India Song

India Song, though "narrative" in relation to the other films in this course, remains a difficult text to parse. However, my general impression of the film is something of a literalization of the idea of films as "moving pictures." The actors were often arranged in positions that were "poses" above all else, and they held their positions for unnatural lengths of time.  Like the heavy, impossible Indian heat described by the narration, any actual movement that took place on the screen was laborious and often recursive. The lack of real movement in these precisely posed scenes made each one seem more like a photograph than a scene in a film (or, perhaps, tableaux vivants).
In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility," Benjamin writes that in film, the directive or meaning that would usually be provided by a picture's caption is instead invested in the sequence of the images. However,  in India Song, the sequence of the pictures provides very little contextual help; instead the viewer relies entirely on the non-diegetic dialogue for signification (which, for us, came in the form of captions), recalling Benjamin's notion that captions are compulsory for photographs. However, it also seemed to me that this narration often had little to do with the image itself, and I'm not quite sure what to make of this distance between the dialogue and the image. Maybe: something to do with the film's general refusal of direct or linear communication--actors and scenes repeatedly viewed through mirrors, the recursiveness of the images as well as of the music.