The Tender Flex of Privilege in Documentaries About the Poor

The first we see of Rahul Jain, the director of the climate-documentary Invisible Demon, now streaming on MUBI, is inside his air-conditioned bungalow in Delhi, looking out through the floor-to-ceiling glass panel. On the other side of the glass slab is a monkey. Jain shows us the gates of his house closing; that the world he inhabits has a distinct ethos of insiders and outsiders. He is blunt about the privilege that lets him ideate and edit this documentary on the hot, humid air of his city — Delhi — in his cool, dry tower. “I just cannot conceive living without ACs and air purifiers. I actually grew up as an air-conditioned child who couldn’t even imagine the natural world outside the city,” he says.

Why centre yourself? Why transplant the discomfort you felt as a rich person making a film on the poor, to us, the audience? The discomfort itself is not a problem, it is inevitable. The impulse to document the “other” in documentaries, like the impulse to cinematically fictionalise the “self” in feature films, is a very human grasping of art. But when so insistently you foreground your gilded being, not for any cinematic purpose, merely to emphasise how alive you are to the politics of making a documentary, we are moved to groan. We bristle, seeing his camera follow young children as they beg for money, cartwheeling on the concrete. What do you want to say? Why are you doing this — to yourself, to us? It is too naive, too garish, this display of awareness, this preening urge to be on the right side of wrong things. At one point, Jain asks, “Who objectively benefits from this growth?” Later, he pulls us deeper into this rhetorical naivete: “If this is what development looks like, let us imagine what a world without development looks like.”

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.

This wasn’t factually true. Sen paid Shakeel to participate in the documentary and paid for Shakeel’s tickets when he went home. Shakeel knew this. Sen, when talking of this moment much later, says he was taken aback, but while he was playing the role of the “guilty, complicit filmmaker”, Shakeel played the role of “documentary subject who turns and asks”. It was a performance, one that came from the dense tradition of exploitative documentary filmmaking. The tension of the documentary, then, as Sen sees it, is to intervene and step back, intervene and step back.

Jain doesn’t want to intervene, except through verbal invocations and visual gestures of solidarity. There is a shot in which an NDTV camera crew scopes the streets of Delhi. We see the cameraman sweeping his camera over people on the footpath. A woman pleads to the anchor to give them a place to live. The anchor replies, yes, wait a bit for the camera, then speak.

The controversy around Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Writing With Fire, the first Indian title ever to be nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category, is also part of this tradition — where the protagonist looks at a film and refuses its representation of them. How much of a film belongs to a protagonist? Jain uncercuts this question by foregrounding himself. That the power, perspective, and performance is all his to cobble into a documentary. In this choice, there is too much control, too much of a heavy hand for anything tender or obscure to emerge. Beauty, sure. But tenderness requires the flexing of something more. A braver, more patient, yielding vision, perhaps?