Bernd Lützeler

Somewhere in the dreary zones of Mumbai's film industry, stuck between star-cult, superstition and the daily gridlock, Camera Threat explores the ambivalent, and sometimes paranoid relationship that this film city has with the moving image itself. Seated on a casting couch, two actors are getting trapped in their impromptu conversations on the unwanted side effects of a world that no longer bothers to tell facts from fiction. An expanded multi-genre film within the constraints of the so-called Masala Formula popularly known from Indian cinema.

The streetscapes of contemporary Indian metros are largely dominated by products. The bazaar expands into all other parts of the city and claims a large percentage of the available public space. The vast majority of the local shops is lacking the facility of a shop window. Instead, their architecture can be described as a garage style, windowless, rectangular box, open to the front. Stepping into such a shop can be like entering a complete new world: Many of them are literally filled with products galore up to the ceiling. The product itself serves as the interior design. Every day hundreds of busses with thousands of shop owners and their family members come from the surrounding villages and small towns into the city. Especially during the rush hours the market gets overrun by an avalanche of customers who seem to enjoy their high-density shopping experience. Shopping galore. Products galore. Profits galore.

They gather here every day. They come from far and without purpose. They don't know each other and they won't come to know each other. They carry their gadgets to optimize the experience. They engage with the world through a small frame. They believe that this moment will remain unforgotten.

This experimental documentary circulates around interviews with four veterans who worked all their lives in analogue (=celluloid) film laboratories and animation studios in Mumbai, and who all lost their businesses and jobs around 2012–14, when the Hindi film industry went through a drastic shift to digital production. They reflect on the loss of their craftsmanship, but also on the philosophies of their handmade film practice versus readymade digital solutions. While the film drifts into various related and unrelated scenarios, shot on the streets of Mumbai, we learn about the art of living and working under precarious conditions in India and survival strategies in one of the most crowded and commercial cities in the world. Finally everything results in a futile collage of nostalgia and memories, mashed up with the absurd aesthetics of AI slop. An expanded multi-genre documentary within the constraints of the so-called Masala Formula, popularly known from Indian cinema.

“These things don’t happen by force,” says Observer A. “Or by one’s will,” adds Observer B. Fictitious Force is an exchange on the impossibility to share experiences, in black and white and grey.

Artefacts from the golden times of small gauge amateur film take centre stage: Ready-made film transitions from the 1970’s and 80’s, short, colourful patterns and animations for the ambitious hobby film maker to be intercut into their home movies. This project brings these forgotten pieces of film culture back to life and celebrates their opulent aesthetics in a stereoscopic film projection. It pumps, jumps, slides, and distorts the reference points of our languid brains. A trip!

As so often, also here it's rather about allusion than description. This also applies to the persons represented. Flat silhouettes of people. Their heads depicted in profile. Faces with no expression, formal gestures. In the background, a little bit of everyday life: The hard, square, stone architecture arises from ocher-colored, brownish, blackish mush of color or mud. A demonstration of the function of the central perspective. An idealized representation of a tropical paradise. Strangely, there's no absurdity in this.

If God came down to earth and try to earn a living in Bombay, most probably he would become successful as a voice over artiste, lending his voice to thousands of Hindi movies and even more documentaries and public service films in India.

Found footage: California in the 1950's and 60's. A young Indian couple enjoys their personal American dream come true in their home somewhere in the suburbs of San Francisco. In great detail they pose with their newly achieved wealth in front of their Super-8 camera. Just like postcards, they would send these film rolls to their joint families back in India. Around the same time, an American missionary couple visits the city of Calcutta to shoot a Christian propaganda film. The drastic reality with poverty and famine in the streets of the Indian metropolis fits perfectly into their wicked plan: To promote the faith in Jesus by showing the misery that pagan believers are doomed to suffer from.

It’s the year 2023. Unnoticed by the rest of the world, a small group of artists, enthusiasts and academics celebrate a 100 years of 16mm film. Meanwhile, the TV tube, the eponym for YouTube, but now incapable to receive even a single frame of moving image, has become a mere fetish for retro fans. Gone are the days when one could be lulled to sleep at night by the soothing white noise. But the echoes of neoliberal wisdom from the 80s and 90s will continue to reverberate in the ether forever...