In conversation: Ashish Avikunthak with Amrit Gangar
"Cinema Prayoga: Indian Experimental Films
1913-2006" eds., Brad Butler
& Karen Mirza, 2006 (London: no.w.here).
He was a regular and unique presence Ð in Mumbai Ð wherever there were film screenings. But I think he felt more comfortable in Screen Unit, the film club I headed then, maybe because of its craziness, because of its youthful and restless curiosities around. Screen Unit always supported the cinematography on the edge, the non-absolutist quests into its archaeology. A decade ago, I remember, I was on the selection panel of the Mumbai International Film Festival of Documentary, Short & Animation Films (MIFF) and a short film called Et cetera came for viewing, moments passed; some started yawning, some started scratching their heads, some craned their necks forwards holding their chins like perhaps RodinÕs Thinker, etc. etc. And the obvious happened; Et cetera was put to vote and rejected. I was dejected. Not because it was a film by someone I knew but because it was a film that attempted to seriously explore the contours of time and human existence in its tetralogy of four separate films. I just conjecture how many such films might have been thrown out of broader festival audience viewing because of certain level of conservatism or resistance to prayagaÕs oddity.
Curiously, even in his lifestyle Ashish looked an odd man out -in his khadi dhoti, kurta, a black ribbon on his sleeve, metal-rimmed specs and black silky moustaches! He always wore black ribbon in support of the ÔSave NarmadaÕ movement and protest against the big dam and massive human displacement. Though a Punjabi, Ashish Chadha (he changed to Avikunthak on the way) is a complete Bengali by spirit Ð all this is part of his jeevan-prayoga (life-experiment). He grew up in Kolkata near the Kalighat temple.
Filmmaking is not his full time profession. Academically, he is a student of archaeology at the Stanford University in the USA, where his dissertation is on the anthropology of Indian archaeology. This followed his undergraduate degrees in social work and archaeology in Mumbai and Pune Universities, respectively. He has worked as a folklorist among the Warli aborigines in Maharashtra. He is also a still photographer and his b&w photographs of KolkataÕs iconic Howrah Bridge were exhibited at the NCPA in Bombay in 1999. Self-taught and financed, he is a prayaga filmmaker for over a decade. His works have been shown in film festivals around the world. This interview was held on the cyberspace, densely surrounded by serendipity.
Amrit: Whenever I see your film Kalighat Fetish, I remember Mahatma Gandhi's visit to the Kalighat temple. He was quite disturbed by the killing of animals there. He asked his host, ÒHow is it that Bengal with all its knowledge, intelligence, sacrifice, and emotion tolerates this slaughter?Ó (Source: GandhiÕs autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth). In your film, you give so much time and space to the ÔviolentÕ images. Is it your Ôexperiment with truthÕ?
Ashish: Kalighat Fetish is contemplation
on two ideas - transgression and morbidity. They are connected by the act of
transformation, leading to death. Both the violence of sacrifice and the
performance of transformation for me are transgressive acts performed as an
engagement with morbidity. They are part of the same act of reverence and
anguish. For me, Kalighat Fetish
is an outcome of my own interaction with the memory of death and dying. The
'brutality' of the sacrifice is for me a meditation on the morbidity of death.
Personally, the film is a cinematographic rendition of memory. The film has
been shot in two spatial formations that are an integral part of my memoryscape
- the house I was raised and the famous neighbourhood Kali temple in Kolkata - the Kalighat.
My home has been an ambivalent space for me - I don't really have very fond memories, nor do I have any terrible memories of the space- it has always been, and very simply, the house where I spent eighteen years of my life from 1973-1991. My parents don't live in that house any more, but we still own it. Over time, it has virtually become an ossified memory space, where I have shot other films too, Dancing Othello and End Note. Whenever I go to Kolkata, I spend a lot of time in this house.
Kalighat Fetish is a manifestation of these recollections - more an experiment with memories than with truth. And unlike Gandhi I do not claim to inhabit any moral universe. Gandhi's comment originated from the Vaishnava sectarian belief that he firmly held and was raised in. He was unable to appreciate the ritualistic necessity of the sacrifice within the domain of the Tantrik Shakta cult of Kalighat.
Amrit: Were your parents religious?
Ashish: Yes, both my parents are religious but have a very different sense of
practice. My mother comes from a Punjabi Hindu family and is a staunch believer
of Krishna cult, so much so she now runs a community Krishna temple in
Calcutta, which is now nearly her full time occupation. Where as my father came
from a staunch Punjabi Arya Samaji
family who had never entered any temple in his lifetime- a
strict non-idol worshipper, however we would have the Vedic fire ritual (havan), regularly if not every week.
My mother was a regular visitor to the Kalighat temple. For the first time, I saw a buffalo being sacrificed was during my visit to the temple during the Kali Puja festival. At the age of six or seven, I was simultaneously fascinated and abhorred by the event. Not really traumatized. Later when I started roaming on the streets of Kolkata alone, I would often go to Kalighat, just to see these daily sacrifices as part of the temple ritual.
Amrit: Tarpor? And then?
Ashish: And then, during my high school studies, I volunteered to work for
about two years at "Nirmal Hirdaya" Ð the home for the dying run my Mother Teresa's
"Missionaries of Charity". Very close to Kalighat, this institution
was transformed from a dharmashala.
It was given to Mother Teresa to run her home for the dying, the first
institution with which "Missionaries of Charity" was formed. It was
here that I encountered death very closely when I saw inmates dying before my
eyes. The film in a certain way a manifestation of these memories and
experiences.
Amrit: How come you turned atikatha into fetish? Atikatha in Sanskrit would mean Ôan exaggerated tale or idle, meaningless talkÕ. And why do you call it ÔfetishÕ? The Bengali title is Kalighat Atikatha. Which is not fetish! Is it because of ÔfetishÕ that it has found place in Anglo-Saxon gay and lesbian film events?
Ashish: Atikatha as
is used in the title is a Bengali word, which, as in Sanskrit, means an
excessive tale, an intense tale (ati = intense / excessive / exceedingly, katha = tale). I usually try to play around with the
English and the vernacular titles in all my films; it is mostly a response to
the difference: a way of causing disjunction. And also I think there are
different audiences that I am trying to woo with the titles, but eventually
they are just titles, the impact has to emerge from the work itself. I feel the
reason the film has got some positive response from the West has little to do
with the title but rather it has to more with the intrinsic context, which is
primarily a juxtaposition of cross-dressing as understood by the West and the ritualization
in the context of Kali worship.
Amrit: Your cinema makes me feel kaal,
its temporality. Do you treat cinematography as a temporal art?
Ashish: In a certain sense I do look at filmmaking as 'sculpting in time' as
Trakovsky puts it. And my foray into filmmaking was directly an attempt at
playing with time- all the four films in Et cetera, are directly an attempt at engaging with real time, the fact that
they are single shot, single take, unedited films. For me, as a temporal
experience they are most linear cinematic narrative, most pure. These films,
rather than sculpting in time, were slicing time. However I feel video art has
been more successful as an engagement with real time. I look at my films as an
attempt at invoking 'kaal' as a metaphysical entity, rather than 'kaal' as a
temporal category; Et cetera and Kalighat
Fetish being articulation of such an invocation.
Amrit: Your body of work shows preference for the celluloid. Any special
reason? What do you think of the video, the digital technology?
Ashish: I do not differentiate between celluloid and video within an aesthetic
framework, as most filmmakers tend to do. I believe this distinction will not
hold ground for long, as with growing possibilities of digital technology, it
will be very difficult to differentiate between a cinematic
image and a digital image aesthetically. My distinction between celluloid and
video is within a framework of a "theory of work and practice" and my
preferences are for the "aura" of the mechanical image rather than
the digital one.
Amrit: On one hand, the digital technology has made it easier and
cheaper for anyone to make films or installation, while on the other this very
phenomenon has thrown challenges at creativity. We donÕt really see many
astounding works nowadays. The general tendency is to take short cuts.
Ashish: With the digital revolution, there has been an exponential increase in
the realm of image production. Digital technology has democratised the
possibility of image production and now virtually anyone with very little
money, as also little expertise, can create a professional image. You can say
that the digital technology has domesticated the visual image making process
within the confines of its economic logic and portability. In a way what has
actually happened with the rise of digital technology is that the "theory
of work and practice" associated with filmmaking has been devalued. Now it
is not necessary to spend endless years in a film school or as a trainee in the
film industry to make moving images. The need to master a craft has given way
to just the importance of the final ÔproductÕ. What has changed with digital
technology is a theory of work and practice; it has given rise to a new theory
of work, which is driven by the ability to produce more images, faster, cheaper
and in great numbers. This technology has made image making rampant and
commonplace. The loss of the aura of image that Walter Benjamin laments
about in his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has further diminished and is nearly getting erased with the rise
of the digital technology and its ability to produce images ubiquitously.
Amrit: How do you differentiate the two images?
Ashish: I like making films on celluloid primarily because somewhere I am still
wedded to the idea of the aura that is preserved in a cinematic image. For me
the cinematic image is more sacred than the digital image, primarily because
the image emerges from a theory of work, which values the aura of an image.
Because the cinematic image is more expensive to make, its production is
heavily depended on craftsmanship and I believe somewhere the aura of the image
is retained. It is because of this that I enjoy the theory of work and practice
that is associated with celluloid filmmaking.
But let me tell you, it is not nostalgia. It is a preference for theory of work that does not allow for opulence (ability to shoot few hours rather than hundreds of hours in video); the image is not instantaneously produced; neither is there instant editing, and precisely because of that there is room for contemplation. It is this process that I believe preserves the aura of the mechanical image. I would even go to the extent of making films on 8mm rather than on video.
Amrit: You are archaeologist by your academic discipline and have also made an archaeological film. Somehow your films seem to me to be archaeology of human mind, of human psyche and relationships with themselves, with others, with spaces they inhabit, the absurdities they encounter.
Ashish: The film you are talking about is called Rummaging for Pasts:
Excavating Sicily, Digging Bombay. I had made it
for an archaeology conference in Stanford (Narrative Pasts | Past Narratives,
2001). Let me reiterate, space is very important to me. I look at cinema as an
exploration both in spatiality of our existence and temporal inconsistency.
Mostly I use space as a metaphor for existential predicament and it recurs
constantly in all my films. Technically I do that by using wide-angle lenses,
hand held movements and high-speed film. The spatiality becomes an implicit way
of exploring space between relationship as in End Note and way of investigating the self in Kalighat Fetish. In both the films, spaces become memory spaces, as metaphors for
an inconceivable loss. The usage of b/w, hi-contrast stock and colour,
edited in an in-concerted way is also a formal process through which I try to
weave temporal and spatial disjunctions to produce a form of existential
predicament that is located in a loss, a bereavement of past, that is not only
nostalgic but is also traumatic. I tried this very consciously while making the
short fiction End Note.
Amrit: Any particular reason for selecting Samuel Beckett for End Note ?
Ashish: I discovered Beckett in my college days in Bombay, when I saw a Marathi
rendition of Waiting for Godot there. Around
that time I was also exploring Theatre of the Absurd, which I chanced upon
while reading existential literature. I was very influenced by Beckett, not so
much by his longer plays but by his short ones. His ability to produce
philosophically profound dramatic works with a strong sense of brevity and
sparseness awed me. So much so that in my college in Pune we performed his
shortest piece ever - Scream. The choice to
decide to make Beckett's Come & Go on which End
Note is based is located during my engagement with
Beckett in those days.
The play haunts me because of its intricate formal structure, cyclical in
nature. Within this formalization, Beckett produces a profound sense of trauma.
It is this sense of melancholic trauma that I wanted to bring out in the film.
This is a very personal film for me, incredibly personal, for not only has it
been shot is my childhood house and neighbourhoods, but specifically because I decided
to cast women dear to me in this film. It has my wife, her sister and my
cousin. I always wanted to make a film that connected to me in a very intimate
way hence I avoided professional actors. The film was shot in two schedules
over two years, in December of 2000 and in the summer of 2002. Because of
terrible lack of money and technical problems it took another two years to
finish.
Formally, the first part of the film is a deconstruction of Come & Go, and the second part a kind of reconstruction. This was done in
order to destabilise Beckett's brevity and to simultaneously exacerbate the
trauma.
Amrit: Could you tell me something about your still-to-be completed feature film?
Ashish: The feature film Nirakar Chhaya (Shadows
Formless) is an 80-minute interpretation of a novella Pandavpuram written in Malayalam by Sethumadhvan. I read this book in English
translation in 1998, during one of my fieldworks among Warli aborigines.
I was fascinated by the story, which deals with a lonely, abandoned wife who
conjures up a paramour in her imagination. The narrative in the book has been
set in such a way that reader believes that the paramour is real and only in
the end do we come to know that it was actually her fantasy.
I take the kernel of this story and try to experiment with the idea of
imagination as a movement between real and non-real and end the film
unresolved, as we do not know if she was really imagining. Shot entirely
in Kolkata, the film (both colour and b/w) is in Bengali. The narrative is embedded
with a symbolic world that is designed to make the film into a deeply
melancholic experience. The film has original score by a music composer who
just completed her Doctorate in music composition at Stanford University.
Amrit: And with Beckett your preference is also Shakespeare, in Dancing
Othello, for example.
Ashish: Dancing Othello is a political film,
unlike the rest. It stands apart from rest of my work. The idea of the film
took roots when I saw Arjun Raina perform in Stanford. I then decided that
I would like to make a film on his Khelkali, which was juxtaposition between Kathakali performance and Shakespearian dramaturgy. The core concept of the film was to subvert both the traditions of classical art to bring out the irony of postcolonial situation. This is done throughout the film as the narrative moves between Kathakali, Shakespeare and the performance of postcolonial mimesis done by Arjun. The film ends with a self-reflexive turn with the last monologue that Arjun delivers, where he gesticulates and mocks the filmmaker for making a self-indulgent film. This film is most influenced by my academic training as a cultural anthropologist. Through this cinematic text I attempt to grapple with the irony of the postcolonial situation which cultural theorist such as Homi Bhaha and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak have tried to enunciate in their scholarly works.
Amrit: I thought you were, in a way, dealing with the postcolonial fetish.
Ashish: True. It is a film that attempts to critique our postcolonial fetish with the idea of the classical, both native (Kathakali) and foreign (Shakespeare), through the usage of Khelkali's English usage that Arjun had developed. This was made during the incipient years of the call centre BPO revolution in India (2001). Arjun had just left his job as a professor at the National School of Drama in Delhi and was flirting with the emerging BPO industry as a voice culturist, teaching young Indian to speak in American English. He was at once amused and shocked at the political and financial valence of the English language in contemporary globalized India. On the other hand this film is also a product of my biography. I went to a very elitist English medium convent school in Kolkata, where we were fined one rupee if we spoke in "vernacular", Bengali or Hindi. We were taught Shakespearian classics, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and the romantic poets. Simultaneously Doordarshan, the Indian television, would bombard us with what the state considered classical, Hindustani classical music and Indian classical dance, from Odissi to Kathakali. So in effect Dancing Othello is a process of engaging with this idea of classical that I grew up. It is an attempt at questioning the symbolic and political meaning of such classical idiom in our postcolonial daily lives. The strategy that I used was to destabilize its symbolic universe and undermine their classical status that they have been endowed with. But eventually, I end the film with a self-reflexive turn where I subvert and destabilize my own authorial legitimacy; in a way transforming this film into an "ironical irony".
This is also the most collaborative film that I have ever made, without a dialogue or a script. It is mostly a product of improvisation and collaboration as we were shooting. The narrative of the film was laid only when I started editing the film.
Amrit. The 'archaeology' of Indian cinema has very few relics of 'independent'
cinema in the context of the cinema of prayoga.
How independent is independent cinema in India?
Ashish: Historically once the studio system collapsed after the World War II,
Indian films have been independent. That is, if you define independent cinema
like the American Independent cinema. But I think this term 'independent'
cinema, has no meaning in India. Indian cinema has always been part of
capitalist modes of production, and therefore, very conservative. Politically,
in the late 40s and early 50s, in the immediate wake of the countryÕs
independence movement and freedom, some radical cinema happened but that was
co-opted by the rising commerce.
Then it was only the state funded cinema that offered possibility of
producing radical cinema in the 70s, because perhaps they were beyond the logic
of capital and commerce. Along with the political pessimism of the
post-Naxalite India, the state funded cinema did produce some exceptional
cinema, but I think that radicalism was only limited to the type of subject
matter chosen. Like most of the commercial stuff, they just wrote different
scripts, and attempted to tell a story which was not often seen on the screen
in Indian cinema theatres. Other than Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, G. Arvindan and
John Abraham, I don't see any filmmaker attempting to experiment with
narrative, form or content. In the Indian context, the genealogy of the cinema
of prayoga only comes, according to me, from these
four filmmakers, who were in some way indebted to Ritwik Ghatak for their
cinematographic radicalism.
The documentary short filmmakers who are part of Vikalp can be called the
independent cinema in India, they come closest to the idea. However even with
documentary cinema, the "genrification" has taken roots, and it has
become a hybrid between television aesthetic and propaganda.
Amrit: Do you miss India in North America?
Ashish: I look my self as in exile in the US that I have condemned myself to.
The reason is only one- cinema. I hope I could raise money to make the films
that I could in India but as you know how impossible it is. With the rise of
liberalization, traditional funding sources for the films have completely
extinguished. I see the corporate academia in the US as the only way to get
funding to make films. Not that Stanford University is funding my films, but
the scholarship money that I have, if saved well, is enough for me to make
films on a regular basis. As a friend of mine says, "it is the buying
power of the dollar". And in my case it has worked. I have just finished a
feature film solely on my own saving. Most of my peers have bought houses and cars
with the money they save- I just made a film.
Glossary:
Arya Samaj: A religious cult established by Swami Dayananda. It believes in the samhita of the Hindu Vedas and various prescribed rituals. Samhita is the matra section of all the four Vedas and their branches. Arya Samaji is the one who follows this religious belief.
Dharmashala: A caravansary; a travellersÕ lodge erected as a work of piety.
Naxalism: The ultra left movement started from a village called Naxalbari in Bengal. A Naxalite is the one who believes in this political thinking.
Amrit Gangar
Mumbai, 14 May 2006