Susan Oxtoby, director of film and senior film curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), is developing a significant curatorial research project that will examine the tradition of Indian art cinema from the mid-1950s to the present. The scope of the project will begin with the landmark film Pather Panchali (1955), the first work of Satyajit Ray’s iconic Apu Trilogy, and extend to include works by filmmakers associated with the Film Society movement and the Parallel Cinema movements, which exemplified an artistic break from India’s mainstream Bollywood film industry in pursuit of non-commercial art cinema practice. The project will also include the study of contemporary Indian cinema and the involvement and recognition of women filmmakers in a field that has long been male dominated. Oxtoby’s curatorial research will result in several BAMPFA film series organized as directorial retrospectives and thematic explorations.
Susan Oxtoby
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”