All posts by Suresh Nautiyal

Documentary cinema: Long way to go

September 15, 2024 | By Suresh Nautiyal
Documentary cinema: Long way to go

THE future of documentary cinema in India has to be promising and bright given its role of educating the people at large. Undoubtedly, a section of the documentary filmmakers is already adapting to the international filmmaking trends and some of them have found success as well on the global stage by adapting to the international trends like focus on the characters and taking the dramatic curves. For example, “The Elephant Whisperers” won the documentary short Oscar in 2022, and “All That Breathes” won both the Sundance and Cannes documentary awards the same year. The digital revolution is also helping the documentary filmmakers to compete on a level playing field, as the cost of digital acquisition is lower than that of the traditional film stock.

Dr John Grieson, the sociologist turned filmologist who was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker and often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary films coined the term “documentary” in a review of Robert J. Flaherty’s Moana in 1926. He was much inspired by the French word documentaire. This genre, however, reached India soon after Dr Grieson, Paul Rotha Basil Wrighty, Harry Watts and others launched the documentary movement in Britain.

But even today the destination has not been reached and still miles and miles to go because in a time of alluring networks, it seems there are no takers for the documentaries. Unfortunately, this is a worldwide phenomenon in general and in India in particular.

Despite some success stories, the documentary filmmakers in India continue to face challenges, such as a lack of funding and lack of producers coming forward to support the documentary cinema projects. Some filmmakers also turn to the online crowdfunding but only a few have succeeded in this.

While the purpose of the mainstream cinema is to communicate through artistic excellence and entertainment, the objective of the documentary cinema remains fulfilling the purpose of educating the people and the government leaders. But regrettably, the Indian documentary cinema hardly has the government patronage. This is evident in the film festivals held in the country where documentary cinema is given a step-motherly treatment.

The film festivals of short and documentary films, where the filmmakers get into the serious business of screening films, holding seminars and workshops, do not have the resources to attract the larger public. All this does not speak of a very bright future of the documentary cinema in the country. As mentioned already, a lack of adequate funds has been hampering the natural growth of documentary cinema.

The Films Division of the Government of India is supposed to produce most of the documentary films but lately it has hardly produced significant documentary films. The Film Division needed to establish its own small theatres throughout the country to screen only the documentary and short films made by it as well as by the private filmmakers to make the documentary films an awareness movement. Instead, it created a kind of monopoly of screening their films in the commercial theatres, which is no longer in vogue. The documentaries produced by the Film Division and other government agencies only served as breaks for the majority of the audience or they simply ignored these films. Through the Defence of India Rules, the British had made it mandatory for every commercial theatre in the country to show either a documentary or a newsreel in every show. This practice continued till the recent past.

As mentioned earlier also, the lack of proper distribution system of the documentary films further hampers the growth of documentary films in the country. This has led many private documentary filmmakers to cater to an overseas market. With such an uncertain future, some very well-known documentary and short filmmakers have had no option but to switch over to the feature films.

The documentary filmmakers will definitely welcome creation of an autonomous institution to take care of their needs. The lack of a proper distribution network has already stifled the growth of documentary films. When documentaries are used as prosaic and subdued sermons or shown at the film festivals occasionally, how can a documentary filmmaker survive in a climate where there is no demand for their films?

A documentary film has to document something, not succumb to be a tool of the government propaganda. Earlier, the audiences were quick to notice that politics and propaganda were intelligently mingled with the documentaries and other short films. They also lost the charm of being the documentaries. Most of the Film Division films thus resulted in artificial portrayal with no sense of reality.

When the multitude of entertainment channels sprang up, the documentary cinema almost became a thing of the past. Today, the multitude of the digital platforms have posed further challenges to the documentary cinema. Another reason is that the documentary cinema has not seen a transformation similar to the feature film over the decades, of course, except a few exceptions.

People generally are not interested in documentaries because of their boring content, and then they have the choice of more alluring and entertaining channels. This means the documentaries come at the fag end of the priorities. Nobody is interested in nostalgic history about the times when short films on mass movements automatically led to a political consciousness, as in the filming of meeting and procession of the Bengal Partition movement. A concerted effort can change this attitude.

Now, the time is ripe for the documentary filmmakers to rebel and let their cameras and microphones roam the streets and houses of today’s life. The poetic, the humanistic and the sociological attitude of the documentary cinema can only be reflected prominently through the documentaries. Moreover, it has now grown into an instrument with a thousand serious jobs to train doctors, nurses, soldiers, mechanics, astronauts, teachers, scientists, biologists and the like.

Kudos to the documentary filmmakers who are working against all odds to make quality films. That they face problems at every step was evident when Anand Patwardhan’s film “Bombay Our City” ran into problems with the Doordarshan and finally could be shown at 11 O’clock at night.

Dada Saheb Phalke, who initiated the industry of feature films, himself made a number of short films on the subjects like the funerals of national leaders, Gokhale and Tilak, or on the Indian National Congress meet of 1918. Even after the advent of feature films, documentary films based on Mahatma Gandhi’s life, the Prince of Wale’s visit to India and similar events remained strong attractions for the viewers. Gradually, all social realities in cultural activities and above all political upheavals came within the purview of the short films which were to definitely evolve it into a distinct genre propagated by Dr Grieson.

In a nutshell, the documentary cinema, which is a medium with an immense power to move people’s mind for good, is yet to be explored fully so that it is not treated with great contempt and disdain. We need to remember that the short films had their day before the feature film was born, and in the western world, the short films were announced and advertised as prominently as the feature films.

We need ecological sustainability

September 28, 2024 | By Suresh Nautiyal
We need ecological sustainability

TRANSLATING grave environmental issues into ecological democracy movement is an enormous task before us all in the globalised world and chosen globalised warming. In fact, the subject looks a dried-out recipe of the tech-savvy modern world even as we wish to move forward in search of ecological sustainability that has been the object of fierce debate in the midst of emblematic North seeing nature as an indiscriminately exploitable resource for their consumption. On top of that, their institutions — which have the responsibility to produce right thinking planners and decision-makers — are busy in reinforcing the elite Northern self-centredness.

The result is that the problems related to the ecological sustainability are neither limited to the specific areas not related to the specific local issues. They have huge dimensions spreading out to larger part of the world in different forms and with differing levels of gravity.

MK Gandhi visualised such a scenario decades ago, and eminent naturalist writer-philosopher, Henry David Thoreau — who had moved from 1845 to 1847 to a hut on the edge of Walden Pond, a small glacial lake near Concord, guided by the maxim “Simplify, simplify” — had foreseen the grim scenario long back.

Now, like Thoreau and Gandhi, ecologists too are expressing alarm regarding the survival of the Planet Earth. But the reality is different. No rich nation has any regards for exercising ecological austerity. More than a decade back, I had read in an Indian newspaper that Japan, the host of the Kyoto Protocol, was unable to cut emission of its greenhouse gases as promised under the Kyoto Protocol. And, the US brazenly did not even bother for the Protocol in the first place. The concept of the carbon crediting has already shown that it ultimately served the designs of North and was only adding to the environmental woes.

According to the OSPAR Assessment Portal, the total inputs of the heavy metals like mercury, cadmium and lead to the Greater North Sea have reduced, since 1990. However, improved analytical procedures for mercury and cadmium since 1990 make it difficult to be certain what proportion of observed changes are due to reduced discharges and emissions.

Actually, there is an inbuilt violence in the very manner of North’s progress and also in the manner in which it has been paid for by the developing world. The “Third World” continues to be a dumping ground for the toxic wastes of the technologised “First World”. The issue is so huge that the West would even agree to the argument of ecological compensation demanded by the global South. Yet, none knows who is going to own the responsibility of causing irreparable damages to the South and Mother Earth as a whole, particularly, after the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth century.

The revolution gave major shift to technological, socio-economic, and cultural conditions first in some western countries and later in the rest of the world. And as for the enormity of this, the least cost of damages that can be done is to give up the path dominated by high (destructive!) technology that most of the times generates only non-degradable and hazardous junk including nuclear waste.

In the face of such a threat, Gandhi would have warned against following the destructive technological path. His firm belief was that if India were to attain real freedom, the people had no way but to live in villages and simple houses made of the cheap natural materials available locally, and not in urban enclaves strewn around a palace of authority and opulence. This principle applies to the whole humanity, even today.

And, we, perhaps, can realise this goal by not surrendering to meaningless greed. Instead, by leading simple life with dignity. Several communities in forest and rural areas of the developing world like the indigenous or Adivasi people, subsistence farmers, fisher communities, artisans or local service providers do exist in the South, and certainly a few in the North.

In all humility, these communities remain content with simple, dignified and natural life-styles. The richness of life has also inculcated in them the sense of belonging to Nature without disturbing the local ecology. The Muslim indigenous Gujjars, mostly vegetarians, in the Central Himalayan Region of Uttarakhand are just an example. They, with their cattle, live in the forest areas and do not disturb the ecology. Instead, they conserve and strengthen it in their own way. So, Gandhi was right in saying, “… the Nature has enough for every human’s need but not for somebody’s greed…”

If we followed Gandhi, simple and stress-free life could have been our natural motto in our respective places or maybe this could have made the world more beautiful, peaceful and ecologically more democratic, diverse and sound.

But sadly, we find ourselves stranded at crossroads if we look at the damages we have done to the Mother Earth – the damages that have been done carelessly, recklessly and indiscriminately since we think more about our greed, and do not mind unthoughtful consumption hardly thinking about protecting the scarce and non-renewable natural bounties that selflessly provide us everything.

We seem to have forgotten that the natural bounties are not resources, and are not infinite. Most of them are depleting or disappearing very fast, like once perennial glaciers. Gandhi had warned against destruction and violence. He also spoke against technology without a human face as he saw modern technology merely as a tool for increasing bodily comforts and consequently decreasing attention to the inner being and the conscience and soul of man.

A lot of enlightened people in the North too are concerned about saving their environment or ecology of the world as a whole. But, can they do it without doing away with too much of possessiveness, vulgar consumerism, and by not sharing the bounties with others? Could they listen to what Thoreau had conveyed to the people finding the contemporary life irresistible?

Thoreau’s goal was actually to simplify his life by living simply. He did that by facing the world with bare essentials of life, by strictly limiting his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with the outside world. Even a century later, in 1954, EB White wrote about the relevance of Thoreau’s philosophy in the Yale Review: “Thoreau, very likely without quite knowing what he was up to, took man’s relation to nature and man’s dilemma in society and man’s capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day.”

Today, the simple philosophy of Thoreau and Gandhi is most relevant as human’s symbiotic relationship with nature is extremely threatened. And if the symbiotic relationship is strained, ecological sustainability would not be guaranteed as these two terms ‘symbiotic relationship’ and ‘ecological sustainability’ are synonymous to each other. And unfortunately, we have conveniently forgotten Thoreau as well as Gandhi. Don’t we need ecological sustainability anymore?

(The columnist a bilingual journalist for the last 40 years. Have worked for Univarta, DD News, AIR News, The Observer of Business and Politics, Amar Ujala, Combat Law magazine on human rights and the law — both in English and Hindi, and UNI (United News of India). Was Consulting Editor of the UNI (United News of India) — incharge of the Central Desk and the international news. He has edited more than 80 books and journals in English and Hindi; written some 20 plays in Hindi, English and Garhwali languages; and obviously, a lot of poetry in English and Hindi. Green Politics is my chosen vogue.)