ABSTRACT The Vikalp Film Festival of 2004 (Vikalp, meaning ‘alternative’ in Hindi) has been celebrated as a seminal event in Indian documentary history, an unprecedented, collective mobilization against censorship that also marked a distinct historical rupture in documentary film history in postcolonial India. In this article, I build on recent accounts of the festival by participants and scholars to explore (a) the nature of the interventions that ‘Vikalp’ sought to stage in the history of cinema censorship and (b) the shifts in political documentary film-making that it engendered vis-à vis histories of grassroots political activism in India, as well as emerging networked social movements globally. While Vikalp did not ultimately succeed in changing the colonial-era censorship regulations that continue to govern film exhibition in India, I argue that it changed the terms on which censorship debates had played out by reimagining the role that documentary film could play in protests. Enacting a shift from viewing individual films as ‘tools’ in political struggle, Vikalp focused on the affective encounter between documentary narratives and diverse new audiences in the new millennium. The documentary film screenings and festivals that Vikalp helped mobilize became one node for a documentary ‘counter public’ that called on a reimagining of the form and aesthetics of political documentary film-making, as well as new relationships between artistic practice and activism that continue to circulate across material and physical spaces of film production and circulation in contemporary India.

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还会有另一个Vikalp吗？印度的纪录片，审查历史和电影节公众

摘要2004年维卡普电影节（维卡普，在印地语中是“另类”的意思）被庆祝为印度纪录片史上的开创性事件，这是史无前例的，集体的反对审查的动员，也标志着后殖民时期印度纪录片电影史上的明显破裂。 。在本文中，我以参与者和学者最近对电影节的叙述为基础，探讨（a）“ Vikalp”试图在电影审查制度中进行的干预的性质，以及（b）政治纪录片电影的变化-使其与印度基层政治活动主义的历史以及全球新兴的网络化社会运动形成鲜明对比。尽管维卡普（Vikalp）最终未能成功地改变殖民地时期的审查制度，该制度继续控制着印度的电影放映，我认为，它通过重新想象纪录片在抗议活动中的作用，改变了审查制度辩论的用词。Vikalp采取了从将单个电影视为政治斗争中“工具”的转变，专注于纪录片叙事与新世纪不同受众之间的情感交融。维卡普（Vikalp）协助动员的纪录片放映和节庆活动成为纪录片“反公众”的一个节点，该纪录片呼吁重新想象政治纪录片制作的形式和美学，以及艺术实践和行动主义之间的新关系继续在当代印度电影生产和发行的物质和物理空间中流通。