Public (E-Journal, York University)

Root, Deborah

2009 Istanbul Biennial

Ho, Elaine W.

Smith, Sean

English

17 Days in Beijing: Screen of Consciousness on the Micropolitical

Falicov (edited by), Tamara L.

r
Dossier
Mobility in the Cinema
Edited by Tamara L. Falicov
In Chris Marker's 1971 documentary The Train Rolls On, a Cinetrain director Alexander
Medvedkin is asked about the importance of the Soviet film trains that travelled around
the countryside in the 1930s. Medvedkin said that the purpose of the trains was to "film
our people, show these films to our people, and thereby help them construct a new
world."This dossier on mobile cinemas/screens brings together various essays interpreting
how mobile cinemas participate in image making, whether by governments at the macro
level to bridge the gap between rural and urban settings as part of a nation building
project or as new aesthetic and sensory worlds created when cinemas become accessible
and wearable through new technologies such as cellular phones, headphones and
embodied screen architectures.
As John Sloop observes, "one of the themes that repeatedly appears in discussions of a
variety of mobile technologies, is that in McLuhan's words, media are prosthetics
allowing us to transcend space and time, and they are an articulation of 'freedom' with
'consumption.'''l I would add that mobile cinemas also have the potential to be at once
democratizing and individualizing. From 1963 Cuba to 2009 Korea, mobile cinemas are
more than simply portable movie theatres or ideological devices. As complex aesthetic,
sensory, technological and ideological sound-images, mobile cinemas are moving worlds.
1 Marshall McLuhan quoted in John M. Sloop, "Thoughts on Democracy and Mobility" [accessedJuly
14,2009] at http://www.cas.sc.edu/engllRheCTheory_ConflPapers/Sloop.pdf


Mobility in the Cinema

Druick, Zoë

At the Margins of Cinema History: Mobile Cinema in the British Empire

Liinamaa, Saara

Complaining Communities: Complaints Choirs Worldwide

Davies, Jon

The Gossip and Ghosts of Colin Campbell

Roysdon, Emily

From "social movement" to "Ecstatic Resistance"

Lind, Maria

Collaborations; On Collaboration, Agency and Contemporary Art

, Rags Media Collective

Public Privations
Raqs Media Collective
Monica Narula / Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective 79
The Public Private Conundrum
The fifteenth century mausoleum of a dead Afghan monarch in a New Delhi public garden
is perhaps the unlikeliest of private spaces. Here, along with an itinerant vendor of snacks
and savories and truant schoolboys, are a clutch of courting couples and a conspiracy of
stolen intimacies, quiet seductions and secret trysts, ransomed from the grip of a heartless
city: A collection of very private moments in very public spaces.They leave their inscriptions
on the walls-defiant declarations of desire-that annotate the ornamental and sacred stucco
calligraphy on the arches. "Raju loves Sunita." "Miriam loves Nusrat." "I love you Ram
Dhan." "Rani + Rana = Sweethearts Forever."
Privacy and affection, separately or together, never come cheap in the crowded city.
Public displays of affection are not necessarily encouraged in Delhi, and only the well-to-do
can afford the luxury of seclusion in love. Rooftop apartments with independent entrances
in family-owned town houses, love nests in hotels, the back seats of capacious SUVs,
weekend getaways in hill station and guest-houses, or keys to the flats of pliant friends are
conveniences that few can access. And those who can can also go to clubs, bars and parties
where public displays of affection do not lead to instant assault. The public that displays its
affections to its own charmed circle finds ways to do so behind high walls, high cover
charges and high gates with vigilant watchmen in attendance.
This public does not carve love letters on the tombs of forgotten kings. They do not
tarry at the milk booth to catch someone's eye, or make small talk across rooftops in a squatter
settlement while hanging out clothes to dry. They do not take long rides on the afternoon
bus that takes them nowhere close to where they live, work or study, where the space of the
bus ride is also the only time in which to have a conversation, uninterrupted, veiled by an
invisible film of brave indifference that guards against the mocking stares of co-passengers.
The abandoned cenotaph, the river-front walkway, the downtown underpass, the ruined
urban fortress, the crowded or empty bus, the broken-down playground, the shade of a
generous tree, the derelict back street of a commercial complex, the corner seat in the cinema
that only shows B movies, the street corner snack stall, the park bench, the dank corridors
of public toilets, and the steps of a public library. These spaces, rife with presence, riddled
with curious gazes, and awash with the traffic of millions of human beings, become theatres
of urban intimacy for millions of people in cities like Delhi. Here, public and private life
become contagious, contiguous, continuous facets of the same messy reality. Public architecture
and the accidents of urban planning yield themselves to the steadfast pressure of private life.
The Private Life of the Public Street
People fall in love, have sex, are born, defecate, cook, eat, sleep, work, play, read, sing, dance,
pray, curse, quarrel, fight, riot, go mad, get possessed, enter trance states, cry, laugh, fall sick,
get drunk, get arrested, get shot, get run over, and die on the street. The street is heaven and
hell, factory and prison, morgue and nursery, market and office, boutique and salon, club and
bar, library and university, high court and parliament, shrine and brothel, school and
playground. The street is the city, the world, the bed you take your lover to.The street is the
80 New Communities
epic that people narrate their life into. The street is cruel and generous and indifferent and
curious and concerned and hostile. The street is the hyphen that conjoins every public
stance to every private longing. The street redeems every privation, hears every prayer, and
kicks every dream into the gutter. It should come as no surprise then that often the most
intensely emotional, even melodramatic moments in Hindi cinema are precisely those that
get to be staged on the street. Here, in full public view, the most intense desires, the most
painful humiliations, the darkest anger, the greatest joy, the strongest love, and the most
profound loneliness find their fullest expression. The street is where the public act and the
private motive get to know each other.
A phone tap of a conversation on a crowded Delhi street between a Kashmiri lecturer
in Arabic at Delhi University and his stepbrother in Kashmir about why his wife is not going
back to her maternal home for a few days becomes evidence in a terrorism show-trial and
the cornerstone of proof of a so-called conspiracy to attack the Indian parliament that
prompts the largest military mobilization since the second world war. Its words, which point
to banal domestic issues, are twisted and mistranslated to mean justifications of a terrorist
attack. A very private conversation gets construed, retrospectively, as a very public statement.
A call centre worker in India, when catering to North American customers, is often
expected to take on a different "private identity." Sunita becomes Susan, her places of work
and residence glide over time zones. The weather report on her computer tells her of the
climate in another part of the world, which she makes her own as she slips into a different
accent to deal with her client. In the course of her conversation, she invokes her client's
credit history, purchase decisions, and other private information.
The shift between one private identity and another and negotiating the contours of an
"other's" (the client's) private life is the ground on which her public persona as a worker in
the service sector of the global new economy is constructed.
Different Histories, Different Publics
The neat separation between public and private existence that is supposed to attend to the
rise of the modern individual in the notionally European centre-stage of world history has
never quite been able to live up to its own premises in South Asian societies. It does not
do so today.
Yet even in Europe, historically, the distinction between public and private breaks has
tended to break down the moment deviations from prescribed moral codes have occurred
-thus behaviour outside the appropriate norms of marital heterosexuality has tended to
invite public punitive intervention even if it has occurred in private spaces, between consenting
individuals. The division ordained by the law and by moral conventions between crimes and
vices (which are offences without victims) in the nineteenth century, and which remained
operational through much of the twentieth century, suggested that an individual's act in the
privacy of his or her own presence, or in the presence of other individuals, is not devoid of
public consequences when it represents a deviation from marital heterosexuality.
It is one of the strange ironies ofpost-colonial societies that these European (and deeply
Christian) heteronormative injunctions regulating "private" behaviour and sexuality
Raqs Media Collective 81
Monica Narula / Raqs Media Collective
82 New Communities
through publicly laid down norms arrived in non-European cultures as "innovations," but
have now become the mainstay of cultural conservatism in the same non-European societies.
Hindu and Islamic fundamentalists both lead virulent campaigns against gays and lesbians in
the name of tradition, neglecting to examine the actual historical record of South Asian and
Islamic societies. In a remarkable act of cultural amnesia, the traditional liberality in the
realm of the erotic and the sexual is forgotten to make way for a recent prudery that is then
apotheosized as a newly constituted mark of"traditional" morality. This too has consequences
on the relationship between private and public life in societies such as ours.
The terms "public" and "private" can then be seen more as placeholders for concepts
that change their content over time, than as actual descriptions of ways of inhabiting space.
Having said this, it is not altogether fruitless to explore how different societies have
realized the distinction in spatial terms. If the post-Renaissance European model of the public
square, the public institutional building, the public park, the public street, and the very private
homestead is an instance of a neat binary operation, then other societies and cultures have
found other methods of articulating the public-private relationship. The rise of modernity
in non-western societies has seen an overlay between different models of publicness and
privacy. It is possible then for an individual to simultaneously inhabit an exclusively "public"
realm as derived from a European heritage, and a "public-private" continuum that is more
porous and flexible.
Traditionally, South Asian cultures have tended to arrange public and private aspects of
life in a series of overlapping and concentric circles. Courtyards and kitchens, terraces and
pavements, encroachments and annexes constantly re-position the line that separates public
and private life by giving rise to permanently provisional zones of liminality.
The Outsideness of Inside-Considerations on Domesticity
The structure of a traditional North Indian "big" house represents such a complex zone,
with its different entrances and exits for different kinds of people: its "meeting room"-the
baithak or majlis-where menfolk do business and conduct public affairs, its inner and outer
courtyards, its shrine, the andar mahal-where the women of the household can go
unveiled-and the capacious beds that have room for more than a couple, the secret niches
and hidden passages, concealed staircases, godowns and attics that become playgrounds of
intimacy, the roof that can be the bedchamber under the sky on summer nights, and the
back-garden overlooking a well or a pond. Within these spaces, different articulations of
publicness and privacy are bound by rigid rules. However, these rules are rigid not because
of the separation between publicness and privacy, but in terms of which term is applicable to
whom and in what context. Let us take for instance the example of the "women's quarters."
Here, the ritualized segregation of the sexes prohibits women from being exposed to adult
men and the "public realm" that such men inhabit. But in many ways, the "inner palace" or
the andar mahal is the most intense conduit ofnews and information from the outside world.
Here, the gossip and rumours of the neighbourhood, court, city and district are conveyed
by servants, artisans, nurses, friends and relatives and circulated with remarkable felicity. The
women of the harem and the traditional household, though veiled, in purdah, in seclusion
Raqs Media CollectilJe 83
from the world outside, would often be more "conversant" with what went on in the world
than even the busy public men who dabbled in the affairs of the world from their noisy
baithaks and meeting rooms. It was possible that female power, exercised from the depths of
private space from within the innermost folds of domestic interiority, was able to change
the course of outer, public events because it had access to unofficial, informal channels of
information and communication. The commerce between ostensibly public and officially
private would often lead to subtle alterations of the balance of power between them, with
private acts leading on occasion to very public consequences.
There is no archive or history ofprivate life. All that we glean ofprivate moments comes
to us from lived experience and from stories, from proverbs and songs, from myths and
parables, told to children by women, servants, and old men. This is how many of us grow up
to understand love and loss, longing and belonging, cunning and compassion, courage and
discretion, and all the things that you need to have a sense of, to lead a life that constantly
fluctuates between public and private registers.
If the public sphere is the realm ofhistory, and private life the domain of interiority, then
history and interiority get constantly dovetailed into each other in all sorts of complicated
ways. Dreams, longings, revelations, instances of amazement and other intensely individuated
moments become the foundations ofpublic acts, performances, pronouncements and positions.
Naturally, this leads to anxieties about propriety and appropriateness, and typically disputes
about behaviour in public spaces tend to be about the fact that the actors concerned were
seen to be acting in a manner that demonstrated their lack of regard for the "publicness" of
the space. In other words, they were acting as if the "street" were their "bedroom." This
objection to the inappropriate transposition of modes of behaviour is complicated by the
fact that often the "street" is also the "bedroom." But even that apart, at issue is that the
models of "public persona" and "private self" being contested are not consonant with the
modes of living and acting of many people.
Public Mourning and Private Criif
Thus, the exhibition and display of grief, a very private emotion, through rituals of lament
and self-mortification in very public lV10harram processions by Shia Muslims in India are
often instances where the whole "public-private" conundrum gets sharply foregrounded.
For the majority Sunni Muslim community, and many non-muslims, the rituals of Shia
mourning are seen as "the private affair of that community." For Shias the mourning is
meaningless if it is not "performed" in public view. Rivulets of private grief mingle to form
a very public lament, which reinforces the sense of identity of a people that sees itself as a
beleaguered community, as a minority within a minority. That the performances of mourning
also often entail the making of ritualized accusations against important Sunni personages is
a bone of contention that ignites Shia-Sunni friction with repetitive regularity. Here, the
private grief of Shia individuals, the "private affair" of the Shia community, and the space of
the street where these are made public come together explosively. Peculiarly, Shia Sunni riots
over Moharram are a very modern phenomenon, and they date precisely to the moment
where public spaces were seen as somehow separate and distinct from private life. The
84 New Communities
1?L[St (d'/t
•·.. J3ActA
Monica Narula / Raqs Media Collective
argument is as follows: if the street is a public space, then it is inappropriate that it be used
for private purposes. If private claims are made on that public space, however temporarily,
then they are likely to come up against counter claims made by other private parties. Thus
it is best that no private claims whatsoever are made on public space or on public consciousness.
"Unspeakablilty"
The conditions ofpublic life legislated through law and juridical convention are ultimately a code and
a language unto themselves-acceptance of an utterance within the public realm is ultimately
a matter of recognition that a speech act or an utterance is intelligible. Yet courts, and a
variety of other constituted public spaces, routinely render different kinds of utterance as
falling outside the circle ofpublic intelligibility.Various kinds of utterance are processed into
the "unspeakable." This forces these claims into a silence, an interiority, a privation that
involves the stripping away of public status, and its reduction to a private and particular
place. Thus, the claims of tribal community to their land, if expressed through myths and
song, is seen as unintelligible ritual, unreadable in the domain of evidence and veracity, while
the apparatus, staging, role play and paraphernalia of jurisprudence itself is not seen in
ritualistic terms. One ritual wins over another precisely by stating that it is not in fact a ritual.
Raqs Media Collective 85
The public realm of the courtroom is then an arena where one "private agenda" (that of
modernity and its institutional history) wins over another (a traditional claim to land by a
tribal group). Perhaps we would do well to be wary of the fact that many public claims are
energized by a complex web of private agendas disguised to the point of invisibility.
The Parable of Lions
The symbolic apparatus of the modern Indian nation state borrows heavily from a re-purposed
ancient imperial past. The lion capital of Ashoka, a symbol of imperial power, is today the
seal of the Indian state. It features four roaring lions standing in close proximity on a pillar.
In conclusion, here is a parable of another image of a lion. Sometime in the summer of
2001, while working on a project that would be realized as "The Co Ordinates of Everyday
Life," a multi-screen and cross-media installation on law, illegality and claims on urban space,
we came across and recorded a broken down wall in what had been a central Delhi squatter
settlement. The demolition, which was recent and incomplete, had exposed the inner walls
of many makeshift dwellings. One such wall was inscribed with a child's drawing-a large,
happy, blue lion.
The lion on the seal of the state roars at the lion on the wall of the makeshift dwelling.
The two lions embody two ways in which a city can speak, and yet both speak of the way
in which the hands of power transform a landscape.The imperial Mauryan lion marks urban
space with an official order, designating what is legal and what is illegal. This official order
comes across a dwelling and demolishes its outer walls, revealing its innermost core, on
which stands inscribed a child's happy lion. The broken interior back wall of an "illegal"
home becomes a public wall when the shell of the house is destroyed. An extant law forbids
private inscriptions and acts of graffiti on public walls.The happy blue lion, hitherto the hero
of a child's fantasy, expressed within the confines ofa domestic space, becomes, post-demolition,
a private inscription on a public wall. A wall is destroyed; a drawing becomes a fugitive.
Private niches yield to the onslaught of public laws, are transformed into public spaces, and
then are subject to further scrutiny. In the civil war that rages between the master plan and
the moment, the walls of the population must be more circumspect and reticent, in keeping
with the urgencies of our times. The privations of the public realm have their own urgent
ways of demanding our attention.


Public Privations

Möntmann, Nina

If We Can't Get It Together: Artists rethinking the (mal)function of communities

Not a member yet