Ethnography, Differently

Velu Viswanadhan’s The Five Elements

Let’s begin at a distance, with two films that serve as canonical reference points in critical ethnographic cinema: Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces: Living Is Round (1985), a cultural document of the social, architectural, and ritual practices of various ethnic groups across several countries in West Africa, and Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1986), depicting Hindu cremation ritual and daily activities along the Ganges River in Benaras, India, transforming the mundane and the culturally alien into metaphors of death and re-birth. In Naked Spaces, Minh-ha employs a narration composed of three women’s voices, blending description with reflexive commentary on the limits of assured ethnography. Forest of Bliss is a sensorial exploration, sans narration. In these films, Minh-ha and Gardner address the other’s alterity from different positions: Minh-ha through a politics of marginality, Gardner through a politics of immanence. Hal Foster’s essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ (1995) provides a suitable vocabulary for summing up this difference: Minh-ha “others the self” while Gardner “selves the other”.

In Minh-ha’s case, who frames her practice from positions of in-betweenness, of national and ethnic identities and hardened categories like documentary and fiction, and whose visual vocabulary in Naked Spaces betrays little formal transgression, questions of ethnographic self-idealization loom large, that cannot be easily addressed from the position of a free radical or through mere deconstruction of language. Gardner, favouring sensorial experience over analytical rigour, instead raises problems of signification: his reading of rituals as metaphors has drawn criticism in visual anthropology on the grounds that this romantic trope abstracts and renders transcendent that which has concrete social and historical meaning for the other. Both filmmakers exemplify a loss of innocence in the ethnographic practice in the late twentieth century; yet the blueprint for truly challenging classical ethnography probably lies elsewhere, for instance in the films of Mark LaPore, whose work considers the other not only through the protracted lens of cultural difference but also as a subject of capitalist extractivism. His inwardly oriented criticality is neither an objective critique of ethnographic objectivity, as in Minh-ha’s case, nor inherited from Gardner’s romantic idealism or others such as Basil Wright, but rather follows from an acknowledgement of the position of the “I” and its relationship to cycles of epistemological violence.

Concerns with immanence, marginality, class, and cultural difference, multifacetedly, but also distinguishably, inform the films of Paris-based Indian painter-filmmaker Velu Viswanadhan. His pentalogy The Five Elements – Sand (1982), Water (1985), Fire (1988), Air (1994), and Ether (2002) – takes its structure from the Pancha Bhutas which, according to the ancient Vedas and other oriental philosophical traditions, form the material basis of the cosmos. The filmmaker wrote:

“The primordial elements manifest themselves in the material universe. Each thing is the embodiment of these elements. Experience and tradition signify to us the forms, the colors, the sounds linked to a deeply significant reality. Each sound of speech or music carries a form and a color.”

Travelling the length and breadth of India, Viswanadhan sifted the motifs of these constituent elements in their isolated, hybrid (interacting), metaphoric, and sensory manifestations from landscapes, architecture, and the rhythms of daily life. The five films constitute an epic project in which he trails the myriad peculiarities of life in India; first in a fragmented idiom, like collages, and then binding them into a reconstructed whole. Yet, precisely through its incompleteness, it relinquishes any ambition to represent India’s cultural cosmos in its totality, even as it begins to approximate it through its own formal autonomy.

Viswanadhan’s foray into filmmaking was fortuitous. After a road accident in Dortmund in 1976, and faced with existential questions during his recovery, he set out to probe the origins of his identity within the constellation of histories and mythologies of his native country. Though based in Paris since 1968, he continued to travel to India, often for extended periods. Born in Kerala in 1940, Viswanadhan studied at the Government College of Fine Arts in Madras in the 1960s under the stewardship of K.C.S.Paniker, painter and pioneer of the Madras Art Movement. Paniker also founded the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, a refuge for young artists like Viswanadhan to experiment beyond the tedious demands of the academic curriculum. His first visit to Paris in 1968 was facilitated by his mentor; he later found representation through Galerie de France, and soon after, a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts paved the way for his long-term stay in the French capital. Filmmaking did not initially occupy his ambitions in the early 1970s, although he regularly attended screenings at the Cinémathèque Française. When I visited him at his studio in Ivry-sur-Seine nearly a decade ago, he mentioned Jean Rouch as someone whose work had left a lasting impression on him.

The ethnographic context, whether it applies fully or partially to The Five Elements, warrants careful consideration, since the common West/non-West binary that often underpins such categorisation does not hold here. For one, Viswanadhan’s interest lies in a pre-industrial topography of India, where traces of Nehruvian infrastructural modernism and the infringement of a globalizing economy are largely omitted or only implicitly suggested. The crucial question is probably one of identity: is the cultural gap between filmmaker and subject – the landscapes and people across India – sufficient to frame these films as ethnographic? There is no standardized metric for such a gulf, but it is certainly worth challenging the commonplace and somewhat lazy presumption that, if the filmmaker is culturally “other”, they gain automatic access to culture of the “other”. Cultural proximity cannot be ignored, yet the difficulty arises in framing an undifferentiated other, one that discounts linguistic, economic, and social differences in favour of an overarching racial/ethnic canopy, a tendency that Mark LaPore pointedly critiques in his film The Five Bad Elements (1997). Near the end of the final part of the pentalogy, Ether, a hypnotic dance sequence unfolds on a river, performed by women in bright garments from the Siddi ethnic group. The tribe traces its history in the subcontinent back to the 16th-century migration of Southeast African slaves under Portuguese colonial rule. As subjects of history, their cultural, racial, and socio-economical distinction from Viswanadhan cannot be starker.

Sand, the opening film of the pentalogy, stands as a bit of an outlier. In the mid-1970s, Viswanadhan travelled along the Indian coastline, visiting sites of historical, mythological, and colonial significance, and gathered sand that he would later use in the seventeen monochromatic textured panels, now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. During these journeys, he was accompanied by his friend and filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who shot hours of Super 8 footage of the coast as an archival exercise. The film was edited on VHS from this material. On the soundtrack, Viswanadhan added a female voice-over which, in a theatrical diction reminiscent of the utterances in the films of Marguerite Duras, recites poems of Kadamanitta Ramakrishnan alongside a text written by the filmmaker himself. From Water onwards, all the films are shot on 16 mm, and the voice is entirely abandoned in favour of a pure sensory cinema, where the visual and the aural are granted sovereignty, unburdened by narrative transparency. Experientially, the films seek not to replicate but to approximate the complex, multisensorial condition of existence, consistent with Samkhya philosophy which considers the separation of the senses as irrational. In this respect, The Five Elements emerges as a distant elder cousin to the work of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. Treating the geography as a vast repository of visual and sonic impressions, and sensations not-easily transmittable, Viswanadhan extends his fascination with metamorphosis: landscapes transitioning at twilight, the shoreline constantly redefined by the movements of waves, people and objects displaced, into the subsequent films.

In a yet unpublished text, film scholar François Bovier notes the parallels between Sand and Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963), situating both within what he calls the under-analysed genre of the “narrative experimental film”. While Sand certainly is not bereft of charms, my own conviction lingers closer to that of filmmaker and friend Els van Riel, who recently remarked after a screening of Water in Ostend that documentaries can do so much more if the voice over is dispensed with. After Sand, the remaining films rely on a mix of religious chants, composed music, and sound recorded on location. Throughout the pentalogy, the recurring motifs are rituals, arts, manual labour, and artisanal craft. Images of the vibrant Theyyam theatre performance, the dance drama tradition of Kathakali, and the Baul songs of Bengal’s mendicant singers, intermingle with scenes of prosaic work: the large-scale construction of a fishing trap, stone carving, land tilling, iron casting, and weaving, along with religious ceremonies, rituals, and temple architecture. Viswanadhan frames his quasi-ethnography through an affinity for old forms of productivism in a way that parallels LaPore. It is best exemplified by a segment in Ether, where heritage sites such as the subterranean architecture of The Queen’s Stepwell in Gujarat, the intricate carvings on the walls of the Kailasa Temple in Ellora caves, the Gopachal rock-cut Jain monuments in the Gwalior Fort, and the walls of the Buddhist monastery in Nalanda, Bihar, among others, are woven together. On the soundtrack, the steady chime of a metal tool hitting stone evokes the labour of carving. Viswanadhan’s approach is resolutely anti-touristic. Even archaeologists and historians might struggle to identify the various locations, spread across the eastern and western parts of India and dating from different centuries, that appear in quick succession. The sound reminds us of how history reverberates in the present, not only through preserved monuments, but also through that which is more easily forgotten: centuries of labour and artisanship. Considering the timespan of the pentalogy, 1976-2002, Viswanadhan’s penchant for historic productivism unfolds against the backdrop of the economic liberalisation of the Indian markets in the early 1990s and its subsequent descent into the hellscape of neoliberalism. While Hindu rituals and iconography dominate the films, they appear in a heterodox form and are complemented by symbols drawn from other major Indian religions. The Five Elements thus articulates a secular plurality sharply contrasting the monolithic narratives of the Hindu-nationalist right that governs India today. The neoliberal assault on Indian society has been accompanied by a divisive communal politics, whose watershed moment – the Babri Mosque demolition in 1992 – occurred around the time when Viswanadhan was shooting the fourth part of the pentalogy, Air.

The confluence of art, religiosity, and labour in Viswanadhan’s films is hardly surprising given his lineage. He comes from a family of potters, blacksmiths, and sculptors, or Visvakarmas – the workers of the worlds – as described in the Upanishads, the foundational texts of Hindu philosophy. His father painted religious mandalas, abstract circular designs intended to contain the cosmos, while also working as a temple architect and an idol sculptor. Viswanadhan himself trained as a potter and a blacksmith after dropping out of school. The clear distinction between art and society must therefore seem arbitrary to him, and autonomy of art, that binding logic underpinning much of the Western culture, equally alien. The Five Elements is permeated with implicit cues to Viswanadhan’s childhood and identity. Yet, to his credit, he codifies rather than commodifies it, drawing upon identity as a lived experience rather than a resource to be exchanged at the identity-alert neoliberal culture market, eager for legible markers of difference. Although the attentive viewer may notice two brief shots near the end of Water in which the filmmaker appears in the frame – one bathing in a Himalaya stream (perhaps the first instance in the history of cinema of a filmmaker showering in his own film?), the other standing beside Adoor Gopalakrishnan who is looking through the camera lens, their bodies reflected in a mirror – it would not suffice to categorise The Five Elements as auto-ethnography. For Viswanadhan, the relationality of art and society operates as an epistemological in-betweenness, rather than as a strategic oscillation between affirmation or rejection of one dominant epistemology, which is crucial for Minh-ha. His liminality draws upon both Western and non-Western (in his case, Indian) knowledge systems. Alternate epistemological possibilities may exist, even if the imagination of an “other” on the outside in the age of globalized capitalism is largely illusory, a romanticism to which Viswanadhan does not subscribe. Does this mean that the epistemological asymmetries between those behind and in front of the camera cease to exist in The Five Elements? Certainly not, it is precisely this asymmetry that sustains the relevance of an ethnographic framing for the pentalogy.

What brings Viswanadhan close to Gardner, aside from the fact that the middle section of Water is shot on the banks of the Ganges in Benaras, much like Forest of Bliss, is a shared investment in a politics of immanence. The affinity is certainly evident. Yet in Viswanadhan’s case, immanence derives from its prominence in the Upanishads. The concealed challenge in coming to terms with The Five Elements in all its complexity resembles that of Viswanadhan’s lyrical abstract paintings which cite both Tantric art and Western abstraction. The films and the paintings clearly enter into dialogue with a broad history of cinema and visual arts while remaining rooted in specific historical and philosophical traditions, they concede neither to universalism nor to exceptionalism. The films’ immanent argument – the cosmos resides in the rhythms of the routine and the mundane, outlasting centuries of social and political transformations – even when removed from a Western philosophical anchor, cannot entirely escape a postcolonial critique. Such an argument risks relegating the tangible legacies of colonialism – its ecological footprint and reification of social hierarchies like caste in its wake – to the realm of the symbolic. Viswanadhan might respond that all subjects of history are entitled to opacity and dignity, and it is precisely that which primarily concerns him in The Five Elements.

If only two things in The Five Elements were to connect it to a history of twentieth-century avant-garde film, they would be landscape and portraiture, motifs that recur persistently throughout the pentalogy. The films abound in sublime, at times overwhelming, shots of landscapes that stand as emblems of defiant beauty from the ravages of a land marked by colonial plunder. In Water, clouds drifting over the Ganges gently lean in to kiss the river; in the opening passages of Ether, shafts of light on the horizon recall J.W. Turner’s sketchbooks. Visages, of those encountered on the journeys, bearing within them oceans of unforetold chronicles, are dispersed throughout. One familiar portrait stands out in Air, of the great dancer and choreographer Chandralekha. Throughout the pentalogy, the intertwinement of nature and human is repeatedly affirmed. A formal proclivity recurrently encountered is a       tightly framed body from which the camera zooms out into the surrounding environment. This gradual transition from detail to description operates as a quiet critique of the Anthropocene from the artist’s own vantage point, once again drawing upon Samkhya metaphysics, whose tenets argue that creation arises through the interaction between prakriti (nature) and purusha (consciousness).

Beyond the framework of ethnography, I am inclined to consider The Five Elements as an artist-film, understood in a narrower sense, before “interdisciplinarity” (often implying a negation of medium-specific vocation, rather than an expansion of it, as in the case of Michael Snow) made the term ubiquitous and diluted. Films made by painters, photographers, sculptors, musicians, and dancers in the second half of the twentieth century have enriched film history in ways we have yet to fully come to terms with. Figures such as Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, Mauricio Kagel, Hiroshi Yamazaki – and more famously, Andy Warhol – form only part of a much longer lineage. Lest we forget, the European avant-garde film of the 1920s was initiated and sustained largely by visual artists. In India, modernist painters of the 1960s such as Akbar Padamsee, Tyeb Mehta, and M.F. Husain had their brief tryst with filmmaking. It is within this rich yet minor history that The Five Elements stakes its rightful claim.