Flyover

While Doing What I Do

Published in Lensight, 2017

In the following fragments I will not endeavor to lead you, dear reader, along the winding or clear cut pathways of an argument. There is nowhere in particular I wish to reach, and no conclusion in particular I wish to impart.

I only wish to share some excerpts of my notebooks, which I carry around with me wherever I go. They are not diaries in the conventional sense, in so far as they do not concern my day-to-day practical life. They are rather the diaries of an imaginative life, involved in the practice of cinema.

The images included, too, are in the spirit of taking a moment’s rest. Sometimes they might be related to the text, looking in, and at other times they might be windows looking out.

When my father went traveling, the days of his return would be celebrated with the exchanging of stories. What happened while he was away – to us, to him, to others. As children, me and my siblings used to eagerly look forward to this day. We still do. My father is a great storyteller.

Come to think of it, the strongest motivation to ever leave one’s threshold at all – other than to earn a living – is to come back richer for it with a story. And for the fainthearted, we have the imagination. (Who needs to scale a mountain when we can scale mountains of the mind!) In the hands of someone like my father, even a ten-minute trip to the local bank or post office could be full of so much surprise and incident as to regale us for days later.

Adventure is most often a rather uncomfortable and treacherous affair, but its value tends to grow in retrospect, when we live to tell tall tales.

This is true of every film shoot I have been on. If I return with no stories, and with my notebooks empty of ideas, then I feel that I probably shouldn’t have left home at all.

Some of my friends accuse me of exaggeration. It seems tall tales runs in the blood. I retort that even Aristotle has written about how exaggeration is the heart and throb of any story worth your time. There is no worse storyteller than one who will only stick to the facts.

My notebooks are playgrounds. My notebooks are libraries. My notebooks are hyperlinked like the internet. They are the knapsack where I store the treasures I find while wandering.

What I write is what I glean. Some of it is theft, some of it is conversation, some of it is imagined. But all of it is an attempt to make sense of what I do.

***

It is a quarter past four in the morning, and I am scrambling up a slippery slope carrying my camera, lenses, tripod and other equipment. The director and sound recordist are close behind, hugging their own bags full of equipment under the synthetic rustle of slightly oversized ponchos. We are all breathless, and do not quite know the way. It begins to drizzle.

Somewhere in the darkness, up this hill, lost in the forest, there is a bakery. Seven young migrants work here day and night, kneading the dough with ripples of pounding muscle and baking the rising mounds in a makeshift oven that is kept heated each and every day of the year. With the humidity, the image of fire mingles with sweat.

Filming the undernourished taut bare torsos of these working men, I feel guilty. I try to follow their movements, I try to endow the image with the strain and pull of their lives, I try to make the binary data recorded on the camera sensor physical. But it strikes me that what I am earning recording their work this one morning before sunrise is equivalent to what they earn actually working for an entire month, day in and day out.

Is what I am doing worthy of being called work?

Nobody speaks a word. I follow one of the men as he lifts a large wooden tray dotted with freshly shaped yellow- white fluffs of pao and carries them over to the oven. The sound recordist ducks down to avoid being seen, and I carefully step over him as I cross the congested floor-space. The director scuttles out of the door carrying the tripod and laptop bag just in time as we reach the furnace. The image is blinded by embers. I have to cut and reset the aperture to see the tongues of warm light licking and swallowing the dough whole. The room is filled with a woody aroma as the glaring heat turns a mixture of wheat, yeast and water into bread. My stomach growls. The sound recordist scowls. We cut, laughing.

Anyone who has worked on a film can testify that it is not only a kind of recording, but also a kind of doing. This is not only true of make-believe studio filming, but equally of the kind of filming where the camera aspires to just look and see.

Looking is an activity. Looking takes practice. Looking is a practice. You can make it a way of life.

Outside, the sky is taking on a deep blue. Out of the tanpura drone of the crickets, competing melodies of bird- song are beginning the lively process of marking out territories, separating day from night. The movements of the bakers take on a new urgency. The bread must be ready for day-break, to be had with the first cup of tea.

Focus, focus the light. My fingers rest on the cold metal, as if I were reading a pulse. The lens is what physically gathers the rays of light into a point on the sensor, but the lens does not focus. I do.

What is the net without the fisherman?

The word ‘focus’, interestingly, comes from the Latin for ‘hearth, fire’. Winter is the season of storytelling, and the point around which the community gathers for nourishment and entertainment is the dancing fireplace. Focus is the pretext for sharing.

***

Word histories form a kind of genealogy, a family tree. The present face wears surprising features carried forward from forgotten forefathers, now long buried in the grave.

Word meanings can perhaps be described as a poetic way of seeing. In allowing us to describe the world around us, they familiarize the unknown with metaphor.

However, as we only grasp at facts through these fluid metaphors of language, it is easy to mistake our own poetry for the actual world it describes. An imaginative way of seeing can thus become frozen and fixed, limiting our understanding rather than expanding it.

Take for example the words we have come to use to describe the act of clicking a photograph, or rolling a reel of film: we say the camera ‘records’, we say the camera ‘captures’, we say the camera ‘exposes’. With each inverse blink of the shutter, we ‘take’ a picture. When we go to ‘take’ photographs professionally, and especially when we go to film, we say we are going for a ‘shoot’.

These words carry with them the bias that because photography – and cinematography in turn – are based on a mechanical device that makes permanent a real image of the world in front of the lens, there must be an undeniable correspondence between image and reality.

These words also carry with them the idea that the clicking of a photograph, or rolling a reel of film, is a kind of imperial exercise of power by means of which we come to possess and make permanent a glimpse of fluid actuality. The words carry with them the idea that a photographer is a kind of hunter, or soldier, or detective, or petty thief.

Contrast this with the assumptions we have about the painter, who ‘draws’, who ‘interprets’, who ‘projects’, who ‘imagines’ – and most importantly, who ‘creates’.

Indeed, almost two centuries after the invention of photography, and long after it has been accepted as a tool of imaginative expression, our vocabulary still persists in carrying forward the world-views of those living at the turn of the 18th Century – in particular their prejudice that an image produced in a machine can never come close to the pure individual self-expression of the ‘finer’ arts.

When we see, we see with our mind as much as we see with our eyes. But the image formed inside a camera is a natural event, following natural laws. Just like falling rain or waves breaking on rock.

The photographer might call his craft ‘painting with light’ – but the analogy can only be stretched so far. Painting by means of cutting, adding or defusing the light reflecting off real objects to be then photographed by a camera, and the traditional physical painting by applying paint on canvas are quite different things altogether.

However, saying that a photograph is merely a shadow of the actual world, having no meaning beyond its physical occurrence, would be an equal blunder in the opposite direction.

***

Over time, the perceived division between the act of ‘recording’ (an objective image produced by means of a camera) and the act of ‘self-expression’ (a creative image produced by means of an artist using a camera) has led to a demarcation between two very different kinds of film practice – ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’.

However, this demarcation is easily and most often misunderstood. A documentary film is no more a record of reality than a fiction film is a record of an unreality.

We might be tempted to say that documentaries seem to express a commitment to represent reality as it is, while fiction makes no such promises. We might say that it is the intention that matters – and we must forgive the obvious manipulations a documentary filmmaker must make as only minor transgressions, as he/she still means to be an impartial conduit of the truth.

But is impartiality a necessary ground for truth? Is the attempt to represent things ‘as they are’ somehow more faithful to reality than when we tell things as a story? And finally, just because something is more faithful does it follow that it is therefore also more meaningful?

Both documentaries and fiction films share a narrative experience with their audience. Both mediums use the sensuousness of their materials as a basis of expression. What differentiates them is that they consist of different practices of generating as well as exploiting their raw material. In the same way that live action and animation are different practices.

We may compare this to the difference between a farmer and a hunter-gatherer. For the difference between them is not so much how and what they eat – the food generated by both might have the same nutritional value, etc. Indeed, the need to eat for survival is something they both share.

Rather, what differentiates them in this context is only how they source their food. No doubt, the hunted boar might taste different from the pig reared in a farm. Recipes might vary, and also the kind of cooking – the farmer might use an oven, while the hunter might cook his meat over an open fire. So although both produce food for sustenance and survival, there is certainly a difference in the kind of food each can offer.

***

What do we ask of an art work when we stand before it? What does an art work ask of us?

To me, what a work of art asks of me most is time. Time to make time disappear and linger. We linger in the part of the present that is also eternity.

Here, aside from the passing frenzy of the everyday, we do not have an agenda. We merely point things out, put things side by side, engage with a sense of play. And suddenly we become so involved in external occurrences that they become internal ones.

Advertising – the Holy Book of Capital – has made a commodity not only of what it advertises, but of the image itself.

Images are bought and sold. Images are copyrighted. The worth of images is linked to the stock market.

Yet throughout our prior history, images were always part of a social activity. Images were conceived of and shared in context of making the everyday meaningful.

For the Warlis, the creation of a painting marked a particular moment of life as significant. Birth, marriage, death. The image had ritual significance.

For the Romantics, the image expressed an inner self in an outer form.

Images draw root from entire dynasties of feelings and associations. They are part and parcel of not only our cultural heritage, but of our subconscious mind.

Images have no boundaries. They are entire worlds. When the curtain rises, like an eyelid, we begin to see.

Real things reflect light, a lens focuses that light, and we begin to see in our mind. Perception is the alchemy whereby transient traces on the retina become images, become memories.

An image is a process. It is not a thing. A flood is welcomed because after its assault and destruction it leaves behind silt – and so fertility. In cinema, images are the silt.

We are shooting the concluding shot of ‘Shivapuranam’, where the protagonist’s isolation and loneliness is interrupted by a visitor. The two men are sitting on the ground, drinking.

After everything that we have seen in the film up to this point, without a single word spoken, finally the time seems ripe for dialogue.

Arun, the director, and myself decide that we will shoot this as a single take. To create the anticipation of a conversation being imminent, and give the impression that both characters are on the verge of saying something, we decide to shoot the sequence with the camera in the middle, separating as well as connecting the two men with swish pans.

They then proceed to finish the entire bottle of rum without a word. The camera glances from one man to the other, like an awkward onlooker stuck in a party of strangers without having anything much to say, waiting for relief in the taught reverberating silence.

By the time I cut, my hands are shaking. With each swish pan, I knew I was risking everything.

In the final edit, the shot lasts 7 minutes and 1 second. It has 39 pans. The original duration was 11 minutes and 39 seconds (16778 frames), with 74 pans.

This single take, more than anything else I have ever filmed before or after, makes me feel that what I do is not record, but perform.

This thrill of performance, strangely, is most acutely felt in the filming of documentaries – which pretend to be impartial conduits of reality. For while other practices of cinema are becoming increasingly dependent on post- production composites and hybrids, thereby coming closer to animation than pure live-action, documentaries continue to hold the real reel rolling as sacrosanct. This sense of uninterrupted time, lived time, time experienced and time felt is the characteristic quality of all performing arts.

The act of photography, any act of photography – for indeed, they need to be qualified as acts – are always caught on the threshold between representation and performance.

Returning from shoot, one day, the shrubbery to my right suddenly gave way to a magnificent view of Chapora Bay. The monsoon clouds were beginning to gather, filtering the evening light into a pallid quicksilver that reflected off the corrugated metallic expanse of water. I stopped the car and got out. Then, suddenly, in the distance, I saw a man walking on water.

It was an unforgettable image.

I had a camera. I held its body in a trance, focused the lens, and clicked. I let the shutter blink again and again, like a flutter of metallic wings, till the man crossed the bay and disappeared behind a curve in the river.

Then I got into the car and hurried home, to tell my wife what I had seen.

While I copy the card onto the computer, I remember the thrill of the dark-room. The suspense, the waiting. I smell the smell of chemicals that I have not smelled in years. Hydroquinone, sodium sulphite, ammonium thiosulfate – the names themselves conjuring, like spells. And with a sudden pungent-sweet whiff of benzene and ethanol, I remember peeking over the flimsy faded-green curtain in the birthing room of Trinity Hospital, which was the only screen separating my wife’s face from the new unknown that – who – would emerge out of a deep clean cut in gurgling skin.

An image is not a moment captured. It is a moment unleashed.

Into stories. Into imaginings. Into dreams. Into nightmares. Into our inner eye.

Your existence is a mere bubble on the ocean.

Every surging wave means danger.
Hold a mirror in your hand, watch your reflection.

How long does the image last?

- Sarmad Shaheed

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