How ‘Everything Is Cinema’ questions the voyeuristic gaze of cinema

Filmmaker Don Palathara discusses the politics of ‘Everything Is Cinema’, which was screened under the Cinema Regained section of the recently-concluded International Film Festival Rotterdam 2021

The camera’s gaze in Don Palathara’s Everything Is Cinema is an outsider’s: Chris, a Malayali filmmaker who sets out to film a documentary on Kolkata and its people, a continuation to French filmmaker Louis Malle’s 1969 documentary Calcutta. Chris is as much an outsider to the city, though he is very much an Indian in spirit, as Malle was when he made a trip to India. It is this outsider’s gaze, the very idea of nationalism: how much these chest-beating nationalists are foreign to their own land and culture, that Everything Is Cinema seems to question. Such a contemplation, even if not implied, can be drawn from its opening sequence. But the documentary, as Chris says, is hardly about Kolkata but a “lockdown memoir” of a filmmaker struggling to find a subject to satisfy his creative thirst. Chris (voiced by Don Palathara) travels to Kolkata to film the documentary along with his moderately successful actor-wife Anita (Sherin Catherine). A few months into filming, the nation-wide lockdown is imposed and the couple is rather trapped with each other where their worlds begin to collide, resulting in a tug-of-war situation. Chris’ project comes to a halt, thanks to the lockdown, and he instead begins to film his wife secretly. “She is unreal and plastic,” observes Chris from behind the viewfinder, as if the lockdown gave him the opportunity to notice her for the first time in years. We don’t see Chris, but Anita, or rather, her projection. A struggling filmmaker who wants to “save cinema from capitalism”, Chris is arrogant, narcissistic, cynical and jealous about his wife, reflective of how he chooses to paint Anita for the viewers. At one point in the 70-minute film, Chris turns the camera away into a black screen for “bearing with her face for so long”. Which is why, if anything, Everything Is Cinema is perhaps the most honest portrayal of the twin words: toxic masculinity and male arrogance. And there has never been a more recent film that has explored into the mind of a “man”, in an ontological fashion where we truly get a deep dive into the narrator’s headspace.