Nocturnes, About Moths, is the Big-Screen Movie of the Year
Nocturnes
An Interview with Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan
In a year of maximalist epics like The Brutalist and Megalopolis, the most transformative big-screen experience to be had is the revelatory 83-minute documentary Nocturnes, about the study of moths in the Himalayan forests. To make their eye-and-ear opening cinematic gem, filmmakers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan spent nearly four years following the ecologist Mansi, who travels with Bicki, a guide from the indigenous Bugun community, to closely observe and study the activities of moths. On moonless nights, Mansi and Bicki lure thousands of moths to a lighted white sheet that looks like a makeshift movie screen. Their scientific work is contemplative, precise, and beautiful. Among the thousands of types of moths, they are mostly interested in the death’s-head hawkmoth, a variety that appeared famously in Silence of the Lambs.
Dutta and Srinivasan (working with cinematographer Satya Rai Nagpaul and editor Yaël Bitton) have created a cinematic symphony that moves in scale between breathtaking closeup views of the insects and vast landscapes where human activity takes a peripheral place in the scheme of natural existence. There is sparing use of music (scored by composer Nainita Desai); the soundtrack is orchestrated from the closely-recorded noises of the moths who, we learn, rely on flapping wings to warm their blood. The film does have something to say about the effect of global warming on the fragile ecosystem, but that is only addressed directly towards the end. Nocturnes is primarily a visceral and emotional experience, and an accomplished piece of filmmaking. Fittingly, the Metrograph premiere run of Nocturne will be accompanied by Dutta and Srinivasan’s selection of three mesmerizing films that were cinematic inspirations: Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House?
David Schwartz: I love the movie. I saw it the other day at the Metrograph, and I was so glad to see it on a big screen. There is a common idea that big blockbuster movies are the ones you have to see in a movie theater, but as I was watching your film, I kept thinking that the only way to really experience this immersive experience is in a theatrical setting. Which is a little paradoxical, because it’s about moths. How did your approach to filmmaking develop, along with your interest in the subject matter?
Anupama Srinivasan:
Yeah, that's a great question, and both Anirban and I are cinephiles. We grew up watching the best of world cinema in theaters on 35mm. So for us, that’s the real way to watch films. It’s been a strange and difficult transition to the smaller screen. We’ll watch on a big computer screen, if we have to watch at home. So our engagement with cinema has been through the big screen, even if it seems like an anachronism in today’s times. But we feel it’s too valuable an experience to give up on so soon. It’s just a matter of time that people will come in bigger numbers to theaters if you give them the right sort of experience. And so definitely, it was very thought out that we wanted to create an experience and a film that will work very well if seen on the big screen.
Anupama Srinivasan, co-director of Nocturnes
Let's talk about your chance encounter that led to the making of the film. How did you meet Mansi, and decide to make a movie about what she is doing?
Anirban Dutta:
Actually, before we met her, we were going through a very personal, internal crisis. It was this whole crisis of living in a big city like Delhi, where the quality of the air in the last decade has plummeted to such a level that in winter you can barely breathe. You are sitting in your rooms with heaters and with an air purifier. You can see a tree from your window, but you can't go and experience the tree, so you are completely cut off from nature. My son has asthma. For him, every winter was a nightmare. We had to get him nebulized again and again. So we were like, what the hell are we doing, and how are we getting so disconnected? Is there a way to get these children who are now completely addicted to devices, the phone and the computer, to get them back to nature, and get people like us to connect back to nature.
We were looking for an idea that would be peaceful, that would calm us down, and that would not add more entropy and dystopia to this world. That was the philosophy, that was an inner urge for both of us. It just happened that we were in the Himalayas, making a commissioned short film on snow leopards, when there was a chance encounter with Mansi. She described this work that she loves, and she told us that she puts up this big white screen, and puts on blue lights, and moths in the hundreds come and flock to the screen. It just seemed like an outdoor cinema, with the screen, and we thought there is a film there. We visited her in Arunachal Pradesh [mountain lands in Northeast India] and we were completely blown away by the experience, the visuals, the sound, the textures. It was a visceral experience. So we just decided that this is the film we wanted to make.
Anirban Dutta, co-director of Nocturnes
I like the fact that you don't explain in the beginning about the concerns you developed about climate change and how that affects different insect and animal populations. It’s not an issue film; you bring some of that in towards the end, but the film really does offer a visceral experience.
Anupama Srinivasan:
We didn't want to color the experience with something didactic. Of course there are issues but if you first fall in love with the forest and allow yourself the joy of watching those little creatures, and the little flutter, and the way the light falls on the wing…we wanted people to get into that zone of childlike curiosity and wonder. If you don't love nature, if you don't make that connection from within, you know, anything we say about how the world is going to collapse is not going to have an emotional impact. That was why we first focused on creating that experience and inviting you to enjoy that for its own sake. There are little clues throughout the film about temperature and climate, but nothing that will make you feel like this is just another climate change film
In terms of having a heightened experience, the sound is critical here. The sounds you recorded are amazing, and you use very little music. The soundtrack is really the sound of the moths. So how did you achieve that very rich soundtrack?
Anirban Dutta:
At the beginning of planning any film that we make, we think of images and sound at the same time. When we went for the first trip to see Mansi's work and heard her work, we knew that this would be a very special film where sound is going to be very important. So we meticulously planned for the sound, and we had a wonderful sound recordist, Sukanta Majumdar, on location. We used specialized microphones, whether it's clip microphones to record the scratching of the canvas by the small insect, or 5.1 surround microphones to give you the spatial dimension of the place, or the extremely focused, unidirectional microphone to get the flutter of the wings and then meticulously log them, maintain the archive and to translate that in the post.
We were also very sure that the sound of a bird which is recorded at say, 1000 meter altitude will not be used at 800 because the birds are very specific there, and bird call in spring will not be used in summer, because in summer, it might be a mating call. And similarly, we recorded a lot of transition sounds, like from night to morning or from evening to night. So all of that sound that you hear, or the frogs, you know, making that sound before the rain, everything is from location.
So you became as obsessive as Mansi.
Anupama Srinivasan:
While we kept the authenticity of the altitude and the seasons and so on, we also tried to see how we can use the sound to create a certain emotion. There’s this beautiful symphony of frogs that happens before the rain comes. How can we build that to create that sense of natural drama that unfolds before eyes? We even treated the music like a sound effect, so it only sort of emerges from under the natural sounds and then slowly expresses itself
A lot of your landscape shots are from very far away. You have these big, vast landscapes, and then you see maybe a vehicle or a person that is very small. Could you talk about your approach there?
Anirban Dutta:
Yeah, the whole film is about scale. This is exactly what Anu and I felt when you go to a vast forest, or stand in front of a mountain, you actually realize, as human beings, how small we are. It was very important to situate human beings as a part of the natural world, and not to make human beings big and omnipresent. So to situate the human beings, both in terms of the human voice that we have in the film and also the scale at which we show the human beings, where it was at the heart of the image design of the film.
Anupama Srinivasan
How do we visually translate our philosophical understanding of the world in which we do not want to privilege human beings? If we want to say human beings are part of nature. How do we find a cinematic expression for that? These kind of shots helped us do that. And also in terms of cutting away from the human action and staying with nature, seeing a cloud pass by the entire valley. Mansi and Bicki may be doing something else, but we are looking at that. It’s to see how we can focus the viewers attention on non-human elements, thereby implying that everybody is equally important. The forest is there, the moths are there, and the humans are there, and they're all part of the same thing, and they're all equally important.
When you hear Mansi talk about the amount of time that she is willing to spend studying these moths…I mean, she's willing to spend years, if it takes it to get certain measurements. I guess that leads to the question of just how much time you spent. Your film is very attentive to changes in weather. There's so many things that happen in the film that seem to have required a lot of waiting on your part.
Anirban Dutta:
The whole film took about five years. The primary filming happened in three and a half years. As we were filming, we also were editing. We had this wonderful editor based in Paris, Yaël Bitton, who worked with Anu to edit the film. So in a way, we were constantly kind of feeding from the editing into the process of filming, and the filming process was feeding to editing, so it was like osmosis.
You talked earlier about the metaphor of the screen representing movies. We expect moths to flock to light. But did you get an understanding of why they do that? They’re not doing that because they want to be in a movie.
Anirban Dutta:
Moths navigate using the moonlight. So when the scientists do their work, it's basically three days before the new moon and four days after the new moon. So this is the time when the nights are dark, completely dark, or there is very little luminance coming from the moonlight. So basically, the lights of the screen disorient them, and they feel they are navigating and moving towards the moon, and that's why they come and sit on the screen.
I am wondering if you can give some sense of the movies that were important to you and if there was a movie that had any kind of influence in what you were trying to do here.
Anupama Srinivasan:
I don't think there was any direct inspiration per se. But overall, our experience of film has been inspired by many filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abbas Kiarostami. We are both huge fans. In fact, we have curated three films at the Metrograph to show the cinematic inspirations. And one of them is [Kiarostami’s] Where Is The Friend's Home? Because that also takes a one-line story, and the whole film is an expansion of that. And we are very intrigued by that kind of cinematic treatment in which the whole point of it is actually the cinema of it and not the story, because it's just a one line story.
That's great. That makes so much sense to me, because that's the experience I had when I was watching it.
Anirban Dutta:
And also, just to add to Anu, we are very inspired by Satyajit Ray. Ray has been very important because I am from the same place, I speak the same language and both Ray and his cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, who beautifully filmed all his early work, including Pather Panchali–which we are curating at Metrograph–and how he shot nature, where nature was not shown just as a beauty. It was used to evoke something, and we are deeply influenced by that vision of Subrata Mitra when he shoots that grass field where the kids are running, and how the flowers fall, how the ripples of water move in the pond. You know, that kind of evoking nature, not for that dutiful nature shot, but something much more than that. And we are also curating Wong Kaw-wai for his love and use of textures. You can show very little, but evoke a lot.
The Death’s-head Hawkmoth in The Silence of the Lambs
Nocturnes, distributed by Grasshopper Film, opens on October 18 at Metrograph.