To sit down and write about a film four weeks after the fact would feel, under normal circumstances, like a risky gambit. After all, memories fade and adulterate. Straightforward recollection — as if there can ever be such a thing — swerves, farther and farther from the facts of the matter. And what is left of one’s screenic encounter is a lopsided mixture, bands of real film ore squeezed amidst the gangue of mismemory.

The longer I wait, the less the act of recall has to do with what I saw and more about what I contrive to see, what I desire and value and what I elide, compress, refashion to suit a politics of my self and what it cares to comprehend. But these are not normal circumstances. A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) is compulsively embroiled in the dynamics of experience and the difficulty of processing — much less organizing — events being lived through or predicting how they might sediment across time.

If there is one thing that consistently stays with me as I think about the film, it is that the work is trying to make sense of rupture. Payal Kapadia is graphing, in the spur, the ekstases, movements and general strain of being young (with a conscience) amidst the wreckage of a dream — her Film and Television Institute, the medium of cinema and the idea of India. The lens, understandably, is at critical overwhelm. A well-made movie could not have survived this onslaught on an extradiegetic plane.

Before jumping into a closer read, I will say that something fascinating about my viewing was how, despite all its curation, there remains a fledgling hurt that runs through and gives soul to the whole project. This is to its advantage, especially in the moments when the students at the Institute talk of justice and resistance. I am moved by and feel an undercurrent of betrayal that suffuses them. For theirs is an iniquitous inheritance, now metastasizing, and the righteous rage with which they strive not to perpetuate the sickness is inspiring.

To plumb my recollections, three instances of Kapadia’s skill shine — choices and splices that strike me as particularly astute.

The first is the use of black and white. Immediately, it speaks to anachronism, an out-of-times-ness to the events being documented. They feel like a dream or straight out of history. The form links Kapadia to a genealogy of film as a historiographic operation. It also evokes the citational stress of realizing a continuing struggle. Inequality, which should have been, in the minds of those attaining a new level of political consciousness, be external to the reality of the twenty-first present.

But then, the dearth of color is also a protective mechanism, an exhaust valve for when the recording of traumatic incidents (still unresolved) gets, as it often does, over-intense. By stripping away one element — color — from the immensity of the pressures at hand, the film can begin to exist. Otherwise, it would risk disintegration, unable to stick so closely to ongoing precarities and injustices. Monochrome allows for the story to coalesce, at arm's length. Its grainy intimacy also evokes the bitter, loving, alienation that cleaves to the bodies on tape.

The second is the ease with which film traverses scales. From the careful, rustic presentations of a college campus and the soft-spoken, epistolary riddles of caste and cowardice therein, to the shifting landscape of sanctioned incompetence, censorship and policing on a national scale. There is an easy slippage between the particulars of the idyll and the heavy waters of a larger movement. And I think this is a strength of the film, the way it refuses a drastic break between levels. In this decision, it shows the simultaneity of multiple registers of conflict. The micro that props up the macro, the everyday acts of unrequitment and punishment that enable the perpetuance of structures against liberation on a grand scale.

The third is the motif of bodies in rhythmic motion. This excitation of matter and muscle recurs at the film’s beginning and end, as exuberant dance. But it also dots the body of the work, and becomes a source of great anxiety when the refrain shifts from ecstasy to violent assault — when vigilantes storm student spaces, attacking those who refuse to fall into step with Hindutva ideologies. The fragility of the body and its availability to being, in turns, fluid and uninhibited, or corralled and disciplined, becomes one of the throughlines of the film. It forces us to confront the material impacts of policy, and the necessary risk of speaking, that is assembling, against the auspices of power.

But it is the choice to end a film with a dance that confuses me. For the last half hour, Kapadia’s work has been revealing the terrifying machinations of a state out to get its citizens of conscience. Then, it shifts back to students swaying once more. And I think this is a problem of transcription, or the immediacy of events being lived through meeting the archival logics of a longue durée one is always already worrying about. It is where the film flags, in my opinion — where uncertainty meets activist optimism, requiring us to manufacture hope against the grain of accumulating catastrophe. This is definitely my distanced cynicism speaking. And yet, it is worth reckoning with the other film that ended without a closing dance. It also makes me wonder about two other facets that continue to linger. One is the question of language and the decision to use this or that tongue to narrate the tale. In a nation regionalized along linguistic lines, it feels like an unanswered question. The politics of language, and the attempts at hegemonizing Hindi, make stark the need to address why we speak the way we do — who speaks and how, and whose sounds remain illegible. The film, for me, never seems intentional enough in this deployment.

And two, I find, is the need for a more sustained reflection on caste. Framed initially, as a story around twin impossibilizations, of exo-amory (and the corollary exogamy), and then, of protest against the state, I wish there had been more time spent on reflexively interrogating the camera itself. The perspective of the filmmakers, of the savarna gaze, which is so often, so easily normalized in Indian cinema, must be fervently interrogated and dismantled. An engagement with a memoriography and historiography (or historiophoty, after Hayden White) is incomplete without this crucial work of destabilizing self-exposure, specifically by oppressors of my sort.

But then, as I let my month of interference mold a distinctly personal transmission of what this film attempts, I am trying, all the while, to stay true to an idea embedded in the piece itself. This is the counter-archival function of the work of art in an age of continuing (and growing) brutality. And it gestures at the need for the fragmented, subjective scatter — the found footages, the idiosyncratic, on-the-ground, crowd’s eye view.

These remnants are the partialities necessary to approach, in any ethically admissible manner, that impossible question, “What really happened?” Because you could ask a state mouthpiece and a student activist and one would speak of sedition and the other of state-supported supremacy. And one would be bellicose, while the other would be afraid. And it speaks to Agha Shahid Ali’s “your history gets in the way of my memory”, for Kapadia and Co. are interested in constructing a bricolage, a mismemory against the narrativizations of the Indian nation-state.

This happened. (Mis)remember now, because otherwise, we will not only forget but detest the brave ones. And we will lose the spirit of young people who gave their lives to a cause. Against the tides of injustice that feel inescapable. A growing wave that sweeps so much of the world today.