Bridging the Gap: Western Perspectives and the Indian Mystical Experience in G. Vignali and G. Prata’s Verso Benares and the Landscape of Indian Cinema
The relationship between Western filmmakers and the Indian mystical experience is a fascinating dialogue, one that has evolved significantly over the decades. In this conversation, the Italian documentary Verso Benares, directed by G. Vignali and G. Prata, stands as a powerful and unique entry. Released in 2022, the film offers a non-narrative, observational journey into the heart of Hinduism’s sacred city, providing a stark contrast to earlier cinematic and literary portrayals and offering a new model for cross-cultural engagement.
Unlike fictional narratives that follow a protagonist on a spiritual quest, Verso Benares is a visual poem. It doesn’t rely on dialogue, a central character, or a traditional plot. Instead, the directors’ camera becomes a silent observer, capturing the rituals, the rhythms, and the profound sense of devotion on the banks of the Ganges. This approach, rooted in a Western documentary tradition, allows the viewer to engage directly with the spiritual landscape. The film avoids explanation and interpretation, inviting the audience to feel the weight of the city’s history and witness its living faith firsthand.
The film’s contribution is best understood when placed within the broader context of both Indian and international cinema. Historically, Western films often depicted India through a lens of exoticism, using its spirituality as a backdrop for a foreign character’s self-discovery. This approach, while popular, often risked misrepresentation and simplified a complex culture. In contrast, Verso Benares removes the central Western character, shifting the focus entirely to the subject itself. It’s a respectful gesture of turning the gaze outward, not inward.
Similarly, within the rich landscape of Indian cinema, religious themes have a long and varied history. While many Indian films, particularly from the early mythological genre, aim to celebrate and explain religious tenets to a domestic audience, Verso Benares provides an external, contemplative perspective. It doesn’t seek to tell a religious story but rather to capture the essence of a place where religion is an inseparable part of daily life. The film acts as a bridge, allowing a global audience to witness the quiet power of devotion without the filters of an a-plot or a familiar character’s emotional journey.
Contemplative Cinema and the Ethics of Looking
What distinguishes Verso Benares most profoundly is its ethics of looking. In an age of fast editing and emotional manipulation, the film chooses stillness, silence, and duration. There is no attempt to dramatize the sacred or sentimentalize poverty. Instead, the camera holds — sometimes uncomfortably — allowing moments to unfold naturally, letting the ambient sound, the movement of water, the flicker of firelight speak without interference.
This method places the film in a lineage of contemplative cinema, alongside directors such as Robert Gardner, Ron Fricke, and Nicolas Philibert, who have also used cinema as a means of meditative observation. Yet Verso Benares offers something particular: the fusion of a European documentary sensibility with an Eastern metaphysical subject, executed with humility rather than assertion.
By removing the need for narrative scaffolding, the directors allow Varanasi to appear not as a set piece, but as a living organism — complex, layered, contradictory. The film’s structure mirrors the flow of the Ganges itself: meandering, cyclical, unhurried. This reflects a deeper philosophical truth about the sacred in Indian traditions — that it is not linear, but rhythmic, ever-present, interwoven with the mundane.
A New Cross-Cultural Grammar
Verso Benares offers a new grammar for intercultural cinema — one that does not rely on translation or explanation, but on experience and proximity. Rather than appropriating meaning, the film steps back and trusts that meaning will emerge on its own. It respects the unknowable, the ambiguous, the ineffable.
This approach contrasts with more familiar cross-cultural narratives where the East is filtered through the West’s personal growth. Here, the sacred is not a metaphor for the protagonist’s transformation — it is the protagonist. The city, the water, the rituals become the center of gravity.
In doing so, Verso Benares contributes to an important shift in global documentary practice: a move toward reciprocal attention, where the filmmaker is less a narrator and more a guest. And in a time of cultural oversaturation, when images are consumed faster than they can be absorbed, such an offering feels both radical and necessary.
Conclusion: Toward a Sacred Gaze
Verso Benares is not just a film about a holy city — it is an invitation to see differently. To look slowly, without demand. To let meaning arise in silence. In its refusal to interpret or editorialize, it becomes a spiritual experience in itself — a rare case where cinema doesn’t just depict the sacred, but participates in it.
In bridging the cultural gap without crossing into appropriation, the film honors both its subject and its audience. It is a model of cinematic humility, and a testament to the possibility that the most respectful form of storytelling may, sometimes, be silence.