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The enchanted worlds of the FTII
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Diploma films
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.. LALITHA GOPALAN
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.. In 1954 a directive from the Film Inquiry Committee, under the auspices
..
..
.. of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of India, recommended
..
..
...
the creation of a film school, and accordingly the Film Institute of India
..
..
..
was established in the grounds of the former Prabhat Studio in 1960. An
..
.. expansion that included the introduction of television saw the institute
..
..
.. renamed in 1972 as the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). As
..
.. is the case globally – from Moscow to Los Angeles, Havana to Prague,
..
..
.. Beijing to Pune – the years spent at film school lead to the graduation of
..
..
..
.. both apprentices and artists. The curriculum of the FTII, which has been
..
..
.. subject to revision over time, includes a steady output of annual
..
..
...
filmmaking exercises that culminate in the making of ‘the Diploma film’.
..
..
..
No more than twenty minutes in length, these almost ‘orphaned’ films
..
.. diverge significantly from the postcolonial state’s initial notion of what
..
..
.. would constitute a better cinema. In short, they enact a roundabout
..
.. subversion of both commercial and arthouse films in such a manner that
..
..
.. they may be deemed ‘experimental’. It is in these sly subversions that
..
..
..
.. there is the chance, however slender, of detecting an alternative vision
..
..
.. that is worthy of attention.
..
..
...
The archive of FTII Diploma films presents a challenge in terms of
..
..
..
both the volume of films produced and the levels of unorthodoxy to
1 School style and auteur
..
..
..
which they aspire.1 I argue here that the subject of the environment has
..
aspirations in the Diploma films of .. exerted a particular presence in the catalogue of Diploma films from
..
earlier decades, from 1965 .. 2013 onwards. Far flung from each other in terms of form, some films
..
onwards, are considered in two ..
.. nevertheless form a distinct group in their sustained attention to their
chapters of my forthcoming book, ..
..
From Archive to Gallery. .. environs, to the extent that we can consider them ideal texts in the

90 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjx007
 ...
2 Scott MacDonald coins the ..
..
growing scholarship on the relationship between cinema and ecology.2
neologism ‘eco-cinema’ in his ..
..
..
These films startle us with their audacity to imagine worlds in which
groundbreaking essay ‘Towards an ..
eco-cinema’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary .. protagonism is not the exclusive purview of humans but rather a shared
..
..
Studies in Literature and .. perspective that foregoes opposition in favour of entwinement. These
..
Environment, vol. 11, no. 2 (2004), .. films captivate and enchant, luring us to enter worlds beyond critique and
..
pp. 107–32. For the most recent ..
.. polemic; in turn they deserve to be closely examined on an individual
collections on this topic, see ..
..

dossier
Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and ..
.. basis.
..
Sean Cubitt (eds), Ecocinema: .. Published synopses of Pranjal Dua’s Chidiya Ud/Fly, Bird (2013),
..
Theory and Practice (New York, ...
NY: Routledge, 2013), and Alexa ..
..
which circulate with the film online and beyond, are generally
Weik von Mossner (ed.), Moving
..
..
..
misleading.3 In fact the film moves away from the language of
Environments: Affect, Emotion, ..
.. diagnostics and precis in order to gesture towards images of becoming. A
Ecology and Film (Waterloo: ..
..
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, .. sense of conclusion is suspended by the renunciation of the restricted
..
2014). .. logic of cause-and-effect in favour of cuts and caesurae. At times the cuts
..
..
3 For example: ‘He works in a .. imply contiguity, so that we place the man and the boy in one space
..
chicken factory. She works as a ..
maid at an upscale hotel. Two
..
.. when the act of stroking yields an egg from the latter’s mouth. At other
..
young souls whose menial ..
.. moments a play between cause and effect emerges, when a boy bites on a
existence helps turn the giant ...
..
..
television remote control and changes channels in a neighbour’s room,
wheels of a harsh, nameless city ..
will give each other strength to ..
..
for example. Elsewhere a cut introduces a third character through the
..
carry on.’ Indian Film Festival of ..
..
opening up of newer spaces, such as when the film cuts from the
Los Angeles, <http://www. ..
.. darkness of the urban street to the lit corridor of a hotel. In this
indianfilmfestival.org/fly-bird- ..
.. minimalist dialogue-free film we embrace the grace of smaller gestures of
chidiya-udh/> accessed 11 ..
..
January 2017. .. movement between protagonists, composed in medium shot: the boy
..
..
..
.. reaches and places one of his earbuds into the ear of a woman sitting in a
..
..
.. commuter train; at the close of the film, the two are seated side by side
..
..
...
against the backdrop of a tumble-dryer, he in a chicken suit and she
..
..
..
stripped to her underclothes. In a film that strikes a complicity with the
..
.. monsoon light that infuses the darkness and indecipherability within its
..
..
.. frames, these images are evocative of an intimacy through the auricular,
..
.. and form one kind of resolution between the use of cuts and the medium
..
..
.. closeup compositions of human figures.
..
..
..
.. Yet the film has not completely exhausted the possibilities of the cut,
..
..
.. thus inviting us to reconsider the relationship between protagonists
..
..
...
beyond its exclusive association with humans. For this reorientation we
..
..
..
have to return to the inspired title in the form of a directive to a bird: Fly,
..
..
..
Bird. Birds are everywhere in this film, chickens in particular: we see
..
.. hens cooped up; we take on a hen’s-eye view; we see, in profile, the boy
..
.. and a hen lie side by side, dead and alive. Interspecies differences are
..
..
.. affirmed when men wearing chicken suits ride buses and walk the streets
..
..
.. at the end of a working day. Most poignantly, the laying of eggs is no
..
..
..
.. longer a distinctive feature of one species or other: the boy mouths eggs,
..
..
...
not words (figure 1).
..
..
..
Through special effects deployed either during filming or in
..
..
..
postproduction, the film determines our point of view at the moment the
..
.. egg slips out. In a closeup composition we see the boy expelling the egg
..
.. from his mouth; retching sounds confirm the form of delivery. The
..
..
.. expulsion of eggs punctuates the film. In a second example we see an
..
..
.. adult stroking the boy and massaging his back. From this medium shot

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dossier

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Fig. 1. Chidiya Ud/Fly, Bird (Pranjal ..
..
Dua, 2013). ..
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..
..
..
..
..
..
.. we cut to a straight-on closeup with the boy bringing up another egg; this
..
..
..
.. time the fingers of an older hand embrace the ovum. Towards the end of
..
..
.. the film, a long struggle with vomiting leaves the boy in a chicken suit
...
..
..
with furry hands contemplating a bloody egg. Against and alongside
..
..
..
conventions of continuity editing that promote realism, Fly, Bird opens
..
..
..
images of a new species whose birth emerges from the very world we
..
.. inhabit. These are gestational images that prefigure horizons for a
..
.. posthuman world.
..
..
.. Prantik Basu immortalizes a subdued animal by granting it the title of
..
..
..
.. his film: Makara/Crocodile (2013). One strand of the narrative relies on
..
..
.. an observational mood by recording details of the netting and
..
..
...
transportation of a crocodile, whose antics have petrified soldiers
..
..
..
stationed at Lake Powai during routine aquatic manoeuvres. The other
..
.. strand of the film serves as a counterpoint to the antagonistic relationship
..
..
.. between species, and it is granted prominence in the voiceover that opens
..
.. the film. Weaving in and out of on-screen images of human figures, the
..
..
.. voiceover narrates the folklore of easy transformation between crocodile
..
..
..
.. and human over a longue durée, the former’s predatory instincts and the
..
..
.. latter’s vengeful behaviour failing to detract from the storytelling pleasure.
..
..
...
In evoking a shape-shifting tale between species, Basu’s film pays
..
..
..
homage to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (2004).
..
..
..
A different form of punctuation emerges in Crocodile, one that draws on
..
.. lines and grids alongside the matter of chance. The film invites us to
..
.. recognize homologies through games, both active and dormant: the
..
..
.. board-game of parchesi, played with cowrie shells, vies for the attention
..
..
.. of women musing on weather and crocodiles in one scene; a high-angle
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.. shot of a tennis court charts a worker’s purposeful walk across a grid;
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..
...
a Game Boy device lightens up a child’s navigational skills around a
..
..
..
tennis match. Emerging as mise-en-abı̂me effects, these games between
..
..
..
partners play back and forth between bureaucratic regulations and
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.. folktale, between human and crocodile, between human and machine,
..
.. and between image and sound
..
..
.. The stalemate drawn in Crocodile is thrown into sharper relief when
..
..
.. seen from the vantage point of Basu’s Hawa Mahal (2015), a shorter film

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dossier
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Fig. 2. Hawa Mahal (Prantik Basu, ..
..
2015). ..
..
..
..
..
.. made after his Diploma. Surefooted in many respects, the second work
..
..
.. converses with what Adrian Martin sees as ‘the rise of the dispostif’ in
..
..
..
.. works whose commitment to the structure of set-ups allows for greater
..
..
.. play during shoots, a paradox that inflects contemporary art cinema
...
4 Adrian Martin, Mise En Scene and ..
..
worldwide.4 Basu’s previously implicit site-specific practice emerges in a
Film Style: From Classical ..
..
..
more pronounced fashion in the title of this film, since Hawa Mahal is
Hollywood to New Media Art ..
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, ..
..
the ruin of a half-finished building on Rohtak campus that orients us
..
2014), pp. 178–204. .. towards the site. The aesthetics of reconnaissance shape the film, as one
..
.. surveyor measures land, another marks trees, the camera tracks across an
..
..
.. endless pile of bricks, and so on. In this steady accrual of tasks mapping
..
..
..
.. the campus, a sense of contingency suffuses the film with unexpected
..
..
.. theatre: winds blow across tree groves; dust winds gather force; a
..
..
...
peacock fans its tail broadly towards a dance; buffaloes wallow in water
..
..
..
canals. The conscription by the state of national institutes as development
..
.. projects can all too often end in disenchantment when the promise of
..
..
.. progress falls short. But Hawa Mahal’s chancing upon such breathtaking
..
.. spectacle works to reanimate these sites (figure 2).
..
..
.. Aman Wadhan’s Letter to Korlai (2015) echoes Chris Marker’s Letter
..
..
5 I watched the film under this title, ..
.. from Siberia (1957).5 The decades that separate them amplify differences
..
although the alternative Letter ..
.. in the epistolary gesture and the shortening of length, yet both rehearse
from Korlai persists elsewhere. ..
When I pointed out the two
..
...
the conventions of the canonical essay film.6 The reversal is no small
..
distinct titles to Aman Wadhan he ..
..
matter in Wadhan’s film; it eschews Marker’s addressee-at-large in
was bemused, as if to reveal an ..
..
..
favour of a specific one: Korlai, a town on the Konkan coast of India.
anxiety of influence. Personal ..
correspondence with Aman .. The notion of whether Korlai receives the letter or not is forever
..
Wadhan, July 2015.
.. postponed, since our viewing performs an interception that plunges
..
..
6 Nominated by André Bazin as an .. directly into the film’s preoccupations with the shape of a form of
..
essay. For an English translation, ..
.. contingency that is inflected by accidents, from production to finale. As
see André Bazin, ‘Bazin on ..
..
Marker’, Film Comment, vol. 39, ..
.. the images unroll loosely from beach to ritual, from horse to obelisk, the
..
no. 4 (2003), pp. 44–45. .. rationale of sequencing seems inconsequential; rather, we are
...
..
..
..
mesmerized by the images qua images: bleached-out beaches, the glint of
..
..
..
a horse’s tail, grainy surfaces and bleeding colours. We are in the thrall of
..
.. celluloid deteriorating, its patina worn out, with scratched surfaces and
..
.. frayed edges (figures 3 and 4).
..
..
.. That these are images blown up from 16mm film stock is obvious
..
..
.. from their grainy veneer. With an avowed affection for the 16mm

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Figs 3 and 4. Letter to Korlai ..
..
..
(Aman Wadhan, 2015). ..
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. camera, the standby for every incoming class for decades at FTII,
..
..
.. Wadhan reclaims and reanimates the apparatus, with its ‘much abused
..
..
...
chromatically deviant zoom lenses [...] accumulation of debris on the
7 Personal correspondence with
..
.. metallic edge of the film gate’.7 The effects of ageing and institutional
..
Aman Wadhan, August 2015. ..
.. neglect are thus presented as an advantage rather than a shortcoming.
..
.. Whether using Fuji Eterna Vivid 500T for the colour portions or Kodak
..
..
.. Double-X 250D for the black and white, his response to the Angenieux
..
..
..
.. 12-120mm zoom lens is one of adoration:
..
..
..
..
..
having passed through the erring hand of practically every first-year
..
..
..
student since the late seventies, its anti-glare coating long spent and its
... response to highlights utterly unrestrained, [the lens] knocks the
..
..
..
.. contrast ratio like a flare, occasionally bleaching the colours off the
..
8 Ibid. ..
..
image, adding a soft halo for all its demeanours.8
..
..
.. Persisting further with horizons of the unexpected, Wadhan’s choice for
..
..
..
.. processing was to seek joyful complicity with the ‘FTII Lab precisely for
..
.. the little mishaps it facilitates. Once again, kudos to the lab staff for

94 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017
Lalitha Gopalan
The enchanted worlds of the FTII Diploma films
 ...
..
..
consistently fumbling their pH ratios and bath temperatures, for making it
..
..
..
possible to achieve, even with their industrial infrastructure, a humble,
9 Ibid.
..
.. hand-washed, artisanal feel.’9 Coursing through Wadhan’s union with
..
..
.. camera, film and chemical is a proposal for a utopia where objects are not
..
10 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A ..
.. inert but vital, pace Jane Bennett.10 It follows that maturity does not turn
..
Political Ecology of Things ..
.. into a cause for superannuation but rises as a guarantee for the longevity
(Durham, NC: Duke University ..

dossier
Press, 2010).
..
.. of image-making; and rather than bemoan deteriorating celluloid that can
..
..
.. only be redeemed in restoration, Letter to Korlai suggests we embrace
...
..
..
images suffused in the act of becoming.
..
..
..
Such attentiveness assigned to the vitality of objects, so as to recognize
..
.. their own maturation, stands in contrast to the steadiness of film’s sound
..
..
.. design, which strikes an anachronistic tone: voiceover and sound effects
..
.. maintain a clipped pace, undisturbed by attrition on optical soundtrack, a
..
..
.. negligence long characterizing FTII films. Perhaps the lure of
..
..
..
.. immortality during the intermediary process of digitization towards a
..
..
.. 35mm blow-up was too tempting an elixir for both human and machine.
...
..
..
Last Mango Before the Monsoon (2015) is a slippery work on all
..
..
..
counts, not a Diploma film but one conceived by Payal Kapadia in her
..
..
..
second year, and yet of a piece in length with the staggered releases of
..
.. the graduating classes from 2013 onwards. Conversing with Crocodile
..
.. and in the orbit of Tropical Malady, the work relishes its in-between
..
..
..
..

status. It is alert to what Agnes Peth}o names ‘intermedial delights’: the
..
..
.. stillness of animation drawings; the graininess of video footage from a
..
..
.. surveillance camera recording animal activity; the switching between
..
..
...
Tamil and Gujarati on the soundtrack; the digital images that play
..
..
..
between light and shadow in the dense forests of an estate or in the

11 Agnes Peth}o, ‘The garden of
..
.. florescent ambience of urban space.11 We are mesmerized not by the
..
intermedial delights: cinematic ..
.. narrative of recording an elephant’s movement or the reunion of an
“adaptations” of Bosch, from ..
.. estranged couple, but by the images that move effortlessly between
modernism to the postmedia ..
..
age’, Screen, vol. 55, no. 4 (2014), .. various formats, their particularity upheld. Here video scan lines shape an
..
..
pp. 471–89. ..
.. elephant wavering (as they are prone to do), animated drawings distend
..
..
.. dissolves to impress their stillness upon us, while images from the digital
..
..
...
camera highlight hues that seem at variance with celluloid luminosity.
..
..
..
We are in thrall to a cinema in the post-film age, a work that revels in
..
..
..
bringing painting and video closer together than has for too long been the
..
.. case in India. As beguiling as the title is, and as easy as it is to assign it to
..
.. the woman eating her mango in the presence of a ghost dog, we note the
..
..
.. wit of the title, notwithstanding the longing for form, both old and new,
..
..
.. that besieges the film.
..
..
..
.. My diary of the few days I spent at FTII, during the strike there in July
..
..
...
2015, notes the obstacle course I walked from the guesthouse to the
..
..
..
institute, which included dodging traffic and beholding the tableau vivant
..
..
..
outside the main gates, tightly shut and covered in the posters and
..
.. slogans of the students. Supporters and dissenters, both following their
..
.. orders, commandeered the space outside the gates; the changing cast of
..
..
.. characters were witness to the long duration of the standoff. The saffron
..
..
.. flags of the RSS incited hostility to the student strike one day; a neat line

95 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017
Lalitha Gopalan
The enchanted worlds of the FTII Diploma films
 ...
..
..
of Congress politicians had a different arrangement on another. I
..
..
..
navigated the fallen props previously affixed by the students, noting a
..
.. cutout punctuation mark, its former stridency now collapsed. Entering
..
..
.. the campus was to walk away from scenes ready-made for television
..
.. crews, to slip into the wings of a theatre.
..
..
.. Once inside the campus a different timetable unfolded, away from the
..
..
dossier

..
.. theatre of strife and towards cinema, with all the adjacent arts in chorus.
..
..
.. By mid-afternoon a life-size celluloid sculpture, a ‘mummified’ human
...
..
..
body (one of three), walked the length of the pathway from the Wisdom
..
..
..
Tree and past the main theatre in slow motion. The morning walk had
..
.. been more sinister: a similar mummy, stiffened by wrapping, lay
..
..
.. slumped against a tree trunk, overlooking a cemetery dotted with crosses
..
.. marking the death of art, film, dance, theatre, and so on. Updating
..
..
.. Bazin’s pronouncement, the celluloid mummy’s shift between the
..
..
..
.. stillness of death and the projection of life in motion – thus animating the
..
..
.. death of film and the longevity of cinema – offered but one shape among
...
..
..
many. Opposite the director’s office and stretched to the wingspan of the
..
..
..
Wisdom Tree, a pitched tent carved a preparatory space: a congregation
..
..
..
of leaders and followers, somnambulists and live wires, press
..
.. conferences and street theatre, music jams and petition writing.
..
.. Aphorisms plucked from film writings formed murals on the former
..
..
.. Prabhat studio buildings as the work of cinema gathered momentum: the
..
..
..
.. shooting of daily life vied with screenings. In-between, films were
..
..
.. hatched.
..
..
...
Severing sound from image is one way of entering Mukul Haloi’s
..
..
..
Level O (2015), a collaborative film that queues up digital footage shot
..
.. during the days of sit-ins and stand-offs – a strike film in short. As an
..
..
.. overture, out-of-focus images of repose inside a hostel room run
..
.. alongside a droning recitation in Assamese of diary entries that recount a
..
..
.. city in slumber. Footage from other films appears, images seized away
..
..
..
.. from campus: a still shot from Hawa Mahal and shots of rising
..
..
.. fumigation smoke from Jessica Sadana’s Water’s Childhood (2015).
..
..
...
A return to FTII draws on the perimeter both horizontally and vertically,
..
..
..
and a round-up of images shot from hostel rooms and around campus
..
..
..
ends the film. A crow’s-nest perch allows us a wide view of swaying
..
.. treetops, while a cut drops us into an undergrowth whose luxuriance is
..
.. squared twice over, once by the outline of the frame and once towards
..
..
.. the centre by a stretched rectangular projection screen.
..
..
.. Placed in a time between day and night, the bleached-out screen recalls
..
..
..
.. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series of still photographs, Theater (1978), in which
..
..
...
projected, whitened film images with wide shutter openings move
..
..
..
beyond legibility. The film also recalls Nam June Paik’s TV Garden
..
..
..
(1974), which is not surprising given the location of the garden cemetery
..
.. within the geography of the strike. Both links recall a long history of
..
.. intermediality in which Level O is immersed. A pantomime act closes
..
..
.. this film: three humans walk leftwards and proceed to retract the screen,
..
..
.. carrying off the two tripod stands; silence is designed through the

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...
..
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minimalism of the sound recording, which suggests ‘level 0’ during
..
..
..
sound mixing and offers the title for the film. In these gestures of tuning
..
.. into and out of the turmoil of the strike, Level O moves through its line-
..
..
.. up of digital images and sustains us through different calendars of action
..
.. and inaction, rustication and framing, suspension and admission.
..
..
.. These are images far from the surety of completion. They evoke a
..
..

dossier
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.. cinema conceived in times between; intervals for ideas and films for
..
..
.. intervals. In their ability to sense time and space, the FTII film, Diploma
...
..
..
or otherwise, radiates in many directions, providing leaps in imagination
..
..
..
that we are yet to conceive and live through. To bind them to scriptures,
..
.. diktats and punition risks forever the chance to glimpse into the shape of
..
..
.. dreams and possibilities in a time of disenchantment.
..
..
..
..
..
.. For Darius Kothawalla. Thanks to Payal Kapadia for knowing that one film leads to another; to Roberta Tejada for sharing my
..
.. exhaustion with disenchantment; to Harish Naraindas for supplying enchantment; and to Anuj Vaidya for unimaginable
..
..
.. futures.
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97 Screen 58:1 Spring 2017
Lalitha Gopalan
The enchanted worlds of the FTII Diploma films