Film Analysis – Auroville Film Institute

Memory and Ground of Life: Reading Andrei Tarkovsky with Mirror

Celebrating half a century of the life of the film, the course will examine Mirror not merely as a memoir on celluloid, but as the director’s rigorous artistic and creative effort to locate and restore his ground of life. By navigating the fluid boundaries between memories, dreams, reality, and history, participants will see how Tarkovsky uses cinematic contemplation to transform personal existence into a universal spiritual inquiry, especially in a time of heightened bureaucratic materialism of erstwhile USSR.
The course would delve into the creative evolution of the film, with the references of Tarkovsky’s own script and diary entries. This transition from raw memory to structured image and fluid sensations offers a rare window into the alchemy of Tarkovsky’s creative process, dissolving the boundaries between lived experience and cinematic form.

Ultimately, the course would underscore Tarkovsky’s belief that without memory, without yearning for the memory, without the conscious engagement with the traces of the lost time, human beings tend to lose their ground of ethical existence, making Mirror an essential human document for preservation of the possibility of ethical becoming of the self.

Béla Tarr, the Hungarian Plain, and the Endurance of the Long Take

28th February and 1st March | ONLINE | with Debkamal Ganguly Course OverviewThis two-day online intensive explores the cinema of Béla Tarr as a sustained philosophical inquiry into time, space, and existence after the erosion of metaphysical and historical certainties. Centered primarily on Sátántangó (1994) and The Turin Horse (2011), the course approaches Tarr’s distinctiveContinue reading “Béla Tarr, the Hungarian Plain, and the Endurance of the Long Take”

Craft, Ritual and Cinema: Mani Kaul’s Mati Manas

Specially Curated Sessions of Film Analysis and Film Appreciation as a part of Open Space Documentary Arts Programme. 29th-30th November 2025_ONLINE14:30 to 18:30 IST with Deb Kamal Ganguly COURSE OVERVIEW :Hovering curiously between the spectrums of documentary and fiction in different intensities, Mati Manas (Mind of Clay, 1985, 92 min) by Mani Kaul is a uniqueContinue reading “Craft, Ritual and Cinema: Mani Kaul’s Mati Manas”

Composing Reality: Structures of Mediation in Documentary Editing

Cinema Praxis Series14:30 hrs IST, 8th & 9th November, 2025, 02 days OVERVIEW:This course approaches documentary editing as a way of composing the impressions of reality, towards emerging discourse and experience, through discovering within the images the rhythms and contradictions of the world itself. Every cut, pause, continuation, or rupture becomes a thought about: howContinue reading “Composing Reality: Structures of Mediation in Documentary Editing”

Temporality and the Sensation of Cinematic Time

Cinema Praxis Series23-24 August, 2025, 14.30 – 18.20 IST, online OVERVIEW:The relationship between cinema and time has always been a central enigma of the moving image.More than any other art form, cinema is bound to temporality, not simply recording events, butimpressing upon us the sensation of time itself. Time in cinema is never only aContinue reading “Temporality and the Sensation of Cinematic Time”

Film-Philosophy with ‘Diary of a Country Priest’ by Robert Bresson

Specially Curated Sessions of Film Analysis and Film Appreciation 9th-10th November 2024_ONLINE14:30 to 18:30 IST with Deb Kamal Ganguly COURSE OVERVIEW :In the history of cinema, it is a rarity that the creators like Robert Bresson arrived and illuminated the possibility of cinematic creation as unique artistic and philosophical achievement on behalf of the frailty ofContinue reading “Film-Philosophy with ‘Diary of a Country Priest’ by Robert Bresson”

Psychology and Cinema: Through a Glass Darkly

Film Analysis and Film Appreciation8th and 9th June, 2024 | ONLINE OVERVIEW:The cinema universe of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman attained unprecedented artistic and expressive brilliance with the film Through a Glass Darkly (1961), the first offering of the trilogy with the unusual modernist thematic of ‘God’s silence’.Exploring the psychological depths of the femaleContinue reading “Psychology and Cinema: Through a Glass Darkly”

What is CONTINUITY?

Exploring Continuity Principles in Cinema? 30th April 2024, 14:30 to 18:30 IST _Online OVERVIEW:This session would illustrate the historical stages of development of various aspects of Continuity Principles, mainly practiced with great success in classical Hollywood era. These principles got gradually adapted, modified, challenged in other cultures of filmmaking in the world. It would beContinue reading “What is CONTINUITY?”

Ecofiction as Epiphany

Introduction to the Cinematic Mise-en-scène A Masterclass with Dr. Soudhamini 10th to 13th May 2024 in Auroville OVERVIEW:Between climate denial and dystopia lies a fertile space for self-sensitization which this short course facilitates through the grammar of the cinematic mise-en-scène. If the Japanese haiku is about distilled observation and startling juxtapositions – akin structurally to theContinue reading “Ecofiction as Epiphany”

The Documentary Impulse

With Deb Kamal Ganguly25th to 29th March, 2024 ; 14:30 to 18:30 IST_Online Duration: 5 days, 4 hours per day COURSE OVERVIEW:This course is designed primarily for the regular participants as one of the initial modules for the one-year multi space documentary program offered by AVFI. At the same time the course is also offeredContinue reading “The Documentary Impulse”