Every time I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘This is a photograph of me’, I remind myself not to consume images complacently. The overwhelming tension between reality and the image in the poem poses vexing questions. Is it possible to locate yourself accurately in a photo? How many selves do we inhabit in the digital age? Can there be a record of tiny, personal histories, if the personal is also deeply tied to the political? Take for instance, our access to the history of the North-east, which has been largely dependent on books, be it fiction, poetry or non-fiction. This fact is especially true for those living in ‘mainland’ India, who cannot fully enjoy forms like folk theatre and regional cinema (both have suffered compromises and setbacks due to the commercial pressure exerted by Bollywood).

Political chaos, mass migration to cities, the changing contours of villages, and the thorough corruption of the media, have all played a part in distorting the traumatic experiences faced in this part of the country. It is in such a scenario that a brave new generation of filmmakers is trying to examine memory and the multi-faceted story of trauma.

At a recent screening organised at Toddy Shop in Hauz Khas Village, South Delhi, I watched four short experimental films, originally curated for the TENT (Theatre for Experimenting in New Technologies) film festival in Kolkata. Curator Shaheen Ahmed says these films, spanning a decade, from 2005-2015, “rupture the teleology of linear history”. Disrupting notions of time and nostalgia, they look beyond sentimentality to create something intangible, as opposed to the physical photograph. The theme that connects these four films, according to Ahmed, is ‘postmemory’. Marianna Hirsch states in “The Generation of Postmemory,” “Postmemory is not identical to memory: it is ‘post,’ but at the same time, it approximates memory in its affective force”. Some of these filmmakers may not have experienced first-hand the horrors of Assam’s turbulent history, but their parents did: and the consequences trickled down into their children’s lives as well.

One 2006 film in particular, called Bhal Khabar ( Good News ), is an excellent meditation on the gradual erosion of journalistic integrity in Assam. Based on a newspaper article by Saurav Kumar Chaliha (who also provides the voiceover for this film) and directed by Altaf Mazid, it takes into account the rise of voyeurism in the general populace. The film is an elaborate lament for the days (before the Assam Movement) when the newspaper’s front page could surprise you. Nostalgia is used to critique several aspects like the lack of goodwill that has emerged with the rise of consumerism.

Making the shift from political memory to cultural memory, Wanphrang K Diengdoh’s 2010 Khasi film, The Fern, uses folk music as an artistic tool to prevent cultural amnesia. Some of his other films focus on identity issues in Meghalaya, a place torn between folk culture and an urban sense of dislocation. The film follows a lonely old man (Ma HK Wahlang) with the duitara (a two-stringed folk instrument), singing about the fern in an elegiac tone. This striking figure represents the decay of primordial folk music which is also a space that contains rich social experiences. To what extent can folklore keep track of memory or recreate the past, Diengdoh seems to wonder.

Mukul Haloi’s film On Memory and Forgetting , based on a family photograph, is an exploration of spatial memory that resists any linear interpretation. A young filmmaker from FTII, Pune, his films have a distinctly Tarkovsky (who, in fact, made a film called Nostalghia ) atmosphere. The still where a photograph is clicked with heads cut off is such an accurate picture of the art of representation. Upon asking the director about the role of fluid space in his films, he says “Space acts as a medium of evocation of certain things of past, which one can’t even think of recalling with a conscious mind. It’s almost like a glimpse of thought or image, which pops up in a half-awakened state.”

When Neil Gaiman, the creator of Dream (from The Sandman series of comics), pointed out that dreams are real, even when they are not made up of matter, he was actually making an interesting comment about the way we perceive images. In Shantom Shar’s Manipuri film, The Linger , elements of horror provide the clues to a dream-like universe, where the romantic angle is mixed with criminal guilt. A troubling oscillation from the world of dreams to the real, this elusive film provides more questions than answers.

This screening was an act of intervention: it was about resisting normative and linear portrayals of traumatic memories. The screening was followed by a talk with Bindu Menon, Kaustabh Deka and Kaushik Bhowmik, and it turned out to be a fruitful and engaging one. These mavericks may well inspire a risk-taking brand of cinema from the North-east in the years to come.

(Rini Barman is an MPhil student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi)

Related Topics