Proposal. March 2010.

CINEMA- CITY: PEOPLE AND PLACES IN PARENTHESES (WORKING TITLE)

Where is Cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvelous
continuous performance of films and scenarios.

Baudrillard, 1988:56

To grasp the secret of the city, Baudrillard suggests, you should not then begin
with the city and move inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the
screen and move outwards towards the city. This then, is a conceptualization of
the cityscape as a screenscape; the topography almost lending itself to be seen
as some sort of a flickering screen rich with metanarratives of performance,
whims, fantasies of stardom, boredom, desires and anxieties. As David Clarke
notes in his introduction to ‘The Cinematic City’ (Routledge 1997) that Cinema
can no longer be restricted to the screen upon which films are projected, or
to the darkened interior of the movie theatre where we become, directly, the
spectators of the film. And though, as one happily acknowledges the absence of
a closure in this way of looking at what qualifies as cinema in the sense that it
constantly spills out from the screen into the cityscape; there is something about
the moment the house lights are put out and we are seductively called upon
to suspend belief. Once while eavesdropping, I heard and still remember, ‘The
power of artificial light to create its own reality reveals itself in darkness’.

This is a proposal for a Flash based interactive narrative that seeks to
interrogate some of these rather fluid relationships between urban and
cinematic spaces, ways, forms and meanings associated with spectatorship
by focusing specifically on the ‘Muslim Mohalla’ (mofussil, Moslem
Neighbourhoods/ ghettos) in screen cultures. An interest in the global images
of Muslim cultures, the persistent theme of veiling and un-veiling, a series of
interviews conducted in a Delhi ghetto in 2003 and a way of photographing the
neighborhood so as to escape the explicit codes of representing such spaces
form the backdrop of this project. It takes the case of Bollywood and ghetto
neighbourhoods as its coordinates.

Unfolding as a video game of the escape of Nilofeur—the protagonist—
includes themes of looking across cultures. Nilofeur’s escape from Delhi
culminates in her meeting the masked woman in New York. The figure of
the ‘masked woman’ is based on the Fearless Nadia, a famous Indian film
actress and stuntwoman who is most remembered as a masked, cloaked
adventuress in Hunterwali (1935, The Princess and the Hunter). Obsessive
cinephilia links Nilofeur to Fearless Nadia. It is interesting to note that Fearless
Nadia was actually Mary Ann Evans, born to an Australian family. She came to
India when her father, a volunteer to the British Army was sent to India. The
project in that sense points to the global histories of evolution of cinematic
cultures in the third world countries. It combines video, text, location sounds,

animation, maps, staged enactments, photographs and graphitti. In following the
video game model of entry and exit points, the project provides interactive nodes
through which the user selects, omits and navigates Nilofeur’s history and times;
a cinematic experience and an interactive map.

One of the multiple histories that explain the emergence of these ‘ghetto’
settlements in India point towards the dramatic changes that have taken place
in connection with the decline and closure of the mills and the restructuring
of industrial employment post globalization in urban centers like Bombay
since 1960s. Ethnic-religious segmentation got aggravated in the post 1992-
93 riots and the 2002 Gujarat Genocide. The highly differentiated Muslim sects
and communities in cities have become more spatially concentrated than ever
before. In many Muslim areas, extra floors are added to the existing buildings to
accommodate migrant families; small workshops are installed on rooftops and
in high rise buildings, often causing additional noise, damage and pollution in
these already congested areas. The density of hutment and pavement dwellers
is high and grows yearly. The struggle to maintain a livelihood is obvious in
the congested streets that are practically blocked by hundreds of mobile stalls
selling cloth, fruits, brassware and so on. This is the space Nilofeur inhabits. It is
a place she loves because she is aware of the ‘invisible places of leisure’ in this
neighbourhood. But it also makes her claustrophobic. One morning, as she walks
in the neighborhood, she sees effigies of Blair, Bush and Musharraf that are to be
burnt that evening to protest against the war on Iraq.

The metaphor of walk and journeys becomes a tool to link the heterogeneous
material of this project. A walk through one of these neighbourhoods today
would most probably end with a mention of how it would bring back memories
and images of places like Karachi, Lahore, Morocco, Old Delhi or immigrant
neighborhoods in Spain. These spaces would evoke connotations of crime,
prostitution, gang war and would evoke the specter/ myth of the Muslim
Badmash. (Evil Character, Villian).The project builds upon this often expressed
feeling that a walk through one of these neighborhoods would mean a sudden,
strange feeling of walking through a set of the film; a film populated by
subliminal, dangerous, strange figures and space as essentially turbulent,
labyrinthine and disorienting.

I propose to map Nilofeur’s cinephilia both spatially (in terms of cartographs,
maps, locations, journeys to and fro cinema hall) and experientially (audio-video
narratives about the desire to watch stories unfold, ‘moviegoing’ as a uniquely
urban experience that overlapped with multiple other concerns of a migrant’s
experience in a city: seeing the city, shopping, grocery, gossip and leisure).

I choose to situate this within an earlier generation of cinemagoers (women who
wore the hijab and frequented the cinema halls during the 40s and 50s; where
the hijab made a certain kind of spatial-temporal mobility possible because
of the anonymity it endowed; along with an anonymity a new city provided
and ‘moving out’ was relatively easier) along with those of a younger generation
of women who are fascinated with the ‘multiplex’ phenomenon. Journeys to

the multiplex are characterized by a desire to be a part of the wider city; a
desire to not be recognized as against the risk of being ‘identified’ within the
neighborhood and be seen as ‘certain’ kinds of women/girls. The modern day
cinema going experience that captures the convergence of new urban spaces,
technologies, symbolic functions of images and products is pitched against
the cinema going experience of an earlier time where journeys to the theatres
meant negotiating a very different City; both in physical and material terms.

The attempt is to work with the dialogic nature of the Cinema-City relationship.
Situating sites where one can locate the multiple channels through which cinema
permeates through physicality of the neighbourhoods and the emotional lives
of their inhabitants. In this process, how marginal subjectivities (ethnic, racial,
gender, class) construct their own narratives of pleasure, abandon and hope- this
is the thought behind this project.

Ambarien Alqadar

Joseph Kraemer

MFA, Film and Media Arts Programme.