Louis Malle’s Phantom India is one among many literary and filmic references that drives Moyra Davey’s 2011 feature Les Goddesses. She’s recalling the vérité approach to photography—the risks and rewards that are only achieved by foregoing the regulated context of the studio for the unconstrained social landscape of “the real.” Malle recorded 30 hours of footage on his trip to India, in which he encountered creative epiphanies and cultural reckonings, while also being asked by locals to stop recording them. And what is more real than the Western gaze on a laboring, postcolonial subject? This first episode offers glances of Muslim Indians, Catholic Indians, and Communist postal workers, while advancing a distinct theme of distrust between those on both ends of the camera’s lens. We hear Malle’s disoriented narrations as he discusses how his cultural understandings were shifted in the face of realizing his place simply as that of tourist with a curious eye. Later in the episode, the filmmaker’s European perspective turns back on itself when he visits with several expat hippies who left their Western origins for India in search of an alternative lifestyle and vague notions of freedom—only to face challenging cultural barriers and disparities in quality of life. This attitude, characteristic to the 1960s and ’70s, is a motif addressed more specifically by Davey in her 2019 film i confess, which will conclude her MoMA series on October 10. –Nicolas Linnert
L'Inde fantôme: épisode 1- La caméra impossible (Phantom India: Episode 1 – The Impossible Camera). 1969. France/India. Directed by Louis Malle. 35mm. In French; English subtitles. 52 min.