Tamil writers showcased
"OUR LIFE today is the realisation of long-term dreams of great visionaries like Jawaharlal Nehru and we have to ask ourselves what our dreams are ..." said Jayakanthan in his evocative inaugural speech at the film festival (Words and Worlds), a golden jubilee programme of the Sahitya Akademi.
Spread over three days, (August 4-6), the festival showcased eight films produced by the Sahitya Akademi on some of the great novelists and poets of the 20th century from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka, the earliest being Subramanya Bharati.
Even as all the films shared a common frame in their selection of material and resources, what distinguished one from the other was the structural organisation and the chosen mode of narrative.
The film on Bharathi by Soudhamini opens with a rolling title giving essential information on the poet. It progresses to frame the rest of the film into a `critique' by Sivathambi, one of the finest literary analysts of our times, on the text and the context of Bharathi's art in a discourse mode, interspersed with and layered by visuals of practitioners of performing arts. The film reveals the process of repossession of the subject and a representation which at once evokes a longing and pride in the viewer about the writer.
All the other films detail the creative aspects of the writers through voice-overs and interviews with contemporaries. Whether it be the exquisitely poetic text of Sachidhanandan that accompanies the film on Nalapat Balamaniamma or the text on O. V. Vijayan's writings which almost matches the rigour of the word of Vijayan or the text on Ananthamurthy which reveals the same minimal yet dense quality of the author's art, all of them remain mere texts as the films lack an aesthetic cohesive.
Lack of visuals
U. R. Anantamurthy comes through as sensual and deeply reflective as his writings, through his conversations in the film on him by Krishna Masadi. But the filmmaker's ambition to pack `everything' into the film through word and not supporting it with credible visuals, gives the film an incomplete look. An extraordinary experience of conversing with poet Gopalakrishna Adiga reaches the viewer as the director Girish Karnad works on the questions like an architect. But the viewer is plucked and thrown off suddenly to a landscape shot accompanying a comment. The film on Adiga together with the one on Ananthamurthy reads like an impressive document/treatise on the 20th century Kannada socio-cultural milieu reflected through a literary history. It is understandable that the filmmakers have to work with many limitations. Ravi Subramaniam, in his film on Indira Parthasarathy, who is also a playwright, goes in for an extremely poor quality stock footage of his enacted plays which could have been framed more imaginatively to overcome the drawback; within his own structure he had employed the drawing of a portrait of the author as a device and it would have required just an extension of the same imagination.
The film on Vijayan works with the motif of travel in a credible manner. The camera fondly lingers on Vijayan's still shots without invading their privacy. By the sheer economy in the selection of one of the seminal texts of Asokamitran and connecting the author's return to the milieu of that work director Amshan Kumar does a commendable job. But he also clutters the canvas with too many statements which hang rather loosely.
Precious
Asokamitran in a close-up, poring over his type-writer, Balamani Amma's manuscript, Vijayan's pen travelling on paper captured in real time and Bharathi's manuscript sensuously brimming in the whole frame are some of the endearing moments for a viewer, especially if one also happens to be a reader of these writers. Saa. Kandasamy's interview with Jayakanthan in the film on JK is a precious section; but the film at best remains rather a simplistic documentation on JK. In these `films' there is a transference of a thought, analysis, critique of a director through an artistic medium, cinema. Therefore does it not demand an idiom of their own, even more in the interest of validating their reverence to their subject?
Poet Sachidanandan's (secretary of Sahitya Akademi) address on the activities of the Akademi which left one wondering how even information could be wrapped and unravelled with such poetry came as a reassurance to voice this question.
However, in our times the word has revealed its hegemonic stance towards theatre and film through different modes, i.e., indifference, rejection and sometimes a patronising attitude. Perhaps the very decision of the Akademi to make/commission films on writers is already a big step to break the pattern.
PRASANNA RAMASWAMY
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