The Documentary Archive in Photography, Film, and Video

Transcription

1 Editorial The Documentary Archive in Photography, Film, and Video Ravi S. Vasudevan, Rosie Thomas, S.V. Srinivas, Lotte Hoek, and Debashree Mukherjee BioScope 8(1) vii xiv 2017 Screen South Asia Trust SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: / This issue of Bioscope sets out to create conversations among visual and screen media that work with a documentary premise. Bringing together work on photography, film, and video will, we hope, help us to think about specificities and overlaps in how these different media technologies work as documentary forms; the institutions and formats through which they are circulated, exhibited, and received for this purpose; and the suggestive, multiple media repository and archive they potentially constitute. While the need to store, catalogue, and access specific media in their particularity is an important one, and is quite underdeveloped in terms of screen media material in the South Asian context, we suggest that we also need to consider their connections: ontologically, in what constitutes their material basis; perceptually, in how they relate us to space, time, bodies and object worlds, landscapes, and built forms; in terms of techne, how they compose and frame, light and use lenses; in their deployment to cover similar subject matter; and how to think about them as database that digitally alters their material form, that is, their historicity, and yet provides a shifting grid both for historical thinking and for future projections. Exploring media specificity as well as inter-referentiality and intermediality constitutes a key feature of this archival agenda. In a fascinating archaeological project, Shukla Sawant considers the relationship between photography and painting as it traveled across academy, individual artist studios, and the patronage of native princes in early twentieth-century western India. Drawing on information in autobiographies and early art histories, and using remarkable photographic evidence, Sawant demonstrates a range of functions for this interface of media technologies: photography as referent, base, and aide-memoire for painting; as aid to accurate painterly observation associated with new colonial forms of perspectival mastery; as producing hybrid forms that overlap classical bodily figuration with a detailing of anatomical musculature. Sawant develops an evocative account of the sites of art production, and trawls through personal collections that relay a sense of a dispersed art publics formed along the axis of new political formations, professions, and aesthetic cultivation. If hoardings, murals, schools of academic art, and portrait galleries compose the spaces and venues for this range of photographically mediated art works, Sawant also points to the importance of the illustrated magazine as a key site for public circulation. Drawing on the photograph as residual trace and evidentiary form, Sawant discerns a layering of photographic imaging and documentation around the process of artistic production. Focusing on the figure of the female model, she shows how the

2 viii BioScope 8(1) photographs of actress Usha Mantri used by Baburao Painter for his paintings drew on European painterly templates for its pose, and are marked by a grid system to facilitate accurate transposition of figure and face in painting; they provide the bodily pose for the color painting that would assume iconic and mythic registers and a wider circulation. As Sawant notes, such photographs also had an existence as part of Baburao s personal archive. Sometimes, photographs were used as referent for a painting done much later; perhaps as personal keepsake for the artist s perusal; subsequently in the holding of the private collector; and as archival index of the studio arrangement and of the grid system which deployed photography in the service of painting. The question of time posed by the photograph can also be rendered in terms of coordinates which extend into the before and after of the photograph, and into the spaces around the photograph and in front, where the photographer stands staging and capturing the scene. This is an interstitial field or potentiality, which may be caught in another image, as Sabeena Gadihoke shows in her article. With Baburao Painter s models, the photograph holds an instant, a pose and a template, is something to be contemplated or used later. Nemai Ghosh s photographs of actresses in Bengali cinema constitute an off-screen moment, where the avowedly ordinary face of the star comes into view, an interplay of images critical to the projection of the star s singularity. Taking place outside the shoot, the images he captures include ones of selfconscious glamour, as in Sharmila Tagore s photographs, but there are others which suggest an outside to the constructed persona of the star. Or do they? There is an eerie arc of publicness in these photographs, as if the private self of the star can never quite be captured; perhaps it is this invitation to probe, to seek signs of subjectivity and interiority that augments the enigma of the star as it is relayed through the publicity photograph. As Gadihoke points out, the star photograph acquires a public momentum as it weaves from cinema into the increasingly dense world of illustrated magazines and advertisements which were developing at this time, and through the field of fashion. Barthes argued that the single frame or photogram in cinema allowed him a pensive response to the image, something not available in cinema. But perhaps we can look at a quite different regime of the single frame: in contrast to the image stilled in the cinema is the photograph which refers to the film, more specifically to the film star and the specific locale within which the film takes place, if not its fictive rendering. Working as if in the shadows cast by the film, this image too circulates, and relates to a wider narrative of the star retailed in print culture. Like Sawant and Gadihoke, Ranu Roychowdhury also highlights the context of photographic circulation, publication, and exhibition in her analysis of Sunil Janah as political and industrial photographer. Roychowdhury takes this now iconic photographer, the subject of important retrospectives and publications from the 1990s, back into the historical context in which he worked. Janah s photographs of the 1943 Bengal famine, the famine in Andhra of 1944, the Direct Action day and Partition killings between 1946 and 1948, are situated by Roychowdhury in the printed texts of communist party newspapers. She provides a vivid contrast between the scaled-down image surrounded by text and the free standing image subsequently mounted for display in an art gallery and in book form. This genre of photojournalism was not, she points out, conceived as an artistic meditation, but as reportage. She distinguishes Janah s work from modernist art works by considering it of the species of the secular icon, where

3 Editorial ix the work addressed, and was part of, everyday life and transformation rather than occupying a larger symbolic register and self-consciously aesthetic stance. She does, however, take Janah s reportage as an aesthetic practice, analyzing how he positions people, and their look, within a tight framing that evokes the limited possibilities of tragic circumstances. These become pronounced when the photographs are separated out for observation; but it is the juxtaposition of the photographs placement in reportage and as art objects which is revealing, as the publishing context gives the images a textured temporality which their subsequent existence as art objects, however, carefully annotated, cannot attain. This article is particularly important in the Indian setting for exploring an unheralded field, that of industrial photography. This was a professional engagement that Sunil Janah approached with a sense of Nehruvian commitment to the large-scale projects of the nation, but also with ambivalence, as these were commissioned commercial works, and the genre raises the question of how industrial labor was situated in this enterprise. As research on industrial and commercial photography and film develops, we will need to research these institutional contexts of sponsorship for documentary production. This involves a fascinating set of relations among government and business history, advertising and publicity, professional filmmaking and aesthetics, consumer and material histories. Here, Emil Stjernholm s article on the work of Arne Sucksdorff in India provides an excellent signpost to the potential of this field. As Stjernholm points out, Sucksdorff, the doyen of art documentary in Sweden, has often been heralded, both in Sweden and in India, for his aesthetic and philosophical engagement with his subjects; some accounts even suggest that he had complete autonomy when making his Indian films. In fact, Sucksdorff received support from Svensk Filmindustri, a major Swedish film company who supported short film, a significant component of the cinema program in Sweden and of film festivals, as well as something which could be shown to professional associations, in film clubs and for educational purposes. The short film thus fitted a commercial, educational, and aesthetic function, giving the producer a return on investment even as it garnered cultural prestige. Sucksdorff s films on India, Indian Village (1951) and The Wind and the River (1953), had a more precise sponsor, the Swedish Cooperative Union and Wholesale Society. This was an enterprise that was at once a civil society initiative, while having close ties with the Swedish government and its bid for international political and economic alignments, in which post-colonial India offered new opportunities. His venture is reminiscent of Basil Wright s work for the Ceylon Tea Board in the 1930s, producing the art house success, Song of Ceylon (1934) as well as a series of more functional travelogue films ( While a similar distinction could be made between Indian Village and The Wind and the River, Stjernholm shows that even the first film, which overtly promoted the cooperative idea in India, nevertheless had distinctly poetic components. In Stjernholm s account, India emerges at the intersection of wider currents in film practice, as part of a map of new focuses, collaborative models, and locations. In the process, we move beyond the imprint of British documentary on India, an important area which was itself transnational in scope, but was only one in a series of influences. Helpful writing on this wider field for example, on the impact of Jean Renoir s work on The River (1951) and his association with Indian filmmakers (Sesonske, 2005), and

4 x BioScope 8(1) Dilip Padgaonkar s careful account of Rossellini s film projects later in the decade (Padgaonkar, 2008) places the post-colonial subcontinent within a wider cinematic universe. One of the key Indian documentarists whose path crossed both Renoir and Rossellini was Hari Sadhan Dasgupta. This issue s archive essay focuses on Dasgupta to invite reflection on the complex profile of the short filmmaker, and the significance of the sponsored film. The archive of his work, diligently collected by the archivist and collector Arun Kumar Roy, is intermittent and residual and, for key works, we are again confronted with the still as the remainder of the moving image. Dasgupta s career is also significant for what it tells us about being a cinephile and filmmaker, at once workaday and driven by ambition, and someone who could traverse advertising, heritage film, industrial works, governmental publicity, and feature films. This career speaks both to the question of sponsorship and its impact on the form and function of the film work, but it also shows how firms such as Burmah Shell, Dunlop, and Lever extended support to films exceeding the advertising objective, for example, in promoting heritage film relating to religion, folk culture, dance, and so on. The topic of advertising is in itself of great relevance. Here, a complementary research agenda would relate such film work to business, advertising, and consumer cultures, an emerging field in the South Asian context (Haynes, McGowan, Roy, & Yanagisawa, 2010); specifically, to the imaging of the object world and everyday life, from cigarettes and tea to tyres, cars, and road construction, from new comforts for the home to the presentation of new agricultural materials, in seeds and fertilizers and rice mills, and, indeed of how the world was being materially transformed in the imaging of the village, riverine cultures, ports and docks, craft and heavy industry, and urban vistas, all of which emerge from Arun Roy s filmography of Dasgupta. As the archival compilation suggests, Dasgupta s career also captures the networked biography of the cinema, how a cohort of filmmakers, of friendship, knowledge, skill, aesthetic engagement, of techniques and technologies, of business initiatives and government patronage, provided resources across a range of film practices. The other key formation of the 1950s that would extend its influence far beyond, was the imposing edifice of the government s Films Division (FD). This substantial moving image archive has been highlighted in the recent past by curatorial and online initiatives. These include the work of Shai Heredia and the Experimenta festival on FD experimental films of the late 1960s; the formation of FD Zone in a collaboration between FD and independent filmmakers; and Alexander Keefe s lively blog Sarkari Shorts (filmsdivisionindia.tumblr.com). Srirupa Roy s work (2007) and Peter Sutoris book, Visions of Development (2016, reviewed in this issue), are academic interventions, and Sutoris gives us a good account of FD as institutional practice, along with a companion website where a selection of FD films can be viewed ( The high visibility today of governmental film points to a threshold in historical, and historiographical, perspective. This cinema never had very good press, barring the experimentalists, but it now constitutes a moving image database whose sheer weight and range urges us to explore it as an archive that highlights, along with (often uncreative) film techniques, the things, places, and people that this cinema captured over time. Of course, such imaging had a corollary of what is not shown (e.g., films promoting industry cannot feature industrial accidents or industrial

5 Editorial xi conflict) but it nevertheless constitutes a partial archive, which needs to be combined with other materials. Experimental practice displayed awareness of how FD material could be drawn upon for new types of signification, as in SNS Shastry s use of preexisting footage in some of his accelerated montages. And in Thoughts in a Museum (1968) Sukhdev s use of FD footage on Nehru and the Nehru museum knowingly unsettles historical perspective by introducing jarring rifts in its construction. As Ritika Kaushik shows, such experimental moments need to be situated in a longer pattern of FD s institutional practices, rather than as an exception to them. She outlines the layers of institutional authority which made film commissioning and filmmaking at FD so convoluted. Ministry representatives who were to advise on the content of a particular subject started exercising overweening influence on the filmmaking process; film proposals would have to go through a long-winded bureaucratic process; a Film Advisory Board could exercise control over what could finally be approved; outside producers were only considered if they could generate the lowest quotation, invariably affecting the quality of the filmmaking. Much of this came up for review and criticism in 1966, with the so-called Chanda Committee Report on mass media. The very arbitrariness of interventions, disruptions, and so on, was not directly challenged in what took place in 1965, with the arrival of Jean Bhownagry at FD. Bhownagry, a UNESCO official, intellectual and arts practitioner, had earlier been involved with FD in the mid-1950s. This new phase was underwritten by Indira Gandhi, then Information and Broadcasting Minster. As Kaushik points out, Bhownagry s distinction was to explore a register of the permissible, where potentially contentious matter did not become the subject of overt discussion. He also brought with him the aspect of the enlightened bureaucrat who could exercise innovation, for example, by giving the experimentalists the opportunity to fashion independent works, while satisfying procedural and financial accountability. Here, Kaushik argues, he followed the model of Grierson. While such recalibration within existing bureaucratic formats marked this phase, as Kaushik shows with Sukhdev s India 67 (1967), this did not prevent actual exhibition from being subverted, despite Indira Gandhi s support to the film in the face of criticism. If bureaucratic forms were substantially reproduced within this period of innovation, the content was novel, and captured the turmoil and churning of the time. Kaushik highlights the problem of the 1962 and 1965 wars, the troubled succession following Nehru s death in 1964, and the way Indira Gandhi cultivated a progressive image in the face of opposition within her own party. Such a setting gave the experimental wedge in FD a radical political context. What is interesting is that the group continued to have a presence in a quite different setting, with Indira Gandhi s imposition of the Emergency, a dictatorial regime that clamped down on civil liberties and free speech. This group s work promoting Mrs Gandhi s rule carries the investigative, direct-to-the-camera dynamism, short shots and rapid moving camera of the initial phase of experiment into a new, more troubling context and function. We need to investigate further this complicated relationship between aesthetics (authoritarian) politics and a new sense of mass energies heralded in the 1970s, with major shifts in the level and density of urban migrations. The large state institution of FD appeared to put a brake on anything which was developing outside it, and this was especially the case with independent producers seeking funding and exhibition outlets through the government. However, from the

6 xii BioScope 8(1) time of independence, a number of institutions made films and film projectors available for hire, sometimes free of cost, for use in schools and colleges, factories and public halls, as part of a non-theatrical circuit. A Central Film Library was set up, and enterprises such as the Burmah Shell Film Unit also made films available in this way. Educational film companies such as the National Education and Information Films Limited signaled a broader possibility for educational cinema. The government too had been involved in film exhibition through motor vans and railway cinema cars to disseminate information for new techniques and technologies for agrarian and small town populations since the 1920s. However, in the 1970s, as Shweta Kishore s article shows, a distinctly oppositional stance came to develop around such non-theatrical circuits. She uses the category little media to suggest a different swathe of information advocacy and activism. Taking the case of the Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (Cendit) as a key initiative, she shows how a media-enabling discourse was set in train about how rural subjects could relate to and use video, unsettling categories of filmmaker and film subject, introducing video and the video screen as an aspect of daily life, and facilitating the circulation of information among local communities. Infrastructures emerged through equipment donation and a corporate sponsorship eager to promote the use of video technology. While Cendit s circuit would appear to lie outside the state, it could also be part of government initiatives, as with the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), relayed by the satellite INSAT 1B, which was used to beam television programs for instruction and education to villages. The image of the cohort which emerges from this research is both familiar and distinctive. The film society provides one background, along with professions such as electronic engineering, media work in broadcasting and film editing, and feminist advocacy that would develop with the elaboration of the women s movement in the 1980s. On the other hand, interface with the state in key areas was followed by involvement with the emergent independent documentary, as with Rajive Jain of Cendit working on Anand Patwardhan s iconic Waves of Revolution (1978); and there would be continuing synergy, with Cendit inviting independent filmmakers to lecture in their training workshops. This nexus between the film society, engaged intellectuals, and independent documentary film was mediated here by information activism. The usefulness of media work was key here, both to adequately represent and communicate matters relating to subaltern populations, and to draw these into media awareness and practice. Kishore draws upon the literature on useful cinema (Ackland & Wasson, 2011) and films that work (Hediger & Vondereau, 2009), that is on films used to impart instruction, even as they may have other, aesthetic dimensions and promotional/publicity functions. Key to this approach is the question of who sponsored the film, what was the occasion/ objective of the filmmaking, and to whom the film was addressed (Elsaesser, 2009). The objectives of civil society formations in funding such information activism becomes a key issue here, and Kishore signposts the need to look carefully at how funding objectives were handled. There is an intriguing double address involved here, as the information and video activist has to address, engage, and activate his or her rural participants, and satisfy the guidelines of a second audience, the funder. The video moment was, of course, much more elaborate than this account. Ishita Tiwary s ongoing research shows how, apart from unsettling cinema through film piracy and reshaping key fields such as marriage through video capture and staging,

7 Editorial xiii it also generated video films, magazines, political campaigns, and news programs, all of which constituted a distinct moment but also went on to shape the development of television. Kishore s work speaks to a longer history of media with a documentary premise: a goal-oriented, purposeful capture and relay of information to target publics who, in this case, were also designed to become producers of information. Not only production but circulation and exhibition were key to this longer term pattern, and defined both photography and cinema, if through different itineraries of publication and exhibition. For our purpose, these histories also emerge as suggestive evidence, both of a particular means and rationale for documenting people, things and places, and of documenting time, movement, memory and history, and the apparatuses and people who brought these images into being. One particular early twentieth-century vision of the documentary premise is to be found in Albert Kahn s Archives de la Planète ( ). Located in Paris, this eccentric multimedia archive was rigorously parsed by Paula Amad in 2010 for its philosophical import. Amad suggested that Kahn s desire to record a world memory through film and photography, privileged the counter-archival impulse of cinema. Film, with its excessive evidentiary capacities, its unruly tendencies of proliferation, and its attunement to the subjective everyday, challenges the promise of the positivist archive. Veena Hariharan, in her discussion of Visions of Development, finds something of the counter-archival at work. Of special interest to Hariharan is Sutoris suggestion that, despite the bureaucratic apparatus that produced the FD oeuvre, there were multiple contestatory and contradictory energies in play yielding filmic forms that evaded a straightforward statist meaning. That which exceeds the intentions of producers, interviewers, cinematographers, and bureaucrat-experts becomes the horizon for a renewed study of the FD film. Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan, brings together multiple genres of writing to construct a necessary record of cinema from Pakistan. In Salma Siddique s view, this anthologyrecord demonstrates the limitations of a national cinema paradigm for studying films, as the varied accounts about cinema and about specific films it presents, as well as the shifting boundaries and internal dynamics of the nation-state, confound neat containment. In her review of the mammoth Project Cinema City, Rosie Thomas opens up the status of the book-as-object, asking what it means to encounter a form that reassembles art works, photographs, events, films, memories, and meetings. Thomas echoes this issue s thematic interest in re-examining the connection between multiple visual media forms, their circulations, and their recontextualizations. The book, in this sense, is built on a documentary premise to record, interrogate, and present the relationship between a city and its cinema. Ultimately, as Thomas suggests, the book itself can only perform a trace, a fragmented record of the past, present, and futures of the city, mimicking film s own counter-archival impulse. References Ackland, C., & Wasson, H. (2011). Useful cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Amad, P. (2010). Counter-archive: Film, The Everyday, and Albert Kahn s Archives de la Planète. New York: Columbia University Press. Elsaesser, T. (2009). Archives and archaeologies: The place of non-fiction film in contemporary media. In Hediger and Vondereau (Eds), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Labour (pp ). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

8 xiv BioScope 8(1) Haynes, D., McGowan, A., Roy, T., & Yanagisawa, H. (Eds). (2010). Towards a history of consumption in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hediger, V., & Vondereau, P. (2009). Films that work: Industrial film and the productivity of media. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Padgaonkar, D. (2008). Under her spell: Roberto Rossellini in India. Delhi: Penguin. Roy, S. (2007). Beyond belief: India and the politics of post-colonial nationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Sesonske, A. (2005). The river runs, the round world spins. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 3(2), Sutoris, P. (2016). Visions of development: Films Division of India and the imagination of progress, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Online references Filmsdivision.india.tumblr.com