‘Cycle’: Shifting Gaze on Violence
There is much to absorb in Devashish Makhija’s latest short film Cycle, a loose adaptation of his own short story ‘Butterflies on Strings’ from his collection Forgetting. To begin with, there is the question of the representation of the Adivasi. Film critic Sohini Chattopadhyay puts it succinctly when she says, “[t]he tribal character was a figure rarely met in Hindi cinema. Encountered, yes; met, no”. In this sense, Cycle helps the urban Indian viewer to meet the Adivasi through a triptych of shifting gazes, each carrying its own politics of seeing. The Adivasi here is not a faceless, voiceless, merrymaking but silent figure, rather, has a face, name, gender, history, and voice. Similarly, the mainland and the margin seem bound together through different shades of violence that unsettle notions of the ‘primitive’ or the ‘pristine’. Along the way, the film deliberates upon the nature of violence and the cycle it sets in motion.
The film follows a three-act structure in variations of the ‘found footage’ mode, framed by three long, continuous takes, each set inside a forest. In the first section, we burst in on a loud and frantic night-time sequence, where men in CRPF uniform can be heard threatening and interrogating huddled, cowering, and whimpering Adivasi men and women. The Adivasis are being shot by a phone camera wielded by a ruthless officer who is barking out his questions at them and ordering his men around. As he doesn’t find the answer to his question, he commands his men to pull one of the women aside and pin her down. He then goads a reluctant officer into raping her, as he records the act. An Adivasi man is bludgeoned with a rifle in the background. Terrified cries rend the air.
The horror of the scene takes all of five minutes to unfold, but feels like a relentless assault upon us, the viewers, making unwilling voyeurs of us. It captures the spectacle of violence so common in lynching videos that go viral these days, used as tools of intimidation and aggressive displays of authority. It is also a reimagination of themes that recur in Makhija’s oeuvre — sexual violence against women, and men training other men in perpetrating such violence — in films such as Ajji, Bhonsle, Happy, and his debut novel Oonga. In pivotal scenes of each of these stories (except for Ajji), we confront a suffocating close-up of a woman under sexual assault. The choice of realism as a mode of narration in the depiction of bodily violence (whether related to gender or caste) raises many questions. Does the depiction of violence in all its minute agony repeat the original act of violence? Is such a gaze exploitative? How are viewers/readers positioned in this matrix and what emotions are evoked in them? Do we learn to process the perpetration of violence in the active or the passive tense? Who is invested with agency in this equation and who is robbed of it? And so, how does Cycle respond to these aesthetic and narrative challenges? Just as the scene of sexual assault gets unbearable to watch, with the woman’s face and voice reflecting the horror and pain she is going through before she is reduced to numbness, the scene draws to a plausible close.
The second section shifts to the daytime with a different gaze and a gentler rhythm. It takes the form of a documentary video being shot by an urban filmmaker, who is recording a regular day in the life of a group of (evidently) Maoist rebels. We learn later that the point of her exercise is to help urban viewers understand what compels the Adivasi to pick up the rifle. While her gaze is sympathetic, it is also marked by distance, hence she quickly clarifies, upon being asked, that she is not ‘joining’ them. Her curiosity about them also reflects her naivete, as she directs questions at different Adivasis camped around her, engaged in different activities in preparation of a meal. She refrains from any mention of violence and there is a hint of the exotic in her quest to ‘humanise’ the Adivasi, as is evident in her requests for songs and her questions about their special ant chutney. In an intriguing reversal of gazes, one of her ‘subjects’ throws her a question, snatches her camera, and records her response, much to her embarrassment; the fact that she ends up being filmed upside-down hints at the gap between their distinct worlds, cultural values, and points of view. Similarly, not all her own questions find their answers. The woman who was raped earlier, reappears, now transformed, and appears triggered to find another camera trained upon her, and keeps returning her piercing gaze towards it. There is another interruption.
The third section loops back to the first, but with significant reversals. Here again is an act of violence being filmed by someone at the behest of another, but this time the active agents are women and the gaze has turned completely around. Bela, the Adivasi rape survivor, now almost unrecognisable, directs the shocked filmmaker’s camera to record her inflicting vengeful violence. Even as the cycle of violence enters its retributive stage and we find ourselves helplessly witnessing another increasingly gruesome incident, at the steepest point of the climax, there is a pause. A moment of deep moral dilemma and a breakdown. Amidst popular culture’s ready acceptance of revenge-themed vigilante films (including Makhija’s own earlier ones), especially those involving sexual violence and a righteous female protagonist, Cycle makes space for hesitation and soul searching. It draws our attention towards the pathos of violence and compels us to question if the cycle of violence is ever as smooth, self-evident, or automatic as it seems, and the kind of cost it extracts from its agents.
The film’s most powerful image is its last one, after which it ends just as abruptly as it had begun. Bela breaches the fourth wall to hold up a rifle at the camera and then directly throws a question at the viewer; it is a question that is different from the challenge thrown by Santhali Dopdi Mejhen in Mahasweta Devi’s chilling short story ‘Draupadi’, but which is just as disturbing. It’s a question filled with anguish and helpless rage — one that refuses to allow a safe, voyeur’s distance to the viewer and implicates us directly in the cycle of violence we are witnessing, disrupting our own cycle of denial and wilful ignorance. Makhija deftly captures a spectrum of emotions in a compressed manner, most effectively through lead actress Bhumisuta Das’s moving embodiment of horror, pain, numbness, wrath, and despair. As a result, if the first section of the film fills us with horror and revulsion, by the end of the film, our response is now filtered through the guilt of complicity, unsettling our conceptions of ‘self’ and the ‘other’.
In place of chest-thumping nationalism, Cycle draws attention to structural state violence that recurs with impunity. In place of evil, conscienceless terrorists who are enemies of the state, it shows us that rebels who wield guns also dream of love. Even in its portrayal of cyclical violence, it carves out space for the promptings of individual morality. A reluctant man is bullied into ‘proving his masculinity’ and a brutalised woman is traumatised into seeking vengeance; each of them has moments of hesitation, each makes a choice, and faces (or is bound to face) the consequences of those choices. With each shift of the gaze between the self and the other, the film examines violence of different kinds and from different angles — the violence of intimidation and sexual violation meted out to vulnerable citizens, the violence accompanying the quest for dignity and justice, the violence of the silent bystander who does not intervene, and the violence we inflict upon our own souls in the pursuit of revenge. It leaves us reflecting on the cyclonic nature of violence that spirals out with increasing girth, sucking in more and more innocence, leaving behind a trail of irreversible destruction in its wake that needs urgent disruption.
Cycle screened at the International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala last weekend.
