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Most people have a basic awareness that India has a huge film creation community known as Bollywood (pronounced: bollywood). Most of the films generated in Bollywood are a fusion between melodrama and musical, very similar to the popular film, Moulin Rouge.
However, in India, Bollywood films are not the only game in town when it comes to popular mass entertainment. A folk entertainment known as Jatra arose in the Orissa State of India nearly a score of centuries ago. It was revived in 1875, in Orissa, when playwright Jagan Mohan Lal directed his Jatra play, Babaji, which used a fusion of melodrama and music to tell culturally impacting stories. It slowly grew in popularity in the rural areas, where many of the actors came from poor and uneducated backgrounds. In the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s of the twentieth century, it became more and more popular as Jatra troupes began to take their shows on the road, incorporating new musical instruments, adapting new audio equipment, and bringing in lighting and effects. As time has passed, the troupes have grown to over one hundred professional groups, and as many as three hundred smaller groups. So powerful has this form of entertainment become that, with the Oriya Film Industry slowly failing, many of the directors and actors were attracted to bring their talents to Jatra. Unlike film, however, Jatra is not officially recognized by the government, despite its long history.
Resembling a cross between a traveling carnival and a Guns & Roses tour, Jatra troupes take their entire outdoor based stage and pavilions with them everywhere they go. Each troupe hires a party of laborers that travels with them to each town they visit in order to set up the theater fronts, hang the rigging, and erect the stages--sometimes being given as little as a single day to do so. Meanwhile, giant lit billboards and signs showcase the upcoming events to passers-by, while announcers in megaphone equipped cars tell folks about the upcoming plays verbally. Each night, when the performers take the multi-tiered stages, fully equipped with a float-like mechanized center stage, they are surrounded by a rainbow of colored lights and musicians. While hand-held props are used, elaborate sets are not.
Throughout this film, director Kapilas Bhuyan shows the history of the Oriya theater and the Jatra art form that evolved from it. In so doing, he looks at the rise of its popularity, the actual work of the different troupes, the struggles actors and troupe owners now have over salaries, sick leave, and retirement benefits, and the struggles between the troupes and the government for official recognition.
Content
The content of this film was very good and has a good pacing, overall. There was a good mix of people interviewed, from troupe owners, to current Jatra actors, to retired Jatra actors, to fans of Jatra. The chronicling from Jatra’s origins to the current power struggle as unions rise up for both the actors and the troupe owners is both interestingly unique and spookily familiar.
Despite the great content, there is a narrative problem in the film which is kind of an audio issue, but relates to content because it impairs the flow of the film. That problem is the lack of a narrator. There are many times where narration is used, but, rather than hearing a narrator, we only see text scrolling across the bottom of the screen. This might be because the Indian narration track was turned off for American subtitled version. If so, this is not a good idea. Hearing a narrator prevents a documentary from feeling as though we are reading a strange book with moving pictures, even if we don’t understand what the narrator is saying. There is simply something about hearing the cadence of a voice that we know is being translated that makes a documentary a documentary. Without it, it feels odd and unnatural.
Again, this does not mean that English narration needs to be recorded, rather it means that the original Indian narration needs to be left in with the subtitles.
(The director recently explained to me that he wanted to make the film more like a video book, which is why he opted not to use narration. I completely understand this intent and applaud Mr. Bhuyan's creativity, but still feel that most Western audiences, at least, would find the film less embraceable because it changes up only one element of the classic documentary format. When you change only one element in a classic format, a piece tends to feel incomplete.)
There is another subtitle issue, but that can wait for the audio section.
Visual Look
The visual look of this piece was kind of a mixed bag. Recorded predominantly on a handheld Sony PD-175 (presumably, the foreign version of Sony’s PD-170), the visuals from the film looked pretty good, for the most part, especially during the colorful look at the spectacularly lit shows themselves. However, the documentary also made use of a number of shots that looked like they came from a lower quality camera which just didn’t look as clean or as professional. Additionally, there were a couple of scenes, especially later in the movie, where it looked like the footage was over-exposed. (In reality, it was probably a shot that was too backlit to be used properly and was lightened in post, which made the footage useable but very low on contrast.)
One thing I really did like was the use of old Jatra masks to count off the different “acts” in this documentary. Masks were animated to move into frame cleanly and professionally, adding an additional mask to the composition for each additional “act”.
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