Sunday, 19 January 2025

a night of knowing nothing (w&d. payal kapadia, w. himanshu prajapati)

“Eisenstein, Pudovkin ... we shall fight, we shall win”

Kapadia’s documentary opens and closes with extended scenes of people dancing, with the music they are dancing to kept offstage. It’s a neat if somewhat flashy device, an understated imprimatur. The film documents in a loose, poetic manner the resistance of the Mumbai Film School to the appointment of a BPJ choice as director of the FTII film school. It is an account of friendship and struggle, told via black and white photography and a muted voiceover, against a backdrop of Modi’s divisive politics. Kapadia invests the film with a wistful, elusive aura as it captures a lost moment in the narrator’s history. This voiceover adds a metatextual level to the doc, allowing it to float somewhere between capturing a reality and capturing time lived as a dream. 

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