A Changing Line in the Light Falls
- Submitting institution
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University of Winchester
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33LK2
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
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- Month
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- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This PaR project investigated the losses and gains of transposing painting to motion picture, drawing currency from, and transgressing, South Asian moving image culture. From its 1920s beginnings, cinema in South Asia was known as chala-chitra (‘moving image’); a technological extension of the scroll painting-storytelling tradition where religious sagas or exceptional news events were (and are) sung in the villages whilst unravelling an illustrated scroll. The research brought my context as a European artist-filmmaker into dialogue with this rich, South Asian moving image legacy, with the intention of hybridizing and diversifying the possibilities of video art internationally, whilst benefitting from Indian audiences’ connection with their local heritage
Using After Effects video software, I painted a series of black and white landscapes, photographically reversed them, and edited them together to form a continuously scrolling animation. Working closely with composer, Will Saunders, an accompanying sung poem was then composed. Whilst the migration of painting to film has been has analysed in film semiotics, my practice distinctively connects with the ‘ecologies of technological experimentation’ in contemporary Indian video art (Nancy Adajania, 2018) drawing conceptually from traditions like Tholu Bommalata (shadow puppetry).
Re-imagining chala-chitra for the digital age, my scrolling panoramas are deliberately reduced to ‘Messianic time’ (Giorgio Agamben); a slow, qualitative, cyclical time that resists contemporary technology’s ideological privileging of speed (see Kidwell, 2015). The animation, installed in an old warehouse, allowed a bodily encounter with the image, replicating the chala-chitra storytellers’ intimate, audio-visually immersive audience experience, exposed to song and visual narrative at once.
The film was screened in 2017 at Future Orbits, a Kochi-Muziris Biennale collateral event (co-curators: Rashmi Sawhney and Lucia King), Kerala, South India and at 'Loss and Lucidity' exhibition, in 2018 at Santora Space 205, Santa Ana, California.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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