Dr. Brigitte Schulze, e-mail: info@femcinecult-kerala.de
c/o Prof. Dr. Martin Loiperdinger, Universität Trier, Medienwissenschaft/ media studies
D-54286 Trier, Germany

 

Marginal Life Utopias in Film and Cinema Practices: Archive & Forum

MarginaLifeUtopias...: Archive & Forum is an innovative 'space' where we document, analyse, theorise, and communicate utopian film and cinema experiences and practices which exist at the margins of hegemonic or powerful media, and are often overlooked by media studies.

Our documentation, theorisation and communication aims at providing knowledge and to motivate informed dialogues on social utopias between the creators of Marginal life utopias, concerned academia and social/ cultural activists. It is tightly coupled with a consistent social praxis.

MarginaLifeUtopias … Forum is a site of a knowledgeable dialogue-and-praxis which runs counter those dominant strategies in the media, academia or in the larger society that force humane and humanist thinking and living under the ‘laws’ of profit-orientation, and systematically produce marginalisation.

Marginalisation, in most of the cases, is passively endured. Our site focuses on those rare and out of the ordinary cases when marginalised women and men become aware of the truth that ‘margins’ are as much as ‘centres’ no fixed locations; that both result from a destructive mechanism to which the systematic transformation of existential resources like land and water into commodities is as much inherent as a person being turned into a dependent variable on her utilisibility in capitalist production, and as “truth, reason, objectivity” becoming ‘unfashionable’ measures and orientations of academic thinking.

Alan D. Sokal’s thought-provoking argumentation in his “Truth, Reason, Objectivity, and the Left” in: Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), 20/08/ 1997 correlate to very particular experiences of Brigitte Schulze who created
www.femCineCult-kerala.uni-trier.de and MarginaLifeUtopias …: Archive & Forum.

MarginaLifeUtopias … Forum therefore, is conceptualised as a dynamic ‘space’ by Brigitte Schulze who sees herself as a sociologist of a praxis on 'moving cultures', i.e. cultural activities which form an integral part of social movements struggling for a more humane and ecologically balanced life.

MarginaLifeUtopias ... Archive is based on the insights and results of Schulze's Participatory Action Research Project (PARP) conducted in close cooperation with Marginal women’s Self-help activities, and their reflections on the representation of ‘femininity’ in the popular cinema in Kerala (South India) during the last couple of years.

 

The Research Project

was generously founded by VolkswagenStiftung (www.volkswagenstiftung.de), where it was part of their focus: Conceptualizations of 'Foreign' and 'Native': Processes of Intercultural Dissociation, Mediation and Identity-Shaping

Title of the research project:
Regionale Kino-Erfahrungen von ‘Weiblichkeit’ als Selbst-Reflexion kultureller Identität in Kerala (Südindien). Perspektivenwechsel in der Theoriebildung über Öffentlichkeit(en) und Identität(en)/
Regional Cine-Experiences of 'Femininity' in Self-Reflections of Cultural Identity in Kerala. (Western) Theories of the Public Sphere(s) and Identities Revisited
Working title: “Self-images of women and cinema in Kerala ...”

Period of the project
Since March 1, 2001, B. Schulze worked at Trier University. She was temporarily employed until December 2003 in order to prepare and conduct the project related works in Germany and in India. The project period ended on September 30, 2003. End of December 2003 Schulze returned from Kerala where she had finalised and wound up her field work, and initiated a documentation centre on MarginaLifeUtopias ... in cooperation with a local Marginal women's self help society.

Research assistants in Trier and Kerala
In Trier Heike Anna Hierlwimmer established and fed our wide database of the "Digital Archive & Media Centre" with those thousands of press materials, clippings, books, etc. from Schulze's research in Kerala; Hierlwimmer also wrote most of the English summaries attached to the press documentation, etc. and handled all this with lots of competence, patience and wisdom throughout the whole period.
Ina Schulte-Steinberg managed most of the works related to the complex organisation of our rich audio-visual archive, inclusive of the extended copying of Schulze's original video film materials from her field work. Part-time support to the audio-visual and documentation sections was given by Bernd Elzer and Irina Leibold.

In Kerala, K.C. Priyamol is a courageous young woman and real friend to B. Schulze. She stood at Schulze's side even during these horrifying weeks when one manipulated upon basic conditions of the researcher's fragile 'single woman's life'.

K.C. Priyamol was a very competent research assistant to Schulze since mid 2002 when she took over these works from Schulze's first research assistant Jalaja Gurukkal. She selected press clippings and generally organised our local Malayalam database, archive, translated extensively texts from Malayalam into English etc. Though she comes from a deprived and oppressed milieu, K.C. Priyamol grew in her English competence beyond imagination. With lots of energy she acquired knowledge and language skills by herself and under the warm guidance of B. Schulze. After a few months she even managed simultaneous translations during our workshops, transcripts from our video-recorded workshops from spoken into written Malayalam and then into English, etc. She was also a major force behind the making of our last film KUDIYIRAKKAPPEDUNAVAR/ DISPLACED PEOPLE.

 

Philosophy of the research project: to give space to the ‘creative energies’
and to pinpoint the blockades to its flow

The researcher finally focussed on understanding the Marginal women's ‘creative energies’ on their own terms: how their life-worlds revolve around srishti (‘creation’). Receptive to srishti Schulze aimed at a twofold task: 1. to appropriately ‘translate’ shrishti from its dynamic ‘life’ to the world of abstraction, and 2. to give ample space to the documentation and discussion on the agents, institutions etc. which block the free flow of this kind of srishti .

It is the parallel existence of
- srishti and the Marginal women as the only beholders of a truly ethical society and of the 'Good life', and
- ‘the Kerala Development Model’ (KDM) – a model in alienation and multi-level destruction – as the fetish of the ‘good (consumer) life’ of Kerala’s mainstream society
which essentially contradict each other.

This contradiction affects but the Marginal women, because the KDM is backed by its rich resourcefulness in power. The enormous tensions, frictions and the physical violence unleashed, has to be born by the Marginal.
Schulze tried to empathically reproduce srishti, its blockage, and the tensions at the verge of an eruption in her video film essay:
“WITH THORNWINGS” UNDER THEIR FEET - TOWARDS THE LIGHT. REFLECTIONS ON WOMEN AND CINEMA IN KERALA, 1999 – 2002 (Brigitte Schulze, 2002, 135min).

When the research project was initiated by Schulze at the Department of Media Studies, University of Trier, one of its major aims was also to critically supplement the media studies’ classical orientation towards the media-related experiences and trends in Western societies with a focus on an important Indian cinema, that is the Malayalam cinema of Kerala.
In the first phase the counterparts in the project on the Indian side were Prof. Rajan Gurukkal, School of Social Sciences, and Dr. V.C. Harris, School of Letters, both at Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam. Here Schulze had lectured as a guest lecturer in 1999/ 2000, and was then affiliated to M.G. University; where she conducted and co-ordinated the research project between the Indian and the German Universities.

This first phase of the project ended in September 2001 with Schulze's participatory action research - documented with her video camera - into the ideas, feelings, reflections of women from two marginalised women's groups vis-à-vis the Malayalam popular cinema. Schulze researched and lived in Kerala for several months at a stretch. By coincidence it happened that her ‘empathic video camera’ corresponded to desires in the Marginal women who cooperated in the ‘cinema evaluation’ to express and represent themselves. Therefore, the original focus on the women's reception of popular cinema shifted towards the women's Self-made video filmmaking. Schulze's partners also changed from upper caste/ class scholars and women's groups to dalit ('untouchable'), poor, or adivasi (indigenous) women.

After the second phase of the project was successfully concluded in March 2002 with the Marginal women's own 13 short video films ENTE LOKAM/ MY WORLD, and a corresponding workshop with committed filmmakers and filmactivists like Suma Josson and C. Sarathchandran, Schulze had to curb all further contacts to the School of Social Sciences of Kottayam M.G. University. The authoritarian habits of Schulze's male colleague to control and patronise her research became intolerable.

Like in this case, there are these countless incidents when the local women’s will and competence to speak and boldly act for themselves, when due to their humanist attitudes they dare to expose themselves to a hostile Kerala public to stand for and establish equality, justice and an open communication of women's problems according to women's own terms, they meet with a more or less ‘public castigation’.

How much more pain and tensions must the more vulnerable, the poor and 'untouchable' women experience daily? Her 'femininity' being deadly dependent on the complex structures of patriarchy in family, clan and community, of caste and class suppression? And - as it is well known from feminist studies with reference to other societies - even if there was no direct or physical violence, or intervention by these patronising forces and dehumanising agents, how could the women free themselves from the archetype of Kerala's self sacrificing womanhood which most of them internalised?