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Literary Review
CINEMA
A little premature?
AJIT DUARA
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While articles on Girish Kasaravalli are welcome, isn’t the filmmaker’s best yet to come?
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Culturing Realism: Reflections on Girish Kasaravalli’s Films; Edited by N. Manu Chakravarthy, NUDI Pustaka, Rs. 150.
Culturing Realism is a collection of articles on the outstanding Kannada film maker, Girish Kasaravalli. These are not commissioned pieces. They are critical reviews and interviews previously published, mainly in film journals. They have been put together rather neatly in this volume by N. Manu Chakravarthy, Professor of English at NMKRV College, Bangalore, with filmography, photographs and annotations nicely presented.
The reservation one has on the publication of this book is that it might be a little premature. Kasaravalli was born in 1950 and still has a couple of decades to go before he completes his filmography. Who knows?
More surprises
Given that first film he made at the age of 27, “Ghatashraddha” (1977), displayed the mind of a fully evolved auteur, provoking Satyajit Ray to remark that he couldn’t believe that a man of his age could come up with a film like that, a few more surprises are in order.
Since “Ghatashraddha”, Kasaravalli has made another 10 films, the best known being “Tabarana Kathe” (1987), “Thayi Saheba” (1997) and “Dweepa” (2002), but most critics generally agree that he has yet to surpass the singular intensity, clarity, purity, passion and beauty of his debut film.
“Ghatashraddha” is based on U.R. Ananthamurthy’s story and is about the crippling nature of Brahminical society, in particular the destructive impact of religious orthodoxy on the lives of women. Kasaravalli took a piece of literature and discovered the cinematic dimension hidden within its structure. Even the writer was astonished. He says: “Speaking personally, his first film based on my story ‘Ghatashraddha’ surprised me by the new dimension he brought to my story. He is original and deeply reflective. We do not just see his films; we are made to meditate on them.”
Not many film critics, you could enlarge this to academics in general, have the grace to retract their opinions once pronounced in print. But such was the impact of “Ghatashraddha” on critic T. G. Vaidyanathan, that in the piece included in this book, he apologises for his first reaction on seeing the film. He says: “In my own somewhat ambitious three-part critique in Deccan Herald....I probably went too far in suggesting that (this was) ‘a film of Brahmins, by Brahmins, for Brahmins’ without quite realising that this was its strength. I now feel that because Kasaravalli’s sensibility is so Brahminical that we feel the force of his indictment. It is to set the record straight, a reformer’s anguish rather than the iconoclast’s zeal and it was against the latter that my rather intemperate wrath was directed.” Revision in critical appreciation of a work is also the signature of a film that is now 30 years old and still poignantly relevant.
Critical of film criticism
One of the interesting things about this book is that the articles are not all hagiography. Also the editor, N. Manu Chakravarthy, is severely critical of film criticism, as he believes it is practised in India. He believes that there is an influential and powerful lobby that propagates Hindi cinema as ‘National cinema’ and cinema in other languages as ‘Regional cinema’ and thereby marginalises films in languages other than Hindi. Not only that, he suggests that these film theoreticians and critics have ulterior motives as the idea of a ‘National cinema’ sells better and furthers their (the critics) personal and professional interests. “Unfortunately,” he says, “such theoreticians seriously undermine the dedicated work of committed film makers who refuse to buckle under the pressures of the market.” Strong words. Tough position.
But the most delightful piece in this book is that of Girish Kasaravalli himself. In an interview with Rashmi Doraiswamy, he tells us about his alma mater, the FTII, and about how he went to this unique institution but never got a degree! Apparently, he had to submit a script as part of his final exam so he wrote a script called ‘Ritual of Excommunication’ in the kind of English he knew (not very good). Girish Karnad, who had just come back from Oxford, and Nabyendu Ghosh, an English Professor, rejected it. Kasaravalli offered to write it again, this time in Kannada. They refused. So, he says, he is an FTII-trained director, but not a degree holder. Fortunately, the script came in useful later. ‘Ritual of Excommunication’ is the script of “Ghatashraddha” ...an FTII story straight out of Franz Kafka.
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