[Reader-list] A Season of Footage and Films, Part I, Saturday, December 11th, 6:30 pm at CAMP

[shaina a]

*A Season of Footage and Films*,
in 8 parts.

*CAMP* presents
Saturday evening screenings through winter, exploring footage both within
and outside the usual capsule of "the film". An experience that could be
similar to watching films, or at other times harder to digest, slower to
release, closer to acts of shooting, less censorious, and less fearful of
finitude. Another life, another world of viewing and listening experiences
is always possible, with footage.

(All screenings at
CAMP <http://camputer.org/campstudio.html> roof, starting at 6:30 pm)

_______

Part 1. *Saturday, 11th December, 2010, 6:30 pm.*
http://camputer.org/event.php?this=phantomindia

Screenings:

a) *L'Inde Fantôme *aka Phantom India, Episode 7: *Bombay, The Future India.
*
Louis Malle, 1969
50 minutes

b) *In and Out of "the City"*
Footage from the city: of things that enter and then leave it, via
excursions out to sea, and double-lives, afternoon-naps, bike-rides,
water-wells, and more.
50 minutes
_______

What are films? Are they calculating commercial wrappers applied by
financiers to moving images, or purified forms that directors and crew
distill from grand ideas and many days of shooting? Surely a bit of both, a
bit of both, and much more too. But among the many, often unacknowledged,
things and forces that make up "the film", there is one thing that
physically, undeniably, film is "made of". We usually call this material,
footage.

But of course, film is not just made of footage pieces, or frames of images.
As if counting all the bricks or square feet in a home would tell us
everything about it. Films have their own wholeness, beauty, aura. Footage
on the other hand, is the ghost that flickers from
 *inside* every film, pointing to the autonomy of the images, threatening to
overflow their "use" in the film.  Flickering by at 24 (or 25) times a
second is not "frames" (since that would be only a narrow technical
definition), nor "truth" (since that would be a bit romantic), but footage.
Footage is what exists, the moment a camera "films", and which remains a
stubborn kernel at the heart of everything made from it.

Louis Malle's 1969 film, L'Inde Fantôme, provides a visceral example of
this. In 2010 this film flickers for us between one kind of recognition -of
the directors voice and intent- and another- of landmarks, people or
contexts from Bombay of the late 1960's- and a third- of the official
response to the film. As the authorial narrative waxes and wanes, and as it
becomes clear that intentions on various sides can expire, the footage
remains. In every film, some footage remains, and we can glean things from
it.  And every footage is then part of possible, future, films.

But there is other footage too, which has nothing to do with films. Which is
not born within the idealism, auterism or commercialism of films. And which
is not just a natural produce of so-called "digital natives", either. In
other words, there are diverse forms, materials and effects, to be found in
the spaces between film and video genres, their technologies, learned
shooting habits and pure chance, that we would like to explore in some
detail over these eight weeks, with the help of others who have thought
through and produced in this way before. All this suggests that footage has
the capacity to be a vital "currency" in relationships, arguments, pleasures
and politics both within cinema and beyond it, not limited to the ways that,
say, YouTube allows us to deal in it.

__________

Looking forward to seeing you there.

An outline of the next three Saturdays is below:

Part 2. Two Footage Films.
*Saturday, 18th December, 2010*
Two compelling and different responses to the question, how to use a footage
archive?

Part 3. Talking Heads.
*Saturday, 25th December, 2010*
Delueze, Godard, Haraway, Navalkar, Roy, Zizek, and more.
How interviews and speeches can be not like those on television.

Part 4.* *Disket Document.
*Saturday, 2nd January, 2011*
A group of left-intellectuals arrive in the Nubra valley in Ladakh in 2001,
for what they believe is a "Seminar on National Integration" only to find
out they are actually speakers at a "Buddh Mahotsav" organised by the VHP.
What happens next? A detailed video document from the sidelines of this
event.


Directions to
CAMP Roof <http://camputer.org/campstudio.html> are here.

More details announced on the Wednesday before each screening.
For related projects and material, see
http://camputer.org
http://pad.ma

For questions and responses email info(@)camputer.org

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