The fifth edition of the Chennai Film Festival, organised by the film collective Marupakkam, will pay tribute to celebrated editor Jabeen Merchant. She has worked on some of the best-known Indian documentaries. Her career highlights include feature films, such as Manorama Six Feet Under (2007), NH10 (2015) and the March 24 release Anarkali of Arrah (2017). In an essay, Merchant revisits her experience of working on the five documentaries that will be shown at the festival, which runs from February 13-19 in Chennai. The festival includes a retrospective of director Sanjay Bernela’s films, a package of films made by women, and a section of Magic Lantern Foundation productions.
Jari Mari: Of Cloth And Other Stories
Jari Mari was the first feature length documentary I edited. In fact, it was the first for all of us – the director Surabhi Sharma, the cinematographer Setu and the sound recordist Gissy Michael. We all felt the excitement of setting out on a journey together, exploring our ideas and craft and figuring out our place in the world of filmmaking.
Shooting a documentary had become easy by the year 2000. 16mm and Betacam were being replaced by the easy-to-use mini DV format. The small camera was perfect for shooting in the narrow bylanes and shanties of the Jari Mari slum. However, editing had become more complicated. We had given up linear tape-to-tape systems and started working with software on a computer. Disk space was at a premium and processor speeds were slow. Although, by today’s standards, there was not much footage (around 30 hours), it was not possible to load everything at once on the system. Surabhi transferred from DV to VHS tapes and spent many days looking through the footage at home, logging, transcribing and making notes about which parts of which tape were usable. But that was just the first pass. We would transfer the portions she had marked to the computer and begin working, then go back to the VHS to look for more shots. As we edited each sequence, we would delete the shots we hadn’t used and then capture the next lot. And then re-edit, re-capture, rethink until the film slowly started to emerge.
We spent as much time thinking, arguing, writing notes and preparing structures on paper as we did actually working on the editing machine itself. Of course, as usual with most documentaries, there was only the rough idea of a script to begin with. Surabhi wanted to tell the story of Bombay’s labour force that was once organized as mill workers but had now been forced into the informal sector, working in tiny slum rooms and sweatshops. She wanted to narrate this through the life stories of four women characters who lived in the slum colony of Jari Mari. The fact that Jari Mari is situated next to the international airport offered a readymade reference to the “globalized” world outside that consumed the products made by these workers, but at the same time, snatched away their right to a dignified livelihood.
Shaping a feature length narrative needs patience and focus. For me, every project leads to new lessons learnt; and Jari Mari is where a lot of my learning began. I think the film has not dated yet, in its form or content. Perhaps we could have used a smaller subtitle font…
Unlimited Girls
Paromita Vohra and I go back a long way, to the very beginning. She was there when I decided to become a film editor, before I went to FTII. To work with a director who is a friend and shares your view of the world, of politics and art, is the best situation any editor can be in. To top that, Unlimited Girls was a dream project – a documentary on the Indian feminist movement.
In terms of its form, this film attempted something new for Indian documentary at the time. It was conceived as part fiction. At the heart of the film are a number of interviews and encounters with people, places and events in the real world; but the documentary narrative is driven by a fictional character named ‘Fearless’. Her face is never seen, but the viewer inhabits her “room with a view” and travels with her as she roams the country trying to understand feminism in all its complexities. There is also a feminist internet chatroom, commercial breaks, animation sequences and text on the screen.
In this film, as in my other work with Paromita, I feel that we have been able to successfully combine her amazing creativity and flair with my overriding urge to bring clarity and order to the film narrative. She is an accomplished writer, so naturally, we had a script. However, it began to change from the first day. The first interview we began editing was with Veena Mazumdar, grand dame of the Indian women’s movement – and we realized quickly that there was no point in trying to fit her into our pre-decided plan. She had totally unexpected responses to many of the questions put to her, and we had to modify our script to accommodate her unique personality. We loved her and every other person in the film. Each interview was rich with new meanings and each person had to be treated with the respect they deserved.
With a small budget, we had to execute most of the visual effects on the editing machine, or at least arrive at a very solid reference before we involved any specialists. Constructing the film involved going back and forth between shooting and editing. Much of the commentary and chatroom sequences had to be written after shaping the documentary scenes and structuring the larger narrative – and then those were sometimes re-edited, keeping in mind what Fearless was doing on screen.
For me, this film has not only stood the test of time, it actually looks better all these years later.
Invoking Justice
Invoking Justice is one of my most recent projects with the stalwart filmmaker Deepa Dhanraj, who is well known for her documentaries about women’s lives and issues.
I will never forget the day that Deepa first called to offer me an editing job, back in the year 2000. I felt like I was talking to a film star. I had seen her documentary Something Like A War as a college student, and she had been my idol ever since. Getting a chance to work with her was like arriving in the big league. Over the years, I feel I’ve done some of my best, most satisfying work with her and learnt about a whole new world. I’ve also had the special privilege of working with Navroze Contractor, master cinematographer who shoots all of her films. His deep understanding of documentary image making, his rich experience and artist’s eye set his work apart, and lend an extra edge to mine as well.
Invoking Justice was a new kind of film for Deepa. It was completely action oriented. Shooting was physically demanding and impossible to control, since it involved following the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat cases as they unfolded in real time. Editing presented a peculiar problem. It is easy to cut action sequences, since they always have clear beginnings, middles and ends. But action without meaning is boring. How to link all those scenes together to tell the story of the Jamaat? There was never any question of a shooting script, since there was no way to know in advance what would happen once the camera rolled. So, we had to write the film entirely on the editing table. Plus, the incredible members of the Jamaat deserved space of their own, so that the viewer could get to know them and relate to the work they do.
Complicating matters further was the fact that this film was to be broadcast by two international TV stations, one in Japan and the other in the USA. Both had to approve of the film and we had to meet each one’s requirements. We had to make a documentary that held up to the Indian audience’s scrutiny and to our own exacting standards, yet made sense to foreigners from a different culture. The Japanese were happy with a 90 film that had no voiceover; while the Americans needed 52 minutes and many things explained. Two versions were made, but we hit upon a good way to satisfy everyone including ourselves. We decided to replicate Deepa’s experience during the shoot, where she had spent a lot of time waiting for events to unfold and had kept herself updated through phone calls. These calls were recreated from her notes, using real voices, hers and the characters’.
Invoking Justice won me my first and only award so far, at the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary and Short Films. That brought me full circle. MIFF is the country’s oldest documentary festival and it was here that I had first seen Deepa’s work, all those years ago.
Till We Meet Again
Every successful documentary editor has to be a script writer too, whether she likes it or not. Working on Till We Meet Again was a liberating experience because for almost the first time, the director did not particularly need my scripting skills. Rahul Roy welcomed my inputs, but every time I sat down at the computer, he presented me with detailed notes about the film’s structure that he had worked out already. This left me free to concentrate on crafting the film, thinking about images, soundtrack and pacing – how to simply make scenes look good. I could take his scripting ideas and find ways to translate them effectively in cinematic terms.
This film was a sequel to a documentary that Rahul had made 12 years ago. When Four Friends Meet was a film with four young men barely out of their teens who lived in the slum colony of Jahangirpuri on the outskirts of Delhi. It had explored their attitudes to gender and masculinity in the context of their life experiences. Rahul had become very good friends with all four of them over the years. Bunty, Kamal, Sanju and Sanjay were now married with children and responsibilities. Everything had changed almost beyond recognition – their lives and aspirations, their neighbourhood and the city of Delhi itself. For his new film, Rahul revisited their lives to explore afresh their ideas about men, women and masculinity. This time, he not only filmed them himself but also given them cameras of their own, so that they could shoot whatever they wished – including their encounters with Rahul.
Working with images shot by Rahul in the past and the present alongside the images shot by the four men in the film was exciting. Transitioning between these different kinds of images meant constantly shifting the point of view and adding multiple layers of meaning to each scene. The way that I was able to explore my craft as an editor in this film is one of the reasons that it is special to me.
Rahul did take many of my scripting suggestions along the way, but I could not make him agree to one more. When we finished, I was not quite satisfied with the way the film ended. I went through the rushes and found one extra scene. In it, the four characters challenge the filmmaker and ask him, “Your film makes you famous, but what happens to us?” Rahul loved the scene I built, but he insisted on using it at the start of the film instead of putting it at the end like I wanted. Was he right, or was I?
The Last Adieu
In my opinion, S. Sukhdev’s India 67 is one of the best documentaries ever made in the world. I watched it for the first time as a student in my first year at the FTII and it is a film I can still watch over and over again with undiminished admiration. To participate in the making of a documentary that pays homage to Sukhdev was a privilege.
In my first year at film school, I didn’t know that my friend and classmate Shabnam was Sukhdev’s daughter; much less about her turbulent relationship with him. Shabnam and I worked together on our diploma film, became close friends and graduated from FTII together, but she never mentioned her father much. Years later, when she was ready to come to terms with everything that her father had meant to her and wanted to make a film about him, she needed to work with someone whom she could trust with her emotions as much as with her precious film footage. I was fortunate to be that person.
The biggest technical challenge with The Last Adieu was that it had to be made out of a variety of image formats. Mini DV (30fps NTSC and 25fps Pal), HDcam, prosumer HD, Betacam, internet downloads and piles of scanned still images collected over many years had to be put together with archival audio recordings and films made by Sukhdev himself. Live shooting and interviews were mixed with dramatic recreations. There were a variety of voices and soundtracks. But the film was not about technicalities. All this assorted footage had to be tamed and structured to tell Shabnam’s story, her mother’s story and the story of Sukhdev’s film career. We wanted to pay homage to him while simultaneously exploring Shabnam’s complicated love-hate relationship with him.
The script evolved with multiple layers. Shabnam wanted to have a series of imaginary conversations with her father, to tell him many things she had never been able to say while he was alive, and to imagine what he would say to her in reply. To bind these conversations seamlessly with the rest of the film, I suggested that we use her personal voice from the beginning instead of a regular commentary. Alongside, I wrote a completely objective series of text cards that spoke in the third person and analysed Sukhdev’s work. These were placed side by side with clips from his films. The narrative had to weave between the intensely personal space of memory and the formal space of a biopic tracing the career of a great man. As often happens, we had to go back and forth between editing scenes and writing the commentary, making each element fit the other. I consider this film to be one of my most difficult scripting efforts and while nothing is ever flawless, I am very happy with how it turned out.
This essay originally appeared on the blog Marupakkam Films and has been reproduced with the author’s permission.