20th, 21st, 22nd & 23rd Dec, 25 at Auroville Film Institute with Dr. Soudhamini
Course overview:
Video Installations can mean different things to a painter, a sculptor, a conceptual artist, an architect, a priest – and a filmmaker. Already working with both motion and time, it is neither consolidation nor fragmentation for a filmmaker, but dilation – an expansion of consciousness. It is a broadening of discourse for maker and audience alike, freeing us from contradictions (internal) and false options (external) to discover/unearth a deeper inclusivity. Overflowing the bounds of the single frame, time, space and narrative all become vectoral, gaining amplitude as well as direction, for momentum is multiplicitous.
Where the multiple is discrete, numerical and quantitative, says Deleuze, multiplicity is continuous, intensive and qualitative. ‘Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the variety of multiplicity – in other words, difference.’ (1994:182). Multiplicities give rise to and embrace difference and self-differentiation rather than splintering into binaries.
What kind of focus and attention does this call for? How now is the instant to be apprehended, and how is duration transformed? What happens when the narrative runs on broad gauge, and traditional montage surrenders to syncopation and polyrhythms? How does one come to view the habitually unacknowledged – gender, race, cultural specificity, hierarchy – and how can this gaze be challenged, refracted, redirected, nuanced, attuned, liberated?
MAIN FACULTY – Dr. SOUDHAMINI :
Soudhamini’s works of the past thirty years lie in the cusp between cinema and other forms of traditional and vernacular culture in South India including music, poetry, performance and ritual. She is deeply committed to understanding how technology can inflect these forms in an inter-medial, non-hierarchical relation, and in discovering the aesthetic first principles common to all. Following a Post Graduate Diploma in Film Direction from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, she began her professional career assisting avant garde film-maker Mani Kaul, and since then has been working across platforms and genres making short fiction, feature length non-fiction and experimental installations, receiving commissions from the Government of India as well as International Institutions like the ZDF, Germany, the Prince Claus Fund, Netherlands and the Australian Council for the Arts. Her work has been shown at all the leading international documentary festivals including Oberhausen Film Festival, FID Marseille, Creteil International Women’s Film Festival, Cinema Du Reel, Festival du Popoli, Asia Society, and the Leningrad International Documentary Festival, Russia, besides regular screenings at the India International Film Festivals (IFFI and MIFF). She has officiated on International Selection Committees and Competition Juries and has been Artist in Residence in Japan (2003) Munich (2006) and Berlin (2010).
CERTIFICATES:
Certificates of participation will be issued to those who fill up this Issuance Form.
TRAVEL GUIDANCE:
The closest Airport to Auroville is Chennai. With respect to Trains, Auroville is about 15km from Pondicherry railway station; about 75km from Villupuram and about 165 km from Chennai railway station. There are some weekly trains directly to Pondicherry, while regular trains from all parts of India to Villupuram and Chennai. There are several options of local buses and passenger trains from Chennai to Auroville; it takes about 3-4 hours approximately. For those preferring to travel by taxi, we recommend Auroville based taxi services as they can pick up from anywhere you are and drop straight to the respective Auroville guest house. Please check Auroville Shared Transport service.
Please visit www.auroville.org for orientation and additional information on Auroville.
For accomodation :
https://guesthouses.auroville.org/
QUERIES:
For any queries, please write to : filminstitute@auroville.org.in
or call / message +919969879319 (Whatsapp and telegram only).
Auroville Film Institute 