[Reader-list] The Wager On Cinema: Screening 1 – ‘Cities of Sleep’

[The Sarai Programme]

The Sarai Programme invites you to the inaugural screening of the film
series titled, 'The Wager on Cinema'

The series begins with a screening and discussion of Shaunak Sen’s ‘Cities
of Sleep’ <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXzElV75x08&feature=youtu.be>.

The respondents for the film are Nivedita Menon and Aman Sethi.

Date: 12th Feb, 2016

Time: 5PM (Tea will be served at 04:30PM)

Venue: The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
29, Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi – 110054.

About ‘The Wager on Cinema’:
How do we estimate the value, aesthetic force, and meaning of cinema today?
As media experience, technological change has transformed it beyond
recognition, its material forms altered by analog and digital video
formats, and the modes of circulating, viewing, accessing cinema and making
it have expanded exponentially. And yet, the dream and ambition of cinema
as we have known it has not dissipated, the desire to congregate audiences
to participate in a distinct world of experience, whether to excite, amuse,
to move or to solicit reflection and engagement, to bear witness and to
mobilize.

For us at Sarai, the wager on cinema carries high stakes. It means renewing
a pact with a bid to explore experience, to take film technique as a
vehicle of the unexpected, making connections that take us aback, working
out strategies to navigate media’s capacity to deceive – to sting the
audience as much as expose secretive acts – through a forensic analytics,
through ethical calibration, but also playfully, ironically. For us, such a
wager also places emphasis on process, how things are done, how techniques
are used, what evidence is presented, what judgments are made, how publics
are engaged, framing the cinema as an act of research. In this series,
Sarai will screen films to shift focus, to conjure up unusual images and
sounds, novel techniques and subject matter, and will organise discussions
with practitioners, researchers and an interested public to renew our
investment in the cinema, to capture what it means in our times.

Synopsis of ‘Cities of Sleep’:
Cities of Sleep (dir. Shaunak Sen, 77 minutes) takes us into the heady
world of insurgent sleeper communities as well as the famous ‘sleep mafia’
in Delhi where just securing a safe sleeping spot often becomes a question
of life and death for a large number of people.

The film trails the life of two individuals, Shakeel and Ranjeet. Shakeel,
a renegade homeless sleeper has for the last 7 years slept in a diverse
range of improvised places like subways, under park benches, parking lots,
abandoned cars and lately, at areas controlled by the sleep mafia. The film
follows his attempts to secure a safe sleeping space just around the time
the infamous winter rains of Delhi are due.

Ranjit runs the ‘sleep-cinema’ community in Loha Pul, Delhi, a huge double
storey iron bridge straddling the banks of the river Yamuna. A thin strip
of land under Loha Pul houses shanty cinemas where over 400 odd homeless
come and sleep through the day for a nominal price. The flooding of the
river Yamuna poses a threat to the people sleeping there every monsoon.

The film looks not only at the tremendous social and political pressure
that sleep exerts on the homeless in the city but is also a philosophical
exploration of sleep at large.

Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and a PhD Candidate in Cinema Studies at the
School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Nivedita Menon is a Professor at the School of International Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is the author of ‘Seeing like a
Feminist’.

Aman Sethi is a journalist and a writer. He is the author of ‘A Free Man –
A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi’.