PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Sharma: Aparna | UK

Working Title:

Resituating boundaries through montage

By: Aparna Sharma,

The Film Academy,

University of Glamorgan

E: Aparna31S@netscape.net

In this paper, Resituating boundaries through montage, I share occasions from my recent ethnographic film work that indicates practice as a site of multiple and competing discourses. The practice under discussion extends from my considerations into problematics encountered while working with the technique of film montage to represent a British Indian diasporic community. The concerns arising in relation to this community, in some measure parallel those from my previous engagements with peripheral communities such as Kashmiri migrants in New Delhi.

While montage, as a modernist technique, serves in disrupting dominant modes of representation, the stated practice questions whether the dialectical mode of editing, based on conflict, is limited and containing insight into the subject of representation. Though modernist formalism is valuable for intervention disrupting dominant discourses and forms of practice, a stress on the primacy of form risks foreclosure into the subject of representation and the possibilities of dialogue between subject and text-maker. Staying with these reservations, my practice tends towards a curvaceous choreography around the subject, performed by the text-maker using the cinematic apparatus. This muddies the boundaries between etic and emic perspectives, and further renders practice as a complex territory of confliction, interrogation and interaction between discourses and theories: here, film theory, postcolonial theory, ethnography and Indian aesthetics.

Ethnographic practice privileges cultural specificity that problematizes metadiscursive constructs such as ‘cultural hybridity’ as being totalizing, burying and obscuring the subject under inquiry. Nevertheless such conceptions are imperative for approaching and unpacking the subject. The textual distinction of practice reveals rich tapestries of cultural and social particularities, pointing the limitation of disavowing specificity, and pressures taking into account the position of viewing/examining the subject. Further, more broadly, it presses on the relation of practice with theory and discourse. Neither stands in a unitary or linear relation to the other. The arising forms of knowledge merit articulation that is appreciative of the specificities of participants and the context for the practice.

Besides research into the subject of my representation, rumination upon the position of engagement, which in film translates into the position from where the subject is being viewed, has propelled dialogue between modernism, stressing selfhood and an esoteric, philosophically informed, native aesthetic tradition. The former manifesting itself in methods of image composition and editing montage including cutting preferences such as those of Dogme; the latter influencing forms of image construction deriving from speculations around prana or breath. This dialogue has been complex given that a tendency towards the native tradition can promptly slip into a kind of oriental naturalism that the modernist impulse, with its political potentials, promptly defies.

The developing practice resists appropriation as purely radical, alternative or oppositional. Testifying the subject culture as intricately layered with impetuses derived from both the home and host land, and the contact between subject and text-maker, pushes the practice towards being a textural document, involving the investment of our specificities. An approach stressing either form, content or ideological motivation surfaces as inadequate for the intercourse between subject, text-maker and the cinematic apparatus.

This practice is being developed as part of my doctoral research in film. Besides academic fora including conferences and seminars, spaces of film exhibition such as festivals and galleries, and forums of ethnographic and commonwealth discussion have been claimed to present the developing practice and discuss it, in terms of both content and form. Possibilities of the cinematic apparatus arising from this research have contributed in my reviews and writing pertaining to film and cross cultural interaction for journals such as the Leonardo Digital Reviews, Seminar and the New Welsh Review.

In this presentation, I will elucidate the complexity of practice as research and the particular interventions that can be derived from my ethnographic work. It will conclude with by highlighting the issues pertaining to the review of such practice and the knowledge arising from it. My presentation will be supported by audio-visual clips.

My engagement with these communities stems from my journalistic research and documentary filmmaking pursued in India during the years 1998-2003.