The poetics of a potato documentary that gets under the skin

A Season Outside (Amar Kanwar, 1998) starts with colour: 'at first I saw colours', says the voice-over, but only after we too have seen colours, saturated red and blue in close up, the texture of cloth as it ripples across bodies. Rows of legs shuffle slowly forward, some wrapped in sarongs, some in trousers, and then we are drawn into a white line painted on a road and two pairs of feet approaching each other. The feet butt up against each other, the legs brace and then back off. One by one more legs and feet jostle each other in ritual conflict across the white line. We search the line just as the voice in the text does: 'sometimes you search in a mythical line that is just twelve inches wide'. This paper started from a fascination with this opening sequence from A Season Outside, directed by Indian director, Amar Kanwar. The fascination came from the way the sequence awoke a sensory awareness of myself watching--a sensitivity to colour, texture, movement, gesture--an awareness that came initially from the movement of the cloth on the workers' bodies, but focused progressively on the line. It was not just the enigma of the line, the question of what it represented, but the materiality of the line that exerted a fascination on me--its texture, its width, its luminosity. By the time this attentiveness to the line shifted registers, clicked into grasping its significance as a historical entity--a border--and the fragments coalesced into the bodies of Indian and Pakistani workers passing huge bundles from one to the other across the border--the line was already saturated with an energetic significance that came from the fascination of viewing. This energetic saturation had nothing to with narrative meaning, or pinning it down as significant in a historical narrative, but was tied to the indeterminacy that allowed the image to stay up in the air and gave the space for engaging with it as an image, absorbing it on a material level.