Reframing participant and audience: a tactics of circulation in Indian documentary (original) (raw)
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The first decade of the new millennium saw an organic growth of independent and unregulated film collectives in many disparate places; Pedestrian Pictures in Bengaluru, Vikalp in Mumbai (which later spread to Delhi and Bengaluru), VIBGYOR in Thrissur, Cinema of Resistance in Gorakhpur (which later spread to other towns in Uttar Pradesh), Marupakkam in Madurai. In an age when the mode of digital film circulation had significantly dented the rationale of the older variant of film societies, the new variant of film collectives, through innovative screening practices, took films to a diverse range of new audiences. Such non-traditional screening practices were not entirely novel, particularly for documentary films. From its inception, the independent non-fiction film had to rely upon alternate modes of film circulation, as the traditional modes of film distribution were out of bounds in most cases. We would show, through the course of this essay, how the film collectives of the new millennium opened up avenues of critical engagement with the cinematic medium. Though the present is a vibrant and prolific time for the making and screening documentary films in India, but, writings and scholarship on the topic are few and far between. Besides a handful of insightful articles, occasional reviews and interviews, not many serious studies had hitherto been undertaken on the practice and growth of non-fiction cinema in our country. Only very recently, some scholars have begun to address that vacuum. In their recent book, K. P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro (2016) have tried to map the growth and emergence of the independent documentary in India. They have shown how documentary films in India have challenged the commonly held notion of depicting the 'real' on the screen, by exploring complex relationships between the subjects, makers and spectators of the films. Peter Sutoris, in his important and critical work (Sutoris, 2016), has shown how there was both continuity and rupture from the colonial 'sarkari' documentary films to the films made under the banner of the Films Division of India; how films produced by the Films Division had tried to augment the statist logic of 'nation building' by othering crucial points of differences and disagreements that could upset the benevolent posturing of the State. The book also chronicles how some of the moments of protest and disjoint found its way, in the later part of 1960s, in some films
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On the Aesthetics and Ideology of the Indian Documentary Film : A Conversation
Understanding Indian documentary film as aesthetic practice and as a set of historical traditions has usually taken second place to political and ideological judgments about filmic significance. However these judgments usually refer to the Indian context exclusively, and ignore the wider global context. We can distinguish two broad trends in the history of documentary film, one that critiqued naïve realism and treated the cinema as a means of self-empowerment for the masses, and the other, that regarded the masses as the object of modernization practices. Both these trends have a shared history, of course, namely, the rise of the masses as a political force, which posed the problem of how the masses/"the people" should be represented, as subject or as object. Assumptions about realism flowed from the historical resolution of this issue in a given context, and changed quite slowly. In the Indian context, they provided the basis for a system where the funding and circulation of documentaries occurred within a complex web of identity and patronage. These assumptions are increasingly coming under scrutiny, due to the pressure of at least three developments: market forces that foreground popular appeal rather than verifiable fact; historical events such as the emergence of the Hindutva documentary that mobilize the presence of invisible worlds to political advantage; and the growing influence of global circuits of funding and exhibition, along with a proliferation of more diverse local spaces, that provide room for a greater range of artistic practice. This article, written as a conversation, discusses these developments and offers some arguments about the ideology and aesthetics of the documentary cinema. BioScope 3(1) 7-20 Paromita Vohra is a fi lmmaker and writer based in Mumbai, BioScope, 3, 1 (2012): 7-20 8
Documentary Film in India: An Anthropological History_Preface and Intro.pdf
This book maps a hundred years of documentary film practices in India. It demonstrates that in order to study the development of a film practice, it is necessary to go beyond the classic analysis of films and filmmakers and focus on the discourses created around and about the practice in question. The book navigates different historical moments of the growth of documentary filmmaking in India from the colonial period to the present day. In the process, it touches upon questions concerning practices and discourses about colonial films, postcolonial institutions, independent films, filmmakers and filmmaking, the influence of feminism and the articulation of concepts of performance and performativity in various films practices. It also reflects on the centrality of technological change in different historical moments and that of film festivals and film screenings across time and space.
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From the turn of this century, the best studies about any form of art have been generally based on the similar notion. What is shared in all these works is not very controversial notion that in order to understand better the style and the meaning of any work of art, one may learn a lot by analysing in detail how it expresses the social and cultural background, the economic, political and economic interests or even the more individual expectation of its patrons and audiences. This is certainly the methodological approach used by some of the best art historians such as Aby Warburg, Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers or, Salvatore Settis. But it also characterizes the works of historians such as Carlo Ginzburg or Simon Schamma, and sociologists of art such as Pierre Bourdieu. Now, it may sound a bit embarrassing to mention such references in introduction to a paper, which is dedicated essentially to the study of the first decades of documentary film making in the British Empire and in ...
Social hierarchies and technological practices: The making of documentary films in India
This article is premised on a critique of the view that technological capacities are independent of social hierarchies and are increasingly becoming participatory, allowing the entry of individuals from different levels of social strata. In response to the work Jacques Ellul and Francois Hetman, this paper argues that knowledge of technology, while indeed providing a momentary space for decision-making, does not necessarily restructure social hierarchies. Through case studies presented from the world of Indian documentary filmmaking, this paper puts forth the view that technology operators, despite being technologically advanced, do not break into the filmmaking hierarchical order. This remains true even where technical knowledge rests most with those in the lowest rungs of the filmmaking ladder. Instead, technological knowledge provides the scope for other kinds of relationships to develop, such as those of ‘trusting the technician’ or ‘admiration for the technician’s work’. This admiration is especially acquired through techniques of improvisation that the technological operator becomes proficient in. Furthermore, what continues to define documentary filmmaking hierarchy is conceptualization capacities of the practitioners, which are influenced by a similarity in socio-cultural backgrounds and film school training accessible to only a limited few.
The genre of documentary films, though closely related with factuality is often a medium that represents an alternative way to articulate the voices which borders on margins. S. Sukhdev's Nine months to Freedom: The Story of Bangladesh (1971) and Pramod Pati's Explorer (1968) belong to a selected category of documentary films which presents a divergence in representing the subject as well as the cinematic technique. This paper focuses on a close analysis of the selected films and attempts to highlight the dissent at multiple levels such as representation of the subject and the use of cinematic technique in the representation of the subject. The films selected for the study belongs to two different genres. Nine Months to Freedom resembles a political documentary; Explorer is an experimental film with plethora of subjects. Through the help of Clifford Geertz's 'Thick Description' the paper attempts to study dissent and dialogue in the film through the help of cinematic apparatus.
THE DIGITAL TURN? TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE HISTORY OF DOCUMENTARY CINEMA IN INDIA
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