Moving towards the epicentre: The void and the image in the film-making of R.V. Ramani

This article explores the methodology of one of India’s leading non-fiction film-makers, R.V. Ramani. His films critically examine the practices of artists and film-makers in works such as Blue Black Yellow (1996), Face like a Man (1993), Heaven on Earth (2001) and, more recently, A Documentary Proposal (2016) and 409 Ramkinkars; Santhal Family to Mill Re-Call (2017). 409 Ramkinkars, an ambitious collaboration initiated by the artist Vivan Sundaram, is a multi-authored installation and promenade performance investigating the work of the Bengali modernist sculptor Ramkinkar Baij. (Baij’s artworks famously celebrated the Santhal communities living near his workplace at the arts faculty of Santiniketan, north of Kolkata). Other works such as Padharo Mharey Desh/Welcome to my country (2010) tackle directly political issues such as the impact of tourism in the state of Rajasthan, as well as the complexities of caste and gender discrimination. The films discussed in this article, however, were not commissioned by others but were initiated by Ramani himself, emerging from autobiographical and environmental dilemmas in his home state of Tamil Nadu, South India. They include, among others, My Camera and Tsunami (2011) and Brahma Vishnu Shiva (1998). These works are analysed to discover how they reflect an engagement with the concept of ‘void’ while simultaneously detailing the film-maker’s authoring processes as a cinematographer. To aid this analysis, I draw upon certain theories of the (late) Indian film-maker, art critic and theorist, Mani Kaul, who describes the space and temporality in which film texts are formed as a movement towards an absent object or void (1991). I will explore how the conceptualisation of ‘void’ can be understood as integral to the film text itself in Ramani’s films, being attentive to the ways in which the gap between the image and the unrepresentable in film-making as well as film spectatorship can be mobilised. I also reference a lecture by the Russian chemist Ilya Prigogine on the behaviour of particles and atoms in chemistry to create analogies between the self-organising systems that exist in natural phenomena, and the modes of rendering sound and image in Ramani’s film composition. Another sub-theme of the article concerns the relationship between spacetime, music and choreography in the work of this film-maker. Choreography refers here not only to the dynamics of on-screen images that film-makers achieve by designing in-camera movement or through editing, but also to the spatial and temporal signifiers at work in the filmic imaginary.