Visual Communications

P.N. Menon, a painter, with the active participation of scenarist M.T. Vasudevan Nair and cameraman Mankada Ravi Varma, made a remarkable film, Olavum Teeravum in 1970. Reminiscent of the Italian neo-realist films in its stark realism, the film told with immense visual appeal the story of an innocent Muslim girl of Malabar. That was also the first authentic statement of the way of life of Malabar Muslims. It was perfect in its accuracy of dialect, choice of location and art direction. M.T. Vasudevan Nair was sure of his milieu. But the film's reluctance to part with conventions like songs and melodrama made it miss the mark of excellence. Olavum Teeravum serves as an important link to the new decade when Malayalam cinema progressed from verbal to visual communication methods.

In the mid sixties efforts were on to create conditions conducive to the survival of artistic cinema in Kerala. A group of film enthusiasts had already formed a film society, Chitralekha, in Tiruvananthapuram, a trend setter in the state. It conducted seminars and discussion on films apart from screening international classics. It encouraged the formation of other film societies throughout the state. As an off-shoot of this society came the Chitralekha Film Co-operative Society, the first of its kind in the country formed by a group of trained technicians with the intention of making artistic films. After a period of practice through documentary film-making, the co-operative attempted their first feature, Swayamvaram in 1972 with Kulathoor Bhaskaran Nair as executive producer and Adoor Gopalakrishnan as director. Technically superb, the film dispensed with the cliches of traditional cinema particularly songs till then considered as essential ingredient in feature film. Although built on a weak narrative, the film was much ahead of the Malayalam film of the time in its cinematic qualities and won four national awards including that of best film. It launched a major film maker in Malayalam. The next year M.T. Vasudevan Nair, who had been writing screenplays for many a directors, came up with his own directional venture, Nirmalyam. M.T was hesitant to shed all the existing conventions but all the same produced a brilliant first work. Although still coming to grips with the medium, he was sure of his characters and their relationships. Much of his pre-occupation with family and societal relationships found earlier in his screenplay was evident here too. Nirmalyam brought the President's best film award to Kerala for the second consecutive year.

In 1974 well-known cartoonist G. Aravindan, who had established himself as the most intellectual cartoonist in Malayalam with his work 'Small men and the big world' in Mathrubhoomi weekly, made his first film Utharayanam. Aravindan had no formal training in film making although he was well exposed to other visual arts. He had also got exposure to international cinema through the film societies. Aravindan demonstrated an extraordinary sense of visual expression and composition in his very first attempt. He was greatly aided by scenarist Thikkodiyan, art director Namboodiri and cameraman Mankada Ravi Varma. The film fetched a national award comemorating the silver jubilee of Indian independence.

John Abraham, the `enfant terrible' of Malayalam cinema, who set himself the untouched path of subversive cinema in his first Tamil film, Agraharathile Kazhuthai, continued in the same vein in his Malayalam films. Abraham could be credited with demystifying cinema's long evolved conventions and he succeeded really well in blending the theme and form with wry humour. His unexpected demise in 1987 caused a set-back to the kind of film-making that John propounded. A number of promising newcomers made their first features in the seventies and eighties who include Azad, K.G. George, K.R. Mohanan, G.S. Panicker, V.R.Gopinath, K.N. Sasidharan and Shaji N. Karun, all alumni of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune and others like Madhu, Bharathan, K.P. Kumaran, P.A. Backer, C. Radhakrishnan, Padmarajan, Mankada Ravi Varma, Lenin Rajendran, Ravindran, Rajeev Nath and Pavithran.

During the last two decades, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Aravindan consolidated their positions in not only Malayalam cinema but in Indian cinema as well. Adoor made six significant films, Swayamvaram, Kotiyettam, Elippathayam, Mukhamukham, Anantharam and Mathilukal. Aravindan directed Utharayanam, Kanchana Sita, Thampu, Kummatty, Esthappan, Pokkuveyil, Chidambaram, Oridathu, Unny and Marattam. Most of these films won laurels from India and abroad and merited screenings at International film festivals.

Theme and Form of Traditional Cinema
Right from the early days, the traditional Malayalam cinema had different genres like socials (Hindu, Muslim and Christian), historicals, wild life films, comedies, political types, crime thrillers, musicals, docu-dramas, fantasies and so on, but the most favoured one was socials. The release of socials particularly Christian and Muslim ones were timed to religious festivals like X-mas and Bakrid and some of them like Kuttikkuppayam proved all time hits. These socials, meant to appeal different communities, were made at regular intervals. The studio-owning producers of Udaya and Neela were very adept at churning out these different genres at regular intervals.

Sometimes there would be simultaneous release of devotional/mythological and other films with identical theme produced by different studios. The same sets and properties were put to effective use for different films. No matter what the genre is, the formula reigned supreme and for that reason the attributes of a genre was not clearly discernible in these films. Many of these films had only the semblance of a genre. There would be songs and sentiments in Vadakkanpattu _ based action films like Unniarcha (with twenty three songs!) and even in wild life films. Formula elements would be found in political films and comic scenes in devotionals. Attention to pace seemed to be absent due to compulsions of including comic scenes, songs and dance numbers, sub-plots and dramas. Song scenes were considered a must till the seventies and the average number of songs in a film ranged from a dozen in the fifties to about half of it in the seventies. In fact the very first sound film Balan had twenty three songs; probably T.R. Sundaram took the cue from the Tamil and Hindi films of the time. Historical films paid very little attention to period recreation and behaviour patterns of the time. Similarly dialects of different regions were conveniently ignored except for comic effects. The written style of the Tiruvitamkur region was the most acceptable form of language so that the widest cross section of people understood a film. Also, most of the early script writers were from the south. In social films, the milieu was not properly established. These two factors sometimes made jarring note in films like Kandam Becha Kottu (a muslim social supposedly taking place in the Kozhikode region) and Unniarcha based on the legends of north Malabar. In the sixties, a number of films dealing with the labour movements were made absorbing the political ferment of the time.

Late seventies witnessed an emphazis on sex in Malayalam film. Sex began to be treated in a more open way which encouraged distributors to promote such films outside the state as soft-porn films. The presentation of every day life and its problems itself without any new insight or psycho-social analysis became the goal of many film makers. The audience also seemed content with such banality, judging from the popularity of such films. Sex was now treated indirectly more at a subliminal level in many of these films with a realistic exterior. The eighties saw a boom in pulp literature in the state and films made out of serialized stories of these journals found a ready market. A number of such adaptations set in the middle class families which cleverly mixed melo-drama and violence on the home front succeeded well at the box office. Such films had a pronounced sexist bias and gender use became offensive to women. The money accumulated in private investment companies which sprouted along the length and breadth of the state, then began to be diverted for film-making of this nature. Monopolistic tendencies began to be felt in production and distribution and with huge investment without any regard to the returns made the commercial viability of an average film at stake. On the other side of the commercial spectrum, film makers like I.V. Sasi and Hariharan who were making sex and violence-oriented films in the seventies, changed their course by making family dramas based on screenplays by M.T. Vasudevan Nair and Padmarajan. This ensured commercial success of a film. Both were prolific in their output. Films based on their screenplays maintain a certain standard well above that of the commercial productions in the rest of the country. Although a sizeable majority of popular film dealt with predictable themes, a few of them explored alternative subjects like tribal life, pollution, Gulf migration, performing arts, biography, women's issues and film-making itself.