Within a few minutes of Invisible Demon, we see shots of sweaty labourers, pulling carts, carting ice slabs on their wet shoulders. A heat wave. Then, raging skies, flooded slums, children using the heightened water level as a pool to waddle in. Stubbles being burnt in empty fields, producing thick, turgid clouds of smoke. The morning after is sepia-ed by the pollution. (The titular demons are the carbon particles in the air) NDTV footage, cutting scenes from streets. Landfills like mountains. A landscape of garbage. Foamy sewage and industrial waste. It is gorgeous, this apocalypse, lensed by Saumyananda Sahi, Rodrigo Trejo Villaneuva and Tuomo Hutri. Beauty in bloodbath, then. That is the power and puerility of this documentary — to look death in its eye and say, how beautiful you look.
Climate change is a notoriously lopsided phenomena with rich countries carting waste into the air that chortles the lungs of poor countries, the rich within a country doing the same to the poor. Environmental racism, for example, is now being considered a robust discipline that studies how climate change disproportionately affects people of colour. If Jain is interested in documenting the effects of climate change, then he must step out beyond his gates, must employ that gaze only an outsider can produce — to look at an endless carpet of trash and find it both nauseating and cinematic.
This comes to the fundamental, semantic question of what a documentary is. Is it inherently exploitative? The process of making a documentary, then, is to either become shameless about it, or to be apologetic about it. (There are, of course, other visions of documentary filmmaking, more politically-participatory like the ones Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee lay out in their book Towards a People’s Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India.)
This power differential between protagonist and filmmaker in the documentary landscape is a throbbing question. This tension is best expressed in Shaunak Sen’s first documentary Cities Of Sleep. Its protagonist, Shakeel — who is established as an unreliable narrator, a vagabond — extremely tired, at 3am, suddenly turns and tells the camera that the crew do nothing for him, don’t give him anything; they just film him.