India produces some of the world’s most attractive textiles
that contribute to making lives in India and elsewhere colourful and
comfortable-- whether it be the clothes one wears or the cloth-based
furnishings in one’s dwellings. Few realize the oppressive conditions in which
textile printing workers in India toil to make the lives of billions of diverse
people across the world happy and content. Machines and human beings together contribute
to those lovely printed textiles. The contribution of human beings in the process
is rarely in the limelight. Toiling within dingy factories, these human beings gradually
become dehumanized and mechanical in their actions in their sheer desperation
to earn a regular income to keep themselves afloat above the abject line of hunger
and poverty. They become machines not out of choice but more from a lack of choice.
Film director Rahul Jain’s honest perspective is not focussed
on the machines that manufacture and print the textiles but more on the
faceless tens of thousands of workers, exploited and dehumanized to work like
machines for extended work hours, deprived of basic rights of hygiene, medical
safety, statutory limitations of working hours and legal age and, of course,
fair compensation for their time and toil. The film Machines underscores the no-win situation of migrant workers within
India caught between poverty and survival, in the clutches of heartless
contractors and factory owners, who spin profits for themselves sitting in contrasting
distant cosy comfort.
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| Cinematography ( Rodrigo Villanueva) picked up two important international awards |
Machines has won several accolades worldwide. Apart from winning the Golden Eye award at
the Zurich Film Festival in 2017 for the Best International Documentary Film,
it picked up the cinematography award at the Sundance film festival, the Silver
Gateway award at the Mumbai film festival, the best cinematography award of the
International Documentary Association and three awards/prizes at the Thessaloniki
documentary festival. What is it that makes Machines tick?
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| Diegetic sound recorded and mixed by the Indo-German crew is laudable |
Machines could
have been made in diverse ways. Mr
Jain could have opted to make a film
contrasting machines and human beings with music matching the visuals on the
lines of the Dutch maestro Bert Haanstra’s 11-minute Oscar-winning wordless sublime
film Glass (1958) on the Dutch glass
factories. Jain’s film consciously does not use music—his attempt was not to
capture the beauty, but the sweat and grime of the workers much in contrast
with the workers in Europe. Machines could
have been made without words to mirror the French director Louis Malle’s Humain, Trop Humain (Human, all too
human) (1974), which is roughly the same length as Machines. That French film looked at the Citroen automobile
factories in France and compared the human workers with the machines on the
assembly line without words spoken except for brief pitches of the sales staff
selling the cars. There are
commonalities between Jain’s and Malle’s film: same length, human workers who appear
and work like machines, and no music. The big difference in Machines compared to the two European
filmmakers is that the punch of the Indian film comes from the honest spoken
lines of the workers captured by the camera replacing the silence of the
European works. Malle probably thought that he conveyed a lot by choosing as
the title of his film to be same as Nietzche’s last book which appeared to
revise all his earlier written works. But little did Malle realize that all filmgoers
need not be as well read as he was to make the bigger connection beyond what
was obvious within the film’s visuals and sounds of the factory.
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| Spoken words matter in the film |
Words when spoken in Machines
sock you on the jaw. The workers have fled their villages because incomes from
crops are undependable compared to grimy, sleep-deprived, and low-paid work that
in sharp contrast can be depended on as steady income. It is
steady as long as you don’t upset the apple cart by protesting the raw deal meted
out by the contractors and the factory owners.
The few spoken words are stronger than the visuals. The workers
state they have never seen the factory’s owners—but the owners watch them on
closed circuit TV in comfortable offices.
The workers can’t afford to buy cigarettes and instead ingest the
cheaper semi-dry mix of raw tobacco and slaked lime locally called khaini while the factory owner
ironically justifies the low wages as being more than double of what it was 10
years before, especially when workers were comparatively more committed to their
work than today, casting a blind eye to the rising costs of living. (Khaini is proven to be injurious to
health as much as it is to work with chemicals and dyes without adequate physical
protection.) Equally disturbing is the logic of a teenage boy (it is illegal
for children to work in factories in India) who claims that working at his age
would develop him into a superior and sharper worker when he grows up compared
to others who didn’t have his experience. Or of another boy who reaches the gates of the
factory each day and wishes soon after entering it that he could run out of the
factory from another gate but chooses not to. More disturbing are the
statements of a worker that any potential unionist seeking better compensation
and hygienic conditions would be knocked off, while fearfully looking over his
shoulder if someone heard him make that statement.
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| A factory worker reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel |
The critical decision that goes in the favour of Machines is that the spoken words are
not preceded by questions. Questions don’t
matter. Those have to be imagined. When the workers do ask inconvenient questions
of the filmmakers, the answers too are not heard. The film as the finished product is the
answer. The brief silence before the end
credits is loud and punchy.
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| After hard labour, a brief nap in the factory |
The crucial bit beyond making of the film was revealed by the
young talented director—the film having won all the global awards is yet to be
widely seen within India because it is awaiting a Censor Certificate from the
Government. Few can deal with
truth, fewer with injustice. Economic growth for those who matter is the mantra
of the day. If the film is indeed seen widely, the question asked by the workers
at the end of the film would be answered. Nietzsche could be smiling in his
grave.
P.S. Director Rahul Jain,
who grew up near a family owned small textile mill in India and studied in the US will soon be teaching at a prominent US University and hopefully continue to make hard hitting films. Terrence
Malick used to teach at MIT. Both wear similar hats.
