Fables of Development: Gaurav Puri’s Dhundgiri Ke Phool
Cartographic bearings of industrial development are inconceivable without the insistent aberrations that underscore their foundation. As large-scale construction projects refashion geographies into mechanised fields of space and time, they refract the local stories, folklore and legends that are dislocated in the process. Attending to these imponderable layers of “development” through a hybrid approach, Dhundgiri Ke Phool (A Flower in a Foglight, 2023) is Gaurav Puri’s graduate dissertation film from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI). Having premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) earlier this year, the film maps the disintegrating character of Soni, a village in West Bengal, when the construction of an ultramodern airport starts in its vicinity. Loosely structured into five fable-like narrative segments that unfold in feverish delusion, the film assembles an uncorroborated cultural mosaic of the village and its inhabitants.
Butterflies infuse the air with melancholy, indefinitely waiting for a boy with whom they have fallen in love. A projectionist falls into endless sleep while screening the Mithun Chakraborty-starring Chandaal (1998), which defers dawn for ten years until the lead character attains salvation. An ambidextrous government clerk, Radhakrishnan, uses his muscle memory to collate village records while he sleeps through a night of overwhelming tiredness. Lataji resolves to fight an iron bird that regularly disturbs her sleep after the airport authorities marked her house for demolition. Shyam frequently visits an ancient village pond to exchange coins for stories preserved under the water by his grandmother—another site now threatened by the proposed runway. These are fragments of a richly-graded phantasmagorical world that overlap and mature under the foreboding shadow of the upcoming airport.
Dhundgiri Ke Phool locates the material conflicts over land and resources by examining the unearthly, mystical figurations of the villagers’ crises. Soni inhabits a liminal location, where it is not wholly displaced but still threatened by the mega-structure project nearby. This transitional phase affords a zone of narrative ambiguities and contradictions through which the film develops a critical praxis. Consequently, it disbands the linear trajectory of developmental aspirations to envision the village’s entangled temporal referentiality.
The film’s artistic design owes its finesse to the cooperative labour of craftspersons, technicians and residents of the Tepantar Theatre Village, a one-of-a-kind rural theatre and cultural community in Satkahunia village of Bardhaman, West Bengal. There is an elastic relationality in how the production’s aesthetic directions materialise the interrelated narrative layers. Walter Kaufmann’s signature All India Radio tune steeps the fantasy of development in emotional ambiguity, while recurring sounds of radio signals and aeroplanes pervade the stories with a baleful presence. Visually, the narrative follows a delightfully undisciplined course as it traverses disparate techniques, transitions, frame rates and screen ratios. Likewise, archival footage interspersed in the film detonates real locations and constructed sequences with alchemic spontaneity. This formal hybridity grounds the film’s thematic alignments.
Indeed, the composite nature of the film speaks to the cohabitation of two oppositional narrative projections. The viewer is drawn to the speculative rationalism of the construction project, marked by maps, computerised blueprints, 3D animations and promotional videos. The other concerns a more anomalous excursion across local myths, subjective visions and phantasmic concoctions around the village. Interestingly, the film does not try to salvage the latter from the former or seek to discern the boundaries between the two with a dogmatic spell. Instead, they mutually catalyse through the cross-layering, dissolving and interpolation of audiovisual frames.
However, Puri draws an arc to encase the film’s unobvious affiliations. The title card, in the beginning, accompanies a cartographic imagining of the proposed infrastructure, with cacophonic radio signals and commercial imagery preceding it. Towards the end of the film, the audiovisual landscape transfigures into a complex compound of factual and fictional relations. Contrariety and incongruities take the narrative lead with a well-honed political sensitivity. Though the film’s rhythm might seem to falter at parts, it adeptly uncovers the agonistic foundations of development to liberate spectral visions.
Read about other spectres of development in Jigisha Bhattacharya’s essay on Shishir Jha’s Dharti Latar Re Horo. To learn more about hybrid film practices, read Najrin Islam’s piece on Payal Kapadia’s oeuvre and Santasil Mallik’s reflection on Obaid Mustafa’s Here is Where We Meet Again.
All images from Dhundgiri Ke Phool (2023) by Gaurav Puri, courtesy of the artist.
