"What's the film about?"

So asked River. My reply appears below.

Although I've been somewhat slow to get into Facebook -- the growingly popular social/literary/whatever internet interface -- I'm lately starting to get with it.

Yesterday, I posted a note to a blogging-poet friend (based in Delhi), River (vide river's blue elephants) -- a note via Facebook's handy "wall-to-wall" modality -- remarking I'd completed such-and-such film, and may be showing it to a few confreres in Delhi next week. River replied with the above-quoted topic question. By way of answer, I dashed out four 1,000-character wall-posts -- perhaps adequate verbiage-volume for a terse, mini-essay. Said graffiti are copied below, for general note. They may not fully address the question, but they make a start in that direction.

cheers,
d.i.

=====================

I.

Padma Bilawal is, as a first layer, a "documentation" of a classical music (dhrupad vocal) teaching session (hence the film's subtitle, "a dhrupad master class"). But I found that 80 minutes in one room with two people, qu;ickly can become visually monotonous -- even if the music engages. One wants as much visual variation, change, nuance and expressivity as one has on the sound level. So what I ended up doing (as an approach toward solving this problem) was -- I went out on a boat in early morning in Bhopal -- on the lake 20 feet in front of where I've been living since January -- with the lakeview I had been studying daily and including in my new paintings -- I hired a local boatman (quite skilled, it turned out) who took the rowboat gliding along past hundreds and hundreds of morning-blooming lotus flowers. The raga that the student and teacher in the film are expounding and exploring is Alhaiya Bilawal, a very rich, colorful, beautiful and harmonious raga . . .

II.

So -- I began to combine footage of the lotus flowers with the real-time, continuous footage of the music teaching session. This combination is mainly done (speaking now in tech terms) via a method known as chroma keying: using a so-called "alpha channel," a certain color in footrage layer A is assigned to appear TRANSPARENT -- so footage layer B can "shine through" layer A at all the places where the particular color appears. So, it might be the color found primarily in the wall, or the door, or the curtains of the room -- all of these and others I use at various points in the film, sometimes more than one at once (through multiple layers of processessing). Or, on the other hand, I often process the two layers in an opposite way: where the scene with the room and the student-teacher "shines through" the world of flowers.

This describes some of the basic technique and, I guess one could say, [serves to suggest some] subject matter of the film . . .

III.

[ PART 3 :-) ]
But when I showed the film to a friend in Bangalore -- and he then also took me to show it to his old friend, who is a noted Hindi film critic -- they both had strong objections to what I'd done! -- mainly, they objected that I had abandoned any use of "film language": the language of the cut, the transition from one scene to another. What I had done, instead, was create a seamless visual world where one is constantly in the same place (even though that place is floriated so extremely). This critic also made a nice remark that found resonance for me. He noted that, as a writer, he listens to any criticism that comes his way -- he doesn't care what the source is. If some reader has a sincere critique, he tries to take a lesson from it. I for my part (somewhat to my own surprise) found myself inclined to take a lesson from his critique. The consequence was a changing and (perhaps) deepening of the film on a narrative or quasi-narrative level . . .

IV.

[okay, final installment]
The film begins OUTSIDE THE SPACE of the room where, otherwise, it will be planted for the next 83 minutaes. It opens with a slow-moving (slo-mo), dark scene of a bank of leaves and flowers (this from the very first footage I shot on the rowboat, at dawn) -- footage that has been processed in dozens of layers, in a certain way . . . this dark vision contrasts with the very bright colors and qualities of most of the film. And periodically, the strange dark, slomo scene recurs in various forms. So that is one layer that has a through-line in the film. Another motif one sees involves what I call (for short) "flower origin": a still image of a lotaus flower that one has already seen, will at some point suddenly become a moving image -- or, one will see a moving image of the flower that then resolves into the still image one has seen. So this constitutes a visual "backstory" of the flower's life on the river . . . .