Films and Videos

Heat and Dust with Filmmaker James Ivory in Person

Sunday, April 8, 1:00–4:00 pm (film screening to be followed by discussion with James Ivory)
Samsung Hall, Asian Art Museum
$5 members; $22 general (includes admission to the special exhibition)
Directed by James Ivory. Produced by Ismail Merchant. 1983, 130 Minutes.

Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her Booker Prize-winning novel, Heat and Dust is the story of two English women living in India more than fifty years apart during very different times. Olivia (Greta Scacchi) shares a troubled marriage with Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), an English civil servant in the colonial India of the 1920s. Anne, Olivia’s great-niece (Julie Christie), comes to the subcontinent -- thirty years after the sun has set on the British empire -- to investigate Olivia’s life, which her family regarded as “something dark and terrible.” Anne finds herself both in the same rooms and in the same predicament as her great-aunt and must then re-assert her own independence, fifty years later. The time and place of the film, set in pre- and post-colonial India, is an immersive summation and next chapter to the Maharaja exhibition closing this same day, which looks at the art and history of India’s native rulers into the 1930s.

The India of Heat and Dust is a balance of visual splendor and the understated ironies that are characteristic of Ivory-Jhabvala work. Merchant spares nothing in the production values -- we move from ornate banquets in 1923 to breathtaking vistas in present-day Kashmir -- yet the film’s grand exteriors provide the backdrop to closely observed interior lives. Award-winning actor Shashi Kapoor plays the dashing Nawab in his fourth appearance in one of Ivory's films. Richard Robbins provides the music, employing Indian master musicians in arrangements that bridge Indian classical with 1920s period songs. Of note to Bay Area audiences is the involvement of our own Zakir Hussain, who acted in the film as Anne’s landlord/lover in India and was also associate music director for the film.

In the discussion, Ivory will highlight some of the literary antecedents to the creation of the film, such as the work of Jhabvala, E. M. Forster, and J.R. Ackerley.

In collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive’s series Afterimage: James Ivory curated by Kathy Geritz. Special thanks to Graeme Vanderstoel and the Society for Art and Cultural Heritage of India (SACHI).

Educational Videos

Below is a sample of the videos produced by the Asian Art Museum. To see our entire collection of educational and Matcha videos, please visit us on YouTube or iTunes U.

Indonesian Puppets