What was the source of inspiration or creative trigger to make this film? Was it an idea, experience, image, incident or thought?
This film has a tenuous relationship with the process of researching and writing. I have conducted unstructured in-depth interviews that used the psychoanalytic method of Free Associationto generate accounts of the lived experience of the wedding night in Kerala. Free Association as a clinical method and as a research method foreclosed questions. I was just recording what the interviewees felt important in my research around wedding night. Sometimes they narrated their wedding night experience. Most often they forgot their experience, but came up with very vivid stories on other people’s wedding night. The process of narrative generation itself was an overwhelming experience for me. I remember myself sitting alone a in a room in 2015 and listening to these interviews again and again and trying to transcribe and understand the ‘polyphonic timbre’ of the voices. I have encountered voices imprinted with trauma. I have witnessed loss and recovery of voice in the re-telling of this experience. I had moments of melt down. The narrative gravity of each one of them were inviting an analysis. But I had no idea how to make sense of these narratives together. And as a research project I couldn’t escape from that injunction to make sense of it. While listening to these interviews I observed that in almost all of them there is at least a passing reference to a failed attempt at ‘escape’ from the nuptial chamber. That was the only point common to these interviews. That was enough I think for Scheherazade to come into this project. She comes to my research as the only bride who managed an escape act from the nuptial chamber. It was so comforting to have a sister like her while navigating through these affect laden stories. The bride who tells stories in the fear of beheading in ‘ One Thousand and One Nights’ becomes a culturally distilled metaphor for a site of erotic danger in the thesis lending meaning to various voices drifting away in different directions.
And Scheherazade did not leave me even after me finishing my doctoral project. I was tired writing “ I propose, I argue, I draw and I depart’ in the thesis. So I asked her what do you want from me as a soul sister. She wanted me to free her from the familiar quarters regimented research. And this film for me is an attempt to do so. She has agreed to help me understand theliminality of wedding night and listen to the uncanny in a better way in return. I am not sure whether the deal between us can be felt in the film. But this was the deal.
How did you arrive at this form?
The braided hair was the image that came to me first when I thought of the film and rest of the images followed. I have always found this plaited hair piece a bit uncanny. I have seen them in bridal make up rooms and make up rooms of school arts festivals and temple festivals . I have always played with them with a secret pleasure of holding something I am not supposed to hold. And perhaps there is no such object than this that could invoke a culturally sanctioned practice that could sever the bodily integrity of a woman.Putting it in a post-lit white cube was a conscious choice. I wanted to capture the stillness of the moment and the making of a claustrophobic space and frozen subjectsall at once. And the nail, as the Kerala folklore suggests becomes the phallic resolution of the feminine excess in the event. I also wanted to foreground the conflict in two perceptual economies present in the moment of wedding night, the visual and the aural. The impulse to see and to listen to. The ‘soft porn’ frame of storytelling and the CG Spider in a way tries to address this conflict. The I-poem was a direct transplant from the thesis and the text animation gave it further momentum than static letters I felt.
The film also can be seen as an essay in seven chapters. That was not a conscious choice. Perhaps I am never a film maker.
I propose .
I argue .
I draw.
I depart.
This could be my I-poem.
Password : ac2020
No comments:
Post a Comment