Monday, September 30, 2019 - 4:15pm
Cathedral of Learning, Room 407
Nostalgia for the Future is a film on Indian modernity, the making of the citizen and the architecture of the home. It looks at imaginations of homes across four examples of buildings made over the period of a century. These are Lukhshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda – the gigantic home built by a progressive monarch in the late 19th Century; Villa Shodhan in Ahmedabad – a private residence which represents the idea of domesticity within Nehruvian modernity, designed by Le Corbusier; Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, which epitomises the Gandhian aspirations of the nation-state; and public housing in post-independence Delhi, designed by the Government of India to house refugees from Pakistan and the bureaucrats of the newly independent nation.
The film explores these spaces and imagines the bodies that were meant to inhabit them through the evocation of the cinematic and aural collective memory of a nation. It uses a mix of formats – 16mm film and digital video in both colour and black and white, along with archival footage from state propaganda films and mainstream cinema.
You can view the trailer here.
Film Details: Hindi and English, 16mm and video, color and balck and white, 54 minutes, 2017
This event is sponsored by the Architectural Studies Program, Asian Studies Center and Asia on Screen, Film and Media Studies Program, Department of English, and Cultural Studies Program.