ABSTRACT
This chapter challenges the idea that ‘performative’ documentary practices in India have been the consequence of the entrance of women filmmakers onto the documentary scene. It starts from a wider excursus of how ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ has been used and theorised in both anthropology and documentary film studies and then goes on to examine specific women practices in India, as well as the discourse about women and filmmaking that circulated in women’s journals such as Manushi and through unedited publications that came out in the 1980s during women gathering and filmmaking fora. After clearly distinguishing the role of women filmmakers in the women’s movement of the 1980s from the discourses about women filmmakers that emerged in the 1990s, the chapter introduces a new way to look at performative practices in documentary filmmaking in India. Juxtaposing archival material with ethnographic data and unedited video-interviews with filmmakers of the late 1980s, the chapter proposes to look at the articulation of performance and performativity in Indian documentary practices through physical movement of cinematographers and editors (both women and men) between different film practices. The case of the cinematographer Ranjan Palit is used as an example to better exemplify this argument.
