ABSTRACT
Reena Mohan’s Kamlabai (1992, 47 mins) aligns the documentary with fiction cinema and the theatrical by creating a compelling yet calm portrait of India’s first screen actress, born just four years after the first documentary material was famously shown at the Watson Hotel in Bombay on 7 July 1896. Made in the early 1990s during a time of major shifts within India’s media landscape, Kamlabai signifies one of the indicative turns that have occurred throughout the rich history of documentary filmmaking in India. The portrait’s content, image depth and slow-paced takes, filmed on the 16mm camera on a tripod, signifies the past, while its intimacy and reflection upon history and memory made it an example ahead of its time. It does indeed ‘experiment more freely’ not only with the performative aspects that are part of the life and play in Kamlabai’s selfpresentation but also with the encounters created by a small film crew coming into her Pune flat. Cinematographic decisions on the right angles to shoot her facial expressions and bodily moves and to follow her mundane and not so mundane daily routines of sleeping, cooking, remembering the ups and downs of her life when looking at photographs are next to Kamlabai acting for
the camera and an imaginary audience and hereby exert the dialogical tenuousness between any filmmaker and her subject.1 Opening here with Kamlabai’s homage to her profession is thus to accentuate that shifts in form, while discernible, are never absolute turning points and film histories never neatly linear while emphasizing that contemporary documentary discourses and practices might want to honor the multifarious preceding legacies that highlight at times overt and at times surprising and ephemeral genealogies.
