Amateur home movies and the archive of migration : Sandhya Suri's I for India (2005)

• Encompassing 40 years of immigrant life in Britain, Sandhya Suri’s filmic essay I for India (2005) is a collage of amateur home movies, British newsreels as well as film stock shot by the director herself. The home movie footage was filmed by Suri’s father who came to Britain as an immigrant doctor in the 1960s and who exchanged super8-films andaudio reels as cine-letters about his new life with his family in India. After having rediscovered the material on the attic of her family home, Sandhya Suri transformed it into her graduate thesis film at the The National Film and Television School in London. Dealing with memory, nostalgia and migrant experiences in Britain, I for India establishes a counter-history to the hegemonic national discourse in which migrant experiences are marginalized, objectified or rendered invisible.My paper is going to examine the role of the amateur footage for reflecting on the ontology of the image and the materiality of the different film formats. How does the reception of the footage change in the course of its dissemination? In what way does the filmic montage in I for India contribute to challenging the dominant media discourse on Asians in Britain? I would like to argue that the amateur footage helps to counter the ethnographic, Eurocentric gaze on the new citizens and subverts the hegemonic use of images of migrants as a means of control and classification (Alan Sekula) or as a weapon (Susan Sontag). How do the amateur images migrate into the collective (national) visual archive? Finally, the example of I for India might also show that Zygmunt Bauman’s binary opposition between tourists and nomads needs to be complicated.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Filmvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Studies on Film (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

amateur filmmaking

migration

ontology

Sandhya Suri

collective memory

Film

Filmvetenskap

Filmvetenskap

Film Studies

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