Documentary as Situated Inquiry: Research Methodology towards Audio-visual Art

14:30 hrs IST, 5th, 6th & 7th November, 2025 | Online

This course explores the evolving relationship between documentary practice and the social sciences, proposing the filmic process itself as a mode of inquiry. The documentary practitioner enters the world like an ethnographer, observing, participating, interpreting, but with a medium that feels and thinks through sound, rhythm, and duration. Every gesture of filming or editing becomes a hypothesis about how reality can be experienced and what kinds of knowledge emerge when perception is both embodied and mediated. With reference to standard aspects of field research
methodologies from social sciences within the networks of information – evocation – testimony – evidence – comparison – analysis – particular – general – proposition – rhetoric, the course would indicate their overlap and crucial differences in various practices of documentary cinema.
Cinema here would be posited to be perceived as experiential discourse: a way of thinking in time rather than about time, where the senses and the intellect operate together. Observation, testimony, and mapping, methods that once belonged to sociology or anthropology, are reactivated within the audio-visual as sensorial reasoning. The filmmaker’s stance, the editor’s choices, and even the camera’s mechanical behaviour are part of this field of knowledge, shaping what can be seen or felt.
One important aspect in the course is the recognition of self-reflexivity and the breaking of the fourth wall as methodological tools. The filmmaker’s awareness of their own limits, the subjectivity of the editing process, and the agency of technological instruments become essential cinematic entities to think and work with reveals the layered encounter between observer and observed. Research, in this sense, includes the study of how knowledge is produced, not only what it posits as evidence of its claim.
The course also situates documentary within the expanded field of artistic research, where images and sounds are not illustrations of prior theory but vehicles for questioning themselves. Audiovisual notes, fragments, and artifacts are treated as situated knowledge: partial, affective, and relational. By engaging with such materials, participants learn to transform the act of filming into a critical dialogue between observation and imagination, precision and vulnerability.
The course invites practitioners to treat the documentary related art practice not as an outcome of research but as research in its own right, a reflective, self-aware discourse in which the filmmaker, the apparatus, and the world co-author knowledge, embedded in particularised experience and situated-ness.

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)