Circulation and Exhibition

Taking into account the tactical and innovative ways in which filmmakers resist assigned peripheral modes and spaces of cultural circulation, I demonstrate the operation of an idea critical to independence, that of resistance to the commercially reified roles of consumer–producer assigned to the artist–audience relationship. Circulation I contend, is re-framed as a forum for dialogue that creates “involved” publics rather than limited to frameworks of cultural dissemination marked by logics of quantity, profit and markets. I argue that the construction of participant-publics and the re-evaluation of cultural ownership or ‘copyright’, repurpose both technological and historical norms, giving shape to Geert Lovink’s (1997) proposition of tactical media through which filmmakers create alternative systems of exhibition containing the vital potential to disrupt a highly regulated public domain.

Introduction

In India, ‘independent documentary film’ is a term that signifies a body of films that first appeared in 1975 during the Constitutional Emergency, a period when the repressive exercise of state authority threatened the democratic political foundations of the nation. The initial usage of the term ‘independent’ to denote a production category located outside of state structures is now a misnomer. In the post-economic reform landscape, independent filmmakers operate with greater flexibility and various interdependent and mutually cooperative forms of organisation between filmmakers, the state, international and domestic NGOs, private institutions and individuals are commonplace. My attempt here is to construct an ongoing critical dialogue between broader concepts of documentary studies and the situated perspectives that emerge from individual accounts and the analysis of films produced and circulated using diverse modes and architectures. Emphasising the historical significance of documentary as a space of oppositional representation, the accounts produce a grounded theory of independence structured in relation to institutions, industry practices, individual subjectivities and technology in post-reform India. Combining the study of independent film practice and textual analysis, the mixed methods study investigates how independent Indian documentary is a practice that not only produces political representation but opens up new material relations between culture, society and the individual.

Financing and Production

Focusing on documentary financing, two forms of organisation appear, an institutionally managed and a private self-managed mode of production initiated in response to the chronic lack of production support for documentary from the industry and public sectors. Filmmakers take concrete actions to resist an instrumental framing of documentary film under a range of social functions and communication discourses in an ongoing struggle for artistic expression. Independence becomes visible in a series of tactical adaptations where standardised media practice is displaced by the formation of cooperative social alliances, the reduced significance of capital in the production process and non-monetary rewards. These re-worked practices implicate the mode of documentary inquiry, textual aesthetics and political position taking to render possible the expression of representational and semiotic concerns within institutional production environments.

Method and Meaning

Independent filmmakers have crafted non-standard methods and artistic vocabularies to realise a form of “independence” that frequently runs counter to commodity relations which position cultural production in terms of consumption and cultural producers as industry professionals. I argue that as a practice, independent Indian documentary has developed an artisanal mode of production that is deprofessionalised in contrast to the focus on professional specialisation and standardisation of creative processes in industrial modes of media production. This is a critical feature as it permits a radical re-imagination of documentary as signifying practice existing in the everyday that produces a system of references to interpret social process and actors, dismissed by mainstream media representation.

Histories and Cultures: Space, Filmmaker, Text and Spectator

Beginning from 1980s onwards to the present day, this chapter examines diverse events including the formation of collectives, alternative film festivals, citizen-partnerships and other forms of democratic petitioning including public protest, to consider the importance of “relationality” or “bundles of relations” as the underpinning of independent documentary practice in India. Following three central concepts of documentary studies, the position of the filmmaker, the politics of textual representation and the position of the documentary spectator, I identify their context specific functioning. I trace the conceptualisation of “documentary filmmaker” formed in dialogue with the values of Third Cinema, the feminist “documentary text” that critiques media representation and ideologies, and finally, the problematizing of “documentary spectator” evident in the methods of participatory video producers

Afterword

Whilst making a significant contribution to public visual culture and narrative formation, documentary filmmakers hold the key to our understanding of independence, occupying the position of agent and subject, whose position can be understood primarily by examining responses to narrow definitions of ‘function’ that have plagued documentary film and filmmakers. Where ‘function’ carries meanings that harness images and image-makers to measurable phenomena of profit-making, institutional communication, consumption or mass persuasion, independent documentary works to challenge the teleological meaning of ‘function’ and its use as a yardstick to evaluate the value and legitimacy of cultural production and cultural producers.

People and Documentary

What does the nature of social associations between documentary filmmakers and documentary participants reveal about the social relations imagined and constructed by the practice of independent Indian documentary. Particularly in the industrial and social context of the NGO-dominated production and distribution environments where governmentality produces specific subject relations and discourses of subject positions (donor, recipient, client, expert), these relationships function as a lens to bring into focus the re-organisational scope of independent documentary practice and its potential to challenge socially assigned identities, relations, functions and thus social relations. In the practice and works of the filmmakers examined, alternate grounds of “interdependent filmmaking” are noticeable, often formed between socially disparate groups by means of reorganised processes such as “negotiated consent”. When projected alongside broader historical practices of documentary, the relationships point towards “interdependent filmmaking” predicated upon horizontal linkages between filmmakers, individuals and communities.