VIDEO GAME of Memory and Record

CS Venkiteswaran writes on Video Game, a short film by the young video film maker Vipin Vijay, who won three Tiger Awards from the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2007.

Vipin Vijay

Vipin Vijay’s video film ‘Video Game’ won the The three Tiger Awards for Short Film at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam 2007. The Tiger Awards for Short Film jury noted VIDEO GAME’s “relentless, complex post-modern intelligence”. Its citation reads thus "Video Game is yet another illustration that there's more to the Cinema of India than can be contained with the received wisdom which seeks to encompass it by reference to a dualism opposing Satyajit Ray to Bollywood. Video Game shows a relentless, complex post-modern intelligence as it processes everything within its view, within its memory, within its wide range of cultural references. Its title is an index to this complexity, as it evokes not only digital game space as an aspect of the real, but the pursuit of video within the understanding of a game, replete with strategies, movements, and counter-movements. A new kind of road movie, indeed."

'Nobody will survive for eternity here

It is a matter of few days ahead and after’

sings the itinerant bard in Vipin Vijay’s Videogame. But this video journey is not just about transience of things and life; it is also about survival, adaptation, transfomation and transmogrification of images, objects and memories which are nothing but different states of being. While the film journeys in a dilapidated jalopy, trundling its way out of the labyrinth of Kolkata city and into the open of the rural verdant green spaces, what unfolds is the the drama of the interface between times, technologies, ways of living, and also acts of remembering, recording and memorising. So objects and images from the past and present jostle here in this video game of memory and record.

In this game, everything gets mixed up, erasing boundaries, formats and time frames. While the bards sing the above song as if to propitiate the jalopy’s soul, women walk along with polyester nets, with the dish antennae perching upon old buildings in the background. This journey of the image of cars takes us through the footages from the earliest period of cinema like those from How it feels to be run over? by Cecil M Hepworth (1900) and The Motorist by R W Paul (1906), to the David Cronenberg film Crash (1996), made almost a century later. The digitised petrol pump is juxtaposed with the old obsolete one lying in disuse yet adamantly in place.  The jalopy itself is juxtaposed with the rusting remains of older ones, having had their run, now re/usting in desolation. The film footages of the ruins of an old temple shot years ago film and which were not used, and bearing the smudges and markings of the editor, jostle with their video images from the here and now, one image graven upon stone, the other upon the tricky surface of the celluloid and the present one on digital pixels. While these images carved upon stone lie desolate in the wilderness, these ‘NG’ shots have been swept away from the editing table long long ago. Yet, both persist in time and space and so, memory; and become the very stuff of this memory-game.

The self reflexive voice-over ponders upon the inert recording equipment called camera and the nature of the images, about how they turn from their physical frontality into metaphors and so on. On their way, this nomadic group in the car make a detour into a prehistoric site and remains - remains and records of the past and images of the present. They memorise history and historicise memory. While the camera peers and ponders over things and landscapes, the voice over muses over the nature of created images: ‘video perhaps doesn’t retain memory, but creates illusions for sure’, which is nothing but a rumination upon the technologies of recording and also memorising. Camera is transfixed by the the image of the vagina engraved upon stone at the prehistoric site, and moves on to its overexposed image then to the projected screen, and onto the film rolls and the cans, as if obsessively trying to reach out to the origins and originals. Then the screen merges into the computer screen where yet another car takes off through the city streets in a racing game.

It is a constant and compulsive slippage, from one image to another, from image to memory, from image to sound and music, from image to metaphors, from the image of reality to the reality of image, from real objects to video and film and digital images etc This incessant slippage is also a journey that parodies our contemporary life-experience of visual mediation and inundation.