By Madhusree Dutta

Filmmaker Madhusree Dutta explores the relationship between fact, truth and the documentary film in the last few decades

In 1914, the word ‘documentary’ was used for the first time in the prospectus of the Continental Film Company in the US for In the Land of Head Hunters, a film on American Indians by ethnographer Edward S Curtis.

The presence of ‘document’ in documentary is a contentious matter. The other nomenclature, ‘non-fiction’, is even more problematic. The moral insinuations of both these terms have been plaguing this genre since its inception. ‘Documentary’ being related to ‘document’ implies proof and authenticity, while ‘non-fiction’ asserts the privilege of being factual. These implications, in turn, lead us to a kind of linearity, a fixed text, a representation of the Truth. This comes from the tendency of treating ‘fact’ or ‘authenticity’ as the truth. Let us take a look at the beginning of this genre.

Authenticity of actuality

In 1895, the Lumiere brothers showed the first cinema shot in history -- a train entering a station. It was a reality shot, or an actuality shot. There was theatre, ballet, street performances in Paris -- but the Lumiere brothers shot streets, factory gates, etc. Miliese, one of the greatest filmmakers of the silent era who attended the Lumiere brothers’ show, noticed that the audience was more engaged with the moving foliage, the crashing waves and the flying dust than they were with the moving people in the frame. The audience had already seen human beings and their actions in theatre, so it was the animated scenery that caught their attention. This made it an ‘actuality’ show. Since then, proving the authenticity of actuality has become a major preoccupation for non-fiction films.

Constructing the Real

In 1898, two cameramen from the Vitagraph Company went from America to Cuba to shoot the Spanish-American War. When they returned, they realised that they had not shot the most important part of the war -- the Battle of Santiago Bay. The whole city was waiting to see the footage; admitting to not having shot it would mean a huge loss of revenue. As it happened, street vendors were selling still pictures of the war. The cameramen bought pictures of battleships, made them float in a tub of water, put some gunpowder on top, attached strings to make them move, and added smoke from cigars. The person who was smoking the cigar, the wife of one of the men, was not a smoker and could not provide a continuous flow of smoke. So the battlefield did not look as dense as it should have. Still, they composed the scene, shot it and ran it in public screenings for months. That, most probably, was the first instance of special effects cinema. But that, most probably, was also the first instance of documentary’s uneasy relationship with ‘reality’.

Fixing the Other

In 1913-14, a 22-year-old White American woman, Jessica Brothwicke, spent a year in the Balkans filming wars and the natives. She says: "During the cholera rage in Adrianopole, everything connected with that terrible disease was painted black. The carts in which the dead bodies were carried were black, for example, as were the coffins in which cholera victims were buried. While the scourge was at its height, I went down into the gypsy quarter to take a film. The people in this part of the city had never seen a camera before, and when they saw me pointing my black box at various objects, they thought I was operating some wonderful new instruments for combating the disease which was destroying them. Quickly surrounding me, they came and knelt upon the ground, kissing my feet and clothing, and begging with dreadful pathos that I should cure them." 1

The making of the Nation

In 1939, the Second World War began. An era of ideological upheaval was born that brought to life such concepts and realities as radical nationalism, capitalist imperialism, totalitarian Socialist states, ultra-xenophobia, independence for European colonies in Asia and, of course, fascism. Documentary filmmaking never had it so good. Generous state patronage came, new technology was developed, young professionals were encouraged -- all to propagate the cause of the war through hair-raising war footage. Hitler’s publicity machine discovered Leni Riefenstahl, and the Arriflex camera was developed according to her requirements. Sixty cinematographers were made available to her to shoot the 1936 Olympics. She shot some of the most powerfully effective military footage: she was the mother of political documentary. Russians and other East European filmmakers tried to counter her work, her ideology, her footage. But the grammar book for the genre had already been written. Political documentary means fearless men marching in file; cut to their feet conquering/freeing the earth for the mother/fatherland; top angle of thousands of files rendering geometrical patterns; cut to a track shot of erect shoulders; cut to a beautiful child waving at them, at their courage and martyrdom; cut to a close shot of rifles on the shoulders of men passing through the frame, threatening to destroy anybody or anything that dares to touch the smile of that child; cut to rough terrain of the battlefield, and so on and so forth.

Projecting the magnified close-up of the mundane (dust flying, train coming), constructing a ‘Real’ according to the audience’s imagination (Vitograph’s bathtub war), discovering and capturing the Other (the Balkan natives and the head-hunters), manufacturing a nationalist brand through spectacles (Leni Riefensthal) -- till today, these remain the formal mainstay of the documentary.

The Indian scenario

In the Indian subcontinent, this phase of expression flowered in the 1950s. In 1943, the British Raj set up the Information Films of India and India News Parade, both with the sole objective of propagating the cause of the war. At the end of the war, in April 1946, the Central Legislative Council was constituted as a precursor to the transfer of power to the Indian government. The council demanded the closure of these two production houses, as they were mainly tools of British interest. Soon after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru realised that the newly formed country needed a mechanism to reach out to a vast population that was multi-lingual, multi-cultural, unaware of the notion of the Nation and the State, and mostly illiterate. He took special interest in reviving a set-up which predated News Parade, and the Films Division was established.

The gaze from the plains of central India travelled to the remotest corners of the country and shot its subjects, the "other" people within the Indian State. In style and aesthetics, these films were a mix of the war film and the anthropological film. The vast, top-angle shots of the land where human beings are part of one linear category, made so popular by war films, coupled with close shots and detailed depictions of the alien customs and people, an anthropological device, were held in consecutive shots. The wide, top-angle shots were to establish the authenticity of locales that are not part of the mainland. The closer shots were for anthropological curiosity, presenting a few chosen details of the "others" that exist outside normative practices -- the Mizos, the Kukis, the Kashmiris, the Banjaras -- and thereby outside the Benevolent State. To this day, the Government of India presents a national award for best anthropological/ethnographic film of the year.

This dominant trend in documentary filmmaking was countered in the late-1970s. The notion of Nation-State was significantly challenged by the Naxalite movement and other organised political formations from the Left and Left of Centre ideologies. Independent political documentaries from local regions were born. Famine was shot, so was homelessness, state atrocities, migration, women as victims of domestic and sexual violence, issues of land ownership, all of these became important. Gautam Ghosh, Utpalendu Chakravarty, Anand Patwardhan, Meera Nair, Suhasini Mulay and Tapan Bose are some of the significant names from that period and they all came from a shared political background. They knew their subjects, their terrain. They wanted to make films in order to prove and disseminate what they already knew as truth. Through the process of the film itself, they placed facts in front of the audience in order to build public opinion. They had the kind of confidence in their arguments that allowed them to hold a mid-shot of an interviewee for minutes. These films were mainly edited on the basis of dialogue tracks -- polemics reigned supreme.

The myth of the Benevolent State was duly shattered. For the first time, instead of exotic people, hungry and tortured humans came up as protagonists; instead of ritualistic song and dance, minority peoples from the lands beyond central India voiced their anger, fear and frustration common to minorities in any totalitarian country; instead of the plastic gloss of national pride, the basic formation of the modern State was questioned. Many feature films of the time were inspired by these documentaries and some of these documentary filmmakers later shifted to making political feature films.

But these films also did something interesting to the aesthetics of documentary, as well as influenced the way in which people viewed them. These films revisited the issue of authenticity, which, in a way, began a war of authenticities. As against the classical anthropology of Films Division, a genre of political anthropology had emerged. Issues were now tackled by the dense dialogue tracks of the protagonists. The object of this strategy and aesthetic leaned towards the principal act of opinion making or, in more serious cases, became a form of "tutelage". The format and aesthetics of these films remained broadly the same, for, in some senses, this genre depended heavily on the aesthetics of the very ideology that it had set out to oppose. Framed differently, this genre of filmmaking created a new category of anthropological subject: no longer was it the alien people of the exotic land, it was now the victim of the Nation-State who came under the lens. However, the distance between the subject, the filmmaker and the audience stayed the same. There is always a triangle: of the filmmaker who collates and presents the facts, the protagonist who is the fact, and the audience who receives the fact. And thus, the primary agenda of making opinion with the help of facts remained.

There was another problem. As far as private screenings were concerned, the opportunities were rare and far between. Besides, ordinary people, after being exposed to compulsory viewing of inane documentaries from Films Division (the State mandated the screening of a documentary before every feature film), grew allergic to the word ‘documentary’. Hence, only a privileged/elite/politicised audience viewed the documentaries of the ’70s and ’80s. Some filmmakers, though, travelled around the country with a film projector and cans of film on their shoulders, but not every filmmaker could be that militant and many films remained in oblivion.

By the ’80s, the film society movement became very popular in India. However, even their members strongly resented documentary films for being didactic and aesthetically inferior.

Facts and truths

Very soon, this genre got into deep trouble, trouble which has now grown into a full-bodied problem. The centre of the problem is the dependence on fact for a certain truth. Remember the news channel advertisement: ‘For truer than the truth, switch onto XYZ’? The embedded CNN journalists in the Iraq war shot facts at close range. But what happened to Truth in that process? You got US propaganda in support of the Iraq invasion. During the Gujarat carnage of 2002, television channels shot the same footage as independent filmmakers did. By the time the independent filmmakers finished their films, with whatever deeper understanding of the issue they were to offer, the audience was in a state of visual fatigue.

Aestheticising the issue

The problem lay in not addressing the issue of Truth formally, and relying too much on ‘fact’. In short, the lack of engagement with aestheticising the issue itself made the argument richer than the dialogue tracks. To make this point clearer, I would like to discuss a scene from Shoot for the Content, made by the Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trin T Minh Ha, about contemporary China. Minh Ha, the outsider in China, sets up a complex journey into the various realities of the country. Throughout the film, she evolves several formal devices to constantly remind us that we are watching a film made by an outsider. In one scene, a Chinese filmmaker gives an interview about State censorship. The scene starts with a shot of a bright spotlight in the middle of the pitch-dark screen. We hear the interview in Chinese followed by para-dubbing in English. After a while, we realise that the camera is moving very slowly and that the bright spot in the frame is getting closer. In the middle of the interview, as the camera keeps moving in, we realise that the bright spot is actually an image of the interpreter who is lit in disturbingly bright and flat light. The black space in the frame is the shoulder of the censored filmmaker. The camera keeps moving: eventually most of the frame gets filled up with the brightly-lit close up of the interpreter and the back of the filmmaker grows more and more marginalised within the frame. 2

I would argue that this is one of the finest examples of aestheticising the issue. Such a scene encourages the audience to participate in the reality of the situation, well beyond merely listening to the dialogue track. The agenda shifts from opinion making through facts to experiencing reality by participating in the extraction of meaning. This is not simply a formal issue, but a political engagement and a cerebral invitation all at the same time.

Our other films

Something interesting started happening after the late-1980s. Two very distinct phenomena developed: a spectacular rise in biographical films and a formal style where the filmmaker’s personal position and his/her relationship with the protagonist became part of the text. The second issue, at its most basic, involved the use of the first-person narrative. But at a more complex level, it was dealt with formally: by camera positioning, by editing style, by using footage which had nothing to do with the proclaimed agenda, sometimes even by the choice of title.

These biographical films make a distinct attempt to locate the ordinariness of an ordinary individual within a larger reading of the Nation-State. The debate, the polemics around citizenship is still there, but now there is an attempt to aestheticise that debate in opposition to the ‘discovery’ and ‘proof’ of earlier anthropological attempts. And part of this aetheticising is to give the person, the citizen, more space than that allowed by a functional agenda. In short: make a portrait and not only a dialogue track argument. The protagonists of these films are not the Films Division models, ie, subjects of the Benevolent State, nor are they simple victims of State oppression. Many of them are ordinary people with no such tall claims in official history. These films make them architects of a discourse of citizenship instead of reducing them to mere case studies. Sameera Jain’s series, Portraits of Belonging (Bhai Miyan, the kite maker and Sageera Begum, the artisan) is a fine example of this genre. In post-1992 Delhi, Bhai Miyan talks about the set of 150 Indian national flag kites that he created to celebrate 50 years of Independence. The two artisans, Bhai Miyan and Sageera Begum, talk about memory as a proactive component in nation-building and their articulation of this process dislodges the normative, subaltern victim narrative.

A prominent trend in this genre was to read an artist and his/her memory. The genre candidly recognises that what we are seeing is also a kind of performance on the part of the protagonist. The text is not what the protagonist is, but is about how he/she desires us to conceive him/her. The validity of the protagonist and the authenticity of the films do not come from actuality but from the essence of these people’s memories and desires. In some senses, it displaces fact for the sake of the truth which is what emerges through a person’s performance of his or her ‘self’ in front of the camera. Allowing the protagonist to do this and allowing the audience to see through that is part of the formal development of the film and the genre.

These performances, a combination of the subjective memory of the protagonist and his/her desire for a particular kind of projection of the self for future reading, make biographic films a part of the current debate on citizenship. There is a distinct shift from the ‘victim’ narrative to a proactive role in constituting the ‘citizen,’ a citizen who is constantly being created through the interaction between a memory of the past and a desire for the future. Since the process of recording this development is part of the film’s text, the filmmaker and the audience become a part of that exercise of constituting the ‘citizen’.

Many of those who make these films are women, and an overwhelming number of the films’ protagonists are also women. Nonetheless, the films have smoothly and non-aggressively passed beyond the confines of the domestic space while portraying female protagonists. Having transcended the need to prove the validity of this choice by establishing the victim status of the protagonists (a common phenomenon in the ’80s and earlier), these filmmakers can now place gender at the very centre of the map of the Nation-State and citizenship.

Unlike in the world of commercial feature films, the documentary works of other South Asian countries have not been hegemonised by the Indian milieu. I shall end this article by citing two excellent works from Bangladesh and Pakistan that revolve around politics in the biographies of non-political citizens. The Bangladeshi war for liberation is revisited in Yasmin Kabeer’s Swadhinata (A Certain Liberation). Here, Gurudasi Mondal, the archetypal vagrant mad woman, depicts the Nation by completely opting out of it. The beggar Gurudasi, who witnessed the massacre of her entire family during the Liberation, does not play the role of protagonist. She counters the very vantage position of the protagonist by denying being rooted in any conceivable identity. The discourse of citizenship itself collapses when she chooses to be vagrant -- giving herself an intangible identity -- right in front of the camera. Even the weight of being the protagonist of a film cannot make her enter the arena of the Nation-State.

In 1997, Pakistani Farjad Nabi made Nusrat has left the building… but when, a sad and hilarious film on neo-colonialism in cultural practice. This is a film in absentia, made after the demise of the Sufi singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and is constructed around various public/popular images of Nusrat. The film, in a convoluted way, becomes an autobiography of the filmmaker who is himself an aspiring young artist at the beginning of cultural homogenisation in the era of globalisation. The angst, the desire and the melancholy that the filmmaker weaves around the perceptions of Nusrat represent the anxiety of South Asian youth cultures in the minutest detail, and the film becomes a contemporary bhakti/sufi text. 3

At the end of Reena Mohan’s film Kamalabai (the first screen actress in India who was 88 years old during the making of the film), Kamalabai gets fed up with the paraphernalia of being in front of the camera. She wants some other excitement and asks cheekily: ‘What’s the programme for this evening?’ The amused director teases her, saying: ‘The camera is on!’ Kamalabai, the protagonist, the actress, thinks for a moment and replies: ‘Ooh… the camera is on!’

1. The War, the West and the Wilderness by Kevin Brownlow (Knopfler, New York: 1979)
2. Shoot for the Content, directed by Trin T Minh Ha, 1991
3. There are many more distinguished films and filmmakers in South Asia who are working on the language of political documentaries. The names mentioned here are only examples and not any kind of representation