Documentary Films in India

Critical Aesthetics at Work

Aparna Sharma

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137395436
• eBook ISBN: 9781137395443
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book introduces the diverse practices of three non-canonical practitioners: David MacDougall, Desire Machine Collective and Kumar Shahani. It offers analysis of their documentary methods and aesthetics, exploring how their oeuvres constitute a critical and self-reflexive approach to documentary-making in India.

Part I

1

Constructing the Self, Constructing Others: David MacDougall’s Observational Films on Institutions for Children in India

The subject is part of the filmmaker, the filmmaker part of the subject.

– David MacDougall, 1998: 29.

Black waters gushing out of sewage pipes into an open field. Lumps of human faeces floating in choked lavatories. Children peering out through the cracked glasses of rusted windows. These images recur in Gandhi’s Children, ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall’s 2008 film about a shelter home and juvenile detention center for homeless and orphaned children in New Delhi. We could dismiss these as stereotypical images of poverty and destitution from the third world, but in Gandhi’s Children, which documents everyday life at the shelter, these recurrent images expose the viewer to the sensory extremities the shelter’s inmates face on a daily basis. The inmates are destitute children: lost, abandoned, runaway, ailing, criminal, violent – and equally, if not more often, violated themselves. Gandhi’s Children follows these inmates’ life stories and their experiences at the shelter. This is not done in a conventional voiceover-led, expository style of documentary. The film is shot principally from within the shelter and, using the principles of observational cinema, MacDougall follows the everyday goings-on here.

The film is punctuated with images of the Delhi vista as seen from the narrow windows of the shelter. The winter air is hazy; a ring of dense smog encircles the city and the piercing cold, we see, bites both skin and bone. Through the entwining of this grey and cold panorama with the living conditions at the shelter, MacDougall subtly gestures to the position of destitute children in Delhi – and, given this is happening in India’s capital city, within Indian society more broadly. But MacDougall is deeply astute and Gandhi’s Children is not a sentimental exposé using any crude victim discourse. Based on very patient camerawork, the film offers a delicate narrative through which the shelter’s inmates appear less the forgotten statistics of an increasingly ‘prosperous’ society, and ever more humane. Filled as much with fears, loss, want and desires as with humour, camaraderie, aspirations, intelligence, poise, self-respect and, before MacDougall’s camera, even an enduring smile. This kind of a thin narrative that simultaneously reveals the inmates’ vulnerabilities and their resilience rests on MacDougall’s sensitivity towards the relations that he, the filmmaker, forms with his subjects. MacDougall has persistently considered the filmmaker–subject relation in his films and his following thought indicates his concerns:

In the eyes of my subjects, my film will not be judged by how it makes the obvious points. They will set a much higher standard. I must go beyond what is implicit between us. I shall not be able to speak as the expert, nor shall I feel comfortable about belaboring the elementary things we both already know. My work will be judged by its good faith¹ toward them and its understanding of their perceptions of the world, without pretending to be their view of it. (MacDougall 1998: 91)

The quiet and sustained approach that MacDougall adopts in Gandhi’s Children allows him to introduce the viewer to the inmates’ wide-ranging dispositions that range from unsettled and impatient volatility to perceptive introspection. While MacDougall’s own personality and experience cannot be separated from this, his considerate approach towards his subjects can be contextualized in relation to the practice of observational cinema.

Observational cinema is a form of ethnographic filmmaking that distinguishes itself from the wider corpus of documentary by emphasizing seeing – the act of looking, as a mode of social inquiry. Colin Young, a key figure who shaped the observational cinema movement encapsulates the practice’s key sentiment thus: ‘The difference is between telling a story and showing us something’ (Young 1995: 103). This emphasis on looking reflects a commitment to exercising the specificity of the cinematic medium that is not essentially verbocentric.²

Observational cinema is committed to the exploration of people’s lives by focusing on the environments they inhabit. Through the exploration of people’s embodied experiences, knowledges, systems of meanings, practices of work and forms of social and creative expression, observational films seek to understand how people interact with their lived environments. Observational films are characterized by an austere aesthetic as this practice radically departs from mainstream forms of cinema based on conflict-driven drama. Observational cinema is grounded in the understanding that the everyday lives of people do not actually unfold according to the structures and principles of mainstream dramatic film, including forms of documentary and ethnographic film based on exposition, conflict or argument. In an early commentary on this practice, film historian Eric Barnouw had noted that observational cinema grew with the rise of new and light equipment that enabled filmmakers to undertake the long-term study of previously unexplored spaces and phenomena. This distinguished it, both aesthetically and discursively, from the wider rubric of documentary cinema. He stated:

These film-makers were as intent on listening as on watching… They often poked into places society was inclined to ignore or keep hidden. Leaving conclusions to viewers, the films were ambiguous. When they seemed iconoclastic, it was not because of superimposed commentaries, but because there were new sights, sounds, and juxtapositions from which viewers – or at least some of them – drew disturbing inferences. (Barnouw 1993: 231)

Observational films do not use conventional techniques such as voiceover commentary, music or graphics to steer a film’s narrative. They rely principally on techniques of cinematography, sound and editing to construct and propose filmic meanings and ideas. Further, unlike conventional ethnographic films, observational films do not fragment filmed realities into parts that are reassembled in post-production using criteria external to ethnographic fieldwork. Observational filmmakers base a film’s narrative and structure on the order of the proceedings documented by the camera. Techniques including depth-of-field, long duration shots and minimal editing that preserve the spatial and temporal continuities of what is observed are recurrent features of observational films. The UCLA Ethnographic Film Programme³ was a laboratory in which issues and techniques of observational cinema were debated and developed. David MacDougall received training at this programme and for over four decades he has both derived from and contributed to developments in the field of observational cinema.

MacDougall’s ethnographic film project in India: the turn to children’s institutions

MacDougall’s ethnographic film project in India began with the highly acclaimed Photo Wallahs (1992). This was an essayistic film that examined photographic practices in the north Indian hill town, Mussoorie. The film spanned varied social strata spanning the English-speaking elites and former provincial royals on to the lower middle classes – all viewed in a range of sites including photographic studios and shooting locations, cemeteries, people’s homes and antique shops. The film wove a rich tapestry of photographic aesthetics registering varied sentiments, narratives and meanings that people deposit on the instance when a camera clicks. It exposed how people from different social backgrounds imagine and construct themselves through visual representations. As the film explored the ties between photographic aesthetics and their underlying political-economies, it demystified image-making.

Following Photo Wallahs, MacDougall turned his attention to children’s institutions. He started with a quintet on the elite boys’ boarding school, the Doon School in Dehradun, north India. This was followed by three films on the Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, south India, an institution founded and influenced by the teachings of the twentieth-century philosopher, J. Krishnamurti. If Photo Wallahs inaugurated MacDougall’s interest into sociocultural and class differences, the school films extended that interest, and together they can be understood as close studies of class structures and the processes of social and cultural stratification in Indian society.

Prior to working in India, David and Judith MacDougall made ethnographic films in Uganda, Kenya, Sardinia (Italy) and indigenous Australia. Working in societies that have contended with the influences and ambivalences of colonialism, education has often been a central theme in their work, forming a microcosmic framework through which to explore wider questions of how individuals sit in relation to society. In viewing MacDougall’s school films, we can see that they consider a series of interrelated questions. What becomes of individuals in a society where colonial rule has supposedly ended? More specifically, the films ask: what impulses, aspirations, and epistemologies are called upon in constructing the citizenry of an independent nation? And: who accesses which ways of being in society and on what terms? In this sense, the focus on children’s institutions such as schools serves in interrogating how a society imagines and constructs itself; how it conjures the past and envisions its future; and what consensus defines how individuals perform as social agents.

In the films about the Doon and Krishnamurti schools, MacDougall maps the cultural discourses and imaginaries of these two renowned institutions and how those inform their approaches to epistemology, formal pedagogies and the aesthetic principles by which they are constructed as learning environments. Since both of the schools were founded in the 1930s, during India’s freedom movement, they have in their own ways called up a discourse around the role and purpose of education for a society undergoing profound historical change. The school films expose us to the citizenship ideals and the conceptions of nationhood fostered by these institutions. They adopt a very different approach from the film Gandhi’s Children, which constitutes a diametrical move away from the elite, middle- and upper-middle-class educational institutions to a very different setting for childhood: a destitute children’s home. This move from one class context to another highlights many shifts in children’s ways of being, their aspirations, language and the very contract in which they as individuals perceive themselves positioned with relation to broader society. The first two projects expose us to the ambitious shaping of individuals to either lead the nation – as in the case of the Doon School – or to self-observe as responsive beings in keeping with Krishnamurti’s existential philosophy – as at Rishi Valley. By contrast, Gandhi’s Children throws us blatantly into the raw, amidst a community of lonesome individuals for whom survival is itself an ambition and whose desire to live is fraught with repeated interruptions. Through the production of this film the MacDougall ethnographic film project acquires a holism, offering a complex portrait of social and economic differences in Indian society.

In this and the following two chapters I study a selection of MacDougall’s films on children’s institutions of India, focusing on two interrelated areas. First, I explore how these films introduce us to ways in which each institution offers a conception, either explicit or implied, of the nation, particularly as a cultural construct. All the films focus on specific institutions or individuals, but they do not present simple, descriptive portraits. Rather, they document students’ embodied experiences and evoke their lives in a finely textured way. They historicize social, cultural and class dynamics; and, in so doing, I argue that the films both suggest and explicate conceptions of the nation exemplified by each institution.

Chapters 1 and 2 take up three films from the Doon school quintet of five films. My discussion of these select films illustrates how MacDougall’s observational approach reveals the ways by which conceptions of the nation, both as an idea and as a project, extend from a colonial discourse, towards which the Doon School sees itself in opposition. This chapter examines the first film in the quintet, Doon School Chronicles, whose essayistic structure clearly suggests how colonialism’s cultural and epistemic constructs permeate and shape the Doon School’s imaginations of the nation, nation-building as a process of modernization and, given that it is a boys’ boarding school, its conception of masculinity. This film also alerts us to the exclusionary dynamics and the processes of othering rooted in the school’s cultural discourses. These processes of othering are advanced by the fourth and fifth films in the quintet, The New Boys and the The Age of Reason, which are studied in chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on Gandhi’s Children, examining the home’s treatment of destitute children. The home in which this film is set is run by an NGO with funding support from various state, national, private and foreign sources and stands as a concrete statement of society’s will to provide welfare. As the film reveals, however, this will is interrupted and compromised through the home’s bureaucratized and summarily dismissive approach towards its inmates.

A second area of my study considers how the selected films derive from the broad tenets of observational cinema and extend its emphasis on reflexivity in terms of the filmmaker–subject relationship. I specifically examine how a filmmaker’s relation with their subjects shapes film narrative, constituting the basis for the insights and meanings offered by the films. One defining feature of observational cinema is its emphasis on exposing the relation/s filmmakers develop with their subjects. Observational filmmakers hold that the filmmaking process situates filmmakers and subjects into a social contract or relationship. This relation is the basis for the knowledge, meanings and understandings that a film offers. In contrast to popular documentary, observational cinema holds that the filmmaker and the cinematic apparatus are not an objective or omniscient presence and that, therefore, it is necessary that the filmmaker–subject relation/s be made transparent to the viewer. This is to enable the viewer to appreciate the processes by which the knowledges and understandings films offer, have been elicited. The centrality of this concern in observational cinema is neatly summarized by Colin Young’s comment on the filmmaker–subject relation:

A possible weakness in the observational approach is that in order to work, it must be based on an intimate, sympathetic relationship between the filmmaker and the subject – not the eye of the aloof, detached observer but someone watching as much as possible from the inside. (Young 1995: 76–7)

This understanding of the filmmaker–subject relationship contrasts with how reflexivity has been understood in avant-garde film and documentary. In contrast to avant-garde and political modernist cinema wherein cinematic self-reflexivity implies revelation of the cinematic apparatus and filmmaking processes, observational cinema emphasizes the social dimension of documentary making. Here, reflexivity is geared towards revealing the social dynamics and power relations between filmmakers and subjects that facilitate the viewer in appreciating the finer nuances through which documentary meanings and knowledges are mediated. Applying MacDougall’s own proposition of ‘deep reflexivity’ (1998) that holds the filmmaker–subject relation as dynamic and changing, I argue that the evolving filmmaker–subject relations that we see in the school films extend from an intersubjective camera practice and they offer platforms for students to express themselves on terms that exceed those by which they are defined within their educational institutions. This is a critical move because through this the films expose us to multiple student experiences and viewpoints that differ from and, on occasion, even question the normative discourses on student identities, citizenry and nationhood endorsed by their institutions. Gandhi’s Children explicates most fully how MacDougal’s reflexive approach has evolved and forms the basis of a dialogue for destitute children to express their discontent and critical reasonings against normative understandings of their bodies within a dominant cultural imaginary.

Before I discuss Doon School Chronicles, I will turn briefly to David MacDougall’s broader concern for the representation of childhood through cinema, a concern that is at the heart of his project in India. In his essay Films of Childhood (2006), MacDougall expresses how representations of childhood in cinema are often limiting because they are constructed by adults and based on adult perceptions of childhood experiences. From an adult perspective childhood is readily seen as the ‘other’ of adult life and so MacDougall notes that:

If representation is how art and science clarify human experience, then the representation of childhood in films (not to say nothing of photographs, paintings, novels, and psychoanalytic theory) would seem to have contributed little but confusion. In the real world, children are by turns kind, cruel, foolish, wise, attractive, unattractive, moral, amoral, innocent, and knowing – but films all too often would have us believe in the essence of the child. (2006: 67)

MacDougall holds that much fiction film, as well as visual anthropology, have either sentimentalized or primitivized children. Children have been depicted as lacking the facilities of self-expression, intelligence or thought that can actually manifest in contingent and cogent ways through the different stages of childhood. For MacDougall, studying childhood by making films about children is about rediscovering children’s complexity and recognizing them as whole persons, in themselves. He summarizes this motivation stating that:

A primary reason for studying childhood is to understand the potential of human ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index