SOUMYADEEP PAUL: When I first visited the city of Varanasi, it was during the winter of December 2008. I sat on the stone steps of its gorgeous ghats, when a DOM (undertaker) came up to me. As we started chatting, he started describing the city, and the mythologies around its many ghats.
‘…Goddess Parvati threw her earring to a spot where it would be hard for Shiva to find it!’, he said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘So that Shiva doesn’t roam around and meditate so much, and spends more time with her’.
The longer I stayed in the city, the more I learned about the myths, legends, and history make up the very fabric of this city. Through the thousands of years of civilization, stories have propagated through scriptures and word of mouth, transforming and itself getting rewritten at the very same time. It’s a narrative that continues to unfold, partly in the collective consciousness, and partly in one’s own perception of the city.
Varanasi is the religious centre-point of Hinduism, and considered one of the few places in the planet where death automatically implies salvation and liberation from the cycle of life. It is said that the city is a microcosm of the entire country, all its artifacts compressed into one strikingly chaotic package.
This highly charged atmosphere of life and death and afterlife, the rhizomatic mixture of truth and legends, this city that constantly lives in the intermezzo of dramatic events, fascinated us. It also sprang a number of questions at us.
How would we film a city both from within and from without the individual?
We put together a small crew size of four (three from London, one from India), and planned meticulously around it. As Matti and I waited for the remaining two members of our team, we got two emails that basically spelled doom for the film – one describing a medical emergency that had befallen our Indian member, and another about the volcano eruption and the resulting ash in Iceland which had stopped all flights out of London, thus preventing our colleague from traveling of weeks thereafter. It was just going to be Matti and I who would have to do it all between us.
As we started shooting in the blinding white heat of 48 degrees, we realized that we were embarking on an insane adventure… one where we would have to learn and unlearn everything we knew, and somehow transform our dreamscapes and nightmares into reality.
MATTI POHJONEN: It has been almost two years since we started discussing doing a film on Varanasi. Soum wanted to work on a film on this city that held symbolic value for him, being, among other things, a holy city revered by his grandmother and family. I, in turn, with a background in critical anthropology, was interested in the project especially for the challenges filming perhaps the most visually represented city in the world posed.
But how could one anymore do a film on a place that has already been photographed and filmed to death by hoards of backpacker tourists, spiritual pilgrims, armchair anthropologists and colourful National Geographic romanticism? How could one avoid the cliches through which especially the Western imaginary of Varanasi had been produced ever since the colonial times? How could we say something new and even, heaven forbid, original about a city with such a powerful place in our imagination? “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”
So … as we began brainstorming on the idea, it was clear that we wanted to avoid a classical approach to this fascinating place. This, we felt, would add nothing to the visual clutter that already exists. Instead, we wanted the structure of the film – both narratively and aesthetically -to reflect the multi-dimensional and -layered nature of the city: ancient yet modern and polluted; mystical and spiritual yet at times eerily banal. How could we make a film, we thought, that would be a bit like the many alleyways of the Varanasi ghats into which unsuspecting travellers often get lost – “rhizomatic”, multi-layered and poetic yet based on real-life places, people and facts?
We began filming in April 2010 in blinding 40 degree heat. We knew we wanted to capture two essentials things while shooting: Narratively, we wanted to follow the different rhizomatic stories until they overlapped with other stories that would then take over. We did not therefore want to work with a tight script but rather let the script be as much written by our encounters with people, feelings created by places, through change and coincidence. Aesthetically, we wanted to experiment with the potential of new digital technology such as DSLR cameras and cheap underwater cameras for guerilla-style on location film making. Somewhat similar to the rhizomatic structure of the film, we also wanted to follow different visual styles and cues as we meandered through the pathways in the city through a kind of spontaneous film-making made possible by lightweight cameras.
In the end, therefore, whether it was the lack of sleep or the long shooting days in the scorching heat, after the 10 days of shooting, it did feel momentarily that, at times, the city itself wrote the film as much as we did. Each alleyway, building, pilgrimage site and interview led us to yet another strand of thought that we followed incessantly until we felt we had reached far enough: tens of hours of footage and a humble feeling that that more we knew about the city the less we understood.
The end result hopefully reflects this:
When writer Anjan Sen disappears without any trace, the only clues he leaves behind are his research tapes about the city of Varanasi, his books, and an incomplete dreamy science fiction story about a being from another dimension. Where did Anjan come from? Where did he go? What was his quest? Why did he forfeit his story? Did he see his own future? Where was he last seen? Is he even real?
Through fragments of his story, the research tapes, and interviews with friends and family, a character sketch slowly unfolds in the backdrop of one of the oldest cities known to man – Varanasi.