Social aesthetics and an unreliable narrator: engaging with homelessness in Cities of Sleep

How can documentary film overcome ‘engagement at a distance' to perceptively express urban experience? In this article, I examine modes of sensory mode of spectatorial engagement in Cities of Sleep (Dir: Shaunak Sen, 2015) to foreground the place of the body and lived experience in portraying homelessness in Delhi. Drawing upon the concept of social aesthetics that recognises the perception of culturally patterned responses produced in socio-cultural environments as a form of knowledge about the world, I make two arguments. A corporeal focus on the sensuous body conveys urbanisms translated into effect, sensation, and behaviour that invite bodily connections with the documentary's traditional outsiders and victims. Next, by revealing individual negotiations with subjectivity, the film dismantles the notion of unified on-screen subjectivities to challenge audience expectations of a stable self in documentary representation. Instead, subjectivities are shown to respond to social experience, and everyday encounters, revealing a terrain of power relations experienced corporeally and emotionally. Political meaning, therefore, I contend derives not so much from the verifiable value of evidence or documentary transparency but from the act of feeling, sensing and perceiving which attempts to collapse our distance from a represented subject and world ‘out there’.