At the Film and Television Instititute of India, training to be an editor, I learnt the rules of storytelling first of all. The Hollywood textbooks were full of that sort of thing. Matching action across cuts, making dialogue sequences flow seamlessly, establishing space and time on the screen. We studied chases, comic scenes and songs, breaking them down to individual shots which had been joined together by an editor to create an illusory whole. We were given material to practice with, and understood how simple it looked but how much patience and dexterity this joining-shots-to-tell-a-story thing was going to demand of us.

I found the actual process of editing completely engrossing and a lot of fun. Working at cutting tables with tape splicers, and winding tables which could draw blood from a carelessly placed finger. There were video machines with flashing red timecodes, knobs to turn and buttons to press at exactly the right millisecond. We learnt to meticulously label and store every little fragment of film. And the calculations. How to overlap the sound of one shot onto the picture of another, and then how many frames to remove at the other end so that the entire reel remained in sync. It turned out that I did possess that most crucial of abilities – to sit in the same chair for hours on end and watch the same thing over and over again, worrying about minute details.

That was as far as mechanical technique took us, but things got seriously interesting only when we went beyond it. We read the theories of the Russian masters, and they explained something fundamental about what we were doing. Eisenstein wrote about montage as a collision of two images which created a third meaning. Pudovkin spoke of building image upon image to create an impact which was larger than the content of any one shot. Kuleshov found that he could move an audience to laughter or tears using a single shot of the same blank-faced actor, simply by changing the image that followed it each time. If a smiling child followed, the audience imagined the actor was showing love and if a plate of soup followed, they felt it was hunger. These ideas were not about the mere telling of a story. They showed us that  the ‘meaning’ of a scene was something that could be constructed on the editing table. I felt that they spoke of the essential nature of my work. Cinema was art and editing was a crucial aspect of it.

When I saw documentary films, I felt that the techniques they employed were among the most difficult, and the most desirable, for an editor to learn. Bert Hanstra’s Glass started out as an abstract visual composition, but then turned into a tribute to the tough labourers handling those delicate globules of molten colour in the glass factory. Chris Marker seemed to have the reverse approach. His La Jolie Mai was cinema verite – shooting on the streets of Paris, having conversations with real people about their lives – but it was a carefully crafted version of reality, which communicated the personal ideologies of the filmmaker. Basil Wright’s Night Mail used classically beautiful images and a poem to speak of the unlikeliest of subjects, the postal delivery system. These films were intensely artistic in their own ways, and they, too, told stories; but they were much more complicated than fiction. It was exciting, the way they used the editor’s tools. They often worked with abstract elements in a shot. Graphics, sounds, colours and lighting patterns created rhythms, sometimes making a sequence flow smooth and seamless but at other times disturbing and shocking. Much as I loved working with fiction stories and much as I hoped to become a successful feature film editor, it appeared as if documentary was where a real challenge lay.

Then, when I finished film school and began looking for work, I found myself in the middle of the most exciting time in the life of the Indian documentary. A change in technology had transformed the way films could be made and viewed. Through the 70s and 80s, filmmaking had been a costly activity, needing bulky equipment along with a crew trained to operate it. A director had to be familiar with several technical processes to cope with it all. In the late 90s, video brought about an immense change. Digital cameras became small enough to be carried in a knapsack, functioned with available light and had built-in microphones. Editing processes underwent an equally dramatic change, shifting from Steenbecks to Hi-Band video and then to computer-based systems. Costs came down and a film could be funded out of an NGO’s budget or a research grant. It became easier for independent filmmakers to experiment. Documentary ceased to be the preserve of Films’ Division and corporates; it began to be taken over by artists and activists.

Many of my friends who wanted to make documentaries found the means to do so, and I was happy to join them. Side by side with editing TV serials and fiction features, I became involved with hours upon hours of images dealing with subjects as diverse as sweatshops in the slums of Bombay, the Indian feminist movement, health workers in Delhi’s bastis, gay and transgender activists in Bangalore, municipal schools in rural Maharashtra and the plague scare in Surat. In the past, when people used precious film negative, they had to plan each shot carefully, making sure that they recorded only what was essential. Now, a whole hour of tape only cost a few hundred rupees and it was possible to keep the camera rolling continuously. The director could concentrate on the immediate moment of shooting and save for the editing room decisions about how to construct those images into a film. We embarked on a process of discovery, exploring new methods to work with a new medium.

It caused me much chagrin in the early days. Having read a detailed written plan for a documentary, I found that the director intended it only as a take-off point and the actual material filmed hardly resembled it at all. It was Surabhi Sharma’s film, Jari Mari – Of Cloth and Other Stories. That title came only after we finished editing – the original proposal was for a documentary centered on the lives of four women. Having finished protesting, I could see, of course, that the director’s abandoning of her script made things more exciting for me. I’d be able to construct the film from scratch, giving it whatever shape and meaning I would by my editing choices. It was, I felt, the art of cinema as I had imagined it at film school.

The process that Surabhi and I followed remains one of my best experiences ever. Our material was far in excess of what we could fit into the computer’s disk, so we viewed it all on tape at first. I asked her to begin by identifying the portions she thought were most useful for the film. Every morning, she would come with lists of timecodes which guided me to the sections of tape she wanted me to look at. We would capture a few hours of material into the computer and work with it, trying out various possibilities, often going back to the source material to search for more images or interviews. Having built one sequence, we kept that and deleted the remaining material from the disk, then captured a fresh few hours to start work on another bit. After some weeks, we had a number of different sequences ready, which we began weaving into an overall structure for the film. We’d shift scenes around to create different flows, write down new ideas every day, then argue over them, trying out the ones we both agreed with, only to be back with our pens and papers the next morning. Eventually, enough fell into place for us to show a rough version to friends and get new opinions. Then more readjusting, then the fine cutting – using the most evocative images and sounds, eliminating, explicating and shifting things about until it all locked into place. At the end of two months, out of 30 hours of shooting material, we had a 75-minute film.

For every documentary I’ve edited subsequently, I’ve ended up using versions of this same working method, and I know that other editors have evolved similar ways for themselves.Technology has improved further and made some things easier. Disk space is no longer an issue, so it’s possible to have all the shots at hand all the time. Computers have become faster, and the picture resolution better. However, the actual editing process has only got more complicated, because the amount of material generated while shooting has kept increasing.

The most I’ve ever worked with is 80 hours, for Paromita Vohra’s Un-Limited Girls. For that film again, the process was fairly structured. There was a written script to begin with, since the film was cast in an unusual form using a fictional narrator and an internet chat room as devices to link documentary sequences. Paromita started by shooting some of the documentary portions, and we edited them into a rough order before she went on to shoot the rest of the film. The script began to break down the day we started editing the first interview. Faced with a documentary situation, she had chosen the same option as everyone else: to record hours of tape. As we worked on those sequences, we realized that many of the earlier scripted connections between them would have to be changed, and entirely new ideas added. As more sequences were shot and edited in, the entire film’s structure had to be altered. It took us five months to arrive at a 95-minute film that satisfied her, me and the NGO which had commissioned the project. I’ve grown to like Un-Limited Girls a lot, and when I look at it now, I feel very pleased with some of its flourishes of editing; but immediately after it was finished, my main emotion was one of regret for all the possibilities discarded and the wonderful things left out.

I thought then I had dealt with an inordinately huge quantity of material, and I never let Paromita hear the end of it; but now I know other editors who have had to tackle over 200 hours. Working with such logistics gives rise to fundamental questions about representing the truth. If one is a filmmaker of any integrity, it’s obvious that one must remain faithful to the people and events that form a film’s subject. Yet, it isn’t possible to screen hundreds of hours of unedited images for an audience. Even if that were done, would such a screening end up displaying more of the truth than a two-hour version? I think I’ve arrived at a sort of answer for myself. Take, for instance, a long interview. The constantly running camera gives the director the luxury of letting a subject relax and to actually have a real conversation, which is an excellent thing. The trouble with conversations is that they ramble, especially if the speakers are having a good time. A question which has a two-line answer will elicit those lines, but most probably separated by a five-minute tangential description. If an editor is able to retain the relevant portions and remove the rambling, that isn’t misrepresentation. On the contrary, it becomes a process of distilling the actual essence of what the person means to say. This idea of arriving at a distilled truth is what guides me, whether I’m editing one interview or shuffling scenes to create the structure for a whole film.

The tricky part is to empathise enough with various characters and events to understand their essential nature; and then to empathise enough with the director to put the film together. That’s the reason why discussions and arguments take up more time than the actual cutting of shots when a documentary is being edited. The more complicated the theme of the film and the more material generated while shooting, the more tortuous the discussions. It helps if one is working with friends.

Un-Limited Girls was finished in 2002, and that’s the last time I worked on a documentary for which the director had a plan. In every other case over the last 15 years, the documentaries I’ve encountered have been scripted from scratch while editing, with only a fuzzy idea of overall theme in the director’s mind. I’m aware that this is a sweeping statement. There are a variety of films out there and this may, of course, be just me. At first, I felt excited and privileged to be able to participate so intensively in the making of a film, but that has changed of late. It gives creative freedom to directors to be able to shoot a lot and spend months afterwards coaxing meanings out of that material; but I’ve also come to the feeling that there’s a thin line between a belief in cinema verite and plain old laziness. It could be argued that a documentary is about real things, and it isn’t desirable, or even possible, to script how that reality will unfold before the camera. Yet, the truth is that all films are constructs. The basic decision to point a camera at one thing means that the director has chosen not to focus on the other, equally relevant realities surrounding that frame. A more direct process of choosing will take place while editing, anyway. Why not, then, begin choosing images consciously while shooting, or even earlier in the form of a script?

There are thoughtful filmmakers who work through such questions, but on the whole, I think this style of image gathering lets directors off the hook. It doesn’t demand much knowledge about the processes of filmmaking. When the camera rolls continuously, it’s usually left up to the cameraperson to decide which images to record. The director can get away with merely conducting interviews. S/he may point to something and ask for it to be shot, but needn’t bother with how it gets framed. It usually doesn’t matter, because there will be so many images at the end. Given enough time for trial and error, especially with an editor who doubles up as script consultant/writer, an hour or two of good material can always be extracted out of the piles of tapes.

I came to documentary films convinced that they were among the best expressions of cinematic art. Now, the way things are going, it seems to me that there’s little connection to any such thing. Documentary is being used for very worthwhile purposes. Activists are picking up cameras to document police brutality or caste atrocities; community groups use video as a means to empower their workers; powerful political films are being made on issues like the Gujarat anti-Muslim violence or the army excesses in Manipur. I’ve been a proud member of a community of film makers involved with such causes, not only helping to make documentaries but also to screen them for different audiences. Yet, as a practitioner of cinema, this much isn’t enough. I feel the need for a space where we’re concerned not only about the subjects of our films, but also about how we make them.

Nowadays I find that I gain much more satisfaction from my work on fiction feature films. There, new technologies have opened up avenues for experimentation with images and sounds. The multiplexes, with their constant demand for programming, have created possibilities for films with different themes outside the mainstream straitjacket. The discussions, debates and heartaches are no less intense, but it’s a space where I can concentrate on fine tuning my craft rather than subsuming it always for the sake of an issue. It’s a relief have a screenplay guiding my editing decisions and to be able to say something as basic as, “I won’t use that shot because it’s overexposed.” Not to mention the joy of visiting studios, mixing rooms and labs and interacting with a whole world of filmmaking outside the confines of one person’s home editing computer.

I’ve also begun to question the notion of authorship for a documentary. The term ‘filmmaker’ is used synonymously with ‘director’, while editing, camera and sound is deemed the work of technicians. There isn’t much money to be made out of a career in documentary, especially for editors who can never hope for a fee commensurate with the many months spent on a project. My work, then, comes out of a sense of commitment, to the causes the films are about as well as to the medium of documentary itself. Yet, when recognition comes to a film that I have lovingly crafted and made a part of my life, I seem to share in it only vicariously. It can be argued that such is the nature of an editor’s work and things are, in fact, worse in the world of fiction films. In that world, however, there is an infrastructure which recognizes the contribution of every crew member on a film. Resul Pookutty won an Oscar for the sound mixing of Slumdog Millionaire, but he has transformed a number of Indian documentaries with his sound design before that, without even the possibility of any similar reward.

I remain committed to documentary films, but I’m not sure how to keep working on them. Technology continues to change our lives, expanding some aspects and diminishing others. I can now edit off my laptop and email the result to the director in another city. That allowed me to work for two years on Deepa Dhanraj’s film The Advocate, side by side with other jobs that paid my bills. It was a great way to work on a project that I’m really proud and happy to have been part of, but I don’t know how many other films could work that way. We may all be in a state of transition. A lot of my friends, grappling with the same issues as I am, have arrived at solutions that, perhaps, exclude me. Some are learning to operate their own editing systems and I’m called in to work part time. That gives them more control, but it makes things less interesting for me. From my point of view, it seems as if the excitement has come and gone, and we’re in danger of being stuck in a rut. However we modify the editing process, I don’t see how anything truly new can come unless we’re willing to alter the ways in which we gather documentary images.