Talks and Curations
"Nation and Its Fragments: Experimental Films from India" at Academy Museum, Los Angeles
Programmed and note by Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton. In this program, we bring together a montage of experimental films from India that reckon with the history of this nation and its fragmentations. Three were produced by Films Division of India, the country’s vehicle for documentary and public information films, at a moment when state funds were directed toward more idiosyncratic and subversive experiments, exemplified by Pramod Pati's psychedelic collage Explorer (1968). In My Dreams (1975), by the feminist novelist Ismat Chughtai, the Urdu poetry of Ali Sardar Jafri inspires a meditation on the utopian aspirations of Nehruvian... modernity on the cusp of its collapse into a period of authoritarianism, an event anticipated in Tyeb Mehta’s Koodal (1970). Referring to the Tamil word for “union” or “meeting point,” Koodal forms the core of our program as it brings together India’s past and present to reveal the dystopian violence beneath glossy hallucinations of progress. Ruchir Joshi’s Memories of Milk City (1991) reflects on the growing victimization of Muslims in Gujarat through a portrait of a city that has seen some of the worst communal violence in the nation’s history. We conclude the program with two films about memories under threat of disintegration: materially, as decaying, speckled, and ephemeral home movies in Ayisha Abraham’s You Are Here (2008), and as the recurring nightmares of filmmaker Mehdi Jahan’s aging mother—an Assamese Muslim woman contemplating the threat of erasure—in What would have been there, had there been nothing? (2023). Total program runtime: Approx. 63 min.
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
Public Lectures on Sayajit Ray_CINEA Antwerp
Delivering 3 lectures on the cinema of Satyajit Ray as part of the ZOMERFILMCOLLEGE by CINEA (Flemish Service for Film Culture) in Antwerp.
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Round Table: Bombay Film Colour in the Archive
This day-long symposium will comprise two roundtable discussions (“Bombay Film Colour in Transnational Networks” and “Bombay Film Colour in the Archive”) and two special conversations (one with production designer Aradhana Seth and one with laboratory specialist Ujwal Nirgudkar). By bringing together academic researchers from South Asian film studies, global colour film history, and industry specialists from India, we aim to open up new perspectives on colour’s distinctive role in Bombay film culture.
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State Sponsored Documentary Asks the Woman's Question | University College London
UCL Film Studies Speaker Series
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No Director’s Cut: King's College London
Film Studies Research Seminar Series, King's College London
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Talk on Akaash at Sinema Transtopia, Berlin
Akaash by Velu Viswanadhan France/India 2002 101 Min., without dialogue, 16mm Followed by a talk with Ritika Kaushik
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"An Eye for the World: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray," Lecture and Film Series, 2023-2024
Lecture & Film October 2023 – July 2024 Kino des DFF, Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main
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