Still from I Tried to Write a Love Letter with My Body
Underground Film Series curator Ruth Riftin explains how filmmaker Priyanka Das interrogates the idea of “otherness” through the prism of the essay cinema form. A version of this article previously appeared in the March/April 2024 issue of the Ryder Magazine.
Born in India and currently based in Brooklyn, Priyanka Das is a voice worth knowing in the world of experimental cinema. The filmmaker’s work has been presented in various festivals around the globe, winning awards and recognition. Under the Jazz. Circulation. Formation. (2019) won Das the Honorary Jury Award at the 2020 Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival, and I Tried to Write a Love Letter with My Body (2021) granted her the 2022 Best Woman Filmmaker title at the Berlin Underground Film Festival. Both awards demonstrate her rising status within the global underground scene.
Das’s films belong to the category of essay cinema. Essay films do not tell a story like many fiction and documentary films do. Instead, like written essays, they are composed, subjective arguments about cultural, social, political, or philosophical concepts, “written” by their creators with the “grammar” cinema has to offer: images, movement, sounds, and editing. Essay films may sometimes look like documentaries, often showing moments from the “real” world. With that, they are self-reflexive, meaning that they constantly use various cinematic tools to point out the fact that this is an artificial work of art, rather than the “real” world represented. In their attempt to keep both senses of realness and artificiality, essay films mix between sequences that look as if they came out of fiction films, documentaries, and experimental cinema. Famous directors who experiment with this kind of cinema vary from Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda to Errol Morris and even Michael Moore. When Das takes from this cinematic form, she uses it to explore issues of identity, gender, transnationality, foreignness, and encounters with other cultures and others in general.
These are not just random, philosophical ideas Das “plays” with; she tackles the burning concepts of identity and representation. There is a higher demand in media industries today for diverse representation. Film and television productions offer us more and more voices that were less heard in the past and are now beginning to become a conspicuous part of the main media and entertainment people watch and follow. Das is a strong new voice in this discussion of representation. Her work is important not just because she is a woman of color directing films; it is because her films investigate this very idea of cultural diversity as a whole. She asks in her films what it is like being new to a culture and meeting someone new from outside the culture. Das’s films wonder what happen in these circumstances: how do we define ourselves in the face of otherness? How are we similar or different from this otherness? How do step into a new culture while remaining true to ourselves and our own culture? And how do we embrace these new cultures without appropriating things? These are all questions that a proper work of representation in the media would always benefit from.
Yet Das’s work is not just for those interested in representation and cultural diversity. The otherness she explores is also a kind of otherness that any human being knows. We all know we do not have to go as far as visiting foreign cultures just to sometimes feel like we are strangers. “Others” in Das’s films take many forms, such as random strangers a person sees on the streets and in ordinary public places, as well as mysterious beings in surreal surroundings. However, ironically, the most familiar “other” Das offers is the “self,” the other that lives inside of us. This is an “other” representing the way we see ourselves, looking outwards at the mirror, or inwards into our soul, and wondering who the person we are looking at is. In the films’ dialogue and voiceover, people use terms like “I,” “you,” “she,” and “they,” but it is never quite certain with these pronouns who they are talking to and who they are talking about. The question of this relationship between the “self” and the “other” is always being asked.
Still from Under the Jazz
Aesthetically speaking, Das’s films continue the essay cinema form, combining fiction filmmaking, documentary styles, and experimental cinema. Some of her scenes are shot in a studio, and it is visibly noticeable that the actors have been directed and the frame is carefully composed and lit. Other sequences seem to have been taken on the street or in public places, as if they are small pieces of the real locations where these images have been captured. During these different aesthetics, Das laces various cinematic experimental moments, layering additional images one on top of the other, adding soundtracks that are not directly related to the shown sequence, changing the color balance of shots, playing with the sequence’s movement using stop motion editing, etc. The films use the essay form to look for their own identity, just like their characters do.
In all of this, Das mixes the ordinary and realistic with the fantastic and the unusual, between the “real” and the “work of art.” She takes moments that seem mundane, situations everyone has encountered, and makes them highly unusual in sonic and visual ways. This mixture is used to make us not just see the sense of otherness and foreignness, but to feel and experience it, to see how reality keeps altering in front of our eyes.
The program Otherness: The Films of Priyanka Das, which includes the films I Tried to Write a Love Letter with My Body and Under the Jazz, will occur at Indiana University Cinema on March 21 at 7pm as part of the Underground Film Series.
Ruth Riftin is a doctoral candidate at the Indiana University Media School. She specializes in the intersection between national and transnational cinema, contemporary French films, cyberpunk, horror, critical race theory, and questions of identity, memory, and trauma.