Review of monograph by G. Battaglia, "Documentary Film in India: An Anthropological History" (original) (raw)

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.

Crafting ‘participatory’ and ‘collaborative’ film-projects in India. Who’s the author? Whose vision?

Anthrovision Vaneasa Online Journal, 2014

, for taking various parts of the two audiovisual works discussed in this paper. I am particularly grateful to the public of the Participatory Video Seminar organised by Alicia Blum-Ross for the RAI 11 th International Festival of Ethnographic Film at Metropolitan University (2009, Leeds) for actively engaging with an old draft of this article presented for that occasion. I also thank the editor of this special issue, Cristina Grasseni and Florian Walter, for encouraging me in developing this topic, and to the anonymous reviewers for constructively engaging with this text. Finally, I thank Christopher Davis for her discussions with me on what has later on inspired the theoretical discussion of this article; Aude Michelet for providing feedback on writing about children; and last but not least, Brendan Donegan for his serious engagement with the content and form of this article and stimulating my further thinking. 1 This article seeks to explore questions concerning participation, collaboration, voices, visions and multi-modal representations in the image-making process. It is a retrospective self-reflection on two audiovisual projects, 'Nila Illam' (Battaglia 2006a) and 'The Electric Oriental Journey' (Battaglia 2009), conducted by myself in India respectively in 2006 and 2009. 2 In particular, in this piece I turn my attention to the implication of the making of audiovisual projects and how different ways of constructing narratives create new forms of representations. In line with the theme of the AnthroVision special issue, I present two film-projects that in different ways seek to integrate invisible voices and make them coexist with my own temporality and agenda, as both an anthropologist and image-maker. My contribution to this discussion, however, is not limited to the relationship between Crafting 'participatory' and 'collaborative' film-projects in India Anthrovision, 2.2 | 2014

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

The Changing World of Satyajit Ray: Reflections on Anthropology and History

Media Watch, 2013

The visionary Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) is India's most famous director. His visual style fused the aesthetics of European realism with evocative symbolic realism, which was based on classic Indian iconography, the aesthetic and narrative principles of rasa, the energies of shakti and shakta, the principles of dharma, and the practice of darsha dena/darsha lena, all of which he incorporated in a self-reflective way as the means of observing and recording the human condition in a rapidly changing world. This unique amalgam of self-expression expanded over four decades that cover three periods of Bengali history, offering a fictional ethnography of a nation in transition from agricultural, feudal societies to a capitalist economy. His films show the emotional impact of the social, economic, and political changes, on the personal lives of his characters. They expand from the Indian declaration of Independence (1947) and the period of industrialization and secularization of the 1950s and 1960s, to the rise of nationalism and Marxism in the 1970s, followed by the rapid transformation of India in the 1980s. Ray's films reflect upon the changes in the conscious collective of the society and the time they were produced, while offering a historical record of this transformation of his imagined India, the ‘India’ that I got to know while watching his films; an ‘India’ that I can relate to. The paper highlights an affinity between Ray's method of film-making with ethnography and amateur anthropology. For this, it returns to the notion of the charismatic auteur as a narrator of his time, working within the liminal space in-between fiction and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, culture and history respectively, in order to reflect upon the complementary relationship between the charismatic auteur and the role of the amateur anthropologist in an ever-changing world.

The Video Turn: Documentary Film Practices in 1980s India

This article focuses on the technology of documentary filmmaking in India, drawing attention to its materiality and its historical transformation after the arrival of video there in the 1980s. Two aspects of the 1980s video-making are emphasized: on the one hand, a focus on possibilities that video created for non-professional filmmakers; and on the other, the novelty of video-documentary practices in India is questioned. I argue that in a context in which documentary activities were already established, video technology enabled these practices to increase in number, become small-media practices and go beyond state restrictions.