Skip to main content

First Short Film: The Earth Beneath His Feet

This is a short-film which explores issues concerning the earth, ecology, environment, and our difficult relationship with them.
Short film on ecology

The Plot: The protagonist, an archetype of modern man, has to face a few hard facts.He had achieved much more than what death could kill. But he feared ‘the six feet of earth’ to where he, like any other mortal, must return. He had a reason to fear. He tried everything at death -he denied… he was angry… he argued… he bargained… and finally the inevitable happened.
Watch the full film here The Earth Beneath His Feet (15.5 minutes)

The Earth Beneath His Feet (2008) is screened and discussed at Voices from the Waters International Film Festival. It is also catalogued by Film Division India.

The Thought Process

2008, the issue of farmers’ suicide was on the peek in India. I wanted to make a film on that. I began reading. I got the statistics and stories. My mind began to wander around the question of ‘why’. Why did farmers, who managed their life for time immemorial by themselves began ending their life all on a sudden? The reason was clear; their farms are not producing any more. They are under debt. Then I hit upon the data that farmers’ suicide is more on areas where farmers had huge success during the green revolution. Green revolution of course was needed to unfetter India out of the great famines. India had to produce more. But today those farms are not producing anymore. High-end Fertilisers and pesticides that they had used have completely sucked out the ability of the soil to produce anymore. The farmers began to use genetically modified seeds, as a result they had to depend every year on business people to get seeds for sowing, and they were expensive. We as a humanity and as a scientific community had messed up the soil; had done irreversible harm to the earth. I had number of newspaper articles and statistics to back it up. 

The Big Idea: Focus of my film shifted to the state of humanity after humans had done irreversible harm to the earth. This film is about the difficult relationship that humans have with the earth. My starting question was, ‘we have harmed the earth; but one day we have to return back to the earth; how will the earth receive us back?’ The film is about the struggle of a man, someone who was directly instrumental for the green revolution, who in some sense represents the whole humanity, to return back to the earth, because he knows he has harmed the earth. How will the earth receive him back? He is on the run.

Theme: The film deals with dying; but who is dying? All see the scientist dying. That is the overarching main text and narrative. As we look deeper, it is about the death of the earth/soil, it is about the death of farmers, and it is about the death of humanity.

Those paying attention will discover that through the dialogues delivered by the protagonist the narrative goes through the five stages of dying by Elisabeth Kubler Rose: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Be it the case of dying earth, dying farmers, or dying humanity, we are going through these stages. Some are in the stage of denial, some are angry, some are bargaining, some are depressed, some are have accepted the end.

There are many ironical facts to note. The film begins with the scientist boasting of him/humanity beginning their journey as a crawling tiny worm and went on to achieve everything; the film ends with the scientist/humanity reduced to a crawling worm. On prescription shown on the table as the scientist is drinking water, he is dying of a cancer caused by contamination of water and earth by pesticides; ironically he was the one who was inventing and promoting such pesticides. It is a film about all of us and the earth.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Visual Analysis: SEMIOTICS

 Visual analysis is a systematic and scientific approach to examining visual materials that goes far beyond casual observation.  In our visually saturated world, images have become a inescapable universal language that shapes our perceptions, attitudes, and experiences. From the artworks adorning gallery walls to the advertisements lining city streets, visuals communicate narratives, evoke emotions, and reflect sociocultural ideologies. However, the process of seeing and interpreting visuals is not as spontaneous or natural as we often assume. As John Berger notably stated, "seeing is an active decision," suggesting that the process of interpreting visuals is neither spontaneous nor natural, but rather requires conscious effort and critical thinking. The way we perceive and interpret visual content is heavily influenced by habits, conventions, and our individual perspectives.  Serious visual analyses requires conscious effort and critical analysis to unravel the laye...

Visual Analysis: INTRODUCTION

 Visual analysis is a systematic and scientific examination of visual materials that explores their communicative meaning, aesthetic qualities, and functional impact. As Susan Sontag noted, humans tend to linger in "mere images of the truth," making it crucial to develop a deeper understanding of visual interpretation. Study the PDF below (for academic use only) Introduction to Visual Analysis PDF The Nature of Seeing: The process of seeing is not as spontaneous or natural as commonly believed. According to John Berger, our way of seeing art has historically been influenced by privileged minorities to maintain social and economic dominance. Visual perception requires conscious effort and is heavily influenced by habits and conventions. The visual faculty consumes approximately two-third of a person’s used energy, highlighting its significance in human experience. The Framework of Visual Analysis: Visual analysis could be traced back to communication models, for example, Har...

Sigmund Freud on Creative Writing and Day-Dreaming

 Freud in his essay, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, explores the psychological origins of artistic creativity and the impact of literature on readers. He draws parallels between the imaginative activity of creative writers and the day-dreaming of ordinary people. It is a discussion about the relationship between creative art and unconscious phantasy. In it, Freud talks about the role of daydreaming and fantasy in human behaviour, and how creative writers are able to express their daydreams without shame or self-reproach. Read the essay below (for academic use only) Creative Writers and Day Dreaming PDF Freud argues that the child's play and the adult's phantasies/daydreams share a common element—the desire to alter an unsatisfactory reality and fulfil unfulfilled wishes. The creative writer is like a successful daydreamer who is able to transform their private fantasies into works that provide pleasure to the audience. Freud suggests that the writer's choice of subject...

2025 Must Create Its Own Art

 Tonight’s art becomes inadequate
and useless when the sun rises in
the morning. The mistake lies not in creating art for tonight, but in assuming tonight’s answers will serve tomorrow’s questions. Louise Bourgeois, a French American artist, reflected, “art is a guaranty of sanity;” but that guarantee must be renewed with each dawn, each cultural shift, and
each evolution of human consciousness. If some art endures through generations, it
is only because of its capacity to speak, its ability to demand fresh interpretations that test and challenge the new. To guarantee sanity in the coming year, 2025 must create
its own art. Why create art? Why watch art? Why read literature? True art, in the words of Sunil P Ilayidam, shakes that which is rigid and unchangeable. Art serves as humanity’s persistent earthquake, destabilising comfortable certainties and creating space
for new ways of seeing, thinking, and being
in the world. An artist’s duty is to reflect the times, and we see this in...

The Brown Sisters: A Four-Decade Portrait of Time and Sisterhood

 Nicholas Nixon's "The Brown Sisters" stands as one of photography's most compelling longitudinal portrait studies, documenting four decades of sisterhood through annual black-and-white photographs taken from 1975 to 2014. Using an 8×10 inch view camera, Nixon captured his wife Bebe and her three sisters—Heather, Mimi, and Laurie Brown—in the same order each year, creating a remarkable visual meditation on time, aging, and familial bonds. For the full set of images see the PDF below (for academic use only) Forty Portraits in Forty Years PDF What began as a spontaneous family photograph in 1975 evolved into a profound artistic documentation of human transformation. The project's strength lies in its methodological consistency: the sisters maintain their positions, with the sequence remaining unchanged throughout the series. This rigid framework paradoxically highlights the subtle changes that occur year by year, creating a powerful commentary on the passage of time...

Early History of Cinema

 The late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the birth and rapid evolution of cinema as a new artistic and technological medium. Lets us examine the key innovations, pioneers, and early milestones that shaped the beginnings of cinema, from its precursors in motion photography to the establishment of narrative filmmaking techniques. Study the PDF below (for academic use only) History of Cinema PDF The foundations of cinema can be traced to experiments in capturing and displaying motion through photography. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking "The Horse in Motion" used multiple cameras to decompose the movement of a galloping horse into a sequence of still images. This technique presaged the fundamental principle of cinema - the illusion of motion created by rapidly displaying a series of static images. A pivotal moment came in 1888 with Louis Le Prince's "Roundhay Garden Scene." At just 2.11 seconds long, it is recognised by the Guinness Book of...

A Critical Visual Analysis of Jan Banning's ‘Bureaucratics’

 Jan Banning's photographic series Bureaucratics offers a remarkable anthropological study of civil servants across eight countries, revealing how power, hierarchy, and cultural identity manifest in governmental spaces. Through meticulously composed photographs taken from a citizen's perspective, Banning unveils the theatre of bureaucracy the most immediate visual impact comes from Banning's consistent methodology: each photograph is taken from the same height and distance, positioning the viewer in the role of a citizen approaching the bureaucrat's desk. The bureaucrats are photographed in their natural habitat – their offices – which become stages where power dynamics and cultural values are performed daily. Make visual analysis of  Bureaucratics  by Jan Banning given below. Bureaucratics by Jan Banning PDF  (for academic use only) In examining the spatial arrangements, a clear pattern emerges: the desk serves as both barrier and symbol of authority. In many image...