@phdthesis{Wolf2007, author = {Wolf, Nicole}, title = {Make it Real. Documentary and other cinematic experiments by women filmmakers in India.}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:521-opus-663}, school = {Europa-Universit{\"a}t Viadrina Frankfurt}, year = {2007}, abstract = {This project explores documentary film practices in India with a specific focus on the relation between documentary film, social movements and political thought and practice. The book concentrates on historical moments significant both in terms of political—referring to state politics as well as non-state activism—and documentary film developments, between the mid 1970s and the present. Hereby, the main body of this anthropological and interdisciplinary research foregrounds the work of women documentary filmmakers and argues that their negotiations of their socio-political and film cultural contexts has led them to, time and again, provoke crucial shifts in and the expansion of documentary modes present today. Hence, Make it Real! argues for feminist film/politics not as a sub-cultural realm, but as making propositions for the political as such and here in particular supported through the continuous discourses in and around documentary mode film. The Make it Real! of the chosen title refers to the book's theoretical approach, which perceives documentary film not as a tool to represent political issues but as a social, political and artistic practice, which continuously opens out the new—new debates on local and global citizenry. This translates into working from the politics that documentaries make through the realities that they imagine and engender and which are often political by thinking and arguing beyond what is thought within the "limits of the possible" (Ranci{\`e}re). Those contextual proposals for the real and the intelligible develop throughout the book into an interrogation of the ethics of documentary mode filmmaking in the context of contemporary regional and global conflict. Herein the themes discussed include the constitution of movements as such, questions of gender and public space, sexuality and the nation, presentations of the female body, as well as, and interrelated, debates on the politics of historicity, on the question of Human/Rights, victimhood and citizenship and the ethics of listening. The book chapters elaborate on singular moments in which particular historical-political constellations and the discourse and practice of documentary mode filmmaking generate points of emergence or a so called turn, which redefine relations between image making, the political and collectivity. Crucial nodes are: The rise of a new independent documentary film movement in the mid 1970s under a State of Emergency and therefore its particular relation to the nation state, to Marxist ideologies as well as its affinities to the Latin American Third Cinema movement. The particular development of mutual impact between documentary filmmaking and the Indian women's movements in the 1980s, the influence of national and international development organisations on film productions in the 1990s as well as the changing media scene post market liberalisation in 1989, up to the moment of a recent significant turn during the years 2002 to 2004. The latter can be seen as a key moment for filmmakers to rethink the relation between documentary film and its possibilities to address pressing contemporary issues such as the communal violence in Gujarat against the minority Muslim population in 2002, which was followed by increasing pressures through censorship regulations of the state. Both challenges spurred new networks for debate as well as state alternative screening and distribution possibilities and, together with and dependent on preceding developments, paved the way for what might be called 'the new Indian documentary'. Make it Real! addresses those moments of emergence through the prism of in-depth portraits of selected film examples - where the production process has in most cases been followed ethnographically. Film projects have been chosen for their innovative formal contributions, while recognizing that the focus on urban contexts as well as the personal selection does not at all lead to a representative description. Nevertheless, the examples are perceived as relevant moments of density from where legacies and genealogies are traced. The very writing of film histories is hereby thematized and the subjective views of individuals and institutions, including of the author herself, are implicated and reflected upon. Furthermore, this text argues for the theorizing that arises from conversations (also as media practice) as well as for an ethnography which does not merely describe and analyze the present but seeks to be attuned to the signals of the future present. Filmmakers whose works are addressed in more detail, next to many others mentioned, are: Monica Bhasin, Madhusree Dutta, Deepa Dhanraj, Sherna Dastur, Pooja Kaul, Surabhi Sharma, Soudhamini, Paromita Vohra.}, subject = {Dokumentarfilm}, language = {en} }