Fragmentary Discourse on Nothingness is a 16mm Bengali language essay film. It is a philosophical exploration of the Buddhist philosophy of “nothingness” (shunyata). Nothingness is defined in Buddhist philosophy as the difference between the way things “appear to be” in contrast to the way they “actually are.” It means that all phenomena including the self are void of inherent existence; that they exist only by imputation and appear only in dependence on other phenomena.
The film was shot in Mahatma Gandhi’s last commune (ashram) in the village of Sewagram in central India where he lived from 1936 to his death in 1948; the three-thousand-year-old Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras; working class factories of Calcutta and, in the 4th-8th century CE Buddhist archaeological sites of Ajanta and Ellora in western India. It also incorporates rare home-movies and lost newsreels from India which were discarded in the flea markets of Bombay. The film sutures these diverse footages to construct a cinematic essay that explores the tension in the philosophy of Shunyata between what “appear to be” and what “actually are.”
