FOOTAGE FOR A FILM WITHOUT END
This article accompanies the online screening of Sanjay Kak’s Red Ant Dream on Deptford Cinema’s On Demand from 14 December 2020 – 3 January 2021. Sanjay Kak also discusses his film with Chris Moffat, author of a biography of Bhagat Singh, and DC volunteer Pragya Dhital in this week’s DC podcast.
At the centenary celebration of a 1910 Adivasi anti-British rebellion in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, a member of the People’s Militia with a hand-made gun in his hand.
Footage for A Film Without End: Sanjay Kak's Long March
by Shuddhabrata Sengupta
There is a lot of walking in the recent films of Sanjay Kak. A lot of footage.
People walk to demonstrations, on patrols, to work, to count the living and the dead, to their farms, to dam sites, to meetings and rallies. They walk because they lead, because they follow, to stay awake, and sometimes they appear to sleepwalk through a dream. They walk because they have places to go to, things to leave behind, or to find refuge from rising waters.
Kak and his frugal crew are themselves hardy walkers. The companions of his journeys - a cameraperson, usually, but not always - Ranjan Palit, a sound recordist, perhaps a translator, and sometimes Arundhati Roy, his fellow-traveller, comrade and friend, have clocked in the hours and days over more than a decade. Their journey began while tracking elections in Tamil Nadu and post-insurgency Punjab in the late nineties in One Weapon (1997). It continued while chronicling the trials and travails of the anti-Dam movement in the Narmada valley in Words on Water (2002). It went in a completely new direction while documenting the bleak unraveling of a militarized occupation in Kashmir in Jashn-e-Azadi (2007). And now in his most recent film, Red Ant Dream (2013), it moves between memories of a deferred revolution and its legacy in Punjab, the Maoist insurgency in Bastar, Chhattisgarh and the Adivasi upsurge against the Vedanta Bauxite Mine in Niyamgiri, Odisha.
Niyamgiri, Odisha.
Sanjay Kak's métier was honed in a time when the simpler rhetoric of the activist 'campaign' film was giving way to a more considered, but no less committed and critical form. It was a time when the seeds of today's turbulence had just been sown. The mosque at Ayodhya had been demolished. Kashmir had erupted. The Berlin wall had come down. Tiananmen Square had shaken many certainties. The first Gulf war had brought satellite television to Delhi. The 'Anti-Mandal' agitation had brought the issue of caste out in the open on to the streets of Delhi.
From the late 1990s onwards, as the post-Emergency social and political consensus began to crack and new demands made themselves felt, documentary filmmaking in India acquired an even sharper edge. Documentary makers met to show and discuss one another’s work, and to find new audiences. This would mature into a lively film-viewing and discussion culture, active in different cities and small towns, college campuses and informal gatherings, and impromptu festivals that defied censorship through new channels of distribution. Kak was at the thick of this phenomenon together with several other filmmakers - Pankaj Butalia, Ruchir Joshi, Reena Mohan, Vasudha Joshi & Ranjan Palit, Nilita Vachani and her brother, Lalit Vacchani, R.V. Ramani, Saudhamini, The Media Storm Collective, Rahul Roy & Saba Dewan and Amar Kanwar.
As a young graduate from a film school, and a member of the newly formed Raqs Media Collective, I recall sitting in the South Delhi basement office of Octave Communications, Kak's production agency. Listening to the talk of senior colleagues, it was hard not to be infected by the excitement of sensing that we were part of something larger than worrying about where the funding for the next project would come from. We were not just making films or dreaming of making films, but also thinking about the ways in which we saw the world.
The first video cameras were beginning to appear in independent filmmakers' hands and the first computers were beginning to appear on their desks. The very idea of the 'independent filmmaker', someone untied to an institutional or commercial imperative, was a fresh and surprising new reality. This was a time of delightful and dangerous uncertainty. Everybody began asking questions. Sanjay Kak was no exception.
How to stay alive in dark times? How to create and sustain the conditions by which critical and imaginative thinking remains possible in the face of terrible choices? No work of art can satisfactorily answers these questions, and it could be argued that Sanjay Kak's latest film is flawed by over-identification with its subjects. But a flawless film is a terrifying thing; it can only freeze all conversation in its wake by pointing to its own perfection. It is the film that leaves us moved but dissatisfied, wanting to have a thousand arguments with its maker, which can alleviate our present misery.
A play about the 1910 Adivasi rebellion in Bastar, Chhattisgarh.
Red Ant Dream offers us a window into the vortex of a powerful conflict and provokes us into conversation with its haunting afterimage. It allows us to 'walk with the comrades' to use Arundhati Roy's telling turn of phrase, to see them dance, to watch them as human beings, not just as the faceless insurgents of Bastar.
Sanjay Kak has walked that distance, and he has listened. Regardless of whether or not we want to make the journey with him, whether or not we share his idea of the map or the destination, there will always be reason to be grateful for the footage that returns with him. The footage never ends because the walking never does.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta is an artist, writer and filmmaker with the Raqs Media Collective. He has kindly given permission for Deptford Cinema’s Online Journal to reproduce here sections from the original draft of his 2013 article on Sanjay Kak, published as ‘A Long March: Sanjay Kak’s journeys with those who live in conflict with the Indian state’, 1 July 2013, The Caravan. https://caravanmagazine.in/reviews-and-essays/long-march