[Reader-list] a study of film viewing

[Anannya Mehtta]

On film viewing �

This study hopes to understand film viewing as a site of meaning, fun and sharing in Delhi. By meaning I hope to convey the now virtual truism that film viewer ship has come to mean more than just the act of viewing. The cinematic pervades every sphere of our lives the social, the political, the emotional and certainly the economic. What is the motivation behind the mechanics of viewing, behind the habit of regular visits to Sarai, the India habitat center, the max Mueller bhavan, the French cultural centre etc? How do audiences understand, interpret and experience films?  How do we unravel the ubiquitous presence of the filmic in our lives? In what way does cinema enter the everyday? What form of group congregation does it result in?  If independent cinema (non commercial cinema spaces) acts as a new, still emerging public sphere where different narratives of politics, culture, debate, desire and entertainment intersect, then who are these regular film watchers? What is it that
 people take back with them? 

 

I wonder if the journey to the city is a journey towards a new self-definition where unlike in the non-city clear lines of history, familial bonds and the like resist coming to ones aid in defining the self. The cinematic experience weaves in and out of real lives, acting as one of the many agents of influence that produces, shapes and transmutes the self. So cinema both defines and gets successively defined. Cinema becomes a window onto the world. Through cinema the world travels to and away from this ambitious sojourner. The fictional world poses as a mirror, which reflects two people/concepts/faces at the same time, the known self and the stranger, whose journey towards self-definition is influenced by the cinematic image. It is cinema that allows a society or people to remember certain things or forget them. Just as people and communities produce cinema so does cinema produce a people. 

 

 

 

 

There are certain emotional and social moments and impulses that are clearly unmappable, where theory or a history of attempting to understand inexplicable actions will inevitably fall short of delineating any clear conception of what influences people.  The myriad narratives, multiple testimonies that I hope to unravel will become a mosaic of the possibilities, dreams and real lived experience that define lives in the city.

 

The second and more unformed aspect of my study is to attempt to understand the motivation of these sites of non-commercial film screenings to remain non-commercial spaces. What are the values that these spaces choose to portray and why? Why do such institutions value non-commercial and independent voices at all?

 

Do any patterns of thought, of imagination, of deed emerge?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/attachments/20050131/b9d6ba2b/attachment.html