“A Night of Knowing Nothing” on Mubi: Haunted Silence of Resistance

Young people dance, in the background a film is projected onto a screen. The images remain silent. The soft voiceover of a woman, dubbed L, lends an otherworldly feel to the scene, filmed in grainy black and white. With a longing voice, she reads (fictitious) letters to an absent lover, which are said to have been found at the state film and television school alongside newspaper clippings and other legacies. The lovers cannot be together, L’s Lover is of a higher caste.

“A Night of Knowing Nothing” starts small and intimate, before the film advances further into the social reality of India with every movement. A hand-painted banner towards the end summarizes the scattered parts that the young filmmaker Payal Kapadia condenses into a collage in her hypnotic debut: Love, Peace, Music, Strike, Resistance, People, Cinema, Loneliness.

Protests erupted at the Film and Television Institute of India in 2015 as part of resistance to the policies of the nationalist government of Narendra Modi. The occasion was the appointment of a right-wing conservative soap opera actor as dean. The government responded to the strikes with discrimination and violence.

Muslims and Dalits, as the “untouchables” at the bottom of the social hierarchy are known, lost their scholarships and were banned from libraries and dormitories, police officers are said to have threatened women with rape. In New Delhi, masked men stormed the university and beat students. The brutal attack can be seen in the images of a surveillance camera.

India’s turbulent present flows into the film

Kapadia, who was studying at film school at the time of shooting, weaves these events into the narrative in fragmentary ways – and without the roar and heated atmosphere that usually accompanies political protest. Instead, an almost eerie silence pervades the film.

The campus events narrated by L are juxtaposed with other violent incidents documented in the newspaper clippings found: an intercastic relationship that ended in an “honor killing”, lynchings, the murder of critical journalist Gauri Lankesch, the suicide of a student, who campaigned for the rights of the Dalits. Donald Trump’s recorded request for sexual assault is also among them.

(On Mubi)

Winner of the Cannes Documentary Award, A Night of Knowing Nothing is a marvel of a film. Kapadia lets political cinema go hand in hand with poetic trance film. Images of festivals, gatherings and protests line up with scenes from the almost deserted dormitory.

A feeling of loneliness hangs over the images, a cat roams around lonely, Godard’s “Out of breath” flickers on the screen of a laptop. 16mm images, Super 8 footage from family archives, cell phone videos, footage from a surveillance camera and scribbled drawings create a visual fabric. At first glance, the gritty images appear nostalgic – and that is precisely why they combine to form a picture of youthful revolts that transcends history.

“Our old car needs a new coat of paint. Let’s come together to paint it,” says a banner. At a nighttime gathering on a basketball court, the scene, bathed in pitch black, is only selectively illuminated by spotlights. Crickets chirp. Cinema, ever present in the interplay of darkness and light, is an ally in the fight for freedom.

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