Imaging Deities and Deifying Images

Review of Celluloid Deities – The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India by Preminda Jacob, Orient BlackSwan



Celluloid Deities is about banners and cutouts that, for almost half a century was ‘an integral part of the visual processes by which Chennai’s residents made the cultural texts of Tamil cinema and politics their own’. Film making was always an industry where inscrutable vagaries of audience preferences coupled with the massive volume of financial investments put at risk every product. But behind each such venture that enters the market is also the irresistible allure of windfall profits and fame. It is such elusive push and pull factors that propel ‘culture industries along schizophrenic tracks, spinning from conservative reaffirmations of the status quo to wildly creative high-risk ventures’. Ironically, in politics too, matters are not very different. With the gradual evacuation of politics and erosion of ideological differences between coalitions, the fortunes of individual politicians and parties also follow the same track. The second part of the book, in fact, has a chapter dedicated to ‘political cutout’. The central questions around which the study and its methodology are organized are: ‘How did the social and political context of these images produce particularities of their subject matter and artistic style? How did a local audience perceive them? And how are we, from an international and global perspective, to perceive and historicize them?’



Structured around two sets of research questions, the first four chapters of the study probes the status of banners and cutouts as art objects by focusing on their production and semiotics of the medium, as to who created these images, their conditions of production, and the aesthetic criteria they employed. The next two chapters on The Coalescence of Tamil Nationalism and the Cinema Industry and The Political Cutout, analyses the social, political and religious contexts of these images to map the complex functions of cinematic and political imagery in contemporary South Indian society. The last two chapters examines the relationship between the notion of darshan and spectatorship, and the future of cinematic spectatorship.



The job of the cutout and banner advertisement workers is to amplify and magnify the desired impact of their subjects, something that has increasingly become tough and unenviable. Their work is at once a craft, an art form, and a means of livelihood. Most importantly, it is a kind of work/art that is evanescent by its very nature; mounted with great aplomb, its relevance wanes after a few weeks, the material itself gets faded or defaced, and it is soon removed and recycled. This could be the reason why no artist preserves their creations in this field, which again impinges upon their creation as art and places them somewhere between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’. But their work is an endless and chaotic play with size, colour scheme, layering, mass, scale, likeness, composition, positioning of figures, font type, design and placement, and one that changes according to locality and target population. What makes the study interesting is the way it delves into the dynamics of this sector, drawing out both the grind and routine aspects of the job, as well as the creative and spontaneous, bringing forth a lot of surprising insights into the workings of banner advertisements and their multiple agendas of art, advertising and propaganda.



The breadth and scope of the second part of the study is vast and it analyses this evanescent media in the background of the larger context, that is, as ‘representative of cyclical shifts in media: from melodramatic theater to academic painting; from academic painting to cinema; from the moving image to film stills and, finally, from the photographic images of cinema to banner painting. Each successive mode of visual representation derived its popularity by entwining the emotive power of rasa with the unambiguous binaries of melodrama’. In the process, the study brings out a lot of interesting insights on Tamil cinema and stardom, as well as the celebrity cult in Tamil Nadu and its political dimensions. But while exploring the complex relationships between film, fame, charisma and political fortunes, in certain places, one can feel the ‘weight’ of such a wide scope. It sometimes pans across certain complex and nuanced concepts and historical moments in a compressed and simplified manner. Instead of as part of main body of the text, they could have been provided as detailed footnotes and references.



Celluloid Deities, as a pioneering attempt in this area, is undoubtedly a significant contribution to film/cultural studies in India.

Bharathipura

by

U. R. Ananthamurthy

Translated by Susheela Punitha,

Oxford University Press (2010)

“I shall await the new man from within me – seeing with one eye the present reality with compassion and, with the other, cruelly lancing it in a bid to transform it, loving it passionately and yet being detached from it; understanding why there’s a caste system even within me, but trying to overcome it through action, I shall await the man who walks tall with his head held high. Letting go and at the same time embracing; gradually getting into shape; walking the wake of cruelty, abuse, greed…” p 234

This reverie of Jagannatha at the end of the novel Bharathipura provides an entry into it and the conflicts and yearnings of the man, who is caught between several contradictions: West and East, modernity and tradition, brahmin and dalit, secular and religious, skepticism and belief. Bharatipura is the name of Jagannathan’s native village and the novel begins with his return to it after discontinuing his studies in London. The rest of the novel is about his idealist attempt to convert the holeyaru (the lower caste people) working in his farm into human beings (to liberate them from the womb of god) and as a symbolic gesture of rebellion, to make them enter the famous Manjunatha temple. The temple forms the epicenter of the village in various ways, the physical and spiritual economy of the village is centred around this temple. Upon his return to his native land, Jagannatha feels that ‘my position, my prestige, my duty towards these people has been predetermined. I could easily bloat like a chickpea in water. Probably, the only way I can make an impact on them is by rejecting Manjunatha first, by hurting them where they trust him.” (p44)

He is the typical post-colonial middle class (brahmanical) intellectual who has to bear the weight (or burden) and the liability of tradition on the one, and has on the other, tasted the freedom of modernity, of being anonymous and free-floating in an exhilarating world of flux and fluidity, where you are not ‘fixed’ by your caste or social identity. It is the hardness of tradition and the enchanting lure of modernity that splits his world into two: there is a certain past that keeps on haunting him, one that is loving, tender, nostalgic and assuring. But he is also pulled by an imagined future – uncertain yet thrilling, potentially tumultuous yet exhilarating. Not at home in both the worlds, he flits between the two, rending his body and mind apart. While one yearns to fly high, the other weighs him down, while the one wants to destroy and demolish, the other wants to cherish and hold on. And the characters in the novel turn into embodiments of his existential angst and conflicts. Jagannathan’s childhood hero and mentor Sripathi Rao, is a Gandhian idealist, who finds himself left behind in the post-Independence scenario, and is skeptical of everything: ‘swallow your atheism and survive’ he advises Jagan. Raghava Puranik who too was once a revolutionary by daring to marry a child widow, totally cut off from his ‘medieval’ surroundings and has created a fort around him with everything British. According to him, ‘the only way is to Westernise ourselves’. There is Subbaraya Adiga, his childhood pal, who had godly visions earlier, and is now a drifter: ‘All of us are in Manjunatha’s womb – the good ones, the bad ones, the greedy ones like me, the brave ones like you..” Likewise the local believers, sycophants and politicians who swarm around Jagan are also post-colonial phantoms or unexorcised spirits of the past.

For Jagannatha, only by fulfilling his mission can he finally purge the seething duality within him; so his every brush with the outside world and the real becomes an encounter with himself. For instance, the sudden suicide of Nagamani, hurts him ‘personally’ and he seethes with self contempt: ‘Yesterday afternoon, I was rejected all over again. I guess I’ll continue to be a slimy, formless mass despite my anguish to firm up unless I take on Manjunatha’ (p75). In another instance, he rants: ‘I must split open in anguish. And I must strain to push forth a shoot from the darkness of the earth into the light’ (p83)

Bharathipura is one of the most wrenching portrayals of the ambivalent post-colonial brahmin subjectivity – one that is sensitive and also condescending to the pettiness and cruelty both within and without; sometimes it breaks out as hatred for blind beliefs and explodes as rage, like when Jagannathan takes out the saligramam from the prayer room in his house and forces the holeyaru to touch it, and desecrate it. In other situations, it also manifests as hatred towards those he wants to arouse, the holeyaru; he often frets and fumes over their sloth, blindness and fear. It is this constant shift and grappling with perspectives and positions that weaves the complex web of the novel’s narrative, with fragments of thought, letters to Margaret, diary notes to himself, storytelling, quotations, reminiscences, memories, and also actual dialogues and events...

Obviously, a novel like Bharathipura that abounds with allusions to local myths, usages, rituals and beliefs, does not easily lend itself to translation. But Susheela Punitha’s translation conveys the spirit of the original, with Kannada words and usages easily melding with the flow of English. The introduction and interview with the author by Manu Charkravarthy put the novel in its historical and cultural perspective, especially as the English avatar comes almost three decades after the novel was published.

digital reflections 3

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Webcam Series - Priyaranjanlal

This series takes further the celebration of the inter-play with surfaces and various media. Images of the artist and his room captured through the web camera is interlaced with drawn images, and everyday symbols. The enclosed nature of the room is constantly under attack by these images of freedom and flight. The image of an aeroplane seeks its way from inside the room to the window to and outside; kids zigzag in joy; a dog, watching the rain outside, thinks up an umbrella; the walls imagine light bulbs, the man walking upside down thinks of his obverse, the shadow of a cat watches over the shadow of a fan; couples, hand-in-hand, meander through the digital image of the window; the artist’s hand tries to capture the imaged butterfly; the plastic chair dream of a wheel chair; people tug a plane across the enclosed space of the room; a cat leaps into the one-dimensional plane of colour from the image of the room..

webclips Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper

In this series, there is a constant interplay and collision between spaces and images, imaged and recorded, made and dreamt. Flat, one-dimensional spaces of colours, trisect the other planes that populate the room - the image of the artist, his reflection upon the mirror, the little animal-images, and thought-balloons. What is ‘picturised’ is the room of the artist as well as his ‘interiors’, the stuff with which he works, and the planes he has to juggle with constantly to make sense of the real, and also memory. Like spaces and images from the past and present, memory and imagination, real and imagined, all seem to gather life to swarm around, at the same time underlining and erasing, affirming and negating, constantly yearning to make sense of the ‘stuff’ experience and reality is made of.

Straddling the Analog and the Digital

Like the past and memory, the problem with the digital is not only its infinite vastness and immateriality, but also the poignant impossibility of ‘mastering’ or taming it to our own essentially limited parameters of cognition and expression. For instance, how do you make sense of your own biography, or how do you place yourself (or find a place for yourself) in this realm of the diffuse, the incorporeal and the virtual?

The series of digital images by Priyaranjanlal addresses this question head on, by taking the digital horse to the pond. He uses the digital to confront both his personal past and the very process of his growing up as an artist. For this, he turns back to the ‘basics’ as it were, to the remnants of his own past: the drawing book which brought him face to face, not very pleasantly though, with the task of representing the world in its own image, and the family album, those fragments from the past, that captured images as moments of past for future consumption. In his digital studio, these ‘found’ objects of memory turn into tools of reflection upon one’s own past and the art. And by exhibiting them, they take corporeal forms to straddle the worlds of the analog and the digital.

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hide&seek Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper Hide and Seek

This series works with an old childhood album containing photographs of the artist and his family. These yellowing and moth-eaten fragments of frozen moments from the past, enter into a dialogue with the digital, bringing alive the dubious connections between the analogic ‘real’ and the digital. These specular images of the artist’s childhood are digitally ‘mastered’ here – erased, cut up, duplicated, scribbled over, superimposed.. In a way, they extend themselves, like from the past into the present, from the analog into the digital plane. New digital objects in the form of miniature animals finds their habitat in this world; they nuzzle themselves into the empty hands of kids, peep into the old tin boxes that contain photographs, while a cockroach (yet another superimposed image) nibbles at them.. New skies take over as backdrops, the scars and bruises on the body, magnified digitally, re-live both pain and memory. The uncle in uniform dominates the foreground, like in the artist’s childhood, who is relegated to the background, or is taking refuge behind the bars of the digital. The artist, playing hide and seek with different media, constantly shies away from the brutal frontality of the photograph. He uses the digital planes to hide his face; he doodles on them, or soften them. It is a ploy that works both ways, for it is both a hiding as well as a revealing, a way to ‘bring one’s self in’ to the image. What is also brought into the foreground is the materiality and hence the transience/fragility of the photographic medium itself. We find visible signs of wear and tear, of time eating its way upon/through it. In one of the images we find the moth-eaten parts of the photographs digitally magnified, and in another, an all too real cockroach is working at a photo.

Surfaces collide, analog and digital, past and present, one and two-dimensional, personal and public, memory and forgetting, real and virtual.

digital reflections

On the digital art of the Trivandrum based digital artist Priyaranjanlal.

The shift to the digital is also a move away from the hitherto corporeal viscerality of graphic and plastic art. It is a shift from the feel of the surface of the canvas, wood, mud or stone, the smell of paints, the leaves of the sketch books, the pencil stubs, the swish of the brushes, the stains of charcoal, the wood shavings, and the dirt and dust of mud and stone… The digital domain is one of immateriality, where nothing is tactile, and one that exists (?) in a virtual space where touch, smell and taste are alien – where sight (and sometimes sound) alone reigns supreme. It is this virtuality that gives it an ethereal and oneiric quality, which makes the very process of imaging and also reception a very baffling and intriguing experience.

Having been liberated from the obligations of fidelity to the object-world, the digital domain is made of stuff that dreams and thoughts are made of, occupying a limitless and enchanting, yet elusive virtual space.. So, it has something in it that is alien to what is around, the concrete, the tangible.. How does one capture the aesthetics of sensation through something incorporeal? How does one tell one’s own story, convey one’s own experience and fears through such an elusive medium?

Interestingly, the chaotic expanse of the past is also akin to a virtual space, strewn with images, memories, spaces and experiences that are malleable in an infinite number of ways. One conjures up images from both to make sense of the present, and to ‘fix’ their elusiveness and immateriality into something visible and ‘concrete’.

Drawing Book Series

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01 ClassIV Photoshop, Inkjetprint On Paper

This series consists of a series of images reworked from the ‘unfinished’ sketches – of primal forms and shapes – from the school drawing book. In a way it is an attempt to go back to the past, to establish vital connections with it, to capture it and bring it into the present. It is also an exercise in linking the digital present with the analogic past, a dialogue between two periods in art history as well as the artist’s life. But instead of being the ‘childhood’ of the digital, the sketchbook here is a presence that captures the ever-youthful yet deeply frustrating yearning to capture/recreate the object-world and its basic shapes and colours into the two-dimensionality of an art form, painting.

So here the circles, trying to take shape within the grids, dream of being a rounded pot, the semicircle is a future umbrella, the straight line is a future leaf-nerve, the oval an owl, and the model stork waits for the other grid to create its replica. What is and was past suddenly becomes pliable and plastic yielding themselves in the digital present for re-formation and encounters with new planes. They find new lives in the digital planes added to them; they ‘re-draw’ and draw upon the drawing book figures creating a tension between the irredeemable past and a present that is in constant flux. Thus the digitally overlaid spaces play with and rework these images, bringing into their ‘grid-bound’ and limited domain the ‘visions’ of the sky and the freedom of colours and shapes. The ‘lessons’ and regimen of ‘learning’ art are also ‘re-worked’ and recaptured to the digital present, which seems to defy all rules and lessons, fighting yet larger grids and ‘rules’ as it were.

The fact that the drawing book, inert and stubborn, has stayed behind and remained, further underline its materiality. It is this very materiality that comes back to haunt the digital domain which in turn tries to ‘capture’ it and re-draw it and draw it into the digitized world.

Hide and Seek

This series works with an old childhood album containing photographs of the artist and his family. These yellowing and moth-eaten fragments of frozen moments from the past, enter into a dialogue with the digital, bringing alive the dubious connections between the analogic ‘real’ and the digital. These specular images of the artist’s childhood are digitally ‘mastered’ here – erased, cut up, duplicated, scribbled over, superimposed.. In a way, they extend themselves, like from the past into the present, from the analog into the digital plane. New digital objects in the form of miniature animals finds their habitat in this world; they nuzzle themselves into the empty hands of kids, peep into the old tin boxes that contain photographs, while a cockroach (yet another superimposed image) nibbles at them.. New skies take over as backdrops, the scars and bruises on the body, magnified digitally, re-live both pain and memory. The uncle in uniform dominates the foreground, like in the artist’s childhood, who is relegated to the background, or is taking refuge behind the bars of the digital. The artist, playing hide and seek with different media, constantly shies away from the brutal frontality of the photograph. He uses the digital planes to hide his face; he doodles on them, or soften them. It is a ploy that works both ways, for it is both a hiding as well as a revealing, a way to ‘bring one’s self in’ to the image. What is also brought into the foreground is the materiality and hence the transience/fragility of the photographic medium itself. We find visible signs of wear and tear, of time eating its way upon/through it. In one of the images we find the moth-eaten parts of the photographs digitally magnified, and in another, an all too real cockroach is working at a photo.

Surfaces collide, analog and digital, past and present, one and two-dimensional, personal and public, memory and forgetting, real and virtual.

Webcam Series

This series takes further the celebration of the inter-play with surfaces and various media. Images of the artist and his room captured through the web camera is interlaced with drawn images, and everyday symbols. The enclosed nature of the room is constantly under attack by these images of freedom and flight. The image of an aeroplane seeks its way from inside the room to the window to and outside; kids zigzag in joy; a dog, watching the rain outside, thinks up an umbrella; the walls imagine light bulbs, the man walking upside down thinks of his obverse, the shadow of a cat watches over the shadow of a fan; couples, hand-in-hand, meander through the digital image of the window; the artist’s hand tries to capture the imaged butterfly; the plastic chair dream of a wheel chair; people tug a plane across the enclosed space of the room; a cat leaps into the one-dimensional plane of colour from the image of the room..

In this series, there is a constant interplay and collision between spaces and images, imaged and recorded, made and dreamt. Flat, one-dimensional spaces of colours, trisect the other planes that populate the room - the image of the artist, his reflection upon the mirror, the little animal-images, and thought-balloons. What is ‘picturised’ is the room of the artist as well as his ‘interiors’, the stuff with which he works, and the planes he has to juggle with constantly to make sense of the real, and also memory. Like spaces and images from the past and present, memory and imagination, real and imagined, all seem to gather life to swarm around, at the same time underlining and erasing, affirming and negating, constantly yearning to make sense of the ‘stuff’ experience and reality is made of.

Straddling the Analog and the Digital

Like the past and memory, the problem with the digital is not only its infinite vastness and immateriality, but also the poignant impossibility of ‘mastering’ or taming it to our own essentially limited parameters of cognition and expression. For instance, how do you make sense of your own biography, or how do you place yourself (or find a place for yourself) in this realm of the diffuse, the incorporeal and the virtual?

The series of digital images by Priyaranjanlal addresses this question head on, by taking the digital horse to the pond. He uses the digital to confront both his personal past and the very process of his growing up as an artist. For this, he turns back to the ‘basics’ as it were, to the remnants of his own past: the drawing book which brought him face to face, not very pleasantly though, with the task of representing the world in its own image, and the family album, those fragments from the past, that captured images as moments of past for future consumption. In his digital studio, these ‘found’ objects of memory turn into tools of reflection upon one’s own past and the art. And by exhibiting them, they take corporeal forms to straddle the worlds of the analog and the digital.

Asian Film Journeys

A chronicle of Asian cinemas

C. S. Venkiteswaran

ASIAN FILM JOURNEYS — Selections from Cinemaya: Edited by Rashmi Doraiswamy and Latika Padgaonkar; Wisdom Tree, 4779/23, Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 1495.

C. S. Venkiteswaran

The film magazine, Cinemaya, by any count, was an adventurous attempt. For, when journals even on Indian cinema (which were few and far between) almost invariably proved to be short-lived, it ventured to keep track of the various trends in Asian cinema and promote the best in it — a task considered impossible because of the diversity and complexity of the terrain. If the magazine managed to survive (and thrive) for more than a decade and half (1988-2004), it was due to the commitment, passion, and ingenuity of the people who were behind it — Aruna Vasudev and her team of dedicated cineastes. As Rashmi Doraiswamy, in her introduction puts it, “it [ Cinemaya] was the product of historical circumstance of looking inwards at our own continent.

The information revolution, internet, proliferating festivals, new technologies and digital media that have changed the rules of production and distribution, the aesthetics and reception of cinema, have also necessitated a different kind of writing and focus on cinema. Cinemaya fulfilled a task it had set to perform: of making the cinema of Asia known in all their fine details.” Coincidentally, Cinemaya came into being when Asian cinemas were beginning to make their presence felt, thanks to the national cinemas as well as notable film festivals.

This volume puts together select articles from the magazine and from the five Cinefan catalogues (1999-2003). It painstakingly presents the rich mosaic of film history, auteurs, events, films, and trends in cinema in various parts of the continent. In between are interviews with filmmakers, historians, critics, and curators. This combination gives the book a dual character — that of a historic chronicle and a first person account. The very list of the countries covered is an indication of its breadth. They include: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. The book also has sections like ‘Musings' (by critics and filmmakers), ‘Beyond Boundaries' (which looks at the interface between various cinematic cultures within the continent, and that between Asia and the West) and ‘Reflections' (a collection of writings that addresses the question: ‘Is there such a thing as Asian cinema?')

A distinguishing aspect of this volume is that it gives, from a historical perspective, a panoramic view of Asian cinemas in their varied dimensions — aesthetic, industrial, sociological, and technical, besides discussing issues related to censorship and identity. Some of the illustrious personalities and stimulating thinkers of cinema figure in this volume. For instance, the section on Japan has writings by luminaries like Nagisa Oshima, Tadao Sato, Donald Richie and Mark Schilling, and that on India feature Ashis Nandy, Madan Gopal Singh, Partha Chatterjee, Amrit Gangar, P.K. Nair and Ravi Vasudevan, among others.

Relevance

Interestingly, by way of self-reflection as it were, the very necessity or relevance of a journal like Cinemaya in today's context is discussed and debated. According to Rashmi Doraiswamy and Aruna Vasudev, the very context that necessitated a publication like Cinemaya no longer exists. Doraiswamy says its ‘classical vision' and its ‘enlightenment' projects are “probably no longer relevant in an age when your neighbourhood is the globe itself, and information about every nook and cranny is available at the click of the mouse.” Vasudev argues that Asian cinema “does not need the sort of promotion that was our single-minded determination when we set out…The histories, cultures, societies of the countries and their cinemas are known and documented…”

But many of the observations made and the anxieties expressed by cineastes in the book strongly suggest that such a journal is indeed as much relevant now as it was before. In Ma Ning's view “the usefulness of the concept lies in the definitive and differential values it has acquired in usage.” Obviously, in the global context, regular and meticulous mapping of the art and industry continues to be essential, not only to demarcate the common ground of such a broad identity but also to delineate the differences between and within. While the new context of digital technology seems to offer a lot of ‘information' as far as perspectives are concerned, one still looks forward to journals like Cinemaya for keeping the debate going on a sustained basis and to serve as a document for researchers and film-lovers to access and work upon. The book stands testimony to such an effort.

Celebration of the Local

Bhojpuri Cinema – by Avijit Ghosh, Penguin India, 2010

C S Venkiteswaran

… at a time when regional political parties continue to assert their identity, the rise of Bhojpuri films is only part of the remodeling of Indian cinema. The availability of cheap technology has allowed dozens of ‘little cinemas’ to flourish in dialects such as Chattisgarhi, Kumaoni, Gharhwali and Khariboli. Even Ladakhis have begun making films in their local dialect. Avijit Ghosh, Bhojpuri Cinema (p 94)

Within a few years of its inauguration at Grand Café, Paris, cinema had cast its magical spell over people in all continents luring a number of showmen and entrepreneurs who made it the most massive mass art ever in the history of humankind. Though cinema has such an international history, enthralling people and drawing them into its global network and idioms, it also has ‘national’ and ‘local’ histories with its own specific characteristics. The latter exhibit a great variety as they followed trajectories of their own depending on local narrative traditions, existing conditions of performing arts and appreciation, openness to new forms, and of course, the socio-economic environment that enveloped all these.

One can see that the new magic of cinema illuminated several hitherto unrealized/unrealizable desires of ‘seeing’ as well as ‘making visible’. In this process of seeing and making visible, the medium – as an industry with a mass base/market – had to necessarily contend with existing or constantly evolving global formats on the one hand, and on the other, the narrative and scopophilic desires of the local. Moreover, it was not just a question of making oneself visible to the world outside; it was also an attempt to make oneself visible to oneself – something that unleashed many a hitherto repressed facets of social and psychological lives in the public domain. Ironically, they were largely played out and imagined within the idiomatics of the national/global, as an assertion of the marginal/regional vis a vis the centre/national/global. And to imagine into being its ‘pure’ untrammeled self, it more often resorted to imitations and ‘remakes’, and brings into play interesting discourses about ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. When films flop, the blame is put on the avaricious producers from ‘outside’. When they succeed it is due to the verve and vigour of the land and its indigenous culture. But like any cinema of the local, even while it celebrates one’s own ‘culture’, its thematic concerns are with its discontents – casteism, class exploitation, dowry system, illiteracy etc.

The film histories of cinemas in India have a tumultuous history of competition between the ‘vernaculars’ and the national marked by the constant rediscovery and assertion of local identities. Avijit Ghosh’s Cinema Bhojpuri is a very interesting account of the same in the Bhojpuri context. The book narrates the history of Bhojpuri cinema, which virtually turns out to be an account of its encounters with the national-popular – the Hindi cinema that threatens to subsume all sub-nationalities that constitute its market-hinterland and also catchment area of themes and locales. The rise of Bhojpuri cinema in that sense is also a moment of pride and a new sense of selfhood, against the all-consuming tide of the national. Avijit Ghosh quotes a newspaper article written in 1965 about the perception of ‘outsiders’ about Bhojpuri people: ‘A few years ago the rest of the country considered Bhojpuri as the language of the rustic people of east Indian villages. In Bombay, it was known as the language of the ‘bhaiyas’. In Calcutta and other cities, it was known as the language of labourers of north India and Bihar.’

The book tracks Bhojpuri cinema from its beginnings in 1962, when Nazir Hussain, at the behest of Dr Rajendra Prasad, made Ganga Maiya Tohe Piyar Chadhaibo(O Mother Ganga, I’ll offer you the Yellow Cloth). Obviously the offering was indeed a very auspicious one, for since then, there was no looking back for Bhojpuri cinema. This is something really astounding if one takes into consideration other ‘vernacular’ cinemas that constitute Hindi cinema’s market, which have grown more and more marginal and almost non-existent.

Avijit Ghosh follows an episodic style and summarizes major trends in the history of Bhojpuri cinema, which he divides into three major periods. The first period (1962-68) begins with Ganga Maiya..; and the next extends from 1969 to the beginning of 21^st century, and is a volatile one of crests and troughs. But the last one starting from 2001 marks the advent of ‘a new, confident Bhojpuri cinema’ with a big boom in production (with around 275 films between 2004 and 2008), and ‘the fledgling cottage industry of the 1960s’ turning into ‘a bustling regional film industry’. In the chapters that follow, the author provides brief sketches of the major personalities – actors, musicians, producers, exhibitors and critics - who made all this possible.

Obviously, the major thread is the relationship with the other – Hindi cinema – which is one of love and hate, and absorption and imitation. Storylines, themes, music, songs, dance and action – all resonate with the ‘other’. For instance, Mother India turns into Dharti Maiya, Sholay into Gabbar Singh, Judaai into Saiyan Se Solah Singaar, Hum Paanch into Pandav, and eventually Bhojpuri cinema having its own stars similar to the trio of Khans. Evidently, we find here the local celebrating the same old clichés that the qasbah and small town audience enjoys everywhere: ‘the rich-poor conflict, urban-rural differences, tradition-modernity contradictions, a good-as-gold brother-bhabhi relationship, lustful villains, stupid comedians and a class-conscious father-in-law’ (p 60). As character actor Brijesh Tripathy observes ‘the scenario has changed completely from the days when we started out. Now we have film parties, premieres and awards. We get interviewed like Bollywood actors do.’

Yet, despite this overwhelming ‘sameness’, Bhojpuria is asserted over and over again, most loudly through its rural locales and rustic themes. (The promo for a Bhojpuri film Hamar Sansar announces: ‘A ground-breaking Bhojpuri film where you’ll see India’s soul – the village environment, the fields, a glimpse of the real life of a farmer’). But the most important of all is music: the 1990s witnessed a virtual revolution in terms of the rediscovery of local folk tunes and lyrics, singers and musicians.

This expansion of local cinema is not without resistance from the ‘other’. The book provides glimpses of brewing tension that is triggered by the success of the regional. Elsewhere, Bhojpuri films have been the target of some sectarian groups like Maharashtra Navanirman Sena and Babbar Khalsa in Maharashtra and Punjab. In urban centres like Nashik, Mumbai, Thane or Ludhiana, cinema halls become virtual congregations of minorities as they are thronged by labourers from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. It is an instance where ‘local’ cinema becomes a vulnerable ‘locality’ that can be easily targeted.

What is most interesting from a film-theoretical point of view, is Ghosh’s attempt to explain the phenomenal rise of Bhojpuri cinema in the last decade. According to him, “One should rather view it as a process with various interweaving strands which at certain points are complimentary and, on other occasions, contrast with each other. At one level, the resurgence of Bhojpuri films could be construed as a reaction to the way Bollywood refashioned in cinematic language and landscape after the arrival of satellite television in 1991. With the growth of the dollar-rich NRI market and multiplexes becoming urban India’s new temples of entertainment, young gel-and-cologne film-makers with Hollywood sensibilities found a formula to bypass ‘India Unhappening’. Soon, Hindi commercial cinema’s alienation from vast snatches of middle India was complete…It was this fissure in aesthetics that the region-specific Bhojpuri cinema adroitly filled.’

Avijit Ghosh also hints at the predicament of the regional identity of Bhojuri cinema now. Growing confidence resulting from geographical widening of locations and expanding storylines, it has stepped out of its comfort zones and experiments with the larger world, which is increasingly blurring the distinct identity of the regional film. A paradox that leads to questions like the one raised by Arti Bhattacharya, first woman director of Bhojpuri cinema: ‘When we watch a Hindi film, it feels like a Hollywood film. When we go for a Bhojpuri film, it is like watching a Hindi film. Where’s our film?’

One major gap in Indian film studies is the lack of writings in English about the history of regional cinemas. Such lack has often led to the preponderance of Hindi films in film studies about Indian films. Ghosh’s book – about one of the youngest cinemas in India - is a significant contribution in this direction – and one that reminds us of the absence of similar attempts about other cinemas in India.

The Flesh of Life, Here and Now

Jiban Narah

The Buddha and Other Poems

Translated from the Assamese by Pradip Acharya, Krishna Dulal Barua and Niren Thakuria

Published by Monsoon Editions, Calicut, Keralam, 82 pages, Rs 150

The Flesh of Life, Here and Now

c s venkiteswaran

Return to the village – they advise

We aren’t far from the countryside not to be able to return

you don’t see the ebony flowers

you see the flesh of trees.

(Flesh of Trees)

Here is a world pullulating with life where trees have flesh and blood, all organisms can speak, feel pain and pleasure, their shrills and cries have distinct colours, that too for men and women among them, where ‘moon’s hair grows longer like the notes of Chaurasia’s flute’ and even canoes and yarn have stories to spin. It is a world where time is a great continuum, where the other-worlds and netherworld merge to create this world which we only seem to inhabit. Jiban Narah’s poems wakes one up into that world that is painfully immediate and hauntingly sensuous. It is not a faraway world but one of here and now, where a dog’s answer can send a ladder into a faint and topple a tale; a place where ‘errant plump swine’ swarm the streets where the poet takes his morning walk, and a glow-worm can murmur to us like this:

With the spiraling smoke

a glow-worm came from the rain

and said:

Do you hear the drenched note of the flute

I’d gone looking for the unknown player

When the wind brought me here

Don’t tell anyone that I’ve come

the wind will keep it a secret

if the sky knows it will tell the stars

I’ll spend this night with you

the colour of the gourd-blossom is on my body

Blow out the lamp

We flower at night

(The gourd blossom)

What animates Jiban Narah’s imageries is their keen sense of place and roots. They are not mere words trying to evoke the lyrical and the transcendental in you, but are extremely sensual and visceral, immediate and palpable. One can see the presence (of life and also death which is part of it as if in a moebius strip) pulsating in them, and always reaching out to you. For instance, this is how death figures here:

The slow tremors of the feet

scatter on the bell

Dust grows

through the toes

earthen lamps burn

in the courtyard

don’t look back

the knell is close behind.

(The Death)

Here, time is not a transcendental and abstract experience, but something ever-present, of body and soil, all too tangible yet heart-wrenchingly elusive:

Whether you rediscover or not

please return home

though the colour of your parents’ faces mingles with the grass

you can feel the times with your touch

(The lesson/2)

While reading Jiban Narah’s poems, what strikes one immediately is their startling freshness and minimalism. They seem to germinate and grow in certain oneiric continents of our lives that we, with a start, immediately begin to recognize and rediscover. These poems open themselves out to us in such a direct and overwhelming manner that we feel we are in the presence of something elemental, direct and profound, intricate yet involving. His is a poetry that draws its strengths from the world and so, its nuances and inflexions are never from the abstractions of it, from culture or literature, but from one’s self and whatever engulfs and engrosses it. Though you come across Kundera here, for the poet, he is ‘just like my father’.

Exactly why doors and rooms that separate and enclose do not make any sense to the poet:

A sound amid the quietude

the afternoon spring decomposes in the darkness

never could think – we are

there could be after us…

Alright tell me – why do people have doors in houses

rooms within rooms

tussles for space

tuggings in the count of opportune hours

(Count of Opportune Hours)

His is a poetry that is woven out of the surroundings – landscapes and climates, fragrances and stench, the intimate and the repulsive, everything freely jostle here. This teeming presence has a certain engrossing inescapability that charges and charms. Here personal memories and agonies waft into the atmosphere mingling and spiraling onto that of the moonlight, the umpteen animals and birds, places and memorials. And the poet embraces them all, living through/in them. That is how his poems effortlessly break away from shallow lyricism and ‘folkishness’. The all-too real river, the paddy fields, the bamboo shoots, the trees, plants, insects and animals and the humans here and now, all meld together to create this tragic celebration of life. And it is this overwhelming presence of the all-too-real elements that makes ‘reality’ very pithy but layered illusion:

Brothers brothers then what’s the boat

Illusion

Brothers brothers then what’s the river

Illusion

Brothers brothers then should we go about groping for illusions

Never never

‘You shouldn’t stretch your stride over a shroud’

(Layered Illusion)

For an urban, uprooted reader, inundated with global images and narratives, Jiban Narah’s poems work against such fragmentation of experience; their energy is simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. While it churns up its restless energy from the local (the life and lore of the Mishings tribe to which Jiban belongs) which irrepressibly spills over, it also makes the outside world its fuel, drawing energy from it and placing itself confidently and spontaneously ‘against’ its apparent all-pervasiveness and self-erosive ennui. Thus what makes these poems contemporary and universal is this unremitting tension between in and out, the near and the faraway, the personal and the tribal, the familial and the social, the mythic and the contemporary..

(Jiban Narah (born in 1970) is author of several collections which include O Mur Dhooniya Kopou Phool and Toomi Pakka Dhaanor Dore Gandhauissa. His poems have been translated into various Indian languages. He is a lecturer by profession.)

Of Stars and Firmaments, Politics and Life

Review of Megastar: Chiranjeevi And Telugu Cinema After N. T Ramo Rao

S. V. Srinivas

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

C S Venkiteswaran

1

“Here then is a short description of Telugu cinema: it is a cinema in the Telugu language made with borrowed plots, for ten crore speakers of the language, by an industry that makes politicians because it cannot make profits”.

This is how Srinivas concludes his book on the megastar Chiranjeevi. It is a ‘conclusion’ that sums up the trajectory of the book and its analysis. For, it traces not only upon the evolution of an actor into a star, a megastar and then a politician and idol of the masses, but also places it the film-industrial and sociopolitical context that envelops it. Woven through the analysis are the film texts and the multiple discourses surrounding them, and in the process, the book throws up scintillating insights into the work of cinema in our popular imagination and society.

Though the phenomenon of ‘stars’ and stardom have been a topic of study especially since the advent of cultural studies, these explorations were and are predominantly Hollywood-centric. If at all ‘other cinemas’ found a place here, more often than not such analysis also employed concepts and theories developed in the Hollywood context, which were applied onto the milieu in question. Such exercises only serve to ‘universalise’ certain film theories all over again, by making other cinemas - Asian, African or Latin American - mere ‘examples’ and ‘proofs’ of an overarching theory.

This was very poignantly felt in the Indian context, which boasts of one of the largest film industries in the world in terms of its numbers and in the last decades, also its overwhelming global reach. It was with the entry of film scholars like Ravi Vasudevan, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Madhava Prasad, MSS Pandian and Sumita Chakravarthy that film studies in India on Indian films actively sought frameworks that were theoretically informed and regionally rooted. These scholars also broke the conventional modes and models of film criticism in India that were primarily engrossed with texts and basically ‘auteurist’ in orientation. As Srinivas puts it, ‘what we may be better off working towards is a better theory, not a special one’. His book is a continuation of such efforts, both with regard to its theoretical sweep as well as academic rigour. It is also a significant addition to the literature on star studies in India, following MSS Pandian’s path breaking book on MGR phenomenon – The Image Trap.

2

Departing from the prevalent ‘mirror’ logic that interprets cinema, society and politics in a linear, one-to-one manner, Srinivas’s book emphasizes the need to ‘explain the cinema-society-politics relationship by pointing to the work of cinema’ in order to raise vital questions about the film industry, modes of production, and reception of films, and the activity of fans and their association as part of it. In his own words, it is the work of taking back the questions relating to the circulation of cinema to the analysis of films themselves. This in a very interesting manner, maps the social life of cinema in our society..

Major portion of Srinivas’ book dwells upon the question of fandom, which he thinks should be understood in the context of cinema’s materiality or what is specific to the cinema: ‘its filmic texts, stars and everything else that constitutes this industrial-aesthetic form’. Fans’ Associations are something peculiar to South Indian states and has been an enigma to many film scholars. They have looked at this phenomenon especially in the context of stars turning politicians as a one-way process of a star ‘influencing’ and creating a mass base, by harnessing films for political purposes where film narratives spill over into the domain of politics. Srinivas looks at it as a much more complex process involving adulation as well as demand, obligation as well as entitlement as he locates it in the history of Indian cinema’s publicness. It addresses certain vital questions that haunt contemporary film theoretical thinking on fandom in India. For instance, though fans’ associations were always there in South India, what has spurred its growth in such scale and intensity? Has it got to do with certain mass psychological proclivities specific to this region? Or, is it, in the South Indian context, conflated with linguistic identity politics that marks public mobilization? In other words, is star ‘a sign of unbound political passions in search of an object’? And tangentially, is politics yet another genre of performance?

In the context of Andhra Pradesh, Srinivas locates it as part of the larger socio-political change in the 1980s marked by a proliferation of new, mobilizable constituencies: the naxalite uprising, the rise of dalit movements, and in the post-Emergency period, women’s movement and the invocation of ‘Telugu’ pride. It is in the post-NTR period that fan activity actually takes the form of political activity. According to Srinivas, “while historically speaking, the political crossover of stars is a crucial development, fans’ involvement in politics actually precedes this development, suggesting that the immediate reason notwithstanding, fans’ associations were already being impacted by the overall proliferation of mobilizable constituencies.” The entry of Chiranjeevi is also linked to the power-struggle between Kamma and Kapu communities in Andhra politics. But fan activity as such, though drawn across such community lines, is not defined by it, for, they often flaunt their ‘secular’ credentials. What is interesting is that fans’ involvement in politics often had less to do with ‘the star’s own preferences and more to do with the complex mediation of local alliances, castes and politics’. Yet, ‘contrary to fans’ own hyperbolic declarations of their loyalty to the star, evidence from ground suggests that the fan-star relationship is one of conditional loyalty’. And for Srinivas fandom is a quintessentially cinephiliac response which has political consequences, hence basically ‘a response to the cinema, and not, say, a consequence of the religiosity of the masses in this part of the world’.

Obviously, star/fan or politician/cadre relationship is not a simple one of manipulation and resistance, influence and credulity, but one intertwined with linguistic, communal, regional and political dimensions and overlaid with such desires, aspirations and identifications. It is an ever-shifting domain where reality and fiction, film and politics, star fans and party cadres, devotion to star and commitment to certain ideology, industry and power collide and negotiate with each other.

3

The Second part deals with Chiranjeevi films and his emergence as a star in the post-NTR era in the context of the evolution of Telugu mass film and cinematic populism. According to Srinivas, “in the mid-1990s the mass film and its stars became a part of a major crisis in the Telugu film industry. The crisis was, in part, a result of the collapse of the mass film, as also its past success. The examination of the mass film allows us to see how populism and blockage dovetail and in turn implicate Telugu cinema’s superstars”. ‘Mass’ film is a loose film industry term referring to films that address the masses with formulaic elements like big budgets, stars in superhuman roles, lack of novelty of storyline etc. and is used in contradistinction with ‘class’ film that addresses middle class audiences. It was this form around which Telugu industry grew from mid-70’s to mid-90’s. In many early films Chiranjeevi played the role of the rebel-hero, who is the product of the criminalization and degeneration of the public domain. Such crisis is often caused either by the absence of the benevolent feudal patriarch or the presence of an oppressive authority figure, or a combination of both. It is the figure of the rowdy or the rebel who resolves this crisis. But the crucial point that Srinivas examines here is the way films produce spectators, or in other words, how the star is deployed in the mass film ‘to seduce and incite historically located viewers into willing spectators’.

Extending Madhava Prasad’s notion about the aesthetic of mobilization, Srinivas makes some interesting observations about the star/fan politician/follower fiction/politics and film/reality relationship in this regard: “The political role played by the star in the fiction, is an extension of his mandate to act according to the spectator’s will. This role – of being the agent of the spectator’s will, of displaying at all times the recognition of an obligation to a spectator who is in turn entitled to make a series of demands on him – played by the star in the fiction, is analogous to his location in the fan domain. In both domains the star is obliged to fulfill the demands of the fan/spectator. Fandom, in turn, is evidence of the leakage of the willing spectator into the extra-cinematic domain, even as there is a textual inscription of the fan in the production of the genre’s spectator.” As he succinctly puts it, “in politics as in films, the star arrives only because the fan-spectator was whistling interminably”.

Taking these notions further into the domain of Industry and Politics, Srinivas relates it to the process of “Bollywoodisation” (in simple terms, ‘the attempt to define culture economically’) and employs the concept of ‘blockage’ to explain the economic crisis within the industry and the narrative crisis in film texts. “In the films from the mid-1990s we notice signs of change but also textual inscriptions of a blockage, something that resists. In hindsight, we can see that the resistance effectively deferred, if not prevented outright, the transition into a new narrative regime and an economic one that corresponded to it”. Films of the period, he observes, are structured around this blockage, manifesting at the level of the film story, genre and/or form and the consequent inability of the stars to free themselves from their imagi chatram (literally, ‘image’s frame’ or the bind of the screen image the star has painstakingly cultivated.

Using several concepts from film and political theory, film texts, fan and political discourses from the Telugu context, Srinivas probes into this enigmatic phenomenon called stars, whom Richard Dyer, describes as those who ‘embody that particular conception of what it is to be human that characterizes our culture’. What makes this work of film theory even more relevant and interesting is that it grapples with the problem of untangling the riddles of citizenship itself in our context.

And thus, tries to answer the question posed at the beginning of the book: “what can cinema tell us about the politics of our time?”

Economics of TV Culture

Economics of Culture Industry: Television in India by K V Joseph

C S Venkiteswaran

In the last two decades, and since the ‘opening up of the sky’ in the 90’s, television has replaced print media as the most overwhelming presence in our public (and private) lives; it is the medium through which we make sense of the world, of us and the other. Most importantly, it has also taken upon itself the task of being the primary agenda-setter in our polity. In other words, rather than being a ‘medium’ we use, the omnipresence of television and also in many cases, its omnipotence, has turned it almost into something like the air we breathe. But, despite that, serious and scholarly studies on television, its economic aspects, socio-cultural impact etc are very few and far between. Most of the books under the ‘Television Studies’ category are about the ‘content’ of television or about audience ‘reception’ rather about the institutional and economic structures that surround it.

In this context, K V Joseph’s book ‘Economics of Culture Industry: Television in India’ is most relevant, as it is an attempt to map the economic aspects of a culture industry like television in India. The book is structured around questions about television - as a media, industry and also, a cultural product. As a result, the analysis encompasses complex issues arising from engagements with various concepts in media technology, entertainment industry and marketing along with issues relating to its aesthetics and social good. Obviously, all these aspects deserve detailed analyses on their own, and hence the author is forced to compress a lot of historical and cultural-theoretical issues to fit into the economic arguments that form the central pivot of the study.

The book begins with an attempt at the definition of ‘culture industry’ followed by a short sketch about the growth of television as an industry. The next chapter is dedicated to a brief history of television in India, followed by chapters on the analysis of the product mix of television industry, marketing, labour market, the audience of television products, and artistic response to programmes. In the concluding part policy options in television industry are also examined.

What makes the book interesting and relevant is the fact that it takes a multidisciplinary approach to television. It freely delves into the works of cultural theorists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Raymond Williams etc on the one side, and attempts to employ their insights to illuminate the paradox that television is in its manifold existence as a means of entertainment, tool for education, potential equipment for indoctrination of various kinds, a peddler of advertisements, a political agenda-setter, and an obsessive sensationalist par excellence. This functional and economic multiplicity of television products themselves often makes discourses about them difficult and dense. But the author diligently wades his way through all this, to make a preliminary analysis of television and its history in India for the last three decades. In the process, he also attempts to examine the multilevel existence of the industry and dynamics of the relationships that ranges from cable operators who are the last mile service providers to the regional, national and global players.

In the course of analysis, the author also brings interesting information about the economics of television industry in Kerala as a case study, illustrated by the changing composition of programming through time. There are interesting observations about the conflicts between the forces of standardization and massification of programmes on the one hand and the pressures for innovativeness in programming due to competition.

Obviously one major challenge in writing about a topic like television is the tricky task of treading between economics and culture. In some occasions, the author is unable to resist making certain value judgments upon the ‘content’ of television, resorting to very moralistic remarks about it. Another problematic area is the suggestion about bringing the state to put controls on media in the form of censorship. There are several instances in history to show that in the war for media/public space, the state was no less oppressive than capital. Any public space like media is a site of conflict and negotiation between the three forces – the state, capital/market, and civil society. Some of the crucial areas that could have been explored are the role of Public Service Broadcasting and professional media bodies/NGOs in setting benchmarks with regard to content, and also in putting in place mechanisms of public accountability and transparency. Equally important is the role of visual media education that should form part of formal curriculum to create a population of discerning consumers of television products. Only through such systemic initiatives can one hope to democratize media space/practices and check the diabolic potentials of the State and Capital.

Economics Of Culture Industry - K V Joseph, Shipra Publications, 2010

The Art and Craft of Sound in Cinema

Review of SOUND IN MOVING PICTURES by T KRISHNANUNNI

Mathrubhumi Books, Calicut, Kerala, 2o10

C S Venkiteswaran

Very few books on cinema explore the art and craft of those who actually create the audiovisual experience that cinema is. As a result, the exciting and tenuous work of cinematographers, editors, sound directors, set/costume designers, effects specialists etc remain forever invisible and unheard.

T Krishnanunni’s fascinating book ‘Sound in Moving Pictures’ is a significant contribution to the field that gives a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the topic which also maps the professional and aesthetic dimensions of sound design and recording. Such a book coming from a professional like Krishnanunni, one of the most eminent sound designers in the country, who has won several state and national awards and has worked with illustrious filmmakers like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G Aravindan and Shaji N Karun, is a welcome sign. The book explains and explores the use of sound an exciting avenue of creativity and freedom in cinema, dwelling upon the various aural elements that complement, contrast and accentuate the visuals.

In a very simple and lucid language, the book deals with all the technical and aesthetic aspects of sound. In the first part it covers areas like recoding procedure, recording media, audio monitoring, mixing console, sound mixing, followed by a discussion on various audio elements in cinema like songs, dialogue, background music and sound effects. Chapters like ‘Sound in Malayalam cinema’ and ‘The Oscar for Rasul Pookkutty’ give a very personal touch to the book as it contextualizes the thrills and pains of sound design in the Indian context. It also draws upon personal experiences to illustrate relevant points and pays rich homage to predecessors and peers like P Devadas of and Vairam. The author also brings into the book a techno-historical dimension as the last decades witnessed the transformation from analogue to digital technology, a shift that had radical implications in the area of sound design.

Significantly, Krishnanunni entered the industry at a very exciting moment when Malayalam cinema was waking up to the technical and aesthetic nuances of sound as a vital element in cinema: “In 1980, when I joined Chitranjali Studio, I used to listen to Devadas and Adoorji conversing regarding the emotional relevance of a particular sound effect for a particular scene and I stood in amazement wondering what it was all about. That would have been the sound of a stone falling into water or that of a night bird calling or that of a particular type of bullock cart. Slowly such discussions became part of the filmmaking agenda for many Malayalam film makers.”

Also interesting are author’s observations about emerging challenges especially in the face of rampant urbanization. After describing the travails of recording sound effects in Kuttanad, which was marred by the blaring devotional songs and traffic of houseboats, he muses: “Will it be possible to record any sound effects in any location in Kerala after a few years? Where will we get those nice bird chirps, flowing river, streams, early morning ambience of a Kerala village etc .. That reminds one also of the importance of recording those sounds now and preserving them for the future.”

Like his art, Krishananunni’s approach to technology is very sharp and clear: “Whatever be the technology, whatever is the number of tracks, whatever be the directions sounds come from, ultimately what matters is how the sound track complements the visuals and how it enhances the artistic or aesthetic value of the film as a whole. ..Technology is only a tool. It is the way one utilizes it that matters.” (p 66-7)

What adds to its charm is the author’s ability to bring in historical, aesthetic and personal dimensions while dealing with a very technical topic like sound. The foreword by Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Preface by Shaji Karun help to put both the book and the author in perspective.