Film

THE WATSON’S HOTEL is a film about a building in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. It was the city’s first hotel and also the first building in Asia constructed from prefabricated cast-iron parts. Completed in 1867, the house was produced entirely in England; the individual parts were shipped to Bombay and assembled there. Of the many stories the house has witnessed, one stands out: in the hotel’s ballroom, the Lumière brothers presented their Cinématographe – and in 1896 cinema arrived in India. The documentary shows what has become of the house and portrays the people who live and work there today – people who, in their small everyday stories, have to come to terms with the long history of the house.

This creates several layers of visual storytelling. On the one hand there is the condition of the house itself, in parts a ruin today; on the other, the film shows how people’s lives go on regardless. The house is a kind of microcosm of the whole country – not least because of its strong colonial history. The everyday life in the house is set against the history of the house. At the same time, a difference emerges in how different cultures perceive cultural heritage: in many places around the world, architecture closely bound to history is protected and sometimes even restored. In India it is a case of both: that the house is visibly falling into decay also shows the difficult relationship with one’s own history, in which colonialism is inscribed.

In this sense, the film is an examination of cultural heritage and shows how important it is to preserve places that can bear witness to it.

Realised in 2018 with Nathaniel Knop and Peter Rippl.

A film by John Skoog and Ragunath V on the performance installation by et al. in 2010. The installation took place in an abandoned apple-wine tavern in Frankfurt, Germany.

The artist group et al. – its members come from Frankfurt, New York and Paris – appeared in Frankfurt in 2010 with their latest project “Haunted House”. In the best Surrealist manner, they transformed a building in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen into a “haunted house”. They used US tropes of Halloween to allude to the historically documented love affair between the architect Le Corbusier and the dancer Josephine Baker, reimagining the sterile relationship between the modern and the body.

The film 3977.64 is based on a journey along the Manali–Leh highway, a road that traverses some of the most treacherous terrains in the northern Himalayas in India and has to its credit some of the highest motorable passes in the world, including the Changla Pass (5,360 m above MSL). The film is shot mainly in the Rohtang Pass (3,977.64 m above MSL) section of this road. It captures the life of the road in the form of the stones being broken into smaller pieces in the valley with a high, almost meditative rigour, which are then transported to higher altitudes to be laid as a substrate for the road construction. Since the road is open only during the summer months for traffic and to people, both maintenance and traffic coexist on the road. New parts of the road are being laid while other parts that may be severely damaged remain unattended.

The central theme of the film is the struggle that the road users (taxis, trucks loaded with essential goods and public transport buses) undergo in getting through a stretch of the road that has been damaged by melting snow and water. The struggle to get through the slush under any circumstance, and the social structure that builds up between the drivers and the passengers who come up to help, become particularly noticeable. The road and the situation as captured in the film become, in a sense, a representation of the coexistence between order and chaos.

A film by Ragunath V. Produced and directed by Ragunath V · Camera: Ragunath V · Editing: Anatoli Skatchov. Special thanks to Bouhlou Hocine, Sebastian Stoehrer and Stefan Wieland.

A short documentary about the making of the book “A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue and Epilogue – A Critical Reader”; a project by Mario Pfeifer and Markus Weisbeck with Ragunath V.

Making of “A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue and Epilogue – A Critical Reader” documents how the book was produced in Mumbai. The film follows the search for local printers, paper stocks and craftspeople, from letterpress to screen printing and offset printing, through to the binding and finishing of the book. Six printing techniques, nine papers, Hindi and English typography, taxi sticker art and hand-painted dust jackets came together in one publication. The film, as documented by Ragunath V, shows the various printing techniques and the production of this book.