TALK "Landscape Films and the Films Division of India" By Priya Jaikumar at School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium (SAA), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Mehrauli Road > 5pm on 6th January 2017

Time : 5:00 pm (Tea will be served from 4.30 pm) Add to Calendar 06/01/2017 17:00 06/01/2017 18:30 Asia/Kolkata TALK "Landscape Films and the Films Division of India" By Priya Jaikumar Event Page : http://www.delhievents.com/2017/01/talk-landscape-films-and-films-division.html School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium (SAA), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi - 110067 DD/MM/YYYY

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served Basis)

Venue : School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium (SAA), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi - 110067
Venue Info : www.jnu.ac.in | SAA Map
Nearest Metro Stations - 'Hauz Khas(Yellow Line)' &  'Delhi Aerocity(Orange Line)'

Event Description : School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University Presents "Landscape Films and the Films Division of India" A Talk By Priya Jaikumar, Bryan Singer Division of Cinema & Media Studies, University of Southern California And author of 'Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India'.

Synopsis: Remembered by fellow documentarians as “Nehru’s favorite cameraman, ” N. S. Thapa directed several landscape and industrial shorts for the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s Films Division unit from the 1950s to the 1990s.  Everest (1968) is one of his award-winning films, which records the historic expedition of the first all-Indian team to scale Mount Everest, on May 20th, 1965.  The story of this film’s production, however, is less matinee-worthy. Films Division initially blocked Thapa’s involvement in the film, so that he was never part of the climb that his film triumphantly documents. The visual aesthetics of the film’s completed version, and its haphazard production process, tell parallel stories about cinema’s status as a visual image and a regulated object. Everest uses a visual lexicon of nationalism characteristic of several Films Division landscape documentaries. At the same time, such shorts register the variable styles of Films Division’s cameramen and directors, and the precarious creative autonomy of its commissioned filmmakers, who were impacted by the institution’s funding structures and the state’s film stock rationing and administrative procedures. In this talk, I use landscape shorts as a provocation to thinking about the relationship between onscreen cinematic spaces, and the institutional and social spaces of bureaucracy, industry, and ideology. The effort is to push back the horizon of historical analysis, so that space refers simultaneously to the visual unit within a film’s frame, and the concept driving a historiography of the state’s efforts to transform a place into a politico-economic territory.

BIO: Priya Jaikumar is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is author of Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India, 1927-47 (Duke, 2006), and has published essays on Indian cinema, transnational feminism, film policy, film and geography, postcolonial cinemas and colonial cinemas, one of which received the Society of Cinema and Media Studies award for best essay in an anthology (2013). She is completing a manuscript titled Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space for Duke University Press. The book offers five arguments in favor of a spatial film history, by following a range of films shot on location in India from the 1930s to the present.  This talk borrows from a section on “Rationalized Space.”

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