BFI

This is one of a series of travelogue films produced by the World Window company and shot in 3-strip Technicolor by the British cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Like sound, colour had been present in the cinema from its earliest days through more primitive means such as hand painting, to more complicated methods using dyes, lenses and filters. But it was not until the 1930s that Technicolor was able to provide a lifelike, cost effective system on a large scale, which satisfied audiences and exhibitors alike.

Colour is an important element of the travelogue film, which aims to offer audiences a realistic window into another world. However, whilst colour may add to the sense of realism, dealing with the heavy, cumbersome 3-strip Technicolor camera on location must have made it difficult to capture natural occurrences on film. Some of the scenes in A Road in India seem a little staged, perhaps understandably in the tracking shots that required the manoeuvring of a camera the size and weight of a piano.

Ultimately, it is not the artificiality of the film's production that is troubling (documentary makers have often used artifice), but the attitude of its filmmakers. For all its exploration of a different culture, there is little effort to promote understanding and identification between subject and audience. While finding beauty and interest on the road in India, it simultaneously dismisses it as a primitive and 'other' world.

Jez Stewart

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