cup2020 | round 2 | Tait v Sastry

[Curtis, baby]

Land Makar (Margaret Tait, 1981) vs. On the Move (S. N. S. Sastry, 1970)

Vote for either xTait or xSastry

Round ends: March 16, 2020

[mesnalty]

My pick should say "Land Makar" instead of "Fountain of Dreams."

[Curtis, baby]

My pick should say "Land Makar" instead of "Fountain of Dreams."

My bad!

[augusto]

at 30+ minutes each, is this the longest tie of the round (and the longest of the cup so far)?

in any case, i picked `on the move' as it's simultaneously quintessential -- kaleidoscopic sound design over dense, disparate, contrapuntal images, furiously edited -- but also something different, one of the few instances of his work with color (and also because i figured `and i make short films', my initial choice for this round, would make for a better closing argument). will defer to sarkari shorts, who delightfully calls this a `masala-vérité frenzy flick', for better-articulated commentary (emphasis in bold mine).

"The typical FDI culture film from the 1950s addressed the country’s much-ballyhooed coexistence of dyads like the “ancient” and the “modern,” the “rural” and “urban,” and so on, in order to reveal and reinforce their hidden harmony, their identity, their unity within their diversity; these films, by contrast, eschew such consoling fictions, evoking in their place a sense of dislocation, crisis and change. If On The Move represents a day in the life of India, clearly some major shit is afoot. It’s a film that resists easy summarization. Mount Everest is climbed in this film; it takes just moments. Deserts are crossed by camel. Vertiginous shots of modern architecture abound. Horses race. Women put on makeup and wigs. A missile launch at Thumba (around 15:30) kicks off a long white-noise space age sequence with a loving darshan of a radio telescope thrown in for good measure. When the passage comes to a close just two minutes later with a shot of a Kashmiri cobbler in a snowbank you might think Sastry is about to look in on the fate of the traditional trades in the cold, modern world. You would be wrong. Our cobbler is in fact striking the chorister’s beat, kicking off a delightful, discombobulating sequence devoted to the music industry and radio. Heroic, low-angled shots of a mustachioed muscleman working out at an open-air akhada accompanied by the sounds of Subbalakshmi give way to bell-bottomed footage of a paisley-clad psych-rock band from Madras called the Silencers playing “Mony Mony” in a club. And it just goes on from there, flipping between the gunghroo-clad feet of Kathak dancers, Ravi Shankar, Bharat Natyam, and Kathakali before coming to a close with the sound of Ustad Bismillah Khan’s shehnai set to a complex shot juxtaposing ruined stone temples with the awesome concrete geometries of “new temples” just behind: dams and powerlines overwhelm the ancient wreckage. The band plays on."

[Mario Gaborovic]

xSastry

[greennui]

xSastry¨

Lovely colours and music.

[ofrene]

xSastry

[flip]

might post comments a bit later, for now

xSastry

[Curtis, baby]

Sastry wins