Whither Indian documentaries?

The overall climate is bleak wherein only a few odd films make it to audiences of the like-minded

Partha Chatterjee Delhi

Documentary films have always been a part of film heritage. Amongst the durable images in cinema is that of a train arriving in the station of La Ciotat, France (1895). It was captured on films by brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who were newsreel cameramen. Soon after, Melies, a magician, also French, was making fantasies in studio-bound conditions. Soon after the First World War, a Canadian fur-trading company sponsored an American Mining engineer, Robert Flaherty, to do Nanook of the North on the lives of Eskimos in the North Pole.

The fact that Flaherty had chosen particular families of Eskimos to film over a period of time made them “actors”. In all his subsequent films like Moana, Man of Aran, The Louisiana Story, The Land, he used similar technique; although in the last film mentioned, his approach to his subject, the Great Depression, that blighted the lives of millions of Americans including farmers, was stark in sharp contrast to his customary lyricism.

At around the same time, another kind of documentary film was being made in other parts of the world. Rene Claire, amongst the most creative of French fiction filmmakers, did an intense, poetic documentary on the Eiffel Tower. In England, John Grierson spearheaded a movement which dealt with the social realities of the day.

Edgar Anstay made Housing Problems on the travails of the lower middle class. Basil Wright’s Night Train was on the postal-service-on-wheels. Contact by Paul Rotha was the first publicity film to cover the routes and places reached by the planes of Imperial Airways, now known as British Airways.

Russia, then Soviet Union, to consolidate the communist revolution, used cinema, particularly documentaries, to reach the people. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and Three Songs for Lenin, along with Alexander Medvedkin’s film Train photographing the nation-building process through the country, gave a new meaning to the term “documentary”.

Information Films of India created by the British in the 1930s tried to connect with audiences heavily under the sway of fictional stories. The leading lights of the Indian documentaries were Ezra Mir and Dr Pathy, a physicist who gave up his calling for the cinema. The Second World War imposed certain restrictions on the length of documentaries due to the paucity of raw stock. Most of what was available was diverted towards the making of films on subjects such as military training, civil defence and nursing. The usual length of any information film was of 20 minutes and which eventually became a norm even in independent India.

Post-1947, Films Division of India (FD), a government organisation and prime source of production/distribution for documentaries, also imposed on directors – both in-house and freelance – the two-reel length excepting of the rarest of cases. Major talents like Hari S Dasgupta, Fali Billimoria chafed at the bit and still managed to produce some enduring films.