Free Falling

A film by Suvani Suri, Simran Chopra & Chayan Deb

Concept Note
Free Falling is an attempt to remediate two very old oral media forms poetry and public speaking, into a film. The theme of the film is Paradox of Freedom. It features Rabindranath Tagores poem Where the mind is without fear (1901), Martin Luther King Jr.s speech I have a dream (1963) and Jawaharlal Nehrus speech Tryst with destiny (1947). All of them talk about freedom in some sense. While Nehru speaks about the freedom of nation state and King about freedom from inequality and racial bias, Tagore speaks about freedom of the inner self. Free Falling essentially remediates the context in which these were written/ spoken. Also the final medium being a film, liberties offered by the medium have been taken to modify the linear structure of the poems and speech to suit our context. The actor, unlike in a conventional film, does not speak but only uses her facial expressions to mime. The accompanying vocal narrative is a rendition of excerpts from Tagores poem and some excerpts from the original recoding of Kings and Nehrus speeches. The editing technique of montage has been employed to remediate the context of the poem and speech. Shots of actors performance are juxtaposed with shots from popular advertisements from TV and print. Additionally, attempts have been made to exploit the properties of film to hyper mediate - graphics have been super-imposed on video in certain places and multiple video windows have been used in certain other places. Separate realities that form contingent parts of a single image or consecutive moments in time are presented to the viewer at a few portions of the film. Todays world of consumerism and material pursuit is whats real for us. TV is real, internet is real and everything it serves out is real for us. The infinite choices they offer are real for us. We find it difficult to extricate ourselves from this ever growing web of visual and electronic media. In a way, we are not free any more. The age of the image and its shadow has us at its feet. The freedom which we talk about, rejoice and celebrate, in which we take pride...are they really real? Free Falling prompts the user to engage in a debate with himself and confront the paradox of freedom that exists.

Script Explanation
Free Falling starts with a film leader countdown interspersed with TV static. It is to make the viewer aware that the new media object which he/she is going to watch is a film, and has got elements of TV in it. As the actor enacts to the opening lines of Where the mind is without fear, a clip from Mountain Dews TV ad comes in. The attempt is to prompt the viewer to interpret the old poem in a modern day consumerist context. The Fair & Lovely logo coming out from the pupil is another such attempt. Kings words about every mountain and rough places being made plain has been interpreted as the massive globalization which we have witnessed in last few decades and which has turned each of us into global souls. Super brands have continuously twisted their identity and stormed into different nations, and in a way homogenized the whole world, thereby making every mountain low and every rough places plain. As Nehrus famous lines At the stroke of midnight play, the screen repeatedly splits to emphasize awakening to light and freedom. The next shots, ironically, are all night shots. They show neon lights and billboards- all shining, glowing and proclaiming the virtues of certain products. These shots have been borrowed from McLuhans Wake, which essentially talks about his ideas of the world as a global village and the symbolism and implications of advertising. A screen slides in showing an overwhelmed actor, who is then again lured back by various cosmetic and lingerie products, referring to our notion of the bodily image and what is beautiful. At this point, the image of the actor which was earlier in sepia tones also gets transformed to a more techno filtered look. The next shot depicts the overdose of consumerism which we all encounter every day: Numerous brands feed into the dormant actors head. The Freedom TV airs excerpts from the Apples 1984 ad, where people who look like clones of each other sit motionless like vegetables are constantly tutored by a man who looks like a tyrant, referring to the world of consumerism that has bombarded us with image and rendered us all in want of the same things. The athlete runs in and throws the hammer on the screen to liberate them. Inspired by the classic image of a news announcer, with a screen of news behind her in a studio, the shot is composed of two different spaces. Derived from Eisenstein's montage theories which are based on the idea that montage originates in the "collision" between different shots in an illustration of the idea of thesis and antithesis, this dialectical nature of this technique has helped elucidate our idea in this sequence and the previous one with the ads scrolling in the same window space as the actor who presents a glamorous self.
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The film ends with a sequence showing the liberated man falling past huge billboards and advertising on buildings, to the sound of the last lines of Tagores poem Into this heaven of freedom my father led my country awake. These lines bring to the fore the ironic ideas of freedom and heaven that is real for us today contrasting with the ideas with which the poem was written. A rendition of the poem sung by the self proclaimed urban folk singer Sushmit Bose has been used here- a term he coined to describe his style of singing and song writing, which largely reflects the themes of the moral and civic decay of modern India. His songs lament the contradictions of the urban life and all the chameleon changes in a fast developing civil society as he quotes. The name of the movie Free Falling, taken from the Tom Petty song by the same name, flashes in this sequence, implying the very same- the bottomless pit of consumerism and want that we are falling into, in a free world. Contrastingly, another interpretation of this sequence, since it follows the one where the tyrant is destroyed, could also be that of the man falling through this version of the world, beyond it, into another version (the real heaven?) devoid of all these intrusions and temptations.

Credits
In order of appearance Where the mind is without fear (1901) - Poem by Rabindranath Tagore Mountain Dew (2009) TV commercial by Benetone Films I have a dream (1963) Speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Tryst with Destiny (1947) Speech by Jawaharlal Nehru McLuhans Wake (2002) Documentary film by Kevin McMahon, David Sobelman Tron Legacy: End Titles (2010) Soundtrack by Daft Punk for Tron Legacy 1984 (1984) TV commercial by Ridley Scott for Apple Computers Flynn lives (2010) - Soundtrack by Daft Punk for Tron Legacy Mad Men (2007) - TV series by Matthew Weiner Where the mind is without fear (2010) - Song by Susmit Bose