The Tate Modern has new displays on cities - looking at them in terms of space, density, speed and so on with statistics, photographs and films to document the dynamics of some of the world's largest cities.
What fascinated me enough to go back again was Paromita Vohra's Q2P.
The second time around, I watched bits of it with a contrarian friend (I wish he would read this blog, but he's busy scrabbling for controversy and virtual fights elsewhere in cyberspace and none of that here!) who got completely peeved with what he seemed to consider the upper caste gaze of the filmmaker and her condescending jibes at the sort of Regular Roadside Romeo figures (in caps to mark my utmost respect for this ubiquitious constituent of life on an Indian street) who were being constantly interviewed through the film.
The filmmaker is out exploring the marginalising of women in India's public spaces and the reductivist view of her (seen as an object, rather than as a real human being with bodily functions, for instance) in popular culture and in people's attitudes and then watching this translate onto the larger canvas of public planning and city growth that ignores women.
The filmmaker chooses the gendered spaces of women's toilets looking at their practicalities and realities to reflect on the space women occupy in public. She looks at where they are situated, how small they are, how much they cost to use, who else occupies them and so on. She interviews members of the Sulabh group who set up a network of public toilets, asking them questions that relate to women's use. She interviews men. The interviews with the men are what friend objected to - most interviewees produced sniggers or looks of disbelief from the audience as they offered views which suggested they could not view women as needing to perform the same functions as them or having real needs.
Friend thought this was pointless - almost as if she was using the unknown man on the street as a fall guy and poking fun at his views? Perhaps because you could argue that these men were part of a larger culture and could not be isolated from it and then ridiculed in these rarified spaces of art gallery/sensitive film audience?
Seemed to me though like she was using irony to demonstrate how institutionalised some beliefs were. Does she not have the license to do that, to make her larger point more effective?
Watch the clip, but better still watch the entire film if you can.
