Oscillations... Occasions of Excess and Interrogation

Abstract

This paper discusses the complexity surrounding inter-cultural exchange, from a post-colonial, critical Indian perspective. For this, I consider my film practice, informed by discourses and thoughts I have engaged within a Western landscape. To furnish the discussion, I draw attention to moments from Indian avant-garde and modernist cinema that bring to the fore intersections encountered by the third world artist. An interface with culturally disparate traditions presents an artist's conscience with tense moments of interrogation and fluidity. Identity, self-determination, resistance and assertion assume altering dimensions as one encounters temporal disjunctions and confusions in the experiences and discourses of tradition and modernity. While developing film practice, I find myself oscillating between the seductions of an esoteric, native philosophical tradition; and the radical possibilities of Western Modern art and discourse. I will discuss varied influences in my recent work wherein, I mix documentary and poetic modes for text construction; combine philosophical understandings of advaitam and formlessness with form-based and reflexive cinematic techniques such as montage. To access a space of re-appropriation, marked by an excess, between assertion and contradiction - where identity is defined, asserted almost essentially, but is not limited in any categorisation.