A Cinema of Songs and People; the Films of Anand
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Anand Patwardhan, Jai Bhim Comrade 2012, fi lm still. Courtesy the artist. A Cinema Songs of and People: The Anand Films of Patwardhan TATE FILM TATE FILM A CINEMA OF SONGS AND PEOPLE: THE FILMS OF ANAND PATWARDHAN Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium 12 July 2013 – 28 July 2013 £5 / £4 concessions per screening Season ticket £30 / £20 concessions Rarely viewed in Britain, the films of Anand Patwardhan represent one of the most important achievements in documentary cinema. This season brings audiences into contact with an astonishing body of work whose profound commitment to radical change offers an experience like few others in contemporary cinema. This comprehensive retrospective, the first to be devoted to the major works of Patwardhan in London, devotes long overdue attention to a giant of cinema whose films inaugurated the independent documentary moment in India in the mid-1970s. Each film in the season will be introduced by Anand Patwardhan and The Otolith Collective and followed by audience discussion after the screening. Guest speakers include filmmaker John Akomfrah, critic T J Demos, artist and critic Janna Graham, political campaigner Kate Hudson and political historian Shirin Rai. Curated by The Otolith Collective Assistant Curator, Fiontán Moran Tate Film is supported by Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation 1978. Prisoners of Conscience of Prisoners Courtesy the artist. the Courtesy of Anand Patwardhan, Screening Screening Patwardhan, Anand A Cinema of Songs and People: The Films of Anand Patwardhan Scenes From the discarded us. You and I can do nothing. Unmaking of Secular India So don’t take photographs of the poor. Anand Patwardhan’s films focus upon the In the 1990s, Patwardhan embarked upon a wounded democratic polity of contemporary series of films addressing what critic Geeta India, continually returning to the painful Kapur calls the ‘unmaking of secular India.’1 entanglements of nationality, warfare, The growing communalism of Indian politics, religion, impoverishment, community, gender, ‘communal’ being the term used in India for caste and class. Born in 1950, Patwardhan sectarian and increasingly fundamentalist studied Sociology at Brandeis University in religious communities was, and indeed remains, Massachusetts at the end of the 1960s; after in direct conflict with the secular, socialist college, he worked with the Farm Workers traditions that inform Patwardhan’s aesthetic Union in California with Cesar Chavez, who and political thinking. later appeared in A Time to Rise, his 1981 documentary film on migrant farm labourers Although his films were always subject to in British Columbia. censorship, it is this context that explains the increased repression visited upon Patwardhan’s Patwardhan directed his first film in 1974, during films. The Central Board of Film Certification, a moment of intense upheaval in India. Waves to take just one example, demanded 21 cuts of Revolution 1975 captured the excitement of from War and Peace 2002 until ordered by the anti corruption mass movement in Bihar, court to pass the film without cuts, a year later. Northern India in 1974 and the repression Doordarshan, India’s national broadcasting imposed by Indira Gandhi when she declared corporation, refused to broadcast Father, Son and the state of Emergency in 1975. Such a film could Holy War, completed in 1995, until the Supreme never have been directed under the auspices of Court forced it to do so in 2006. the state run Films Division that produced and distributed documentaries in India. Patwardhan has gradually developed a range of aesthetic methods capable of puncturing Prisoners of Conscience 1978, his first film to the aggressive defences common to all be widely screened in India, emphasised the fundamentalisms. These methods stem from widespread policies of arrest and torture, both his style of shooting. As well as editing his films, before and after Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship, Patwardhan also operates the video camera while Bombay: Our City 1985, his deeply felt and at the same time, conducts interviews. In documentary, depicted the struggles of the frame, he tends to focus upon a single face Bombay’s millions of pavement dwellers. In a within a crowd, drawing its forms of speech key scene, Patwardhan filmed a Dalit woman and varieties of gaze towards his lens. In these holding her baby as she questions his motives: moments can be seen the young fanatic that expresses himself with the freedom of the Where can we go? Do you have a solution? mob and the upper class that articulates self- At least give us shelter during the monsoons. congratulation in the tone of self-pity. After that we’ll go somewhere. But you won’t shelter us even for four months. You just In the film In Memory of Friends 1990, there is want to earn a name taking photographs! a scene with young Sikh separatists who have What else can you do? The government has claimed the memory of the young Communist TATE FILM Bhagat Singh, executed by the British in 1931 From the 1990s onwards, Patwardhan’s films for rebellion. One man, wearing a pale green have increased in their gestation: seven years turban, white shirt and grey sleeveless jumper, for Father, Son and Holy War 1995, four years for speaks as the lens slowly travels towards War and Peace 2002 and fourteen years for Jai him. Patwardhan asks him, ‘Today you’re Bhim Comrade 2012. Perhaps the only equivalent commemorating Bhagat Singh? The youth to this form of incubational cinema might be agrees quietly. Patwardhan points out that, ‘he found in the films of Shinsuke Ogawa, a director called himself an atheist not a Sikh. He was a Patwardhan admires. Partially, this durational Communist.’ The man replies ‘No, later it came process stems from Patwardhan’s processual or out he was religious. He was Sikh to start with…’ ‘unpremeditated’ practice that cannot anticipate Patwardhan persists: ‘But he wrote a book the form or the subject of a film nor whether the Why I am an Atheist.’ The young separatists try to process of shooting might ever produce a film. change the subject. Patwardhan insists, ‘What Indeed, the epilogue so often appended after about the book on atheism?’ The man looks the closing scene of his films suggests that the down, away from the lens. From out of frame, ending is to be regarded as provisional as much someone declares: ‘That’s written by Congress. as conclusive. Those are not his words. He was a Sikh, not an atheist.’ What is striking is how War and Peace and Jai Bhim Comrade move between the quietude of Confronted with the historical evidence of the solitary interview, the noise of the crowd their hero’s atheism, the young Sikhs do not interview and the focus upon the activities that rethink their position; on the contrary, they constitute the mechanisms of the media event. reaffirm it. In this scene, which recurs, with Patwardhan’s films alert you to the format variations throughout his films, Patwardhan’s of the public event staged for television and aim is not to persuade the fundamentalist to newspapers; the festival or the rally sponsored correct their faith. It is to reveal the forcefield by BJP or by Shiv Sena, the main fundamentalist of faith that reassures the fundamentalist of parties, are especial favourites. Watching their duty to deny the truth. Scenes such as this Patwardhan’s films entails an education confront the viewer with the realisation that the in watching the ways that crowds watch fundamentalist impulse is not to solve problems politicians perform and listen to performers but instead to remove all possibility of solution. politicize. In this way, one begins to gain a heightened awareness of the processes that This sobering revelation is passed on to the are accumulated and filtered until, in the words viewer. It is often a moment of noise that is of John Akomfrah, ‘particular events attain the counterpointed to interviews that summon the definitive status of the real’.3 qualities of what Sadie Benning calls ‘time and air’ into the atmosphere of thinking.2 Whether Perhaps Patwardhan’s most consistent cinematic it is the Dalit woman that hesitates to speak signature is the song. Whether it is the harvest because she is so accustomed to being ignored song that concludes A Time to Rise or the or a villager seated indoors carefully narrating Internationale that is sung in Punjabi in In the course of events, a context is created for Memory of Friends or the song sung by Vilas watching people making up their mind about Ghoghre, the charismatic Dalit bard, that guides what they think in order to arrive, gradually, at the listener through the travails of poverty in an understanding of their present situation. Bombay: Our City or the anti-caste song A Cinema of Songs and People: The Films of Anand Patwardhan We Are Not Your Monkeys, that Patwardhan BIOGRAPHIES co-wrote with Dalit poets to critique the Hindu is the name adopted by The Otolith epic Ramayana, the song conjures powers of The Otolith Collective Group for its public programme of curatorial projects, gathering and solidarity, memory and futurity screenings and discussions. Recent screenings include that play an important role in the montage and Peter Watkins, The Journey 1987, Tate Modern, 2013 and the mood of the Patwardhan film. The Militant Image screening series, International Institute of Visual Arts, 2010-present. Recent curatorial projects include Mark Fisher and Justin Barton: On Vanishing Land, Jai Bhim Comrade indeed is a documentary The Showroom, 2013. narrated by songs. It is a documentary in the form of a musical that reflects upon cinema’s John Akomfrah is a filmmaker, artist and theorist who power to commemorate the mnemonic power lives and works in London.