Output details

Algorithms

Algorithms is a feature documentary focusing on blind and visually-impaired youths and their blind mentor and coach in India. The research aims of this practice-based output were: 1) to develop ethnographic film practice capable of representing its unusual protagonists sensitively, without sensationalising them or perpetuating otherness; and 2) to create a new ‘creative-critical’ filmic narrative combining fine art expressive possibilities with audio-visual techniques from documentary practice. For example, the expressive rather than illustrative aesthetic places responsibility to construct and interpret meaning on the audience, rather than relying on narration (i.e. voice-over or expert-interviews). This is supported by cinematographic techniques: hand-held camera movements, long takes, extreme close-ups (of faces and fingers) and high-contrast black-and-white images. Intended for big-screen theatre viewing, these techniques combine with intense exchanges between the protagonists to create an immersive audience experience, countering the detached ‘looking on’ typical of documentary. Algorithms is the first feature documentary on blind chess and its significance for blind and visually impaired people, especially in India. Through ethnographic immersion in the lifeworld of the blind chess community, Algorithms reveals affinities between the experience of blindness and the tactile and cognitive game of chess. Following the reflexive tradition of Direct Cinema filmmakers (e.g. Jean Rouch), the danger of Orientalism inherent in the relationship between Western able-bodied filmmaker and disabled Indian Other is consciously undermined. The visual anthropological exploration of blindness as a form of alterity becomes a cultural critique of ‘ocular-centric’ society, subverted in the by-line of the film: “four moves in, we are all blind”. In the year since its first screening (November 2012), Algorithms was screened at fourteen international film festivals and has won an audience award in the UK, received a Special Mention in Africa and won a Best Film award in South Asia.

Algorithms is an international feature documentary that required detailed planning, the skilful management of multiple relationships, and the execution of creative and technical skills. The three-year shoot generated a considerable body of original material (260 hours of footage) on a community to which access is not easily gained. The lengthy period of shooting and immersion in the blind chess community, followed by sixteen months of editing, produced a multi-layered feature documentary that has made possible the presentation of critical insights into a marginalised community, as well as critical reflections of mainstream ‘ocular-centric’ society.