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The screening will be followed by Q&A with director Karan Johar and screenwriter Shibani Bathija conducted by Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies.
Karan Johar is the director of two hugely successful and award winning Bollywood films, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something is Happening), 1998, and Kabbi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Happiness and Tears), 2001, as well as writer of the screenplay of Nikhil Advani's first feature Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come), 2003. He is host of a popular chat show on Indian television "Coffee with Karan," which has given him celebrity status.
Shibani Bathija is a screenwriter who holds a BA from DePauw and an MA from San Francisco State. This is her second screenplay--her first was for the hit film Fanaa (2006)--and she is currently working on a follow up to India's own superhero movie Krrish (2006)--Krrish 2.
Karan Johar's work inhabits the mainstream idiom of contemporary Indian film, the family melodrama, of which he is arguably the most articulate exponent. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is a risk-taking departure for Johar for it takes as its subject matter marital infidelity. Dev (Shah Rukh Khan) is a professional soccer player whose promising career is nipped in the bud after an accident. He is married to Rhea (Preity Zinta) whose career is on an upswing. They have a son, Arjun, and Dev's mother, Kamaljit (Kirron Kher), lives with them. Maya (Rani Mukerjee) teaches at a nursery and has married her closest friend Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan), a PR consultant, who like his playboy father, Samarjit Singh (aka Sam, Amitabh Bachchan), enjoys having fun. The dissatisfaction simmering below the surface of these apparently harmonious relationships is catalyzed by a chance encounter between Dev and Maya. How all the different characters deal with this new development in their lives forms the crux of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna.
A Seminar by Visiting Professor Moya Luckett
Following the recent publication of Amelie Hastie's new book, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History (Durham, NC: Duke U.P., 2007), this seminar seeks to open up consideration of how historiography itself might be gendered. While social film histories clearly reveal how history traditionally supported more masculine and patriachal accounts of culture and society, the extent to which historiography, methods, and sources contribute to the gendering of history is still open. Hastie's work explores emphemera, marginal writings, collections, souvenirs and stars' own publications, arguing that these often neglected texts construct not only alternative feminine film histories but open up alternate feminine historiographies. Professor Luckett will extend some of these ideas examining how these supposed alternatives actually correspond to more mainstream historiographic practices and histories, and encouraging participants to think about what gender's role in historiography might be. Professor Luckett hopes to open up discussion on sources, documentation, materiality and methods, thinking about how we use them and what else they might signify.
This round-table discussion will explore some of the issues around the ontology of the filmic image, especially in the wake of innovations in digital technology. The format will be the discussion of ideas rather than formal presentations. Lisa Broad (2nd-year Ph.D.) will discuss the relationship and distinction between the metaphysical status of the image--what a film image is--versus what kind of knowledge it affords about the distribution of physical objects vis a vis analogue and digital images, Ohad Landesman (3rd-year Ph.D.) will talk about the impact of digital aesthetic on the nature and function of the documentary film. Richard Allen (Chair of Cinema Studies) will discuss what kind of sense might be given to the "transparency thesis" of photography and cinema that avoids a neo Bazinian committment to ontology of cinema and the causual theory of perception that underpins it.
This workshop revisits the long-standing concern amongst filmmakers, critics, and historians with the border between fiction and non-fiction in documentary cinema, focusing on what is perhaps the most vexed aspect of this problem: the status of performance in general, and historical re-enactment in particular, in documentary. Panelists will present an excerpt from a paradigmatic work of re-enactment, and explain how their works-in-progress address the problems raised and exemplified by these works. Topics to be considered include: the ritual and unconscious dimensions of re-enactment; the tensions between political, social, and theatrical senses of acting; the use of film and other recording media for cultural memory and social fantasy; the artistic, sociological, and ethnographic dimensions of casting and directing non-actors; narrative structures in documentary; the voice as site and medium of re-enactment.
Professor Kahana will discuss his recent work on United 93. Also presenting work on the role of performance in nonfiction work will be Anuja Jain, Katie Model, and Vinicius Navarro.
Although the use of non-professional actors has a long history in both narrative and documentary cinemas, the casting of non-actors as themselves in central roles in United 93 at once draws on and inverts the usual auratic function of this dramatic device. The presence of these social actors in the diegetic frame and structure of United 93 focuses the contemporary problem of the political speech act, and its dependence upon what Pierre Bourdieu calls the performance of sincerity. Appearing as “himself” in the midst of a professional production of narrative entertainment, the official or public person models what Bourdieu calls the “symbolic power” of politics, the system by which “credit and credibility” are extended to state offices and the functionaries who occupy them. The dramatic performances of these figures thus permit United 93 and films like it to generate reflection on the place of belief and fantasy in the production of political authority and the substance of the state. At the same time, the tension produced in such works between various senses of acting – dramatic, social, political – can provoke speculation on the conditions through which reality can be acted upon or changed, a question common to both politics and documentary film.
This presentation explores the ways in which Indian cinema, both feature fiction and documentary shapes a new sense of “national” identity with the emergent “national” consciousness in 1990s. Central to this discussion is the way in which melodrama specifically functions in such imaginings of a “national” identity within both cinemas. Often melodrama is associated with mainstream popular cinema, and this presentation will show how a documentary film like Suma Josson’s Bombay’s Blood Yatra also deploys the melodramatic mode, thereby raising the issue of performance.
Usually documentary filmmaking is distinguished and privileged above commercial cinema because of its use of interviews, along with footage and other archival material. These “natural,” “spontaneous,” and non-constructed narratives legitimatize the representations made by the documentary, valorizing documentary in itself as a new source of knowledge. My paper points out how not only narrative accounts by interview subjects, but other choices such as low-angle shots or high-key lightening by the filmmaker mobilizes a similar kind of emotional “excess” and narrative enticements which often keep us riveted to our seats during the commercial or popular melodramas. By focusing upon this very conscious use of melodramatic mode within the documentary cinema, this presentation draws attention to the issue of performance, and reasons for it by the subjects as well as a desire for performance and its use by the filmmaker himself, within the documentary film.
The TECO’s Press Division has kindly provided the Enchanting Taiwan photography exhibition for display at the conference. The representations of Taiwan’s scenic landscapes and folk customs are linked to the conference’s exploration of “Reality.” Enchanting Taiwan is at the King Juan Carlos Center from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday, February 17, 2007.