Bound tjy Abbey Bookbinding of South Wales Jnrt 3 Gaballa Workshops Clot Menter Excelsior Ind Est Cardiff CF14 3AY T: i 44 (0)29 2062 3290 2064808 F i 44 (0)29206? 5420 E info'^abbeybookbinding co uk www abbeybookbmdmq co uk Montage and Ethnicity: Experimental Film Practice and Editing in the Documentation of the Gujarati Indian community in Wales. — Apama Sharma University of Glamorgan 2007 Montage and Ethnicity: Experimental Film Practice and Editing in the Documentation of the Gujarati Indian community in Wales. Aparna Sharma A submission presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Glamorgan/ Prifysgol Morgannwg for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 2007 Acknowledgements I thank Professor Michael Punt for first encouraging me to consider undertaking doctoral research; engaging with my early research proposal; and later, inviting me to the Metatech Seminar series convened by himself. I am grateful for his persistent encouragement as editor of Leonardo Digital Reviews (MIT Press), where I have channelised some of the discourses and arguments arising from this research. I thank all members of staff and post-graduate students at the University of Glamorgan who have interacted with me, responded to my work and facilitated its development. I am particularly grateful to Professor John Beynon for his advice and support after reading a draft of my thesis this summer. I thank family and friends, near and far, for their loving support. Thank you to Jesse Schwenck and Martha Blassnigg — friends with whom I have shared intellectually provocative conversations and whose presence has more than made up for the absence of asangha in Cardiff— and in my life generally. Thank you to Caroline Lomax Daniels for making with me Crossings in a Beautiful Time — our time together was full of a lot of catching up, but eventually we traversed the geographical & cultural distances as well as the temporal gaps that history so carelessly smatters in our worlds. Our conversations at the editing table I will always cherish — they have taken away from me any reason to complain about the intellectual frustrations I felt on numerous editing tables before. Lastly, but most importantly, I thank my supervisors — Clive Myer for his encouragement and support at every step; and Dr. Teri Brewer for her guidance and patience while I developed this work. Besides echoing in this thesis, her readings of my thought and our passionate intellectual conversations across numerous landscapes will remain with me as they have shaped my perceptions about the entwinings of culture/s, history/ies and film practice. Most of all I owe her thanks for her unflinching faith and confidence in my vision that as the hours piled up and physical resources depleted, became the essential provocateurs for me to write, call every cut and sustain the intellectual pleasure of this journey. Copyright Unless otherwise stated, the copyright of this submission including a thesis entitled, Montage and Ethnicity: Experimental Film Practice and Editing in the Documentation of the Gujarati Indian Community in Wales, and a film, Crossings in a Beautiful Time, belongs to the author, Aparna Sharma. Contents Abstract 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Background and Motivations 1.2 The Subject 1.3 Montage 1.4 Documentary 1.5 Injecting the Self 1.6 Engaging with Thesis 2. Research Methodology 19 2.1 The Ethnographic Investment 2.2 The Film Process 2.3 Implications of Ethnography: Confusing the Etic and Emic Positions 3. Literature Review 37 3.1 Anthropology 3.2 Post-colonialism 3.3 Documentary 3.4 Film Theory 4. Evocations: Mapping the Terrain in the Subject Community 65 4.1 Migrations and Settlement in Cardiff 4.2 Provocations: Intersections of the community history and practice 4.3 Scope of the Practice: Beyond POV 5. Articulations: Subjectivities attended through Montage 86 5.1 Historical and Aesthetic Origins 5.2 Tagorean Synthesis in Cinema 5.3 The Dualisms of Gender 5.4 Conversations 6. Practice 107 6.1 Interrogations 6.2 Critical Juxtaposition 6.3 Extending the Work 6.4 Interventions 7. Conclusion 139 7.1 Summary 7.2 Research Implications 7.3 Future Work Bibliography 163 Appendices 177 Abstract This research, Montage and Ethnicity: Experimental Film Practice and Editing in the Documentation of the Gujarati Indian Community in Wales, posits montage practice involving a polyphonic film structure as relevant for documentation of ethnic subjects; and it explicates the implication of cultural context in montage techniques such as juxtaposition, thus countering the socio-cultural indifference and universalism implied by definitions of montage as an editing technique, alternative to mainstream cinema conventions. The submission includes an experimental film surrounding an ethnic subject: the Gujarati Indian community in Cardiff, which has been developed by combining filmmaking with ethnographic methods. The thesis of this submission articulates the conversations between montage and ethnography that extend conventional understandings of both practices. Ethnography emphasises cultural context in film practice; and polyphonic montage stresses ethnographically informed documentation beyond cultural description, intervening by disassembling ethnic constructs as homogenous or unitary. Deriving from the ethnographic imperative, the thesis includes revisitations of early montage practice, in particular the theorisations of Sergei M Eisenstein, alongside discussion of montage deployments in third world cultural practice to posit an intercultural claim in montage that gets obscured in discussions emphasising it as a modernist practice differing from the conventions and coda of cinematic realism. On this basis, it is argued that the move to equate the discourses of realism and modernism in the cinema with formal codes — a tendency that characterised classical film theory and later political modernism, is reductive. The intercultural claim evidenced in montage practice from the third world combines a critical stance against the categories of tradition and nation — derived from the thought of Rabindranath Tagore. The implication of this is that ethnicity gets reflected as a site of multiple and competing historico-cultural and social inscriptions. This complicates the binarisms of power accompanying historical movements such as colonialism. Montage practice in this submission emerges as an intellectual project that challenges binaries linked to the operations of hegemony and dominance pertaining to culture and cinema. Since this submission includes film practice and a written thesis, it is advised that a viewing of the submitted film precedes reading of the thesis. For engagement with the practice and thesis, appendix 1 lists the sequence breakdown of the submitted film. Time-code references have been included in specific chapters. CHAPTER 1 Introduction Montage is not only the organization of cinematic material, it is the implication of meaning — of a meaning that can only be implied, since films, like dreams, have a syntax which functions chiefly by association and accumulation. — Michael Wood, in Levenson, M. 1999: 223 This research, Montage and Ethnicity: Experimental Film Practice and Editing in the Documentation of the Gujarati Indian Community in Wales, arises from reflection upon my practice in television documentary and later independent filmmaking. It involves my interest in working with ethnic subjects through film. It contextualises concerns and criticisms towards my earlier work and utilises those to develop a film practice and dissertation that attend the issues raised by this research and its emergent implications. This research includes an experimental documentary film surrounding the Gujarati community in Cardiff. It experiments with montage practice that facilitates attending the subject of ethnicity through a complex register. The montage developed in the submitted film raises issue with the implication of cultural context in montage techniques of juxtaposition. Film experimentation is combined with an additional focus on ethics and responsibility towards informants included in the film. The research process has spanned a trajectory comprising pragmatic concerns in encounters with ethnic subjects through film, as well as discursive issues pertaining to that encounter. These are elaborated in the dissertation. Together the practice and dissertation formulate as a suggested intervention towards practice-based engagement with the subject of ethnicity. 1.1 Background and motivations My interest in examining the scope of film practice with relation to ethnic subjects arises from critical reflection upon the approaches towards mainstream documentary filmmaking that I had been trained in while working as a broadcast media-person in India, during 1999-2001 l . This experience had stirred me to interrogate the conventions of television documentaries for perpetuating inadequate understandings of subject matter. Bearing proximity to television news, television documentary content is often premised on individual and institutional confrontations and disputations, which I found were seldom probed within a wider socio-historical context. This aspect of television documentary can be contextualised in terms of its budgetary and broadcast scheduling constraints, as well as its situation within: 'a set of quiet tight, if often implicit conventions concerning the 'public interest' and 'due impartiality', on behalf of broadcast institutions. (Corner 1996: 23) At the heart of television documentary