ARTISTS ON FILM: VIVEK BALD ON MUTINOUS ARCHAEOLOGIES: FILMS FROM THE DUB AND PUNK ARCHIVES

NYU’s PROGRAM FOR ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN STUDIES presents:

Asian American Visual Cultures

ARTISTS ON FILM: VIVEK BALD ON MUTINOUS ARCHAEOLOGIES: FILMS FROM THE DUB AND PUNK ARCHIVES

Selections from:
DREAD BEAT AN' BLOOD: THE POET AND THE ROOTS (dir. Franco Rosso, 1979) THE PUNK ROCK MOVIE (dir. Don Letts, 1978) DANCE CRAZE (dir. Joe Massot, 1981) MUTINY: ASIANS STORM BRITISH MUSIC (dir. Vivek Bald, 2003)

Followed by a discussion between Vivek Bald and Sukhdev Sandhu

When: Tuesday 27 October 2009, 7pm
Where: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square (Bowery and East 5th) Free and open to the public

In the second of the Asian American Visual Cultures’ ARTIST ON FILM series, filmmaker Vivek Bald presents a group of British music documentaries from the late 1970s and early 1980s that shaped his trajectory through music and film and ultimately influenced the production of his 2003 documentary, ‘Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music’.

The screening will include selections from ‘Dread Beat an' Blood’, a 1979 profile of the poetry, music, and political activism of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson; ‘The Punk Rock Movie’, Don Letts’s Super-8 film documenting the early days of British punk as it unfolded at London’s Roxy Club (featuring the Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Slits, X-Ray Spex and others); ‘Dance Craze’, Joe Massot’s document of the British Two-Tone ska scene (featuring The Specials, The Selecter, The Bodysnatchers, The English Beat); and ‘Mutiny’ which charted the rise of South Asian music in 1990s Britain, focusing on the two decades of musical cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that moment (featuring Asian Dub Foundation, Fun^Da^Mental, Anjali, DJ Ritu, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, and Black Star Liner).

Vivek Bald is Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the last eighteen years, his work in multiple media forms - film/video, music/sound, and writing - has engaged with the politics, cultures and histories of the South Asian Diaspora. His documentary films include ‘Taxi-vala/Auto-biography’ (1994), about South Asian immigrant taxi-drivers in New York City, and ‘Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music’ (2003) about South Asian youth, music, and politics in 1970s-90s Britain. In 1997, he co-founded, with DJ Rekha, the club-night Mutiny, which showcased South Asian electronica from the U.S. and Britain and ran monthly until 2003.

Bald’s current work examines the little-known histories of Bengali Muslim seamen who jumped ship in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and settled in local working-class communities of color in places like New Orleans, Harlem and Detroit. This work is the basis for a forthcoming book, ‘Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York’, and a documentary film, with writer/performer Aladdin Ullah, entitled ‘In Search of Bengali Harlem’.

Co-sponsored by 3rd i  www.thirdi.org/~ny

Queries: ss162@nyu.edu