Vipin Vijay : On his work
VIDEO GAME
1. What was the source of inspiration or creative trigger to make these films? Was it an idea, experience, image, incident or thought?
I need to rewind a bit. As a filmmaker, my earliest experience to align with like-minded friends started from my film school days. We were all very young. For my graduation film ‘The Egotic World’, I was working on the thematic probe of the epic text of Yoga Vasishta. To recollect now, I still remember the night we reached this place in an interior village in Bengal after a daylong location scouting. To our surprise the next morning we found that the place was scattered with thousand-year-old Jaina ruins and idols. The space was totally alienating to us. I just took the call and finally we decided to shoot the film there. Now as we started shooting, the process of filming became a bizarre encounter for all of us. People getting lost and going missing, camera breaking down, crazy accidents…The crew was slowly getting very numb. Slowly we realized that we were adopting spatial feelings with different time-based co-ordinates. This particular realization and the filming process in itself was a high. Now to look back, I would say a new process and an idea of what it means to ‘collaborate’ started originating from there. This idea of making encounters hard to make our positions strange to ourselves is something I gathered from this experience. This feeling of being pulled and pushed at the same time has been one of the pivotal areas of my filmmaking. This I feel was exchanged conceptually in the works that followed. The film school was indeed a window opening to the vast function of art amidst the contemporary confusion. Then I graduated and I came back to Kerala. I found the situations really confusing in terms of practicing cinema at that point of time in Kerala. I developed ideas but on the level of film practice, I was not finding money to work on 35mm. Digital Video revolution hadn’t fully arrived in the country. So the only possibility was to utilize low-end video. This is also a time when one read Fredrick Jameson, the Marxist political theorist, and his seminal essay where he talked about the phenomenology of memory in context of video. So there was a conscious attempt to look at the medium from those contexts. It was clear by then - a work in video is much separate from that of a work in film. But it is perhaps in “Video Game”, with my editor and collaborator Debkamal Ganguly that we have tried to engage ourselves to those discourses on video in a much more interesting way.
The inspiration for ‘Video Game’ was the unused 35mm black & white footages of my earlier mentioned diploma film ‘The Egotic World’, that I got to get hold of in one of my visits to the institute after I passed out. I had edited my diploma film on a steenbeck machine, so one had a to make a 35mm positive work print for editing the work. Usually the institute discarded the unused positive work print footages after the student graduates. They were sold as scrap and I was told in some cases the filmstrips were recycled and made into bangles. I somehow got access to those 35 mm work print positives before they were thrown off. Once I had access to this, we decided to take a trip revisiting to the earlier mentioned location where I had shot my diploma film this time carrying a video camera and on an old Mark II Ambassador car. I specifically wanted a black Ambassador car. No reasoning, I just chose this time. We searched and found out an old black ambassador car. We took off, did take a few detours, had few new encounters but when we finally reached the space where I had actually shot my diploma film, somehow the enigma for me on a personal level had vanished. I was also doing the camera work. I kept shooting whenever I felt like, but nothing much happened. There were three of us, my film school batch mates, who were also part of the earlier film shot in the same space. We stopped talking to each other. I gave up and came back. But surprisingly a whole new process evolved while editing this video. Just during the process of watching those 35mm footages, we observed that the dust particles on the old film footage worked in a totally new fashion. I had actually shot the unused 35 mm positive footages using a video camera. These ingredients on the 35 mm filmstrip again got unbalanced when those got recorded in the medium of video. It suddenly felt like a preserved substance that was held with memory. A new set of sensibilities started evolving. We decided not to just only look on the informational part of the images. This was a game we invented by pushing the images we shot to our intellect and reasoning. We were sucked into a new experiential self, and in the process fundamental concepts were discovered. Eventually this opened up uneven outline of feeling and perception. Nevertheless it was not a search of hidden truth in the images. Of course, these images carried unseen folds of the subjectivity. This subjectivity is not a distinct one and was also not easily decipherable. I think it was a combination of very many things. The idea of memory possibly came from a variety of sources. Human subjectivity and memory, subjectivity of the machine, post-human pragmatic thought, audio-tactile medium of video, the archeology of imagination, all started emanating from this process. This was a vital turning point. It was a like an unexpected wave which secretly gave you a reassurance. It was an assurance to move beyond the surface level information that one saw in the images. The process slowly picked up. And strangely a sense of confidence was building and we knew that the turf of the video was becoming extremely playful. In the next phase we conceptually assimilated it. We ended up treating those images as 'concept-image'. This process tends to continue till date.
I would say Chitrasutram / The Image threads; my fiction feature film that followed is in one sense an extension of this preoccupation. Lastly, I should specifically thank Mr. Rajiv Mehrotra and the team of PSBT who supported me in making this video.
SMALL –SCALE SOCIETIES
What was the source of inspiration or creative trigger to make these films? Was it an idea, experience, image, incident or thought?
It was around 2018, and I had almost given up making films. I embarked on a new phase, deciding to teach cinema at the film school. As part of the curriculum, I had invited Dr C S Venkiteswaran as an expert to evaluate the student projects. We were having lunch in the campus and I talked about this place called Jwalapuram, where I had shot a portion of my last feature film. Jwalapuram is an archaeological site, which shows and has traces of hominid habitation before and after the Toba event. The volcanic residue scattered around Jwalapuram is a living testimony to it. The earth’s largest known eruption, Toba super volcanic eruption had actually occurred around 75,000 years ago, at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. I also told Dr Venkiteswaran that evening while having a cup of coffee about the possible further exploration I might want to do if I get a chance. I don’t know why I said it. Dr C S Venkiteswaran was part of the curatorial team that was looking at projects from the sub continent for an arts festival. The project was spearheaded by artist and curator Riyas Komu, which was titled ‘ Young Sub Continent’, for the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa. Both of them traveling around the sub continent scouting projects and meeting artists. Dr Venkiteswaran called me after a week asking me to meet Riyas. I wrote a project brief and met Riyas in Kochi. We spent qualitative time discussing the possibility of a project. On a personal front, it was a meeting that as of today changed our destinies in very many ways. Riyas supported me with the project and I owe it to Riyas for taking me out of my hibernation. This video art project was one of the free wheeling exercises that I ever did. It was not envisaged as a film or a work for film festivals. There was neither hardly any script nor any destiny attached to it. I only knew that the finally the video would be looped inside a room within a colonial structure, the old management institute in Goa, provided by the Serendipity Arts Festival team. I have always had a keen interest in archeology since my film school days and most of my works have been situated in specific spaces dealing with archeological layering. I live with this feeling that the projected uncertainty of the past gets redefined within us continuously. So I made it a point to set an encounter every time I got to make a film or a video. Over a period of time I have also felt that cinematoprahic writing and archeology have some open-ended closeness to each other. Both in the form of a document and as an encounter. But when I finally decided to shoot the project, we invented a few queries within the framework of this project, which guided the process. These are queries for which probably I haven’t still found answers, which also means the project, could have further extension.
These are the basic questions -
1. Archeology is a discipline, which is at the boundary of both science and humanities. Is the present engagement of archeology is more tilted towards science, and if it is the case how the concern of humanities can be brought back to archeology?
2. By analyzing the prehistoric artifacts is it possible to understand the prehistoric mind? Is there a fundamental abyss between the prehistoric and contemporary human mind? Can that abyss be crossed?
3. Archeology always deals with past. But a time in future will come when present time, even the horizon of conceivable future will be a topic of remote past and hence explorable by archeology. What can be the imagination of that archeology of the future?
4. A significant enterprise of archeology is dating and hence quantification of past. How that quantification of time can be used to nurture the qualitative sense of past, a feeling of time?
Given these possibilities to explore, the video was finally finished and exhibited at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2018.
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