City of Photos: Special Screening and Filmmaker in Person

went to see “city of photos” today at the dryden theatre, a documentary by indian filmmaker nishtha jain. i love the idea of imagining people’s lives (and times) by exploring the photographic archives of tiny photo studios in india. the film was shot in calcutta and ahmedabad in 2004. it has a loose narrative structure that drifts from theme to theme, story to story, photograph to photograph.

it’s also political and some of that political contextualization is careless and jarring.

the most problematic element for me was how the gujrat massacre was brought up. in 2002, the burning of a train carrying hindu pilgrims in the state of gujrat was blamed on muslims. as a result, hindu gangs went thru muslim neighborhoods in a paroxysm of violence. they raped, hacked to death, burned and demolished, in scenes reminiscent of the 1947 partition. at the end of 3 days (and less intensely over the following 3 months) about 2,000 muslims were killed, mosques were smashed, homes were destroyed. it was an ethnic cleansing that remains in effect to this day. the hindu nationalist state government, led by present prime minister narendra modi, was complicit in the massacre.

nishtha jain chooses to present this horrible episode in gujrat’s history thru the lens of a photographer based in ahmedabad (the state capital). she is fascinated by how he catalogued the aftermath of the riots with a series of photographs. we are shown some of these pictures. most of them focus on damaged property. jain mentions the “gujrat massacre” as a result of “communal violence” without any interest in how it impacted the poor muslim neighborhoods she is filming. it’s not just ambiguous, it’s irresponsible.

in the post screening Q&A, jain explained how hindu fundamentalism was so hegemonic at the time that she expressly went to ahmedabad to see if it had entered photo studios. since that was the purpose of her trip to ahmedabad, it would have been more honest and powerful to come out with it in the film.

she also explained how calcutta was home to most of these quaint photo studios and how the majority of their clientele is muslim, not hindu. a young woman in the film, who belongs to a conservative muslim family, talks about how photography is a sin in islam but she cannot help but indulge in her passion for pictures. she is attractive, compelling and determined to create an album of photographs in which she poses like famous movie stars.

jain was asked about her and she repeated the same line about how “photography is a sin in their religion.” not really. hence the abundance of these studios and their muslim clients.

although i appreciate the fact that she did not screen the film widely in india in order to protect that young woman and another couple’s secret romance, i find the privilege of going into otherized minority communities and telling their stories from one’s entitled, normalized vantage point to be questionable. it can be done right of course but it might be more difficult to do it justice in an abstract, splintered film. the narration could have added so much more to what we were seeing if it had acknowledged some of these indisputable politics and had steered away from further abstruse, romantic layering.

this was jain’s first film. i’ve seen her 2012 documentary “gulabi gang” and it’s a much better film in every respect.