LOCATING PATWARDHAN AMONG HIS PEERS IN INDIA AND ELSE WHERE

LOCATING PATWARDHAN AMONG HIS PEERS IN INDIA AND ELSE WHERE


For many years, as films became more narrative-based, documentaries branched out and took many forms since their early beginnings - some of which have been termed propagandistic or non-objective. In 1939, the Second World War began. An era of ideological upheaval was born that brought to life such concepts and realities as radical nationalism, capitalist imperialism, totalitarian Socialist states, ultra-xenophobia, independence for European colonies in Asia and, of course, fascism. Generous state patronage came, new technology was developed, young professionals were encouraged -- all to propagate the cause of the war through hair-raising war footage.
Documentaries during the Great War and during Second World War were often propagandistic. Innovative German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl's pioneering masterwork epic “Triumph of the Will (1934)” was explicitly propagandistic yet historical in its spectacular yet horrifying documentation of the Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg in 1934. It was a revolutionary film combining superb cinematography and editing of Third Reich propaganda. She also documented the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the stunning film “Olympia (1938)” - with graceful and beautiful images of 'Aryan' athletes in competition. Americans, Russians and other East European filmmakers tried to counter her work, her ideology. To respond to the Nazi propaganda, Frank Capra was commissioned by the US War Department to direct seven films in a “Why We Fight (1943)” series of narrated Second World War newsreel-style films.

Originally, the earliest documentaries in the US and France were short newsreels, instructional pictures, records of current events, or travelogues (termed actualities1.) without any creative story-telling, narrative, or staging.

After World War II, topical television documentaries benefited from the vision of two Americans, reporter Ed Murrow, famous for his wartime radio reports from London, and producer Fred Friendly. American networks broke the restraints of news by submitting issues to more detailed examination and larger perspective. With this several journalists found the documentary as a convenient medium for detailed political analysis.

British and Canadian television encouraged personal documentaries by individuals who often produced works which were not just of high artistic merit but also politically charged in their mode of presentation. It is in this juncture of time we notice a radical shift from state sponsored documentaries to alternative film making. This movement grew stronger with the anti-Vietnam War. Social activists and political dissenters efficiently used the medium of documentary to fight against aggressive state policies during this period.

Two hard-hitting documentaries provided critical, anti-war commentaries on the Vietnam War: Emile de Antonio's powerful “Vietnam: In the Year of the Pig (1968)”, and Peter Davis' Academy Award-winning anti-war documentary film “Hearts and Minds (1974)” questioned US involvement in the Vietnam War.





At the same time European documentary makers agitated the authority in their respective nations. In France Marcel Ophüls made films on major political debates of the time. “The Sorrow and the Pity” (French: Le Chagrin et la pitié) is a two-part documentary film made by Marcel Ophüls in 1969 concerns the French Resistance and collaboration with the Vichy government and Nazi Germany during World War II. This film used interviews of a German officer, collaborators, and resistance fighters from Clermont-Ferrand(a provencial town in the south of France). They comment on the nature and reasons for collaboration. The reasons include anti-Semitism(antagonisn towards semetic people), anglophobia(fear of Anglo saxon invasion), fear of Bolsheviks and Soviet invasion, the desire for power, and simple caution. This film was first shown on French television in 1981 after being banned for years. It is frequently assumed that the reason was French reluctance to admit the facts of French history.

In Britain, the Conservative government fiercely condemned Thames Television in 1988 for the film Death on the Rock, about the killing of three Northern Irish terrorists in Gibraltar by British security agents. Television companies have themselves stopped the program: the Griffith/Collins documentary, made for the British station ATV (Associated Television) in the early 1970s, was not shown for over 20 years. The subject was held to be too sensitive because terrorist violence arising from the same issues was then killing and injuring hundreds of people in Northern Ireland.
A BBC documentary about nuclear war, “The War Game” was similarly withheld for years during the international Cold War tensions between the Communist countries and the Western democracies from the 1950s to the 1980s. The program was judged to be too disturbing. Television documentaries in many countries about cruelty, child labour, prostitution, political scandals, dubious business deals, have been banned, cut, or condemned because governments said they were untrue, unfair, partial, or against the national interest.
Director Barbara Kopple's “Harlan County, USA (1976)”, another Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, documented a Kentucky coal miners' strike in the early 1970s against the Eastover Mining Company. She also directed a second Oscar-winning documentary film on labour struggles, “American Dream (1990)”, about striking employees at a Hormel meat-packing plant in Austin, Minnesota.

Another critical expose, Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) provided a scathing indictment of President George W. Bush's handling of the terrorist crisis and his alleged connections to Al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden's family. The documentary film was included among the Cannes Film Festival's main competition (only the second time in 48 years for a documentary) - and won the top prize - the first for a documentary in nearly 50 years. The controversial film had earlier gained further publicity and notoriety when Disney opted not to distribute the film through its Miramax subsidiary unit, and Moore accused the company of censorship. [Supposedly, Disney2 feared the film might endanger tax breaks Disney received in Florida where its theme parks were located, and where the president's brother, Jeb Bush, was governor at the time.] Moore's film set box-office records as the highest-grossing non-concert, non-IMAX documentary film of all time - and at the time the only one ever to win a box-office weekend during its debut showing. His next film was the searing look at the American health care system, “Sicko (2007)”.

The BBC's expose Trouble at the Top: The People vs. Coke (2002) surveyed the New Coke debacle when the Coca Cola Company tested the new drink product with focus groups in the mid-80s and went ahead to create one of the biggest marketing and business blunders ever.


Morgan Spurlock's dark comedy satire “Super Size Me (2004)”, his debut feature documentary that won the Best Director award at Sundance, examined the reasons for US obesity, marketing ploys of fast food companies, and the frightening health after-effects of his 30-day binge of fast-food eating (at McDonalds). As a result, Spurlock experienced declining health: he gained 25 pounds, developed chest pains and bad skin, had an increase in body fat of 7%, an increase in cholesterol of 62 points, loss of sex drive, and the pain of toxic-shock withdrawal at the end of the experiment. Another expose of the irresponsibility, exploitation, and lack of accountability of global businesses, and how corporate decisions have impacted the world was contained in Jennifer Abbott's and March Achbar's “The Corporation (2004)”.

Robert Greenwald's “Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War (2004)” examined what the intelligence community knew about the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and provided a harsh critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy and its single-minded determination to enter into war. Earlier, Greenwald had executive-produced the disturbing “Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2002)” which examined the voting debacle and court abuses that took place in Florida following the last presidential election. He also released “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (2004)”, which provided an insightful look at the partisan, 'unfair and unbalanced', conservative political viewpoints of FOX-News. There are many more distinguished political documentaries and political documentary makers. The names mentioned here are only examples and not any kind of representation.

(Much of the information is collected through trusted Online Encyclopaedias like Microsoft Encarta and Wikepedia Online Encyclopaedia. Some of the documentaries cited are closely watched in their English and French version for the dissertation)
Indian context


In India soon after Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru realised the need for a mechanism to reach out to a vast population that was multi-lingual, multi-cultural, unaware of the notion of the Nation and the State, and mostly illiterate. He took special interest in reviving a set-up which pre-dated News Parade, and the Films Division was established.

Films Division travelled into the nooks and corners of India to shoot the lives and cultures of marginalized people like the Mizos, the Kukis, the Kashmiris, and the Banjaras. In style and aesthetics, these films were a mix of the war film and the anthropological film .The idea was to show unity in diversity of India and its nationhood. This trend in documentary filmmaking was countered in the late-1970s. It was mainly challenged by the Naxalite movement and other organised political formations from the Left and Left of Centre ideologies. Independent political documentaries from local regions were born. Famine was shot, so was homelessness, state atrocities, migration, women as victims of domestic and sexual violence, issues of land ownership, all of these became important. Gautam Ghosh, Utpalendu Chakravarty, Meera Nair, Suhasini Mulay, Gopal Menon, Suma Josson , Amar Kanwar and Tapan Bose are some of the significant names from that period .Anandh Patawardhan comes from this political background'. In his debut Waves of Revolution' (Kraanti Ki Tarangein), he showed government repression in Bihar and in other parts of India on student movements in 1971. Patwardhan offered a withering critique of the internal emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi from 1975-77 in "Prisoners of Conscience" (1978,) .With the advent of video and particularly Digital Video, today the entire scenario of documentary filmmaking of India has changed. More and more independent filmmakers and organizations are making their own documentaries.

Patawardhan’s career can be broadly placed between Vietnam War (1959 to 1975) to Iraqi invasion of America. His role as a documentary maker now has reached more crucial stage than that of those days. He opines
“Both wars were illegitimate, immoral, but I think the reasons for the Iraq war are even more transparently venal. If there is less public protest this time than there was during Vietnam, I attribute it to the fact that there is no draft”.3 His documentaries have functioned as a sort of early warning system for Indian democracy. He knew his subjects, his terrain. He made films in order to prove and disseminate what he already knew as truth. Through the process of the film itself, he placed facts in front of the audience in order to build public opinion. He had the kind of confidence in his arguments that allowed him to hold a mid-shot of an interviewee for minutes. These films were mainly edited on the basis of dialogue tracks. This drastic change from Anthropological Film Division documentaries to politically charged subjects can be noticed in most of the independent documentary makers of post emergency period. Film maker Filmmaker Madhusree Dutta’s comment on this movement of radical documentaries is apt mentioning here.



“The myth of the Benevolent State was duly shattered. For the first time, instead of exotic people, hungry and tortured humans came up as protagonists; instead of ritualistic song and dance, minority peoples from the lands beyond central India voiced their anger, fear and frustration common to minorities in any totalitarian country; instead of the plastic gloss of national pride, the basic formation of the modern State was questioned. Many feature films of the time were inspired by these documentaries and some of these documentary filmmakers later shifted to making political feature films”. 4

This battle doesn’t confine to making of the film and its release it’s also important to note that these film makers have won lot of legal battles with Censor Board, Door Darshan, and National Film Awards (NFA). The recent one being with NFA Patawadhan managed to convince them with his peers Simantini Dhuru and Gaurav Jani that films need not have a celluloid version and Censor Board shouldn’t eligibility criterion to enter NFA annual completion. His battle with above mentioned statutory bodies is discussed in the chapter fourth chapters in detail.
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Notes
1. Actualities –The first attempts at film-making, by the Lumiere Brothers and others, were literal documentaries, e.g., a train entering a station, factory workers leaving a plant, etc

2. Disney-Walt Disney (er Elias) (1901-1966), American animator and producer.

3.Interview by Kathleen Maclay | 13 October 2004UC Berkeley News Center
4. Dutta, Madushree., October-November 2007, Volume 20. “In defence of political Documentary”. Himal South Asians. (http://infochangeindia.org/)