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Event
RASA YATRA
Rasa Yatra (50 mins) evokes the beauty of pilgrimage in India through non-linear narrative. Rasa is Sanskrit for 'juice' or 'taste", and yatra means 'journey', suggesting a joyful inner expedition, beyond the confines of routine and conceptual conventions. Photographed over a period of four years, Rasa Yatra takes the viewer on a meditative journey from the majestic Himalayan mountains into Vrindavana, the spiritual heart of India. For the receptive viewer, Rasa Yatra becomes a pilgrimage rather than a mere depiction of one.
In America and Europe some 30 million people practice many different forms of yoga (Ashtanga-yoga, Kriya-yoga, Raja-yoga, Vikram-yoga, Kundalini-yoga, Dhyana-yoga, Hatha-yoga, etc.) and many wish to know more about where they come from. Today in India the Himalayas are still home for yogis, sages, and families too, who live there in obscurity, far from the masses. One who wishes to inquire from the ascetics must climb high into the remote mountainous regions and serve them in a humble mood as long as possible.
Rasa Yatra is a documentary, which has already done the steep walk for the viewer. It offers one a transcendental viewpoint of tradition, which has inspired filmmakers, poets, scholars as well as spiritual practitioners in the past, in the present and it will, no doubt, in the future. Through cinema's ability to perceive the flow of time as contemplation, Rasa Yatra conveys meaning through arresting image juxtaposition in combination with meditative sounds, real-life dialogues and sacred texts.
A particular form of yoga is the yoga of devotion to God (Bhakti). People in and outside India worship Krishna, the God of love who is enchanting his devotees with his love calls since time immemorial. Vrindavana, the place where Krishna spent his youth, is a prominent centre of Hindu pilgrimage and attracts a large number of pilgrims all year round, from all over the world. Rasa Yatra portrays Vrindavana in a beautiful contemporary manner, in contrast with the effects modernity has on this holy place: corporate media greed, social crisis, and the transformation of Indian identity. At present Vrindavana area is facing the largest environmental pollution in its history caused by the insensitive politics of power structures in modern India.
The power of this film is that you are free to create your own meanings out of it.
Appreciations of RASA YATRA
NEAR the beginning of the film, a text is quoted from the Bhagavad Gita with a thought that could not have come from our accelerated world of time: "Of sacrifices, I am the sacrifice of quietly repeated prayer: of stationary things, I am the Himalayas." These timeless words are, for me, a cinematic key to Param Tomanec's film RASA YATRA. Walking through the structure of the film's stationary frames is a journey to enter and behold. The zoom, the pan, the tracking shot, the dissolve and fade are a very slight addendum, if at all present. The focus of the film is the power of the unrelenting moving still. Moving still, to jump cut, to moving still what you see is what you hear, more to say than can be spoken. RASA YATRA, for those that are receptive, may offer a line to our own inner voice, the narrative of this film.
While surrendering the more overt, popular cinematic form of unmistakable meaning, this non-linear narrative may offer the viewer in return a meaningful experience. A story to be told is given up for a story to behold. What is lost to information for the mind may be gained in a cinematic watermark of the heart.
Godfrey Reggio, Director and Producer of QATSI trilogy
RASA YATRA is visually stunning and leaves a fine impression.
Shyam Benegal, Director, Writer, Producer
I HAVE had a stunning experience watching RASA YATRA. It is really a masterful bit of film/video making.
Robert Gardner, Filmmaker and Author, Founder and former director of Centre for Visual Arts, Harvard University.
THIS FILM is the visual expression of an idea, the idea of devotion or bhakti, and unfolds that idea through a series of striking images. Param Tomanec takes us on a journey through a stunningly visual landscape from the natural beauty of Himalayan mountains, yogis, to the human beauty of tears, fragility, and laughter. This film is a vivid, visual description of popular devotion to Krishna and Radha, which not only presents us with images but successfully manages to convey through sound and vision the sense of people's devotion, calmness, and sometimes playfulness. From wonderful, bleak mountains with the cold moon reflected in the still pools and the wind whistling through the hills to lush valleys, interesting lined faces, and laughing children; from snow to fire; and from silence to noise and back to silence. Tomanec has realized a striking film, beautiful in conception and in execution.
Gavin Flood, Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion, Oxford University.
IN RASA YATRA, Param Tomanec gives us a photographic tone poem that is utterly worthy of its title. Rasa yatra would be, in Sanskrit, "a journey of sentiment" or perhaps "a journey to sentiment." A dominant tradition of Indian aesthetic analysis chooses the metaphor of liquid or flavor (rasa) to describe the way in which all emotions are related, and how they go to the core of who we are as embodied beings. Tomanec takes us on a journey that makes this taxonomy of sentiment go into geography with photography of remarkable beauty. Forty-nine minutes, but what a journey!
John Stratton Hawley, Professor of Religion, Columbia University.
IT challenges us to sharpen and refine our spiritual senses as it brings us into the atemporal dimension of Krishna-bhakti, suspending the temporal by its moving vision, and moving the heart by its suspending images and sounds.
Kenneth Russell Valpey, Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies / Chinese University of Hong Kong
Param Tomanec
Turning away from a promising career in the commercial film and advertisement industries, at eighteen years of age Param Tomanec embarked on a journey of rediscovery. This call to adventure led him to a joining a spiritual yoga ashram of Krishna tradition, north of London in 1997. There he spent eight years practising meditation, studying philosophy and serving the community. While based in the monastic community Param worked on photographic documentaries in eastern Africa, Asia, and Europe. Since 2005 he is living in Oxford, UK. Param graduated from the University of Westminster at the school of Media, Arts & Design in Photography in 2009. His studies explored the relationship between moving and still image. Param's creativity is largely inspired by Eastern traditions with filmmakers like Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke and Andrei Tarkovsky bringing influences into his work.
Param is shaping a scenario for his first feature motion picture project entitled Krida (krida is Sanskrit for 'to play', 'pastime', or 'spontaneous adventure' encompassing both, human and divine). He has been proposed by art curator Martin Gurvich to direct a new documentary focusing on the lives and practices of living visual artists in India.
In 2009 he was appointed as Artist-in-Residence at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, a Recognized Independent Centre of the University of Oxford. Param's still and moving pictures are used at Universities across the world for courses on Indian life, culture and art. He contributes to archives at BBC Online and Sri Chaitanya Prema Sansthan, India.
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LocationThe Bhakti Center - Studio 2w (View)
25 First Avenue
New York, NY 10003
United States
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