Paromita Vohra: Time travels and speculative non-fictions

Illustration/Ravi Jadhav

Last week I re-watched a classic Canadian documentary from 1957, called City of Gold, currently featured on one of my favourite websites, Aeon. Directed by Wolf Koenig and Colin Low, the film is about a town called Dawson which came into being during the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s and is narrated by a former resident, historian Pierre Berton. The film pioneered the use of still photography in documentary and juxtaposes dramatic, panoramic photos of the gold rush with contemporary footage of Dawson as a considerably more placid small town in the 1950s.

With swift strokes and colourful details, the documentary quickly brings alive a sense of the stampede and the urgency of adventure - amateurs travelling thousands of miles from home, undergoing spectacular hardship, hunger, illness, building boats joined with gum and sometimes their own underwear, digging through many feet of permafrost in the hope of hitting pay dirt - a ribbon of gold. Some of the stories are told through the memories of the older residents of the town who came as young men and women in the rush, including the narrator's father, as well as memories of the narrator's own childhood, spent playing in the abandoned "dolls houses" - remnants of a glittering, excessive, rare and debonair time of whisky, women and saloons and magical mystery tales of rags to riches and rags again, of women whose business was pleasure, reclining in bathtubs full of wine. Of course, nowhere does the film mention the devastating effect of this adventuring on the area's indigenous population. That's often how history-telling rolls.

Watching the film in 2018 is a kind of double vintage experience: we are watching one past look at another past. This makes it a meditation on Time itself. The layered pasts remind us that perhaps there is no such thing as 'the past'. All pasts are simply other people's presents.

As if conscious of this, the film too seeks a sense of the contemporary experience. Closing up on a crowd shot, the camera pans across individual faces, speculating on what they might be feeling. Of the thousands who came to look for gold, we are told only a few found it, but intriguingly, some, despite the struggle to get there, never bothered to look for it at all. They felt perhaps only a strange "elation" says the narrator. Something about travelling to that moment in time, to another place, "had stirred their imaginations" and that was enough.

It reminded me not a little of the other place they call City of Gold, where we live, Bombay. There are many stories of those who came here claiming to chase those mythical unicorns - sudden discovery, dazzling stardom, impossible riches - but who seem to have pursued these perfunctorily. Could it be sometimes those legendary goals are simply a proxy for other human dreams and desires to which we give no credence - to be alone, or free, to wander a bit, to partake of a crowd of human striving, not as its centre, but happy at its edge?

Perhaps all such travels are really time travels towards the romance of a present where the future seems unknown and unpredictable. Perhaps many such lives are really speculative non-fictions, a gold rush in which we strive to stir our imaginations and prospect for that mysterious thing: ourselves.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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