Writing Natures Magazine – Issue 2: Insubordinate Vitalities: Natures across Documentary

The opening shot zooms into a parcel of distressed earth, the camera lingering on the cracks that race through the frame. The film tape’s audio static mixes with the soundtrack of a child crying, producing a disorienting acousmatic—the film tape or the body of the medium is sonically assertive here, and the child’s wails is disembodied, specular. The image of parched earth is intended as terrestrial evidence of drought and the absence of rain but appears in this shot as an abstract composition. As the camera holds this image for over eight seconds with the wails getting progressively louder, it is impossible not to wonder whether the “disaster” image as the residue of destruction held an allure for the filmmaker as a form that compresses the many modalities of devastation into a concentrated point, a retinal shorthand that transmits contained meaning and forecloses dimensions. This is followed by a series of quick cuts alternating between close-up shots of children crying and the opening image recurring as a motif—the film binds these frames together, implying a neat causality. Towards the end of this sequence, the child stops crying, his face reorganises into a look of rest, and he looks away from the camera, as if done with the activity. It’s a moment I have replayed and thought of in various registers; what is the child signalling in that ambiguous closing look—Ambivalence? Exhaustion? Indifference? Disgust? It certainly relays a narratological closure—the crying stops and the shot ends. It begs the question: where does the camera as a narrative agent sit in the causal dyad of drought and distress?

Produced in 1971 and directed by S Sukhdev, A Village Smiles fits the bill of Films Division documentaries on state projects (Sutoris, 2016)—the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam is introduced through the gentle swaying of a flower to the rhythm of water’s cascade, its tremendous hydraulic force distilled as a backdrop to the picturesque. This sequence exists to comfort the viewer and to preclude the onset of dread as the camera pans out to reveal the scale and velocity of water that is churning. Even as the voiceover extols the virtues of state-led development, the footage created for A Village Smiles treats the dam as an aesthetic object, whose beauty must be demonstrated through slow camera movements that play with perspective and detail, compositions that fetishise the symmetry of the structure as a code for order, and the desire valencies of slow, languorous scenes of pools of water touched by light. In the cloudy wisps rising from the dam’s churn, we are presented with a story that ends with a village smiling.

The opening sequence from A Village Smiles reappears in Anand Patwardhan and Simantini Dhuru’s documentary A Narmada Diary (1995) as an excerpt that also functions as the opening shot for this film. A Narmada Diary, which tracks the many voices and participants of the Narmada Bachao Andolan against the dispossession and displacement of Adivasi communities and damage to local ecologies as part of the Sardar Sarovar Dam project, tells another story—a counter-narrative to what A Village Smiles has to tell us, and to do so it chooses to begin where the state’s narrative did, the interceding effects of drought and distress, only this time followed by scenes not of tranquillity but agitation, of people’s organising and mobilisation to challenge the destruction of their lifeworlds. A patchwork assembly of filmed matter and found footage, A Narmada Diary draws its aesthetic scheme not from composition techniques—rather leaning into the jagged blur of the mobile and dissident camera—but from the presence of speaking human subjects, who narrate the movement’s challenges and aspiration and offer personal testimonies. But even the camera in A Narmada Diary meets its limit in the testimony of Bhula Moti, who is both frustrated and distraught at the destruction of his home, his livelihood and the rupture in his surroundings. His testimony is brisk and at times impatient, gesturing to the illogic of having to clarify his loss, which stands evident in the monumental presence of the dam; the timbre of his voice rises and falls sharply as he lists all that has been destroyed. The dam that exists as a backdrop in the frame, is the material locus of the total devastation Bhula Moti’s world; this representational sleight is not lost on him. His concluding sentence is brief and his turn away from the lens definitive, he’s done speaking; just as the child had finished crying. Whereas tears and testimony are addressed to another and are often included to elicit empathy—a standard currency in the documentary form—a grimace or a look of insolence does not seek identificatory or reconciliatory possibilities with the viewer, and is closer to the act of drawing a line and gesturing at a refusal, a turn inward and away. It is a pinch in the seamless progression of story.

Bhula Moti’s frustration and the child’s ambivalence present us with agitational tremors rumbling within the narrative field of these two starkly different films—one supported by the state and the other an independent film submerged in popular struggle. They both reveal, in distinct ways, the toll imposed by documentary narratology and the demands of storytelling across its typologies and genres—the search for the appearance of coherent yet disempowered or heroic subjects, the appetite for testimonies of loss and survival, the hunger for aesthetic sublation, the iconicity of the disaster image, the ruined landscape, the visual excess of catastrophe, and so on. The agitational tremor—brief, barely detectable and fundamentally inscrutable—does not interrupt the narrative but leaves imprints of a disturbance, the shadow of a puncture. It resists any acts of assured decipherability, and unlike the speech matter of testimony it does not make direct claims. It expects us to pay heed to its invocation of withdrawal, its turn to opacity; these momentary registers of frustration or indifference that slip into the stream of narrative not only signal its blind spots but inaugurate a refusal of needing to be understood or even grasped wholly. Situated in the narrative yet in constant friction against it, the agitational tremor is a portal to what may emerge in the wake of narratology’s retreat. Drawing on an insistent illegibility, it asks how we may then understand all of the rest in our engagements with the ideas of “nature”—the production of meaning, its effects on our reading of truth, and our own role as consumers of narratology?

Insubordinate Vitalities invited responses to this question—asking us to consider the tactics that key into these fugitive frequencies in documents and the documentary form as it mediates and organises our experience of natures—gaps, glitches, errors, interruptions, slips, a grimace—that lurk in a zone between perceptibility and articulation. The contributions gathered here perform many methodological revolts—hijacking the formats of bureaucracy and taxonomy towards speculative hauntings, warping the flow of time to distort organised historiographies, tuning into subterranean spectres and echoes from lost dreams, tilting the axis towards annotations and marginalia, attacking the extractive impulses of research, ventriloquizing history with memory, and recovering the cadences of a more-than-human’s world’s resistance to being flattened in narratological schemes of dominance and subjugation—of reason, of civilisation, of caste, of empire, of nation, of development, of ethnonationalism, of data, of records and metrices. These contributions foreground interruptions, stoppages, errata, and shadows as potential routes away from the totality of narratives we have received thus far. Attentive to the frequencies that are unruly, impossible, inaudible and inexplicable and which persist within and at odds with the semantic fold of every document’s narrative, the authors orient us towards modes of reading that are sensitive to these latent irruptions. Betraying the document’s intent by turning this form against itself and pulverising the asymmetries of precarity that mark situated life and its disconnected viewership, they let us glimpse, at a slant and with restraint, the complex and imaginative worlds that seed insubordination.