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Third Text, 2013 Vol. 27, No. 6, 735– 747, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.857898

Beyond Cinephilia Situating the Encounter between Documentary Film and Film Festival Audiences: The Case of the Ladakh International Film Festival, India Shweta Kishore

BACKGROUND In June 2012, I attended several film sessions at the inaugural Ladakh International Film Festival (LIFF). Ladakh is located in western Jammu and Kashmir, bordering with China to the north, Tibet to the east, and Pakistan to the north-west. Strategically located between two contentious borders, Ladakh is a heavily militarized zone. So significant is the association between Ladakh and the Indian Army that infrastructure development in the region is driven by army manoeuvres and positions. The army also provides the main source of employment. Consumer culture has made slow progress here: mobile phone connections and internet are available intermittently and few people own cars. The terrain features remote villages, a limited road network and scarce public transport, and the mobility of the population is restricted to certain areas and seasonal conditions. Leh, the capital city of Ladakh and the venue of the festival, is located at an altitude of 3500 metres and is a bustling regional centre for the remote hill tribes and international adventure tourists. One of the most striking aspects of the town is environmental consciousness; most houses use solar power, grow food and recycle waste.

FESTIVAL LOCATION AND DISCOURSES Locations consist of both physical and cultural co-ordinates within national and global histories. In this article I map the physical and # 2013 Third Text

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Ladakh Film Festival special cover, 15 June 2012

1. New festivals include Cinema of Resistance at the Allahabad Film Festival, Sonapani Film Festival, Cinema of Resistance at Nainital Film Festival and Cinema of Resistance at Patna Film Festival among others. 2. Cindy H Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen, Rutgers University Press, Piscataway, New Jersey, 2011, p 18 3. For instance, Cannes Film Festival positions itself as an industry festival for festival professionals, Toronto Film Festival positions Canadian films on an international stage, while the Hong Kong International Film Festival positions itself as the best place to watch Asian films. 4. Wong, op cit, p 39

cultural terrains within which LIFF was situated, and analyse the implications of these for the form and objectives of the festival. Film festival culture has been particularly buoyant in India in recent years. Several general and special-interest film festivals have been created in regional, non-metropolitan areas, and the inclusion of documentary film alongside art-house and independent cinema is especially significant.1 While it is part of the emerging desire to stage good cinema beyond the urban peripheries, LIFF stands apart from most of the other new festivals in two respects. First, its remote geographical location coincides with an absence of any cinema theatres in the entire Ladakh region. Second, in contrast to more accessible regional festivals, security concerns are heightened in this border location, and in 2012 the entire festival took place under strict Indian army security, transferring a tangible sense of the fraught social conditions to the event proceedings. Announcing itself with predominantly online marketing and limited local publicity, the inaugural LIFF opened at the Sindhu Cultural Centre, a state auditorium located on the outskirts of the regional capital. Cindy Wong suggests that, as a conglomeration of objects, people and institutions, film festivals provide an ‘institutional framework’ for the study of issues of cinematic taste, power, industry and historical global relations.2 An emerging festival such as LIFF offers a unique opportunity to examine the formation of an institution located at the axis of the particular social and historical conditions that constitute and shape it. Local and global cinema and festival discourses, industrial power relations and industry structures act upon the form and nature of the festival and position it publicly and in the festival sphere.3 Wong identifies several junctures where film festivals intersect with global economic and urban cultures to function beyond sites for aesthetic and creative interaction, often creating branding opportunities for entire cities.4 In this instance, LIFF was scheduled during the busy summer tourist season in partnership with state agencies – Jammu and Kashmir Tourism and the Leh Development Council – with a brief to highlight ‘Ladakh’s special place in the world’. Visually and symbolically, the development of a cinema culture was linked with the spectacle of Ladakh’s special tourist offerings, such as its geographical features and

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5. ‘About the Festival’, http:// liff.in, website of the Ladakh International Film Festival, accessed 25 January 2013 6. Anonymous, Report, Ladakh International Film Festival, Monasse Incorporated, 2012, http:// liff.in, accessed 20 December 2012 7. Mark Peranson, ‘Film Festivals: Between Art and Commerce’, in Richard Porton, ed, Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, Wallflower, London, 2009, pp 23 –38 8. Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2007, p 187

indigenous cultures, thus marketing a form of cultural tourism.5 Promotional images featuring Ladakhi landscapes and the festival tagline ‘come explore the magic of cinema in the magical land of Ladakh’ give the physical location of the event equal significance with the programme of films (emphasis added). There also exists a political element to the staging of a film festival. As an event, it is affiliated with certain institutions, competes with other events for audiences, power and legitimization, and projects a certain image of the region. In an extension of its affiliation with tourism, LIFF aligned itself with environmental and conservancy institutions such as the Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust and Inheritance India, and adopted the endangered snow leopard as its mascot. During the festival, an outdoor space was allocated to local civil society organizations and NGOs to showcase their projects and products. The screening of films such as Think Global, Act Rural: Solutions locales pour un de´sordre global (Coline Serreau, 2010) and Cultures of Resistance (Iara Lee, 2010), attracted attention to issues of social justice, environment and popular resistance. LIFF thus presented itself as an event that exceeded its cinematic mandate to encompass concerns about social justice and the wider public sphere. Business opportunities were incorporated into the structure of the event, with a separate networking venue provided for Ladakhi businessmen as well as a conclave event to explore business opportunities in and around Ladakh, aimed at enabling ‘investments, partnerships or tie-ups’.6 The visible presence of state authorities in official and ceremonial roles at, for example, the festival opening, reinforced the legitimate, state-affiliated credentials of the event in both public and business spheres. Mark Peranson offers two models to help understand film festivals: the business festival and the audience festival.7 LIFF demonstrated several criteria associated with the business festival, such as major corporate sponsorships, the presence of celebrity guests, a large staff, a film market, competition sections and corporate networking events. While the core element of a film festival is its film programme, association with recognized directors, journalists and critics positions the festival in the film-festival economy, locally and globally. Legitimation within these circles enables greater recognition, prestige and cultural credibility, which Marijke de Valck suggests functions in much the same way as at museums and art galleries, by adding ‘cultural capital’ to the objects on exhibit.8 Structurally, this can translate into bigger films, increased visitor numbers, improved institutional connections and expansion opportunities. Along with an international film programme, the patrons of LIFF comprised veteran Indian auteurs such as Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani, and international associates such as CPH PIX festival director Jacob Neiiendam and British film critic Derek Malcolm. The multiple alliances of LIFF point to a peculiar political location. Positioned at the axis of cultural tourism, global economies of cinema culture, civil society and corporate business, LIFF operated as a promoter of culture, aligned with state, commerce and market actors as well as with civilsociety agendas such as ecological conservation and biodiversity protection, which ultimately seek to limit the power of the private sector through the discourses of environmentalism and social justice.

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9. Ju¨rgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 10. Quintin, ‘The Festival Galaxy’, in Richard Porton, ed, Dekalog 3, op cit, pp 38– 53 11. Wong, op cit, pp 165 12. Peranson, op cit, p 25 13. Paul Willemen, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered’, in Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, British Film Institute, London and Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1994, pp 230 –234 14. Christian Metz, ‘The Perceived and the Named’, Visual Communication, vol 6, no 3, 1980, pp 56 –68

Film festivals articulate as a form of public sphere, which Ju¨rgen Habermas considers as a space for the development of a broadly inclusive civil society, existing between the state and economic spheres, where the public can discuss and represent issues marginalized in more powerful spheres.9 However, while functioning spatially as public sphere, festival power structures retain exclusionary practices, often building on a sense of elite taste that excludes the working classes and, typically, the ‘masses’. Festival film selection, operations and panel discussions unfold as conversations amongst the film world and public elites, denying audiences true interventionary power in the structural operation and discourses presented at the event. At LIFF, the involvement of an international film jury, political leaders, glamorous actors, veteran Indian art-house film-makers, international film buyers and sales agents as festival patrons, panel members and celebrity guests, served to promote certain commercial and cultural agendas, while audiences formed only one part of the equation, that of film consumer. Audiences were restricted to the established position of ‘viewer’, which allowed the consumption of film but excluded contributions to structural aspects of the festival. Opportunities for intervention, such as post-film discussions, interactions with film-makers, and festival structures that included audience feedback were missing – especially significant given that LIFF was the first film festival in the entire region. Thus, the possibility of a dialogue between audiences and the festival beyond that of producer – consumer remained minimal. Restricted roles and spaces for audiences in festival structures preserve the cultural exclusivity of such events; they become formalized as a ‘galaxy’, where audiences remain peripheral to the central cores of power.10 Audience participation as festival visitors is an important aspect of the festival equation, but here too, Wong argues, film festivals direct audience taste, voices, and opinions through the discourses created explicitly and implicitly by publicity, promotional material, invitees, panels, texts and ‘agendas of interpretation’.11 The focus at LIFF on celebrity patrons such as the renowned Indian film industry directors and actors, created particular discourses of good cinema around notions of success and popularity. Panel discussions about the importance of international film sales and the presence of international agents such as film-makers, distributors and festival managers included cross-cultural impulses and a desire to be incorporated within the global festival circuit and film industry. According to Peranson, film festivals function as alternatives to traditional commercial distribution, offering an opportunity to view commercially unviable films and enable interactions between communities of cinephiles.12 One of the central discourses that festivals are structured around relates to the practices of good cinema, a universal discourse of aesthetics that transcends local and national idioms to appeal to pure forms of cinephilia. Cinephilia is identified as the driving force behind audience patronage of film festivals. Paul Willemen identifies cinephilia as an expression located in the personal relationship of cinema to subject, coming into being when the spectator subjectively identifies with a screen image or gesture.13 Christian Metz refers to a ‘projective’ relationship between spectator and cinema – an instance of recognition between the screen and the spectator’s experience, where the spectator participates in not only interpreting but producing meaning.14 Cinephilia,

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15. Susan Sontag, ‘The Decay of Cinema’, New York Times Magazine, 25 February 1996, pp 60 –61 16. Adrian Martin, ‘No Flowers for the Cine´phile: The Fates of Cultural Populism 1960 –1988’, in Paul Foss, ed, Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Cinema, Pluto, Sydney, 1998, p 117 17. China Heavyweight, Think Global, Act Rural, Cultures of Resistance and Kung Fu Nuns were included in the documentary programme. 18. Interview with Melwyn Chirayath, Festival Director, 29 April 2013 19. Menjunath Pendakur, 2012, ‘Digital Pleasure Palaces: Bollywood Seduces the Global Indian at the Multiplex’, in Jump Cut 54, http://www. ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ PendakurIndiaMultiplex/ index.html, accessed 3 January 2013 20. Partners in Crime, directed by Paromita Vohra, ninetyfour minutes, 2011, problematizes copyright laws and private ownership of intellectual and cultural property in India.

however, appears to be a victim of industrial-scale production and distribution of images. Susan Sontag laments the decay of cinephilia, based on the decline in the conditions that enable cinephilia – the movie theatre.15 Replaced by television and the multiplex, with a mass offering of films, one substitutable for the other, festivals have come to be positioned as opportunities for the staging of cinephilia – the opportunity for ‘immersion in the film itself’.16 Festival organizers and programmers see themselves as enablers of cinephilia, developing and extending the art of cinema, and offering an alternative to commercial cinema with selected international offerings of sophisticated, unique cinema. LIFF performed this responsibility through a process that selectively curated retrospectives of classic Indian art-house features, local and internationally acclaimed documentary film, and independent shorts and features.17 The intention to promote good cinema and defend cinephilia also includes the potential curation of Academy-nominated and winning films in future festivals.18 At the same time, festivals are rooted in local contexts that vary both socially and politically, and while part of global cultural traffic, festivals function in site-specific ways. Socially, the popularity of particular local cinema cultures, the presence of alternative forms of cultural traditions, the structures of cinema exhibition, audience attitudes and viewing modes, and the position of cinema itself as an aesthetic, cultural object within the audience community, constitute important factors in the structural relationship between the festival and the local environment, extending beyond the boundaries of cinephilia. For instance, the absence of cinema theatres in the Ladakh region has created a popular desire for the cinematic experience, which, in the instance of larger metropolitan cities, is driven by other subjective factors such as preference, loyalty and taste. Unlike other non-metropolitan regions, where multiplex screens are being constructed, none of the 12,000 national cinema screens is located in Ladakh.19 The absence of cinema theatres has granted ritual significance to screen performances of film, and mainstream commercial products predominate, supported by informal distribution networks and easy accessibility. Historically, as a community practice, cinema viewing occurs at a family or neighbourhood level, comprising new-release DVDs of mainstream Hindi fiction films. Screenings occur in the form of social gatherings, and film viewing is often one element of entertainment in a larger choreography of community social events, such as festivals, family gatherings and weddings. Thus, besides cinephilia, a number of geographical, cultural and site-specific factors play determining roles in the relationship between cinema, film festivals and audiences.

AN ENCOUNTER WITH DOCUMENTARY FILM The film programme at LIFF comprised four sections: international, national, Ladakhi and competition. Documentary film occurred in each section, and a dedicated prize for best documentary film was awarded to Paromita Vohra’s Partners in Crime (2012).20 Of the documentary sessions I attended, two proved eventful in terms of the material experience of being present within an audience community that was unfamiliar with

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21. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991, p 3 22. Despite the efforts of the mobile film units of the Department of Field Publicity and a robust network of NGOs, the nature of documentary film that has reached the remote regions of India consists predominantly of state and civil society film productions intending to change public behaviours such as sanitation and hygiene habits, primary education, family planning and those of a pedagogical nature such as how to . . . vote or avoid waterborne diseases.

viewing practices related to documentary film as a cinematic object – viewing practices that, according to Bill Nichols, place documentary film as a ‘discourse of sobriety’ amongst the sciences, politics and religion.21 I am concerned here with those audiences who may not share uniform educational, social or cinema viewing backgrounds, but do share inexperience in particular documentary cinema viewing practices. The documentary cinema they encountered at LIFF was not the form, more familiar to them, that positions them as recipients of instructional or didactic knowledge. I acknowledge that, at its most basic meaning, documentary refers to a certain relationship with the ‘real’, and includes forms such as photography and writing, and television modes such as non-fiction factual entertainment (reality television, travel shows). I am, however, concerned with one-off ‘theatrical’ or ‘feature’ documentary, which, in the Indian context, is shown in select, non-commercial theatrical screenings largely limited to urban arts centres, educational institutions, film-clubs and the festival circuit.22 The documentary film screening unfolded in a large hall packed with approximately 200 people, strikingly self-segregated. In the front rows sat a handful of local and international film-makers, journalists and documentary film enthusiasts, and behind them local audience communities, some of whom had travelled with their families from remote areas. The theatre itself appeared to be a multi-purpose space. The windows were blacked out with tarpaulin and the film was projected on a portable screen using an overhead data projector. Two critically acclaimed films were screened in the session: Think Global, Act Rural (mentioned earlier, 2010) and China Heavyweight (Yung Chang, 2012). During the screenings, Ladakhi audiences conversed, refreshments were passed around and members audibly commented upon and discussed the screen performance. At the same time, a section of the experienced documentary audience watched intently, became increasingly exasperated by the distracting conditions and eventually demanded silence from the Ladakhi sections, who seemed flabbergasted by this admonition. The physical and emotional interaction between the two sections signalled a sense that accepted modes of documentary spectatorship had been challenged and the ‘serious’ process of experiencing the documentary object had been interrupted. A section of the audience had failed to approach documentary film with pre-existing documentary expectation, documentary consciousness and documentary desire – conditions that, according to Nichols, exist in documentary film spectators. Documentary desire had not existed prior to arriving at the encounter, and the cinematic object had not been differentiated from fiction, with its attendant appeals for ‘rhetorical engagement’. Instead, the spectacle and promise of an extraordinary screen-based event had drawn audiences, and only at the instance of the object appearing on screen had audiences apprehended it as documentary film. Importantly, the foreign-language films were subtitled in English, and most audience members neither spoke nor read English. As the films progressed, visual and audio information held audience interest, sustaining most of the audience until the conclusion of the films. Few audience members left the screening, and the event concluded with vigorous clapping from large sections of the audience. Teshome H Gabriel, in Questions of Third Cinema, provides pertinent observations

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about recurring developing-world viewing practices, based on observations of African and American audiences. He finds that African audiences complain about the strict code of silence and the solemn atmosphere of the American movie-theatres, while American and Europeans hate viewing films on African screens because everybody talks during the screening.23 While histories of cinema and its social position are specific to each nation, deeper issues of cultural identity and cultural relativism are at stake when modes of spectating collide with cultural practices of collective participation. Modes of viewership and orientation towards the cinematic object are rooted in particular cultural contexts, and at LIFF this manifested itself through the socially interactive audience. Later, when speaking to festival volunteers about the lively nature of the screening, they confirmed that LIFF was the first festival experience for most local audiences and that the current screenings were the first experience of documentary cinema for many audience members, despite familiarity with non-fiction screen modes such as news and current affairs. The festival director also commented upon the fact that since theatrical, feature-documentary cinema was not available on DVD, the majority of Ladakhi audiences had minimal opportunities to participate as viewers of this film form. The festival thus functioned as an introductory encounter to this particular screen form, a form that placed different language and spectatorial demands on its audience from those of fiction. Theories of spectatorship that seek to understand the complex processes of meaning creation turn on one critical condition of subject production: the conditions produced in a darkened room that isolate the viewer to preserve a ‘synthetic unity’ between the subject and the ideological screen objects, Jean-Louis Baudry writes: No doubt the darkened room and the screen bordered with black like a letter of condolence already present privileged conditions of effectiveness – no exchange, no circulation, no communication with any outside. Projection and reflection take place in a closed space and those who remain there, whether they know it or not (but they do not), find themselves chained, captured, or captivated.24

23. Teshome Gabriel, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films’, in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds, Questions of Third Cinema, British Film Institute, London, 1989, pp 30 –53 24. Jean-Louis Baudry and Alan Williams, ‘Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’, Film Quarterly, vol 28, no 2, winter 1974 – 1975, pp 39 –47 25. Gabriel, op cit, p 39

The production of subject that rests on the condition of separation between viewer and co-viewer remains culturally bound and insufficient in the context of developing-world spectatorship, where cinema viewing is often undertaken in community settings with active collective participation, obstructing the physical and psychological separation that guarantees subject production in poststructuralist and psychoanalytic models. Gabriel mounts a case against the privileging of the individual and the subjective in poststructuralist theory, pointing out that developing-world societies replace the individual self with structures based on the community and the collective.25 Consciousness occurs in relation to social and political dimensions and less around Oedipal conflict and resolution. The community as a dynamic entity that encloses the individual and links him/her with the social fabric replaces the notion of the singular individual effecting change. At LIFF, apart from experienced festivalgoers, the majority of audiences approach cinema with a different consciousness, grounded in previous viewing experiences of cinema as a community practice in socially interactive settings.

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26. Jane M Gaines, ‘Political Mimesis’, in Gaines and Michael Renov, eds, Collecting Visible Evidence, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1999, pp 84 –103 27. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, Verso, London, 1994, pp 23 –24 28. Elizabeth Cowie, ‘The Spectacle of Actuality’, in Collecting Visible Evidence, op cit, pp 19 –46, p 29 29. Nicholls, op cit, p 171 30. Carl Platinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p 38 31. Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the [In]Credulous Spectator’, Art and Text, autumn 1989, pp 818 –832

Documentary film theorists also critique psychoanalytic theories on account of their failure to interrogate structural differences that separate the documentary subject from the fiction subject, where the cinematic object is anchored in the world of ‘the real’, and the subject is not characterized by his absence from the imaginary screen universe, but recognizes the ‘real’ as existentially known. In her essay about documentary film effect, Jane Gaines critiques psychoanalytic approaches to subject construction on grounds of its inadequacy in explicating documentary film subjectivities that position individuals as social subjects.26 Socially, the documentary film spectator is constructed as a ‘subject of agency’, with outer forms of desire directed towards social and political spheres of everyday life, while the fiction spectator is constructed as a ‘subject of desire’ with inner forms of desire.27 According to Elizabeth Cowie, the documentary asks its spectator to ‘invoke and require identification’, where the spectator must identify or become cognizant of the facts and their meanings, and thus be constituted as subject.28 The documentary spectator is driven by epistephilia, the desire to know, as opposed to scopophilia, pleasure in looking. While the fiction narrative asks the spectator to suspend disbelief or embrace magical realism, the documentary film asks the spectator to evaluate objectively, taking a position of ‘empirical realism’.29 But here we encounter a major theoretical shortcoming with regard to audiences unfamiliar with documentary film modes as part of their viewing experiences. While spectatorship and viewing practices may unfold in culturally specific settings, the theory of the production of meaning is predicated upon agreed notions of prior experience, education and knowledge. In relation to the production of meaning, the documentary subject, Nichols argues, in addition to being ideologically constituted, employs prior knowledge of documentary film to derive meaning; documentary desire and expectation occur at the instance of spectatorial engagement framed by prior experience and expectations of the documentary form. Carl Plantinga distinguishes documentary from fiction on the basis of an ‘implicit contract between the producer/ author and reader/viewer’ to view or read the work according to ‘certain conventions’.30 However, Nicholls and Plantinga also ignore the articulation of documentary amongst the nascent spectator who is not conditioned by documentary language, convention and expectation, or driven by desire for knowledge, but experiences documentary as cinematic object in the first instance. Importantly, the spectator here is not considered naive or unknowing in the sense of the astonished spectator of early cinema who, Tom Gunning argues, is an incredulous subject, demonstrating unconscious physical reactions to on-screen visual trauma.31 Instead of essentializing Ladakhi audiences based upon the cinematic experiences, I propose that the audiences under discussion possess different sets of cinematic experiences, experiences that do not conform with the documentary-film viewing modality required in festival settings such as LIFF. Given the intrinsic significance of spectator knowledge to the documentary project, how does documentary film articulate amongst constituencies with little pre-constituted documentary film knowledge, expectation, or epistephilic desire? In India and, indeed, much of the developing world, such constituencies, outside the metropolitan areas

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32. Thomas Waugh, video recordings, interviews with Indian documentary filmmakers (1989) personal collection of Thomas Waugh, shared with the author in January 2013 33. ‘Chalachitra Andolan ki Byarthotar Pathe?’ (‘Is the Film-society Movement Heading towards Failure?’), report on a discussion organized by North Calcutta Film Society, Cine Club of Naihati, and Film Study Circle, Asansol, Chitrabhaash, July – September, 1984, p 50

and large regional centres, have historically remained beyond the reach of documentary film screenings. The materiality of this encounter, therefore, must be explored in terms of theoretical frameworks that begin on the screen, instead of extending into areas of film literacy and prior knowledge and experience. In India, the nature of audience experience was raised in the 1980s when the new communities of independent documentary film-makers and film-club organizers attempted to expand their audience constituencies beyond urban, familiar audiences. The political project of dissent documentary sought national audiences where the ‘voice’ of the documentary could ‘speak’ to constitute a questioning, active public. The success of this ambitious project, however, remains limited. Speaking to Thomas Waugh in 1989, film-makers Suhasini Mulay and Deepa Dhanraj note the lack of distribution and screening circuits for documentary film, which was entrenched in the financial non-viability and general unpopularity of the form due to historical connotations of instruction and didactic pedagogy.32 However, in instances where documentary travels outside its traditional class boundaries, Indian film-makers such as Anand Patwardhan identify a loss in translation, an ellipsis in interpretation of aesthetic and rhetorical components. In relation to his film, Bombay, Our City (1985), Patwardhan notes that certain metaphorical uses of verite´ style to depict upper-class power and excess failed to signify the intended irony beyond the regular middle-class, knowing audiences. Concerns about the concentrated nature of urban audience circuits were raised by film-club communities in the 1970s. Reflexive assessments by film-club organizers such as Suvendu Dasgupta identified urban, elitist audience bias in the film-club movement predicated upon spectatorial modes. Cinema elites believed that, while knowing audiences derived ‘intellectual delight’, unfamiliar or inexperienced audiences consumed film for ‘pathological excitement’.33 Assumptions about meaning production processes amongst non-urban, new audiences posited totalizing, singular-meaning construction trajectories grounded in semiotic and structuralist models, insufficient to establish how new audiences may make sense of an unfamiliar mode such as documentary film. Given the encounter with documentary film, questions arise about the trajectories and pathways through which audiences make meaning of the cinematic object which, while seemingly familiar in its non-fiction aspects, differs in its mode of address and purpose when related against the historical patterns of documentary film consumption. Unlike early non-fiction forms, which employed superior positions of instructional or pedagogic film address or expectations of pre-determined public behavioural outcomes, the festival films contain aspects of both pleasure and knowledge, combining the public and subjective to produce complex works that expect no empirical public outcomes.

THE PHENOMENON OF DOCUMENTARY FILM In her influential work Towards a Phenomenology of Non-Fiction Experience, Vivian Sobchack suggests a phenomenological approach that accounts for numerous subjective relations between spectator and

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34. Vivian Sobchack, ‘Towards a Phenomenology of Nonfiction Film Experience’, in Gaines and Renov, eds, op cit, pp 84 –103

the visual object, offering a way out of the pre-constituted subject-identification positions posited by psychoanalytic models.34 Suggesting three modalities of spectatorship, Sobchack employs Pierre Meunier’s 1969 publication, Les Structures de l’expe´rience filmique: l’identification filmique, to explicate distinctions between fiction, documentary and film-souvenir or home-movie modes based on a range of viewer identification processes and consciousness that begin on the screen and which the viewer either sees through into the life-world or focuses on for specific, filmic information. The level of transparency is a function of the relationship between the screen object and its existential knowledge for the spectator. In the case of fiction, attention is focused on the specific screen objects, while in documentary, attention is focused both on the screen objects, as constitutive activity is obstructed by only partial knowledge of the historically real being represented and, through the screen, to a general recovery of the existence of the events, locations and actions. Thus, constitutive activity does not demand prior cultural knowledge of documentary- film convention or epistephilic desire as a condition of documentary-film spectatorship; instead it encloses the existential experience of the viewer at the instance of meaning production. Proceeding from the given conditions of all cinema as visual object, and absence of the ‘real’ represented screen object, phenomenology suggests that spectatorial modes reside in the alteration of this absence by the personal and cultural knowledge between the viewer’s own position and the existential position of the screen object. The intense act of viewing gives rise to two processes. These subjective modifications of objective cinematic ‘givens’ are actualized by the spectator in a progressive and increasingly intense form of attention to the screen that, in its engagement with the cinematic ‘data’, constitutes an increasingly autonomous reality, differentiated from the reality of the spectator’s life-world and existing only in its mediated presence between the screen object and its perception. Furthermore, this progressively intense and subjective form of attention to the screen dynamically co-constitutes with the objective cinematic ‘data’ the particular form or genre of film we perceive: film souvenir, documentary, or fiction. The process of identifying visual objects as documentary, fiction or home-movie occurs at the instance of the encounter between the visual object, the spectator and the spectator’s consciousness of the referential indexicality between the screen image and his/her personal/cultural knowledge world. Further, the constitutive activity that implicates the cinematic object and spectator is a function of the specificity of the screen object to the existential world of the spectator, co-constitution activity being greatest when screen objects relate to known objects and events in the life-world. Thus, documentary film, instead of being epistemologically different from fiction, is apprehended as documentary in a subjective mediation between the perception of the screen object and its relationship to the existential life-world of the spectator. This creates the possibility of dispersed methods of meaning creation such that knowledge is created in a continuous negotiation between spectator and screen object, placing constitutive value on the shared existential conditions of the spectator and cinematic representations. A phenomenological approach includes the recognition and acknowledgement of spectator life conditions, experience and cultural history, elements of existential conditions, enclosed as a

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35. For instance, Films Division productions such as Ladakh (Khandpur, 1963, fifteen minutes) feature Ladakhi people, who are described as ‘colourful’. The film shows a Ladakhi wedding and traditional dances by monks. Other films such as Mountain Vigil (Gupta, 1963, seventeen minutes) and Taming of Snows (Ghate, 1983, eleven minutes) portray the work of the Indian Armed Forces and new defence technologies in securing Indian borders in the Ladakh region. Both films emphasize the ‘perilous’ nature of the terrain of the region. 36. Gargi Sen and Supriyo Sen, ‘Indian Documentaries Today: Changing Fields, Scope and the Practice of Documentary’, in Jane Yu, Asian Documentary Today, Busan International Film Festival, 2012, pp 76 – 108 37. Jag Mohan, Documentary Films and Indian Awakening, Publications Division, New Delhi, 1990, pp 93 –108 38. Madhusree Datta argues that linear categories were employed to organize the unfamiliar ‘other’ on the basis of ethnicity. ‘Truth and the Indian Documentary’, in Himal Southasian, vol 20, October, The South Asia Trust, Kathmandu, 2007, http://www.himalmag. com/component/content/ article/1327-Truth-andthe-Indian-documentary. html, accessed 19 December 2012.

constitutive element of meaning production. It can be argued that vast spatial, temporal, cultural distances between screen representations and existential conditions of spectators, such as at LIFF, may intervene in the constitutive processes, diminishing knowledge derivation. Sobchack suggests a particular engagement mode of ‘apprenticeship’ towards the cinematic object that builds upon existing cultural knowledge to create identification with the unfamiliar screen object. Processes of knowledge construction occur contemporaneously with viewing the film inasmuch as the viewer does not have specific knowledge of the screen object but posits its experience in a general location, ‘elsewhere’, and the existence of the screen subjects as part of a general occurrence. Specific knowledge is produced in the form of learning as the film is viewed. Enclosing spectator life-worlds, personal and cultural experience at the instance of meaning production rescues documentary film spectatorship from a convention of the knowing, a conversation circulating amongst recurring audience constituencies, in a shift towards newer audience terrains and emerging documentary consciousness.

AN UNFINISHED TRANSACTION The location of LIFF in the remote region of Ladakh acts towards restoring balance in a transaction that has never been fairly staged. Remote populations such as Ladakhi communities have performed as subjects at the production stage of the documentary process, but the position of documentary viewer has eluded them within the historical architectures of documentary process.35 Historically, state production institutions such as the Films Division of India controlled production and distribution of documentary film in India. Until the 1980s, when the ‘fourth generation’ of film-makers launched an independent documentary practice outside state structures of production and distribution,36 the medium had functioned as an arm of state propaganda, employed for purposes of publicity and the communication of nationalist agendas. Following Independence in 1947, one of the agendas during the subsequent nation-building phase was the integration of the diverse ethnic and geographically dispersed population groups. Documentary film was to ‘introduce India to its own people’, and, in an attempt to bridge the cultural and ethnic differences, a series of documentary films entitled ‘Know your Country’ was initiated.37 Ladakh as a region features in two contexts here. The first is as the location of culture-bound ‘colourful’ tribes, identified by cultural identifiers such as religion, costume and rituals. The second context separates the landscape to re-create it as a source of natural danger and insecurity, to be tamed by Indian Armed Forces. Here, the armed forces, and by extension the state, visualize their commitment to securing Indian borders, juxtaposed against a ‘perilous’ Ladakhi terrain. Ladakhis occur as recipients of development, visually present but absent as identifiable individual subjects. Characterized by standardized strategies of representation construction, the films employ the conventions of anthropological film-making to depict regional ethnic groups embedded culturally in particular geographical terrains. Thus, human subjects are arranged in ‘linear categories’,38 taxonomized according to ethnicity, and filmed engaging in cultural rituals and everyday activities,

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39. K P Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro (2000), ‘Media, Power and Identity: Critical Media Education for Students of Social Work’, Indian Journal of Social Work, vol 61, no 2, pp 240 –254 40. Annie Morgan James, ‘Enchanted Places, Land and Sea and Wilderness: Scottish Highland Landscape and Identity in Cinema’, in Catherine Fowler and Gillian Helfield, eds, Representing the Rural, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 2006, pp 185 – 201 41. In conversations with Thomas Waugh, Deepa Dhanraj and Manjira Datta discuss the lack of screening infrastructure and prohibitive costs involved in transporting documentary film to rural and regional areas. 42. For remote and rural audiences, a parallel distribution system outside cinema theatres controlled by the Films Division was established. In 1953 the Directorate of Field Publicity began to take the films to remote locations across India to be screened free of charge through a network of travelling film units. The mobile units consisted of a Nissan van equipped with a sixteenmillimetre projector, a power generator, a public address system and a tape recorder and tapes; Mohan, op cit, p 111. 43. Data obtained via interview with LIFF management, Ms Meghna Dubey, Operations Manager, February 2013 44. David Whiteman, ‘Out of the Theaters and Into the Streets: A Coalition Model of the Political Impact of Documentary Film and Video’, Political Communication 21, issue 1 2004, pp 51 –70, web 45. Ibid, p 51

defined visually and through narration by their otherness with reference to clothing, jewellery or cultural practices. K P Jayasankar and Anjali Monteiro (2000) are especially critical of the ‘us’ (film-makers/experts/ urban audiences) and ‘them’ (poor/rural/illiterate) frameworks of film construction during this phase.39 Geographical terrain and landscape function as ‘ethnoscape’,40 cultural and physical sites of identity production that contain symbolic ‘otherness’. Ironically, the visualization, intended to integrate, served to further segregate and create ‘curiosities’ to be consumed by the predominantly urban cinema audiences. Quite apart from the exclusionary process of representation construction, the documentary process from production to consumption excluded the very participants who performed as the aesthetic object of the documentary. Often limited to performance as sources of documentary imagery, remote population groups, as noted by film-makers and filmclub organizers above, have rarely been enclosed as participants in documentary consumption, nor in the critical functions of documentary spectatorship. The urban-centred documentary film industry has acknowledged the exclusion of remote groups,41 but despite this producers and practitioners have focused on conventional constituencies of knowing spectators.42 It is possible that site-specific factors, such as the absence of cinema halls mentioned earlier, have restricted the circulation of state-produced documentary films, distributed specifically through theatrical screens; however, these exigencies have continued to exist over extraordinary temporal phases, entrenching the exclusion of remote populations. While LIFF has not argued this point, and the festival focus remains on cinephilia, cultural tourism and business exposure, local audiences formed sixty-five per cent of the total visitors at the first festival of its kind in the region.43 A case can be made that the documentary-film encounter thus occurred to complete the transaction that had been left unfinished. David Whiteman’s ‘coalition model’ of documentary-film impact is predicated upon the conceptualizing of film as a larger process ‘incorporating both production and distribution’.44 Whiteman establishes the importance of all stages of production and production personnel, participants and viewers as politically significant in a structure that encloses the ‘entire film-making process’.45 However, in the case of geographically remote Indian populations, the equation has lacked an integral component of the documentary process architecture, the consumption stage. Even as the matter of participation includes its own set of representational and ethical problematics, the opportunity to critically engage with documentary representation and build knowledge of documentary convention has been unavailable to geographically remote audiences such as those in Ladakh. Thus, documentary film itself has been unable to create spaces and cultures across the country. It is possible that LIFF catalyses a shift in this relationship, allowing documentary film to travel beyond its limited screens and generate consciousness through small but significant steps.

CONCLUSION Historical and social contingencies and contexts add unique dimensions to film festivals; as discourse, film festivals present formations of power

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that reflect the grounds within which they are born, the people and operations that fuse together to bring life to the enterprise. Generalizations such as promotion of cinema or cinephilia, commercial agendas or cinema industry discourses guide the shape and forms of the event. However, they fail to probe the specific history, site and cultural dimensions that are unique to each location. In terms of audience, history of cinema experience, and geographical terrain, cultural factors influence public orientation towards events such as film festivals, which cinephilia alone fails to explicate. The emergence of new festivals in territories beyond traditional film distribution and, in particular, documentary film distribution, offers a unique opportunity to investigate the initial encounter with the documentary form, and its unfolding suggests processes beyond the scope of psychoanalytic theory of subjective meaning production in relation to the cinematic object. Social conditions and social structures in the developing world challenge the effectiveness of psychoanalytic models, creating the need for spectatorship to incorporate particular site-specific histories and cultures. Beyond the conventional axes, LIFF demonstrates the need for locating specific audience constituencies, and for recognition of the particular cultural experiences of cinema in the festival structure. I do not argue that the festival should function simply as a platform for cinema education. However, meaning production requires linguistic comprehension, opportunities for discussion and a particular orientation towards the film – actions that acknowledge the personal and cultural knowledge of the audiences and enable rewarding encounters.

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