David Mc Dougall's films
Vikalp Bengaluru presents three films by celebrated documentary and ethnographic filmmaker David Mac Dougall:
March 21, 6.30 pm
TEMPUS DE BARISTAS (TIME OF THE BARMEN)
A film by David Mac Dougall, 1993, 100 minutes
The filmmaker will be present for the screening
March 22, 6.30 pm
PHOTO WALLAHS
A film by David and Judith Mac Dougall, 1991, 60 minutes
TO LIVE WITH HERDS
A film by David Mac Dougall, 1972, 70 minutes
Venue:
Nani Cinematheque, Centre for Film and Drama
5th floor, Sona Towers, 71 Millers Road, Bangalore 560052
For directions, please click the link on the right.
Entrance for members only. Please bring your membership cards.
If you are not a member, please come to the venue half an hour before the screening and register.
Synopses:
TEMPUS DE BARISTAS (TIME OF THE BARMEN)
One of the most acclaimed works of renowned ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall, the film profiles three goatherders in the mountains of eastern Sardinia and, with extraordinary insight and nuance, explores a traditional way of life that is rapidly disappearing as commercial farming displaces herding and young people drift to the coast for the higher pay and glamour of the tourism industry.
Pietro, a boy of 17, loyally helps his father in the herding and milking of their goats. His father Franchiscu, 62, would like his son to stay in the mountains but knows he will probably have to leave to further his education and his prospects. Their friend Miminu, in his 40s and still unmarried, knows all his goats by name but faces a future of increasing poverty and isolation.
For Pietro, the lives of his father and Miminu provide reference points against which to measure himself and consider his future in a changing world.
PHOTO WALLAHS
A film about the varied meanings of photography.
It is set in Mussoorie, a famous hill station in northern India which has attracted tourists since the 19th century. In this setting photography has thrived.
Without spoken commentary, the film discovers its subject in the streets, bazaars, shops, photographic studios and private homes of Mussoorie.
In the process it compares the diverse work and attitudes of the local photographers – Mussoorie’s “photo wallahs”. Although photography has developed certain culturally distinctive features in India, its many forms and uses there tell us much about the nature and significance of photography throughout the world.
TO LIVE WITH HERDS
A classic of ethnographic cinema, at last readily available in Australia. TO LIVE WITH HERDS is a film about the Jie, a predominantly pastoral people of northeastern Uganda. Following a period of relative isolation under the British Protectorate government, the Jie are now under increasing pressure to exchange their traditional culture and subsistence economy for a cash economy and participation in a modern nation-state. The film examines this predicament in the light of Jie values. The question is not whether change is avoidable, but whether forms of change can be found that extend rather than attack the foundations of Jie life.
“One of the most humorous, touching, formative, and (in both spirit and aesthetics) beautiful anthropological films I have ever seen … A prophetic look into the human costs of the political changes which are sweeping the new African states.” – Karen Cooper, Film Forum, New York.
“One of those rare documentaries that seem to have a life of their own.” – Howard Thompson, The New York Times. Winner of the Grand Prix ‘Venezia Genti’ at the 1972 Venice Film Festival.
About David Mac Dougall
David MacDougall is a documentary filmmaker and writer on cinema. His first feature-length film, To Live With Herds, filmed in Uganda, won the Grand Prix Venezia Genti at the Venice Film Festival in 1972. Soon after, he and his wife Judith MacDougall produced the Turkana Conversations trilogy of films on semi-nomadic camel herders of northwestern Kenya. Of these, Lorang’s Way won the prize of Cinéma du Réel in Paris in 1979, and The Wedding Camels the Film Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1980. With Judith MacDougall, he then co-directed a number of films on indigenous communities in Australia and, in 1991, a film on photographic practices in an Indian hill town, Photo Wallahs. In 1993 he made Tempus de Baristas, on goat herders in the mountains of Sardinia, winner of the 1995 Earthwatch Film Award. In 1997 he began conducting a film study of the Doon School in northern India. This has resulted in five films: Doon School Chronicles (2000), With Morning Hearts (2001), Karam in Jaipur (2001), The New Boys (2003), and The Age of Reason (2004). Recently he has been filming at a progressive, co-educational boarding school in South India and in a shelter for homeless children in New Delhi. His latest film is the experimental SchoolScapes (2007). MacDougall writes regularly on documentary and ethnographic cinema and is the author of Transcultural Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1998) and The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton, 2006). He is presently a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra.
