New Delhi: Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) Pune released a special issue of its quarterly academic journal LENSIGHT in Panaji, Goa today to coincide with the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa.
Subhash Ghai, renowned film maker and FTII alumnus launched the October-December 2017 issue of the prestigious journal on film and media which has been standing out for its scholarly content since last 26 years. Bhupendra Kainthola, Director FTII Pune and Amit Tyagi (Dean Films) were present at the launch.
“LENSIGHT journal publishes articles and research papers by film scholars, researchers, academicians and various other subject experts in the field from India and abroad. There’s a need to have more such journals to broaden and deepen the understanding of cinema”, said Subhash Ghai in his address.
Addressing the event, Bhupendra Kainthola said, “The theme that each practitioner resonates with is the universally important question of Reality and Imagination. This is what we deal with in Cinema, where the real challenge lies and also the joy of creation. This makes it a unique exercise in understanding the process, with its pains, joys, sorrows, difficulties in a transparent and vulnerable way, opening an intimate space for dialogue between the makers, and the lovers of cinema who wish to always know more.”
Rajula Shah, FTII alumna has guest edited the issue. A sensitive film maker Rajula’s work falls in the interstice of poetry, cinema and anthropology. She doodles, writes, makes books, installations, web portals and tends towards the constantly evolving, changing, mutating forms of creative practice.
Says Rajula Shah, “This being the academic journal of the film school, we have kept it focused on the ‘process’, ‘learning’, the ‘making’ of a film and a filmmaker. For this reason, it becomes imperative that we have the practitioners writing about it rather than the critics or theoreticians. Cinema has so many dimensions, that there is hardly anything that falls outside the domain of a filmmaker. And this issue has tried to project the multi-faceted aspect by inviting diverse voices from Film Direction, to Cinematography, Sound, Music, Art et al.”
‘LENSIGHT’ was launched in 1991 initially with a focus on technical articles to enlighten technicians about new technology and equipment used in filmmaking and video productions. It was repositioned in 2008 with emphasis on film-related articles especially on aesthetic values.
The special issue has diaries and notebooks of prolific makers, as testimony of their everyday practice. It also has essays, memoirs, articles, specially written. The contributors hail from our FTII’s luminous alumni that include expats like Nandini Bedi, and important voices like RV Ramani as also musician of the high stature of Moushumi Bhowmik and even a neuroscientist based in the US. Hansa Thapliyal, Amit Dutta and Payal Kapadia, a current student at FTII whose film THE AFTERNOON CLOUDS was India’s only entry to Cannes this summer.
The frames running on the edge of both pages are from early cinema and contemporary cinema, a wish to bring in the cinematic movement in to print, a remembering of a pre cinema device, in the manner of a flipbook that delights young and old equally.
