Ayisha Abraham
I Saw a God Dance has a serendipitous beginning that take us all the way back to 1938, when Tom D’aguiar filmed the Indian choreographer and dancer Ram Gopal in his youth, dancing on the terrace of his large bungalow in Bangalore. Abraham found this footage by accident in a plastic bag in D’aguiar’s house (on whom Abraham made her film Straight , and she revisits the deteriorating footage of Ram Gopal ten years later to embark on a different exploration of another man and his professional and personal quests. Bringing together the heavily blemished 8mm footage with photographs, documents, reviews, audio, and recent interviews with those who knew him, I Saw a God Dance conjures Ram Gopal’s life from disparate archival fragments.
En Route or of a Thousand Moons presents a speckled and staccato view of post colonial India’s visual histories. Removed from contexts of their time and space, these images acts as apparitions of India’s past that remain hidden in the obsolescence of their material life. The film puts us face to face with a private world of picnics, birthday parties, and interior lives, worlds that been hidden and preserved in deteriorating and aged film, offering a meditation of fragmented and alternative view of India’s histories.
A disjunctive montage of freckled 8mm home movies and jarring sounds of everyday life, You are Here conjures a day in the life of mid-century India. The film maps the fragility of its 8 mm material with the specters of India’s modernity—the array of shots of the world through windows of vehicles, moving trains, balloons in air, busy bridges, flowing water bodies, sites of worship, and ordinary people in their everyday activities.
Straight 8 is an exploration of a collection of 8mm home movies of film enthusiast Tom D’aguiar, an Anglo-Indian who lived in Bangalore. Drawn from home movies made around the 1940s, we see scenes of everyday life around Tom’s house including amateur fictional thrillers shot with his friends and graceful dances of the renowned figure Ram Gopal. Instead of a nostalgic re-presentation of the past, the video creates montages of everyday personal life strung together with personal anecdotes that indicate a precision about the domesticated use of technology. Through its enigmatic grainy images, Straight 8 evokes an enticing realm of memory and imagination that governs the relations technology, creativity, and ordinary lives of people.
