"Phantoms from the Past": A glimpse at India with Ritika Kaushik
This Wednesday at Comfort Film we welcome Ritika Kaushik as our Guest Curator and her screening Phatoms of the Past: a program of Ayisha Abraham’s short films. Ritika Kaushik is a PHD student at the University of Chicago in the Cinema and Media studies program. I got to talk to Ritika about her work on the Films Division of India, found footage and as the things that intrigue her about the construction of the past.
E: What is your background and in how do you work with film?
R: I’m actually a PHD student at University of Chicago in the Cinema and Media studies program, I’ve been there for a couple of years working on my PHD. I work on state sponsored documentary films from India made during the 1960s and 1970s. It’s a historical study of that period... there’s a range of experimental films that were made during that decade and also some more propagandist films.
E: Is there a specific region that these films are from?
R: This is the state sponsored, national agency so these films would go all over the country - translated into different languages. They would be made in English or Hindi. It’s called Films Division of India.
“It felt like an alternate way of looking at India’s history - more poetic, disjunctive by way of using amateur footage…”
E: What can you tell me about the filmmaker Ayisha Abraham and why did you choose her work?
R: So she’s both an installation artist and a shorts filmmaker, I think a lot of her shorts are shown as part of installations. She now lives and works in Bangalore where she also teaches. I came across her films a few years ago but hadn’t really gotten a chance to see them. I was intrigued by the way she described them and not just the way they look: very grainy, fragmented, deteriorating, using this kind of fungus laden 8mm film but more in terms of how they’re a way of looking at India’s past that is so different from the history that has been written about it. It’s so different from the professional archives that carry those histories, like the ones I work on. It felt like an alternate way of looking at India’s history - more poetic, disjunctive by way of using amateur footage by people who were shooting home movies during this time.
E: I haven’t seen the films yet, are they all found footage or mainly found footage?
R: Some of the films have interviews and materials drawn from the official archives, but the main premise of the films emerges from the found footage.
E: I found her films often described as dreamlike or fragmented, this intrigued me. Which shorts of hers did you choose and why did you choose them?
R: I chose four films by her that all use found footage, at least three of them use 8mm home movie footage that include montages and scenes of everyday life. That was very interesting to me, to see how theses films use [scenes of everyday life] in different ways. I really wanted to put all of them together to see the longer trajectory of her work.
“I think that’s very interesting to think about, these films throwing light on the past through these blemished, disjunctive, poetic montages. I would like to think more about how her filmmaking can show us historical methods with these obsolete forms.”
E: What do you want to highlight with these films?
R: One of the main things I’m struck by in her work is what she calls the “phantoms of the past” how the way her filmmaking works is like a magic lantern. She describes it as when light falls through the lens of the projector and the images are presented to us it kind of conjures these ghost like phantoms that show us the past in a different way. I think that’s very interesting to think about, these films throwing light on the past through these blemished, disjunctive, poetic montages. I would like to think more about how her filmmaking can show us historical methods with these obsolete forms. A lot of these films had not been projected, in fact, she had to do a lot of work to project them. It’s almost like she’s preserving some of them by making the films. Her work as a filmmaker is also that of an archivist and a preservationist by collecting these forgotten an obsolete films.
E: Are you working on other projects at the moment that you'd like to share?
R: Other than my dissertation, what I’m looking at doing is a video essay on one of the filmmakers that I’m interested in, SNS Sastry. I’m currently trying to figure out how to remix his work as a video essay.
E: I'm always interested in what one would call their first experience with film/art. What was yours?
R: Now that I think back a little, I think I had a very different relationship with films growing up, maybe different than other cinephiles or what people expect cinephiles to be. I think my family had its own cinema culture at home, that wasn’t just about watching films but more about the everyday way in which we would share films and film songs. My family is very much into music and singing between my dad, grandmother, aunt and uncle there was always music based knowledge being shared related to Hindi films. They were always nerds about lyricists and songs and they would experience the films that way, by remembering the name of the songs first and film later. I had heard so many songs from my grandmother singing them and it wasn’t until my adulthood that I actually saw the films that they were from. It’s something that you live with and that you share with other people, a community based experience where you share your enthusiasm and your memory of watching those films.
Join us at 8 pm on the lawn to see “Phatoms of the Past”: a guest curation by Ritika Kaushik.
You can find more of Ritika’s work on the Film Division of India here.
Interview by Emily Perez, Comfort Film Programs Assistant.