Months ago, while watching what was in effect a docu-hagiography about a prominent literary icon in Malayalam and wondering about its structure, I was enlightened by a little voice that piped up from a few rows behind. “Nyoosh” (news), it said. On screen, the literary icon appeared and began to talk. A few minutes later, the little voice trilled again, “Parshyam” (commercial). And lo! The icon dissolved, followed by what looked exactly like a commercial, a sequence of visual tricks, visual hallelujah to the wisdom of the revered sage. The little voice thus revealed to me that the structural rhythm of the docu-hagiography was effective precisely through its prayer-like repetitiveness; it also alerted me to the fact that it was extraordinarily similar that to the visual strategy of television (Truth-dream-Truth-dream…), which again is perhaps vital to its sway over viewers.

I, however, also knew from lived experience that unlike the owner of the little voice, four-year-old Anpu, who still lives in the blissful world of childhood from where he can safely proclaim aloud the Emperor’s nakedness, I, as a woman newly enfranchised in the world of Malayalee high culture, will have to be more wary. Especially because of this: unlike the Malayalam literary public which has been democratized to a considerable degree, the Malayalam cinema-public is still dominated by male homoaesthetic circles. Indeed, my later experience of speaking about this docu-hagiography did reveal my misgivings to be real; the extent of male hubris aroused by my (decidedly innocuous if critical) comments on this docu-hagiography was striking.

The same sense of self-preservation that I had ignored then rose up again after I viewed Chitrasutram at IFFK last December. Post the screening it was raining opinions, and some real nasty ones at that. The movie is a con, some said. No, it is a path-breaker, others insisted. And these opinions fell thick, flying at each other like missiles bent on mutual annihilation. The hostility towards the film was such that it was on the verge of the pathological. None of the defenders I met were able to articulate clearly about why it deserved a better reception. The critics, however, broke into commonplace babble (when they were not outright dismissive) when asked about their objections. In such an atmosphere, writing about the experience of viewing the film would have been quite an exertion. The distance of time, however, makes me bolder.

As usual, I found myself in neither camp. I both liked and disliked the film; it fascinated me even as I disagreed with it. It did not act upon me the way I wanted it to. I have always liked cinema that moves me deep down, that leaves me like freshly-ploughed earth ready to receive the seed. This film did not do that to me – it held me at a distance, forcing me to be alert to each frame. But strangely enough, this distance did produce a peculiar pleasure, of being in control. I have always positioned myself as a viewer with limited exposure in the cinema-public, and do believe that sharpening one’s sensitivity to the visual text – remaining open to it – requires that one must subject oneself to exercises in self-reflexivity. Therefore these comments carry no weight of knowledge and its authority. And they are offered in the spirit of critical friendship, in the hope that one may get past both blind rage and blind devotion.

To start with, I think I understand why many viewers who were not outright hostile – and who, I believe – constituted the large majority in the screening at IFFK – said that they could not make sense of the film. This may not really because the film is non-narrative. Indeed, as I will argue later, the film does have a central narrative, and it reveals its presence at the very beginning. I think that this has rather to do with the fact that short story on which the film is based is located within a very specific slice of time in our recent history,  now solidly in the past. I remember reading Nandakumar’s fascinating story in the late 1990s or soon after. I do not remember the exact year, but certainly the brilliant inter-mapping of (the worlds of) abhichaaram (black magic) and cyberworlds caught my imagination instantly. In those days, this was possible, I feel, because cyberworlds were not so readily within my reach; I set up my email for the first time in 2000 and had only occasional access. Both these worlds seemed to mirror each other in a tantalizing way – both were distant from the normal and the entrenched, seemed to hold mysterious subversive possibilities. Watching the film with this memory in mind was important, I feel. Very many there however had not read the story and even those who had were not mindful of the specificities of its time. About a decade later, cyberworlds do not seem mysterious or excessively subversive at all; we know a great deal about their subversive possibilities but also about the limits of these. In other words, the almost magical subversiveness attributed to the cyberworld in much of postmodern theory of the late 20th century does not hold now. The inter-mapping so successful in the story in an earlier time perhaps could not be achieved in the same way now – many viewers, therefore, saw no point at all in it.

But I do not understand how some felt that the film had no narrative. Indeed, my major discomfort while viewing the film was precisely that there was a narrative, often an overweening presence, throughout. And I felt that it echoed too closely the familiar narratives of literary modernism in Malayalam despite its explicit commitment to get beyond. That is, despite the many postmodern resonances of the film. Here I think I share the skepticism expressed by many feminists about the liberatory claims of postmodernist strains that attempt to deploy the signifier of Woman ostensibly against phallocentrism; I do think such efforts very often reproduce exclusions rather than get beyond them. The central character echoed too closely, I thought, the alienated hero of literary modernism. He is defined by his alienation from the many systems that constitute his lifeworld and by his close identification with rebel paternal/patriarchal figures of alienation. The dynamics of gender in the film, I felt, resonated closely with familiar models from literary modernism: I did not feel that . There is the familiar fascination for the archetypical feminine (and of course the disembodied female voice) coupled with neglect of or even contempt for, the living female body. Therefore the male actor gets to act; the female actor gets to pose (not that posing is easy). The alienation of the male character is with reference to both external and internal worlds – the market and the family, while that of the female character is with reference to the world of intimate relationships, with the father and lover. (If I remember right, this is a deviation from the short story). She is also strikingly wounded, unlike the man. In any case, the tragic end of the love affair between Hari and ‘Ramani’ seemed to me like a disavowal of the very possibility of the subversion of gender attributed to cyberspace. Indeed, I think I could sense the ‘package’ that often comes along with literary modernism in several key moments of the narrative, the one that consists of misogyny, necrophilia, homophobia and elitism. I felt that this narrative was central enough to the visual text, powerful enough at times to completely blunt its effort to complicate entrenched binaries (for example, gender, in the sequence in which the male character cross-dresses), returning inexorably to male-female.

The struggle with gender and more obliquely, caste, has been central to my everyday life, and therefore for me, reading or viewing standard sorts of literary modernism has often been a very disturbing experience. Yet I enjoyed the film immensely. Perhaps this is what is most important about it: even as you know that the narrative is unfolding in a familiar way and drawing you in, the visual experience of the film pulls you in an entirely different and liberating direction. Fifteen minutes into the film, I told myself that I must forget the narrative and allow myself to be seduced by the utterly fascinating decentred cinematography. In fact, the film is best viewed slowly, like a visual installation or a series of visual installations, so that one may ruminate upon each frame.  The film keeps you painfully awake because you have to negotiate between a familiar, entrenched narrative, and cinematography that incessantly challenges entrenched viewing habits. Not that this emphasis on the visual is entirely new. Aravindan, one would remember, was a master of such seduction – in his work, one often forgot the narrative, totally seduced by the visual and the music, longing to turn the narrative back to stay with them. In Chitrasutram too, at many moments, I longed to linger on and play with Shehnad’s brilliant images (many of these kept me guessing where the centre of the frame was, or whether there was indeed a centre at all), not wanting to follow the inevitable flow of the narrative.

Indeed, I have experienced this earlier in director Vipin Vijay’s earlier work which insistently deploys the visual in challenging ways. It is not that I think he has been entirely effective. Rather, I do think his critics are not sufficiently sensitive enough to the enormity of the task he has set for himself. The visual language of Kanchanaseetha was essentially one shaped by the theme of gender peace which reverses binaries while continuing to rely upon them. While I agree that this shaping, even today, is a novel and immensely exciting process to watch, Vipin tries to allow a different world, that of cyborgs, one in which binaries are simply unavailable, to shape his visual language. Whether he is successful or not is a question that should be asked, but the difficulty of the task should not be ignored. Whatever be its degree of success I do feel that the film met its target to some extent (perhaps not to the extent I’d like), judging from the peculiarly incoherent yet desperate words produced in reaction to the film. Such words are produced precisely because the visual experience of the film unsettles at least to some extent the comfortable binaries in which our everyday worlds are ensconced (but without really getting beyond patriarchy). That is, while the echoes of patriarchal and elitist modernism do shape the film significantly, there is a way in which the visual language attempts to decentre, which clashes with the former. I can well imagine another movie, a Prithviraj-starrer, perhaps, with the same short story as reference point, which employs a familiar  treatment and ‘normal’ visual language; this, I feel confident to say, will not arouse the demons that populate the Malayalee bourgeois unconscious.

Besides, Kanchanaseetha had the advantage of being based on a play with significantly dramatic moments; it was able to emancipate itself from the narrative of the play while fully exploiting the latter. Chitrasutram enjoys no such advantage, being based on a text that is significantly non-dramatic. Hence the greater sense of strangeness, non-familiarity, of its visual language. There are of course moments in the film in which it succumbs to a certain verbosity (which left one wishing that the dialogues were non-existent), but others in which the visual comes into its own powerfully, and besides, the effort is significant in itself. (I remember Kanchanaseetha here precisely because it had also elicited many hostile reactions about its treatment and the visual language as an immediate reaction).
Lastly, I suppose that future reflections on the film will focus not just on the text but also on the reactions that it produces. And maybe it is better to be remembered thus. That is, as an entity capable of producing responses in others; this is powerful evidence for it being a living text. This I feel is a much better fate, much better than being consigned to history as a frozen bit of commonplace, as just another snoring noise in the seemingly endless slumber of the Malayalee bourgeoisie.

CREDITS
Cast: Athira, Raghoothaman, Sandeep Chatterjee, Gopalan, Smitha, Debapriya, Aadarsh
Story: M. Nandakumar
Editing: Debkamal Ganguly
Cinematography: Shahnad Jalal
Sound Design: Subhadeep Sengupta
Sound Mixing: Ajith M. George
Production Design: Rajesh Karthy
Art Décor: Sanchayan Ghosh
Producers: Altaf Mazid, Zabeen Ahmed, Susanta Roy
Script and Direction: Vipin Vijay
Produced by: Unknown Films
Duration: 104 Minutes
Format: 35mm, colour, 1: 1.85 aspect ratio / 2010, Malayalam (Subtitled in English).