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Such a Morning

Director in Person
Screening on Film
Directed by Amar Kanwar.
India, 2017, digital video, color, 85 min.
Copy source: Marian Goodman Gallery

To cook slowly, on a slow flame, for a long time: sometimes that is a good way to be.

— Amar Kanwar

Amar Kanwar (b. 1964) is a New Delhi-based filmmaker and artist whose work has powerfully mined the potential of a slower, drifting method of moving image to forge a politically charged and engaged mode of gently expanded cinema. Kanwar’s critically acclaimed yet fiercely debated Such a Morning hovers on the border between magical realist allegory and slow cinema trance film with an almost Calvino-like fable of a renowned mathematician impulsively abandoninghis university post, without explanation, to hibernate in a train car abandoned deep in a lush forest. Studiously meditating on the darkness of his cabin as he carefully blocks out the stubborn sunlight, Kanwar’s obscure hero seeks an enigmatic form of solace, a passenger on a secret train of thought bound for an uncertain destination. The appearance, or apparitionof a woman indifferently guarding a house systematically dismantled by workersoffers a haunting bookend to the mathematician’s patient project, a form of deliberate waiting, or resistance, or surrender. Crafted with a cinematographic precision and remarkable attention to light and shadow, Such a Morning shimmers with fierce political allegory and obdurate mystery, inviting the viewer to sit and to wait, like the film’s characters, for an expected revelation. – Haden Guest

The evening before the screening, Amar Kanwar will be giving a free talk in the theater at 6pm.

Such a Morning introduction and post-screening discussion with Haden Guest, Dan Byers and Amar Kanwar. ©Harvard Film Archive

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