ABSTRACT
This chapter develops around the question of what it means to be ‘independent’. In doing this, it shows that depending on various agents of significations (namely film, filmmaker or filmmaking) ‘being independent’ refers to different cinematic practices. Accordingly, the chapter argues that the concept of ‘being independent’ is a feature of various film practices and generic categorisations that coexist and, at the same time, influence one another. Focusing on the period between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, the chapter goes beyond a more common history that associates the beginning of ‘independent documentaries’ in India to the figure of Anand Patwardhan and to the political moment of the Emergency. Rather, it reconnects independent practices to the role that individual filmmakers played within the state institution Films Division, to the development of the new wave cinema (as a practice and as a scholarly discourse) and to the political discomfort of some filmmakers, existent before, and not after, the declaration of the Emergency. Finally, the chapter reflects on the way in which films and filmmakers often get ‘discoursified’ and ‘objectified’ by narratives created by themselves or by scholars and critics, marginalising other film practices also useful to contextualise the specific political and historical moment that we chose to analyse.
