Les Leveque a little girl dreams of a new pluralism meanwhile the old war continues
October 24 -
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Press Release
a little girl dreams of a new pluralism meanwhile the old war continues
is a feature length hallucinatory re-edit of Wee Willie Winkie, the1937 film based on a Rudyard Kipling story directed by John Ford and staring a young Shirley Temple and Cesar Romero as Khoda Khan. Set in Northern India in 1897 during the British occupation little Shirley brings peace between the warring Nationalist Khan and the British occupiers. The re-editing structure moves the film to the perceptual edge of coherency. Doubled images dance with each other while words emerge from a dialog of babble and bag pipes. Throughout the film a crawling text taken from The Social Basis of The Third Universal Theory by Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi performs a discursive visual mash up of Ford's colonialist narrative with Al-Qadhafi's nationalist manifesto in pursuit of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore's idea of "piercing the veil of the real."
... we need to infuse a plurality into the word "imagination" itself to make it usefully global. To bring heterogeneous practices of seeing under the jurisdiction of this one European word "imagination." I further want to suggest, would also require us to think of the word "political" as referring to a field of activities irreducibly plural. Dipesh Chakrabarity, Nation and Imagination: Training the Eye in Bengali Modernity