City on the Water Director: Charles M.Correa Year: 1975 May he sit still, they said May the sins of your previous birth be burned away tonight, they said. May your suffering decrease the misfortunes of your next birth, they said. May the sum of all evil balanced in this unreal world against the sum of good become diminished by your pain. Nissim Ezekiel, “Night of the Scorpion” directed by Charles Correa — it’s not an art film, or even an architecture film. It’s a case for Navi Mumbai. Correa, who was one of (then) New Bombay’s original planners, and from 1970 to 1974 its chief architect, first (rather heavy-handedly) lays out the rationale behind the project — with dystopian visuals of a Bombay teeming with “half a million people arriving every morning; nobody leaving;” surging platforms of faceless commuters; Pearl Padamsee’s mellow, disembodied voice says “sometimes it’s hard to remember I’m a human being” — and then pushes his vision of what it should become. Pity that it didn’t turn out that way. His vision of a development comprised of housing “in typologies that migrants could afford” — dense clusters of three story walkup apartments, made of brick and with tiled roofs — stood in stark contrast to the “expensive and inhuman high-rise towers that are sprouting up every day” across Bombay. This film is much more a part of Correa’s advocacy of this vision — a document deeply engaged with the complex politics of sarkari urban planning — than anything else. But, as Correa laments in his 1985 book The New Landscape, “at the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO), the organization created by the Government of Maharashtra to design and develop Navi Mumbai, there was unfortunately little understanding of the concepts. On the contrary, the management and their advisors were enthusiastic about buildling a city of high-rise tenements, of the kind they had just seen in Hong Kong and Singapore. In fact, many sections of The New Landscape were written as memos to the powers that controlled CIDCO — but to no avail. Finally, in 1975, I left CIDCO — and went back to architecture.” On a final, sad note: the film was written and directed by Correa, but it was produced by none other than Pramod Pati who died of cancer during its production. He was only 42 years old. Films Division, and Indian documentary film, had lost one of its most original voices. filmsdivisionindia.tumblr/ https://youtube/watch?v=-Khc9kR-6_U
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 21:19:40 +0000
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