Film
The director of the critically-acclaimed documentary film Machines talks about what happened behind-the-camera during his time filming on location at a textile factory in Gujarat.
There’s a longish shot in Rahul Jain’s documentary Machines that features a boy of about 12 or 13. He’s operating a machine in a textile factory, like one of many in the state of Gujarat. It might be late at night, but it’s hard to be sure.
The unnamed workers in this factory seem to live in a state of perpetual wakefulness that is intertwined with bone-crushing exhaustion — their environment has its own interpretation of time that has little to do with the world outside. The boy peers into the camera with subdued curiosity, eyes shutting every few seconds, hand veering dangerously close to the belt of the machine. A mishap could make him unemployable for the rest of his life. The camera pointed at his face costs more than he’d make working at this factory for the next two decades.
That shot lasts about two minutes in the film; in reality, Jain and his cinematographer Rodrigo Trejo Villaneuva rolled the camera for 37 continuous minutes. “I know there’s certainly an ethical problem in doing this,” admits Jain, 26, in one of several phone conversations from Valencia, California, where he has been studying filmmaking at CalArts since 2011. “But as artists, we were curious to try and understand the tired, exhausted body and mind. So I guess we took that license, from thin air, knowing we weren’t going to abuse it.”
Machines, a 75-minute look at the lives of immigrant workers in a Gujarat textile factory, treads extremely sensitive territory with great maturity and finesse. It has been made by a young debutant who comes from a diametrically opposite background.
Jain, who grew up in Delhi and was later educated in the United States, belongs to a wealthy business family. While away from home, in a military academy in Indiana that he attended during his high school years, he read Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, which he says affected his thinking most at a young age. “I read it back-to-back, in one sitting, twice over a span of 20 hours,” he says. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The way it described socio-economic ladders in our country and made all these connections, very simple ones that my brain had refused to accept, was unbelievable to me.”
Many of the workers depicted in Machines are from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, and Odisha. These are young men — most of whom are slender and suffering from malnutrition — working 12-hour shifts to earn roughly Rs 7,000 per month. They barely have time to eat and rest, living in cramped quarters far away from their families, perpetually in debt thanks to the loans they’ve taken to come here.
These are the cogs that keep the engine of growth ticking along, the ones who do all the labour and reap none of the benefits of the very thing they’re making, often with their bare hands. In the factory shown, workers routinely handle toxic material without any safety equipment; none are provided in this factory, and the documentary alludes to the assumption that this is the rule, not the exception, across the country.
“You don’t need to have studied quantum mechanics to realise that the guy standing behind the camera is from a different class, caste, and upbringing,” he says. “We were there asking all these naïve questions about their lives. I don’t think they’ve seen anyone in their class being represented like this.”
Machines was earlier titled ‘Machines Don’t Go On Strike’, which was shortened because Jain felt it was “saying too much”. It melds with the aesthetic of the film, which also avoids interviews, voice-overs, and background music. Jain keeps himself out of its gaze even on occasions where it seems impossible; one such instance is when a number of off-shift workers mill around the camera and the filmmaker, some of them aggressively questioning his motives.
“I almost wanted to put my voice in this to show there was a human being there,” he says, “but just like in life what you don't see and hear is just as important as what you do — it's called subtext. But you're not hearing anything in this scene because I'd rather not be the fulcrum for how the viewer experiences the film.”
Instead, it is more visual in its approach, often resembling a beautifully shot and colour-graded series of tableaux, accompanied by painstakingly detailed sound design. This technical finesse envelops a film that’s deeply observant and subtly political. Villaneuva’s camera glides smoothly across the factory floor, in dimly lit conditions, providing the viewer with a clinical gaze of the workers putting their bodies on the line. Elsewhere, in a tube light-fitted, air-conditioned office, it shows us the factory owner explaining why paying the workers more money for shorter hours is not only bad business, but it will also lead to them spending more money on alcohol and tobacco.
Three catalysts led to the beginning of the project. In 2013, Jain was in film school and needed to make a film, or he feared he’d be thrown out. That year, in April, a five-storey commercial building called Rana Plaza situated on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed killing 1,134 people in what would come to be known as the deadliest structural failure in modern human history. The building housed a number of garment factories. At the same time, he was also flipping through Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado’s Workers, a collection of photographs depicting working men and women across the world, including India.
He started out by getting access to the factory through “different connections”, convincing its owners that his objective was to show how it employs people. “They were very happy,” he says. “I guess that’s the narrative they wanted to perpetuate.”
When they began filming in June 2013, Jain found the experience overwhelming. He started filming anything that caught his attention, including steam coming out of the ground, trying to capture his immediate environment.
“I think all art is perspective,” he says. “Films are framing; they're framed devices of how we see the world. We don't see the world in a cinematic frame — it's not horizontal or geometric. Films give you lines and a framework, so you can practice a kind of creativity that is kinda loose and push people to imagine.”
He continues: “And this can come from anything. It can come from watching how they bathe inside a factory, communally; watching their faces when they collect their salary. I think every scene has the potential to describe the entire universe of the place.”
Machines took three years to make, of which they only shot a total of six months. Much of the remainder was spent in the editing room, whittling down more than 100 hours of footage to a little over an hour, for which Jain took a year off film school.
Today, the film has travelled to more than 85 festivals across the world and has scooped up a handful of awards at the likes of Sundance (for cinematography), Zurich, and Thessaloniki. It screened for the first time in India at the 19th Mumbai Film Festival last October, eventually winning the Silver Gateway award under the India Gold section. At the Q&A of one of the screenings, Jain said, “You make a film like this because you’ve been thinking about things like this your whole life.”
A five-star review of Machines in The Guardian by Simran Hans calls it “explicitly political” and “a direct call for unionisation”; nevertheless, Jain feels that filmmakers who think their film is a form of activism are “deluding themselves”.
“I went in the factory thinking I have these questions, came out thinking there are even more questions,” he says, a note of agitation in his voice. “It’s made me more cynical — this consciousness — and I don’t know what resolve I have. I grew up thinking you can’t make any changes. When I travel to other parts of the world, people have agency. They feel their vote counts. Why do I come from a culture where you can’t do anything on an individual level?”
His next film deals with the issue of water stress in Delhi. Jain, who spent some time researching for this film during a recent visit home, is clear that he, for the time being, is more comfortable making documentaries than he is doing fiction. “I’m rather young to be making such a grand statement — making fiction, that is,” he says. “I feel like it’s my time to learn from real life at the moment. I need to see how it works from my inexperienced and naïve perspective."
Much of his work is guided by a famous question asked by the Renaissance-era French philosopher Michel de Montaigne: Que sais-je?, or ‘What do I know?’. “When I read this, I could empathise with it very strongly,” he says. “Since I was young, I’ve always been helplessly curious. So, instead of wondering where this comes from, I just keep asking myself that question.”
‘Machines’ is slated to have a streaming release in April 2018.