Avijit Mukul Kishore with Shankhajeet De
Introduction by Gargi Sen
Because of this strange space that the documentary falls under in the popular minds, the entire body of work that the documentary practitioner of today is developing, which to my mind falls in the realm of art, gets neglected. There’s a complete indifference to this developing community of documentary filmmakers who have been trying to tell stories with a particular form. The form differs from person to person, but it is definitely a formal quest.
We have Manjira Datta here who is one of the pioneers of this shift in form. Her second film, which we screened on the first day of this festival, had two packed auditoriums! There is an audience, there is the content and there is the form; but the audience still needs to be helped to see something different when we say documentary.
With an attempt to do this, we focus on this whole range of divergent forms, because it definitely isn’t one form, it’s a range of emerging forms. We don’t question the politics the filmmaker brings because these are very different from propaganda, very different from journalism – these are works of art, and we have with us practitioning artists.
Shankhajeet De introducing Avijit Mukul Kishore
This is the first time that cinematography is being looked at very clearly with regard to the realm of documentary. It is a fantastic idea to have Avijit Mukul Kishore with us today because he is one of the very few people who after passing out from a film school, which is known as a bridge to the popular film industry in Bombay, Kolkata, Chennai and other parts of India, chose to consciously enter the realm of documentary.
In my time it was almost taken for granted that after doing cinematography in FTII (which Mukul left it 1995) you will naturally progress to make feature films. Very very few used to move into other realms, and I used to wonder why people would chose to take a decision like that and not enter feature films.
I was told that it was because they couldn’t cope up with the industry, which requires a lot of courage, strength, the big idea, vision and the perseverance to get into the mainstream Bollywood industry. It was believed that these people were a bunch of failures and that’s why they went into all this “sidey” stuff.
Why did you take on the decision to stay with documentary even though technically you were quite qualified to enter the mainstream industry?
I guess it was a variety of things and here I’m going to pick up from something Saba Dewan said about how documentary was seen as this form of propaganda and talking about issues and fiction was seen as this form where you could experiment with film form and language. For me the reason to take documentary was because my experience was the opposite.
I felt that to engage with fiction filmmaking, which I’ve done and would also like to do given a chance, the whole genre is very dependent on factors that are completely external to what you want to do. The director, cinematographer or the entire creative teams’ vision is dominated by the genres sense of aesthetics, of dealing with actors, the market and so on. So I felt that independent documentaries were free of those shackles and you could experiment with what you wanted to do.
My first couple of films were quite complicated in terms of how they were addressing the issue of constructing films formally. It was also very exciting to deal with real people while working and also deal with aesthetic issues: for instance how do you film performing arts, how do you film painters and so on. Working out devices of dealing with all that is what interested me in the documentary form.
It was not connected to any mainstream form so distribution system was of course a problem. We keep talking about the entire need to disseminate and make people familiar with non-fiction forms, these films need to be seen more, distributed more and have to be more remunerative. All those things are there, but it also made a lot of things possible.
Rather than the lack of courage and perseverance needed to survive in mainstream, on the contrary it is more challenging to deal with documentary cinematography. As far as the form is concerned, you don’t have prewritten screenplays and scripts, the shots are not discussed at length; and also there is no art direction department per se. The recce options are also very limited as compared to fiction.
Before you or your generation of twenty years ago, independent documentary did not really exist as a movement, but now I see a pattern of proliferation of independent documentary coming up.
In your school I am sure what you were taught and how you were told to create the larger framework must have been very different. I would like to know more on how, you devised a strategy to negotiate with the filmmaker and how did you deal with this absence in screenplay?
In the words of Madhusree Dutta, it is easier to find a life partner than a unit you can happily work with: whether it’s a cameraperson or an editor. So yes the entire question of being in sync with your unit and for the unit in turn to be in sync with the director is of such utmost importance before you even arrive on location and deal with the subject.
You have to be able to understand how the other person thinks. Where the person is coming from, what their sense of politics is, aesthetically too, you have to be on the same plain. Both have to be willing to negotiate a way between somebody else’s sense of aesthetics and my sense of aesthetics and it should be a process through which you grow. I shouldn’t bring in any preconceived notions that this is the way it should be shot and the director should not have one way of looking at things.
You arrive on a location with absolutely no screenplay and you are dealing with a set of variable and real people, changing light and so on. Very often we almost make it a virtue to shoot on available light and you do that a lot. We may carry a basic lighting kit but to understand how light will change across a room is something that has to be done on the spot.
Naturally there are a set of conventions that one follows and just an understanding of filmmaking whether its fiction or documentary helps. For instance I am classically trained in fiction, Madhu has her own background of theatre and film, so you apply those conventions that you bring in with you.
It’s not that difficult really: you do a mental breakdown or a mental script. For instance you need so many long shots, so many group shots, we need close ups and cut aways of hands and so on. Likewise you devise this approach to whatever your subject may be.
It gets a little more complicated when you are shooting an artist, be it a visual artist, fine artist, performing artist, whatever. There can never be a set answer to anything, it is all location and situation specific. The exciting part for me as a documentary cameraman, which I feel becomes a problem for me when I shoot fiction, is that I am responding.
Things are happening and I’m responding to them. My camera is responding and I am deciding how to move with the camera. For instance if you are shooting with a small camera or a DV camera or an HDV camera, most of the time you’re hand held. I prefer it that way, unless of course it’s a long sequence, or an interview or a steady frame.
There are no marks: people don’t come to their marks, the camera is not on its mark so you keep it fluid. If some one is coming towards me I may decide to move away or just remain there depending on the situation and what keeps the frame interesting. You also have to create a sense of movement within the frame, and of the frame, by changing the relationships and create changing perspectives. One is also thinking of the edit while shooting. If it’s a talking sequence, you think of an edit in a certain way.
What is very exciting is to shoot visual sequences, I love shooting markets and activity and movement, I love responding to it. Defined by the reality and the entire visual scene that you are shooting you think, ok I have enough long shots now, let me move in. Then you just stay with the person, observe look and then you develop your own language of covering things.
You as a cinematographer are continuously saying what you have to say through your camera. Later on you have moved on to direct your own films, so you must have realized this shift in being able to direct a sequence rather than a camera, silently observing.
I want to talk a little about a change the in technology of the camera, from bulky beta cam camera 4375, 5376 or film cameras which were bulkier to the coming of these small digital cameras. How did you negotiate with those smaller cameras that came with their own problems and advantages in terms of a cinematographer engaging in documentary?
The point at which I came into documentary filmmaking was pretty much at the same time of the transition that was made from large cameras to more compact DV cameras. The Sony vx 1000 was the one thing that we were all very excited about, but a lot of people were like: How can you shoot with this? This is a toy!
My training was at FTII where we shoot on 35 mm cameras, which is a great luxury and my first film was on a mix of 16 and DV because of the way the film was constructed. I am talking of Kumar Talkies that was about a filmmaker visiting a small town in Southern UP where his family owns a cinema hall. The film was about the small town and its relationship with cinema and about him being a filmmaker revisiting this place and looking at the economy of the small town. The 16 mm camera, called the A camera was shooting the film and the DV camera was filming us filming. That was a mix of classical 16 and then video, which was meant to look like video.
We were not trying to hide the fact that we shot on video so in terms of quality of course it didn’t look like it was shot on film. This was in 1997, where film transfer facilities in terms of budget were not an option and they were also very rudimentary. But we said fine, we edit the video separately and we shoot it off a monitor, if we get lines or the contrast gets blown off its fine. We decided to of course let it go within limits but not fight the fact that it’s shot on video.
So one was able to shoot a lot on mini DV, where one had to accept its limitations and its various advantages. It put people completely on ease. Like Bishakha was saying yesterday, In the Flesh was shot with a handy cam, not even a big PD 150 or something which was necessary because she was shooting in intimate settings and discussing very intimate things and the camera was not seen as something threatening, but seen as a toy, so it helped here.
When one worked with small cameras, it helped break the whole spectacle of shooting. You could be right there, you could mingle. It was very important that we didn’t make a spectacle of ourselves while shooting. The standing joke was that the camera has shrunk, but the mic is still a monster. The moment you take out a boom mic and the mixer, everybody is aware that you are shooting. Of course there are technical and scientific reasons because sound can only be recorded in a certain way.
But cameras became completely unobtrusive and a lot more was possible. It facilitated a lot of things. For instance, it’s impossible to shoot on the roads in Bombay. They have these stupid rules because it’s seen as the centre of mainstream Bollywood, so shooting with anything is “shooting”, for which you need permission from three different organizations, you need to inform the police, the traffic police, pay a hefty fee. But DV cameras made it possible to go to a location, pretend to be tourists, get some shots and get out of there.
I made a film over a long period of time with my parents, which was called snapshots from a family album which was shown at this festival a couple of years ago and it was only possible to do that because of the DV camera. If it was a larger camera, it would not have the kind of intimacy that was needed to shoot somebody at home or somebody hanging around with the same level of closeness.
Audience: How do you shoot artists and performers and how do you devise a structure for it and why did you think that this was an area that needed to be especially thought about. Also most of the time documentaries have a possibility of dealing with personal stories, how do you carve out a structure for this purpose, as opposed to the classical learning that you have received.
The first thing that one learnt is that without making a spectacle of oneself, focus on putting your subject at ease, if intimacy is of importance. For instance if it is an observational film you want people to perform the way they naturally would. But sometimes for editing purposes you do need to give directions like walk from here to here, climb the stairs, dab you paint brush in paint and so on. But it is very important that one must not intrude on someone’s personal space, at least at first.
Whether it is a painter, a theatre person, a musician or dancer and so on, at first you must be an observer and the language of shooting a sequence comes from the discipline you are filming. For instance dance has its own movement within it so you have to devise a way of moving the camera within it.
Ever since shooting has become cheaper with the coming of DV and so on, what you can do is you can just start filming and respond to what is happening and then figure out what can be done better in what way. Say maybe I can go handheld or maybe I can move the camera to include other angles and so on. These were not options we had on film, because film is expensive and the cameras are heavier.
One of the earlier films we did was ‘Sundari: An Actor prepares’ which was directed by Madhusree Dutta, based on a play done by Anuradha Kapoor on impersonation. It’s on the life of an actor called Jayshankar Sundari who used to perform women roles in Guajarati theatre in the 1920’s.
We were filming the rehearsals of the play and in such a situation you have to be very careful because not only theatre people, but all performers are very conscious of the camera, because they are not yet entirely prepared, they are making mistakes, and the very fact that somebody is filming it, gives it permanence. They could come across looking amateur and not sure of themselves. One also has to respect the fact that it’s a process that they arrive at a performance through.
For example at first we would just sit in one corner and film from there and when they would take a break I would move to another angle and take shots from there and so on. It was only until later that we could take the liberty of moving the camera around or ask them to repeat a certain scene because we needed it for editing.
So you work out a way in which you give them space and they become comfortable around them. Largely in these situations you have to work at remaining invisible, until you feel its okay enough to step forward.
When you are shooting painters, it’s one story but how do you shoot painting itself? You discuss what is happening in the painting and what is the movement within painting, how can the camera work with it or against it, do you want the camera movement to highlight it or conflict it.
For example in the film ‘Made in India’ the brief was Indian Art: in the bazaar, in the shrine, on the street and in the gallery, commissioned by an art gallery in England. So it was all about different styles of filming different types of art.
In Made in India, when you pay attention to the manner in which it was filmed, is almost a new style that was emerging in ways to capture art and artist.
As a filmmaker and cinematographer, here what would be considered as a bad shot in classical form of filmmaking, but you chose to go ahead with it and why? It’s almost as if you are developing your own form and your way of looking: developing your new gaze not only in terms of documentary but also in terms of the new technology.
Audience: This is the first time that the Dadasaheb Phalke award was given to a cinematographer, VK Murthy. Slowly in the last two years something very magical has started happening in India, where technicians and people behind the scenes are being given a lot of recognition and respect. Even the Oscar was given to Resul Pukutty. It’s very exciting actually; from my experience as a teacher I am slowly seeing that it’s fashionable to be a technician. The whole confusion between I want to be a filmmaker equals I want to be a director, that I personally deal with among young students is also dying slowly.
For me its convenient to be a technician because I get paid more!
In the film ‘Snapshots of a Family Album’, Mukul moved on to direction apart from the cinematography. You can hear him indulge in a prolonged dialogue with his mother as he conducts the camera. The reason I pointed out this part of the film, is that you can sense the intimacy not only in what is being talked about but also the way in which the camera was positioned. It would not be considered as a good composition when you look at it in classical terms, but why did you decide to take that particular decision.
The one thing that I find very hard is to write the synopsis of a film, so I am not going to summarize this one before I begin. Irrespective of what a film maybe about, for instance this one was on a family that is living divided between two cities, because my mother and father worked in two different cities at that point and both me and my brother were coming of an age while my parents are drawing closer to their retirement. So in a way the film is about these rights of passage and the mode of that is one of intimacy. Therefore for me intimacy is the language of the film.
It came a lot more easily with my mother, who is happy to perform for the camera and it slowly becomes a very teasing kind of performance between me and her where I’m not just happy with what she said, I want more, so I keep doing chaabi to her and she plays along till she cant take it anymore. When she was genuinely uncomfortable I switch off, which is a conscious decision that I made both while filming and during the edit.
As you see there are no dramatic elements in the film and if I felt that at any place my parents would feel vulnerable and feel their space intruded upon, I just would not film. A lot of my filmmaker friends said, my grandmother who is in the film, passed away a couple of years after I had shot this sequence with her, why aren’t you filming this, it’s a very important part of your family’s history but I didn’t want to film it because that was an intrusion and it was a choice that I made.
Coming back to this scene, I had to shoot very close because the whole nature of the conversation is that I am lying next to my mother and chatting away, talking rubbish. The content of that conversation is next to nothing, you even wonder what the sequence is leading to until it gets to that part about how its so hot I cant deal with it and I say lets go back to Bombay and she said I cant deal with that even more. Thus bringing in the hometown, which is Allahabad, which comes later in the film.
Another reason for shooting it so close was that it was just me. I couldn’t have a sound recordist and expect the quality of intimacy. I could not have lit up the sequence. So things that are technically incorrect (like shoot with the gain pushed up because the natural light is much more exciting) just in camera terms for instance, this is shot with 12db gain which introduces a lot of grain in the picture, it also looks so red because it was Delhi and voltage at night was very low but I left it all uncorrected.
This kind of intimacy is not something that my brother or my father lent themselves to. There was a lot of formality and a lot of back and forth when I was working with them. At the end of the film for my father to say what he says took a lot of time because for them the performance was very formal and immediately it became not spontaneous which lost the ease that mother had.
How do you capture memory? How do you look at memory on a physical space because the camera itself is a device to get visuals out?
The film shuttles between Bombay in Delhi. Bombay is where Mukul lived with his father and brother and his mother lived in Delhi. Their ancestral place is in Allahabad and we have our own ideas about Allahabad from the film.
In a film like this how do you look at sequence and how do you look at old people (people of your grandparents generation) where you feel that these are the repository of memory and history and things like that.
This film looks at those parts of Bombay, which is perhaps not in popular notion of it being the city. There are perhaps a lot of parallel cities that live and the filmmaker says that perhaps the Bombay he explores is the “real” Bombay and perhaps not.
So he’s developing a way of looking at Bombay with a new eye because the film was more about seeing that aspect of Bombay that people might not see: that which is lost or that’s gone into oblivion behind the façade of the new structures and lifestyles that have come up.
In documentary usually nobody gives you a shot, you have to compose your own shot. The cameraman or cinematographer is very responsible in the whole scheme of things. The director often can’t see or has not created the shot, so the cameraman is almost deciding what will be the image.
In this shot popular documentary notion is getting broken here. I was quite intrigued by this particular shot because I wasn’t sure if Mukul was just reacting to a situation with his camera, or was it constructed and planned to be this way.
In this shot my question is was it composed or real?
It was completely organized. A lot of people have said that we were very lucky for getting that shot of ten cement mixer trucks at Bandra fly-over and how did you do it: we paid for it!
It was a long film, and it was shot over a period of time. As part of entering the film and devising a way of looking at the city, Madhu and I would go driving around and the first part of the shooting we did was in the monsoon because as per cliché Bombay has two seasons, heat and rain. The city becomes really gorgeous in the monsoon.
We were on the Ghorbander Road that connects the western suburbs to Thana and a lot of quarries and construction activity was happening there. We saw one of these cement mixer trucks and we filmed it, with wipers running and we found it very exciting so we got that man’s number. Then Madhu said, we have to do this, this has to be an iconic shot, and it has to be an iconic sequence.
It took a lot of time and negotiation because the moment you tell people we want to use this in shooting, they smell money, but the assistants did their job and organized it.
So yes the shot is completely organized, it’s set up. We chose to do this at dawn on a Sunday morning because of the light, the early morning light before sunrise, magic hour as it’s called.
In Bombay it’s impossible to shoot on the roads that too the Bandra flyover that now leads to the Bandra Worli see link. Security is crazy and I wonder if we will be able to do it today, this is five years earlier.
So we got there at the crack of dawn, with two cameras, just in case. This shot is actually taken by my friends Ajay Noronha. We had two cameras and this particular shot I was on a different camera, using the tripod and that shot is also seen later in the film.
We weren’t satisfied so we wanted to turn them around and bring them in again, but ten trucks bringing them back would take twenty minutes at least and the cops would have arrived by then. But we still did it again, there were two takes: four shots with two cameras, a completely set up shot.
Most of the time we don’t have video assist, the director doesn’t see what is being done, there are no rehearsals: as compared to fiction. In documentary the cinematographer needs to know what has been shot and it can only be seen later, when it is comes to video and it is viewed only when the sequence is completed.
Keeping this is mind, did you feel that as a documentary cinematographer, is it necessary for you to have a vision, and how different is that visualization from narrative or fiction shooting?
That style or outlook is completely mediated by the cameraman’s sense of politics, aesthetics, composition, colour. So yes completely, the cinematographer needs to have a vision.
How different was it to do the camera for yourself, once you started directing your own films. Is there a difference in how you perform as a cinematographer when you are working for yourself or for others.
In an ideal situation, the energies of a Director and the energies of a Cinematographer should come together and give you something more than just two plus two is four. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t happen. When I am directing, the way I shoot for myself is very different from the way I shoot for somebody else.
Snapshots was another story because I was shooting my parents, and that was not really direction because I was simply shooting things as they were happening and the film was completely made on the table.
But in say Certified Universal, for me it became quite a strain because a director not only directs, they do PR, chat up people on location, direct your crew and so on. Especially in uncontrolled locations it became very difficult and I remember at one point I actually started to flake out.
Especially added to all these, to do an interview, some people have really developed that skill. Ranjan Palit does it, Pankaj Rishi Kumar does it. There are people who shoot, do sound (I wasn’t doing sound, thankfully) and do interviews, take care of everything else and direct.
It was all still fine till someone started talking in a language that was alien to me, which could be Marathi or Guajarati. That I could not handle.
So you are definitely looking for inputs. It’s not like the director is never looking, because there is an LCD and you’re not always sure so you just ask the director for pointers. He has a certain vision of the film so for instance it may be a good frame but the director might want it to show a little context so in that sense it will be tight frame. You are always looking for these pointers and that’s a very special partnership that the two share
Audience: in the last scene of John and Jane, where was the camera?
It was on the top of a skyscraper; all those shots were taken from the top of a high-rise building. The last shot is where you can see the aircraft landing one after the other, which is why it is taken from various high points around the airport.
Audience: We are often wondering about the medium when we are planning a film, which camera to use and how to shoot: whether we need DSR or HDV or Mini DV. So if somebody has a story and they have to decide a medium, how do they make a decision about a camera that will give them the result that they want?
That depends on what the film is meant for. If it is meant for television, they usually have standard specifications, whether it’s ok to shoot with HDV or do you need a bigger lens and so on. The second factor is the budget of course.
For John and Jane, we chose to shoot on 35 mm because a certain kind of image quality was important to him and I think he’s used it very well in the film. Its not just being obsessive about film quality but it was because he wanted some kind of a formality associated with the film. Of course because it was shot on 35 mm it had a theatrical release in the US, he managed to have a release on HBO and it even ran for a week in PVR.
In ‘The city project’, you have worked with different imaging devices such as mobile phones and so on. It uses archival footage, documentaries of Films Division time, as well as excerpts from popular cinema.
(The film is about how cinema has influenced the city and how people look at the city, and also how living in Bombay, though you are from Delhi, has influenced how you look at things)
This is part of a package that was jointly commissioned by Majlis and PSBT as part of this project called Cinema City Mumbai, which is Majlis’ initiative, which is an attempt to look at Bombay and the cinema and the way they produce each other. There are various aspects to it, there is an urban studies aspect, a cinema aspect and a whole lot of things that are happening around it.
This is one of the films of a six series that have already been produced and it’s called certified universal, about the cities engagement with image making, and our engagement with image making through various forms that are accessible to us.
The whole thing of just the proliferation of the image and our engagement with the image whether its coming through people taking pictures of each other or making movies of each other through cell phones or surveillance cameras, like there is cctv footage of VT on the 26th November attack. We are forever surrounded by news cameras and images coming to us very often, unedited, unmediated and so on.
Also there is this sequence of me coming down an elevator with my mobile phone, which shows that we are forever in and out of the city and its image making and how real people are depicted in cinema. The entire slum demolition sequence and the building that they have been moved to and their engagement with their personal choice of cinema, when this woman says I like watching sad films, which is completely against this whole practice of people watching happy and feel good films.
Mukul don’t you miss the twenty light boys and focus puller and 65 kilo water flight and the big camera?
No. Like actors say I’ll do a nude scene if the script requires it and if its artistically done, similarly if I am shooting a commercial or there are bits of say seven islands and a metro (that’s a film that uses fiction a lot and a lot of sequences were set up) we’ve used cranes, rainmakers, all kinds of lights, everything because the scene needed them. That’s not verite, you can’t shoot that with a tiny camera.
So yes I do like it, but only if the project needs it.
Where do you think about documentary cinematography is going to go? You have seen the technology, the way the space has emerged for documentary, camera and editing is cheaper and so on. In this light, where do you see the camera in documentaryin the future?
I can’t answer that, it’s like asking me to be prophetic.
But I do think it’s a very positive trend, it is important that people are educated how to look at things and make informed choices when they are going about producing, whether its BMM courses or Mass communication or film schools, a lot of it is designed to service the growing media and film industry but people can chose whether they want to join that as a service provider or they want to engage with it differently.
It’s a great trend but I do feel that it has to be guided a lot more. Things have come up but there isn’t enough infrastructural or academic backup. Teachers are always lacking to teach these courses, but I do feel that we will get there.
Audience: We were just talking about cinematography and how it is very a macho kind of thing, with your twenty light men and the DOP rules the roost. But now the camera is becoming smaller and documentary is becoming very personal. So if I am making a very personal film, why do I need another interlocutor? Why do you even need a documentary cameraperson? Why can’t the director himself just shoot his film?
You don’t. A lot of filmmakers are doing it, especially if intimacy is of importance then its best if you do it yourself. These days we know the basics of camera technology and the basics of composition. So if small crews and intimacy is of importance, then of course filmmakers should shoot their films themselves.
In what kind of circumstances would you recommend somebody to take on a cinematographer?
I would say when technical expertise is of importance and the Director does not want to bother with buttons and dials and where you need to be focused on your work, do interviews, do PR, make small talk.
Interviews is one area that I find very very difficult because you have to make eye contact and look at the frame and listen which I can’t do at the same time. Also if you are shooting with a big camera, you need assistance if not a cameraperson.
27 February 2010, Conversations on Documentary Practice, Persistence Resistance 2010