21 Apr Plastic Archives: Documenting the Cinema-City
Bhaskar Sarkar (Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Thursday, April 21 / 4:00 pm
2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building
This lecture focused on a certain trajectory in recent works by documentary filmmaker Madhusree Dutta: her preoccupation with the triad city-cinema-publics to lay out the contours of a different kind of documentary poetics in which subjectivity, space, and material practice become inseparable. At stake is a documentary praxis that self-consciously articulates nonrepresentational strategies—camera movement, nature of film stock, editing rhythm—that produce structuration and induce intuitive comprehension, along with the more deliberative representational tropes—talking-head interviews, voice-over narration, documentation of activities and events—that produce easily recognizable iconographic depictions.
Bhaskar Sarkar is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition and co-editor of Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering. He is currently working on a monograph on plastic nationalisms.