Papers by Ritika Kaushik
Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past, 2023
Economic and Political Weekly, 2022
The lack of clarity and transparency in the impending restructuring of organisations like the Fil... more The lack of clarity and transparency in the impending restructuring of organisations like the Films Division of India and the National Film Archive of India, under the umbrella of the National Film Development Corporation of India, disenfranchises the real stakeholders of India’s film heritage—the Indian public.
Vol. 57, Issue No. 15, 09 Apr, 2022
(Correction: where I refer to Indira Gandhi as PM and it should be union minister of I&B)
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies
S. A. Chatterji, Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India. SAGE Publication... more S. A. Chatterji, Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India. SAGE Publications, 2015, 320 pp., $59.99. K. P. Jayasankar & A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. SAGE Publications, 2016, 276 pp., $54.99. A. Sharma, Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, XIII, 276 pp., 41.59€.
Economics and Political Weekly, 2020
Joker (2019) is set against an exterior world mirroring the New York City of the 1980s, with its ... more Joker (2019) is set against an exterior world mirroring the New York City of the 1980s, with its crumbling economy and neo-liberal policies, woven together with the interior world of the rapidly deteriorating mind of its protagonist Arthur Fleck, who has a mental health condition. The article analyses the mild-mannered Fleck’s transition into the slick and charismatic Joker by tracing acts of violence inflicted on him and those that he commits violence upon. Interrogating violent scenes in the film reveals how Joker glorifies and legitimises specific forms of violence, situating the story in a backdrop devoid of historical and political rootedness.
EPW Vol. 55, Issue No. 12, 21 Mar, 2020
Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2017
This article looks at one decade (1965–1975) in the history of Films Division of India (FD), the ... more This article looks at one decade (1965–1975) in the history of Films Division of India (FD), the first state film production and distribution unit in the country. It tracks the changing political environment and several administrative, infrastructural, and policy changes of the time, along with the emerging " experimental " film and interview format films. Under the dynamic supervision of Jean Bhownagary, a constellation of film makers and artists like Pramod Pati, S.N.S. Sastry, S. Sukhdev, among others came to the fore, experiment with film form was encouraged, and dissonant voices rose against the state itself. I suggest that it is possible to study certain experiments and formal practices emerging at a particular time and space not as mere aberrations, but as something that emerges from complex shifts in institutional practice. I locate these as part of a layered body of film uses, a palimpsest, in which the filmmaker's creative engagement needs to be situated in a bureaucratic order that could be arbitrary and inflexible but also provide for a regime of the permissible.
Book Reviews by Ritika Kaushik
Bioscope : South Asian Screen Studies, 2020
Book review essay on 3 books on Indian documentary-- Aparna Sharma's 'Documentary films in India:... more Book review essay on 3 books on Indian documentary-- Aparna Sharma's 'Documentary films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work', K.P. Jayasankar and Anajali Monteiro's 'A Fly in the Curry', and S.A. Chatterji's 'Filming Reality'
Documenting the Archive | Conference by Ritika Kaushik
Documentary film practice inflects and is in turn also inflected by the theories and practices ar... more Documentary film practice inflects and is in turn also inflected by the theories and practices around the study of the archive. Documenting the Archive will be a forum for theoretical and methodological interventions in cinema and media studies by invoking the archive’s historical and theoretical relationship with cinema, especially documentary film practice. This conference pushes the boundaries of cinema and media studies to ask what domains of critical inquiry, forms of experience, and historiographic methodologies emerge by examining the multifarious relations between documentary and archives.
April 26th and 27th, 2019
15th Annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Conference Organising Committee: Sean Batton, Ritika Kaushik, and Cinta Pelejà
Documenting the Archive: XVth Annual Graduate Student Conference
Organised by: Cinta Pelejà. Riti... more Documenting the Archive: XVth Annual Graduate Student Conference
Organised by: Cinta Pelejà. Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton
Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Documentary film practice inflects and is in turn also inflected by the theories and practices around the study of the archive. Documenting the Archive aims to be a forum for theoretical and methodological interventions in cinema and media studies by invoking the archive's historical and theoretical relationship with cinema, especially documentary film practice. The latin root of the word document, "docere"-which means to show, to teach, or to cause to know-connotes the fraught yet deeply intertwined historical relation between the word 'document' and the terms 'documentary' and 'archive'. The practices of documentary filmmaking and of archival production, distribution, and preservation both share the challenged notion of the document as a repository of knowledge. Archives don't just happen to be there; they are social, historical, political, and cultural constructions that in turn construct social relations themselves. Documentary cinema participates in a similar dialectic: on the one hand, it engages with the world presented in front of the camera-the profilmic. Yet, on the other, it is inextricable from the concerns posited by the archive: evidence, testimony, and historiography. Film scholars and practitioners have animated the archive by imagining new configurations of it, speculating about its lost fragments and absences and exploring the limits and possibilities of cinema's medium to counter and resist an idea of archive as a static and classificatory storehouse of the past. Recent theoretical works (Amad 2010, Baron 2013, Russell 2018) specifically engage with archives in relation to film and documentary forms. As new modes of apprehending and preserving the everyday are redefining and reconfiguring documentary film practice, the transitions to digital paradigms have led to an epistemological destabilization as well as a reconsideration of the concept of the archive itself. In the wake of technological transformations, what are the political, ethical and aesthetic implications involved in the institutional preservation, artistic strategies, collective praxis and modes of exhibition practices in relation to the archives? The conference pushes the boundaries of cinema and media studies to ask what domains of critical inquiry, forms of experience, and historiographic methodologies emerge by examining the multifarious relations between documentary and archives.
Film Curations by Ritika Kaushik
The Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago
May 3, 2019 | 7pm
One of the key figures of... more The Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago
May 3, 2019 | 7pm
One of the key figures of documentary and short film practice in India, S.N.S. Sastry was a bureaucrat making state-sponsored films for the Indian government’s Films Division. Most government films were considered boring, but Sastry developed a nervous, flashy, and humorous style to catch audience attention, leavening serious topics with humor, self-reflexivity, and irony. Even during the period of the Emergency, when state-sponsored films were heavy-handed propaganda, Sastry used images and sounds in ways that evades fixed meanings—including an eclectic style of montage, dissonant sound, and “remix”—demonstrating the possibilities of subversion against state mandates.
(India, trt: 102 min., digital video, courtesy of Films Division of India)
Curated by Ritika Kaushik (CMS) as part of the Film Studies Center’s Graduate Student Curatorial Program.
Sarai-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2016
Founded in 1948, India’s primary state institution of documentaries and short films, Films Divisi... more Founded in 1948, India’s primary state institution of documentaries and short films, Films Division of India had the mandate of making films to inform, educate and publicize the government’s efforts to develop India’s economy and society and secure its integrity. Deriving its lineage from its colonial predecessor, Information Films of India (1943-1946) the institution has often been criticized for producing ‘crude propaganda’ in its communication of development goals. During crisis situations of the sort this presentation is concerned with, it took recourse to so-called ‘quickies’, very short films to create an impact on public opinion, and a range of films made to mobilize and evoke a sense of allegiance to the government in times of trouble. However, the films do not always manifest official mandates and ideology in an unambiguous way. Cinematic objects are charged with elusive valencies, and films made with apparently clear objectives offer a greater diversity of meanings than were ever intended.
This presentation facilitated an informed discussion on official deployment of films during emergency situations, and explored the infrastructural context of their production as reflected in the archival information available about commissioning processes, bureaucratic interventions, and film-making practice.
While the ‘Emergency’ in India primarily refers to the 21 month long period from 1975-1977 when a state of internal emergency was declared in addition to the continuing external emergency, emergencies have punctuated post-independence history. A state of external emergency was declared at the time of the Indo-Sino war of 1962, continued until 1968, and was declared again for the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. In each instance the official film infrastructure produced films thought appropriate to the context. While the films called for unity and peace in 1962 and struck an affective chord of pride and hurt amongst the people, the 1970s FD films sought to evoke fear, the breakdown of public order and everyday life, and economic jeopardy in response to the mounting civic unrest in many parts of the country. The threats that were conceived as external in earlier years were replaced by “internal disturbances” in 1975. Amongst other film propaganda strategies, films were made to promote the Prime Minister’s 20 Point Programme as the panacea for all developmental ills and public disorder. This presentation attempted to unpack these ‘propaganda’ forms, looking at films from different periods of Emergency in India.
The event began with an introductory note by Ritika Kaushik. She presented an overview of her research on bureaucratic film infrastructure carried out at Sarai accompanied by an audio-visual compilation of archival material.
Clips from Films Division’s films used in the Presentation:
The Nation Stirs | 2:19 min. 1962
The Unavoidable Internment | 11:55 min. 1963
Keep Going | 3:41 min. 1971
Line of Resistance | 5 min.1971
Our Indira | 13:50 min. 1973
Violence: What price? Who Pays? No. 2 | 1:50 Min. 1974
We Have Promises to Keep | 9 min. 1975
Thunder of Freedom | 21 min. 1976
Conference Papers by Ritika Kaushik
South Asia Graduate Student Conference, University of Chicago, 2019
This paper explores a moment in film practice of Films Division of India (FD)—India’s primary st... more This paper explores a moment in film practice of Films Division of India (FD)—India’s primary state institution of documentary and short film— when the production of short films, trailers, and ‘quickies’ was initiated as part of a nationwide “campaign against violence” in early 1970s. In response to an upsurge in protests and displays of aggression through “violence” and “destruction” in the country, the Indira Gandhi government actively used films and mass media to address the existing situation. FD undertook this task by commissioning the films to a few independent producers and produced some on its own. The paper will map the nuances of this fractious moment in the shadow of the Emergency by following not just the filmmakers and their film texts, but also the archival documents produced by the state institutions themselves: FD’s internal production files of films, official documents regarding the policy of this campaign, research study and seminars on “violence” conducted at the time by state institutions and even the audience study conducted on the reception of the films. The paper excavates the peculiar collaborations between the mainstream film industry, advertising agencies, independent filmmakers and the bureaucrats, researchers and policy makers of films. Working at the intersections of the public sphere and state sponsored mass media, the paper explores the peculiar tangents of film practice countering violence.
Emergency and Emergence | First Forum 2018 | University of Southern California
Opaque Media: A Workshop, UC Irvine
This paper outlines the institutional forms of government film making in the 1970s ,j... more This paper outlines the institutional forms of government film making in the 1970s ,just before and during the years of the Emergency era in India.2The intensifying propagandist agenda of the political situation led to the state documentary production unit, Films Division of India (FD) to produce campaigns such as the Film 20 series (1975) to uplift public morale and of ‘quickies’ (very short films) to address the problem of violence (1974).3[2] The state itself was precipitated into a crisis of legitimacy reflected in the Film 20 series not using FD's logo to avoid the connection with ‘government propaganda’. Along with the films made by the government, this presentation will focus on paper work, a key infrastructure of media production, composed of film production files, film policy documents, audience reception reports, and newspaper reports. Paying close attention to the bureaucracy-speak in a production file of the Emergency film We Have Promises to Keep(1975), the paper will explore the banality and non-linearity of the everyday functioning of state power in its official records even during an authoritarian regime. Layering the films with the files, it seeks to locate the films as vehicles of material production of affect and power and not just residues of their ideological mandates. The archive of files and films evokes the imprint of complex bureaucratic infrastructures whose protocols were often variable in their deployment and sometimes completely ineffective, subject to various lobbies and marked by infringements and exceptions. Thus, the paper explores the structuring indeterminacies of state funded film practice to capture the peculiarities of governmental media form in a period of political turbulence
Screen Studies Conference 2016, SCMS, 2017
This paper outlines the institutional forms of government film making in the 1970s, just before a... more This paper outlines the institutional forms of government film making in the 1970s, just before and during the years of the Emergency era in India. The intensifying propagandist agenda of the political situation led to the state documentary and newsreel unit, Films Division, (FD) producing campaigns such as the Film 20 series, (1975), to uplift public morale, and of ‘quickies’ to address the problem of violence (1974). The state itself was precipitated into a crisis of legitimacy, reflected in the Film 20 series not using FD's logo to avoid the connection with ‘government propaganda’. Along with the films made by the government, this presentation will focus on paper work, a key infrastructure of media production, composed of film production files, film policy documents, audience reception reports, and newspaper reports. This archive evokes the imprint of a complex bureaucracy whose protocols were often variable in their deployment, subject to various lobbies, and marked by infringements and exceptions. Thus, the paper explores the structuring indeterminacies of state funded film practice to capture the peculiarities of governmental media form in a period of political turbulence.
Visible Evidence XXII, 2015
Visible Evidence XXI, 2014
The Futures of American Studies: Annual Conference of the Department of English, University of Delhi, 2013
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Papers by Ritika Kaushik
Vol. 57, Issue No. 15, 09 Apr, 2022
(Correction: where I refer to Indira Gandhi as PM and it should be union minister of I&B)
EPW Vol. 55, Issue No. 12, 21 Mar, 2020
Book Reviews by Ritika Kaushik
Documenting the Archive | Conference by Ritika Kaushik
April 26th and 27th, 2019
15th Annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Conference Organising Committee: Sean Batton, Ritika Kaushik, and Cinta Pelejà
Organised by: Cinta Pelejà. Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton
Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Documentary film practice inflects and is in turn also inflected by the theories and practices around the study of the archive. Documenting the Archive aims to be a forum for theoretical and methodological interventions in cinema and media studies by invoking the archive's historical and theoretical relationship with cinema, especially documentary film practice. The latin root of the word document, "docere"-which means to show, to teach, or to cause to know-connotes the fraught yet deeply intertwined historical relation between the word 'document' and the terms 'documentary' and 'archive'. The practices of documentary filmmaking and of archival production, distribution, and preservation both share the challenged notion of the document as a repository of knowledge. Archives don't just happen to be there; they are social, historical, political, and cultural constructions that in turn construct social relations themselves. Documentary cinema participates in a similar dialectic: on the one hand, it engages with the world presented in front of the camera-the profilmic. Yet, on the other, it is inextricable from the concerns posited by the archive: evidence, testimony, and historiography. Film scholars and practitioners have animated the archive by imagining new configurations of it, speculating about its lost fragments and absences and exploring the limits and possibilities of cinema's medium to counter and resist an idea of archive as a static and classificatory storehouse of the past. Recent theoretical works (Amad 2010, Baron 2013, Russell 2018) specifically engage with archives in relation to film and documentary forms. As new modes of apprehending and preserving the everyday are redefining and reconfiguring documentary film practice, the transitions to digital paradigms have led to an epistemological destabilization as well as a reconsideration of the concept of the archive itself. In the wake of technological transformations, what are the political, ethical and aesthetic implications involved in the institutional preservation, artistic strategies, collective praxis and modes of exhibition practices in relation to the archives? The conference pushes the boundaries of cinema and media studies to ask what domains of critical inquiry, forms of experience, and historiographic methodologies emerge by examining the multifarious relations between documentary and archives.
Film Curations by Ritika Kaushik
May 3, 2019 | 7pm
One of the key figures of documentary and short film practice in India, S.N.S. Sastry was a bureaucrat making state-sponsored films for the Indian government’s Films Division. Most government films were considered boring, but Sastry developed a nervous, flashy, and humorous style to catch audience attention, leavening serious topics with humor, self-reflexivity, and irony. Even during the period of the Emergency, when state-sponsored films were heavy-handed propaganda, Sastry used images and sounds in ways that evades fixed meanings—including an eclectic style of montage, dissonant sound, and “remix”—demonstrating the possibilities of subversion against state mandates.
(India, trt: 102 min., digital video, courtesy of Films Division of India)
Curated by Ritika Kaushik (CMS) as part of the Film Studies Center’s Graduate Student Curatorial Program.
This presentation facilitated an informed discussion on official deployment of films during emergency situations, and explored the infrastructural context of their production as reflected in the archival information available about commissioning processes, bureaucratic interventions, and film-making practice.
While the ‘Emergency’ in India primarily refers to the 21 month long period from 1975-1977 when a state of internal emergency was declared in addition to the continuing external emergency, emergencies have punctuated post-independence history. A state of external emergency was declared at the time of the Indo-Sino war of 1962, continued until 1968, and was declared again for the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. In each instance the official film infrastructure produced films thought appropriate to the context. While the films called for unity and peace in 1962 and struck an affective chord of pride and hurt amongst the people, the 1970s FD films sought to evoke fear, the breakdown of public order and everyday life, and economic jeopardy in response to the mounting civic unrest in many parts of the country. The threats that were conceived as external in earlier years were replaced by “internal disturbances” in 1975. Amongst other film propaganda strategies, films were made to promote the Prime Minister’s 20 Point Programme as the panacea for all developmental ills and public disorder. This presentation attempted to unpack these ‘propaganda’ forms, looking at films from different periods of Emergency in India.
The event began with an introductory note by Ritika Kaushik. She presented an overview of her research on bureaucratic film infrastructure carried out at Sarai accompanied by an audio-visual compilation of archival material.
Clips from Films Division’s films used in the Presentation:
The Nation Stirs | 2:19 min. 1962
The Unavoidable Internment | 11:55 min. 1963
Keep Going | 3:41 min. 1971
Line of Resistance | 5 min.1971
Our Indira | 13:50 min. 1973
Violence: What price? Who Pays? No. 2 | 1:50 Min. 1974
We Have Promises to Keep | 9 min. 1975
Thunder of Freedom | 21 min. 1976
Conference Papers by Ritika Kaushik
Vol. 57, Issue No. 15, 09 Apr, 2022
(Correction: where I refer to Indira Gandhi as PM and it should be union minister of I&B)
EPW Vol. 55, Issue No. 12, 21 Mar, 2020
April 26th and 27th, 2019
15th Annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Conference Organising Committee: Sean Batton, Ritika Kaushik, and Cinta Pelejà
Organised by: Cinta Pelejà. Ritika Kaushik and Sean Batton
Cinema and Media Studies
University of Chicago
Documentary film practice inflects and is in turn also inflected by the theories and practices around the study of the archive. Documenting the Archive aims to be a forum for theoretical and methodological interventions in cinema and media studies by invoking the archive's historical and theoretical relationship with cinema, especially documentary film practice. The latin root of the word document, "docere"-which means to show, to teach, or to cause to know-connotes the fraught yet deeply intertwined historical relation between the word 'document' and the terms 'documentary' and 'archive'. The practices of documentary filmmaking and of archival production, distribution, and preservation both share the challenged notion of the document as a repository of knowledge. Archives don't just happen to be there; they are social, historical, political, and cultural constructions that in turn construct social relations themselves. Documentary cinema participates in a similar dialectic: on the one hand, it engages with the world presented in front of the camera-the profilmic. Yet, on the other, it is inextricable from the concerns posited by the archive: evidence, testimony, and historiography. Film scholars and practitioners have animated the archive by imagining new configurations of it, speculating about its lost fragments and absences and exploring the limits and possibilities of cinema's medium to counter and resist an idea of archive as a static and classificatory storehouse of the past. Recent theoretical works (Amad 2010, Baron 2013, Russell 2018) specifically engage with archives in relation to film and documentary forms. As new modes of apprehending and preserving the everyday are redefining and reconfiguring documentary film practice, the transitions to digital paradigms have led to an epistemological destabilization as well as a reconsideration of the concept of the archive itself. In the wake of technological transformations, what are the political, ethical and aesthetic implications involved in the institutional preservation, artistic strategies, collective praxis and modes of exhibition practices in relation to the archives? The conference pushes the boundaries of cinema and media studies to ask what domains of critical inquiry, forms of experience, and historiographic methodologies emerge by examining the multifarious relations between documentary and archives.
May 3, 2019 | 7pm
One of the key figures of documentary and short film practice in India, S.N.S. Sastry was a bureaucrat making state-sponsored films for the Indian government’s Films Division. Most government films were considered boring, but Sastry developed a nervous, flashy, and humorous style to catch audience attention, leavening serious topics with humor, self-reflexivity, and irony. Even during the period of the Emergency, when state-sponsored films were heavy-handed propaganda, Sastry used images and sounds in ways that evades fixed meanings—including an eclectic style of montage, dissonant sound, and “remix”—demonstrating the possibilities of subversion against state mandates.
(India, trt: 102 min., digital video, courtesy of Films Division of India)
Curated by Ritika Kaushik (CMS) as part of the Film Studies Center’s Graduate Student Curatorial Program.
This presentation facilitated an informed discussion on official deployment of films during emergency situations, and explored the infrastructural context of their production as reflected in the archival information available about commissioning processes, bureaucratic interventions, and film-making practice.
While the ‘Emergency’ in India primarily refers to the 21 month long period from 1975-1977 when a state of internal emergency was declared in addition to the continuing external emergency, emergencies have punctuated post-independence history. A state of external emergency was declared at the time of the Indo-Sino war of 1962, continued until 1968, and was declared again for the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. In each instance the official film infrastructure produced films thought appropriate to the context. While the films called for unity and peace in 1962 and struck an affective chord of pride and hurt amongst the people, the 1970s FD films sought to evoke fear, the breakdown of public order and everyday life, and economic jeopardy in response to the mounting civic unrest in many parts of the country. The threats that were conceived as external in earlier years were replaced by “internal disturbances” in 1975. Amongst other film propaganda strategies, films were made to promote the Prime Minister’s 20 Point Programme as the panacea for all developmental ills and public disorder. This presentation attempted to unpack these ‘propaganda’ forms, looking at films from different periods of Emergency in India.
The event began with an introductory note by Ritika Kaushik. She presented an overview of her research on bureaucratic film infrastructure carried out at Sarai accompanied by an audio-visual compilation of archival material.
Clips from Films Division’s films used in the Presentation:
The Nation Stirs | 2:19 min. 1962
The Unavoidable Internment | 11:55 min. 1963
Keep Going | 3:41 min. 1971
Line of Resistance | 5 min.1971
Our Indira | 13:50 min. 1973
Violence: What price? Who Pays? No. 2 | 1:50 Min. 1974
We Have Promises to Keep | 9 min. 1975
Thunder of Freedom | 21 min. 1976