PUBLIC FILM SCREENING // EAEFF Satellite Programmes
NIRAKAR CHHAYA by Ashish Avikunthak
Saturday, 27, July 2024
5.30 - 8 PM
4th Floor, KCC
OPEN TO ALL | Register by clicking here
Nirakar Chhaya
A Film by Ashish Avikunthak
35mm, Colour and B&W
Bengali, 82 minutes
2007
Nirakar Chhaya (Shadows Formless) is a film trapped between two monologues. A lonely and abandoned wife's fantasy comes to life when the imagined paramour she has invoked springs forth and transforms her reality. The film is an interpretation of the Malayalam novel "Pandavapuram" by the distinguished novelist A. Sethumadhavan from Kerala.
The film will be screened as part of Emami Art Experimental Film Festival (EAEFF) 2024 Satellite Programmes.
Ashish Avikunthak (born in 1972) is an Indian avant-garde filmmaker, film theorist, archaeologist and cultural anthropologist. His works have been screened at art galleries and private screenings, including Tate Modern, Centre George Pompidou, and Paris Film Archive; along with Rotterdam, Locarno, and London film festivals, among others. He is a professor of film media at Harrington School of Communication, University of Rhode Island.
He is considered to be an iconoclastic film artistwho works outside Indian mainstream cinema.His films explore Indian philosophy and existentialism and are categorized by their use of unorthodox cinematography and editing. Avikunthak films are rooted in Indian religion, epistemology, ritual, and form.Mythical, metaphysical, metaphorical, and mundane elements are found in his work.Art Review describes his works as: “Avikunthak's works insist on an Indian epistemology while utilizing a rigorously formal visual language that is clearly aware of Western avant-garde practices such as those of Andrei Tarkovsky and Samuel Beckett. These are self-consciously difficult works that are filmed in a self-consciously beautiful way.”In his essay "Cinema of Prayoga", Amrit Gangar names Avikunthak's films as an example of his eponymous strain of filmmaking.