It’s hard to not think of cinema as magic, when talking to Shaina Anand – curator of the New Medium section of the Jio MAMI 20th Mumbai Film Festival with Star (MAMI). “[With] cinema, when I enter a dark room, I travel,” says Anand. A filmmaker and artist, Anand conceptualised The New Medium section which was launched in 2016 at MAMI. With its previous two outings — the festival-within-a-festival section — has pushed the cinematic envelope.
Setting the pace
The highlights of The New Medium section continues to be impressive. For its inaugural programme, the section featured live jazz by the Vitaliy Tkachuk Quartet that accompanied the restored Man with a Movie Camera (1929). the following year, Anand curated a selection of CCTV footage from collaborative art studio, CAMP’s Landscape from Lower Parel. This time, for the festival’s 20th edition, the artist and curator is all set to transform an auditorium into multi-screen cinema. She’s also programmed the section into two compact days instead of an entire week.
The intent is clear, Anand wants to recreate the headiness that accompanies film festival viewing.
The New Medium III experience will follow the festival rhythm, where you see multiple films in a day, one after the other, with little sense of day and night.
“It’s like a jagran, a zone you go into,” Anand explains the fundamental rather eloquently. “For me, that is film festival rhythm. Film festival mein ek nasha aa jata hai (is intoxicating) because you go in, see a film, come out, ek cigarette maro, chai piyo, you chat with friends, you go in, one more film, you come out, when you go in it was four, you come out, it’s seven, you don’t know night or day. It becomes a kind of high, in which you sleep through one film, but you’ve seen four-five a day, a swirl of images, I wanted that to happen.”
Technology is art
New Medium III is all about multi-screen, or polyptych cinema that is very important to Anand. Multi-screen cinema requires special installations to be built, which are a rare find in places other than museums or biennales. Anand’s curation of films are specifically made for multiple projections, and have been carefully crafted by filmmakers. This year, the folks at CAMP (which Anand co-founded with Ashok Sukumaran), virtually rebuilt an entire cinema hall. Auditorium one at Andheri’s PVR ECX Citimall has been transformed from a single screen into an installation that allows for two to three projections simultaneously.
CAMP has developed the necessary technology and software to entirely produce and design New Medium III. “Technology for playing the films on loop exists, but it is not cheap,” explains Anand.
Highlights
The aim was to present significant films, made between 2016 and 2018, but also historical works that Anand considers important. A particular highlight is Piyush Kashyap and Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Iti—The End (2017) featuring Mani Kaul’s films. A young film editor, Kashyap collaborated with film scholar Rajadhyaksha to extract sequences from Kaul’s documentaries on art forms including poetry, music, sculpture, cinema and performance.
The result is a ‘brand new’ three-screen Kaul treatise on aesthetics and cinema. For a MAMI audience that is largely millennial dominated, this is an exceptionally rare opportunity to experience an inaccessible filmmaker like Kaul.
Another treat is Agnes Varda’s 3 moving images. 3 places. 3 rhythms. 3 feelings. (2018) who sets the stage by showing us what multi-screen grammar is like. At the age of 90, she debuts her first multi-channel work at New Medium III. Taken from her films Vagabond, Documenteur and The Gleaners and I respectively, Varda’s work is essentially three single shots, each with a different speed, featuring transient and multiplied sound.
Anand views the multi-screen experience as a way for people to access the language of cinema. It’s also one of CAMP’s commitments to democratise art. From a time when cinemas used to seat up to a 1,000 people, to the creation of a multiplex — housing multiple single screens under one roof — times have evolved. What CAMP has done, however, is to reverse it.
They have gone inside a cinema hall and, as Anand says, ‘multiplexed’ the screen to create a truly unique, one-of-a-kind experience.
The New Medium will show on October 29, 30 at PVR ECX, Citimall, Andheri, schedule details on CAMP and MAMI’s websites 27