The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist

[Dave Monroe]

Conversation
The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist

HOMI BHABHA: Welcome to the third and final History
and Literature public lecture for this year. We are
most grateful to have your full attention. We've had
wonderful audiences, very appreciative evenings, great
questions. I hope you will be true to form again this
evening.

Growing up as I did in Bombay, some miles south of the
gaudy and glitzy world of Bollywood, you may well
imagine that my relation to the topic of truth in
cinema is somewhat skewed, perhaps even a little bit
dubious.

Song and dance routines aside, Bombay was also the
home of a pioneering documentary film tradition,
rather like Errol Morris' non-fiction features,
committed to an invigorating aesthetic of social
inquiry. These documentarians distrusted the
information that was liberally disseminated in the
public sphere. They tirelessly sought an aesthetic
form in the film that initiated an interlocutory
relationship with the topics or themes of their films
and their audiences.

The investigative genre assumes a more unidirectional
search for truth. What I'm calling the interlocutory
form, however, reveals what appears to be true, only
when the subject, good, bad or indifferent, talks
back. And the viewer, like the director, is empowered
to read between the lines.

It gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce Errol
Morris in the company of Bombay's interlocutory
filmmakers, because he belongs to a public sphere of
cultural citizenship, in which the truth of historical
events, is not luminous. It emerges from the murky
shadows, the twilight terrain, from which we come to
learn what really happened or not, or what was truly
done or what was said to be done in truth....

http://www.errolmorris.com/content/lecture/theantipost.html

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