In collaboration with Majlis Cultural Centre
PUKAR and Majlis together worked on the PUKAR monsoon workshop for 2005. The germ of the workshop was at a seminar of archivists in Goa. It was built
on the idea that the archive should not be a dead space or a forbidding bureaucratic one, and that methods of increasing access should be part of its daily work.
Majlis is a Centre for Alternative Culture and Rights Discourse. The Majlis archive- Godaam- tries to work on thematic collections, primarily of audio- visual material. One of the collections is on aspects of Bombay: the Bombay riots, and the mill areas. This archive includes documentary films made on these subjects, some rushes, a collection of video research on roadside shrines in Bombay, some unedited video material on Bombay's recent elections, some play recordings and some VCDs of Hindi films around these themes.
Working with available footage was a new area to many filmmakers. A matter of concern was to work with young students and make them sensitive to form when even the idea of seeing unedited footage, hours and hours of it, was new to them.
Rahul Srivastava suggested an idea that became a fulcrum of the workshop- that is, experimenting with the short, compressed form, poetry, in particular. We located material including short filmic forms - Channel V's very expressive 'Gheun Tak'; Ayisha Abraham's exploration of questions of personal religious identity, working with footage of a grandmother, a granddaughter many years hence, and images from very early colonial footage of conversions. Longer films too were shown.
Mumbai poet, Sampurna Chatterji, brought a diverse collection of poems for discussion, including some of her own. She received an enthusiastic response from the 40 odd participants from different undergraduate colleges across the city. Artist Vidya Kamat made a presentation of an aspect of the material of her collection on roadside shrines- the religious procession on the streets of Bombay. This helped to make the experience of footage more personal since the students could see and interpret the recorded image.
Exercises were carried out to present personal interpretations of an existing image, how the image makes one feel, what it makes one think. People brought in diverse images and associations. The students worked in groups of 5 and each group was given five CDs of assorted footage to look through, to discuss, to research further.
Niraj Voralia introduced the idea of editing, and familiarized the students with the machine. The pieces were edited by the students themselves, including most of the machine operation.
The workshop created four short films- of 2-6 minutes. The participants were allowed to include and reinterpret existing images, outside of the archive, that were part of their lives. One group brought in a VCD of ‘Indian Idol’, and reinterpreted it playfully with the election footage, one group brought in a Harivanshrai Bachchan poem, another group worked with images that one of its members had painted. An unedited piece of fictional footage lying in the archive found new resonance in their works.
