Composing Reality: Structures of Mediation in Documentary Editing

Cinema Praxis Series
14:30 hrs IST, 8th & 9th November, 2025, 02 days

OVERVIEW:
This course approaches documentary editing as a way of composing the impressions of reality, towards emerging discourse and experience, through discovering within the images the rhythms and contradictions of the world itself. Every cut, pause, continuation, or rupture becomes a thought about: how life unfolds, how perception gathers meaning, and how emotion structures our sense of reality. The editor, both like a field researcher in the research field and the author shuffling the research notes at the writing desk, engages with the world’s textures and intervals, discerning patterns of relation between human gestures, landscapes, ideas and imaginings of about the life,
recoverable from the fragments.
Through the close study of selected sequences from major works of documentary cinema, the course explores how narrative and temporal structures emerge from lived situations rather than predetermined scripts. Editing is considered here as a mobile and transient form that translates the density of lived time into perceptual form, a dialogue between the intuitive and the constructed. At times the emphasis may reveal the cinematic moments when the human figure, the environment, and the machine may coexist in the same flow of narrative logic, but with different orders of sensorial affects, even within a same film.
Participants will examine how rhythm, duration, memory and imagination can create multimodal discourse beyond textual limits of narration, how visual and sonic continuities and divergences can potentially create blocks of experience with possibilities of their renewal. The course situates documentary editing within a wider field of artistic and philosophical inquiry: between realism and construction, empathy and detachment, observation and invention. Rather than isolating editing as a technical craft, the course will invite participants to conceive editing as a craft of thought, where the film’s structure becomes the articulation of its ethical and creative stance.
The aim would be to perceive editing not as the end phase of production, but as a way of arrival at grafted singularities (one decision at a time, and thick accumulation of a whole array of decisions to create the body of the film and to breath the life too), a charged negotiation between the materiality of images and the immaterial pulse of thought and experience, towards a unique sense of embedded, contextual knowledge, and being in the world.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE :
Early-stage filmmakers who already know basic editing operations.
Documentary practitioners seeking deeper reflective practice.
Film students, artists, researchers or visual anthropologists engaging with documentary film making.

FACULTY PROFILE:
An alumnus from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, Debkamal Ganguly is an independent filmmaker, researcher and teacher of cinematic arts. He has taught for 08 years (2012-2020) and designed curriculum in Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune,  in the departments of Film Editing, Film Direction and Screen Studies; and as a guest faculty in National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, Flame University, Pune, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar. Ganguly’s works have been published under special curator-ship from Lowave, Paris; his video art featured in the exhibition ‘Indian Highway’ and showcased in galleries of various cities of Europe and Asia. His films done in the capacity of editor, script-writer and sound designer have been shown in competitive sections of various international festivals and received recognition, including ‘Tiger Award for Shorts’ in Rotterdam (IFFR 2007). Ganguly has presented papers in various international and national seminars and conferences on various themes related to cinema, Deleuze studies, visual art, interfaces of art practices, translation studies, collective memory, Bengal studies, Media studies, pedagogy of cinema, film editing as a discipline, immersive sound etc including CARA-CILECT conference in Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg (2018), CILECT conference in VGIK, Moscow (2019), Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater (2019). He is a participant of an international project for artistic research involving BRICS countries, being the coordinator for India (2018).

CERTIFICATES:
Digital certificates of participation will be issued.

QUERIES:
For queries, if any, please write to: filminstitute@auroville.org.in
or call / message +91 9969879319 (whatsapp and telegram only)