Film Description

In 1967, Louis Malle was commissioned by France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make a series of films about India. Having planned only a five-week visit, Malle was at once so enraptured and so appalled by the country that he returned several times over the next 12 months -- the year of the Beatles and the Maharishi, of Ravi Shankar, of sitars in the Hit Parade and the opening of the hippie trail to Kathmandu -- accompanied only by a cameraman and sound engineer. Malle’s M.O., “no plans, no script, no lighting equipment, no distribution arrangements of any kind,” dovetailed with his desire to merely watch and absorb -- mindful of the limitations of his alien perspective (“Westerners with cameras; foreigners twice over”) -- the transcendent beauty and quotidian horrors of the nation V.S. Naipaul would later call “a wounded civilization.” The result, broadcast on French television in 1969, was Phantom India, an epic portrait of a terribly impoverished, grossly overpopulated country, bisected by religion and caste and still reeling from 200 years of British imperial stewardship. tuated halfway between complex political treatise and sunstruck fever dream, Malle’s documentary stands as an enduring attempt to comprehend a complex, possibly incomprehensible nation.