Examines modes of resistance within contemporary Indian documentary culture and films
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Identifies and examines a range of texts, sites and practices that are central to documentary culture and study, in effect mapping the field of documentary culture in contemporary India
Expands the conceptualisation of documentary resistance in a context organised by specific political and historical factors e.g., caste, religion, colonisation, distinct from Western or Eurocentric contexts of cultural production
Not limited to dominant definitions of ‘political’ in documentary, uses alternative ways of defining politics through a wider consideration of textual and extra textual factors
While sizable literature exists on the themes, issues and voices that constitute resistance in historical Indian documentary cinema, less is known about contemporary modes of resistance in Indian documentary. This volume identifies languages and practices of resistance constructed by Indian documentary practitioners located in contemporary global and national contexts organised by majoritarian political discourse, rising social inequalities, tightening media regulatory mechanisms and variable access to digital technologies. Extending its analytical lens beyond textual politics, the volume offers an original conceptualisation of how we identify, mobilise, and recuperate acts of resistance as both represented in documentary and those represented by the organisation of documentary practice e.g., documentary exhibition, curation, education, and criticism. Combining scholarly essays and practitioner writing, the volume offers a timely reconsideration of how central debates and issues of power and representation in documentary may be studied as objects of analysis and as subjective accounts of individual experience, decisions, and actions relating to documentary aesthetics and practice.
List of Abbreviations Introduction: Resistance in the digitised present - Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray Part 1. Critical perspectives on documentary aesthetics and form
Chapter 1. The corporeality of homelessness in Cities of Sleep: social aesthetics and an unreliable narrator - Shweta Kishore
Chapter 2: "Canine Spaces": Kolkata’s Slum Dogs - Veena Hariharan Chapter 3: "Threadbearing": Journeys with our Subjects and our Documentary Narratives - K P Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro Part II. Representation of lived experience Chapter 4: Personal is Political: Documentary and Intimacy - Shabnam Sukhdev
Chapter 5: Making films from and about the Margins - Lipika Singh Darai
Chapter 6: Against all odds – a filmmaker’s quest to make films in North-East India - Haobam Paban Kumar
Chapter 7: Experiencing and Representing Conflict: Encounters of a Kashmiri Filmmaker - Raja Shabir Khan
Chapter 8: Documentary & Oppositional Bahujan Agency - Jyoti Nisha Part III. Resistance in practice
Chapter 9: Curating Documentary Film and Video Art in a Museum: Reflections from Loss and Transience - Rashmi Devi Sawhney & Lucía Imaz King
Chapter 10: Working with Time: Editing the Documentary - Sameera Jain
Chapter 11: Cultural Documentary: Dialogues Between Aesthetics and Society - Ein Lall
Chapter 12: The Politics of Image Making - R V Ramani
Chapter 13: Two Starting Points: The Sonic in my Films -Yashaswini
Chapter 14: Conversations, Confusions, Confessions: Living with and Working in Cinema - Anupama Srinivasan
Chapter 15: About Critique: Indian Media & Documentary Cinema - Kunal Ray & Mochish KS Epilogue: On Building Documentary Cultures of Resistance, An interview with K.P. Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro
Indian documentary films have served as ventriloquists for state reason, and then as tribunes defending the people. Increasingly, over the past three decades, they have grown to include a rich repertoire of ways of linking the personal and the political, unpacking and rethinking assumptions of majority and minority, of secular realism and its critiques, and of technique and exhibition. Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray have assembled an expansive and deeply nuanced set of essays on these issues and more, from scholars, filmmakers, and curators, reflecting the state of the art on Indian documentary film. This book is a necessary addition to any library.
Shweta Kishore lectures in Screen and Media at RMIT University, Australia. She is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice and has published widely on Indian documentary, documentary ethics, feminist film, and activist film festivals. Shweta is a documentary practitioner and has curated documentary and artist cinema programmes for the Kochi Muziris Biennale (India), The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre (Vietnam), and the Melbourne International Film Festival (Australia).
Kunal Ray teaches literary and cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune, India. His writings on art and culture regularly appear in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times amongst other publications. He co-edited Shabd aur Sangeet- Unraveling Song-Texts in India. He is also the co-founder and co-editor of On Eating – A Multilingual Journal of Food & Eating.
