
Shambhavi Kaul
2021Mount Song
Shambhavi Kaul
A strange yet familiar sense of place dominates Shambhavi Kaul's deceptively disorienting and visually entrancing Mount Song. As a wild, foreboding gust courses through the night, a subdued elegance is brought forth from past cinema spectacles, whose generic albeit highly suggestive set constructions remain lodged in our imaginary.
Mount Song
Private Detective: Two Plus Two Plus One
Rajat Kapoor
Naseeruddin Shah, Shambhavi Kaul
An urban contemporary film about adultery, murder and betrayal in the film noir style. A simple story to which the director imparts a feeling of unrest and disquiet, catching the city in its various moods. The film breaks generic conventions, notably in the presentation of the private detective through his deglamourised life and his process of discovery of 'who did it'. It is not constructed through his point of view at all. In fact the policeman and the detective, the fact finders, are in the dark about the crime, to the very end.
Private Detective: Two Plus Two Plus One
Scene 32
Shambhavi Kaul
Scene 32 maps the terrain that lies between a beloved place and the things that represent it. The salt fields of Central Kutch are examined through High Definition video and hand processed 16mm film to become another thing altogether: neither a specific location in India nor its representation but a rebuilt world of precipices and gullies, untouchable textures and unfathomable scale.
Scene 32
Place for Landing
Shambhavi Kaul
A household landscape of mirrors. A child and its reflection are inscribed in a shadowy lunar patchwork. The camera switches its optical pursuit: the child disappears and a bird emerges. The surveying mirror implodes or explodes into space. Its mottled hallway glass both indicates and becomes a PLACE FOR LANDING. After a series of clever misdirections by the mirror, all is redeemed by a fragment of song in this unsettling haptic illusion.
Place for Landing