What would the voice of God say, were his language understood?
What God actually says is not important. As we all know he is omniscient but that doesn’t mean we can understand him. Often in films, voiceovers are used in a godlike manner, but in fact they are spoken by voiceover narrators, not by God. So if God himself would come down to earth and work as a voiceover narrator, we might not even understand what he says. And since he is omniscient, he’s also aware that we don’t understand. And he also knows english although he might not make any use of it. So if he speaks in an alien language, maybe we should accept it and listen to the sound of his voice.
How did you collect the images and what did you expect to recreate with their dialogue?
Ever since I had come to Bombay, I wanted to capture the mad energy of this city onto film. So I combined two techniques: time-lapse and long-time-exposure. In a regular time-lapse the camera only exposes each frame for fractions a second, but keeping the shutter open throughout, allowed me to expose each frame for 2 minutes and therefore compress an entire day into 15 seconds of film. In the beginning there was just this technical idea, there was no script at all. Roaming around in the city slowly shaped the film: Some pieces of footage I found on the road, even my protagonist I found that way. But shooting the time-lapse footage became quite a challenge. Trying to place this cluster of camera, accessories, batteries and wires into a Bombay traffic jam for several hours became a hopeless undertaking. Whatever looked like a good spot to put a camera in the morning, would be overrun by traffic in the afternoon. On top of that, a lot of people in Bombay have the habit to object or even call the police when they see a camera. So I started hiding my camera in a bag, acting as if I’m just waiting for someone. Or I stayed in the most filthy hotels to hide my camera behind the curtain. Finally, after weeks alone out there in the crowds and the jams and the heat, I realized that I had become as paranoid as this city…
