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Lights, camera... emotions

It’s a hard-hitting and heart-rending film dovetailing the plight of widows of farmers who committed suicide in Punjab.

Lights, camera... emotions

A still from Candles in the Wind, a documentary by National Award-winning filmmakers Kavita Bahl and Nandan Saxena. It is a moving account of women living in complete penury



Nonika Singh

It’s a hard-hitting and heart-rending film dovetailing the plight of widows of farmers who committed suicide in Punjab. The much-appreciated film Candles in the Wind by National Award-winning filmmakers Kavita Bahl and Nandan Saxena builds up one after another moving account of women living in complete penury. Suddenly, as the film is about to wind up, the camera pans on Kavita’s sobbing face. Moved by the predicament of her subjects, she breaks down completely and her emotional outburst, undeniably, becomes one of the most impactful and moving scenes of the film. Yet, it also gives birth to some discomfiting queries… whatever happened to dispassionate ways of compiling factual reality?

Welcome to the new world of documentary making where emotions rule, where objectivity is no longer an overrated virtue and where makers themselves have no qualms in placing themselves right in the centre of their narratives. Young maker Rajesh Thind even boasts how he is complicit in the film. His feature length film 12 Acres is a subjective first-person approach that zeroes down on his Punjabi family.

Factual and subjective

Once upon a time documentary films were all about facts, facts and more facts. These began and ended on rather sombre note with the narrator speaking in almost a drone-like fashion. Objectivity and balance were the overriding and governing postulates. The ‘I’ of the filmmaker was conspicuously absent.

Today internationally acclaimed director Pan Nalin, however, scoffs at the old theory, “In this information age who wants facts…emotions are the key to all filmmaking.” And this, he says, in connection with Faith Connections, a film that documents a spectacle of the Kumbh mela. Celebrated documentary-maker Mike Pandey, the only Asian to have won the coveted Green Oscar thrice, agrees that human beings are, indeed, emotional creatures, and emotions the most compelling force.

He recalls the overwhelming response to his six minute film Vanishing Giants. Focusing on the distressing plight of an elephant caught in captivity, it outraged and provoked viewers. Around 3,500 e-mails clogged the Prime Minister’s inbox and led to major legislative changes not only in India but all over the world. Now had the film not been a heartfelt attempt at reaching out to people, it probably would have failed to put an end to the capture of elephants in India. Reasons Pandey, “The manner in which the film questioned the inhumane treatment being meted out to animals, it was being emotional. I was targeting people’s emotional quotient and not appealing to the intellect of viewers in a sterile fashion.”

Nisha Pahuja, the woman behind the much-talked-about The World Before Her, feels that like all filmmakers, documentarians, too, are essentially story tellers and emotions are one way of engaging with the viewer. Well-known maker of films such as Jashn-e-Azadi, Sanjay Kak avers: “An appeal to emotions is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the dichotomy between heart and head is not a real one — we do think with our hearts, and feel with our heads, do we not?”

That’s exactly what Kavita has to say about their decision to include the footage of her breakdown in the film. In fact, she insists that it was not an impulsive choice but a well thought-out and deliberated-upon decision. She reasons, “It humanises the film — otherwise it would have remained just a vicarious gaze. And if the film can include women baring their souls ,isn’t it only fair that I reveal mine?”

A thinking heart

Fair enough, but what can’t be glossed over is the fact that emotions can be a double-edged sword, too, and often can be used to manipulate viewers and colour the truth. But then objectivity is anyway an overrated virtue, feels Sanjay Kak, whose films delve into political subjects such as Naxalism. He says: “Impartial observation is nothing more than a trap. See, as documentary film-makers we have long given up on the notion of "objectivity" as an achievable — or even a desirable — ambition. You can have a very illuminating film with the film-maker at the heart of it. And you can have a film that pretends to be objective and yet is very shallow and misleading...”

Kavita argues that we are subjective all the time and there is nothing like fly-on-the-wall approach to filmmaking. The moment the camera comes into picture one is already obliterating a lot of things and focusing on what the maker wants to show. She quizzes: “Isn’t that manipulation?” Pandey, however, agrees that there is a flipside, too, and emotions can create havoc. He uses the analogy of guns to underline how in the hands of inexperienced makers emotions can turn into volatile cocktails that could sway people in the wrong direction.

Many of the propaganda films from across the border do exactly that and end up exploiting sentiments. While employing emotions as a tool there is also an inherent danger of offering the viewers catharsis there and then. After all, when people cry they can’t think clearly and don’t really take home anything substantial.

Truth matters

At the end of it every film tells a story. But should we ignore the facts to find the truth? Because Thind believes, facts, too, are sacred. Why else would makers spend years researching and even Nalin states that as a documentary-maker his job is restricted to knowing when to switch the camera on and when to shut it off. And according to makers from old school — like Pandey, India needs information. Yes, the same can be packaged in many ways, and can be, at times, evoke fervent emotions. Pahuja’s film that juxtaposes the training of girls in the beauty industry with Durga Vahini volunteers has been unequivocally acclaimed as non-judgmental. But even she, whose film took four years in the making, agrees that, at times, truth is deeper than the facts.

While in a documentary film facts can’t be manufactured, she observes that facts are only one level of reality and to state the larger truth emotions can be a significant tool. Kak puts it differently: “If the emotional condition created is a surface dressing, or distracts from the real story, then obviously there is a need for caution...The point is that the audience must be convinced, you must be convinced. Are my emotions being aroused? Or are they being manipulated? I don’t think there can be rules for this. Audiences must train themselves to ask these questions.”

In short, while building the bridge between the subject and the viewer, emotions can be a critical element and catalyst. Provided the film is made responsibly and passes the acid test of creating social awareness and initiate a debate.

Passionate chroniclers

Call them testimonies of subjects as Kavita does or a significant world view as Kak sees them or just another way of telling a story…. ultimately documentary filmmaking is all about unveiling new truths or viewing the existing ones in a new light. With documentary film-making moving into an exciting phase, rest assured more and more films like Abhay Kumar’s The Placebo that uses real footage with surreal animation sequences will be made. An incisive investigation of one of the most competitive institutions in the world — All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi — the film, too, took off from a personal incident concerning his friend. Pahuja rates it as one of the most powerful and emotionally stirring films she has seen in the recent times.

But emotionally compelling films are not exactly a recent phenomenon, Pahuja and other makers argue. Anand Patwardhan’s films are largely political and have always been electrifying and not for nothing has he been called a passionate chronicler of modern India. But dispassionate or fervent, every film is akin to an emotional journey for the maker.

As the lexicon of documentary films is being redefined, more and more documentary filmmakers are seeing the world from their heart, filtered through misty eyes. But then as Nicholas Sparks said, “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it...”Or better still remember Alain de Botton’s quote: “The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

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