Perhaps I should begin with how I watched the film (I promise, it is relevant). In an inflatable theater at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF), with indoor air-conditioning and a Dolby 5.1 surround sound, the audience had covered every inch of space, seated even on the steps of the aisle, sweatered and shawled; the shadows of their heads, their hair, falling over the lower half of the screen, mixing with the impressionistic images of Payal Kapadia’s film, A Night Of Knowing Nothing.
In between there was a powercut, a blackout and a stunning silence remained while the generator purred the film back into action. No movement, no uneasy shifting, just reeling from a shock to the senses — a meditation but also a citric sharpness. Later, someone I met at the festival told me he was thankful for the blackout, that we needed an interval, to just breathe. Another person, a filmmaker, recounted watching the film with a college audience with a terribly grainy projector and somehow, she would not have it any other way.
I say film, but I mean something more expansive. (Kapadia prefers the rather mechanical term “hybrid documentary”.) For one, there is a lot of reading, a lot of text on screen. It is a stylised archive of our broken, fighting generation, where the brawn and brutality of the oppressive state and right wing goons infest the imagination, trying to break its spirit — from the clobbering of students at Jawaharlal Nehru University as they chanted slogans against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens, to Rohith Vemula’s suicide, to the 2015 protests at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) protests over the appointment as chairperson of television actor and right wing enthusiast Gajendra Chauhan. Quoting the poet Aamir Aziz — “Everything will be remembered” — Kapadia has stitched together footage of pain. It is an archive and to question the film — as you must for its brave but broad and unwieldy strokes — is to question the need for an archive. Over these visuals is the voiceover of a woman, L, a fictional concoction by Kapadia, reading out her love letters. (She used a similar device in her 2016 short, Afternoon Clouds.) At once, the question hits you — how does the romantic sound voiced by the calming timbre of Bhumisuta Das and the stylised or politically-charged archival visuals connect?