A Night of Know­ing Nothing

In a mon­soon that occurred in 2015, stu­dents of the state-fund­ed Film & Tele­vi­sion Insti­tute of India called for a strike against the polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed appoint­ment of their new chair­man. Push­ing against the resur­gence of fas­cist pol­i­tics, as well as rigid forms of film­mak­ing, Pay­al Kapa­dia – a grad­u­ate of the FTII – paints protest with del­i­cate­ly ele­gant, nuanced brush­strokes as she seam­less­ly mesh­es mem­o­ry, real­i­ty, fic­tion, pos­si­bil­i­ty and resistance.

It’s remark­able how a fea­ture debut can so organ­i­cal­ly trans­form a dex­ter­ous mul­ti­me­dia col­lage into a per­fect ode to the beau­ty and pain of resis­tance in con­tem­po­rary India. Framed by fic­tion­al love let­ters from a film stu­dent named ​“L” to her estranged lover, A Night of Know­ing Noth­ing adopts a fic­tion­al, albeit inves­tiga­tive mode of sto­ry­telling, with the flu­id lyri­cism and inti­mate allure of L’s nar­ra­tion wan­der­ing between past and present.

The love let­ters are an apt fram­ing device, lend­ing a sen­su­al dimen­sion to the inter­sec­tion where per­son­al meets polit­i­cal. Casteism is the cause of heart­break that tears the lovers apart, while it also becomes the ves­sel through which the film expands and becomes ani­mat­ed by polit­i­cal passions.

Inti­mate and pierc­ing, the cam­era casts a dis­ap­prov­ing eye on the polit­i­cal con­tra­dic­tions at the heart of Naren­dra Modi’s Hin­du nation­al­ist, right-wing gov­ern­ment; its unequal dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of human val­ue; its rigid caste struc­tures; its sou­venirs of vio­lence. Audio­vi­su­al mate­r­i­al sourced from 8mm archival footage, phone videos, 16mm black and white shots and CCTV record­ings are jux­ta­posed with text and drawings.

These are inter­rupt­ed by news­pa­per clip­pings that report hor­ri­fy­ing acts of vio­lence enact­ed upon mar­gin­alised Dal­its and Mus­lims. Image and sound move flu­id­ly through­out, like the shad­owy fig­ures danc­ing to the back­drop of stark silence in the film’s open­ing and clos­ing sequences.

In her let­ters, L often talks about the past. ​“Mem­o­ry is frag­ile. It can­not with­stand the test of 2000 years. Those who con­trol it, call it his­to­ry”. Indeed, to anchor a cer­tain vision of the past in the annals of pub­lic mem­o­ry as his­tor­i­cal fact, is to set in stone an amor­phous ver­sion of his­to­ry, a dream con­fig­u­ra­tion that eras­es the mate­r­i­al real­i­ty of marginality.

What Kapa­dia has achieved with this film is to for­mu­late a cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage capa­ble of com­mu­ni­cat­ing truths beyond what can be expressed, or felt, through con­ven­tion­al sto­ry­telling. An aban­don­ment of clear form does not sig­nal an aban­don­ment of mean­ing or speci­fici­ty. On the con­trary, through dis­rupt­ing lin­ear time, Kapadia’s spec­u­la­tive, poet­ic rumi­na­tion on mem­o­ry, polit­i­cal real­i­ty and per­son­al asso­ci­a­tion trans­forms the view­ing expe­ri­ence into some­thing transcendent.