A chronicle of our tumultuous present that’s cloaked inside a faux artifact from the past, Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing is at once a low-fi, agitprop documentary on India’s recent wave of student protests, an intimate meditation on thwarted love, a critique of the country’s still-functioning caste system, and perhaps a few other things as well. After premiering in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, where it walked away with the prestigious Oeil d’or for best documentary, this highly original and rather unclassifiable debut should continue playing festivals and scooping up prizes. The Cinema Guild picked it up for U.S. distribution this past October.
Shot on a mix of Super 8, 16mm and video that’s so grainy and contrasty at times, it looks like it’s been through several cycles in the washing machine, the movie is purposely retro in form and yet extremely contemporary in the events it depicts: mainly, the demonstrations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pro-Hindu government that swept through India’s public universities beginning in 2016.
One such school was the Film & Television Institute of India — located three hours from the Bollywood epicenter of Mumbai — where Kapadia and cinematographer-editor Ranabir Das were both students, and where a part of their movie takes place. Using occasional narration (voiced by Bhumisuta Das) and intertitles, the filmmakers explain how they uncovered a series of letters that were left behind in their dormitory by a certain ‘L,’ who addressed them to a former lover from a higher caste. But such letters are really more of a pretext for the film to explore the current state of India, delving into the class divide and social upheavals plaguing the country.
The film’s opening section chronicles life at the school, where we see students dancing, partying and hanging out in their tiny apartments, sometimes with a Godard movie playing on a laptop. Indeed, the throwback aesthetic of Night recalls the black-and-white, off-the-cuff look of 1960s European arthouse cinema, which Kapadia and her fellow classmates seem to be well versed in. At one point she cites a poem by Pasolini on the Italian student protests of 1968 (“I sympathized with the policemen! Because policemen are sons of the poor”), while a rally at the Institute has a group of fervent cinephiles chanting: “Eisenstein, Pudovkin, we shall fight, we shall win!”
It’s hard to imagine many students in Europe or the U.S. still being this militant and aware of their filmmaking ancestors, and the dual influence of art movies and local politics is what shapes A Night of Knowing Nothing into such a unique experience. Rather than directing a full-on activist film, Kapadia opted for a work that resembles found footage discovered some time in the future, portraying the events of the past years — including Modi’s crackdown on the protest movement, which lead to arrests, beatings and claims of torture — as if they had taken place in an epoch other than our own.
“A fleeting memory of violence,” is how the narrator describes what we’re seeing, and Kapadia’s film underscores the difficulty of preserving such memories in our media-saturated world. By transforming her images, whether they were shot on celluloid, with a phone, or taken from newscasts or CCTV cameras, into archaic fragments of the present, she manages to give them more weight, distinguishing them from the swathe of visuals we face on a daily basis. Watching A Night of Knowing Nothing is like viewing our world through a distant lens that somehow draws us closer inside.
Director: Payal Kapadia
Screenwriters: Payal Kapadia, Himanshu Prajapati
Cast: Bhumisuta Das
Producers: Ranabir Das, Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
Cinematography: Ranabir Das
Editing: Ranabir Das
Production companies: Petit Chaos (France), Another Birth (India)
Sales: Square Eyes
96 minutes
