Turning Around the Camera

IT IS HARD TO MISS the brochure lying on documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak’s table. It explains, in Hindi, the schedule of the Fourth Gorakhpur Film Festival, organised this February by the Jan Sanskriti Manch. First staged in 2005, it has since become an annual event in the eastern Uttar Pradesh town. It is perhaps one of several indicators that documentary cinema, traditionally considered to be the preserve of a niche metropolitan audience, is moving away from the metro-festival circuit and finding new channels of circulation.

Kak is no stranger to the process. He recalls that when he began screening Jashn-e-Azadi, his last film on the meaning of azadi (or freedom) in Kashmir, he realised that people all over India were already familiar with his earlier film on Narmada Bachao Andolan, Words on Water.

With film festivals screenings in small cities such as Gorakhpur, Patna, Allahabad, Surat, Bhilai and Yamunanagar over the last three years, the independent documentary seems to have grown into a viable cinematic medium. It is a form that contains both fluidity and experimentation, complexity and a certain transparency. There is a political vision and a critical edge, but also scope for asking questions about social memory, alternative and often forgotten histories, and cultures of protest and transgression. There are films being made on and around gender, sexuality, urban life, identity, art and subaltern cultural practices.

With a profusion in the numbers of documentary films being made, their scope seems chaotic yet creative, diffused and limited at the same time. What are the parameters of their non-commercial distribution? Where can the lines be drawn between documentary and fiction, when the former so freely uses devices of the latter?

MANY OF THE QUESTIONS associated with today’s documentary cinema come from its early history. The British government used documentaries as propaganda tools during WWII, with compulsory screenings of such films in cinema halls. Later, in newly independent India, documentary cinema came to be perceived as an artform that could be deployed for building and integrating the nation. As a result, there was little disagreement between the government and the filmmakers as far as the voice of the Films Division-funded documentaries were concerned. These films emphasised the collective rather than the personal, the didactic rather than the dialogic.

By the 1970s, however, in the period following the Emergency, a number of political documentary filmmakers such as Gautam Ghosh, Anand Patwardhan, Utpalendu Chakravarty, Tapan Bose and Suhasini Mulay began to challenge the benevolent perception of the state through a series of films critical of it. Yet even as there was an attempt to question the state, the aesthetics and the language were often similar to the earlier films.

“In these films, instead of a benevolent state, there was the rogue state. Instead of trying to define the citizen, there were citizens as victims,” points out Gargi Sen, documentary filmmaker and co-founder of the Delhi-based documentary distributor, Magic Lantern Foundation. Yet many of today’s filmmakers had their first experience of seeing documentaries at this time, even though they would go on to raise questions about them later. Kak saw his first documentary in the 1980s in a darkened classroom in his Delhi college—Anand Patwardhan screening his film, Prisoners of Conscience, on political prisoners in the time of the Emergency.

“Anand was one of the first persons to go crisscrossing the country to show his film with such energy,” says Kak. “After the screening, I realised that it was possible to do this. Yet, apart from a few films, the scope for seeing documentaries was limited, and we often made our films long before seeing many others...”

BY THE 1980S, THE documentary scenario looked less bleak. More people started to work with the medium and the source of funding expanded. Feminist filmmakers such as Manjira Datta, Reena Mohan, Nilita Vachani, Deepa Dhanraj, Madhushree Datta, and the Jamia-based Mediastorm group made their first documentaries around this time.  Many of them came from a context of engagement with the women’s movement and its politics. Remarkably, at a time when female filmmakers were a rarity in mainstream cinema, a number of them began to use documentaries to consciously identify themselves as feminists. For many subsequent filmmakers, this opened up several possibilities of how documentaries could become a political way of storytelling.

Towards the end of the decade, there were several parallel streams of documentary cinema. The Films Division continued to produce them, but there were some exceptions that ran contrary to the institution’s expository approach. These included Mani Kaul’s Dhrupad and Siddheshwari and Satyajit Ray’s The Inner Eye. Simultaneously, a large number of films began to be commissioned by NGOs as well. In their early career, Delhi-based filmmakers Saba Dewan and Rahul Roy worked on several such films. Often these films would be driven by their own agendas, which circumscribed their scope and creativity. “These commissioned films co-opted the language of protest that was associated with earlier non-commissioned independent films, but their concerns were restricted and within the state’s limits,” Dewan recalls.

And then there were the independent, non-commissioned political documentaries that often portrayed moments and issues of political injustice. Even as some films were being made with a more nuanced vision by a number of feminist filmmakers, the limitations of the earlier language of expression were making themselves visible. Questions were raised about finding a new form to articulate political concerns. Dewan describes her earlier films, Dharmayuddha and Nasoor, as protest films, made in the midst of the late 1980s and early 90s identity politics.

In accordance with the language and objectives of the documentary genre of that time, “they sought to expose hidden faces of reality.” Dewan adds, “While I believed in the issues of the earlier protest films, their form was predictable and did not excite me as a filmmaker. Along with making political documentaries came the need to work with images and form and to think of documentary as an aesthetic medium. If I do a film, then it has to satisfy the political person as well as the filmmaker in me.”

AS THERE EMERGEDA need to engage with the political in newer ways, there was also a reworking of the means of expressing it, so the political was not reduced to the didactic. On one level, this critique was directed against the cinema that tended to make the people and lives it filmed instruments of politics.

“Politics is often thrust on the shoulders of people who one works with as a filmmaker, which either projects them as heroic figures who stand up for resistance or by demonising them,” says Rahul Roy. “By placing them under a singular lens, there is a refusal to look at the complexity of how people lead their lives and a limiting of the potential of documentary to humanise those it represents.”

After the 1990s, the Internet and a wider exposure to international cinema led to a considerable shift in the way documentary filmmakers approached their craft. Yet, the still-expensive nature of filmmaking, its government funding and the long-held expectations that documentaries should contribute to nation building meant the filmmaker’s gaze was often turned towards the Other, the less privileged. This often left little scope for the filmmaker to be experimental and even mildly self-indulgent. However, documentaries soon began to seek ways to subvert state influence. In several of them, the presence of the filmmaker in the narrative became a significant way of questioning this authority. This could also challenge the perceived truism of documentary being an objective way of representing reality. In recent years, filmmakers have done so by turning the camera on their lives and relationships. The film often becomes an engagement between filmmaker and subject, blurring the boundaries between the two.

From Shyamal Karmakar’s irreverent—bordering on the indulgent—narrative of a singer in Mumbai in I’m The Very Beautiful, to Avijit Mukul Kishore’s sensitive portrayal of his relationship with his mother in Snapshots From A Family Album, to Supriyo Sen’s film Way Back Home, detailing his parents’ first journey to their homeland in Bangladesh since Partition. What these films share is that the personal often draws from the political, but the political also becomes the personal.

Extending the argument, Saba Dewan says this aspect is common to several South Asian documentaries, where the personal is linked with bigger political realities and contextualised with wider concerns, unlike ‘Western’ documentaries with much more individualistic concerns. Sita’s Family (2002), based on three generations of women in Dewan’s family, was semi-autobiographical and narrated in the first person. Her films, especially the most recent trilogy on female performers, seek newer ways of depicting the process of negotiation and interaction between filmmakers and their subjects. In Naach (2008), dancers performing at rural cattle fairs in Bihar ask her questions about her own life in a particular scene, inverting the hierarchy of power. The first film in the trilogy, Delhi Mumbai Delhi (2006), follows the life of Riya, a working-class girl from Delhi, as a beer bar dancer in Mumbai. Here, too, as Riya develops a sense of comfort with being filmed, she takes control of the camera and the interview towards the end.

Dewan explains the ways in which the Personal enters her films. “In Sita’s Family, I wanted to tell the story of my family in the first-person. Yet in other films, like Naach and Delhi Mumbai Delhi, which are in a verité style, the presence of the camera and the filmmaker acting as catalysts to people’s reactions and events is acknowledged, and becomes a way in which comment takes place across gender, caste and class.”

Her latest film, The Other Song (2009), is a kind of search for the figure of the tawaif (courtesan) as a performer of Hindustani classical music, negotiating the past and the present as part of the journey. The need to represent alternative and transgressive histories and memories posed newer questions of form and narrative.

“How do you create a past without falling into the trap of nostalgia or dramatic recreation?” she says of her film that took around eight years to make. “The archival material, both visual and oral, was visually located in the images of the present, to represent the resonance of the past in the present. It was also important to find the filmic representation of their song, like through the use of images of the Ganga along with Raga Bhairavi to create a certain mood.”

Most documentaries are about finding and giving space to narratives, which may not always be the filmmakers’ own. In the process, the documentary also increasingly draws upon the emotional language of fictional idioms to create a new hybrid language for telling stories. In their own way, these sought to release documentaries from a kind of trap that came with the compulsion to represent the Real. These range from Mumbai-based Paromita Vohra’s zany, stylish editing that moves from one medium to another, to RV Ramani’s poetic images which seamlessly flow into each other and find their own vernacular for looking at reality.

Vohra’s films give the Personal a unique twist by using the persona of the filmmaker as a trope, to raise questions and spark off conversations, instead of her explicit presence in it. For instance, her Unlimited Girls uses the narrator’s conversations in a feminist chatroom to explore the meaning of feminism through conversations with other women.

“In the film, the almost unreliable narrator leads the audience through her questions,” says Vohra. “As she is unsure of her own stand, the audience cannot rely on her and instead relies on its own understanding of the film.”

At the same time, the younger generation of filmmakers like her recognise what documentaries can do. “For me, films operate in the realm of culture and ideas, not planning,” she says, giving the example of Q2P, where she takes a critical look at urban planning through a witty investigation into the near absence of public toilets for women.

HER FILMS ARE AMONG a considerable number that engage with the circulation of popular culture through mainstream cinema and television, exploring the ways in which it shapes the identities and aspirations of their subjects. She has drawn upon local myths, language and subcultures in her films, as a reference point for connecting with various viewers. Her latest film, Morality TV and The Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale, set in Meerut, uses the local language and cultural references to look into the idea of love in small towns through an investigation into the city’s Operation Majnu, a televised operation on police officers chasing and beating lovers in a local park. Another film, Where’s Sandra? explores the making of the local urban legend of the stereotypical Christian girl, Sandra from Bandra, Mumbai. “As the masculinist myth of the pan-Indian film is broken, a more idiomatic and particular flavour of a film and its individuality increasingly connects people to the film,” observes Vohra, a self-taught filmmaker.

In these films, instead of a doctrinarian monologue, there is focus on dialogue. Yet in other ways, there are no rules to these films. Dialogue may be present, but much can also be conveyed only through silences and sounds, apart from conversation. Genres and styles blend freely.

If Vohra’s films are remarkable for the editing and the mixing of mediums, Chennai-based RV Ramani’s cinema is marked by a poetic evocation of the medium’s potential. Elements of fiction find their way into the stories that their documentaries seek to portray. As a filmmaker, Ramani says, he has been creating fictional elements in all his films, only without actors.

“I think that fiction needs to become independent of its association only with literature,” he says. “While the focus of commercial cinema is primarily on the literary aspect, there is a need to link images and see what image can be used next based on the images I have just shot.” So it is often that his camera seems to linger lovingly on each frame that flows into another, like in the conceptual Brahma Vishnu Shiva, and the lyrical Heaven on Earth. A deep engagement with different art and performance practices runs though his films—theatre, painting, and more recently, shadow puppetry in Nee Engey and Tamil writing in Nee Yar, these become ways of exploring the parallels of cinema and art.

“My films are politically motivated even though the themes may not based on newspaper headlines,” says Ramani, who shoots, directs and often produces many of his own films. “Instead, the process of demystifying the commercial aspect of cinema and staying away from the commercial form by engaging the audience in ways other than only pleasure, itself becomes politics.”

What has evolved is a nuanced film practice that engages with the Political in various ways. The recent films of Shyamal Karmakar, Vipin Vijay, Rajula Shah and Arghya Basu, among others, draw upon a mélange of styles: the observational, verité, the personal, and a multiplicity of film languages, both visual and oral, to tell their stories.

Experimentation in style and form as well as the creation of an independent film language have been made easier by the availability of digital video technology, which allows for much longer shoots and easier editing. At the same time, circulation has broadened thanks to VCDs and DVDs. Technology has allowed more people to work, making it possible for more voices to emerge.

The absence of a concrete funding structure for Indian documentaries has played its own role in allowing experimentation. Independent documentary filmmakers have had to reach out to their audience directly, without the mediation of a television audience, and this has given them a certain freedom to narrate their own stories in the ways they wanted to tell them.

Kak sees this as creating a certain purity and density in documentary form that would have been absent with funding. “The lack of a single overwhelming funding support has allowed various people to search out film languages that they were comfortable with,” he says. “Now there is a range of languages being spoken in film which have found their audience, so even if there are commissions, people will continue to work their way.”

This freedom has opened the space for stories that have challenged and ruptured the grand nationalist narrative with which documentary films were once concerned. Instead, questions are raised about a range of issues from the persistence of caste inequalities (in films like RP Amudhan’s Shit and Stalin K’s India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart), debates around sexuality in queer cinema, and subnationalist movements in the Northeast and Kashmir. While Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace questioned celebratory accounts of India’s nuclear test at Pokhran, Amar Kanwar’s A Night of Prophecy captured protest poetry from all over the country, and Rakesh Sharma’s Final Solution  investigated the 2002 Gujarat riots.

In 2003-04, an attempt by the government to censor documentaries met with resistance from the filmmakers, who organised a parallel film festival called Vikalp-Films for Freedom, which later grew into a film archive. “The campaign against censorship was significant because of the value of why it was important not to have censorship; you could only contest it by screening,” says Kak. “It galvanised people, especially non-filmmakers, with many film festivals being started subsequently.”

When Jashn-e-Azadi began to be screened in 2007, it met with adverse reactions. Yet the space created by the founding of Vikalp allowed 100 screenings to be held within a month all over India.

In his own words, Kak’s films have, since Words on Water and Jashn-e-Azadi, begun a “conversation about Indian democracy. At that time, my own political journey and practice as a filmmaker came together with a recognition of how the audience is changing.”

EVEN AS DOCUMENTARIESBEGIN to travel outside the mainstream festival circuit and are being screened at smaller festivals by students, citizen groups and NGOs, at the heart of the discussions around them is the question of their value and how to sustain them. As a non-commercial, independent artform, the documentary constitutes a kind of public culture. “The problem is that non-commercial is often understood to be free,” says Gargi Sen. “Yet, if public culture is entirely free, it tends to lose its value. Film festivals themselves are a kind of performing public culture and without the state support given to festivals like the Berlinale, it becomes difficult to sustain public culture. Documentaries must have some way of earning revenue, if only to pay for screenings and circulation.”

Often, the kind of distribution a film can have depends on its sources of funding. Unlike earlier, the government-backed Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), which produces many documentaries, gives filmmakers a certain independence to express their subjectivity. Its films are screened on Doordarshan and Lok Sabha channels. Yet, the PSBT’s ownership of these films sometimes poses a conflict of interest with independent filmmakers.

The Bangalore-based India Foundation for the Arts provides grants for films made around art and culture, while giving the rights of the film to the filmmaker. Under Construction, the distribution centre of the Magic Lantern Foundation in Delhi, produces and distributes documentaries in various film festivals and through its website, while giving filmmakers the option to distribute their films independently. As avenues of funding and distribution open up, they are still at an early stage.

For now, non-commercial spaces for screening documentaries are primarily educational, cultural spaces. However, there are some attempts to experiment with newer viewing practices to accommodate changes in the way cinema is

being viewed. As the Internet continues to be a space for

accessing and downloading cinema, there is a shift away from the exclusive focus on cinema halls. The Magic

Lantern Foundation has tried out various practices in the festivals that it organises, which include video parlours and booths for smaller audiences. Sen adds, “The laws of screening are governed by laws of the film industry, which the documentary that is made at a much lesser budget also has to abide by. While the industry has been organised for 100 years, documentary filmmakers are still a relatively fledgling group.”

In several ways, the informal, often haphazard distribution and public screenings of documentaries call for a different way of conceptualising viewership, which is outside of the parameters established for mainstream cinema that counts audience in terms of commercial collections at the box office. These are often closely circumscribed by the spaces where the film is screened, the duration of its release and its run. Yet, documentaries often circulate in contrary ways. There are several examples, one being Reena

Mohan’s 1992 film Kamlabai, which, as Sen says, has been in circulation for the last 18 years, travelling to multiple sites and locations.

Documentary filmmakers in India have been wearing many hats. They have been exhibitors and distributors, travelling with their films as they screen them. Yet for many filmmakers, while this process can often be tedious, it also allows for interactions with the audience that become extremely significant. Screenings often take the shape of social and sometimes even political activities. With their fluidity and openness, independent documentaries become channels of starting conversations, which have room for questioning and disagreement. The film becomes only part of the argument, given new meaning by the audience.

“Our relationship with reality is a triangulation, there is reality, there are filmmakers and there the audiences,” Kak says. “As television becomes more and more complicit in only one narrative, and unable to reflect the complex reality which is unfolding before us, documentaries become an alternative way of knowing.”

Yet this space for documentaries in the form of festivals in smaller towns has been built over several years, and these, in turn, attract buyers and distributors. In the 1990s, there could be a certainty about who the audience would be: it was often those with NGO concerns. Now, with wider channels of circulation, there is no fixed audience. Yet documentary film practice is often happy with these multiple publics, who grasp the form and the language of the films, bringing their own understanding to it. Ramani points to attempts being made by filmmakers to identify smaller venues and towns for screenings, with an interaction with a smaller audience and their engagement with the film often becoming more rewarding for the filmmaker. It is through this potential of the medium to raise questions and provoke conversations that documentaries can find their place in the contemporary public sphere, not only in Delhi but also in Gorakhpur.