On the Filmmaker’s Archive

ConTrust Research seminar “India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia”

With Ruchir Joshi

Ruchir Joshi joined the film world in India in the early 1980s, when he was in his early twenties, first as an assistant director and then as an independent documentary and essay film-maker. In this talk Joshi will begin with mapping out the cinematic work-scape in India (specifically in Calcutta and Bombay) and putting it into the wider context of art-practice current at the time. The talk will go into the peculiar difficulties and challenges faced by film-makersaspiring to serious cinema, while unpacking the effects of a flickering, present-absent archive and archival practice on a milieu that was yet to form a stable relationship with distant and recent memory.

Ruchir Joshi is a film-maker, columnist and writer based in Calcutta. His films include Egaro Mile /Eleven Miles and Tales from Planet Kolkata. He is the author of a novel, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (Harper Collins UK and India). He is an opinion writer for leading newspapers and magazines in India, as well as a contributor of several essays and photo-text pieces to magazines, including Granta.

Presented by:
Graduate Research Training Group “Configurations of Film”, Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies (TFM) at Goethe University and Research Initiative “ConTrust: Trust in Conflict – Political Life under Conditions of Uncertainty” at the Research Centre Normative Orders