[Reader-list] The World of Afghan Films, Saturday, 18 August, 2012. 7:00 pm

[shaina a]

Dear All,
We invite you to spend an evening at CAMP and to travel into
The World of Afghan Films
Saturday, 18th August, 2012
7:00pm
Venue: CAMP Rooftop <http://camputer.org/campstudio.html>
301, Alif Apartments
34-A Chuim Village,
Khar (W)
Mumbai-52

Program:

1) Introduction to the Afghan Films and Pad.ma <http://pad.ma> workshop in
conjunction with documenta13 in Kassel and Kabul.

2) Screening:* Audiences and Crowds from the Afghan Films Archive*. 23
minutes (A cut from the digitized archived that was made and    screened in
Kabul in April, 2012).

3) An annotated filmography of Latif Ahmadi, Afghanistan's most prolific
filmmaker in recent times.

4) Discussion with Shaina Anand, Faiza Ahmad Khan, Ashok Sukumaran, who
were part of the workshop in Kabul, and invited guests.

Afghan Films, the national film institute of Afghanistan, opened in 1968,
was never shut down and remains the main film commissioning and producing
body in the country. In March/April 2012, we held a workshop there that
engaged with the Afghan Films archive, the peculiar forms of history
present in it, and its possible futures. The emphasis was not only on
physical preservation of films, but on asking what kinds of memory lives in
these images, and in the people working with them for the past few decades.

The negatives archive of Afghan Films is intact, protected and preserved by
a long-term staff who also produced and screened these films, through the
vagaries of political upheaval. The positives archive is less intact, but
more accessible. It is marked by gaps, most famously the missing reels
burned by the Taliban in the 1990s. Surviving films show the signs of
extensive use, the scratches and splices that come from a film print being
run through one projector after another, again and again. To watch these
reels is to see an often violently changing ideological landscape set
against the continuous effort and precariousness of making films under such
conditions. But these images traveling now from film to pixels also showed
us rich, surprising and joyful things, everyday moments and festivals and
feasts, all the forgotten textures of times past and places lost or since
remade in some other image. Both of these aspects of the archive suggest
its potential, if it is able to reach a broader audience. It will need both
concrete work and special charms to bring this promise to fruition. Our
workshop attempted to build the first steps: to leave behind the idea of
the archive as a fortress, to enter more fertile and open territories.

It began with a bit of time-travel: Vijay Chavan, a Bombay film technician
adept with older Spirit telecine machines, arrived in Kabul. He repaired
the 1980's  FDL90 telecine machine and editing Steenbeck owned by Afghan
Films, and trained four staff members to use and trouble-shoot them.
Shortly afterward, a local offline database was set up using an instance of
Pad.ma. Pad.ma is a web-based video platform, run by a group of groups,
including CAMP in Mumbai, 0x2620 in Berlin and the Alternative Law Forum in
Bangalore. Unlike YouTube, Pad.ma’s focus is on deep annotation and
metadata, i.e. both written and automated analysis of video material, which
is often footage rather than finished films. The software platform is built
around the idea that digitised film can be indexed and enhanced with rich
metadata, including time- coded transcriptions, translations and
annotations (which can range from historical context, to interviews with
cast and crew, to critical essays by film scholars).

To introduce these dimensions into the database built during the workshop,
the digitising of reels was accompanied by a process of talking to people
who are part of the community around Afghan Films. The 90 or so films and
reels digitised so far range from the 1920s to the early 1990s, and cut
across many genres, including newsreel, documentary shorts, and fiction
features. Several of the current Afghan Films staff have worked there since
the 1970s and have been part of these films as directors, cameramen, actors
or support staff. Our conversations with them, and with former staff and
actors, became a rich set of annotations for the digital film material.

The workshop ended with an outdoor screening of excerpts from the archive
in Shar-e-Naw Park, Kabul. In June, when the growing database makes its
public debut both in Kassel and Kabul, much of this material will be seen
for the first time in decades. The voices of communities around the films,
and our own voices as artists, filmmakers and enthusiasts, provide an
accompanying score.

*This evening is part of Umbrella, a new coalition of art spaces in
Mumbai.*For more information on events between August 16-19 see pdf at
http://camputer.org/umbrella/UmbrellaArtEvents.pdf


____________

To unsubscribe from this mailer, simply send an email with the word "
unsubscribe" as the subject to camp-request at lists.mailb.org