The only phenomenon ‘constant’ in the cosmos is ‘time’; the ‘samaya’; constant in its forward ‘movement’, it never stops, even metaphorically! In dreams and reveries it flashbacks, forth and back like on a film editing machine! Moments turn into dews, dews of time, reflecting memories, pure in their translucence and dew sparks up from My Museum of Memories, afresh, in its cosmic constancy!
“The Sight of Time” is the title of Sandra Lischi’s monograph on Robert Cahen, one of the ‘most important and internationally renowned artists in the realm of experimental video.' Long ago, my wife and i had the opportunity of meeting Robert Cahen in Copenhagen. And then we had a few more occasions to meet up – in Zurich, he came there from his home town Mulhouse (East of France) and we met, to Paris he came and we met up again. And he was on Jury of the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short & Animation Films, for which i had also organized and curated a retrospective of his oeuvre; Indian cineastes were seeing his work for the first time then – in 1998.
How do we sight time? Through intense intuition? Through cinema? Through poesy? Through Shiva’s third eye? Mahakaal, how do we perceive Him? [AG]
Robert Cahen and Amrit Gangar at the Film+Video Workshop Festival, Copenhagen, photograph by Kuntal.
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THE ELEMENTAL WATER AND ROBERT CAHEN’s VIDEO
Water (also) evokes yet another element – reflection, it becomes an image-reflecting mirror, or the transparent surface revealing the mysteries underneath, the mysteries of history – of persons, of objects, of times. In ‘Corps Flottants’ (Floating Bodies, 1997) we see an old man bathingin water while the water / plasticity reveals stones, his skin and limbs and pubic hair. I think, in its water imagery, video / electronic medium provides a different perception than the film’s. Maybe, it’s a slightly different sensuality. – Amrit Gangar, ibid.
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“To depart or to arrive?
Those able to depart have already arrived,
assuming they’re capable of changing rhyme, or even tune,
since beyond you blooming meadow
waits what has always been awaited.”
[From “Robert Cahen”, Introduction, 5th MIFF 1998 catalogue, Ed. Amrit Gangar]
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"I don't use slow-motion to pretify, but to see things better, to retain the best..." - Robert Cahen (Ibid)
" je n'utilise pas de slow-Motion pour embellir, mais à voir les choses mieux, de conserver le meilleur..."-Robert Cahen (ibid)
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Copenhagen and Robert Cahen...does he not resemble Dany Kay ?.D.K.played the famous fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersan in thefilm of the same name...!.Please correct me if there is any mistake in the name of the town. I had seen the film probably before 55-60 years!.....ભૈ સાંબ...જુની વાતો યાદ શુકામ યાદ અપાવો છો ?.