Documentary Today #5

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

1

The Cover A striking capture from Ashish Avikunthak’s “prayogic chitrapat” Kalighat Fetish which is an attempt to negotiate with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial veneration of the Mother Goddess Kali, the presiding deity of Calcutta. The film ruminates on the nuanced transsexuality that is prevalent in the ceremonial performance of male devotees cross-dressing as Kali, in an act of obsessive devotion. This is interwoven with grotesque elements of a sacrificial ceremony, which forms a vital part of the worship of the Goddess. Both these narratives are merged in an experimental encounter, celebrated with liturgical utterances in Sanskrit, in order to grasp the subtleties that are integral to Kali worship.

4 The Cinema of Prayoga Theorist and film critic Amrit Gangar examins why popular cultural imagery feels increasingly shy of bold prayoga when it breaks all the conservative and non-conservative rules.

15 My Documentaries are like Detective Stories Scott Harlan and Jennifer Merrin interview Alex Gibney who bagged the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature with his investigative Taxi to the Dark Side which exposes the seamier side of the Iraq War.

22 Rossellini’s India Iranian diplomat and Rossellini’s first collaborator on the India films Fereydoun Hoveyda recalls the making of Rossellini’s India series.

27 A Return Ticket to Hollywood Belgian film critic and member of the FIPRESCI jury at MIFF 2008 Koen van Daele remembers his short stint as jury member and his alltoo-brief brush with the magic of Bollywood.

31 Nanook and Me Louis Menand’s tongue-in-cheek down-to-earth look at the documentary tradition and what it did to him. Reproduced from The New Yorker.

48 60 Years of Films Division: Photo Feature Photographer S.S.Chavan captures the Diamond Jubilee ceremony of a great institution turning sixty years old.

50 What Constitutes Fair Use for Documentary Filmmakers?

What can the documentary filmmaker use as part of his film without being entangled in a web of expensive copyright controversies? A panel of experts constituted by the Center for Social Media attempts to answer the question.

Plus • Complete list of award winning documentaries at the 54th National Film Awards.

• The latest news from the world of documentary films • The latest documentaries on display • Video Primer: The Creative Process

From The Editor’s Desk

establish an exclusive Research and Reference Centre for researchers and scholars who want to engage themselves in the research and study of any subject of their choice on which documentary films are available with Films Division: from the freedom movement to the vision of independent India, from music, arts and culture to science and technology, sports to political events, green revolution to white revolution, performing arts to cinema etc.

Another unit that has been established is the Research and Reference Centre which has been set up in the Films Division complex. We are sure that the centre will soon become one of the most sought-after destinations for researchers, students and scholars.

The euphoria of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of Films Division refuses to abate. It continues its stately journey, started from Delhi and moving to all over in the country in the coming months – bringing joy, smiles and astonishment on the faces of all those who did not really get an opportunity to understand the documentary in its true form. What a splendid collection of documentary films is being offered during these few days: from the unknown footage of the Second World War shot by the Information Films of India.Unit of the British Raj, the historical coverage of a nation in the making, from the Bengal famine, the reorganization of states to an array of films mirroring India after independence, rare biographies of Indian personalities, political events, a peep into the world of arts, music and culture, the animated cartoons to the most awaited and amazing shots from the world picked up from the award winning collection of the Mumbai International Film Festival of Documentary, Short and Animation Films ( M.I.F.F.) since its inception in 1990.

Though the Diamond Jubilee is itself a milestone in the life of the Films Division it is raring to create many more. Yes! It may be belated but the power of the documentary and the Films Division has at least been recognized by one and all.

This power is encapsulated in more than 8100 informationpacked films truly justifying its archive as a ‘Golden treasure’.

So far, only a few who needed some stock footage have gone through hundreds and thousands of film tins. So, we thought would it not be a better idea to enlarge the scope of this archive which has by now been almost fully digitalized.

This digitization has opened up a Pandora’s box of opportunities for these films: a world wide market as well as accessibility to the community of students and scholars.

To achieve these twin objectives recently Films Division has established two units with different identities. One is the International Digital Archive for Documentary, Short and Animation Films. This digital archive aspires to enhance its present collection of more than 10,000 national and international short films. The objective of this archive is to attract the best short and animation films from all over the world and facilitate their exhibition for those who really care for this genre of cinema. With this small beginning we hope to become the best archive in the world in the years to come.

In this we were Inspired by the vision of our Hon’ble Minister of Information and Broadcasting Mr P.R.Dasmunshi to 4

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

The International Digital Archive for Documentary, Short and Animation Films and The Research and Reference Centre in the Films Division complex, Mumbai was inaugurated recently by Mrs. Sushama Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting,. These newly established units will in future co-exist with the Films Division’s dream project Museum of Moving Image (MOMI).

I am confident that these news activities of the Films Division will make all of us and the nation feel proud. I welcome everyone to explore and experience the potentials of rejuvenated and invigorated Films Division.

And finally while we celebrate one Diamond Jubilee we must not forget another smaller but no less significant occasion: the completion of one year of Documentary Today. The magazine was started as a small venture exclusively for documentary filmmakers but has gone on from strength to strength and within a matter of one year become popular with students of cinema and the mass media. As we enter the second year we re-dedicate ourselves to the task of serving documentary and non-fiction film.

Kuldeep Sinha Editor Kuldeep Sinha Executive Editor Sanjit Narwekar Production Co-ordinator Anil Kumar Photographer S. S. Chavan Printed at Work Center Offset Printers (I) Pvt Ltd. A2/32, Shah & Nahar Industrial Estate, S. J. Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400013 Tel.: 24943227 / 24929261 Published by Films Division, 24, Dr.Gopalrao Deshmukh Marg, Mumbai 400026 Tel.: 23510461 / 23521421 DOCUMENTARY TODAY

4

LEAD STORY

The Cinema Of P rayoga Prayoga

By Amrit Gangar In 1949, Einstein pointed out to me during one of several long and highly involved private technical discussions that certain beautifully formulated theories of his would mean that the whole universe consisted of no more than two charged particles. Then he added with a rueful smile, “Perhaps I have been working on the wrong lines, and nature does not obey differential equations after all.” If a scientist of his rank could face the possibility that his entire lifework might have to be discarded, could I insist that the theorems whose inner beauty brought me so much pleasure after heavy toil must be of profound significance in natural philosophy? Fashions change quickly in physics where theory is so rapidly outstripped by experiment.

D.D.Kosambi The late Prof D.D. Kosambi was perhaps one of those few Indians who had grasped the modern transformation of science and its implications, particularly for India. He was, perhaps, the only one who had endeavored to act on a wide canvas, to make the scientists of this country realize their tasks and catalyze the tradition-bound society. Through the study and his writings on Indian history, mythology and religion, literature and sociology he not only applied scientific methods to these areas but also showed that new explanations to age-old beliefs were desirable and possible.

Interestingly, Prof Kosambi has left a profound influence on some of our progressive, innovative filmmakers Kumar Shahani, in particular. Prof Kosambi lived in Poona (Pune), close to the Film & Television Institute of

India (FTII). As Shahani told me once, Prof Kosambi had good insights into cinematography, too. As a great teacher he would take young Shahani to the surrounding areas; on the way he would pick up a pebble and start narrating history. History, for Prof Kosambi, was at one’s doorstep.

‘History at the Doorstep’ was his radical concept to study and understand the past. Some of his field works are extremely significant.

Einstein’s dilemma or self-doubt also reminds me of Stan Brakhage regretting in an interview about his underestimating ‘the historical flypaper’ he was stuck in. “I didn’t realize until much later how people in their daily living imitate the narrativedramatic materials that infiltrate their lives through the radio, TV, newspapers and, certainly, the movies.” He also felt that “despite all the evolutions of his film grammar and his inclusion of hypnagogic and dream vision, they were still tied to the more traditional dramatic-narrative framework!” It is, I think, a trial and error game that one keeps playing, always in pra-kriyâ, the process, creative or post-creative. But there is a difference

between empirical sciences and the plastic arts such as cinematography.

What, however, puzzles me is Brakhage’s repeated use of the term ‘film grammar’ which is essentially rules bound whereas avant-garde, to my mind, is iconoclastic. It is interesting to note from Prof Kosambi’s comment that even in physics, fashions change quickly and theory is so rapidly outstripped by experiment. Does this, or has it, happen/d in the praxis of experimental cinematography? Later in this essay and in the context of Cinema of Prayôga and the Euro-American

Ashish Avikunthak’s Dancing Othello DOCUMENTARY TODAY

5

avant-garde and underground cinema, I propose to refer to the kind of unsteady axes these terms have always stood on, floundering.

The Spirit of Experimentation It was during the ‘Experimenta 2005’ in Mumbai I thought of creating the term Cinema of Prayôga, as a prayâya, an alternative to Experimental Film and its synonyms. [Prayôga is also pronounced as prayôg, and paryâya as paryây]. Paryâya could also mean ‘synonym’, a convertible term. The Jaina philosophical etymology of paryâya suggests a mood or state of being. Or whatever has origin and end or destruction in time is paryâya.

And I wrote briefly about it in the festival catalogue. Since the first explorations into the so-called experimental / avant-garde / underground films started in Western Europe and North America, naturally the relevant theories also emerged from there. Why so? Isn’t experimentation intrinsically universal – in one form or another? In the times when, the EuroAmerican establishment can only assimilate non-western art on manifestly ethnographic terms while keeping the option open to reject it precisely on those terms, how do we recognize the avant-garde in India?

Do experiments happen in isolation of local conditions? Do experiments rapidly outstrip theories across the spectrum?

Or, in particular, how stable the theories or paradigms of these operative terms have been vis-à-vis developing cinematography and its technology?

And does the experiment end once the artist has completed his work? If so, are we talking about just the process that the ‘experimental film’ has gone through? These are some of the questions (and they are not actually new) that have been troubling my mind for quite some time, and in the context, I would like to check whether the idea of cinema of prayôga could be put in currency in the global cinematographic vocabulary and discourse for better employment and use. Prayôga includes both these applications.

6

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Le Corbusier’s design of the city of Chandigarh is a matter of criticism and debate among the architectural fraternity.

While examining and elaborating the term prayôga, I would also like to explore and contextualize Indian film history in brief. It is also of interest to see the Indian political economy entering the realm of the ‘experimental’.

In fact, the so-called ‘experiment’ works in the form and with or without the form. Again the question - what after all is not experimental? looms large. This essay would branch itself into multiple but integral streams, all finally flowing into the mahâsâgar, ocean of prayôga.

Experimental / Environmental As Ritwik Ghatak said, experimentation is an ever-living and never dying thing.

Experiment is part of life so why name it, why label it. To my mind at the moment, the three most experimental objects or organisms that we always live in are: food, architecture, and erotology. All these are experimentsin-perpetuation. Look at food and the way we ‘experiment’ with it all the time, look at its history, it is nothing but the history of experimentation, underground or over-ground, inside the oven or outside it, front guard or rear guard, less spicy or more. The configurations keep on changing, even the way the vegetable or meat is cut and placed. The gastronomic

aesthetics is a glocal experiment; it has its visuality and aurality, plus the smell.

And the sound. It was quite amusing to know from an artist having allergy to the sound of a mango being cut. I call it an acoustic allergy. Some may have visual allergies, too. But I haven’t yet found the term experimental gastronomy or avant-garde food except the explorations made in molecular gastronomy. Architecture has its own avant-garde and experimental history, but not without problems. The fact is, like the art of culinary; the art of architecture affects us the most. As is well known, the Indian city of Chandigarh was designed by Le Corbusier and built largely in the 1950s.

The city’s design is a matter of criticism and debate among the architectural fraternity. Chandigarh is a union territory (administered by the central government of India) and it is the capital of both Haryana and Punjab states.

Architecture was the first obvious sign of post-modernism, just around the corner of our living place, or across the street - anywhere in the world.

And thirdly, Erotology, that fathoms the human body, mind and its deepest environs, in the realm of fantasy, pleasure and pain. One of the greatest ‘experimental’ work of art, a grand

prayôga, in this realm is Vâtsyâyana’s Kâma Sâtra. It is a manual for erotic specialists, in the same sense that Kautilya’s Arthashâstra is one of the most open-ended manual for power specialists, and it drily lists the techniques of sex. There is a widespread notion among foreigners that every literate Indian reads the Kâma Sâtra. Interpretationally, Mira Nair ’s film Kâma Sûtra remains experimental. Censorship, suppression, and the depredations of time have had their way, and consequently, for lack of other, and probably earlier, texts surviving, the Kâma Sûtra has become a historical landmark in erotology. The Arthashâstra is one of the world’s earliest books devoted to statecraft.

I think if we contextualize experiment environmentally, or environment experimentally, we get a transcendental experience of the realm of cinematography. It is always in the process. The naming or labelling perhaps helps give it a push, to polemicize the thought that dies and takes birth again to die. The term prayôga suggests the eternal quest, a continuing process in time and space.

And it is not exclusivist. It, I think, would create ‘an ecology of aesthetics’. In its comprehensive sense, the word ‘ecology’ is crucial in our context. According to French

philosopher and mathematician, Michel Serres, the American philosopher Henri David Thoreau (1817-1862) must have invented this word in 1852. In the French language, it appeared for the first time around 1874, following the German usage proposed by the biologist-philosopher Ernst Heinrich August Haeckel (1834-1919) in 1866.

Since then ecology has generally acquired two meanings: as reference to a scientific discipline, dedicated to the study of more or less numerous

post-war avant-garde is an attempt to overcome fragmentation by approaching performance as a part of rather than apart from the community.

Sometimes this community is the community of the artists making the work; this has been the pattern in New York, London, Paris and other Western cities. Sometimes – as in the general uprisings of 1968 – the art is joined to large political movements. Sometimes, as in black and Chicano theatre, and more recently in other ‘special interest’

India is a peculiar case. On one hand we have some of the craziest kinds of popular culture imagery or art works, breaking all the conservative or non-conservative rules, while on the other we see our cinematography feeling increasingly shy of bold prayôga. sets of living beings interacting with their environment. And secondly, ecology also refers to the controversial ideological and political doctrine varying from author to author, or group to group, that aims at the protection of the environment through diverse means.

Experimental or avant-garde theatre has happened all over the world, either on stage, or in streets. As Richard Schechner comments, “Much of the

Shooting for Bhuvan Shome, financed by the Film Finance Corporation.

theatres, the artists identify with – even help to form – a sense of ethnic, racial or political identity. This communityrelated avant-garde is not only a phenomenon of the industrialized West, but also of countries that are industrializing or undergoing great changes in social organization.”

Theatre makes it possible, because it is much more physical than the cinema?

But I think here there is much more conceptual clarity, so it is perhaps in avant-garde music. In Indian classical music (both Hindustani and Carnatic) the prayôga or prayôgam (both in the sense of experimentation and usage), is an integral part. The relationship between Yoga-Tantra and music is another wonderful area of pra-yôga study to intensify its ecology.

Indian Environment: State Funding & Spirit of Prayôga India is a peculiar case. On one hand we have some of the craziest kinds of popular culture imagery or art works, breaking all the conservative or nonconservative rules, while on the other we see our cinematography feeling increasingly shy of bold prayôga.

One of the reasons for this is heavily loaded and presumptuous censorship, DOCUMENTARY TODAY

7

both moral and political. In fact, it’s B and C films that seem more interesting at times.

Following the over-all vision of independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC), later becoming the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) were set up in the 1960s.

FFC’s original objective was to promote and assist the mainstream film industry by providing, affording or procuring finance or other facilities for the production of films of good standard.

Later, under the direct influence of then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, the FFC initiated the New Indian Cinema (media dubbed it as Indian New Wave) with Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome and Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (A Day’s Bread), both made in 1969. This indeed was a national prayôga in cultural-political economy. Kaul’s debut was an adaptation of a short story by the noted Hindi author Mohan Rakesh and was perhaps the ‘first consistently formal experiment in Indian cinema.’ While this state-funded film was violently attacked in the popular media, aesthetically sensitive intelligentsia defended it across the country.

Paradoxically this new movement was born of a governmental decision and not from the impetus of filmmakers rebelling against the existing commercial or popular cinema. The public institutional aid created its own problematic. In most cases, the financial aid was very meagre and that many a time became detrimental to the formal vision of the film. But eventually, as Cinemaya editor, Aruna Vasudev said, “because the prizes and awards won by these small budget films led to the feeling that only ‘small’ was ‘artistic’. But nevertheless, as the English proverb, “Necessity is the mother of Invention,” goes, innovative auteur filmmakers found creative ways to make films, the body of which was eventually called the ‘parallel’ cinema in India; parallel to the mainstream. In 8

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Visually stimulating ‘food for thought’ to nourish India’s millions of illiterate people...

Vijay Chandra’s Child on a Chessboard.

between the parallel-mainstream poles also emerged the ‘middle-roader’ cinema, the one that compromised between the two in order to attract more viewers. Buddha took the Middle Path between the extremely ascetic Jainism on one hand and the more opulent Hinduism on the other. In China, Mao Tse-tung, called it ‘middle-of-the-road’ politically. I don’t know whether Indian journalists had these nuances in mind.

The scenario was noisy with loud rhetoric against the state funded filmmakers who took initiatives to rigorously explore the potential of cinematography in their works. Many said it was waste of public money. In these times, filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani made some of the most serious films, beginning with Uski Roti and Maya Darpan (Mirror of Illusion, 1972), respectively.

One of the most ‘remarkable avantgarde’films Ghasiram Kotwal (1976) was made by the Yukt Film Cooperative. It was co-directed by the Cooperative’s founders, Mani Kaul, K. Hariharan, Saeed Mirza and Kamal Swaroop, and was shot by the cameramen Binod Pradhan, Rajesh Joshi, Manmohan Singh and Virendra Saini – all FTII alumni. Interestingly a nationalised bank financed this film in those days when the film industry was not recognized as such officially.

Experiment of Government-Made ‘Experimental Films’ It is quite interesting to see the category of ‘Experimental Films’ in the Films Division’s catalogue. However, as Jag Mohan, the author of a book on the Films Division said, “Experimental films as understood in the West have made slow progress at the FD. From its inception, the FD has been concerned with information, educational and propaganda films. The utilitarian aspect of the film is primary consideration in the selection of subjects. Besides, the Film Advisory Board, which approves films for public exhibition through the FD circuit, also keeps a watchful eye on the utilitarian value of the films.

Thus films of the type popularised by Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Lotte Reiniger, Maya Deren and later by the American Underground filmmakers cannot be found here. Probably for hitherto underdeveloped and now a developing country like India, such films are a luxury.” John Grierson is said to have advised Pramod Pati that the kind of films he was making was a luxury for a country like India.

According to Marie Seton, some of the Films Division films had practical as well as artistic value. “They make their impact, strikingly different as they are because they have a style of their own.

They are mature films.” Nevertheless, the Films Division did venture into this so-called ‘luxury’. The late Vijay B. Chandra, who was then FD’s Chief Producer (later the first Director of the Bombay International Film Festival for Documentary, Short & Short Films launched in 1990) always talked about producing visually stimulating ‘food for thought’ to nourish India’s millions of illiterate people. To whatever extent, it was the public sector Films Division that took the risk of making films such as Explorer (Pramod Pati, 1968), And I Make Short Films (S.N.S. Sastry, 1968), Trip (Pramod Pati, 1970), Child on a Chess Board (Vijay B. Chandra, 1979); all these filmmakers were the FD staffers.

Mani Kaul has made several interesting documentaries for the Films Division, as an outside independent producer.

And there are many other young and old leading filmmakers - including Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Arvindan, Kamal Swaroop, Rajat Kapoor - whose films are in the FD’s collection. As the Founder Director of Datakino, I had the opportunity of setting up a comprehensive database of the entire FD output from its inception to the year 1995 - over 8,000 newsreels, newsmagazines, documentary, short

features, and animation films. We did it on a primitive PC286, without Windows; I would jocularly call this project like making of Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955) that Satyajit Ray could make without adequate resources. Of late, the Films Division has updated the Database and made it Window based.

Political Attitudes Towards Cinema Mahatma Gandhi was not well disposed towards cinema no matter his work had influenced many a filmmaker

he has the least interest in it and one may not expect a word of appreciation from him.” Journalist-turned-filmmaker K.A. Abbas wrote an open letter to Gandhi and while greeting him on his 71st birth anniversary, Abbas said, “I have no knowledge of how you came to such a poor opinion of the cinema. I don’t know if you have ever cared to see a motion picture. I can only imagine that, rushing from one political meeting to another, you chanced to catch a glimpse of some lewd cinema posters that disfigure the city walls and concluded that all the films are evil and

Had Gandhi and others taken interest in the budding filmmaking enterprise during 1930s and 1940s, would the Indian cinema have taken a different shape? in those early days of Indian cinema.

Gandhi’s dislike for cinema is evident in his note to the Indian Cinematograph Committee (the Rangachariar Committee) in 1927-28. Again in 1938, on the occasion of the film industry’s anniversary, a Bombay trade paper asked Gandhi for a congratulatory message; his secretary responded, “As a rule Gandhiji gives message only on rare occasions – and those only for causes whose virtue is ever undoubtful. As for the cinema industry

K.A.Abbas … an open letter to Mahatma Gandhi.

that the cinema is a playhouse of the devil.” In his letter, Abbas also provided a list of Indian and foreign films which were ‘unexceptionable even from the viewpoint of the strictest moralist. This letter was published in Film India of October 1939. Had Gandhi and others taken interest in the budding filmmaking enterprise during 1930s and 1940s, would the Indian cinema have taken a different shape?

Phalke’s Pioneering Experiment When Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (18701944) pioneered feature filmmaking in India in 1913, India was still a British colony. The Indian story film, Pundalik, about a Hindu saint, was made in Bombay and released on 18 May 1912, but it was a filmed play as it is generally accepted. Dadasaheb (as he was popularly known) Phalke was a versatile artist; he learnt and pursued many arts and crafts including drawing, painting, printing, engraving, photography, moulding, architecture, music, magic and amateur acting. Thus he was a complete karmayôgi (man of action) prayôga person. On 30th April, his 136th birthday was celebrated at Trayambakeshwar (29 km from Nasik) where he was born and had spent his childhood. His bust was installed there on this day.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

9

After watching the film Life of Christ at the America-India cinema in Bombay during Christmas in 1910, he had decided to make a film featuring Hindu gods and goddesses. As per my assumption this could be a Pathe film.

Earliest parts of the film Life of Christ seem to have been traced to 1898 but the addition of two reels in better form must have been completed in 1905. It was then re-released as The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ, and similarly was expanded again to 3 reels in 1908 and re-released under the same title.

The colour tinted film of 31 tableaux with a running time of 44 minutes became the most impressive of its kind and one of the first long films in the world. These films were presented by missionaries and itinerant showmen all over the world. My guess is that Phalke must have seen this re-released verion of Life of Christ. In an interview published in Kesari of 19 August 1913, Phalke mentions about the Pathe Company of France and says that most of the films coming to India were from this Company.

As he wrote, “While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualising the Gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramchandra, their Gokul and Ayodhya. I was gripped by a strange spell. Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?” He was forty

Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra … India’s first feature film.

of necessary equipment, he went to London, pledging his insurance policies. There, Mr Carbourne, editor of the Bioscope weekly helped him to identify the right camera and other equipment as well as raw negative film.

He also introduced Phalke to Cecil Hepworth who took him around his studio.

Back home in April 1912, Phalke busied himself making his / India’s first silent feature film Raja Harishchandra (King Harishchandra). It was released on 13 May 1913 at Bombay’s Coronation

Phalke mixed his patriotic ‘swadeshi’ spirit with his cinematographic prayôga experimental praxis – in constructing the gaze, the frame, the space and time. then and without any dependable source of income on which his family could fall back, and since he was not prepared to do anything else except his experiments in filmmaking the future was dark, insecure. Undaunted, he made a short film Growth of a Pea Plant to convince his potential financier.

Incidentally, through this film, he introduced the concept of ‘time-lapse’ photography as also the first indigenous or ‘swadeshi’ instructional film. To get the first hand knowledge 10

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Cinema. About the most upright and truthful king, the film was based on a story from the epic Mahabharata. The film was advertised as “an entirely Indian production by Indians,” indicating Phalke’s resolve to establish a new ‘swadeshi’ or India’s own industry in those colonial times. Gandhi was yet to return home from South Africa. Lanka Dahan (Lanka Aflame, 1917) was a big success and he could make a new version of Raja Harishchandra. Released in 1918,

Shree Krishna Janma (Birth of Shree Krishna) was made by the new Hindustan Film Company of which Phalke was a working partner with other five financing partners. Feeling bitter, due to internal differences, Phalke took a voluntary retirement and went to the holy city of Benaras towards the end of 1919. However, convinced by several other producers, Phalke rejoined restructured Hindustan and remained there until it folded up in 1932, when Indian sound film was barely a year old.

The last silent film directed by Phalke for Hindustan was Setu Bandhan but with the advent of sound, the film had to be post-synchronised. It flopped. On 16 February 1944, Phalke died pauper at the age of 74 in Nasik. ‘like those two other pioneers of early films, George Melies in France and Fraise Green in England.”

In our Indian prayôga context, Phalke occupies a significant space because, besides being a pioneer, he personified the prayôga spirit in those awkward times. It is an open secret that Melies had already made a ‘fantastic’ film such as A Trip to the Moon in 1902 and Phalke took ten more years to produce his first feature film, which does not survive in toto, but we do get a definite idea about his insights into the art and its craft. He wanted to prove to the

British that an Indian working under primitive conditions could make films too. On aesthetic level, Phalke’s tableaux remind us of Raja Ravi Varma’s oleograph paintings. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha mentions, “The painter Raja Ravi Varma was in many ways the direct cultural predecessor to Phalke, greatly influencing his themes, his images, his views on culture.” Phalke mixed his patriotic ‘swadeshi’ spirit with his cinematographic prayôga experimental praxis – in constructing the gaze, the frame, the space and time.

Comparing Lumiere’s L’Arroseur arrose, Rajadhyaksha observes that in Phalke there is almost no definition of time; the contiguities are employed in the different states of seeing as they come together. “The story, if there is one, is a continuous back-and-forth interaction between the viewers and the object viewed; we are shown the imaginary universe condensed into the object, our seeing is reciprocated.”

Apparently, Phalke was aware about the plastic potential of the medium he was working in. In nutshell, Phalke provides the earliest example of India’s private filmmaking enterprise as against the post-colonial public Films Division.

The Great Divide It was in the 1960s and 1970s, the divide between the so-called ‘art’ and ‘commercial’ film became rhetorically pronounced, often becoming acerbic.

Thousands of national / mental hours were spent on deciding what was ‘good’ cinema and its corollary ‘bad’. This obviously moralistic stand unfortunately took the toll of the

prayôga spirit. In retrospect when I look at this past, its ramifications seem to have been widespread and serious.

Gradually, the ‘rhetoric’ impacted the FTII and its progressive, prâyôga outlook towards cinematography. And as we witnessed, it led cinematography to becoming part of mass communication and management studies curricula in colleges, depriving millions of youngsters the experience of facing creative challenges that cinematography potentially puts forward.

‘Self-Social’ balancing becomes pivotal to art in a country like India, determining its very nature and its own essential ‘self’. And became the fertile terrain for ‘rhetoric’ to mushroom.

Nevertheless, beyond all this ‘goodbad’ debate, what was significant in the prayôga context was Mani Kaul’s persistent radical cinematographic / philosophical praxis in Indian cinema.

In his film Naukar ki Kameez (Servant’s Shirt, 1999), he did not let his cameraman look through the camera

Mani Kaul believes, “the moment the eye looks through the camera it ‘appropriates’ the space it is filming by a dichotomous organization that splits the experience of that space into a fork: of being sacred and/or of being profane.

A film Cinema-India International (OctDec 1986) interviewed several thinkerfilmmakers about what they thought of ‘good’ cinema and whether it was viable commercially. The general tone amplified the Indian artist’s struggle to make ‘self’ responsible to her/his art and at the same time to ‘society’ at large. As film and theatre director Vijaya Mehta said, “The filmmaker must have a sense of responsibility to the society at large.” For Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, good cinema was one that resensitised the sensibility of the people who watch it. This

while a shot was being taken. He believes, “the moment the eye looks through the camera it ‘appropriates’ the space it is filming by a dichotomous organization that splits the experience of that space into a fork: of being sacred and/or of being profane. Obviously it saves what it knows as sacred from an exposure to what it thinks is profane.” This gives yet another dimension to the understanding prayôga, if I may say so. His philosophy of abhed âkâsh or undivided space and its application to cinematography is a part of his prayôga. He has been resisting the idea of the European concept of Renaissance perspective since it splits space into object-horizon polarity.

Today, media has almost completely shunned that period in Indian film history that was pregnant with a certain youthful restlessness. But strangely it keeps using the word ‘avantgarde’ even for the most oldfashioned stuff simply because it seems different from the crass commercial crap. Recently, a journalist wrote Mani Kaul … the sacred and the profane. that the older generation of DOCUMENTARY TODAY

11

avant-gardes ‘bridged the gap between masala and art cinema.” Did avantgardism in cinema in Europe played such a function? For Andrew Sarris, the avant-garde films pointed the way for commercial movies.

Avant-garde Indian Cinema Early on, the label avant-garde was used especially for the films by filmmakers such as Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani who, I presume, felt embarrassed since their cinema had attempted to rigorously revitalise Indian narrative traditions, including the epic. Interestingly, they could reconcile Ritwik Ghatak and Robert Bresson in their cinematographic worldview. For their films’ obvious ‘visual or dialogic slow or static’ space and their public praise of Bresson, the journalists dubbed them Bressonian, in the sense of imitating him.

Reconciling Ritwik Ghatak to Robert Bresson...Ritwik Ghatak plays himself in his film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo.

The Old/New Underground

labels was the womb they were born from; the womb was in movements outside it – Dadaism, Surrealism, for instance, no matter plastic. As Kumar Shahani commented, the avant-garde experiments, borrowing syntax from the other arts, have been attempts at achieving a kind of respectability for the cinema. Or as Janet Bergstrom argued, “When avant-garde is used to describe an artistic movement, such as Cubism, it means that the movement is, for a time, ahead of critical acceptance. But when Cubism becomes absorbed into the mainstream of the tradition, it is no longer avantgarde. In connection with cinema, however, avant-garde does not mean ‘in advance of’ a developing film tradition; it is taken to mean, rather, apart from the commercial cinema.”

Especially its own historians – in terms of a development completely separate from that of history of cinema, almost always see the avant-garde cinema. It is seen in terms of the ‘art world’ (painting, graphics, music, poetry, sometimes architecture) rather than the ‘entertainment industry’”

Watching from the hindsight, we could feel how unsteady these nomenclatures or terms have been historically. I think one of the major problems with these

On the contrary, Andrew Sarris thinks that the avant-garde films point the way for commercial movies. “It is difficult to think of any technical or

How do we recognize the avant-garde in India? while raising this pertinent question, Geeta Kapur, the eminent art critic and author says, “The EuroAmerican establishment can still only assimilate non-western art on manifestly ethnographic terms, keeping the option open to reject it precisely on those terms. On the other hand, Asia / Africa / Australia, not to speak of Latin America, look for a new formalism, an extension of language on the basis of cultural difference and political urgencies which, because of the shared history of the 20th century (via capitalism / imperialism), implicates the artists in global questions: of location and the appropriate forms of political redress from their vantage point. These artists, living in societies riven with contradictions, ask for synthesizing universals, for visionary and vanguard initiatives.” Kapur’s context is Indian fine arts and within the questions of cultural differences in a changing India.

12

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

stylistic innovations contributed by the avant-garde. Avant-garde critics and filmmakers have had to be dragged screaming into the eras of sound, colour, and wide-screen. Avant-garde impulses seem to be channelled toward the shattering of content taboos, political, religious, and sexual. Luis Bunuel and Rene Claire have come out of the avant-garde, and some think that Cocteau never left it, but avant-garde mannerisms stand for long the withering gaze of the camera.”

Bergsrom also believes that the definitions of avant-garde or experimental cinema have always been controversial because they have always presupposed value judgments; even those offered in the most recent histories provoke the kinds of counterexamples, which imply conflicting opinions about what counts as avantgarde cinema.

And with the historic shifts in these movements, terms for the cinema also kept floundering with self-doubts around the exclusivist factions. Quite earlier on, the sudden advent of the 1929-depression shook up the dominating art-for-art’s sake philosophy of the avant-gardes. And as Arthur Knight said, with panic, starvation and ruin all about them, they

found it peculiarly inappropriate to the concerned solely with revolving starfish and swinging pendulums, with textures and prisms and the dream world of the subconscious. “The penetrating works of Soviet realism had been seen and discussed in the numerous avant-garde cine-clubs that spread through the Continent after 1925. For many they were a revelation, a proof that the problems relating the real world could be as intriguing, as challenging – and as artistically valid – as anything they had done before.

After a decade of altering reality, kidding reality, ignoring reality, they suddenly found themselves concerned with reproducing reality, substituting social purpose for aesthetic experiment.”

The willingness to experiment, to try out new forms, new techniques and ideas, is as vital to the arts as it is to science. “Today, through an unfortunate limiting of the word, experiment in film has come to be associated almost exclusively with the efforts of small avant-garde coteries working quite apart from the mainstream of motion-picture production.” In fact, a lot of ground or path breaking work in cinematographic aesthetics and technology had already been done (without any labels). Quite early on, what was Griffith doing when he pushed his camera closer to the actors against the prevailing conventions? What was Ritwik Ghatak doing in his radical employment of the archetypes? Or evolving strange but sweet love between man and machine in Ajantrik, for example? They were creating newer forms of narrating stories; they were at the vanguard.

Most of the time the artists only reclaim the old to make it new, in newer contexts and environments. But it is all in a continuum.

There is a general belief (due to lack of media coverage or the ignorance created by the so-called information age) that nothing of substance has happened in Indian cinema after the generations of Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, Saeed Mirza, et al. This is a

false notion since there is a younger generation of filmmakers in India that has created a substantial work of intense as well as playful aesthetics. I am in the process of curating a programme that I call In Continuum because this generation of filmmakers and their fellow artists (directors of photography, editors, sound designers, actors) don’t work in a void.

Incidentally, it was only later that I came to know about Peter Greenway’s definition of Cinema as a continuum, though there is a sense-shift.

and ‘little cinema’ aura gathered about the word as well.”

Underground Film and Pop Art, as Parker Tyler said, represent the only elites in human history which insist on the privileges of an elite without any visible means of earning or sustaining those privileges; that is, without any values that can be measured, or even, properly speaking, named except by its own labels. A distinct irony of the Underground is that here the film, the only complete time art of the theatre, exactly duplicating itself simply by

It was during the 1920s, when the avant-gardes were in full swing on the Continent, that the idea of experiment became identified exclusively with their peculiar kind of filmmaking. “If a film were abstract, baffling or d o w n r i g h t incomprehensible, it could always be described as ‘experimental’. And since these films came from Europe they were also considered ‘artistic,’ an assumption based largely upon the native American tradition that anything European is necessarily more artistic than the native product.

Thus experiment acquired a certain h o n o r i f i c connotation, a quality that has clung to it ever since. And because the men who were experimenting in the studios, never claimed that they were doing anything but making films as best they could, a certain preciousness Andrei Tarkovsky DOCUMENTARY TODAY

13

staring the reel over again, declines to take seriously its own historical integrity. Underground standpoint, is to betray the very lifeblood of the avant-garde.

For Andrei Tarkovsky the concept of avant-garde in art was meaningless.

“The whole question of avant-garde is peculiar to the twentieth century, to the time when art has steadily been losing its spirituality.” He thinks the avant-gardes were confused by the new aesthetic structures, lost in the face of the real discoveries and achievements, not capable of finding any criteria of their own, they included under the one head avant-garde anything that was not familiar and easily understood – just in case, in order not to be wrong.” Tarkovsky, even questions the experimentation in art: How can you experiment in art? Can one talk of experiment in relation to the birth of a child?

Experiment, according to Richard Schechner, is going beyond the boundaries, though he thinks experimentation in theatre was dead.

“There’s not much of that going on these days. As things have gotten desperate outside of theatre, they’ve overcome more conservative within.

The great period of experimentation that began in the fifties ended by the mid-seventies.” What is, however, interesting for him is the ‘foundation of practice’ bestowed by the experimental period. This foundation is a performance art based on postmodern consciousness. Experimental film or the avant-garde cinema doesn’t seem to be sharing this experience with theatre, maybe because of its huge technological stake.

Every technological change or shift affects it aesthetically, lately from analog to digital, the new media, for instance. But still the connection with history can’t be snapped.

Applied Avant-gardism has often met with its death. It has also become like the chameleon, changing garbs and loyalties. The author of A History of Experimental Film and Video, A.L. 14

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Experimenting with colours and forms … Amita Dutta’s Kshya Tra Gya.

Rees, thinks, “Using the terms ‘avantgarde’, or even ‘experimental’, film at this late date may appear anachronistic or a provocation. For a long time they have scarcely been used without some degree of embarrassment. It was applied loosely to artists’ filmmaking from the 1920s, but peaked in the 1970s when it ousted the term ‘underground film’ as a seemingly more serious name for the then rising structural film movement.”

à`moJ… Cinemâ of Prayôga – Part I The loosely equivalent word for the English ‘experiment’ in Sanskrit is ‘prayôga’ which has several different connotations, including design, contrivance, device, plan; application, employment (esp. of drugs and magic); use, practice, experiment (opp. theory), exhibition (of dance), representation (of a drama), a piece to be represented, recitation, delivery; prayôgâtisaya (in drama) is ‘excess of representation’ while prayôgârtha means ‘having a sense of prayôga’. If we deconstruct the word Prayôga, we get Pra+Yoga, where the prefix ‘pra’ in a way is an engine. As a prefix to verbs, it means ‘forward’, ‘forth’, ‘in front’, ‘onward’,

‘before’. In other words, it carries the sense of vanguard. With adjectives, it means ‘very’, ‘excessively’; and with nouns, whether derived from verbs or not, it is used in various senses including, commencement; power, intensity, source or origin, completion, perfectness, excellence, purity, etc. depending on what noun it is prefixed to. Among its many interpretations, yôga also means uniting, combination, contact, touch, employment, application, use, charm, spell, incantation, magic, magical art, substance, deep and abstract meditation, concentration of mind, contemplation of the Supreme Spirit, which in Yôga philosophy is defined as cittavritinirodha. Yôga is the system of philosophy established by Patanjali, etc. As stated before; I would like to propose prayôga as a better alternative to English experiment-al.

Prayôga is also practice or an experimental portion (of a subject); (opp. shâstra, ‘theory); VXÌ^dm{Z_§ _m§ M emóo à`moJo M {d_¥eVw & Prayôgatisaya if one of the five kinds of prastâvana or prologue, in which a part or performance is superseded by another in such a manner that a character is

manner. Prayôga was, I think, Pati’s svabhâva (pronounced svabhâv) and hence even on themes such as family planning he created narratives of sharp curiosities. Pati had learnt the art from Norman McLaren of the National Film Board of Canada. Then Pati was a 23year-old man full of youthful exuberance. He also studied animation filmmaking in Czechoslovakia for a couple of years and returned to India in 1960. Pati’s wasn’t a conscious effort to make something different for its own sake, but to put his art at stake with his own artistic and idealistic endeavours.

Obviously, within the Films Division constraints, Pati took a risk to make such films. Pati was a man of prayôga, an artist who stuck his own anûbhav (experience) and svabhâva and integrity.

Cinemâ of Prayôga – Part III Shaina Anand’s Rustle, a television documentation.

suddenly brought on the stage; i.e. where the Sutradhâra goes out hinting the entrance of a character and thus performs a part superseding that which he has apparently intended for his own, viz. dancing; Sâhityadarpana thus defines it: EH$pñ_Z² à`moJmo@Ý`… à`wÁ`Vo Ÿ&

Vo Z nmÌ-àdo e üo V ² à`mo J m{Ve`ñVXm Ÿ&& [Sahityadarpana = A collection of materials for the production or performance of anything. Sutradhâra = stage manager, a principal actor who arranges the cast of characters and instructs them, and takes a prominent part in the Prastâvanâ or prelude, he is thus defined: ZmQ>çñ` `XZwï>mZ§ VËgy̧

ñ`mËg~{OH$_² Ÿ& a§JX¡dV-nyOmH¥$V² gyÌYma B{V ñ_¥V… Ÿ&& Unlike avant-garde, prayôga is a nonmilitary word; it is, in fact, artistic and meditative. The English ‘laboratory’ becomes more connected as it is called prayôgamandir (temple of prayôga) or prayôgashâlâ (hall or saloon of prayôga). The word finds place in all major Indian languages (northern or southern) and with some interesting derivatives. Prayogika, for example, is a new word in the Gujarati lexicon,

which means ‘a light essay’. While in Hindi, prayôgavâdi is an experimentalist or experimentalistic, while in Bengali it becomes pragmatic or pragmatist. The general meaning of ‘use’ or ‘application’ is found everywhere. In Malayalam, prayôga also means, manipulation, eagerness to fight, preliminary performance, adj. prayogâbhinjan, an expert at tactical performance, prayôgâthisayam (drama), mode of prologue in a drama, as explained earlier.

In its praxis, the phrase Cinema of Prayoga also carries its creator’s own state, own svabhâva or temperament.

It has the quality of being intuitive, capable to achieve a certain bhâvasandhi, a unity of emotions in its characteristic manner.

Cinemâ of Prayôga – Part II In its meta-text, I would like to call Pramod Pati’s cinema, the cinema of prayôga because it carries its creator’s own state, own svabhâva, temperament. It has the quality of being intuitive and congenial, capable of achieving a certain bhâvasandhi, a unity of emotions in its characteristic

So far, the concept Cinema of Prayôga has been received very positively in India. Mani Kaul said, “In my mind too the expression ‘experimental’ evokes an uncomfortable feeling. It does nothing more than marginalize serious work in cinema. In its implications, as commonly understood, the word creates a narrow focus on some kind of isolated cinematic activity. The word ‘prayôga’ is wider and more relevant.”

For Ashish Avikunthak the cinema of prayôga is defined as much by aesthetics as that followed by a “theory of practice”. “Proyoga is a theory of experimentation that is not just limited to aesthetics but also the production aspect of cinema. Prayôga for me is a practice of experiment.” I believe, we have reached a juncture that needs a fusion (to clear the historical confusion), a term that captures the flux in its inner self; the integrative prayôga would avoid dualistic paradigms of west versus east, traditional versus modern (or postmodern, or post-post-modern), etc. Let us explore the Cinema of Prayôga.

Amen.

(Amrit Gangar is a Mumbai-based film theorist, curator, historian and cultural activist.)

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

15

INTERVIEW ‘M yD ocumentaries are like D etective Stories,’ ‘My Documentaries Detective says 2 00 8 Oscar winner Alex Gibney 200 008 In 2005 Alex Gibeney’s documentaryEnron:The Smartest Guys In the Room won the nomination but not the statuette (“I lost it to some penguins,” he is supposed to have said) but this year he has done it! The Oscar season is long over and filmmaker Alex Gibney has finally emerged triumphant with his film Taxi to the Dark Side winning the coveted statuette for Best Documentary. In fact, he faced one of the most delicious dilemmas a filmmaker can face during award time. He was competing against himself. Of the six feature-length documentaries up for an Oscar this year, two reflected his work: No End in Sight and Taxi to the Dark Side. But Gibney has no equivocations over where his heart lies. He is sure that the better film has won, namely, Taxi to the Dark Side.

After attending Pomfret School, Gibney earned his bachelor’s degree from Yale University, where he was a member of the literary society St. Anthony Hall, and later attended the UCLA Film School. He is the son of the noted journalist Frank Gibney and stepson of the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin. Gibney is President of Jigsaw Productions, a production company which produces independent films, music documentaries, and TV mini-series. This year he won the Yale Film Studies’ Program Award for his contributions to film culture. SCOTT HORTON and JENNIFER MERIN quiz the acclaimed documentary director about Taxi to the Dark Side and his career.

Alex Gibney … glancing through the Cinemaeye Award.

16

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Taxi to the Dark Side is a very complicated documentary, with three different story lines and a great deal of information. You tell of the torture of prisoners by American military personnel in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba. When presented with the subject matter and the opportunity to make the film, what was the thing you learned, the first bit of information that convinced you could make the film work not only as a document about torture, but as a film?

I knew it was an important issue before I was even considering making the film.

I’m not sure I knew it was an important film to do until the project was actually presented to me, but even then, when I knew we had the money to make it, I wasn’t sure it would be a good film.

Because when someone says how’d you like to make a film about torture, it’s sort of like, would anybody go to see that film? But, like everything else, you learn something as you go. In a documentary, you write the script at the end instead of at the beginning.

But part of writing that script is learning and going down all sort of interesting pathways that make you understand what’s important and what’s moving and what’s valuable. So, over time, I discovered the story.

But what was the first thing that indicated to you that you had a film?

What was the element that made it click for you?

and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was transferred from FBI to CIA interrogators for harsher questioning?

I’d read Tim Golden’s New York Times article and thought the Dilawar story would be good in a film. But when we first started doing the interviews with the guards and interrogators who’d been at Bagram prison, that’s when I knew there was a movie.

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi is a kind of selfcontained story. Moazzam Begg was good addition for me in the sense that he is really a branch off the Dilawar story. Moazzam knew Dilawar at Bagram. He was one of the Bagram prisoners, and he saw Dilawar being beaten, so he was a witness to the central murder. But it’s sort of like other movies that I like—like Three Days of the Condor or Chinatown, where you start out with a little crime, and as you follow that little crime, the next thing you know, you’ve come to a conspiracy that’s so immense you can hardly believe it.

How did you find them? And, how did you get them to speak with you?

One of them we got to through his lawyer, and then over time we got more of them through the grapevine. We had a list of people who’d been stationed at Bagram, and we had a copy of the criminal investigation, the report they’d done on the Dilawar murder, so we kind of knew who we wanted to get, and bit by bit my team and I went out to try to convince some of these people to talk.

The film involves three stories, actually. Dilawar, the Afghani taxi driver who was tortured to death, is your central character, but how important are the other two stories— of Moazzam Begg, the British citizen who was detained without reason,

The story of the Afghan taxi driver Dilawar in Taxi to the Dark Side.

So, Moazzam is a step along the way.

Even al-Shaykh al-Libi is the illustration of a point—he also has a Bagram connection because his initial interrogation takes place at Bagram by the FBI—and then the Bush administration doesn’t like the information they’re getting from him, so they wrap him in duck tape and stick him in a box, send him off to Cairo to be water-boarded, where, tortured, he gives them whatever information they’re looking for—and then falsely sends us on the road to Iraq.

So there are lots of balls in the air—a lot of stories—but what they have in common is that, on the one hand, you have the Dilawar story and it’s ramifications—because we use the Dilawar story rather loosely, you know, when we follow the passengers who’d been riding in Dilawar’s taxi and were arrested with him—we follow those passengers to Guantanamo. And, then there‘s Moazzam, who‘s still—to this day—testifying against the guards.

But at the same time, we’re answering key questions about this important subject of torture of prisoners and getting false information, and that has to be worked into the larger narrative.

You know, questions just what is torture—like the water board, is that DOCUMENTARY TODAY

17

real torture? What about this ticking time bomb scenario? Why do so many Americans seem to think that torture is okay? All these issues have to be reckoned with in some way, shape or form, and you have to find a way to fit them into this larger narrative.

You build the narrative around the life and death of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who died in a prison at Bagram Air Base, and not on the far better known cases out of Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib. For most filmmakers who have addressed the issue of detainee abuse, the victims remain anonymous and alien. But you succeeded not only in unlocking the details of Dilawar’s death, but turning him into a living breathing human being whose death left a painful sense of loss in his family and community.

Explain what led you to Dilawar’s story and why you thought it would provide the central thread necessary to the narrative.

There were a number of reasons why I chose Dilawar’s story. First, he was a pure innocent. Everyone — including his interrogators — believes that he was not guilty of anything except being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So, in Dilawar’s death, we can see the cost of an official policy of cruelty:

The interrogators and the interrogated … Taxi to the Dark Side.

most heart-wrenching things in the film: after Dilawar’s death, he can no longer “taste his food.”

There was also something about Dilawar’s story — as told by Tim Golden in the New York Times — that also haunted me. After the third day of a five-day interrogation, his interrogators had concluded that he was innocent. Yet his guards continued to brutalize him and the sergeant in charge of his interrogation demanded

There’s a lot of different styles in the film. The way they’re put together, I like to think of them as different textures. You know, each section has a little different texture—and that distinguishes from other sections. innocent people are brutalized and, sometimes, killed.

I also thought it would be important, as you say, to show the face of a victim of Dick Cheney’s “dark side” approach.

We see where Dilawar lived in Yakubi, a small farming village near the Pakistan border. We discover that this kid — he was only 22 at the time of his arrest — had never spent a night away from his home. We meet his father, beautiful young daughter, and brother — Shahpoor — who says one of the 18

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

that Dilawar’s interrogators “take him out of his ‘comfort zone’.” That detail in Tim’s piece testified to the inexorable momentum of torture: once you start it’s very hard to stop. Alberto Mora refers to this syndrome later in the film and gives it a name: “force drift,” the observed tendency of interrogators to keep “pushing the envelope” of violence to get results. It’s also something that the psychologist Stanley Milgram noted as part of his experiment in “Obedience.” Subjects would allow themselves to leave the

bounds of morality provided they did so incrementally.

The last reason I chose the Dilawar tale was that the echoes from his story reverberated throughout the network of detention and interrogation centers established by the Bush Administration. I used the Dilawar story to show that detainee abuse was not a case of a few “bad apples”; it was the result of a concerted policy.

Following the death of Dilawar, the people who interrogated Dilawar (the 519th MI unit) went from Bagram to Abu Ghraib. And the three passengers in Dilawar’s taxi — innocent farmers from the little village of Yakubi — were sent to Guantánamo. There was no real reason to send them there except that, in all likelihood, the Army wanted to make it look like there had been a terrorist conspiracy. (In the film we show that the U.S. military had been fooled by local Afghan militia, who handed over Dilawar to cover up their own rocket attack on a U.S. base.)

Dilawar’s passengers spent fifteen months in Gitmo, until they were released. Also, Moazzam Begg — one of the detainees at Bagram who witnessed some of the violence meted out on Dilawar — was also sent on to Guantánamo from Bagram. So following the tale of Dilawar was an

organic — and very human — way of looking at the larger story of a policy of cruelty in detention and interrogation.

Your film maintains a steady level of tension in its use of prison guards and interrogators to carry the story. Most of the individuals you show were court-martialed, and you give information on the outcome of their trials at the end. But in the documentary itself, these witnesses come across as human figures, indeed, even as sympathetic. This treatment seems to suggest that these young men and women may be guilty of some horrible deeds, but that they’re also victims—that they were let down by a military that failed to give them the training, the experience and the oversight that was their due. So they may have done wrong, but you are not labeling them as the true culprits. Am I interpreting this correctly? Was this ambivalence in the presentation of the soldiers intentional from the outset?

You are interpreting the film correctly.

The guards and interrogators are not “pure victims,” as you suggest. Some of them did terrible things. But those

who were convicted of crimes were scapegoats because they were punished while their superior officers — who ordered them to commit crimes or, at the very least, condoned them — were not convicted of any wrongdoing.

Also, I think they were victims in a way that few people think about. As someone noted in a recent blog of yours, “You don’t torture people and then lead a normal life afterwards.”

Even the young men who weren’t convicted of anything—like Damien Corsetti—are haunted by torture that they witnessed.

Administration introduced. Can you tell us about your discussions with your father and how they influenced the film?

My father Frank Gibney was a big influence on my life. A long-time journalist and old “Asia hand,” he had learned Japanese during the war so that he could interrogate Japanese prisoners — something he did on Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific campaign in World War II. At the time, there had been many reports of Japanese torturing

Editing is all about rhythm—and not just fast or slow.

It’s a certain pace that you establish. And there are different rhythms you establish—rhythm within the scene, and rhythm within the larger narrative.

Some of the most compelling footage of the film comes in the closing credits in which you include scenes from an interview you conducted with your father, who was a Navy interrogator, and who was obviously distressed about the changes in military tradition that the Bush

Alex Gibney acknowledges his Oscar at the 2008 Academy Awards.

Americans. Further, there was a pervasive view that the Japanese were a new kind of enemy, one that was so fanatical that some of its soldiers (kamikaze) would use airplanes to fly suicide missions. (Sound familiar?) But my father and his fellow interrogators were not taught “coercive interrogation techniques.” They didn’t waterboard anyone as a matter of policy. Just the opposite, they practiced rapport building techniques that were extremely effective in eliciting information despite the supposed “fanatical nature” of the prisoners.

Most important, my father felt that, by not engaging in retribution, he was adhering to a higher standard. “We never forgot,” he says in the film, “that behind the facade of wartime hatreds, there was a central rule of law which people abided by. It was something we believed in. It was what made America different.”

As a former Navy interrogator, he was furious about the Abu Ghraib scandal.

As more details emerged about the way that torture appeared to be part of a wide-ranging policy, he was even more enraged. He encouraged me to take on this project. While I was working on DOCUMENTARY TODAY

19

Taxi to the Dark Side, I visited him in Santa Barbara just before he died. One day, he said: “Go get your video camera; I have something I want to say.” We had to turn off the oxygen machine so he would be audible. A foreign policy conservative, he raged against Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush for upending the very values that he had defended as a soldier. His anger, and his belief that we could — and did — do better offered a ray of hope in a bleak film.

Your documentaries—Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and Taxi to the Dark Side are really extraordinarily well-researched, but they’re also extraordinarily wellcrafted films, far above most documentaries. Can you define for me what makes a good documentary?

And, what makes a documentary a good film?

At the end of the day, the subject itself is not a movie. You have to—like a good nonfiction book, you can be sure that the civil rights movement a good story, but unless you tell that story well, it’s not a good book. The same thing is true with a documentary. I mean, I think you have to get all ‘the stuff.’ But then you have to put it together in a way that makes it compelling viewing for people who’re going to come to see it.

And, hopefully, there’s enough of the author, too, sometimes in indirect ways, that makes the documentary interesting.

How do you as the author appear in this film—I know you’ve voiced the narration, but where is, what is the Alex Gibney signature?

Well, sometimes the author is—well, I’m not in my films like Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock are in their films.

We tried that a couple of times, and it’s always been an embarrassing failure.

In Taxi to the Dark Side, you see me a couple of times in Guantanamo, but in an incidental way. You know, there are certain stylistic things that I do, and certain ways I have of telling a story— that‘s me.

20

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Jeff Skilling, former CEO of Enron in the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guy in the Room.

How would you define those?

I don’t know. Um, you know, part of it is that I’m very much intrigued by the idea of detective stories. I like detective stories. And Enron, in it’s way, is a detective story, and I think, Taxi to the Dark Side, too, is a detective story. So is my next film—about Hunter S. Thompson. That seems like a good mode because it’s a way of asking questions—sometimes basic, fundamental questions, but you keep asking those fundamental questions and they show you a path that you follow. First of all, the path is interesting to walk along. But then the idea that you’re moving ever more slowly to bigger and bigger and bigger crimes, that’s interesting, too. Because I always like—the other thing that unifies my stories is I tend to be—there are a lot of documentaries that tell about victims. Now, Dilawar is a victim, a pure victim. But most of the people who are in this film are perps. They’re not victims. Same thing with Enron. So, in these films about corruption, I tend to be more interested in the perps. And then there are certain other stylistic

things I tend to like. You know, I borrow techniques from other filmmakers…

Like what?

Well, I don’t know whether I’d call it techniques, but I like to think of sequences in my films as I would think of sequences in a narrative movie: the taxi moving sinuously through the landscape, as it does during the film’s title sequence. That, to me, is…telling a visual story. A compressed visual story. The way that we went at the Mohammad al-Qahtani sequence, too—there’s a lot of different styles in the film. The way they’re put together, I like to think of them as different textures. You know, each section has a little different texture—and that distinguishes from other sections. So, so you’re there, in that section, and then you’re finished with that texture and you move on to the next. That’s what keeps an audience refreshed. So, in other words, I mean to say that sometimes I approach things not as ‘let’s record it’ and put it together. But I think about how might we shoot this more effectively to tell the story.

The cinematography in your films is phenomenal. It’s gorgeous and serves as a very strong directive for the audience.

Well, I’m an editor—and I actually see the camera as my weakness. But I surround myself with pretty good photographers who have good eyes.

And I have a good sense of story, so I’m able to say what this or that sequence means, and together we find a good way to visualize it. Like we used a scheme for the Bagram interrogator interviews, we photographed them in a way that would put us in that place, even though we were shooting the interviews elsewhere.

That turned out to be terribly important in terms of creating a mood and also a sense of place, a visceral sense of place for the viewer—it’s part of what makes the story.

Let’s talk about sound. Many directors—of some very good detective films, among them—have told me they’re using subsonic sound, subsonic vibration to influence the audience’s mood. Are you doing that?

Have you considered it? And, can you tell me about your use of music— which often seems ironic.

Sound is important to me, but there’s something about that kind of

manipulation that…if you talk about subsonic under-girding of scenes, I don’t know how I feel about that.

Maybe it makes me a little uncomfortable because maybe there’s a degree of Pavlovian manipulation that maybe I don’t like. I like to think that even in the Mohammad Al-Qahtani sequence in Taxi to the Dark Side, people know we shot him in a deliberate way and rendered him in such a way that you don’t think, don’t realize we were using a cell phone camera at Abu Ghraib. Music is very important to me.

The music in Taxi to the Dark Side was pretty different than music in a lot of my films, with a couple of exceptions. I mean, obviously, My Little Corner of the World and the tango in the Guantanamo tour sequence. But I thought Taxi to the Dark Side would be a more scored film. There are a couple of exceptions. I mean we had fun, well not fun exactly, but there’s the gamelon music that we used during the interrogation of al- Qahtani, which gave that sequence a little different texture. Just like in Enron, instead of using a hardcore bar tune in the strip joint, we used Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach score, where you hear over and over “one-two-three-four,” ‘cause for those guys, it was all about the numbers, but it was also very weird

Then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger greets General Weyand in The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

music to be using for strippers. So, I do think about music a lot, and sometimes find ways to use it for ironic effect. I look for ways to get something unexpected out of it. But in Taxi to the Dark Side the score is also an attempt to be very environmental—you know, you feel you’re in Bagram. There’s a sense of haunting, a sense of dread in it. But also, I worked very hard with the composer to create a sense of hope at times, particularly at the end, where you’re moving through Washington DC and there’s a kind of undercurrent in that score. I’m a huge music fan. I’m the only tone deaf person who’s every won a Grammy. I like the dramatic possibilities of music.

What are your ideas about the rhythm of the film—not only in the pacing of delivery of information, but also in the length of scenes and whether or not you use a stationary or moving camera? How much do you control the film’s rhythm through the editing process?

Editing is all about rhythm—and not just fast or slow. It’s a certain pace that you establish. And there are different rhythms you establish—rhythm within the scene, and rhythm within the larger narrative. Rhythm within the larger narrative is particularly important because documentaries can exhaust people by the end, because there’s no relief. Particularly with films that get as complicated as mine—both Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron. I like the idea of chapters. Maybe that’s an idea I stole from Ken Burns, but I do it differently.

I like chapters because they give you a moment to pause. It’s like having a beat at the end of a musical phrase. I would say rhythm is extremely important to me in filmmaking.

(Alex Gibney is currently hard at work on his latest film Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a documentary based on Hunter S. Thompson and his “Gonzo” style of journalism.)

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

21

Alex Gibney: Filmography The Fifties (1997) In the post-war boom of the fifties, the American Dream was born of innocence, prosperity and peace.

Yet beneath the surface, turbulent times were brewing. The documentary miniseries, based on the best-selling book by Pulitzerprize winning author David Halberstam, reveals the people, places and events which shaped this compelling era.

Sexual Century (1999) The six-part mini-series chronicles the profound changes that have characterized human sexuality in the 20th century. Drawing on film, music, advertising and other media, the series traces the evolution of sex from a basic human instinct into a powerful cultural force, and explores how private passions become public obsessions.

The Huntress (2000) The documentary follows domesticated Dottie Thorson (Annette O’Toole), wife of murdered bounty-hunting legend Ralph “Papa” Thorson, as she and her feisty young daughter (Aleksa Palladino) attempt to carry on the family business.

Speak Truth to Power (2000) The doumentary documents a staged reading of Ariel Dorfman’s play Voices from Beyond the Dark, featuring nine of today’s leading actors—Alec Baldwin, Julia LouisDreyfus, Giancarlo Esposito, Hector Elizondo, Kevin Kline, John Malkovich, Rita Moreno, Sigourney Weaver and Alfre Woodard— as well as musical guests Jackson Browne and Hugh Masekela.

Brooklyn Babylon (2000) (as Executive Producer) The documentary is the story of the triumph of mysticism and love over fanaticism and hate.

22

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Soldiers in the Army of God (2000) The documentary focuses primarily on the “Army of God,” a pro-life group brought together by the Internet and a common belief that abortions must be stopped at all cost.

It includes harrowing footage of high-profile crimes targeted at abortion clinics, as well as an exclusive death-row interview with the man who committed these murders: Paul Hill.

Herbie Hancock: Possibilities (2006) The documentary showcases the life and work of Herbie Hancock, an icon of modern music who continues to bring audiences new and inventive musical visions.

Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006)

The film chronicles the life and mysterious death of the EV-1, the General Motors’ car which ran on Jimi Hendrix and the Blues (2001) electricity, produced no emissions The film tells the story of how the and catapulted American greatest guitarist of his generation technology to the forefront of the took the Mississippi Delta Blues into automotive industry. the stratosphere.

Mr. Untouchable (2007) The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) The true-life story of a Harlem’s Featuring previously unseen footage, notorious Nicky Barnes, a junkie newly declassified U.S. government turned multimillionaire drug-lord, documents, and revealing interviews the film takes its audience deep with key insiders from Henry inside the heroin industry of the Kissinger’s White House years, the film 1970s. examines charges facing the former Love Comes Lately (2007) Secretary of State. (as Producer) The film is a tribute to his body of The Blues (2003) work producer by Isaac Singer and (as Series Producer) Seven directors explore the blues to the actor Otto Tausig. Three short through their own personal styles and astories by the author depict the perspectives. The films in the series power of love. Directed by Jan are motivated by a central theme: how Schuette the blues evolved from parochial folk No End in Sight (2007) tunes to a universal language.

On May 1, 2003, President Bush declared an end to combat in Iraq.

Lightning in a Bottle (2004) More than three years later, 3,000 (as Producer) The documentary film chronicles a American soldiers and an estimated landmark night in February 2003 790,000 civilians are dead, and Iraq when thousands of music fans still burns. The film is a jawgathered at Radio City Music Hall for dropping, insider’s tale of wholesale a tribute concert to honour the incompetence, recklessness and enduring legacy of blues music. venality.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua.

Human Behavior Experiments (2007) ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the The film revisits three famous behavioral studies to explore some Room (2005) Based on the best-selling book of the perennial questions about why same name by Fortune reporters human beings commit unethical acts Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, under particular social conditions: the film is a multi-dimensional study Stanley Milgram; Philip Zimbardo; of one of the biggest business and Columbia University’s 1969 experiments. scandals in American history.

REWIND

Rossellini’s India

With India’s beloved Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

(A book entitled Under Her Spell: Roberto Rossellini in India by Dileep Padgaonkar is presently doing the rounds in India. Roberto Rossellini is an enigmatic figure in post-World War II film history, noted as the co-inventor of Neo-Realism. He was a man who made films and lived his life with passion and intensity and his youth is peppered with a lavish reckless lifestyle which had gained him notoriety. Rossellini’s first collaborator on the India films was the Iranian diplomat Fereydoun Hoveyda, a man of unusual versatility equally at ease in the worlds of international politics and the arts. A co-founder of the influential French magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Hoveyda championed the cause of many the “new wave” directors.

He worked on several film projects, writing screenplays for Iranian and foreign film-makers, most notably Roberto Rossellini, collaborating on the script of his India: Matri Bhumi. In this article Fereydoun Hoveyda recalls the man and the filmmaker.)

I met Rossellini in 1954 at a time when he had just finished the shooting of La Paura, based on Stefan Zweig’s short story. Like his previous movies with his wife Ingrid Bergman, this was a failure at the box office as well as among most film critics. He deeply felt the need for a change both in his private life and artistic undertakings.

During the autumn of that year, a common friend, Enrico Fulchignoni,

who, like me, worked at the UNESCO informed me that Roberto, to whom he had mentioned my name, wished to meet me. The renowned movie producer looked forward to visiting India and wanted to travel with an automobile through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. He needed to ask me for information on Islamic countries of which he knew very little. He was keen on India because it had a large Moslem community.

Fulchignoni asked if I would consecrate a few evenings answering his questions. As one can imagine, I did not hesitate for a single second.

As a matter of fact, when I arrived in Paris back in 1946, following World War II, two films had delighted me: Citizen Kane and Rome Open City. In spite of the abyss that separated them, I found a little something in common between Orson Welles and Roberto Rossellini.

This “little something” took shape in DOCUMENTARY TODAY

23

my mind many years later: Both authors were demystifyers.

Thus, I accompanied Fulchignoni to the hushed corridors of the Raphaël Hotel where Rossellini had taken residence. I felt a little uneasy. The very notoriety of the two cinema luminaries intimidated me. I don’t know if you are acquainted with the Hotel Raphaël. It is quite different from modern palaces.

The walls are adorned with imitations of the great Florentine masters and the high ceilings ornate with golden plaster motives. The subdued lighting, the thick carpets, in short the entire setup contributed, if I may say, to solemnize the atmosphere.

I compared myself to an ambassador who follows the master of ceremony in order to surrender his letters of credential to some high and mighty head of state! Right away, the spectacle presented to me entirely washed away any sort of concern: A plump man in short sleeves, lazily stretched on a Louis XV sofa, the eyelids half closed, the hands joined on a towering belly.

The words of Cocteau characterizing Rossellini surged in my mind: “a dozing fawn.” With a tired gesture the master invited us to sit down. As soon as Fulchignoni began to enumerate my “points of competence, his features began to animate and from this moment on he did not stop shifting and talking.

He began with a praise to laziness: “Compare,” he said, “Greek statuary to Roman’s. In Athens, the heroes stand up martially, muscles stretched, ready for action. In Rome the contrast is total: the emperors and generals present themselves seated to the public, and if they are standing, they lean to a wall or a column. He added: “God himself doesn’t mind laziness, didn’t he rest after the six days of creation, leaving humans to commit all the sins in the world?” As I would discover by the end of the evening, all that was nothing but craftiness in order to charm the crowd and mix up the tracks. The truth is that Rossellini was a tireless toiler.

He had managed to convince his friends of the inverse. Thus, when he devised 24

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

his system of panning optic commanded by a button near his hand, Fulchignoni joyously declared: “That’s a product of his laziness. Now he can make a movie while stretched on a long chair.”

Anyhow, Roberto quizzed me at length on Iran, Turkey and Arab countries where he wanted to make films like Allemagne Année Zero (Germany Year Zero). For each country he coveted to listen on the happenings or anecdotes people were recounting. “These anecdotes and current events contain more truths than any scholarly analysis,” he emphasized. For example, when on that first evening I narrated to him the anecdote about the Shah of Persia’s reaction to a 1900 public execution on Boulevard Arago and urging that the attorney general be executed at the guillotine instead of the criminal, Roberto burst out: “What a marvelous description of oriental despotism!”

We discussed about politics, culture, and religion. His curiosity was limitless,

he assimilated information very quickly and several days later would bring it forth as if he had a magnetic sound recorder in his brain. Towards the early morning we were already on first-name terms! He had always been attracted to the “East.” He decided to travel to India by car through Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, and to make films about these countries as he went along.

We spent many nights in 1955 and 1956 exchanging ideas about them. Several story outlines emerged from our discussions. In 1956, I told him about the case of a monkey exhibitor about whom my friend Chubak, a great Iranian writer, wrote a tragic novel. Roberto asked me to write a different scenario on a monkey educated by humans — that returns among his free brothers and remains in the animal universe…

That is exactly the fourth episode of India Matribhumi.

In late 1956, however, he had to limit his multi-country project to India because of financial shortcomings.

When Roberto came to India at the end

The greats of Italian cinema: Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini and Frederico Fellini.

family, erupted into a scandal which forced Roberto to leave India hurriedly before completing his feature.

Additional scenes had to be shot in studios in Italy and in France. He himself edited most of the documentaries in a small makeshift editing room given by Henri Langlois at the French Cinemathèque.

Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini flank M.V.Krishnaswamy, then a student of cinema but later a filmmaker with Films Division.

of 1956, he was passing through a bad phase in his career. His films like Europa 51 and Viaggio in Italia with Ingrid Bergman had received bad reviews and were unsuccessful. But by then, Hollywood’s boycott of Ingrid was over. Ingrid had restarted work in Hollywood with films like Anastasia, for which she received an Oscar.

Probably her relationship with Roberto was in crisis. According to Palmira, Roberto’s gardener’s wife, Ingrid was supposed to go to India, to join Roberto in 1957. Instead, she decided to do a film with Lars Schmidt, who later became Ingrid’s third husband. So, eventually, Roberto went to India alone.

For his film on India, Rossellini had envisaged a Paisan type of feature with four or more vignettes and a series of “Cine-oeil” (Dziga Vertov) documentaries. He was interested in what he used to call “actual and real India,” not in exoticism and western invented myths such as “spiritualism” and other tourist attractions: yoga, “serpent charming” or “rope climbing”.

He intended to debunk all the coinmonplaces and platitudes the media spilled about India. Roberto stayed in India for almost 9 months, refusing to look at famous monuments and rather preferring to take a non-

exotic view of India, by looking at lives of common persons. Hiding with his cameraman, Aldo Tonti, in the street or on apartment balconies of many Indian cities, he accumulated hundreds of hours of images, while working at the same time on the feature.

In Bombay he met his “future” wife Sonali Das Gupta, a married woman who helped him develop vignettes for the film. As she changed many of our previously agreed stories, Rossellini used to call me over the telephone to discuss some points about the scripts.

His relationship with Sonali, who asked for a divorce and abandoned her

Eventually, Roberto’s Indian stay led to two works: a documentary film India Matribhumi (1959) and a TV 10episode mini-series India vista da Rossellini (J’ai fait un beau voyage aka India seen by Rossellini, 1959) produced jointly by India, Italy and France. The episodes were: India without myths, Bombay Gateway to India, Architecture & costumes of Bombay, Varsova, Towards the south, Lagoons of Malabar, Kerala, Hirakud dam on river Mahadi, Pandit Nehru & Animals in India.

Originally the feature was titled, India 57. As one of the “inventors” of NeoRealism, Rossellini liked to “date” his productions as in the case of Germany Year Zero and Europe 51. But as the release was delayed, the distributors dropped the year mention. Finally the title agreed upon was India Matribhumi which became a film in 4 parts. The first part took a lyrical look at the daily life of a mahout (elephant handler). Part two was about an East Bengal refugee who is working on a dam and after the work is finished, he is relocated to another construction site. Part three was about an elderly person contemplating nature in a jungle and finally, part four is about a monkey owner dying from heat and the monkey looking for another owner.

Rossellini wanted to convey the problems facing Indians as their country struggled on the path of development, especially the “conflicts” between tradition and technology, even at the level of animal life (the stories of the tiger and the monkey, for instance). The film might seem “incomplete” (one of the stories concerning land reform was dropped and others had to be completed in DOCUMENTARY TODAY

25

Europe). In any case it has to be seen together with the television documentaries with Rossellini himself answering questions by a journalist.

Both the works were restored some years ago by the Cineteca, film archives of Bologna, and have since been shown in some festivals.

Noted critic Jose Luis Guarner described the film thus: “The consistency of the themes tackled and the diversity of material investigated

Rossellini rejoins, before the letter, one of the consequences of modern physics by which recent theorists affirm that the universe could not exist without the men — and evidently the women — who observe it.

I then asked him: “What you did in India, do you think that one could make it just as well in Brazil, or even in France, in Italy?” It is then that Rossellini revealed a vast project of which his Indian adventure

The function of real cinema and television is to confront people with these realties – as they are, and to inform people of other men and other problems.” irresistibly recall the huge synthetical task of October.” Although India does not strictly use the resources of montage, at least in the traditional sense it is conceptually even more elaborate than Eisenstein’s film. With a conscious economy of means, Rossellini achieves richer and more complex association than Bresson or Resnais. India repeats the stylistic principle of Viaggio in Italia, which can seem superficial to a spectator lacking in concentration; it takes the form like a musical movement that manages at the same time to be very fast and very slow.”

Immediately following the showing of India, in the spring of 1959, Jacques Rivette and I interviewed him for the Les Cahiers du Cinéma (April 1959 issue). At a certain juncture, Rivette asked him: “Why not a simple documentary, in the Flaherty way?”

Roberto answered: “What matters to me is man. I tried to depict the soul, the light that is inside these men… with all the meanings of things which surround them. For the things around them have a sense (and I underline it), since there is someone who watches, or at least this sense becomes unique by the fact that someone watches… If I had made a strict documentary, I would have been obliged to abandon all that happened inside, in the heart of these men.” Here 26

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

constituted the experimental prototype.

For him the modern means of diffusion delivers to the public nothing more than false problems. “Before all,” he said, “it is necessary to know men as they are. Now that the world has become very minuscule, one continues not to know each other. Today we live shoulder-to shoulder. It is very

important to begin to know each other.

Only then will we find solutions to problems.”

For Rossellini a new world was in the process of being born and scientific and technological developments were about to over-shadow a civilization that we knew up to now. These extraordinary advances confronted us with immense problems. It was necessary therefore to begin by knowing one another. Then, he concluded: “Why not make the effort to go and see men everywhere, of telling them, showing them that the world is full of friends and no, not full of enemies, even if there are some foes.

The function of real cinema and television is to confront people with these realties – as they are, and to inform people of other men and other problems.”

He added: “I began to make some broadcasts for television. There, I can not only provide the image, but also say and explain some things. I have thus contributed to Human Knowledge

Rossellini’s cameraman Tonti poses with his son.

woman; prison life and the identification of the little crook to the hero in Rovere, etc.

An Italian view … Rossellini with his Indian bride Sonali.

a world very close to us, amounting to more than 400 million men (India in 1958). Maybe my television broadcasts will be able to help in the comprehension of my movie. The film helps discern a country through emotions rather than statistics. That probably allows us to penetrate it much better.” Elsewhere Roberto Rossellini had written regarding his experience in India, “I wish that cinema can serve as a means to knowledge, that it has a cultural value and it promotes an opening of consciousness. I went abroad to experiment this view of cinema but I can try it in Europe as well.

Wouldn’t it be good to have ethnographic films on Paris or Rome?”

In his letter on Islam, Rossellini mentions several times over what he calls “his method.” It certainly pertains to the didactic-historic conception of his films for television. When thinking deeper, this method did not depart too much from the one he used for movies.

In Rome Open City and Paisa, critics talked about him as the father of neorealism. He did not accept gracefully this categorization. To put himself apart from others, he insisted that for him, neo-realism was before anything else a moral position. At the beginning of our friendship I did not understand what he meant by these words.

Certainly there was a unity of style in his work. But his discourse varied from one story to another. But the more I reflected on his films apparently quite deviant from one-another, I thought to have found a common denominator between them that consisted in “a will to demystify.”

Demystification of resistance and war in Rome Open City, Paisa, the Escapees of Night; demystification of defeat in Germany Year Zero; of sanctity in Fiorettis; of philanthropy in Europe 51, of marriage in Fear and Voyage in Italy; of heroism in General della Rovere; of philosophy in Socrates; of monarchy in the Taking of Power by Louis XIV. That was his cinematographic style. What they named neo-realism, reflected this “moral position.” How come? I have abandoned criticism for more than 30 years and do not have any intention to return to it. But I would like to give one or two examples of this union between moral thought and artistic style in the films of Rossellini. He alternated in all the pure documentary and dramatical scenes. Take for example Voyage in Italy or Stromboli: procession in the streets of Naples or fishing! Berlin in ruins, and a kid running to his suicide; the deprived of Europe 51 and the drama of a wealthy middle-class

In 1959, I t old Rossellini that I finally understood his meaning. For a moment he remained perplexed then he nodded his head: “It is exactly what I tried to transmit when I said that for me neorealism was before anything else a moral position.” All at once I understood why his films spawned so many controversies. He was terribly ambiguous. Even during Fascist time.

Thus Il Navo Bianco or Un Pilota Retorna demystified Mussolinian patriotism! I remember the long discussions in the press and religious circles on the topic of fathoming if the Fiorettis or the Miracle were Christian films. Neither Christian, nor antiChristian.

This tendency to demystification made of Rossellini an individual apart, a man open to the world, totally incapable of fanaticism, but capable of love and friendship transcending his egotism.

He was a man who radiated sympathy and invited dialogue. Working with Rossellini was a joy. He was not interested only in the work at hand, but in every aspect of life: art, love, food, politics, traditions, science... and the “future.” He could not resist beauty (especially as incarnated in women). To him cinema was not everything. It was just a medium to express ideas, to inform and to educate. That is why in the sixties he definitely abandoned “commercial” film-making and inaugurated his television features: History of Iron; Pascal; The Messiah; The Medicis; etc.

The period of return from India coincided with lot of his work for Italian TV rather than for making films, and is also called his most solitary period. At the time of his death he was working on a television film about the young Karl Marx called Lavorare per umanità (Working for humanity). Entertainment for the sake of entertainment was at odds with his conception of cinema.

The absorption of the Nouvelle Vague in commercial cinema saddened him. He died after a heart attack on 3 June 1977.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

27

MEMORIES

AR eturn Tic ket to H ollywood Return Ticket Hollywood

By K oen van Daele Koen As I’m flying from Frankfurt to Mumbai to attend the 10th Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films, Lufthansa immediately makes a point. On our way to the Indian subcontinent the in-flight entertainment programme offers us first a Hollywood movie and then a Bollywood picture. Hollywood may be dominating Western airspace, but the closer we get to our destination the more the airwaves are filled with the popular tunes of the Hindi song and dance film.

I state the obvious by saying that India has the largest national film industry on the planet. Much later I disciover from the country’s Central Board of Film Certification that every three months an audience as large as its entire population (currently 1.12 billion) flocks to see the over 1000 annually produced feature films, screened in over 13000 cinema halls all over the country. The multiplex business is booming, though it is a relatively new phenomenon. Although by the end of 2007 India had some 450 multiplexes, these represented merely 4% of the total number of screens. According to a comparative study published in BusinessWeek, Bollywood sold in 2001 3.6 billion tickets, whereas Hollywood had to do it with one billion less. But since ticket prices are amongst the world’s

lowest, Hollywood’s worldwide revenue is but a tiny speck of Hollywood’s earnings.

I’m aware that one has to be careful with figures like these. I’m merely mentioning some — more or less randomly picked — numbers to give an idea of scale and proportion. For, if we would judge by the near total absence of Indian cinema on our screens, we easily overlook its significance. While American and European entertainment news in February is traditionally dominated by the Oscar-fever, on the Indian subcontinent the traditional

Hollywood red carpet event is largely overshadowed by the Filmfare Awards that are annually taking place in the very same Oscar-weekend.

And even if many of us ‘Westerners’ have never heard of the nominees at the 53rd edition, billions of viewers in India, the Middle East, large parts of Africa, and in countries with large Indian expat communities cheered as superstar Shahrukh Khan — alias King Khan, alias SRK—once again took home the Black Lady (as they call the elegant equivalent of the Oscar statuette). Having been nominated for no less than seventeen times, he won his seventh Filmfare Best Actor Award for his performance as coach of the women’s Indian national hockey team in Chak De! India (which happened to be the Lufthansa in-flight movie on my way down).

This year’s award for Best Actress went to Kareena Kapoor, an actress in her late twenties who is obviously in the process of becoming another superstar.

Kareena is the granddaughter of Raj Kapoor, the legendary Chaplinesque figure of Bollywood’s Golden Fifties.

It’s the images of Raj Kapoor —the smiling, dancing, singing tramp – and Nargis (Mother India) that are flashing through my mind as we are driving to my hotel at three in the morning, passing by thousands of homeless sleeping along never-ending roads. It

The disillusioned coach …

Shahrukh Khan in Chak De India.

28

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

takes us a little more than an hour to get to our destination in the southern part of this megalopolis.

It’s these two extremes of what used to be called Bombay that keep on accompanying my first passage to India: Mumbai as the dream factory, and Mumbai as this rapidly expanding, 21st century metropolis, bound to spin out of control. This is a city with its gigantic urbanisation problems, where more than half its population is living in slums. Some might say: the ideal setting for a documentary festival. The biennial festival is organised by Films Division, a department of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting. Films Division was established the year after India declared independence from British Colonial Rule and has, ever since, been engaged in the production, distribution and promotion. In half-acentury they have shot 8000 titles. If you want to see Mahatma or Indira Gandhi, Tagore or Mother Theresa on celluloid you can be sure they have it on their shelves.

Having arrived a day prior to the festival opening I had the chance to get a closer look at the organising institution. One of the first things that strike you on the premises of Films Division is that everywhere you encounter people who are passionate about and devoted to cinema. All the more s u r p r i s i n g , considering that this is a huge governmental body with over 700 people on its pay-list. Based on my discussions with the staff it seems that the politically Marine Drive is a 3 kilometer-long curving road along one appointed public of Mumbai’s central bays, also known as The Queen’s servants are largely Necklace. outnumbered by the cinephiles. The staff’s pride, love and is a 3 kilometer-long curving road along care one detects while walking through one of Mumbai’s central bays. “After their pre-festival Behind the Frames sunset, when all the city lights go on, exhibition — featuring old cameras and we call it Queen’s Necklace,” Rajiv film equipment— is certainly not that explains. of a bureaucrat “with the right The restaurant is packed with young connections”. people. The available leg-, arm-, and The international film critics tablespace is very limited. That every (FIPRESCI) jury —consisting of a square centimetre needs to be used, colleague from Kerala in India’s South- strikes me wherever we come. Like: on West, a Pakistani critic and myself— many an elevator there’s a sign has been appointed a coordinator who forbidding you to wear bags on your accompanies us throughout our stay. shoulder. Rajiv tells me their standard Rajiv Kumar is by profession director joke about a foreigner arriving at the of the Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) Central Railway Station, which is branch of Films Division. He is a allegedly one of the biggest on the filmmaker and graduate of India’s most globe. Not knowing where to go, he celebrated film academy of Pune (the stands still with both hands rested on Film and Television Institute of India), his hips. Immediately a Mumbai citizen and by spirit, a philosopher and poet, tells him to put his arms down and who even recites a ghazal from time to move on: “We don’t have space time. One couldn’t imagine, nor wish enough for this!” for a more ideal guide and go-between.

He takes me for my first lunch to a Having been warned by everybody small place on Marine Drive, which who travelled to India, I’m suspiciously peeking into the open R. K. Laxman’s cartoon character door leading to the kitchen. Despite the the Common Man is another icon friendly faces staring back at this of Mumbai. foreigner, one peek is enough to DOCUMENTARY TODAY

29

imagine the worst. Rajiv reassures me: “I always come here when I visit town.

The only thing you have to take care of in India is the water.” He adds as he carefully inspects if the bottle of water on our table is properly closed. In no time the waiter serves us lunch. The colours, scents and tastes are wonderful. Exquisite! “Simple food, we call it.” During lunch we hear the melancholic voice of Guru Dutt in his 1957 masterpiece Pyaasa (Eternal

beautifying the opening, participating in the ceremony of lighting the auspicious lamp, and attracting industry and media attention for an unpopular film-form that always seems to be pushed in the defensive. The “Bollywood beauty component” looks like a steady ingredient, as it is later repeated for the closing ceremony. As far as attracting media attention is concerned the strategy seems to be working. When later that night I surf

One of the first things that strike you on the premises of Films Division is that everywhere you encounter people who are passionate about and devoted to cinema.

Thirst), played on a cassette-player whose best days are long gone. Rajiv tells me that they always play golden Bollywood classics at this charming restaurant.

Later that afternoon the festival opens in the Tata Theatre of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, a large venue situated by Nariman Point, which is the city’s – so actually the country’s – business district. As we enter the building in this upper-class area, someone tells me about a recently published cartoon by R.K. Laxman, India’s oldest (now over 80, but still active) and best known cartoonist. On a pavement in the financial district one beggar tells his fellow beggar — as he’s gazing at the one rupee coin thrown at him by a businessman: “I think the stock market is steady. He threw a one rupee coin after a fortnight”.

The opening ceremony is indicative of the uneasy relation between the Bollywood film-industry and the documentary scene. The title of one of the keynote speeches indicatively sounds: “Why doesn’t anybody give a damn about documentaries?”

Besides the political authorities, the Festival Director has invited a Bollywood star as guest of honour. Of all the VIP’s, rising star Vidya Balan is the only one who doesn’t have a speech. Her role can be summarised as: 30

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

the hundreds of TV channels in my hotel-room, it is Vidya Balan — the actress who has absolutely no connections with documentary — who gets most of the screen time in the news-reports.

At the end of the ceremony dozens of photographers and cameramen storm

the stage to take their close-up of Ms. Balan. Meanwhile Aijaz Gul, my colleague from Pakistan, points in the direction of a beautiful old lady who is also sitting on the first row, but on its far end, alone, with nobody really ‘covering’ her. He explains that although Mubarak Begum is not a megastar, she is one of the great Bollywood vocalists and playback singers, who had her prime during the fifties and sixties. We decide to ask her if we can take some pictures of her with us. Afterwards Aijaz tells me that Indian actresses have the make their careers in a very fast tempo. There are not too many years that separate the screen-appearance and disappearance of a Bollywood actress. In this respect there’s not much difference with Hollywood practice.

Since we were to judge the international competition, and since our screening-schedule was packed, unfortunately we had to miss the Indian competition, and many other interesting retrospectives at the

The glamour quotient … Festival Director Kuldeep Sinha escorts Bollywood star Vidya Balan at the inauguration of MIFF 2008.

The omnipresent unforgettable Vidya Balan … this time in Bhool Bhulaiyan.

festival. Without listing or attempting to review the strongest films of the competition, there are two general observations I would like to make. First: many of the non-Indian films had an Indian component: the director was of Indian origin, some scene had been shot in India, or the subject was in some way or another related to India.

Sometimes it was something that seemed utterly trivial but still it was there. Like in the documentary about the Swiss years of Yehudi Menuhin which obviously had nothing to do with India. And yet, there was a minute or so about Menuhin playing with Ravi Shankar, and another few seconds about the violinist’s Indian yoga teacher. Afterwards a friend remarked that my persistently noticing all these Indian ingredients might have been, quite simply, the result of me being a Westerner.

characterized the Bombay-based cinema of Raj Kapoor by comparing it to that of his contemporary Calcuttabased Satyajit Ray. If Ray made films about the people -their living conditions, hardships, poverty, etc, Raj made them for the people. Is it really a surprise that women are leading when it comes to making films about the people?

On the flight back to Europe Lufthansa offers us Bhool Bhulaiyan, an amusing Bollywood song and dance mixture with thriller, horror, psychological drama, comedy and parody ingredients.

Vidya Balan is playing the female lead.

After the movie I leaf through the latest issue of Filmfare, “India’s # 1 Entertainment Magazine”. I’m again stunned by how much Bollywood is anchored in a strong film-historical tradition. In his editorial Jitesh Pillaai opens his attack on film-censorship by reminiscing about Guru Dutt. He continues with: “The truth is that for India by and large, cinema is a friend, to share one’s sorrows, a soul-mate, to share one’s joys, a punching bag, to release one’s angst and helplessness.

A parent, into whose bosom we could lose ourselves and find a comfort zone.

A sworn enemy in whom we see what we are not. In short, we believe cinema is another one of us.” It feels good to read such passionate cinephile credo in a commercial film magazine. He concludes, “We all share a common blood group: cinema positive.”

(Koen van Daele is a noted film critic, programmer and organiser from Belgium and was a member of the FIPRESCI Critics Jury at MIFF 2008.)

A memento for the return trip to Hollywood … Koen van Daele with Festival Director Kuldeep Sinha.

A second point to make is that many of the strongest documentaries at the festival were the work of women, and were very often featuring women protagonists. In his foreword to one of the better coffee table books on Bollywood, the eminent British film critic Derek Malcolm adequately DOCUMENTARY TODAY

31

COMMENT

Nanook and M e Me Fahrenheit 9/ 11 and the documentary tradition.

9/1

By Louis M enand Menand Whatever you think of Michael Moore’s immensely satisfying movie about the awful Bush Administration and its destructive policies—and reasonable people can disagree, of course—one thing that cannot be said about “Fahrenheit 9/11” is that it is an outlaw from the documentary tradition.

“The documentary tradition” sounds like a grand phrase for a genre that includes everything from Nanook of the North to Girls Gone Wild. There’s no doubt that it’s an eclectic form. The “Documentary” section shelves Michael Moore next to National Geographic, movies about bad Presidents next to movies about butterflies, bodybuilders, and Eskimos.

These movies do have one thing in common, though: they show you what was not intended for you to see. The essential documentary impulse is the

impulse to catch life off camera, to film what was not planned to happen, or what would have happened whether someone was there to film it or not.

That’s why people make documentaries, and why people go to see them. It’s a genre founded on a paradox.

The term is as old as the cinema.

Documentaire was one of the names that early filmmakers, back when many of the prominent ones were French, gave to movies of ordinary life, exotic places, and current events. The word suggests observational neutrality, a documentation, an unretouched record of what’s real; and if that was the promise it was betrayed almost from the start. The film and television historian Erik Barnouw, in his excellent survey of the documentary, lists a

The Lumiere Brothers … a novelty without a future?

32

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

dozen cases from the early years where material was simply faked. Finding that on film Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill looked more like a hike on a hot day, producers at Vitagraph reënacted the battle of Santiago Bay in miniature on a tabletop and added it to what they had shot in Cuba. The British producer James Williamson filmed the Boer War on a golf course. Thomas Edison made a documentary of the Russo-Japanese War on Long Island.

Biograph exhibited a movie called The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius made nowhere near Mt. Vesuvius. The Danish mogul Ole Olsen produced a safari documentary by buying a couple of aging lions from the Copenhagen zoo, moving them to an island, and, intercutting stock jungle footage, filming them being killed by hired “hunters.”

Audiences didn’t seem to mind.

Those early documentarians were not journalists. They were, by cinematic standards, scarcely even filmmakers.

They were businessmen. The first man to charge admission to a movie, the French industrialist Louis Lumière, thought that the cinema was a novelty without a future. He got out of the production business, at which he had been fantastically successful, after two years. That was in 1897. Early documentaries therefore had politics the way that tabloids have politics: they flattered prejudice. They were indistinguishable from propaganda.

They were also, like the dramatic films of the time, short. It was after the feature-length film became standard that the documentary acquired its distinctive political cast and became a medium of progressivism.

sandwich was named after the protagonist—a Nanuk. Paramount called back. It ended up producing Flaherty’s next movie, Moana, which he made in Samoa and which came out in 1926.

Robert Flaherty among the kids … shooting one of his early documentaries.

It is not surprising that documentarymakers have usually worked in a spirit of advocacy. They are people sufficiently committed to a point of view to go to the trouble of obtaining expensive equipment, carting it into the field, shooting miles of film under often unpleasant or dangerous conditions, and spending months or years splicing the results into a coherent movie. It’s easier to write an editorial. It’s easier, even, to write a book. People who make documentaries don’t make them because they believe that “reasonable people can disagree,” or that there are two sides to every question. They believe that there are, at most, one and a half sides—a right side and a side that, despite possibly having some redeeming aspects, is, on balance, wrong. They make movies because they are passionate about their subjects and they want to arouse passion in others, many others.

These passions may tend to be progressive rather than conservative because progressives are more likely to be the sort of people who feel good about expressing their activism in an artistic medium that requires hardship and teamwork, and that results in a product that has little chance of making anyone rich. It may also have something to do with the nature of documentary itself. A preference for the off-camera is a preference for

ordinary life—”the drama of the doorstep,” the legendary Scottish producer John Grierson called it.

Ordinary people don’t lose their dignity when they’re caught off camera, because they’re always off camera. It’s on camera, in fact, where most people appear awkward and undignified. But people who are normally seen only on a stage—the powerful and the celebrated—lose a little dignity and authority when they’re shown barking at their secretaries or putting saliva on their combs. The documentary has a builtin bias against officialdom.

In vérité terms, Nanook is largely a fake. “What I want to show is the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible—before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well,” Flaherty wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Former” is the key word.

Flaherty arranged, for example, to film a walrus hunt in order to show how indigenous people once gathered food.

The Inuit had long since stopped walrus-hunting, and they ended up struggling to drag a harpooned walrus out of the Arctic surf and begging Flaherty to shoot it with his rifle.

Flaherty pretended not to hear them and kept filming. Later on, Nanook and his family are shown building an igloo out in the wilderness. It was too dark inside the igloo to film, so a special igloo—in other words, a set—was constructed with one wall removed, and the family was filmed, in daylight, pretending to go to bed. When a shot didn’t work, Flaherty asked his subjects to repeat what they were doing until he was satisfied.

Ordinary people don’t lose their dignity when they’re caught off camera, because they’re always off camera.

It’s on camera, in fact, where most people appear awkward and undignified.

The man who made the documentary into an art form was an American, Robert Flaherty. He began shooting film of the Inuit in northern Canada in 1914, but his famous first movie, Nanook of the North, did not come out until 1922. It was financed by one French company, Revillon Frères (a fur business), and distributed by another, Pathé, after Paramount and four other studios had turned it down. It was a worldwide hit; in Germany, an ice-cream

Nanook owed its popularity to Flaherty’s decision to tell the story of a family rather than try to document a whole community. The opening scene, in which Nanook’s large family adorably crawls, one by one, out of an impossibly tiny kayak, is the perfect audience hook. Flaherty used the same strategy in later films, but he often cast the members of his screen “family” himself. And, as he had with the walrus hunt, he persuaded his subjects to DOCUMENTARY TODAY

33

reënact abandoned traditions. In Samoa, it was the practice of tattooing; in Man of Aran, made in the Aran Islands, off Ireland, in 1934, it was a shark hunt. He had to bring in an expert to teach the locals how to do it.

Flaherty staged the unstaged.

Flaherty inspired many filmmakers.

Some made movies in the anthropological spirit of Nanook and Moana, and some, like Grierson, turned to modern life, but with similar ennobling intentions. Grierson’s only directorial effort, made in 1929, is a piece of industrial poetry called Drifters, about North Sea herring fishermen. “Fishermen still have their homes in the old-time villages—but they go down, for each season, to the labour of a modern industry,” reads a typical intertitle, and this strikes the exact progressive note: traditional folkways encountering the global economy in the figure of the heroic worker. This is the spirit of a lot of the movies that Grierson went on to produce as the head of the Empire Marketing Film Unit, in Britain, and, later, of the National Film Board of Canada. Those movies don’t represent the purest progressivism in the documentary tradition, though. That distinction belongs to the brilliant Soviet documentaries of Dziga Vertov—movies with titles like Stride, Soviet!, One Sixth of the World and Three Songs of Lenin.

The toxic antibody in the tradition, of course, is Leni Riefenstahl, who died last year, at the age of a hundred and one. Triumph of the Will, filmed at the 1934 Nazi Party rally, was released in 1935. In most respects, it represents a complete inversion of what the documentary since Flaherty had been all about.

It doesn’t try to speak truth to power; it tries to speak the truth of power. Riefenstahl’s 34

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

camera is in love with the stage. There is no sense of a reality beyond the frame. There isn’t even any sense of a frame, outside which something else might exist. Still, for everyone who watches it today, “Triumph of the Will” has the essential documentary fascination: you feel that you are seeing things you were not intended to see. It is a weird case of propaganda, over time, turning into something like an exposé.

The notion of the documentary as a plotless, commentary-less, vérité-style record of life as it is—the notion of the documentarian as a fly on the wall— was born in the nineteen-fifties. Lighter and more mobile cameras were less obtrusive, more suited to capturing subjects “off camera.” Highspeed film opened up interior spaces. But the fresh variable was sound. In the late nineteen-fifties, the American filmmaker Robert

Drew helped to perfect synchronized sound shooting. He also understood the key to creating the kind of documentary that the new equipment made possible: access. You get in the door, and then you just hang around until people forget you’re there.

In Britain, this method was associated with a movement known as Free Cinema; in the United States, it was called “direct cinema.” Drew went on to make a series of remarkable insidelook documentaries, including Primary, about the 1960 Wisconsin primary, and Crisis, about the forced integration of the University of Alabama, in 1963— two of the best records of the Kennedys on the job. His group, Drew Associates, gave a start to filmmakers like D. A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles.

The Mozart of the form is Frederick Wiseman. His first documentary, Titicut Follies, of

Leni Riefenstahl … revealing the true power of the documentary.

The catch in Wiseman’s approach, as in almost every documentary, is that there is one exception to the implicit claim that the camera is showing you everything, and that is the camera. As night begins to fall, Nanook and his family are caught in a blizzard, far from their igloo. We are watching all this, so obviously there is at least one other person present, Flaherty. In fact, Flaherty often shot alone, and he was willing to suffer the privations of his subjects. But, as in the adventure with the walrus, there is something fundamentally bogus about what we are seeing. If the Inuit (as the intertitles explain) are driven to hunting walrus from sheer hunger, can’t the man with the movie camera (and the rifle) help them out? It is the paradox of “off camera.”

Frederick Wiseman … the voyeur of the ear.

1967, an exposé about the Bridgewater State Hospital, in Massachusetts, shows scenes that do not require comment—and, of course, there is no comment in a Wiseman film. Wiseman must have felt that even the title was an editorial intrusion (it refers to a song-and-dance revue performed by some of the inmates), for his subsequent titles are neutral to the point of petulance: High School, Hospital, Juvenile Court and so on. Wiseman does not operate the camera when he films; he operates the sound system, and the sound is the bravura element. The movies do not just show what was not intended for you to see; they let you listen to what was not intended for you to hear.

Wiseman is a voyeur of the ear.

Not surprisingly in the case of a filmmaker who goes to such lengths to suppress editorializing, editorializing is the central issue in Wiseman’s work.

His own position is subtle. He refers to his movies as “reality fictions,” and although he edits in extremely long takes, which give an impression of inclusiveness, he insists that the results correspond to nothing in real life. “All the material is manipulated so that the final film is totally fictional in

form although it is based on real events,” he has said. There is (as many people have guessed, anyway) a theme in Wiseman’s work: it is about dehumanization, about what happens to individuals when they get caught in a system. But is Wiseman showing you this, or is he telling you this? Part of the experience of watching his movies—not just Titicut Follies, where the point is blunt enough, but, for example, The Store, about the NeimanMarcus department store in Dallas,

One way to handle this is to put the filmmaker inside the frame, as Marcel Ophuls did in The Sorrow and the Pity, on the Occupation in France, and Claude Lanzmann did, to a much greater extent, in Shoah. The filmmaker is seen; his voice is heard. “Getting the story” is part of the story. In those films, though, what is “off camera” is not the interview subjects, who are presented in relatively formal settings, but the facts of collaboration and extermination—things that the collaborators and the exterminators had hoped no one would ever see again.

Television watchers have become so accustomed to the comedy of the outtake that it’s amazing the technique has any bite left at all. which demands a lot of viewer input— is asking yourself: Why these scenes, where nothing much seems to be happening, and not other scenes, where something might actually be happening? And then: What about those other scenes? Could they open onto a different side of the story?

Wiseman’s point, in talking about his movies as fictions, seems to be that these are questions that people always should be asking. There may be a neutral style, but there is no neutrality.

A more radical solution is not to enter the frame but to break it. Errol Morris opens The Fog of War, his recent documentary on Robert McNamara, with a scene in which McNamara is explaining, “off camera,” what he intends to say once the interview starts. This is more than an “it’s only a movie” disclaimer—as though anyone might doubt that it is. It’s a reminder of who is controlling the narrative. It’s consistent with Morris’s tendency to photograph McNamara in a way that DOCUMENTARY TODAY

35

makes him look off balance and dishevelled, a little too hot for the camera.

Mainstream journalists generally admired The Fog of War; they generally despise Fahrenheit 9/11. What they complain about (politics aside) is manipulation, that the logic of the movie is, If it looks bad, it probably is bad. Members of the Bush family palling around with wealthy Saudis looks bad; deputy defense secretaries licking their combs looks bad; politicians in “live-feed” shots before they go on the air look bad. So do children who have been wounded (we are not told how), names blacked out on official documents (we don’t know by whom), John Ashcroft singing his own composition Let the Eagle Soar (well, that is pretty bad). The criticism is completely correct: this is the logic of the movie, by and large. It’s the logic of the visual. “We don’t know the source for what we’re seeing,” people have complained. They’re right.

Movies do not have footnotes.

Some of the tricks Moore has been attacked for using—the slow-motion replay of live feed of President Bush before delivering a televised address, for example—are used by Morris, too.

Morris runs slow-motion footage of Curtis LeMay and Lyndon Johnson that makes them look just as rabbity and unstable as Moore makes Bush look. Moore introduces Bush Administration characters with shots of them being made up for television— they fake the way they look, so we can’t believe what they say. Morris shows McNamara checking sound levels before he starts speaking on camera. It is all standard documentary demystifying, the backstage glimpse of people getting dressed to impress. In McNamara’s case, the treatment actually makes him more credible, because we feel we are seeing him in the raw. And where’s the shock value, anyway? Television watchers have become so accustomed to the comedy of the outtake that it’s amazing the technique has any bite left at all.

36

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Moore’s own presence in Fahrenheit 9/11—he does the voice-over, he gives himself a lot of screen time, he does his political performance-art bits, like buttonholing congressmen and encouraging them to have their kids enlist—has annoyed even viewers disposed to appreciate his bias. He’s an obnoxious embarrassment, they feel, and his case would be stronger if he stayed offscreen. But if Moore stayed offscreen his movie’s tendentiousness would be a lot more sinister. It’s hard to evaluate something when you can’t discount for perspective. Moore does not exactly conceal his. He’s a populist ideologue who boils everything down to a single article of belief: the rich screw the poor. Most people who see Fahrenheit 9/11 already know the degree to which they accept this as an explanation for everything, and they adjust their reception of the movie accordingly.

Why do people who do not credit Michael Moore with much political sophistication like his movie anyway?

One common reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11 is that it shows you things that have never been seen before—the “Pet Goat” and “Now watch this drive” clips, scenes of carnage and brutality in Iraq, Saudi-schmoozing, Ashcroft singing, Al Gore being forced to reject repeated petitions by black representatives to contest the official counting of the electoral-college votes in the 2000 election. It may be that most of these things were shown somewhere, but the movie is designed

to make audiences feel that they have never been seen, or that, having been seen, they have been deliberately suppressed. Someone doesn’t want us to see this: it’s the pure documentary impulse, and it works.

Liberals have been relatively forgiving of the movie in part out of sheer exhaustion from the cravenness of the mainstream media, which investigated Whitewater with far greater zeal than it did the claim that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the shameless cheerleading of the rightwing media. Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a movie that has yet to tempt a distributor but has been exhibited in special screenings, and that circulates, samizdat style, on videotape and DVD, is a forceful reminder of how vicious the cheerleading is. “Outfoxed” ought to be a redundant exercise. The right-wing bias of Fox News, whose laughable motto is “Fair and Balanced,” is not something that ought to require a

documentary to uncover. But where is the mainstream media? The answer is that the mainstream media is a place where Tucker Carlson is identified as a “political analyst.” Reporting on television is now accompanied by so much partisan yapping disguised as analysis, and there is such a panic to get anything on the air that comes over the transom regardless of the source (like pictures of John Kerry in a silly hat), that the other networks have to feel uncomfortable about accusing anyone else of confusing news with opinion. Outfoxed suggests, in fact, that competing news organizations, like CNN, having seen that flag-waving attracts viewers, are starting to imitate Fox. Cinematically, Outfoxed is a straightforward film, consisting mostly

of clips and talking heads. Greenwald is reported to have assembled an enormous archive of Fox News videotapes, and the movie reveals, by montage, telling patterns of bias and innuendo. He also managed to score some damning memos, sent to the Fox News organization by a senior vicepresident for news named John Moody, which explain what the story of the day will be and how reporters and announcers are expected to spin it. There may be a few viewers out there who continue to confuse Bill O’Reilly with Eric Sevareid. Outfoxed will disabuse them.

Greenwald has also produced two documentaries on the Bush Administration, Unprecedented, about the 2000 election, and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War—films that went straight to DVD. According to an article by Robert Boynton, in the Times Magazine. Outfoxed was partly funded by MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, liberal groups, and the movie ends, weakly, with a call for the people to rise up and protest (shots of tiny groups of picketers with handlettered signs) and with similar exhortations from the usual exhorters. There are no interviews with current Fox employees, or with anyone else who might offer a defense of the network or challenge some of the movie’s assertions. Outfoxed is not a work of reporting; it is a brief for the prosecution, most of it supported by the juxtaposition of very short clips from Fox News broadcasts. It’s totally manipulative. Mainstream journalists will love it anyway.

Michael Moore … a populist ideologue.

What’s wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11 isn’t the method. It’s the thesis.

Moore’s big idea is that the war in Iraq wasn’t about running the world; it was

about money. This seems exactly backward. It’s possible that if going to war in Iraq were bad for Halliburton the Bush Administration would have hesitated, but it did not go to war in Iraq because the war would be good for Halliburton. It went to war because of an idea about America’s worldhistorical mission. It was an idea that a lot of people who were not conservative Republicans signed on to with enthusiasm and with reasons more articulate than any Bush himself is capable of uttering. The war and the occupation have gone sour, but although you don’t hear much about the idea anymore, it’s not at all obvious that it has been abandoned. The intellectual investment in the Iraq war is much scarier than the financial involvement. Moore’s movie never treats it.

One of the first movies shown to a public was called The Arrival of a Train. A movie camera had been placed at the edge of the platform, and the train was filmed pulling into the station. It was one of Lumière’s most popular shorts. The story grew up that audiences screamed and tried to get out of the way when they saw the image of the approaching train, and this anecdote became a kind of touchstone in meditations on the power of the cinematic. But recent scholarship suggests that the story is baseless.

Audiences did not think that the train on the screen was going to run them over. They knew what was happening: they were watching a movie. Movies are a powerful means of expression, but watching one is not the equivalent of being hit over the head with a brick.

You can still think. If you don’t, it’s not the filmmaker’s fault. You can withhold your assent to a lot of what Michael Moore implies about George Bush and his brutish, arrogant, reactionary Administration, and still take pleasure in the way he makes them look bad. You can even think that the reason they look bad is that they are bad. It’s only a movie. (courtesy: The New Yorker August 9, 2004) DOCUMENTARY TODAY

37

NEWS REEL Film Bazaar 2 00 8 to have section on documentaries 200 008 A new section on documentaries will be introduced at the forthcoming ‘Film Bazaar 2008’, to be held in Goa between November 26 and 29, 2008 as part of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI). The section will be called ‘CoProduction Market Section for Documentaries’. The Film Bazaar Coproduction Market will invite submissions for feature films and documentaries that are India-centric and aimed at international audience.

Selected projects will have the opportunity to seek collaboration in the realm of distribution and production with potential international and Indian partners. In the film segment, 15 movie projects and in the newly-introduced documentary section 10 projects will be presented at the market for global audience.

“Film Bazaar every year aims at promoting cinema which reflects the diversity of India and which aims to tell unseen and unheard stories of contemporary India with a view to taking these stories to International audiences. With a vibrant congregation from all over the globe bringing filmmaking and distribution expertise to India, Film Bazaar is a global learning and networking business opportunity for production studios and independent producers who seek an international market for Indian stories,” said Ms Nina Gupta, Managing Director, National Film Development Corporation, while addressing a press conference.

Over these 4 days Film Bazaar will host the following: International Co-Production Market: The Film Bazaar Co-production Market will invite submissions for feature films and documentaries that are Indian centric and which will be seeking a 38

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

global platform for international audiences. Selected projects will have the opportunity to seek collaboration in the realm of distribution and production with potential international and Indian partners. In the films segment 15 feature film projects and in the newly introduced documentary section 10 documentary projects will be presented at the market for global audience.

Screenwriters’ Lab: The Screenwriters’ Lab will run concurrent to the Film Bazaar. In search for authentic Indian voices that are internationally appealing, this year the lab will be conducted by renowned guest mentors and will be held in association with Binger film lab: an Amsterdam based International Feature Film Development Centre. A select pool of Indian screenwriters will be individually mentored in the development of feature film screenplays. Seven screenplays will be selected and advised in their development by renowned guest mentors.

Work-In Progress Workshop: A special knowledge sharing workshop will be conducted as a part of Film Bazaar for five pre-selected films at rough cut & story board stage. Each film will be mentored by 4-5 advisors drawn from India and abroad. Terms & Regulations for this workshop will be announced in August 2008.

Film Conclave & Business lounge: NFDC will organize The Film & Business Conclave on global industry developments in association with Screen International and will comprise of keynote address, seminars, and panel discussions. Eminent Speakers from India & abroad including Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land), Gary Hamilton from Arclight Films, and Shekhar Kapur etc will elaborately discuss on various topics. The Business Lounge aims at providing an interactive platform between prospective buyers and sellers of all film rights from India and abroad.

Delegates can also avail of pitching sessions, master classes & screenings in this conclave.

Marketing Bollywood at Cannes... the ultimate film market worth emulating.

Third Tibetan Film Festival

The desolate landscape of Tibet … from Martin Scorcese’s classic Kundun.

The vast desolate landscape of Tibet with its rugged snow-lined peaks, majestic valleys, howling winds, Buddhist monasteries and a colourful indigenous culture woven around the gospel of Siddhartha was revealed in full splendour at a festival of Tibetan movies held at New Delhi’s India International Centre between July 5 and July 9, 2008. The festival of feature and documentary films, organised by the Foundation for Universal Responsibility for His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, was the third of its kind since December 2007.

The festival began with a screening of ark Elliot’s 50-minute documentary The Lion’s Roar on the life of 16th Gyalwa Karmapa, one of the most revered figures in Tibet.

The screening was followed by other award-winning and popular masterpieces like the Travellers and Magicians, Tintin in Tibet, Spirit of Tibet: Journey to Enlightenment, Mystic Tibet: An Outer, Inner and Secret Pilgrimage and the widelyacclaimed The Saltmen of Tibet.

Day two featured A Song for Tibet

directed by Anne Handerson, a story of the efforts by Tibetans in exile, including the Dalai Lama, to save their homeland and preserve their heritage against odds. This was followed by the screenings of ‘Windhorse, The Sacred Site: A Pilgrimage to Oracle Lake, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a classic biography of the young Dalai Lama, and The Dalai Lama Renaissance.

The highlight of the third day was Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic Little Buddha which tells the story of a group of monks, led by Lama Norbu (Ruocheng Ying), to seek out the reincarnation of his great Buddhist teacher, Lama Dorje. Eric Valli’s Himalaya’ concluded the festival.

Scheme to produce shorts on Goan legends Digambar Kamat, Chief Minister of Goa, said that the State Government was looking at a scheme to produce documentaries on the life of living Goan achievers in diverse fields so as to preserve their life and times for posterity. The younger generation is ignorant about the contributions of many living Goans who have excelled in various fields during their lifetime, he said. Mr Kamat was speaking at the release of a documentary on the life and times of noted Konkani litterateur Ravindra Kelekar at the Maquinez Palace in Goa. The documentary is produced by the Department of Information and Publicity and directed

by Dharmanand Vernekar and Dilip Borkar.

The president of Goa Konkani Akademi, Mr Pundalik Naik, in his speech said that Mr Kelekar is a national writer who writes in Konkani language. He also said that Mr Kelekar had given recognition to the Konkani language on the national level. Prof Suresh Amonkar and Mr Borkar also spoke on the occasion. The director of information and publicity, Mr Nikhil Desai compered. The documentary was later screened for the audience.

The Tibetan Film Festival is an open festival and anyone who is interested in Tibetan cinema is welcome to it. Most of the films screened at the festival barring a couple of international hits, were relatively unknown. “The Tibetan community of filmmakers is very small.

They are young and mostly shoot documentaries and occasional feature films. The industry unlike Hollwyood and Europe is just taking off,” said Tsewang, programme manager for the Foundation.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

39

Orissa Short Filmmakers want comprehensive State Policy

Oscar-winner In Trouble

The newly-formed 100 member strong Orissa Short and Documentary Filmmakers’ Association (OSDFA) has urged upon the government to formulate a comprehensive policy for the short and documentary filmmakers of the State.

The organization has also demanded the abolition of all empanelment lists of producers maintained by government organisations except the one maintained by the Department of Information and Public Relations. They felt that a few selected filmmakers were walking away with a lion’s share of the audio-visual productions that amounts to around Rs.5 crore per year while a large chunk of talented filmmakers were being neglected. “Maintenance of multiple empanelment lists is the reason behind this anomaly,” they pointed out and alleged that different government departments have been violating the government’s rule regarding selection of films and filmmakers.

OSDFA president Bijay Ketan Mishra cited the Government’s Gazette notification dated April 30, 1993 which named the Department of I&PR as the nodal agency of the State for short and documentary filmmaking by government agencies. The same notification, Mr.Mishra pointed out, provided the mandate to the department to produce such films directly and prescribe all other departments and government undertakings in the matter.

However, in gross violation of the government’s direction, at least eight empanelment lists have been floated by various government agencies, including ORSAC, OPEPA, SIET, NRHM, OFDC, OSDMA and Orissa Water and Sanitation Mission.

40

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Ross Kaufman shoots for Born Into Brothels, shot in Kolkata’s infamous Sonaghachi.

The internationally acclaimed documentary and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2004, Born Into Brothels, directed by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski and shot extensively in Sonagachi, the redlight area of Kolkata, is once again in the news – this time for allo the wrong reasons. The major Kolkata daily Ananda Bazaar Patrika recently broke the news that some children portrayed in the film brought a breach of promise lawsuit against the filmmakers. They did it on the ground that those including the muchpublicized children who were promised that they would share in some of the huge profit the film made did not receive any money at all.

Earlier, in February 2005, Partha Banerjee, who worked as an interpreter for the documentary had, in a letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, questioned whether the sex worker mothers’ permissions were ever obtained by the filmmakers when they had intruded deeply into their personal lives and professions. He subsequently found out by talking to these women that indeed, no such permission had ever been secured; moreover, the sex workers’ union also told him that they were never informed that the filmmakers were filming them for this purpose. He had also alleged that music from Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy was used on Born Into Brothels, when the copyright holders specifically asked them not to use it.

The other bone of contention is that the children’s names were publicized across the globe, while the filmmakers had promised that their identities would be safeguarded. One of the kids also alleged that he didn’t even know he was being filmed and interviewed for the purpose of making a documentary. In fact, that was an allegation frequently made by the sex workers themselves.

A secretary of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a prostitutes’ organization active in Sonagachi, has criticized Briski for using hidden camera work to present the children’s parents as uncaring, for ignoring the prostitutes’ substantial efforts to unite, and for harming the global movement for sex worker rights and dignity.

Untold Stories F rom The P ast From Past winning documentary about the US Media coverage of the war in Iraq.

Focusing on the human costs of war, it contrasts the mass media’s coverage of the invasion of Iraq with independent reports of the brutal realities on the ground. Following a Norwegian filmmaker in the United States who questions how the US media covers the war in Iraq, the film brings awareness to the disparity between the war the American people see through the corporate controlled media and the realities on the ground in Iraq.

Independent Intervention explores how the growing media democracy movement in the US works to challenge the mass media.

Exploring the life of a revolutionary … The Hands of Che Guevara.

The Hands of Che Guevara, Independent Intervention and A Jihad For Love were some of the documentary films being showcased at the five day Tri Continental Film Festival held at The International Centre and Marqueniz Palace in Goa between July 26 and 29, 2008. The Film Festival which was held in Goa for the second time covers documentary productions from Asia, Africa and America and screens some of the best films on Human Rights. A five-member international jury selects the films that are screened. This year over a hundred and thirty five entries were received of which 21 films were selected for screening.

The other films shown included Assaulted Dream (Uli Stelzner / Guatemala/Germany); You, Waguih (Namir Abdel Messeeh/ France); The Women’s Kingdom (Xiaoli Zhou/ China-USA); Pirinop, My First Contact (Dir Maria Correa & Karane

Ikpeng); It’s Always Late for Freedom (Mehrad Oskouei/ Iran); In the Tall Grass (J. Coll Metcalfe | Rwanda); The Devil Came on Horseback (Ricki Stern/ Anne Sundberg/ Sudan); With or Without Fidel (Ishmail Blahgrove Jr./ Cuba) and Reinalda Del Carmen, my Mother and Me (Lorena Giachino Torrens/Chile).

The documentary The Hands of Che Guevara, directed by Peter Kock, is a search for the severed and missing hands of the Latin-American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

It leads to a number of remarkable people; men and women who were prepared to risk their lives for two dead hands. Through their testimonies and anecdotes a story unfolds. A tale so bizarre and secret that it has been banished to the shadows of history.

Independent Intervention, directed by Tonje Hessen Schei, is an award-

The Indian films screened at the festival were Thousand Days and a Dream, directed by P. Baburaj & C. Saratchandran and the animation film The Mall on Top of My House, directed

by Aditi Chitre. Thousand Days and a Dream tells the story of a bottling plant set up by Coca Cola in rural Kerala which, initially borught jobs and development but then began to cause alarm. Community members began to see a darker side as their water supply started to show signs of contamination and depletion. Despite ridicule and dismissive attitudes, local citizens organized and fought to bring their message to the outside world. Directors P. Baburaj and C. Saratchandran follow these groups as they are pitted against politicians, state police and corporations in hope of protecting their lands and children from the dangers introduced by the plant.

Touching upon issues of environmentalism, globalization and grassroots activism, this film is a testament to the perseverance of dedicated individuals attempting to effect change in their community.

The Mall on Top of My House deals with the issue of rampant land reclamation by flouting the environmental laws—and the consequent displacement of the fishing DOCUMENTARY TODAY

41

community. The film narrates the story of a fisherman living in a dark underground tunnel, constantly negotiating with the chaos of traffic, fancy malls and luxury housing built on land that was once his. Reclamation has pushed the sea further away from him and reduced it to a puddle of industrial waste. In the past, he had a home, a family and a sustaining catch from the sea. But today emerging land laws rendered the community homeless overnight. With builders taking ever increasing chunks of the city’s open space, where does the fisherman go?

The festival was started by a group of Latin American filmmakers, the Movimiento de Documentalistas, as an arts and cultural initiative. The idea was to explore links between social struggles and respect for human rights.

It was initiated in Argentina in 2002, South Africa 2003 and in India in 2004.

The Tri Continental Film Festival is brought to India by Breakthrough New Delhi, an international human rights organization. The films capture diverse images from the Global South.

In 2008, the attempt of the festival is to bring to the fore untold stories from the past. The common thread of human rights runs through stories from countries as diverse as Tunisia, China, Rwanda, Sudan and Brazil. The festival aims not only to screen excellent cinema but also spark discussions, diatribes and debates around human rights and social justice.

Sushma Singh is new I&B Secretary Sushma Singh, a 1972 batch IAS officer from the Jharkhand cadre has been appointed as the new Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B). Singh has earlier been the Secretary, Ministry of Panchayati Raj and then, Secretary, Ministry of Development for North East region since 2006. She succeeds Asha Swarup who took charge of her new assignment in her home cadre as the Chief Secretary of Himachal Pradesh after a 15-month tenure at the I&B ministry.

42

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Kiran B edi stars in T oronto opener Bedi Toronto A compelling feature-length documentary on the extraordinary life of India’s first female police officer, Kiran Bedi, Yes Madam, Sir, will be screened in the opening weekend of the forthcoming 33rd Toronto International Film Festival. Written, photographed and directed by the Australian short filmmaker Megan Doneman, the film was shot over six years and edited from over 500 hours of footage – often involving perilous international travel and situations. The film has bbeen narrated by Academy Award winning actress Helen Mirren (The Queen) with the acclaimed composer Nathan Larson providing the score.

Magasaysay Award-winner Kiran Bedi is adored by the masses and vilified by her critics. She has publicly fought high-level corruption, feudalistic bureaucracies and brutal opposition, all of which has come at great personal and professional cost. Yes Madam, Sir follows this remarkable humanitarian for six years, presenting her in the most intimate and revealing light.

Despite having no industry funding or crew to produce the project, Doneman travelled alone to India in 1999 on a mission to meet the woman she had first read about when she was just 13 years of age. Attracted to Bedi’s extraordinary courage and intrigued by the inherent contradictions in her character, Doneman’s desire was to produce a world-class documentary that would profile Bedi in the most probing style possible. Even being robbed of her every possession on an overnight train to Delhi would not stop this auteur from realizing her vision. In turn Bedi, who had been approached

India’s first female police officer Kiran Bedi is the star of the documentary Yes Madam, Sir.

by many other esteemed filmmakers in the past, was instantly intrigued by how this young filmmaker was going to pull off the task. Bedi agreed to allow Doneman to exclusively tell her story.

Filming began in 2001, an intensive process which saw Doneman assume the role of writer, director producer, cinematographer, sound recordist and editor. As the size and significance of the project grew, private investors offered financial assistance. This enabled Doneman to complete the final stages of the production with quality and integrity.

Donneman has in 1998 won the “Most Promising New Filmmaker” at the Pacific Queensland Film and Television Awards as well as the Classic Cinema Award for her debut-making short Dark City. She then went on to produce, direct, and write Till Morn’ Do Us Part, which was selected to screen at Tropfest’s The Best of the Rest. Doneman has also worked as an assistant editor on a number of blockbusters and art house classics including Mission Impossible 2, Queen of the Damned, Perfume, The Monkey’s Mask, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong.

Dubai Film market will revolutionise content acquisition programme sections at various theatrical venues in this west Asian metropolis.

Indian film bags top award at Montreal

The Dubai International Film Festival to be held during December 11-18, 2008 will host a new film market to promote Arab, Asian and African filmmakers.

The Dubai Film Market will facilitate the exchange of rights, services or product ownership. It will also empower buyers and sellers with industry knowledge and simplify the transaction of content trading. The new initiative is part of DIFF’s efforts to raise the visibility of world cinema with an emphasis on Arab, Asian and African filmmakers and stimulating regional and international film production and trade.

“The Dubai Film Market will revolutionise the way content acquisition takes place,” said Ziad Yaghi, Director of the Dubai Film Market. The main highlight of the Dubai Film Market, according to DIFF, is the introduction of a revolutionary process to acquire audio-visual content through Cinetech, a digitized film library that will include feature films, documentaries, short films and TV content.

“Cinetech content will be thoroughly filtered and served to film market participants through the most innovative technology. It will also provide people involved in the TV, home video and film industries with a networking platform to discover future trends and trade content on a global level,” he added. Cinetech will help participants browse and screen through

a multitude of film titles. The initial archive will consist of over 200 titles, with the aspiration to grow year on year.

Further assisting buyers and other industry professionals in their browsing experience, Cinetech will categorise all available content under different labels. Cinetech will also assist industry professionals in the selection process by giving them the opportunity to contact or interact with sales agents and rights holders.

Rajesh Jala’s Children of the Pyre which was the premiere film of the Montreal Film Festival ended up bagging the top award at the festival.

The film which was completed only recently in July 2008 is all set to win global recognition and has now been selected for screening at the Pusan Film Festival in Korea.

International recognition is not new to this Delhi-based filmmaker. Earlier, his film Floating Lamp of the Shadow Valley was nominated for the 14 th Raindance Film Festival and won recognition at the International Documentary Festivals in Amsterdam and Palm Springs.

Stating that Dubai has now got good infrastructure for filmmaking and production, DIFF chairman Abdulhamid Juma said: “The Dubai Film Market is a natural progression as it is designed to gradually establish Dubai as the regional centre for discovery and trade of Content that will benefit the rapidly evolving film, media and technology industry at large.”

Children of the Pyre is a compelling real-life, self-narrative of seven extraordinary children who make their living out of the dead at Manikarnika, the busiest cremation ground in Varanasi, India, where nearly 150 corpses reunite with the elements every day. Tempered by the heat of the pyre, strengthened in the face of adversities, crafted by the volley of abuses, watch these imps weave through the pyres and struggle through disdain to snatch their livelihoods. This film is a terrible saga of exploitation that celebrates the victory of innocence over the most harrowing realities of life.

For several months, Delhi-based filmmaker Rajesh Jala braved infernal heat and severe health hazards at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, filming the lives of seven children who worked inhuman hours at the pyres, withering away even as they survived on death.

Founded in 2004, DIFF is a not-forprofit event and screens between 100 and 150 feature films, documentaries, and short films organized into different

Rajesh Jala has earlier made various documentary films such as Floating Lamp of The Shadow Valley, Chinar and Aazadi.

Participation in the Dubai Film Market is open to content providers from across the world and they can trade in a diversified range of genres such as feature films, documentaries, short films and television content.

Registration is free and open to all industry professionals including buyers, sales agents, programmers, filmmakers and producers.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

43

FOR THCOMING FESTIV ALS FORTHCOMING FESTIVALS November 2008 (last week)

3rd Nazariya Films for PEACE Festival Festival Director: Gaurang Raval Organiser: Drishti Media, Arts & Human Rights The principal objective of the non-competitive Nazariya Film Festival for Peace is to promote and encourage awareness, appreciation and understanding of peace though films. It mandate is to present the most understanding and powerful films produced in every part of the world. The idea is to introduce alternative perception into our society by screening documentaries and short film that reflect a broader reality of the people in our society. Nazariya acknowledges the possibility of another point of view, another version of truth, another way of viewing. Nazariya is an attempt to reach out to newer unreached audiences through films. Films are selected on the basis of theme, quality and originality.

The festival also promotes youth to raise their concerns for peace and involve them in the process of peace.

Website: http://www.drishtimedia.org Send entries to: Gaurang Raval Film Festival Co-ordinator DRISHTI Media, Arts, Human Rights 103, Anand Hari Tower, New Sandesh Press Road, Opp. Chankya Tower, Bodakdev, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad-380054 • November 26-30, 2008

10th Madurai International Documentary and Short Film Festival 2008 Festival Director: R.P.Amudhan Organiser: Marupakkam The festival is a non-competitive one with no entry fee.

There is no specific theme for our festival. Any film that is produced anywhere in the world during the last 24 months (approximately) in any language, in any format, in any style is welcome. The films that are not in Tamil should have English sub-titles. The screening format is DVD. The idea behind the festival is to create a platform for documentary and short filmmakers to reach out to audiences of Madurai and in turn to facilitate an international film festival for our audience. The festival will also screen retrospectives of Anand Patwardhan, Deepa Dhanraj and a special package of the Under Construction films from Magic Lantern as well as a package of films from Kerala curated by Sarat Chandran.

Website: http://www.maduraifilmfest.blogspot.com E-mail: marupakkam@rediffmail.com 44

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Send entries to: Marupakkam, A 9/4 K.K.Nagar, Madurai 625020 December 11-15, 2008

6th Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival 2008 Festival Director: Ramyata Limbu Organiser: the Himal Association KIMFF seeks to demonstrate the complexity and diversity of mountain life.

The festival will screen the most recent and exciting films about mountain issues, environment, cultures, communities and societies from various corners of the world along with various other activities during the festival Website: www.himalassociation.org/kimff.

Send entries to: Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival Himal Association P.O. Box 166 Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur Kathmandu, Nepal December 12-19, 2008

13th International Film Festival of Kerala Artistic Director: Bina Paul Venugopal Organiser: the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy The International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) is a civil answer to the cultural ailments of present day humanity and a celebration of the best the medium has to offer.

‘IFFK-the right audience’, is the motto of IFFK. In the short span, the Academy has built up a fine reputation for organisation and purposiveness. The IFFK is a member of FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations), in the Competitive Specialised category of film festivals. IFFK has an attractive competition for films from Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as the World Section. Other section include world cinema, documentaries, short fiction, retrospectives, homages and tributes.

Website: www.keralafilm.com Send entries to: 13th International Film Festival of Kerala Mani Bhavan Sasthamangalam Trivandrum, Kerala,India 695010

5 4th N ATI O NAL F WAR DS NA TIO FII LM A AW ARD

Awards in the N on F eature Film category Non Feature

Mr Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting, poses with the chairpersons of the various juries of the 54th National Film Awards: Buddhadeb Dasgupta, K.Bikram Singh and Madhu Jain. At extreme left is Ms Neelam Kapoor, Director of the Directorate of Film Festivals.

Best Non-Feature Film: Bishar Blues Producer: Amitabh Chakraborty Director :Amitabh Chakraborty CITATION: The Award for the Best Non Feature Film of 2006 is given to Bishar Blues for courageously treating a sensitive subject in a poetic form. It demolishes the myth that the practice of Islam is monolithic and not multi-faceted.

Best First Non-Feature Film of a Director: Andhiyum Producer: N Dinesh Rajkumar Director: Jacob Varghese CITATION: The Award for the Best First Non Feature Film of 2006 is given to Andhiyum for displaying command over the medium that goes far beyond the level expected from a first film.

Bishar Blus... courageous treatment.

Best Anthropological/Ethnographic Film: No Award Best Biographical/Historical Reconstruction/ Compilation Film (given jointly): Minukku Producers Devadasan Keezhpatt & Bina Narayanan Director: M R Rajan CITATION: The Award for the Best Biographical/ Historical Reconstruction/Compilation film of 2006 is given to Minukku. The film succeeds in imaginatively presenting the life story of ‘Kottakkal Sivaraman’ the legendary Kathakali artist, who specialises in performing female roles. In the process it also highlights some aspects of traditional Kathakali dance.

Guru Laimayum Thambalngoubi Devi Producer-Director: Aribam Syam Sharma CITATION: The Award for the Best Biographical/ Historical Reconstruction/Compilation film of 2006 is given to Guru Laimayum Thambalngoubi Devi for the simplicity and grace with which the Director has related the story of the great Manipuri dance & theatre artist Guru Laimayum Thambalngoubi Devi Best Arts/Cultural Film: Jatra Jeevan Jeevan Jatra Producer :Kailash Chandra Bhuyan Director :Kapilas Bhuyan CITATION: The Award for the Best Arts/Cultural film of 2006 is given to Jatra Jeevan Jeevan Jatra for creatively presenting the transformation of Oriya Jatra from a folk form to a highly commercialized and mainstream form.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

45

Best Scientific Film / Environment Conservation/ Preservation Film: Kalpavriksha _Legacy of Forests Producer: Mike Pandey Director: Nina Subramani CITATION: The Award for the Best Environmental Film of 2006 is given to Kalpavriksha _Legacy of Forests for bringing out the symbiotic relationship between forests and human life and underlining the need for conserving the rich bio diversity still existing in our remaining forests.

Best Promotional Film: Rendezvous With Time Producer: Madhya Pradesh Madhyam Director: Rajendra Janglay CITATION: The Award for the Best Promotional film of 2006 is given to Rendezvous With Time for sensitively evoking the spirit of the cultural heritage of Madhya Pradesh.

Best Agriculture Film: Jaivik Kheti Producers: Mr Ravindra alias Nitin Prabhakar Bhosale & Mrs Mrunalini Ravindra Bhosale Director: Mrunalini Ravindra Bhosale CITATION: The Award for the Best Agriculture film of 2006 is given to Jaivik Kheti for its direct and convincing approach to the need and methods of organic farming.

Best Film on Social Issues: Children Of Nomads Producer: Leoarts Communication Director Duo: Meenakshi Vinay Rai CITATION: The Award for the Best Film on Social issues of 2006 is given to Children of Nomads for Aribam Syam Sharma’s Guru Laimayum Thambalngoubi Devi shared the award for the Best Biographical Film.

Filmmaker and conservationist Mike Pandey’s Kalpavriksha bagged the Award for the Best Environment Conservation Film.

gently drawing attention to the deprivation experienced by the children of nomads and for creating sensitive interaction between an urban child and a group of nomadic rural children.

Best Educational/Motivational/Instructional Film: Filariasis Producer: A S Nagaraju Director: M Elango CITATION: The Award for the Best Educational/ Motivational/Instructional film of 2006 is given to Filariasis for a straight forward and matter- of- fact treatment of a major health problem that has no cure but that can be controlled.

Best Exploration/ Adventure Film: No Award Best Investigative Film: Mere Desh Ki Dharti Producer : Rajiv Mehrotra Director: Sumit Khanna CITATION: The Award for the Best Investigative Film of 2006 is given to Mere Desh Ki Dharti for exploring in depth the problem of falling agro-production and poisoning of the food chain due to use of chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides.

Best Animation Film Nokpokliba Producer: Children’s Film Society, India Director: Meren Imchen Animator: Meren Imchen CITATION: The Award for the Best Animation Film of 2006 is given to Nokpokliba for relating a beautiful folk tale from Nagaland in lyrical colours and fluid animation.

Special Jury Award: Lama Dances Of Sikkim Producer: Smt. Anuradha Mookerjee Director: Manash Bhowmick

46

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

CITATION: The Award for the Best Cinematography for 2006 is given to Raga Of River Narmada for stretching the technical possibilities of videography and capturing the varying moods of river Narmada.

Best Audiography: Bishar Blues Audiographer: Partha Barman CITATION: The Award for the Best Audiography for 2006 is given to Bishar Blues for creating a sound track by combining location sound, ambience sound and music that enhance the “meaning” of the film.

Best Editing: Bishar Blues Editors: Amitabh Chakraborty & Amit Debnath CITATION: The Award for the Best Editing for the year 2006 is given to Bishar Blues for creating a rhythm which is unhurried and profound and that is in tune with the life and world view of Fakirs in rural Bengal.

M.R.Rajan’s Minukku shared the Award for the Best Biographical Film.

CITATION: The Special Jury Award for the year 2006 is given to Lama Dances Of Sikkim for presenting the ritualistic significance and the colourful natureof the Lama mask dances in cinematic language.

Best Short Fiction Film: Ek Aadesh_Command For Chhoti Producer: Children’s Film Society, of India Director: Ramesh Asher CITATION: The Award for the Best Short Fiction Film of 2006 is given to Ek Aadesh_Command For Chhoti for sensitively bringing out the moral dilemma created by existence at a subsistence level in a hostile environment.

Best Film on Family Welfare: No Award Best Direction: Ek Aadesh_Command For Chhoti Director: Ramesh Asher CITATION: The Award for the Best Direction for the year 2006 is given to Ek Aadesh_Command For Chhoti for making imaginative use of the locale and cast of characters, and for displaying complete ommand over all disciplines of film making.

Best Cinematography: Raga of River Narmada Cameramen: Rajendra Janglay & Sanjay V

Best Music Direction: Raga Of River Narmada Music Directors: Ramakant & Umakant Gundecha CITATION: The Award for the Best Music Direction for the year 2006 is given to Raga Of River Narmada for creating a music score which becomes an invocation of the spirit of the holy river Narmada.

Best Narration/Voice Over: Minukku Narrator: Nedumudi Venu CITATION: The Award for the Best narration/voice over for the year 2006 is given to Minukku for the unique style of first person narration, the quality of narrator’s voice and the selective use of narration that advances the story of the film.

Special Mention: Special Children Producer: Kuldeep Sinha Director: Suresh Menon.

CITATION: Special Children highlights the problems faced by special children or differently abled children and their families-an aspect of our society that is still not receiving adequate attention.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

47

Digital Arc hive & R esearc hC entre Inaugurated Archive Researc esearch Centre According to UNESCO, there are 2.2 billion metres of 35mm movie film in archives all over the world. In spite of the huge efforts of special, air-conditioned storage spaces, most of these films will soon be completely useless due to their extreme sensitivity to various physical and chemical effects and their current level of degradation.

Pressure is growing fast for film archives to restore and save their priceless collections before the original material has decayed beyond repair.

Much of this output is on celluloid and hence, in accessible to most film researchers and scholars.

Films Division has been making documentaries and newsreels for the last sixty years and faces similar problems of preservation, archiving and dissemination. It is however acutely aware of the fact that it is a custodian of a nation’s history which should be taken back to the people of India.

It was with this main objective that the Films Division came up with the idea of establishing two units: International Digital Archive for Documentary, Short and Animation Films and the Research and Reference Centre. Both were inaugurated by Ms Sushama Singh, Secretary in the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting, on her recent visit to the Films Division in August 2008.

A beginning has been made with as many as 10,000 films which are readily available in the DVD format. Individual video kiosks have also been created so that researchers can watch any film of their choice. Books and magazines dealing with documentary films will also be available.

The idea is to develop it as a leading centre for documentary film research and study of documentary cinema in Mumbai. Towards that end efforts are being made to add the DVDs of classic Indian and international documentaries as also those which have won awards at major international film festivals.

48

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Kuldeep Sinha, Chief Producer, Films Division, welcomes Ms Sushama Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, with a memento (top).

Ms Singh also inaugurated the International Digital Archive for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (middle & bottom) which has been set up along with the Research and Reference Centre.

The Venue: Films Division Auditoriam, New Delhi.

Ms Shruti Kakkad, Joint Secretary (Administration), and Ms Sangeeta Singh, Director (Films), both from the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, exchange notes.

Mr Kuldeep Sinha, Chief Producer, Films Division, with Mr Pyarelal, Joint Secretary, and Mr Amitabh Kumar, Director (Films), both from the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting.

Mr Kuldeep Sinha presents a memento to Mr Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting.

Mr Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi lights the auspicious lamp to signal the start of the function. Looking on are Mr Uday Verma, Additional Secretary, and Mr Kuldeep Sinha.

The Ministerial message ‌ Mr Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi addresses the gathering.

Mr Uday Verma, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, addresses the gathering.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

49

Mr Kuldeep Sinha felicitates former cinematographer-director A.K.Goorha (left), former cinematographer-director S.R.Das. (centre) and Former Chief Cameraman and Newsreel Officer M.S.Jaral.

June 12, 2008. New Delhi witnessed a unique event: the celebration of the diamond jubilee of an institution which has rendered yeoman service to the nation by recording for posterity its birth and evolution over the last sixty years. The four-day celebrations were inaugurated by Mr Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting on June 12, 2008. As many as 78 documentary films were unspooled at the event over the next three days. The celebrations culminated on June 14, 2008 with the felicitation of all those who had contributed to the growth of this great institution.

Mr P.K.Saha, presently Director-incharge, Delhi office, Films Division, addresses the gathering.

The stalwarts of the Delhi office of Films Division who were felicitated on the occasion.

50

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

ESSAY

What C onstitutes F air U se F or Constitutes Fair Use For Documentary Filmmakers?

The epic 1986 documentary series on the civil rights movement, Eyes On The Prize, contains a scene showing Martin Luther King Jr. on his 39th birthday — his last — in 1968. King, who was trying to take on poverty and the Vietnam War simultaneously, was under tremendous stress at the time, and his staff sang ‘’Happy Birthday’’ in an attempt to cheer him up. But the producers of Eyes On The Prize almost had to leave the scene out of the finished documentary. ‘’Happy Birthday,’’ as it turns out, was copyrighted in 1935 and, following the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998, will remain so until at least 2030.

Martin Luther King in Eyes on the Prize, the 1986 film on the civil rights movement cannot be shown due to copyright problems.

Filmmakers have been known to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for just one verse, according to a recent report on documentary clearances issued by the Center for Social Media. The song ultimately stayed in the film, but don’t plan on celebrating King’s birthday tomorrow by going to your local video store to buy a copy of Eyes on the Prize. Thanks to rights restrictions on archival material used in the documentary, the 14hour chronicle tracing the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycotts in the 1950s to the rise of black mayors in the 1980s can no longer be released in DOCUMENTARY TODAY

51

new editions or shown on television. PBS’s right to air the film expired in 1993. Meanwhile, the VHS edition has gone out of print and a DVD release would require relicensing.

(Complete sets of used videos are currently going for as much as $1,000 on Amazon.)

When executive producer Henry Hampton and his Bostonbased company Blackside began making ‘’Eyes on the Prize’’ in the 1980s, they faced a particularly complex tangle of copyright issues on photographs, TV news footage, and songs beyond what most documentarians face. Since Hampton’s death in 1998, at age 58, a group of his former colleagues have been seeking ways to renew the expired licensing agreements and get the programme back on the air and into classrooms. Last year the Ford Foundation, one of the series’ original funders, made a $65,000 grant to assess the needs of restoring master tapes, securing new licenses, and, if necessary, re-editing the program to remove images and music that can’t be cleared. ‘’The majority of licensors have been hugely cooperative,’’ says Sandy Forman, an attorney for Blackside who’s overseeing the project. ‘’One major music licensor has been a holdout. We’re optimistic that they will see the light.’’

The problem goes beyond one documentary.

Documentary makers who are on limited budgets have apparently had to make “shortcuts” when licensing archival footage, sometimes meaning that the footage they’re using can only be used for a few years. What that means is that certain award-winning documentaries can no longer be shown. While the filmmakers obviously knew what they were getting into when they signed the license deal, this does begin to show some of the sillier sides of content protection like this. It’s basically saying that you can “rent an idea.” Content is an idea. Once it’s out there, you can’t put it back in the box — but with licensing programs, that’s exactly what people are trying to do. The end result is that people end up having completed, historically significant documentaries that no one can watch because it breaks the law.

It appears this problem is only getting worse. There is a growing concern among documentary filmmakers that issues concerning copyright make it increasingly difficult to actually make documentary films. Having reached this age where so many people are claiming “ownership” of content and demanding huge fees for any usage, documentary filmmakers run the risk of either getting charged repeatedly with copyright infringement or going through the long, difficult and expensive process of securing the rights. As the article quotes one documentary film maker saying, “Half of my budget is rights clearances, if you can get them.” Given that the whole point of documentaries is to document things that are actually happening, it seems rather silly to realize that 52

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

Common ‘Fair Use’ Myths If I am not making any money off it, it’s fair use Noncommercial use is indeed one of the considerations for fair use, but it is hard to define. If people want to share their work only with a defined closed-circle group, they are in a favorable legal position. But beyond that, in the digital online environment, wholesale copying can be unfair even if no money changes hands. So if work is going public, it is good to be able to rely on the rationale of transformativeness, which applies fully even in “commercial” settings.

If I am making any money off it (or trying to) it’s not fair use Although non-profit, personal, or academic uses often have good claims to be considered “fair,” they are not the only ones. A new work can be commercial—even highly commercial—in intent and effect and still invoke fair use. Most of the cases in which courts have found unlicensed uses of copyrighted works to be fair have involved projects designed to make money, including some that actually have.

Fair use can’t be entertaining A use is no less likely to qualify as a fair one because the film in which it occurs is effective in attracting and holding an audience. If a use otherwise satisfies the principles and limitations described in this code, the fact that it is entertaining or emotionally engaging should be irrelevant.

If I try to license material I’ve given up my chance to use fair use Everyone likes to avoid conflict and reduce uncertainty, and a maker may choose to seek permissions even in situations where they may not be required. Later, a maker still may decide to employ fair use. The fact that a license was requested—or even denied—doesn’t undercut an otherwise valid fair use claim. If a rights holder denies a license unreasonably, this actually may strengthen the case for fair use.

I really need a lawyer to make the call on fair use Fair use is a part of the law that belongs to everyone. A lawyer usually works for a client by reducing risk; in copyright law, that often means counseling purchase of rights for all uses of copyrighted material. If clients tell lawyers that they want to assert their rights (something that has a very low risk, if they understand what their rights are) then lawyers can recommend appropriate policies; but lawyers need to be told what their clients want.

they can’t document many things without first paying for the permission to do so. In a sense we are crippling the story-telling of our own culture by the rigidity of our copyright interpretation.

The problem has been further compounded with the advent of video which is increasingly becoming a central part of our everyday landscape of communication, and it is becoming more visible as people share it on digital platforms. People make and share videos to tell stories about their personal lives, remixing home videos with popular music and images. Video remix has become a core component of political discourse, as the video George Bush Don’t Like Black People and the Yes We Can parodies demonstrated. Both amateur and professional editors are creating new forms of viral popular culture, as the Dramatic Chipmunk meme and the Brokeback to the Future mashup illustrate. The circulation of these videos is an emerging part of the business landscape, as the sale of YouTube to Google demonstrated.

More and more, video creation and sharing depend on the ability to use and circulate existing copyrighted work.

Until now, that fact has been almost irrelevant in business and law, because broad distribution of nonprofessional video was relatively rare. Often people circulated their work within a small group of family and friends. But digital platforms make work far more public than it has ever been, and cultural habits and business models are developing.

As practices spread and financial stakes are raised, the legal status of inserting copyrighted work into new work will become important for everyone.

It is important for video makers, online service providers, and content providers to understand the legal rights of makers of new culture, as policies and practices evolve.

Only then will efforts to fight copyright “piracy” in the online environment be able to make necessary space for lawful, value-added uses.

Mash-ups, remixes, subs, and online parodies are new and refreshing online phenomena, but they partake of an ancient tradition: the recycling of old culture to make new.

In spite of our romantic clichés about the anguished lone creator, the entire history of cultural production from Aeschylus through Shakespeare to Clueless has shown that all creators stand, as Isaac Newton (and so many others) put it, “on the shoulders of giants.”

In fact, the cultural value of copying is so well established that it is written into the social bargain at the heart of copyright law. The bargain is this: we as a society give limited property rights to creators, to reward them for producing culture; at the same time, we give other creators the chance to use that same copyrighted material without permission or payment, in some circumstances. Without the second half of the bargain, we could all lose important

new cultural work just because one person is arbitrary or greedy.

Copyright law has several features that permit quotations from copyrighted works without permission or payment, under certain conditions. Fair use is the most important of these features. It has been an important part of copyright law for more than 150 years. Where it applies, fair use is a right, not a mere privilege. In fact, as the Supreme Court has pointed out, fair use keeps copyright from violating the First Amendment. As copyright protects more works for longer periods than ever before, it makes new creation harder. As a result, fair use is more important today than ever before.

Copyright law does not exactly specify how to apply fair use, and that is to creators’ advantage. Creative needs and practices differ with the field, with technology, and with time. Rather than following a specific formula, lawyers and judges decide whether an unlicensed use of copyrighted material is “fair” according to a “rule of reason.” This means taking all the facts and circumstances into account to decide if an unlicensed use of copyright material generates social or cultural benefits that are greater than the costs it imposes on the copyright owner.

The Center for Social Media, therefore, helped to draft the Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use which makes clear what documentary filmmakers currently regard as reasonable application of the copyright “fair use” doctrine.

Fair use expresses the core value of free expression within copyright law. The statement clarifies this crucial legal doctrine, to help filmmakers use it with confidence. Fair use is shaped, in part, by the practice of the professional communities that employ it. The statement is informed both by experience and ethical principles. It also draws on analogy: documentary filmmakers should have the same kind of access to copyrighted materials that is enjoyed by cultural and historical critics who work in print media and by news broadcasters.

Fair use is flexible; it is not uncertain or unreliable. In fact, for any particular field of critical or creative activity, lawyers and judges consider expectations and practice in assessing what is “fair” within the field. In weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, the extent of the use and its economic effect. This still leaves much room for interpretation, especially since the law is clear that these are not the only necessary considerations. In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions: z

Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

53

z

Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

Both questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner. If the answers to these two questions are “yes,” a court is likely to find a use fair. Because that is true, such a use is unlikely to be challenged in the first place.

Another consideration underlies and influences the way in which these questions are analyzed: whether the user acted reasonably and in good faith, in light of general practice in his or her particular field. Online video makers’ ability to rely on fair use will be enhanced by the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use that follows. This code of best practices serves as evidence of commonly held understandings—some drawn from the experience of other creative communities (including documentary filmmakers) and supported by legal precedents, and all grounded in current practice of online video. Thus, the code helps to demonstrate the reasonableness of uses that fall within its principles.

Video makers can take heart from other creator groups’ reliance on fair use. For instance, historians regularly quote both other historians’ writings and textual sources; filmmakers and visual artists reinterpret and critique existing work; scholars illustrate cultural commentary with textual, visual, and musical examples. Equally important is the example of commercial news media. Fair use is healthy and vigorous in daily broadcast television news, where references to popular films, classic TV programs, archival images, and popular songs are constant and routinely unlicensed.

Unlike many traditional creator groups, nonprofessional and personal video makers often create and circulate their videos outside the marketplace. Such works, especially if they are circulated within a delimited network, do enjoy certain copyright advantages. Not only are they less likely to attract the attention of rights holders, but if noticed they are more likely to receive special consideration under the fair use doctrine. That said, our goal here is to define the widely accepted contours of fair use that apply with equal force across a range of commercial and noncommercial activities, without regard to how video maker communities’ markets may evolve. Thus, the principles articulated below are rooted squarely in the concept of “transformativeness.”

In fact, a transformative purpose often underlies an individual creator’s investment of substantial time and creative energy in producing a mash-up, a personal video, 54

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

or other new work. Images and sounds can be building blocks for new meaning, just as quotations of written texts can be. Emerging cultural expression deserves recognition for transformative value as much as more established expression.

BEST PRACTICES This code of practices is organized, for ease of understanding, around common situations that come up for online video makers. These situations do not, of course, exhaust the possible applications of fair use to tomorrow’s media-making techniques. But first, one general comment: Inevitably, considerations of good faith come into play in fair use analysis. One way to show good faith is to provide credit or attribution, where possible, to the owners of the material being used.

1

COMMENTING ON OR CRITIQUING OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

Description: Video makers often take as their raw material an example of popular culture, which they comment on in some way. They may add unlikely subtitles. They may create a fan tribute (positive commentary) or ridicule a cultural object (negative commentary). They may comment or criticize indirectly (by way of parody, for example), as well as directly. They may solicit critique by others, who provide the commentary or add to it.

Principle: Video makers have the right to use as much of the original work as they need to in order to put it under some kind of scrutiny. Comment and critique are at the very core of the fair use doctrine as a safeguard for freedom of expression. So long as the maker analyzes, comments on, or responds to the work itself, the means may vary.

Commentary may be explicit (as might be achieved, for example, by the addition of narration) or implicit (accomplished by means of recasting or recontextualizing the original). In the case of negative commentary, the fact that the critique itself may do economic damage to the market for the quoted work (as a negative review or a scathing piece of ridicule might) is irrelevant.

Limitation: The use should not be so extensive or pervasive that it ceases to function as critique and becomes, instead, a way of satisfying the audience’s taste for the thing (or the kind of thing) that is being quoted. In other words, the new use should not become a market substitute for the work (or other works like it).

2

USING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL FOR ILLUSTRATION OR EXAMPLE

Description: Sometimes video makers quote copyrighted material (for instance, music, video, photographs, animation, text) not in order to comment upon it, but because it aptly illustrates an argument or a point. For example, clips from Hollywood films might be used to demonstrate changing American attitudes toward race; a succession of photos of the same celebrity may represent the stages in the star’s career; a news clip of a politician speaking may reinforce an assertion.

Principle: This sort of quotation generally should be considered fair use and is widely recognized as such in other creative communities. For instance, writers in print media do not hesitate to use illustrative quotations of both words and images. The possibility that the quotes might entertain and engage an audience as well as illustrate a video maker’s argument takes nothing away from the fair use claim. Works of popular culture typically have illustrative power precisely because they are popular.

This kind of use is fair when it is important to the larger purpose of the work but also subordinate to it. It is fair when video makers are not presenting the quoted material for its original purpose but to harness it for a new one.

This kind of use is, thus, creating new value.

Limitations: To the extent possible and appropriate, illustrative quotations should be drawn from a range of different sources; and each quotation (however many may be employed to create an overall pattern of illustrations) should be no longer than is necessary to achieve the intended effect. Properly attributing material, whether in the body of the text, in credits, or in associated material will often reduce the likelihood of complaints or legal action and may bolster a maker’s fair use claim.

3

CAPTURING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL INCIDENTALLY OR ACCIDENTALLY

Description: Video makers often record copyrighted sounds and images when they are recording sequences in everyday settings. For instance, they may be filming a wedding dance where copyrighted music is playing, capturing the sight of a child learning to walk with a favorite tune playing in the background, or recording their own thoughts in a bedroom with copyrighted posters on the walls. Such copyrighted material is an audio-visual found object. In order to eliminate this incidentally or accidentally

captured material, makers would have to avoid, alter, or falsify reality.

Principle: Fair use protects the creative choices of video makers who seek their material in real life. Where a sound or image has been captured incidentally and without prearrangement, as part of an unstaged scene, it is permissible to use it, to a reasonable extent, as part of the final version of the video. Otherwise, one of the fundamental purposes of copyright—to encourage new creativity—would be betrayed.

Limitation: In order to take advantage of fair use in this context, the video maker should be sure that the particular media content played or displayed was not requested or directed; that the material is integral to the scene or its action; that the use is not so extensive that it calls attention to itself as the primary focus of interest; and that where possible, the material used is properly attributed.

4

REPRODUCING, REPOSTING, OR QUOTING IN ORDER TO MEMORIALIZE, PRESERVE, OR RESCUE AN EXPERIENCE, AN EVENT, OR A CULTURAL PHENOMENON

Description: Repurposed copyrighted material is central to this kind of video. For instance, someone may record their favorite performance or document their own presence at a rock concert. Someone may post a controversial or notorious moment from broadcast television or a public event (a Stephen Colbert speech, a presidential address, a celebrity blooper). Someone may reproduce portions of a work that has been taken out of circulation, unjustly in their opinion. Gamers may record their performances.

Principle: Video makers are using new technology to accomplish culturally positive functions that are widely accepted—or even celebrated—in the analog information environment. In other media and platforms, creators regularly recollect, describe, catalog, and preserve cultural expression for public memory. Written memoirs for instance are valued for the specificity and accuracy of their recollections; collectors of ephemeral material are valued for creating archives for future users. Such memorializing transforms the original in various ways—perhaps by putting the original work in a different context, perhaps by putting it in juxtaposition with other such works, perhaps by preserving it. This use also does not impair the legitimate market for the original work.

Limitation: Fair use reaches its limits when the entertainment content is reproduced in amounts that are disproportionate to purposes of documentation, or in the case of archiving, when the material is readily available from authorized sources.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

55

5

COPYING, REPOSTING, AND RECIRCULATING A WORK OR PART OF A WORK FOR PURPOSES OF LAUNCHING A DISCUSSION

Description: Online video contributors often copy and post a work or part of it because they love or hate it, or find it exemplary of something they love or hate, or see it as the center of an existing debate. They want to share that work or portion of a work because they have a connection to it and want to spur a discussion about it based on that connection. These works can be, among other things, cultural (Worst Music Video Ever!, a controversial comedian’s performance), political (a campaign appearance or ad), social or educational (a public service announcement, a presentation on a school’s drug policy).

Principle: Such uses are at the heart of freedom of expression and demonstrate the importance of fair use to maintain this freedom. When content that originally was offered to entertain or inform or instruct is offered up with the distinct purpose of launching an online conversation, its use has been transformed. When protected works are selectively repurposed in this way, a fundamental goal of the copyright system—to promote the republican ideal of robust social discourse—is served.

Limitations: The purpose of the copying and posting needs to be clear; the viewer needs to know that the intent of the poster is to spur discussion. The mere fact that a site permits comments is not enough to indicate intent.

The poster might title a work appropriately so that it encourages comment, or provide context or a spur to discussion with an initial comment on a site, or seek out a site that encourages commentary.

6

QUOTING IN ORDER TO RECOMBINE ELEMENTS TO MAKE A NEW WORK THAT DEPENDS FOR ITS MEANING ON (OFTEN UNLIKELY) RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE ELEMENTS

Description: Video makers often create new works entirely out of existing ones, just as in the past artists have made collages and pastiches. Sometimes there is a critical purpose, sometimes a celebratory one, sometimes a humorous or other motive, in which new makers may easily see their uses as fair under category one. Sometimes, however, juxtaposition creates new meaning in other ways.

Mashups (the combining of different materials to compose a new work), remixes (the re-editing of an existing work), and music videos all use this technique of recombining 56

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

existing material. Other makers achieve similar effects by adding their own new expression (subtitles, images, dialog, sound effects or animation, for example) to existing works.

Principle: This kind of activity is covered by fair use to the extent that the reuse of copyrighted works creates new meaning by juxtaposition. Combining the speeches by two politicians and a love song, for example, as in “Bush Blair Endless Love,” changes the meaning of all three pieces of copyrighted material. Combining the image of an innocent prairie dog and three ominous chords from a movie soundtrack, as in “Dramatic Chipmunk,” creates an ironic third meaning out of the original materials. The recombinant new work has a cultural identity of its own and addresses an audience different from those for which its components were intended.

Limitations: If a work is merely reused without significant change of context or meaning, then its reuse goes beyond the limits of fair use. Similarly, where the juxtaposition is a pretext to exploit the popularity or appeal of the copyrighted work employed, or where the amount of material used is excessive, fair use should not apply. For example, fair use will not apply when a copyrighted song is used in its entirety as a sound track for a newly created video simply because the music evokes a desired mood rather than to change its meaning; when someone sings or dances to recorded popular music without comment, thus using it for its original purpose; or when newlyweds decorate or embellish a wedding video with favorite songs simply because they like those songs or think they express the emotion of the moment.

CONCLUSION These principles don’t exhaust the possibilities of fair use for online video. They merely address the most common situations today. Inevitably, online video makers will find themselves in situations that are hybrids of those described above or will develop new practices. Then, they can be guided by the same basic values of fairness, proportionality, and reasonableness that inform this code of practices. As community practices develop and become more public, the norms that emerge from these practices will themselves provide additional information on what is fair use.

(From a report developed by a group of panelists chaired

by Peter Jaszi, Faculty Director of the GlushkoSamuelson Intellectual Property Clinic, and Patricia Aufderheide, Director, Center for Social Media. Funded by the Ford Foundation.)

NEW FILMS NALINI BY DAY NANCY BY NIGHT (Sonali Gulati/26 minutes/HindiEnglish) Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night is a documentary on outsourcing of American jobs to India. Told from the perspective of an Indian living in the U.S., the film journeys into India’s call centers, where telemarketers acquire American names and accents to service the telephone-support industry of the U.S. This insightful documentary explores complex issues of globalization, capitalism and identity through a witty and personal account of her journey into India’s call centers. The filmmaker is herself an Indian immigrant living in the US, explores the fascinating ramifications of outsourcing telephone service jobs to India—including how native telemarketers take on Western names and accents to take calls from the US, UK and Australia.

A fresh juxtaposition of animation, archival footage, live action shots and narrative work highlight the filmmaker’s presence and reveal the performative

aspects of her subjects. With fascinating observations on how call centers affect the Indian culture and economy, Nalini By Day Nancy By Night raises important questions about the complicated consequences of globalization.

THEADVOCATE (Deepa Dhanraj/130 minutes/English) Part biography, part history, the film attempts to document the remarkable contribution of the advocate K.G. Kannabiran whose name has become synonymous with the founding of the human rights and civil liberties movement in India. Spanning the period from 1968 till 2005 the film tries to cover his landmark cases, his work as Secretary of the Tarkunde Committee and the Bhargava Commission.

As president of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee from 1978 to 1994, Kannabiran brought its work international recognition. As President he acted as a mediator in many kidnap cases. As a founding member of the

Nalini By Day Nancy By Night explores complex issues of globalization.

Concerned Citizens Committee he acted in the capacity of a mediator in the peace talks between the Andhra Pradesh Government and the Peoples War Group. He was elected national president of the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties in 1994, a position he continues to hold even today.

The documentary is produced by Kalpana Kannabiran for Pedestrian Pictures, a media activist organization based in Bangalore. The film has been edited by Jabeen Merchant with cinematography by Navroze Contractor and sound by Dileep Subramaniam.

AFRICAN LENS: THE STORY OF PRIYARAMRAKHA (Shravan Vidyarthi/55 minutes/ English) One of Africa’s first international photojournalists Priya Ramrakha was killed in 1968 while on assignment for Life magazine, covering the civil war in Biafra, Nigeria. He was 33 years old.

But while he lived he travelled the continent, documenting the lives of ordinary people for the world press.

African Lens:The Story of Priya Ramrakha commemorates the work of a remarkable photographer who defined his career by embracing the people and events of Africa as a personal subject Since his death, Priya’s work has never been displayed. His stunning portraits of African life were never exhibited. His photographs for Life magazine were never republished. Until now, his story has never been told. The film features rare archival images and newsreels from 1950’s and 1960’s Africa, as well as interviews with various photographers, journalists and historians, including Morley Safer (CBS News), Dr. Ali Mazrui (African Studies scholar), the late Achieng Oneko (Editor of Ramogi Newspaper), Chester Higgins Junior (New York Times photographer), Paul DOCUMENTARY TODAY

57

Theroux (author), and Peter Sissons, (former ITN correspondent.)

BEFORE THE BRUSH DROPPED (Vinod Mankara/30 minutes/English) Before the Brush Dropped is both a tribute to Raja Ravi Varma as well as an analytical study of his unmatched artistry. In a sense the film is an answer to Ravi Varma’s critics who had dubbed his works as kitsch.

The film is the end-product of around three years of research which involved interviews with as many as 100 persons.

Mankara also had access to Raja Ravi Varma’s diary which was a rich source of information. It would seem that the Parsi Theatre in Mumbai had a profound influence on the artist.

Thediary has innumerable sketches drawn by the artist while watching the plays. The identity of the models and other such details are elaborately discussed in the diary. The model for paintings of Mohini, Lakshmi, Saraswathy and Ganga was Anjana Malepekar, a dancer and musician from Mumbai.

The film opens with a journey to the places that have been hotspots of Ravi Varma’s activities outside Kerala. The

The Killamanoor Palace where Raja Ravi Varma spend his childhood.

first port of call is Lonavala where the artist had established his lithographic press in 1886. Shots of dilapidated buildings in the sprawling compound serve as an introduction to the callous indifference on the part of the authorities. Both the visuals and the narration provide a wealth of information about the press from which oleographic prints of Gods and Goddesses had poured out in huge quantities. Now only a few of the 40,000 lithographic stones used for printing the pictures remain.

A tribute to a great photographer … Priya Ramrakha.

In Kerala the film shows vignettes of Ravi Varma’s royal background and childhood from shots of Kilimanoor Palace. Here, the stress is on artistic and literary tastes of his forebears, many of whom were Sanskrit scholars, poets and musicians. Clippings of Ottan Thullal have been added to highlight ‘Parvathy Swayamvaram,’ a poetic work by the artist’s mother, Uma Amba Bai Thampuratti. Vadodara, Mumbai and Mysore are other destinations of the journey. According to Mankara, this cultural backdrop greatly influenced Ravi Varma’s works.

Mankara who has eight State awards (including the one for this film) and a national award for his work on occultism titled Beyond or Within, says that he received co-operation from everyone connected to Raja Ravi Varma. In Vadodara, the Maharaja, himself a painter, was very cooperative and he gave permission to film the paintings that were displayed in his bedrooms. The visuals at Vadodara include the studio that the Maharaja of erstwhile Baroda had built for Ravi Varma.

The film also highlights the artist’s influence on Dadasaheb Phalke’s film Raja Harischandra. Costumes, ornaments and spacing of the characters in the film seem to have been inspired by Ravi Varma’s paintings.

Phalke was exposed to these styles since he had worked in the Lonovala

58

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

in the final. But the fact remains that, having lost the toss, India batted first, making 183, but the paltry score turned out to be a winning one as the Windies collapsed for 140.

“I think that belief was the only thing that was different between the Indian and the West Indies team; and that, somehow, somewhere, we start believing. How it comes into the team, I don’t know... I mean, I can’t really put a finger,” Kapil said, recalling the day.

The film’s co-producer and director Ashis Ray is a cricket writer and commentator on the UK’s BBC Radio and SKY TV. THE WARRIOR PRINCE (Mitali Ghosal/English)

press for a long time. A dance sequence of Vinita Nedungadi seems to also suggest that Kalamandalam had borrowed the coiffure of Mohiniyattam from the Ravi Varma pictures. The film also attempts to recreate paintings such as Damayanti, ‘Milkmaid, At the Bath and Lady with the Veena.

Had Ravi Varma not been a painter there is no doubt that he would have been a prodiigious poet. Mankara’s extensive research reveals that the painter had written as many as 500 poems and maybe more. Research also reveals that every painting was followed by a poem – something is by the works Ragamalika and Manasa yathra.

Ravi Varma could not complete his last work Kadambari as he had become physically weak by then. The film appears as a flashback from this painting and hence the relevance of the title. The film ends on a haunting note with Ramesh Narayanan narrating Subramanian Bharathi’s poem.

The film is produced by A.V. Anoop.

Cinematography is by Kannan while the narration is by Harry Key.

1983: INDIA’S WORLD CUP (Ashish Ray/60 minutes/English) Had Kapil Dev not lost the toss in the 1983 World Cup final, he would have opted to field against two-time champions West Indies in the historic match. This and several other unrevealed interesting dressing-room nuggets have been packaged in a documentary to commemorate the 25 th anniversary of India’s greatest ODI triumph.

Here is a documentary feature which will answer all your questions about the Prince of Kolkata also known as Sourav Ganguly, India’s most successful cricket captain to date and a player with a fighting spirit which has made him the ultimate come-back kid of all time. According to journalistturned-filmmaker Mitali Ghosal it was when she saw Sourav making his maiden century at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata last year whenh most observers of the cricket scene had written him off that she decided she

Produced by Prudential (who, incidentally had also sponsored the 1983 World Cup), Century TV and journalist Ashis Ray, 1983:India’s World Cup features footage from England and India, capturing the places and faces that were central to that historic triumph. The documentary incorporates archival footage from the tournament as well as extensive interviews with key players and commentators. And it is in one such interview that Kapil reveals that he would have fielded had he won the toss DOCUMENTARY TODAY

59

must make a film on the player even if it meant quitting her job.

Eight months down the line the film is ready and seeks to answer the most controversial questions – Rahul Dravid breaks his silence about his supposed “tiff” with Sourav – as also reveal littleknown facts about the man: He loves Thai food and Bollywood masala films and his favourite actor is (who else?)

Amitabh Bachchan. Making an appearance are his teammates, colleagues and competitors. And there is also his family who talks about the Maharaja and even his mother has something to say. A film well worth watching – and not only for cricket lovers.

MINUKKU (M.R.Rajan/60minutes/Malyalam) Filmmaker’s M.R.Rajan’s penchant for documentaries on the greats of Kathakali – Pakarnnattam featured the legendary Koodiyattom artiste Ammannur Madhava Chakyar, while Ithihaasathinte Sparsam’ was on Premji, Nataka Patha on T.P. Gopalan and Nottam on Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair – is so well known that it is no great surprise to note that his latest Minukku is also based against the same background. The film is on the life and times of Kottakkal Sivaraman, the great Kathakali maestro who has immortalized female characters in the last five decades. Shot in Sivaraman’s native town of Karalmanna, Minukku is a rare mix of Kathakali and cinema.

A host of dramatis personae such as Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair and Kalamandalam Gopi enrich the film with anecdotes about Sivaraman. M.P.S. Namboodiri enacts the role of an aasaan in the kalari. Cartoonist Unni’s appearance and his sketches of Sivaraman, who poses for him effortlessly, add to the grandeur of the film. Select scenes from numerous Kathakali plays have been excerpted in the film to highlight Sivaraman’s histrionic prowess. What makes them memorable is the appearance of veterans such as Kalamandalam 60

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

A great personality deserves a great voice … Nedumudi Venu (right) spoke the commentary for Minukku on the life of Sivaraman (left).

Ramankutty Nair and Kalamandalam Gopi with whom Sivaraman shares the stage.

The plays include Nalacharitam, Keechakavadham, Rugmangadacharitam, Puthanamoksham, Lavanasuravadham, Duryodhanavadham and Narakasuravadham.

Kathakali actors, the only exception being Unarvinte kaalam, which was made on social reformer and playwright M.R. Bhattathiripad. Filmed in 35 mm, Minukku has been produced by Devadas Kizheppattu, a system engineer in Bangalore, under the banner of Cinemtograhic Kerala.

The film is narrated by the noted Malayalam actor Nedumudi Venu, who is also an ardent fan of Sivaraman. His informal interaction with Sivaraman brings to the limelight several facets of the maestro’s personality. In the film, as Sivaraman demonstrates

INQUILAB

Nakrathundi in Narakasuravadham, Venu sits transfixed over the inimitable mukhabhinaya (facial expressions) of the Kathakali actor. Even as Sivaraman’s own narration sheds much light on himself, Venu’s narration stands out for its tone and diction.

Small wonder that Venu also was honoured for his graphic narrative style.

Rajan bagged national recognition with his first film Pakarnnattam in 1995 and then never had to look back. Minukku is the latest and the fifth to win him national recognition after Ithihasathinte Sparsam and Unarvinte Kaalam. Interestingly, all his creations have been anchored on outstanding

(Gauhar Raza/Urdu) Bhagat Singh was considered to be one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian independence movement.

He was hanged by the British in 1931 for the assassination of a British DSP J.P. Saunders, in Lahore the place of his birth. Inquilab traces the evolution of this revolutionary icon as a political thinker and a visionary. It begins by tracking the early influences, his revolutionary family, locating him in the national and international political context and finally tracing the roots of his future ideological formations.

Bhagat Singh was an anarchist, a Marxist and an atheist.

The film spends little time in glorifying Bhagat Singh and his comrade’s revolutionary actions. Scripted and directed by noted filmmaker Gauhar Raza, the film contains archival footage and original visuals of locations, rather than a dramatic re-picturisation, which gives the film an authentic look. Textual

materials have been effectively used to illustrate his political persona and it delineates the dreams of the revolutionaries to create an independent, socialist and multicultural India. This film attempts to craft an intellectual biography of Bhagat Singh in an audio-visual format.

This documentary emerged out of S.Irfan Habib’s book project To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and his Comrades and was produced by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in collaboration with ANHAD (Act Now for Harmony and Democracy).

The director Gauhar Raza is a social scientist and communicator working in the area of Public Understanding of Science and Cultural Studies. He has published seven books and more than 25 research papers. He has also produced 11 video documentary films on socially relevant subjects.

WATERS OF DESPAIR Produced by Praxis The year 2007 witnessed one of the worst floods in the contemporary history of Bihar. According to the Department of Disaster Management of Government of Bihar, the disaster had struck 22 districts across the state, taken 967 lives, damaged 6.9 lakh houses destroyed crops worth Rs. 1332 Crore (across 17 lakh hectares of land) and caused unprecedented damage to infrastructure. The floods had affected 245 lakh people of which nearly 48 lakh people were in dire need of immediate assistance.

Waters of Despair is the result of wading deep into the lives of these people. Following the floods, a team of researchers and film crew from toured the flood-ravaged district, in a bid to capture the ground realities of the situation and bring to the fore, what lies beyond the murky waters.

The film touches a wide range of issues and critically evaluates the disaster preparedness and mangement vis-à-vis frequent floods in Bihar. It examines government responses to the

Quarrying sand from the riverbed … from En Peyar Palar.

process of relief distribution, benificiary identification, the devastating impact on the women and children and the plight of the landless and Dalits.

The film also exposes inherent in-built mechanism of exclusion and marginalisation in the entire process of relief and rehabilitation and how the powerful and influential inhabitants of the area systematically misappropriate the limited supply of relief materials.

The film at the end raises few pertinent questions regarding the basic human rights of Dalit and marginalised community.

EN PEYAR PALAR (R.R.Srinivasan/85 minutes/Tamil) The 85-minute documentary journeys along the River Palar starting at its source in the Nandidurg hills in Karnataka till it joins the Bay of Bengal.

Along the way, the film delves into how activities such as sand quarrying and discharge of industrial effluents are sucking the life out of one of Tamil Nadu’s prime sources of drinking water.

As the Palar enters the northern districts of Tamil Nadu, crops disappear and the screen fills with murky water coated with a layer of slime. This state of the Palar at Vaniyambadi and Ambur stands testimony to the unchecked release of effluents from tanneries in these regions. In the last 30 years,

crops such as betel leaf and coconut have almost disappeared. The scene shifts to bits and pieces of rotting skin, mixed with hair and other refuse. The camera zooms out to reveal the riverbank dotted with mounds of tannery waste. Obviously health issues crop up along the banks.

At Kancheepuram there is an unending train of brightly painted trucks etched on a brown, sandy backdrop. It would have been a picturesque sight but for the ecological disaster the trucks wreak. These trucks are carrying an irreplaceable resource: the sand of the Palar riverbed. This sand has a secret.

It traps water within so that it can be dug out during the lean seasons.

Without the sand water scarcity is inevitable.

Moving towards Chengalpattu, cement structures of distilleries and soft-drink giants come into focus. For washing bottles and preparing drinks, lakhs of gallons of water are sucked up every day.

And thus it goes on. Frame after frame, director R.R. Srinivasan weaves testimonies from people with the river watching in the background.

Srinivasan’s earlier films includes Old man and the sea about post-tsunami relief. The documentary was produced

by Social Action Movement and Water Rights Protection Group, both from Chengalpattu.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

61

VIDEO PRIMER

The Creative P rocess Process (This is a continuation of a our series on understanding the world of video.)

Let’s assume you have a story to tell.

It might be Girish and Girija’s Wedding or The Hometown Bank’s Loan Officer Training Guide or Emma’s Big Adventure: A Film About My Cat or How to Assemble the Waldo Widget.

Whether you are making a very short video for the Web, an industrial or training presentation, a television commercial, a feature film, or just doing a personal project, the process is virtually the same.

As you can see from the following chart, sometimes stages will overlap.

You’ll end up tailoring your own process to fit the project, or to your own, individual working style.

Depending upon your personal working preferences, you might want to shoot, create and/or gather all your clips before you begin the assembly process. Or, you might prefer to work back and forth on production and post

62

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

production tasks (or, if you have a team, concurrently). With digital video, your movie making tasks can flow over and around one another in an extremely fluid manner.

Pre-Production Pre-production is the planning stage.

Typically, it includes steps to take before you begin “production” (shooting film or video). But this is a flexible process and the non-linear editing methods made possible by the advent of digital video make it even more so. When you begin your project, you may have already shot some or all of the video you’ll need. You may be “re-purposing” content that includes existing video, still photography, charts, graphs, illustrations and/or animations. Or you may be starting with a blank slate.

The “pre-production” phase should include all the steps you need to take to be sure that you are prepared to move from concept to completion.

Outline: No matter how “simple” (and this is, of course, a relative term!) you intend your project to be, begin with an outline. An outline helps you plan.

It can be shared with coworkers or clients, to make sure everyone is “watching the same tv show” in terms of their expectations. Your outline will help you identify what materials you need to create, assemble, and/or acquire in order to get your process underway. You can also use your outline to plan the budget for your project.

Script: An outline may be enough for you to work from, or you may want a more formal script that includes dialogue, narration, notes about the locations or settings, the action, the lighting, the camera angles and movements, the edits, as well as the visual and sound effects.

Storyboards: You may also choose to do storyboards—sketches of key moments in the action—like a comic strip—labeled with notes about the

action, sound, camera angles or motion, etc. Sometimes storyboards are even translated into motion to create animatics, using a tool like Adobe Premiere or After Effects. This is called pre-visualization, and may be used to help work out notions for a sequence, share an idea with coworkers, or “sell” a concept to a client.

Budgeting: Whether you are doing a personal or a professional project, it is definitely a good idea to add a budget to your outline as early as possible.

For professionals, you’ll need a budget to secure financing. Your budget should include wages for yourself, your coworkers, actors and other talent (e.g., effects specialists, graphic designers, musicians, narrator, animal trainers…) as well as costs for location fees, costumes, props, equipment rentals, catering— and anything else you can think of: videotape or DV cassettes, lunch…

z

Be sure your costumes, sets, and props will be ready when you need to shoot.

z

Make sure you have all the rental equipment you need, that it all functions, and that you know how to use it—before you head out for a location.

Production “Quiet on the set! Action! Roll ‘em!”

Capturing live or animated action and sound on film, videotape, or DV— shooting or creating raw footage—is called production. During production, your concerns will include: lighting, “blocking” (where and how your actors or subjects move), and shooting (how the camera moves and from what angles your scenes are viewed. There are many good learning references available regarding production— books, Web sites, classes, and more.

Post Production

Casting, Locations, Props, Costumes, Equipment Rentals, Catering, etc.: Every project is different. Plan adequately for yours. Do sweat the details! Here’s a very brief list of tips to get you started thinking about some of those details: z

z

z

Take the time to test your cast, to make sure they work well together.

For example, a conversation between a very tall and a very short person might not work well on camera.

If you are shooting “real people” be sure to give them guidance about what to wear. For example, white shirts generally don’t photograph well, as they may glare under artificial light; stripes and small patterns might be problematic, etc. “Real” people should be reminded to pay special attention to grooming (hair and makeup) if they are going to be in your video, or you might want to have professional help on hand.

If necessary, get permission to use locations.

What comes out of production is a collection of clips—i.e., different scenes shot in different places at different times. To actually develop your “story,” you need to edit and assemble your clips and, perhaps, add visual effects, graphics, titles, and a sound track. This part of the process is called post-production.

This is where Adobe enters the picture, with two of the industry’s leading software applications specifically designed for post-production: Adobe Premiere, the essential tool for professional digital video editing, and Adobe After Effects, the essential tool for motion graphics and visual effects.

While both of these award-winning products are easy for the novice to learn and use, they are also the choice of a great many professionals. Adobe is also well-known for two powerful software applications that have set the standard for graphic arts professionals worldwide and are enormously useful for creating and enhancing elements during the post-production process— Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe makes it easy for you to acquire all the software you need, with an affordable Collection developed specifically for videographers.

Comprised of Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator, the Adobe Digital Video Collection is a powerful and complete set of professional tools that deliver unparalleled integration and precise control for creating movies and motion graphics from digital video.

Plus, if you plan to incorporate your video productions into Web sites, Adobe can provide the software you need for a comprehensive, cross platform solution that’s tightlyintegrated. Adobe LiveMotion™ lets you create interactive animations for the Web and dynamic user interface elements with motion and sound. Use Adobe GoLive® for developing and managing your Web sites.

Acquiring Source Material You’ve configured your system. You’ve shot and/or gathered some video. And you are eager to begin post production. But first you need to gather all of your raw material together, on your computer.

DV Without Delay If you shot DV, or if your raw material is on DV tape, with Adobe Premiere, capturing your clips can be as easy as “plug ’n play.” Adobe Premiere lets you customize a wide range of settings to streamline and optimize your workflow to handle your specific DV needs.

Bullet-in support, in Adobe Premiere, for all types of DV devices allows you to customize control of each model independently.

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

63

Know Your Connectors

Cables

and

If you are new to video, figuring out all of those audio and video cables and connectors can be as difficult as untangling a bowl of spaghetti one noodle at a time. This chart is intended to help.

Pictured (top to bottom) are two audio connectors: XLR and RCA; and three video connectors: BNC, S-Video and IEEE 1394. The depicted connectors are all male, although female counterparts also exist.

XLR connectors are used to connect microphones and other balanced audio devices and for the AES/EBU digital audio connection. An RCA connector is also called a phono plug and is often used to connect consumer audio and video equipment like VCRs, tuners and CD players.

BNC, which stands for baby “N” connector is used to connect various video sources, including analog composite, analog component, and serial digital video interface (SDI).

BNC connectors are also used for other signals like genlock. The S-Video connector connects SVideo equipment, like S-VHS camcorders and video disks. In video, the IEEE 1394 connector is used to connect a DV camera to a computer IEEE 1394 port.

Device control customization: Just specify the DV device (deck or camcorder) manufacturer and model and Adobe Premiere optimizes its builtin device control for maximum reliability and efficiency, making the video capture process more precise. DV presets: Adobe Premiere stores groups of project settings in files called presets, which include settings for compressor, frame size, pixel aspect ratio, frame rate, depth, audio, and field order. When you first start a project, you’ll be prompted to select a preset, or you can customize your own by selecting individual settings.

Importing Computer Graphics If your source material includes digital animations or computer graphics, 64

DOCUMENTARY TODAY

previously digitized clips or digital sound, you can import or export many different types of video, audio, and image formats.

Support for input and output formats in Adobe Premiere is extensive, and the software offers a high degree of crossplatform compatibility.

You can transfer project files, titles, motion graphics, storyboards, effects, batch lists, EDLs (edit decision lists), libraries and other files between Windows and Macintosh systems. If support for the format you want is not built into Adobe Premiere, chances are a third party plug-in will provide it.

Capturing Analog Video Although digital media equipment is

becoming increasingly common, a great amount of video and audio continues to be recorded and stored using analog equipment. For this reason, you may need to capture analog video and audio as part of your workflow. You can digitize analog video directly into Adobe Premiere if you use digitizing hardware to connect an analog video player or camera to your computer. Video-digitizing hardware is built into some personal computers, but usually must be added to a system by installing a compatible hardware capture card. For a list of compatible cards, see the Adobe Premiere Web site (http://www.adobe.com/premiere). If you will be adding analog video to a DV project, you can avoid compatibility problems by digitizing the analog video as if it were DV. Batch Capture If you have the proper setup for device control and have a videotape recorded with timecode, you can set up Adobe Premiere for automatic, unattended capture of multiple clips from the same tape. This is called batch capture. You can batch capture clips from analog or DV camcorders or decks. You log, or create a list of, the segments you want to capture, using the Batch Capture window. The list (called a batch list or timecode log) can be created either by logging clips visually, using device control, or by typing In and Out points manually. When the batch list is ready, you just click one button to capture all the clips in the list. Batch capturing is very useful in a professional production environment, and can be especially helpful when you need to return to a previously produced project that you need to recreate from the original tape sources.

Online and Offline Editing Online Editing: Online editing is the practice of doing all editing (including the rough cut) on the same clips that will be used to produce the final cut.

Previously, online editing had to be done on costly, high-end workstations designed to meet the quality and data-

Use the Adobe Premiere Movie Capture window Use the Adobe Premiere Movie Capture window to capture DV and analog video and audio. The Preview area displays your currently recording video.

If you don’t have a controllable playback device (some inexpensive consumer VCRs and camcorders are not controllable), you can manually operate the device and, while watching the picture in the Preview area, use the record button in the Movie Capture Window to capture the frames you want.

The Logging Panel With the Movie Capture window’s Logging panel, you can quickly log video clips, set In and Out points, name clips and reels, effortlessly batch-capture multiple logged video clips, and add comments about each clip.

processing requirements of broadcast video. Editors who could not afford an online system had to rent time at a suitable production facility. As personal computers have become more powerful, online editing has become practical for a wider range of productions including broadcast and even motion-picture film productions.

When you work with DV source material, all editing is done online.

DV compression makes standard DV manageable on many desktop systems.

For online editing using analog source material, you capture clips once at the highest level of quality your computer and peripherals can handle.

Offline Editing: In offline editing, you edit a rough cut of your video using low-quality clips, and then produce the

final cut using high-quality clips.

Offline editing was originally developed to save money by preparing rough cuts on less expensive systems.

Although offline editing can be as simple as writing down time points for clips while watching them on a VCR, it is increasingly done using personal computers and capable software such as Adobe Premiere.

If you are working with analog source material, offline editing techniques can be useful even if your computer can edit at the quality of your final cut. By batch-capturing video using lowquality settings, you can edit faster, using smaller files. In most cases, you need only enough quality to identify the correct beginning and ending frames for each clip. When you’re ready to create the final cut, you can redigitize

If you have a more sophisticated camcorder or deck, you can use the Device Control feature in the Movie Capture window to perform batch capture, by recording a list of In and Out points for each clip and then capturing all clips on the list automatically, while you do something else.

the video at the final-quality settings.

This is another example of where the logging and batch capture techniques in Adobe Premiere can be useful.

Professional editors looking for a powerful, affordable off-line editor will appreciate the way Adobe Premiere software facilitates quickly building an off-line edit and exporting an edit decision list (EDL) for conforming online. EDLs can be exported in industry standard formats compatible with all leading edit controllers, such as the Sony BVE 9000 and BVE 9100, as well as CMX. Find a list of plug-ins for Adobe Premiere at www.adobe.com/products/ plugins/premiere/main.html, and a list of plug-ins for Adobe After Effects at www.adobe.com/products/plugins/ aftereffects/main.html DOCUMENTARY TODAY

65

66

DOCUMENTARY TODAY