NEXT: Global Shorts Festival

'Next' is the generic name for a series of festivals that deal with youth film-making and gives us a good idea about next-generation film-making. Most of the films tend to come from well-known film schools around the world. The first edition is called 'Next: Global Shorts' (Mumbai, July, 2012) and will be followed by 'Next-Ibero-American Shorts' (Delhi, 2012) and 'Next: Indian Shorts' (across several cities of Europe and Latin America). The partners of every event keep changing though the curators remain the same.  

Get all the information here

The Future of Film & Media Education in India

In response to Paromita Vohra's write-up on Subhash Ghai and Whistling Woods in Mid-Day: 

Vohra’s logic is so sloppy that to deal with it comprehensively, one would need more space than what this forum allows. Though I have been a professor at WW since its inception, I am not its spokesperson by any means and I resolutely maintain my critical distance with it. However, certain things need to be pointed out. The state of film education in India is a serious matter that needs to be addressed with the right degree of seriousness and certainly not with flippant social analysis which trivializes the entire issue with mere claptrap. Vohra might get some cheap thrills out of ridiculing the “international” aspect of WWI but I bear witness to what the Dean of UCLA (one of the world’s leading film schools) had once said: “We do not have anything like this in the US”.  Having seen all major film schools in India from the inside (and several major film schools abroad), I have not come across any institution where curriculum issues and teaching methodologies are discussed and debated in detail for months on end and constantly updated by some of the best minds in the Indian film industry. Student responses are constantly assessed and courses are redesigned in almost every semester. Personally, I have never witnessed such positive energy, seriousness of purpose and academic rigour anywhere else, far less in our state-run film schools which are in a pathetic state of decay.  

At a time when the Indian state acknowledges its own failure in creating worthwhile institutions and is emulating successful ideas developed and implemented at WW (entrusting it to develop, for example, the CBSE curriculum), it is a fundamentally regressive mode of thinking that creates false oppositions of “state vs. private” (or legit subsidy vs. lusty profit) as if it was a good guy vs. bad guy encounter of a “Bollywood” thriller. At a time when India is on the verge of ushering in private universities to play a lead role in defining India’s intellectual future, individuals like Vohra need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the state’s role in enabling the creation of such institutions, which may often have to include generous land grants/subsidies without which it is impossible to make such educational ventures possible, specially  in a city like Bombay. In any case, the whole hoopla around the legitimacy of the land grant is based on a false premise. WW does not even own the land. It is convenient to ignore such small details. 

There are several things in WW that one would be critical about but the fact remains that rarely in India has one seen such an efficient set-up where everything seems to work with clockwork precision. What I personally consider extraordinary about Subhash Ghai’s achievement is not necessarily the films he has made but the fact that he has made WW grow beyond himself and if one looks closely, one would find that ALL the teachers who are moulding the “next-generation” filmmakers of the mainstream industry actually belong to the opposite camp of “parallel cinema”, thus imbibing students with a sensibility that can perhaps change the face of our cinema. In this regard, Ghai’s extraordinary dedication and sincerity takes on the dimension of some kind of “public service”. Add to this the fabulous infrastructure and the beautiful architecture! 

Far from being a rhetoric, the ‘international’ dimension in WWI is real in that there are several members of faculty, staff and students who are from abroad and the curriculum is not at all narrowly ‘Bollywood’. The overwhelming number of films that I personally show and analyse in my Film Appreciation classes are a far cry from what goes by the name of Bollywood. We have even shown extremely “mediocre” Indian documentaries and put them up for debate. Vora should be thankful for that.

The prohibitive fees is definitely the major talking point, always. However, the student profile seems to be changing gradually. They are not rich-kids always; many of them have inner-town middle-class backgrounds, empowered by loans at a time when Indian middle classes have consciously realized that education is their best investment.

It is fundamentally dishonest to ask WW to show results in terms of “stars” that it has churned out. It is common knowledge that hardly anyone makes an impact in the film industry in less than 15 years and WW’s first batch graduated only 4 years ago. A proper assessment can only be made at least a decade later but to dismiss all the significant achievements already accomplished, is to trivialize the debate about film/media education and the creative role of the private sector. Every film institute in the world, overtly or covertly, has a certain ideological stance (and agenda) with regard to mainstream industry. It is obvious that a film school located in the heart of the world’s biggest film industry would be resolutely industry-oriented like many film schools in US. It does not serve any purpose to resort to simplistic, prejudiced stereotypes that refuse to see the cultural battles that are being fought on daily basis by people who have chosen to be inside the bastion of commercial filmmaking with the hope of making it a bit more sensitive to the world around us.

Finally, I would leave Vohra with the thought to honestly ponder over whether she would go to a state-run subsidised hospital or go to any extent to avail the services of an efficiently-run but expensive private hospital, in case she is confronted with a severe cardiac arrest.  

Listamania: 30 Great Film Books

In the year 2000, Sight & Sound magazine asked 51 leading critics and writers which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written. The choices threw more light on the writers who made the selections rather than on the content or quality of the books they mentioned. It only intrigued me enough to come up with my own list, though not restricted to a list of five. These may not be the 'greatest' books on cinema (if any such judgement was possible) but they are the ones closest to my heart.

30 Best books on Cinema (not in order of excellence)

1.      Signs & Meaning in the Cinema by Peter Wollen (Secker & Warburg, 1969)

2.      Hitchcock by Francoise Truffaut (Paladin, 1967)

3.      The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of the Film  by Stanley Cavell (Viking, 1971)

4.      What is Cinema? Volumes I & II by Andre Bazin (University of California Press, 1967, 1971)

5.      Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson (Editions Gallimard, 1975)

6.      Currents in Japanese Cinema by Tadao Sato (Kodansha International, 1982)

7.      Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel (Random House, 1974)

8.      Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky (Bodley Head, 1986)

9.      The Cinema Book by Pam Cook (BFI, 1985)

10.   The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema by Robert Phillip Kolker (OUP, 1983)

11.   Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein (Harcourt Brace, 1949)

12.   Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein (Faber & Faber, 1943)

13.   A History of the Cinema: From its Origins to 1970 by Eric Rhode (Allen Lane, 1976)

14.   Bergman on Bergman ed. Stig Bjorkman, et al (Touchstone, 1973)

15.   Godard on Godard ed. by Tom Milne (De Capo Press, 1986)

16.   To the Distant Observer: Form & Meaning in Japanese Cinema by Noel Burch (University of California Press, 1979)

17.   Ozu by Donald Richie (University of California Press, 1974)

18.   The Japanese Film: Art & Industry by Donald Richie & Joseph L Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1982)

19.   Movies & Methods, Volume I and II ed. Bill Nichols (University of California Press, 1976 ; reprinted by Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993)

20.   Film Theory & Criticism ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (OUP, 1985)

21.   Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism ed. Stuart Kaminsky (OUP, 1975)

22.   Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism ed. Peter Bondanella (OUP, 1978)

23.   Concepts in Film Theory by Dudley Andrew (OUP, 1984)

24.   My Autobiography by Charles Chaplin (Penguin, 1964)

25.   Jump-Cut: Hollywood, Politics and Counter-Cinema ed. Peter Steven (Between the Lines, 1985)

26.   New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism & Beyond ed. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (Routledge, 1992)

27.   Brazilian Cinema ed. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam (Columbia University Press, 1995)

28.   Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America by John King (Verso, 2000)

29.   The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie (University of California Press, 1998)

30.   Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave by David Desser (Indiana University Press, 1988)