At the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea Russian figure skater Alina Zagitova, all of 15 years, stepped onto the ice to the tunes of ‘Black Swan’ just a quarter of an hour after her teammate Evgenia Medvedeva broke the women’s free skating world record. On the same day, after winning six of their last seven contests, Virat Kohli led India onto the field at SuperSport Park, Centurion, looking to seal the T20 series in the final leg of India’s tour of South Africa. In the same week, a Class 12 student from Madhya Pradesh, an MBA student and Engineering student in Hyderabad, and a Navi Mumbai MBBS student committed suicide due to academic pressure. Though they may sound poles apart, the three situations are irrevocably connected.
Conflicted narratives
Into the second hour of Abhay Kumar’s 2015 documentary, Placebo , a student kills himself. Up until this tragedy, Kumar had been committed to magnifying a culture by highlighting the cripplingly competitive academic environment at Delhi’s famous All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He spent months following four students from different backgrounds, capturing their mental landscape across sweaty hostel rooms and corridors. The suicide alters the campus mood. Furious students stage protests outside the apathetic dean’s house. At this point, the filmmaker is faced with a moral conflict – does he continue making a “film” about victims of a problematic culture, or does he let these problems become the film? Given the boy’s reservation-quota status, there is an opportunity to overhaul the narrative’s ambitions, pursue the broader politics of the system’s procedural drawbacks and turn a bleak social experiment into a real-life investigative thriller. By choosing not to, Kumar sticks to the observational rules of his artistic medium — of reflecting, and not necessarily affecting, life. Consequentially, Placebo remains an evocative and slick documentary, rather than being an accidental one.
Underdog stories
A little more accidental is the form of Death of a Gentleman ( DOAG ), a 2015 documentary made by sports journalists Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins. What starts as a purist ode to the modern decline of test cricket quickly turns into a desperate underdog account that investigates one-sided administrative reforms orchestrated by the villains heading the three biggest cricket boards in the world: ECB (England), CA (Australia) and the most notorious, BCCI (India). The writers cannot escape the inevitability of the two narratives being interlinked. They risk their careers while piecing together the oppressive revenue-sharing model that has resulted in the seven other boards fighting for scraps. The three-board monopoly drives South Africa’s homegrown players to secure Kolpak deals — that is, lucrative English county contracts at the cost of international careers.
Unlike Placebo , the makers allow DOAG to assume the direction of their conscience. By personally probing the perpetrators, they virtually script this film through their experiences. In pursuit of employing their reportage as a serious campaign, they equip it with the aura of an exposé — which is why it is perhaps a lesser “documentary” than Placebo , but a stronger work of expression. But DOAG lacks the luck — the cinematic serendipity — that a story pivoting on the weapon of revelation (“the biggest scandal in sports”) needs. It misses the theatrical validation of a whistleblower.
Moral dilemmas
In this sense, Bryan Fogel’s Icarus (2017) is the luckiest film of all time. Icarus is the most flawed documentary of the three – a weakness that is, in this day and age, ironically its greatest strength. Contrary to the rulebook, the film occurs because of — and not in spite of — its maker. It begins as a personal experiment. Fogel sets about trying to prove how easy it is to get away with doping as an amateur cyclist. To execute this “professionally,” he contacts Russian scientist Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov who, despite heading his country’s anti-doping laboratory, knows exactly how to cheat the system. Though Fogel suspects more, he sticks to his business – until, towards the end of 2015, Fogel, too, like Kumar, Kimber and Collins, finds himself having to choose between being an artist and a human being.
Formalising his worst fears, the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) publishes a report alleging elaborate state-sponsored doping, and urges the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban Russia from the 2016 Rio Games. At this point, with the ominous Putin-led system seeking a scapegoat, and with former conspirators mysteriously dying, Fogel recognises the threat to Rodchenkov’s life.
Fogel instinctively chooses to feed the famine-stricken child rather than simply clicking his award-winning photograph. He empathises with his subject, brings him to America, houses him and enables the eccentric Russian’s whistleblowing testimony to the New York Times . In doing so, Fogel forsakes — transcends, even – the identity of his medium. While films are routinely made to reflect life, it’s life that starts reflecting in this documentary. The two men develop a bond that drives the importance — rather than competence — of this project. The sudden “humanity” of Rodchenkov is convenient, but Fogel frames his subject as a lovable, brave, George Orwell-inspired renegade who sacrificed his nationality to save sport and live under America’s witness protection program.
Scandalous consequences
On one hand, by merely existing, Icarus triggered the ban of 111 Russian athletes, including the entire athletics and weightlifting teams, for the Rio Summer Games. It also enabled the ban of the “idea” of Russia from the 2018 Winter Games — no officials, flags or anthems, with only 168 out of 500 athletes participating under the unambiguously titled OAR (Olympics Athletes from Russia) contingent.
On the other, one wonders if the punishment would be more severe — a blanket ban, perhaps — if Icarus weren’t hailed as a globally path-breaking documentary. It won several awards, including the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. I wonder if bestowing the recognition of craft on what is primarily a revolutionary and responsible piece of citizen vigilantism actually dilutes the potency of its real-world purpose. Does our awareness of them being designed as works of art – this includes Placebo, DOAG and Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning documentaries in context of their negligible long-term effect on authorities – actually colour our perceptions of their social relevance? Are they, by being well-constructed films, handicapped in their roles to service the societal debates their subjects deserve? After all, these aren’t just movies about civilization’s illnesses; they exist, for better or worse, as part of the cure too.
I wonder if there is an answer in the way we express our feelings about a particular scandal — we invariably invoke a film accompanied by adjectives judging the medium (“stunning,” “tense,” “coup”), rather than those judging the incident itself (“shocking,” “disgusting,” “criminal”). I wonder if there is an answer in the applause for Alina Zagitova, who broke a 15-minute-old world record and won the gold medal on that cold February evening – one of two celebrated by the “nationless” OAR team. Two days later, India clinched a historic limited-overs tour double by winning the third match in Cape Town; six of South Africa’s eleven T20 players had made their international debut in the last one year. Simultaneously thousands of aspiring doctors from different corners of India excitedly scrambled onto the AIIMS website to register for May’s annual entrance examination.
