The Art of Documenting:
Phantom India by Louis Malle

August 26, 2007

Phantom India (1962) is an obviously youthful work.. youthful in terms of confidence and sentiments. There is nevertheless much to learn here. I am especially intrigued by the possibility of visiting a different culture for a significant amount of time and filming as many details as possible. Louis Malle went through reel after reel of film and searched out every detail of public life. He narrates this series of short films with a voice over technique that places him in the role of critical guide. The best moments occur when scenes play out with no commentary.. and at the end the narrator steps in to offer thoughts. Least effective are the rather helter-skelter interviews which get sandwiched into the episodes.

Of the five episodes that make up this documentary, I found the second the most interesting. It begins with a drawn out rendering of the passage of a shrine through Madras. The crowd throngs its sides.. and the camera is alive with a human sea. The narrator offers the following personal experience:

We got caught up in the madness. We became part of the crowd, shooting reel after reel, jostled like them, drenched like them, joyous like them. For a moment I forgot who I was. I was part of something else. i belonged. I gave myself up to it, heart and soul.

It is not hard to critique that language of personal connection. Malle's experience is different than that of all these thousands of other people if only because he has no idea about the context or meaning of anything that is going on around him. And this is the main weakness of his documentary method: he has no room for interpretation. He gets experience from the outside and interacts with it from the outside.

This point of view is most clearly stated near the beginning of episode four:

With this explicit goal of experiencing but not understanding, Malle offers colorful sequences of rituals.. but without any real insight into the cultural system that lies behind them. That system of Indian culture and religion is famously complex.. and with Malle's travelogue approach to filming it would be almost impossible to explain every detail he encountered. Nevertheless the lack of interpretation is a major weakness.. and an academic approach to documentary work would necessarily take as its central goal the question of understanding.

At the close of episode 2 (returning now to my favorite) we are taken into a dance academy. The young girls here are practicing the traditional dance known as Bharatanatyam.. a dance form that communicates a narrative. Malle gives us long stretches of scenes from dance practice.. and the lithe and dynamic movements of these girls is powerful on film. At one point he informs us: "From outside we judge its aesthetic qualities as a performance." Again, note the hesitancy to get inside the meaning of anything that is happening in front of him. He is watching amazing movements.. but the deeper mysteries of physical communication will not be investigated.

The place where I lost patience with Malle came as the filmmaker turns his attention to two foreign girls who are practicing this traditional dance form. The girl above is American.. and the narrator cuts her down as "pathetic". The lesson drawn from them is that outsiders cannot break into Indian culture. That may be true.. but I would bet that this girl could have explained a few things about Indian dance to Malle. And anyway, if Malle is allowed to "forget himself" in the midst of an Indian ritual, why can't this girl achieve something similar in her dancing?

At the end of the episode we learn that Malle was thrown out of the dance academy. In his description of this event it is possible to glimpse his inability to defend his own documentary project:

We keep filming. We watch them endlessly. Time has stopped. We don't want to leave. We can't tear ourselves away. Then we're suddenly thrown out, like slightly suspect characters come to disturb their perfect order. They sensed something fishy about our presence. When I think back on it now, I think they were right. We were indeed thieves, intruders in a world in which we did not belong.

If it is impossible to understand another culture, then all gazing must be stealing. But if understanding is possible, there is a new rationale for documenting: the affirmation of human connectedness. The method for building that kind of understanding will be the art of interpretation.