"India Films: The Naked Eye" October 9, 2009

Event: “India Films: The Naked Eye”, a visual exploration of culture and identity through the medium of photography and cinema. India Films is a continuing series of programs exploring India in all its facets. The program includes Photo Wallahs,, by famed ethnographic Filmmakers David and Judith MacDougall. Photo Wallahs examines the complexities of social anthropology by filming the photographers of Mussoorie, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, and the world in which they live. Bombay Movies is a revealing portrait of Bollywood superstar Vinod Khanna, his super fame, spirituality and family. With highlights from his famous films. Also: Norman McLaren’s brilliant A Chairy Tale with musical score by Ravi Shankar with Chatur Lal and Modu Mullick
Date: Friday, October 9, 2009 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 94110
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Photo_Wallahs_PR.pdf
India Films: The Naked Eye
Photo Wallahs+Bombay Movies
Screens at Oddball Films

"The films of David and Judith MacDougall evince a special brand of casual elegance. … These artists are among the world's finest anthropological filmmakers." - Film Forum, NY.

Oddball Films presents another program in its continuing series of films exploring the culture and identity of India.
Photo Wallahs, directed by renown anthropological documentarians David and Judith MacDougall examines the complexities of social anthropology by filming the photographers of Mussoorie, in the Himalayan foothills of northern India, and the world in which they live. The program is preceded by Bombay Movies, a portrait of Bollywoood Superstar and now politician Vinod Khanna and A Chairy Tale, by famed National Film Board of Canada director Norman McLaren with music by Ravi Shankar, Chatur Lal, and Modu Mullick. Show time is 8:30PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Films Include:

Photo Wallahs (Color, 1991, English and Hindi with English subtitles)
In this perceptive and wry documentary, renowned chroniclers of traditional cultures, David and Judith MacDougall, explore the many meanings of photography as it is practiced in Mussoorie, a famous hill station in the Himalayan foothills of Northern India. A tourist haven since the 19th century – initially for British and Indian princes, now for the Indian middle class – the local industry of photography has grown and evolved in each of these epochs to the point of obsession. Photo Wallahs compares the diverse work and attitudes of the local photographers - Mussoorie's "photo wallahs". Although photography has developed certain culturally distinctive features in India, its many forms and uses there tell us much about the nature and significance of photography throughout the world. Without spoken commentary, the film explores its subject in the streets, bazaars, shops, photographic studios and private homes of Mussoorie. Through a rich mixture of scenes that includes the photographers at work, their clients, and both old and new photographs Photo Wallahs examines photography as art and social artefact – a medium of reality, fantasy, memory and desire.

Bombay Movies (Color, 1977, Produced by Film Australia )
Vinod Khanna was one of the most popular Hindi movie stars in the massive Bollywood film industry. This film explores his life and work as a way of gaining insight into India's popular culture. The film also shows the contradictions between his super fame, spirituality (Vinod was a long time devotee of Bhagwan Rajaneesh, the sex and love guru, now called Osho) and Indian way of life. A revealing short with highlights from his Bollywood films.

A Chairy Tale (B+W, 1957, Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra)
“As filmmaking, A Chairy Tale is a virtuoso piece. A mélange of single-frame animation of a chair and an actor, multi-speed shooting, reverse shooting, moving time exposures, and the chair-as-marionette, being operated with black nylon thread, for the most part by Evelyn Lambart and Herb Taylor. A chair refuses to let a man sit on it. After many trials, the man (Claude Jutra) realizes that the chair wants the same privilege. The man concedes. Only then does the chair agree to accept his role in life, that of being sat upon. The film, with an improvised score by Ravi Shankar (With Chatur Lal and Modu Mullick) was a big success, yet co-directors McLaren and Jutra were uneasy. Brilliant though it was, they realized they had in fact made a film about assimilation. The chair was still the loser”-Donald McWilliams
A Chairy Tale won a Canadian Film Award for Best Arts and Experimental Film, as well as a BAFTA Special Award, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Live Action Short Subject.


About the Filmmakers

The McDougalls
Born in the United States but living since 1975 in Canberra, Australia, David and Judith MacDougall trained in filmmaking at UCLA in the late 1960s, married soon after, and have devoted the years since to making more than 20 ethnographic documentaries. While their work may not be well known in the wider, more populist documentary field, they are generally considered by anthropologists to be the most significant ethnographic filmmakers in the English-speaking world today. Additionally the MacDougalls were among the first filmmakers to introduce subtitling of indigenous speech into their films, an innovation that revolutionized visual anthropology. Their films continue to break new ground, both conceptually and cinematically.

About David MacDougall
David’s first feature-length documentary, To Live With Herds, filmed in Uganda, won the Grand Prix Venezia Genti at the Venice Film Festival in 1972. Soon after, he and Judith produced the famous “Turkana Conversations” trilogy on semi-nomadic camel herders of northwestern Kenya. One of the films of the trilogy, Lorang’s Way, won the prestigious first prize of Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979, and another, The Wedding Camels, the Film Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980.
The MacDougalls then made a dozen films on indigenous communities in Australia. In 1991 their work took a new direction with a film, Photo Wallahs, on photographic practices in an Indian hill town. David went on to make Tempus de Baristas, a BBC co-production about goat herders in the mountains of Sardinia, winner of the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award.
Since 1997 he has been conducting an extensive study of the Doon School, India’s most prestigious boys’ boarding school, sometimes called “the Eton of India.” This has resulted in five films focusing on various aspects of childhood and adolescence, masculinity, the social aesthetics of institutions, postcoloniality, and the training of South Asian elites.
David MacDougall’s films are distinguished by their humanity, intellectual subtlety, visual beauty, and eye for the telling detail. He also writes regularly on documentary and ethnographic cinema and is the author of Transcultural Cinema and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses.

Judith MacDougall
Judith MacDougall has made more than a dozen documentary films in Africa and Australia, and more recently, working in India and China with digital video. Her film Diya was filmed in India on digital video and continued her interest in developing new strategies to examine the relationship of people to their constructed environment and material culture. Her current film, The Art of Regret, filmed in Kunming, China, is currently in post-production. It examines the effect of the Cultural Revolution on current photographic practices and how the digital revolution is changing how photography is used. The film moves from scenes of family albums to large technically advanced studios, and raises questions about the role of photography as a medium of truth and fantasy. She continues to work with cross-cultural issues, and with the development of strategies for using video as a research tool in fieldwork situations.
Upcoming Programs:
Fri Oct 9-India Films: Photo Wallahs
Sat Oct 10 – Weirdsville 7 (Oddities from the Archives)
Fri Oct 16 – Crazy Cats 2: The Cat Came Back (Cat films- all new program)
Sat Oct 17- Home Movie Day, Strange Sinema- “World’s Strangest Home Movies”
Fri Oct 23-Sonic Oddities Live! With Jordan Glenn ( Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Roscoe Mitchell)+Friends
Sat Oct 24-Scared Straight : Drug+Alcohol Scare Films
Fri Oct 30-Rock n’ Roll at the Movies
Sat Oct 31st Terror Noir- The House on Telegraph Hill in SF + Halloween Wet Dream

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educationals, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Official Website: http://www.oddballfilm.com