The World of Afghan Films

Saturday, 18th August, 2012
7:00pm
Venue: CAMP Rooftop

Program: 

1) Introduction to the Afghan Films and Pad.ma workshop in conjunction with documenta13 in Kassel and Kabul.

2) Screening: Audiences and Crowds from the Afghan Films Archive (a cut from the archive, made and screened in Kabul in April), 23 minutes

3) An annotated filmography of Engineer Latif Ahmadi, Afghanistan's most prolific filmmaker in recent times.

4) Screening: Khan-e-Tarikh (House of History) 1996. An essay film by Qader Taheri made during the civil war using archival footage from Afghan Films.  

5) Discussion with Shaina Anand, Faiza Ahmad Khan, Ashok Sukumaran, who were part of the workshop in Kabul, and invited guests.

Afghan Films, the national film institute of Afghanistan, opened in 1968. It is responsible for commissioning and producing the vast majority of films made in Afghanistan till today. In March/April 2012, we held a workshop there that engaged with the Afghan Films archive, the peculiar forms of history present in it, and its possible futures. The emphasis was not only on physical preservation of films, but on asking what kinds of memory lives in these images, and in the people working with them for the past few decades.

The negatives archive of Afghan Films is intact, protected and preserved by a long-term staff who also produced and screened these films, through the vagaries of political upheaval. The positives archive is less intact, but more accessible. It is marked by gaps, most famously the missing reels burned by the Taliban in the 1990s. Surviving films show the signs of extensive use, the scratches and splices that come from a film print being run through one projector after another, again and again. To watch these reels is to see an often violently changing ideological landscape set against the continuous effort and precariousness of making films under such conditions. But these images traveling now from film to pixels also showed us rich, surprising and joyful things, everyday moments and festivals and feasts, all the forgotten textures of times past and places lost or since remade in some other image. Both of these aspects of the archive suggest its potential, if it is able to reach a broader audience. It will need both concrete work and special charms to bring this promise to fruition. Our workshop attempted to build the first steps: to leave behind the idea of the archive as a fortress, to enter more fertile and open territories.

It began with a bit of time-travel: Vijay Chavan, a Bombay film technician adept with older Spirit telecine machines, arrived in Kabul. He repaired the 1980's  FDL90 telecine machine and editing Steenbeck owned by Afghan Films, and trained four staff members to use and trouble-shoot them. Shortly afterward, a local offline database was set up using an instance of Pad.ma. Pad.ma is a web-based video platform, run by a group of groups, including CAMP in Mumbai, 0x2620 in Berlin and the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore. Unlike YouTube, Pad.ma’s focus is on deep annotation and metadata, i.e. both written and automated analysis of video material, which is often footage rather than finished films. The software platform is built around the idea that digitised film can be indexed and enhanced with rich metadata, including time- coded transcriptions, translations and annotations (which can range from historical context, to interviews with cast and crew, to critical essays by film scholars).

To introduce these dimensions into the database built during the workshop, the digitising of reels was accompanied by a process of talking to people who are part of the community around Afghan Films. The 90 or so films and reels digitised so far range from the 1920s to the early 1990s, and cut across many genres, including newsreel, documentary shorts, and fiction features. Several of the current Afghan Films staff have worked there since the 1970s and have been part of these films as directors, cameramen, actors or support staff. Our conversations with them, and with former staff and actors, became a rich set of annotations for the digital film material.

The workshop ended with an outdoor screening of excerpts from the archive in Shar-e-Naw Park, Kabul. In June, the online database made its public debut both in Kassel and Kabul, and much of this material wasl seen for the first time in decades. The voices of communities around the films, and our own voices as artists, filmmakers and enthusiasts, will hopefully provide an accompanying score.

Archive Practicum took place at Afghan Films in Kabul between March 23 and April 15, 2012 as collaboration between Afghan Films, Goethe Institut, documenta13, Mariam Ghani and Pad.ma.

Workshop team: Shaina Anand, Vijay Chavan, Faiza Ahmad Khan, Mariam Ghani and Ashok Sukumaran



Gallery: The World of Afghan Films
Archive Practicum: Dont Wait for the Archive 3

A workshop at
Afghan Films, Kabul
March 25th to April 15th, 2012

with Shaina Anand, Vijay Chavan, Mariam Ghani, Faiza Khan, Ashok Sukumaran and members and staff of Afghan Films

Rough Guide to the Media Arts

Salzburg Summer Academy

This course, part history, part practical, will explore big questions raised by media art – a term usually used to describe software art or electronic practices. However, we expand this definition to all distributive media: radio, television, CCTV, electricity, the Internet and other "networks"

Indiancine.ma

Pad.ma has a sister project.

Indiancine.ma is an annotated online archive of Indian film.

Phantas.ma/polis

The video art programme of the 2021 Asian Art Biennial

Presented by Pad.ma

Fwd: Re: Archive

The central event of a month-long gathering organised around the 10th anniversary of Pad.ma the footage archive, and the 5th anniversary of Indiancine.ma.



Broken Cameras

featuring
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Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar
الجار قبل الدار

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Two films by CAMP
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From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf

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with Bombay Tilts Down (2022) and A Photogenic Line, (2019) as part of Photo 24, Melbourne.
In this pair of large-scale works, CAMP explore two sides of their practice; one that produces experimental film and video, often with unusual equipment and angles of participation, and another that creates and animates archives of moving images, documents and photography.

Closing Party! BOMBAY TILTS DOWN

Low-End Therapy
By Swadesi crew Kaali Duniya (Bamboy/Tushar Adhav) with guest MC's Kranti Naari, Pratika, MC Mawali, Khabardar Revolt.
BassBrahma and RaakShas Sound
Equality on the dance floor.

Bombay Tilts Down in Mumbai!

7-channel environment. 13 mins, on loop with two alternating soundtracks

A vertical landscape movie in facets. Filmed remotely by one CCTV camera from a single-point location atop a 35-floor building on E. Moses Road during the pandemic.

READING LISTENING SEEING Bombay Tilts Down

A tour of the work with CAMP in three acts.
12 January 7 pm, ft. Bamboy
13 January 6 pm
14 January 7:30 pm
20 January 7 pm

Concave Room

CheMoulding Part II - FUTURING
60 years of Chemould Gallery
+ CAMP invites:
Mohit Shelare, Curve in the Desire.
++
himanshu S and aqui T, Parallel Universe.

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