Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2018

This article concentrates on the multimedia installations of the feminist artist Sheba Chhachhi. Her art practice is situated in such diverse ecologies of pedagogic and technological experimentation as, first, her own experiences of sharing visual communications skills with urban and rural activists in the women’s movement and presenting her photographs in slums and women’s workshops, and later showing her video installations in a gallery setting, a mall and community centre. Secondly, the historic multimedia environments of the National Institute of Design (Dashrath Patel was the founder-secretary of NID and a mentor figure to Chhachhi) will be investigated; and finally, the discussion encompasses the jugaad-oriented entrepreneurship of artisans in India’s street-markets whose creative improvisations modify the techno-kitsch that washes up on our shores as the flotsam of globalisation.

In the period from 1965 to 1975, some unprecedented and original experiments with the non-fiction film were conducted within Films Division India (FD), the Indian government’s documentary production organisation. The films of this period are important because they mark the first expression of dissent and resistance to statist agendas of propaganda, as well as to prescriptive ways of making documentary films. This article examines the work of a select group of FD film-makers and their engagement with politics and film form, under the leadership of FD’s then Director, Jehangir Bhownagary. This decade has often been referred to as the ‘golden age’ and the ‘experimental film’ phase of FD, framing the popular understanding of the FD documentary through the binary of ‘nation-building/propaganda films’ or ‘experimentation’. This article analyses the films of this period – from the perspective of a documentary film-maker and curator, with a long-standing engagement with the FD archive – to foreground the critique embedded within experiments with film form, as well as the status quo-ist and regressive nature of some of the highly abstract and unconventional films made in this period. By doing so, the article attempts to pry loose the rigid classifications that have now congealed debates about the FD films, and to offer a more nuanced reading of this material.

Is it still possible to think of some contemporary art as belonging to a religious or a secular world, where ‘world’ is understood in Wittgenstein’s sense as all that is the case? What purchase can these powerful concepts have on today’s art, especially in the realm of video and photography with their peculiar relations to reality and subjectivity? Echoing Talal Asad’s question ‘[i]s there a secular body?’, I ask whether there is a ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ gaze that belongs to this body, how it describes its own boundaries and what lies outside it. Looking at Pakistani art allows me to investigate the longer duration of culture from which some recent video practices have emerged and found a place in globalised art circuits. I claim that Bani Abidi’s video art, and specifically The Distance From Here (2010) can be seen as a sustained exploration of heterogeneous temporalities and subjective positions that are as yet not entirely taken up by their international presentation, audience and circulation, and derive from a space that is not understandable as simply divided between the secular and the religious. This remainder or intractability might indicate the possibility of encounters with forms of life that unsettle existing conceptual divisions between the secular and the religious or the local and the global. Seeing Abidi’s work in relation to a powerful tradition of allegory and of narrative deriving from the philosophy of Ibn Sina, I argue that these currents persist in popular culture and in local literary or artistic forms, even when they are not explicitly referred to. This allows me to make a case for seeing Abidi’s work in a context that is not restricted to the history of (Euro-American) art and its philosophies.

Idhi Katha Matramena/Is this just a story? (1983) is one of three short films made by the feminist film collective Yugantar (1980–83). Through a collaborative process with members of the activist and research collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, the film developed into an improvised fiction. The collective’s self-reflective debates, or activist ‘study’ (Harney and Moten 2013) on the manifold layers and subtlety of physical and emotional violence within the family, including their own hitherto unspoken experiences, brought forth novel aesthetic vocabularies affording new female subjectivities on-screen. Those in turn offered a new political language that entered the autonomous women’s movement in India, off-screen. I argue for the political as constituted in the interstices between activism, research and the creative collective process of film-making, rather than political film as either advocacy for a set political agenda or a position of autonomous creative/artistic practice and thought. I particularly stress legacies of feminist fiction’s ‘passionate constructions’ (Haraway 1988), i.e., experimental film practice that is specifically cultivated out of collective study and the complexities of feminist friendship, forging a process of collective imagination as speculative politics. Thinking from Yugantar’s contextually situated practice as an expansion of the possible, I join arguments for fiction and speculation as modes of feminist intervention in South Asian film, activism and discourse. Rather than stressing an authentically Indian legacy of feminist film, however, this exploration of Idhi Katha Matramena highlights collective aesthetic practices that build solidarities within the context of India, and through speculative cinematic friendships across space/time localities of radical change. The text thus probes Yugantar’s past practice as a pertinent spectre for our present future.

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.

Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 440 pp., ISBN 9783775741460, hardback, €45