Payal Kapadia and the Poetics of Cinema

There is an image of a tablecloth from Payal Kapadia’s award-winning film A Night Of Knowing Nothing that slots her as one of the most sensitive image makers of our time. 

At first, the monochrome frame has a corner bathed in a shadowy black. A soft breeze and suddenly, the material catches the light, as though lit by a flame, announcing its existence. It is one of the most poignant flutters of the film where despite being in front of you the whole time, the tablecloth was never made available to you in all its poetic and prosaic possibilities. You can read into this moment as much or as little as you want. It is the kind of surface that provides as much depth to dig into as breadth in which to luxuriate.

Odd, isn’t it, that in a film — Kapadia prefers to describe A Night of Knowing Nothing rather mechanically, as a “hybrid documentary” — that serves as an archive of our broken, fighting generation, sewing together footage from the protesting students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as they chanted slogans against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of Citizens, to those speaking up against Rohith Vemula’s suicide, and the 2015 protests at Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) over the appointment of the Right wing-backed Gajendra Chauhan as chairperson, the most enduring image, for me, is that of something as quotidian and so without political flourish as a tablecloth?

 Image-making in Kapadia’s Films

Things emerging into being is a powerful visual invocation in Kapadia’s films. One of the early images in And What Is The Summer Saying, Kapadia’s 23-minute film set in Kondhaval village, is that of an emerald patch that you slowly realize are parts of a tree at night, lit by a torch that is moving around, creating a collective portrait out of the fragments. It takes time, this building of coherence. In Afternoon Clouds, Kapadia’s 13-minute film about a 60-year old woman and her Nepali househelp, desire enters the story when the househelp’s lover is introduced — first by his name uttered by her lying in bed; then his back, looking out the window, leaning against the frame, facing the light, in the corridor outside the apartment; then him turning towards her; a turning, an emerging that paves the film’s path itself. 

Described by critic Najrin Islam as “post-photography gestalt exercises”, Kapadia’s work contains these turns of visual phrase that make room for a larger, unifying idea that suddenly lassoes the threadbare fragments of thought, animation, scribbling, image, and sound — often an idle voiceover in low, hushed tones of forced melancholia. These voiceovers feel like ghosts looming uneasily, you just wish you could swat it away with reason, but alas, there is always romance that comes in the way. A Night Of Knowing Nothing, for instance, was framed by the voiceover of a sultry, lovesick woman, L — a fictional concoction by Kapadia — reading out her love letters to a man who has deserted her because of her caste. 

Given the force of these images, it is hard to take Kapadia at face value when she says that for her, “sound is the most important thing in cinema”. Sure, you can locate moments in her oeuvre — a handful of short films, a hybrid documentary feature, and now her first feature film which is the first Indian film to be in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 30 years — that act as validations of her commitment to the cinematic possibilities of sound. 

Filmmakers Kapadia evokes in her interviews and artistry include Pedro Costa, Naomi Kawase, Miguel Gomes, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul — whose last film Memoria was, literally, about a woman chasing a sound that only she seems to hear, obsessively trying to transcribe it. While shooting And What is the Summer Saying she would go into the forest with just her sound recorder, and ended up designing the film using the sounds she captured. In Afternoon Clouds, set entirely in a seaside apartment in a seaside city, we hear waves crashing as a constant presence. Through sound, the world outside is yanked indoors, mingling with the small shrills of clinking bangles on an old woman’s wrist as it moves and the domestic, damp squelching sound of fingers sinking into a plate of rice made wet by stew. There is also the sound of a mother combing her daughter’s hair in her short film Watermelon, Fish, and Half Ghost, a soft whoosh of comb teeth raking their way through thick hair. We hear thunder and rain in that short film, and when we close our eyes to hear nature’s howls, we can sense somehow that the camera is inside a room, that the sound is being filtered through concrete and open windows. The eyes open; it is so. 

A Hybrid Language

At such junctures you can feel that, perhaps, her cinema is one emerging from sound — her central organizing principle — even as sound is the thing overlaying her images. Yet while her world is built through sound, primarily, it is through images — the turning of the cloth, the man, the torch — that it is pieced together. 

An alumnus of FTII, Kapadia made her second film Afternoon Clouds as part of a dialogue writing exercise during her second-year. FTII sent it to various festivals and it was selected in 2017 as the only Indian entry in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, in the 16-film shortlist of the Cinéfondation student film section. It did not win, but it put her foot in the door. Four years later, in the 74th Cannes Film Festival, in 2021, Kapadia’s first full-length film, A Night of Knowing Nothing, won the Golden Eye award for Best Documentary. 

It is impossible to know that A Night Of Knowing Nothing is, in fact, a documentary — the genre under which it was awarded — since its synthetic beauty, its polished articulation, exists alongside the unstudied chaos of its footage of protest, of campus parties, the serendipitous grace of found footage on pad.ma. The throbbing vibrancy of these show-don’t-tell “political” moments alongside the hushed meditativeness of the tell-only “romance” — which, as the film shows, is in fact political, too — produces a film that is too glossy for the documentary, too raucous for the feature film, and it dangles, not uneasily, but confidently between the two. There is no crisis of identity with respect to the film’s form. Even as she rips it apart, there is only confidence in every gesture she makes as a director, toying with form. 

Kapadia returns this year to Cannes with All We Imagine as Light. Her first fictional feature film, it will be fascinating to see whether her short films and “hybrid documentary” have allowed here to build a playpen of possibilities that she will now build on and further hone — like this sense of emergence, with rips of animation and text that scar her film’s surface — or pivot away from, to concoct a style that is cleaner, perhaps, more coherent, less sputtering, less gestalt, but, hopefully no less exalted.