Bard Graduate Center’s exhibition on the life of artist, designer, journalist, and colonial administrator John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) opens up questions about visual representations of the colonial encounter in India and its aftermath. Lockwood Kipling, a significant figure in his own time, is better remembered today as Rudyard Kipling’s father. He lent his considerable talents to poetry, journalism, book illustrations, editing, museum design, furniture-making, and the plastic arts more generally. In Screen India, a film series that accompanies the exhibition, we turn to cinema through the works of artists who came of age in the shadow of empire, war, and, decolonization to explore issues of identity, interracial intimacy, and friendship across the colonial divide. Set in the context of a post-imperial world caught up in its own predicament about cross-cultural relations, and coming seventy years after the end of British colonial rule in the India, Screen India presents a series of films by renowned directors from India, France, Italy, Britain, and the United States. Scholars from around the country will introduce each film followed by a screening.
Adults $8 / Students and Seniors $5. Five-event pass, $35. Gallery admission is free with a purchased ticket. For tickets and information visit: bgc.bard.edu
Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor of the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She has written extensively on the history of gender, marriage, and family in India, postcolonial thought and history, Indian intellectual history, and the history of Indian cinema. Majumdar’s books include Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal(Duke University Press, 2009), Writing Postcolonial History (Bloomsbury, 2010). She is co-editor of Civilizing Emotions (Oxford University Press, 2015) and From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford University Press, 2007). She is currently finishing a book entitled Art Cinema in India that analyzes the works of renowned Indian directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, and Mrinal Sen to demonstrate unexpected alliances between art and popular cinema in India during a period of postcolonial political upheaval.
Tom Gunning works on problems of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture. His published work (approximately one hundred publications) has concentrated on early cinema (from its origins to the WW I) as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose (relating it to still photography, stage melodrama, magic lantern shows, as well as wider cultural concerns such as the tracking of criminals, the World Expositions, and Spiritualism). His concept of the “cinema of attractions” has tried to relate the development of cinema to other forces than storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, and an emerging modern visual culture. His book D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film traces the ways film style interacted with new economic structures in the early American film industry and with new tasks of story telling. His forthcoming book on Fritz Lang deals with the systematic nature of the director’s oeuvre and the processes of interpretation. He has written on the Avant-Garde film, both in its European pre-World War I manifestations and the American Avant-Garde film up to the present day. He also also written on genre in Hollywood cinema and on the relation between cinema and technology. The issues of film culture, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism and spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work.
October 13, 2017: Ghare Baire (Home and the World), 1984. Directed by Satyajit Ray. Introduced by Rochona Majumdar. 120 minutes.
November 3, 2017: A Passage to India, 1984. Directed by David Lean. Introduced by Sangita Gopal. 164 minutes.
November 17, 2017: The River, 1951. Directed by Jean Renoir. Introduced by Priya Jaikumar. 99 minutes.
December 1, 2017: Bhowani Junction, 1956. Directed by George Cukor. Introduced by Debashree Mukherjee. 108 minutes.
January 5, 2018: India: Matri Bhumi, 1959. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. Introduced by Tom Gunning. 90 minutes.
We are also pleased to extend complimentary need-based community tickets by request to all ticketed events. To learn more, please email [email protected].
Leading support for Public Programs at Bard Graduate Center comes from Gregory Soros and other generous donors.
