaDoc/index.htm.>
Senses of Cinema, 2015
In this article, specifically in the context of Indian independent documentary, I attempt to draw... more In this article, specifically in the context of Indian independent documentary, I attempt to draw ethics into the domain of criticism, and in particular, reflect upon the relationship between documentary ethics, inquiry and film form. I will examine documentary ethics through the practice of two independent documentary filmmakers that take as their subjects some of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in Indian society: Dalits (ex-Untouchables) in Seruppu (2006) and long term incarcerated prisoners in YCP 1997 (1997). While filmmaker Amudhan RP singlehandedly made Seruppu, YCP 1997 is directed, filmed and edited by the filmmaking partnership of Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar. (3) Each film, through a combination of informal conversations, interviews and observed events, creates a powerful narrative that argues for social justice and dignity for its subjects. At the same time, what makes these films notable is the way in which ethics play a central role in how the filmmakers organise their inquiry as well as the form of each film.
Deepa Dhanraj is a filmmaker and feminist whose extensive filmography spans issues of gender, lab... more Deepa Dhanraj is a filmmaker and feminist whose extensive filmography spans issues of gender, labour, education and women’s position in Indian society. In 1980, she founded the Bangalore-based filmmaking collective Yugantar, an organisation that produced films about women’s labour and domestic conditions in Southern India. With searing imagery, Dhanraj’s highly influential 1991 film, Something Like a War, presented the gender and class violence of the population-control policy of the Indian government.
Dhanraj is a guest at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year. She presented her recent film Invoking Justice (ITVS, 2011) as part of the India in Flux: Living Resistance strand of contemporary documentary cinema and was a panellist on the Talking Pictures panel, Currents of Dissent: Documentary Resistance in India, with Anand Patwardhan and Meenakshi Shedde in conversation with me.
In this interview, I talk with Dhanraj about the historic relationship between activism and documentary film and the ways in which she addresses contemporary industrial as well as aesthetic shifts in this cinema.
Third Text, 2013
Film festival discourses position festival audiences in homogenized ‘local’ contexts where ‘local... more Film festival discourses position festival audiences in homogenized ‘local’ contexts where ‘local’ is geographically and conceptually located within national boundaries distinct from the global flows of cultural traffic that festivals facilitate. Particularities of audience constituencies, such as the relationship with cinema and the historical and cultural contexts in which cinema and festivals are experienced, are overlooked. Other approaches position audiences within the rubrics of the ‘cinephile’, a descriptor of audience behaviours that insufficiently references the consumption contexts and processes of meaning production that occur at each consumption site. Using personal observations from an encounter between documentary film and nascent audience constituencies at the Ladakh International Film Festival, India, the author suggests that desire for the cinematic object emerges from social and historical contexts exceeding cinephilia. A phenomenological approach affords a meaningful framework for locating its significance. Finally, the consumption of documentary film transpires as a unique instance of restoring equity within this cultural-historical cinema context.
Contemporary Indian documentary film is pushing against its historical position as a state-contro... more Contemporary Indian documentary film is pushing against its historical position as a state-controlled medium of creating and consolidating state hegemonies. Film-makers seek to problematize dominant discourses through the architecture of the filmic narrative but also the aesthetic crafting of the documentary film form. Politics is thus embedded within the construction of the film and multiple forms of knowledge are possible with each reading. As a community of citizens, film-makers also make material interventions in the social world in order to create space for dissent and debate. Through text analysis of two recent films, Nero's Guests and Development at Gunpoint, and the history of the film-maker collective Vikalp (The Alternative), I explore the dispersed modes of political knowledge and intervention being articulated by Indian film-makers.
Practice based research projects by shweta kishore
Kochi Muziris Biennale. Kerala, India, 2019
Downloadable curator note and programme
The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, 2018
‘Moving Reels’ is a series of workshops that explores the diverse functions of cinema in public c... more ‘Moving Reels’ is a series of workshops that explores the diverse functions of cinema in public culture, both as text and practice. This program aims to be a forum for fostering cross-cultural dialogue between Vietnam and different geographical contexts, engaging how citizens and artists use cinema to reflect upon, and critique, transformations between society and the individual, examining how this relationship is of impact on their physical and psychological environment. For example, the first year’s program, which focuses on the cinematic synergies between Vietnam and South Asia, developed and curated by Dr Shweta Kishore, will look at Vietnam and India’s shared discourse between public architecture and nation building in urban life. Structured as a video screening followed by guided discussions around relevant themes, the ‘Moving Reels’ workshops envisage educational outcomes that contribute to constructing meaningful viewing cultures and cinema spaces in Ho Chi Minh City. A chance to look at our interwoven world through a cinematic kaleidoscope!
This program aims to foster commonalities with people near and far, looking at our shared ‘materials’ that stem from intertwined historical circumstances, social upheaval, and cultural context, all through the language of the moving image. More importantly, The Factory wishes to activate an interdisciplinary thinking community for visual artists, filmmakers, architects, anthropologists, and other cultural workers in Vietnam, pushing the boundaries, understanding and relevance of cinema today.
The aims of the practice-based research project are to theorise Vietnamese women’s contemporary ... more The aims of the practice-based research project are to theorise Vietnamese women’s contemporary artistic expression in relation to feminist discourse, to create not only academic scholarship but also materials that create social dialogue amongst artists and the broader community
Book and Film Reviews by shweta kishore
On the streets of Kathmandu, a group of street children take the filmmaker into their disturbing ... more On the streets of Kathmandu, a group of street children take the filmmaker into their disturbing world. Living on scams, begging and petty crime, they ruthlessly protect their territory from intruders. They survive on the barest of necessities and their only companions are each other and stray dogs. Dismissed by the residents and considered a menace by the city, these children are a ‘Lonely Pack’
Independent documentary is enjoying a resurgence in post-reform India. But in contemporary cinema... more Independent documentary is enjoying a resurgence in post-reform India. But in contemporary cinema and media cultures, where ‘independent’ operates as an industry genre or critical category, how do we understand the significance of this mode of cultural production?
Based on detailed onsite observation of documentary production, circulation practices and the analysis of film texts, this book identifies independence as a 'tactical practice’, contesting the normative definitions and functions assigned to culture, cultural production and producers in a neoliberal economic system. Focusing on selected filmmakers, the book establishes how they have reorganised the dominance of industrial media, technology and social relations to develop practices that build upon principles of de-economisation, artisanship and interdependence.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video , 2023
In Trinh Thi’s Nguyen's Letters from Panduranga (2015), an epistolary narrative unfolds between a... more In Trinh Thi’s Nguyen's Letters from Panduranga (2015), an epistolary narrative unfolds between an unidentified man and a woman as they search for a language to talk about representing the ‘other’, in this case, the Cham people whose history, culture and identity has undergone centuries of obliteration in Vietnam. The woman echoes the filmmaker’s own discomfort, “I’m trying to avoid speaking on behalf of the other.” she writes in one of her letters. The well-intentioned spokesperson, who speaks for the oppressed other, is the focus of ongoing interrogation in documentary studies spurred by ethnographic, feminist, and postcolonial inquiry, all of which intersect in Nguyen’s practice. Nguyen’s essay films interrogate hierarchies of speech, inextricably tied up with documentary’s institutional and didactic histories in post-independent Asian nations. The subjective address and associational lateral form of the essay film are, for Nguyen, a method to re-examine unequal relations of speaking and listening authorised in historical narratives and representation.
Nguyen works with materials sourced from Vietnamese state archives, Hollywood cinema, the internet, home movies, and still photographs. Conceptual audio-visual arguments are constructed using juxtaposition, repetition, jump cuts, textual layering and often disjunctive and contrapuntal arrangement of sound and image that allows distant images to reveal overlapping ideologies on themes that Nguyen continually returns to; constructions of nation, historiography, ecology, representation, gender, colonisation, and the gaze of the artist herself. In this interview, I discuss the cultural, and historical concerns that motivate Nguyen’s artistic style and address; her ethical concern with the interrogation of gaze; use of montage and found footage filmmaking as a form of ‘critique’; and the speculative and ethical possibilities of the essay film form.
Studies in Documentary Film, 2021
What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities a... more What do we learn about documentary forms, practices and relations when marginalised communities adapt documentary filmmaking to revise their historical conditions? The use of documentary filmmaking...
Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers, 2018
Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripher... more Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripheral modes and spaces of cultural circulation, I demonstrate the operation of an idea critical to independence, that of resistance to the commercially reified roles of consumer–producer assigned to the artist–audience relationship. Circulation I contend, is re-framed as a forum for dialogue that creates “involved” publics rather than limited to frameworks of cultural dissemination marked by logics of quantity, profit and markets. I argue that the construction of participant-publics and the re-evaluation of cultural ownership or ‘copyright’, repurpose both technological and historical norms, giving shape to Geert Lovink’s (1997) proposition of tactical media through which filmmakers create alternative systems of exhibition containing the vital potential to disrupt a highly regulated public domain.
Studies in Documentary Film
in Contemporary Radical Film Culture : Networks, Organisations and Activists ed. Steve Presence , Mike Wayne , Jack Newsinger 89-99. Routledge, 2020
Chapter 8 also discusses issues of distribution but in a very different context, as Shweta Kishor... more Chapter 8 also discusses issues of distribution but in a very different context, as Shweta Kishore explores the circulation of radical documentaries in India and the ways in which different kinds of regulation – from censorship and vigilante forces to gate-keeping NGOs – impact on the films, the audiences they reach, and how they reach them. Developing the notion of ‘tactical circulation’ to examine how some of the country’s leading radical filmmakers and organisations are countering these regulatory forces, Kishore provides a valuable analysis of con- temporary radical film practice and culture in India.
in Activist Film Festivals: Towards a Political Subject. Ed. Tyson Wils and Sonia Tascón. Intellect. (2017). 259-279, 2017
Kishore, S., “Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema ... more Kishore, S., “Reframing the Margin: Regional Film Festivals in India, a Case Study of the Cinema of Resistance” Activist Film Festivals: Towards a Political Subject. Ed. Tyson Wils and Sonia Tascón. Intellect. (2017). 259-279
Thus I make three arguments, first, that in the context of the present study, COR creates a set of conditions with an objective to establish a critical relationship between cinema and the spectator, where films are not only presented as objects of consumption, scopophilia or
narrative identification but also historicized and contextualized to permit numerous ways of viewing and interpretation. Next, I argue that attention to the historical positioning of its regional and non-metropolitan audiences in relation to commercial and state cinema
production and circulation regimes permits COR to create practices and events that counter these historically exclusionary processes. Finally, I contend that the philosophy and forms of audience relations authorized at this festival provoke consideration about how regional audiences may take active roles in viewing and creating cultural structures that offer genuine forms of cultural participation and expression of subjective and collective concerns.
Feminist Media Studies, 2018
In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban expe... more In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain’s documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become “out of place” in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women’s subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation’s capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as “emplacement” which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of “becoming” allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments.
Bioscope, 2017
Video in the form of " little media " arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schr... more Video in the form of " little media " arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of " little media " were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of " little media " and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.
Camera Obscura , 2017
In her films, Paromita Vohra is the trickster, the bahurupiya who entertains, unsettles, and ulti... more In her films, Paromita Vohra is the trickster, the bahurupiya who entertains, unsettles, and ultimately encourages the spectator to think, reflect, and reconsider. Always penetrating in her analysis, Vohra is interested in the ways power is exercised through history and discourse. Her films are aesthetically distinct in the context of the formal histories of social documentary in India, which emerged at a moment of political crisis and subsequently came to be associated with instrumental use in education, advocacy, and public address. For Vohra, the textual stability of documentary address, representational regimes, and cinematic and verbal language are important areas of political interrogation. Each film is a complex construction in which the “real” is only one element in an affective and reflexive architecture of performance, fiction, poetry, and the intuitive. In this interview, Vohra and the author discuss the filmmaker's discomfort with the historical conventions of social documentary and how she reworks documentary's aesthetic terms through the prisms of the personal.
Jump Cut, 2016
Examining the cultural exchange between New Latin American Cinema and Indian documentary with a f... more Examining the cultural exchange between New Latin American Cinema and Indian documentary with a focus on the films and practice of Anand Patwardhan.
Read free online <http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/-KishoreIndiaDoc/index.htm.>
Senses of Cinema, 2015
In this article, specifically in the context of Indian independent documentary, I attempt to draw... more In this article, specifically in the context of Indian independent documentary, I attempt to draw ethics into the domain of criticism, and in particular, reflect upon the relationship between documentary ethics, inquiry and film form. I will examine documentary ethics through the practice of two independent documentary filmmakers that take as their subjects some of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in Indian society: Dalits (ex-Untouchables) in Seruppu (2006) and long term incarcerated prisoners in YCP 1997 (1997). While filmmaker Amudhan RP singlehandedly made Seruppu, YCP 1997 is directed, filmed and edited by the filmmaking partnership of Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar. (3) Each film, through a combination of informal conversations, interviews and observed events, creates a powerful narrative that argues for social justice and dignity for its subjects. At the same time, what makes these films notable is the way in which ethics play a central role in how the filmmakers organise their inquiry as well as the form of each film.
Deepa Dhanraj is a filmmaker and feminist whose extensive filmography spans issues of gender, lab... more Deepa Dhanraj is a filmmaker and feminist whose extensive filmography spans issues of gender, labour, education and women’s position in Indian society. In 1980, she founded the Bangalore-based filmmaking collective Yugantar, an organisation that produced films about women’s labour and domestic conditions in Southern India. With searing imagery, Dhanraj’s highly influential 1991 film, Something Like a War, presented the gender and class violence of the population-control policy of the Indian government.
Dhanraj is a guest at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year. She presented her recent film Invoking Justice (ITVS, 2011) as part of the India in Flux: Living Resistance strand of contemporary documentary cinema and was a panellist on the Talking Pictures panel, Currents of Dissent: Documentary Resistance in India, with Anand Patwardhan and Meenakshi Shedde in conversation with me.
In this interview, I talk with Dhanraj about the historic relationship between activism and documentary film and the ways in which she addresses contemporary industrial as well as aesthetic shifts in this cinema.
Third Text, 2013
Film festival discourses position festival audiences in homogenized ‘local’ contexts where ‘local... more Film festival discourses position festival audiences in homogenized ‘local’ contexts where ‘local’ is geographically and conceptually located within national boundaries distinct from the global flows of cultural traffic that festivals facilitate. Particularities of audience constituencies, such as the relationship with cinema and the historical and cultural contexts in which cinema and festivals are experienced, are overlooked. Other approaches position audiences within the rubrics of the ‘cinephile’, a descriptor of audience behaviours that insufficiently references the consumption contexts and processes of meaning production that occur at each consumption site. Using personal observations from an encounter between documentary film and nascent audience constituencies at the Ladakh International Film Festival, India, the author suggests that desire for the cinematic object emerges from social and historical contexts exceeding cinephilia. A phenomenological approach affords a meaningful framework for locating its significance. Finally, the consumption of documentary film transpires as a unique instance of restoring equity within this cultural-historical cinema context.
Contemporary Indian documentary film is pushing against its historical position as a state-contro... more Contemporary Indian documentary film is pushing against its historical position as a state-controlled medium of creating and consolidating state hegemonies. Film-makers seek to problematize dominant discourses through the architecture of the filmic narrative but also the aesthetic crafting of the documentary film form. Politics is thus embedded within the construction of the film and multiple forms of knowledge are possible with each reading. As a community of citizens, film-makers also make material interventions in the social world in order to create space for dissent and debate. Through text analysis of two recent films, Nero's Guests and Development at Gunpoint, and the history of the film-maker collective Vikalp (The Alternative), I explore the dispersed modes of political knowledge and intervention being articulated by Indian film-makers.
Kochi Muziris Biennale. Kerala, India, 2019
Downloadable curator note and programme
The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, 2018
‘Moving Reels’ is a series of workshops that explores the diverse functions of cinema in public c... more ‘Moving Reels’ is a series of workshops that explores the diverse functions of cinema in public culture, both as text and practice. This program aims to be a forum for fostering cross-cultural dialogue between Vietnam and different geographical contexts, engaging how citizens and artists use cinema to reflect upon, and critique, transformations between society and the individual, examining how this relationship is of impact on their physical and psychological environment. For example, the first year’s program, which focuses on the cinematic synergies between Vietnam and South Asia, developed and curated by Dr Shweta Kishore, will look at Vietnam and India’s shared discourse between public architecture and nation building in urban life. Structured as a video screening followed by guided discussions around relevant themes, the ‘Moving Reels’ workshops envisage educational outcomes that contribute to constructing meaningful viewing cultures and cinema spaces in Ho Chi Minh City. A chance to look at our interwoven world through a cinematic kaleidoscope!
This program aims to foster commonalities with people near and far, looking at our shared ‘materials’ that stem from intertwined historical circumstances, social upheaval, and cultural context, all through the language of the moving image. More importantly, The Factory wishes to activate an interdisciplinary thinking community for visual artists, filmmakers, architects, anthropologists, and other cultural workers in Vietnam, pushing the boundaries, understanding and relevance of cinema today.
The aims of the practice-based research project are to theorise Vietnamese women’s contemporary ... more The aims of the practice-based research project are to theorise Vietnamese women’s contemporary artistic expression in relation to feminist discourse, to create not only academic scholarship but also materials that create social dialogue amongst artists and the broader community
On the streets of Kathmandu, a group of street children take the filmmaker into their disturbing ... more On the streets of Kathmandu, a group of street children take the filmmaker into their disturbing world. Living on scams, begging and petty crime, they ruthlessly protect their territory from intruders. They survive on the barest of necessities and their only companions are each other and stray dogs. Dismissed by the residents and considered a menace by the city, these children are a ‘Lonely Pack’
Metro, Jan 1, 2010
Abstract: The inspirational, and at times enigmatic, public life of The Hon. Michael Kirby is the... more Abstract: The inspirational, and at times enigmatic, public life of The Hon. Michael Kirby is the subject of Daryl Dellora's Michael Kirby: Don't Forget the Justice Bit (2010). The film presents a complex portrait of Kirby's nuanced personality, exploring his public role and also ...
Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, Jan 1, 2010
Abstract: The influx of global capital over the last two decades has brought more than just econo... more Abstract: The influx of global capital over the last two decades has brought more than just economic prosperity to China. As the country rapidly ascends the ladder of economic development, its cities are changing to reflect the shine of affluence. Georgia Wallace-Crabbe&#x27;s New Beijing: ...
Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, Jan 1, 2012
In India water has a deep spiritual and functional significance. The Rising Wave explores both th... more In India water has a deep spiritual and functional significance. The Rising Wave explores both these aspects; worshipped as a sacred common while also being essential for generating livelihood.
The film eloquently presents a culture built on water being shared, used and managed in ways unchanged for centuries. Richly filmed in three different states of India, The Rising Wave uncovers groups that have been dependant on their local natural water resource for generations as they fish and farm for livelihood.
In the rapidly transforming economy of India, corporations now lay claim to control and determine access to this natural resource. A contrasting picture emerges; a contrast between the two divergent views of water; water as a billion dollar industry against water as a sacred natural gift for all humankind. This spells conflict for the future.
Conference Publication: How to Live Together? Circulatory Practices and Contested Spaces in India (Ed. by Fritzi-Marie Titzmann and Nadja-Christina Schneider), 2022
Full conference publication available at: https://replito.pubpub.org/how-to-live-together Eman... more Full conference publication available at: https://replito.pubpub.org/how-to-live-together
Emanating from the fruitful academic and activist exchanges over the course of a three-day international digital conference in September 2021 (organized by Nadja-Christina Schneider, Fathima Nizaruddin and Fritzi-Marie Titzmann), the five articles in this collection follow the above mentioned questions about circulatory practices and contested spaces in India as dimensions of the main theme of living together. The five articles share a media perspective which includes interrogating the visual mediation of a new female ideal (Schneider), examining documentary film practices, their audiences and specific communicative and representative forms (Kishore, Kramer), a transmedia newsletter in the context of the Indian Farmers’ movement (Titzmann), and music video circulation that combines spiritual and political messages (Kirchhof).