you were not meant to watch that

This piece is about films you weren’t meant to watch. (But maybe you should).?

The filmmakers too wanted it that way.?

If you’re a Yellow Envelope reader, that is. First, there’s a less than 50% chance that you are a woman (I looked up the mailing list).?

Nowadays, we aren’t just one person, so in addition to being a woman, you would have to be either a domestic servant (quaintly known as ‘maid’), or a tobacco factory worker, or a wife struggling to be a mother and chief earner; or a Chipko activist who puts her body between the tree and the commercial logging op in a forest..?

You’d have to be someone who seeks to resist the way things are; the rules and expectations that maintain the very un-level playing fields you are used to. Call it the ‘system’, or capitalism or your preferred phrase.

If you are such a person,? you might need inspiration, or even training to organise yourselves. Visual material is a great way.??

Four people

That’s what a group of four people set out to do. They formed India’s first feminist film collective, Yugantar. Only one, a cinematographer, had been to film school.???

It was 1980. A politically charged time, with the memory of the Emergency still fresh.?

The films served as a training resource for feminist activism. Mass screenings among the human subjects of the films was the idea.

Made in the fragile 16mm film technology of the day, they degraded over time. Luckily they were restored by Arsenal, a film archival institute in Berlin.?

The website we designed…

…was the culmination of that revival project. Mass dissemination is still the idea.?

The design presents the revival as an act of scholarship, yet is charged with creative activism.?

It involved trying on a few hats. We re-drew the hand-drawn posters used by agitators, brought the process of collaborative filmmaking alive. We learnt the importance of reviving something that was at risk of fading away.??

Let’s gatecrash the show

The films were not made for us, yet we watched them with interest.??

Here’s the thing. Think of a movie star, whose screen persona excites us but whose everyday reality we can only speculate about—and?perhaps we’d rather not know.??

Likewise, the people these films are about—and for—are personas, not people.?

We know them by the cameos they perform, as the domestic help does everyday. Not what happens when they go home. Again we’d rather not know.?

If the movie star is larger than life, perhaps these characters are smaller than life? They are part of the Great Unwatched.?

Molkarin (1981) is Marathi for ‘maid’. It’s about a spontaneous strike by domestic workers from Pune, after one of their comrades was unjustly fired by her employer.

The beedi factory worker is even less visible, seen only as a photograph or a statistic. Some few among us have seen an actual strike, or we visit a factory and see these humans as parts of the machine they operate. Ooompa loompahs*. Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali (1982) or ‘Tobacco Embers’ documents and re-enacts parts of a strike by a 3000 member, all women union of tobacco workers in Nipani, Karnataka.??

Domestic violence cuts across classes; maybe it’s just covered up better up the ladder. Women struggle in this triple-role. Idi Katha Maatramena, (1983), fondly called Yugantar’s hit film, is fictional. In the ending, the woman survives (founder Deepa Dhanaraj says that male directed films tend to sacrifice the female protagonist).?

In Sudesha (1983) Sudesha Devi is a village activist involved in Chipko, the women led conservation movement against illegal felling of trees. Domestic duties don’t spare her though.????

Showtime

Yugantar’s films are now up on the web, carefully restored from fragile 16mm reels over 4 years. They will be watched for education, training and inspiration by the people on whose lives they’re based.

At about 25 mins a watch, they are worth your time. These characters and you are part of the circle of mutual dependence (read that slowly).? Finally, they are engaging as deeply human stories are.?

On the watch,

Itu?

________

*the tiny human-like factory creatures in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory from Roald Dahl’s famous short story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They never leave the factory, find humans very funny and eat only cacao beans.

The Great Unwatched

Design that tries to do justice to its subject. Charged and Serious. Activism and scholarship. From spools to screen. Watch. Read. Share. Agitate (only if you must).