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.

Before them came Paul Zills, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. He made two of the most poetic films in the genre, namely, An Indian Village and Ripening Seed about unwed motherhood. Zills left for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the late 1950s and continued his good work there. Indian filmmakers, however, remained tied to the apron strings of the FD and had to get by as best as they could, publicising the “good work” done by the Government of India in rural, suburban and urban India. Amongst the directors sponsored by FD was Sukhdev who made Before the Eclipse and Miles to Go on constitutional reforms. In that vitiated creative climate a few directors managed to flourish. Idiosyncratic and brilliant Mani Kaul directed Chitrkathi and Nomad Puppeteers of Rajasthan and subsequently the moving Arrival, in which migrant labourers arrive in Mumbai like so many sacks of vegetables or grains.

The government-run Doordarshan, the lone television network in the country at that time, happened to be the other outlet for documentaries, apart from cinema halls that were forced to show FD productions. The lot of the filmmakers did not change noticeably although there was more work available in the 1980s, especially from the central and state governments to publicise the work done on various projects.

Simultaneously the proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) came as a boon to many filmmakers including Deepa Dhanraj and her cinematographer husband Navroz Contractor. Money was available for documentaries on issues of education, health, social justice and protection of the environment.

Ironically, the avenues for showing such documentaries began to dwindle because of the rise of satellite television and the proliferation of TV channels which modelled themselves on their US counterparts. Suddenly, game shows, chat shows, soap operas took over all the airtime. The documentarist was left in the lurch. The enormous advantage gained by the advent of video – first analog and then digital – in terms of speed and economy was all but lost as there was hardly any outlet left apart from Doordarshan. Documentaries, rarely, if ever, made money for the sponsors, hence the chance of them being aired any commercial TV channel was nil.

There was a strong climate change in the TV and cinema viewership. Suddenly, a huge amount of money began to circulate amongst the small, upwardly mobile middle classes possibly because hawala money was being re-routed through the non-resident Indian investment channels. Came consumerism and a change of taste and imitation of things all-American. In this make-believe feel-good world, there was no place for the social documentary. If at all a documentary could be shown on a commercial TV channel it would perforce have to be connected with tourism or glamourised versions of dance and music.

Dissemination of information as such has no place in such an environment although information documentaries dealing with a wide variety of subjects shot almost exclusively on digital video continue to be sponsored and made. They are seen mainly in small festivals and smaller halls by like-minded people.