[ Co-authored by Darshana Sreedhar and Vinu Abraham, this originally appeared in the Sarai Reader No 9: Projections. Darshana Sreedhar is a PhD scholar at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her work focuses on the history of Malayalam cinema. Vinu Abraham, journalist, novelist and scenarist, is better known for his novel Nashtanayika, the fictionlised biography of PK Rosy, which formed the basis for Kamal's Celluloid (2013 ). ]
I have always been interested in this theme of survival, the meaning of which is not to be added on to living and dying. It is originary: life is living on, life is survival [la vie est survie]. To survive in the usual sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
- Jacques Derrida, “Learning to Live Finally”, p. 26
In his last interview to Le Monde, given two months before his death in 2004 and later published as “Learning to Live Finally”, Derrida ruminates on survival, which for him straddles two nodes. One entails a vivacious desire to explore life in all its fullness, unscathed by an imminent death looming large. The other is the possibility of a life after death, experienced like a silhouette, awaiting its turn to be recalled to the present. This ‘return’ is facilitated not only by the desire to re-live the past, but also to pepper the present with a melancholic nostalgia, something which could trigger past memories back to the present. The spectral presence of what was earlier a dim memory becomes the constitutive feature of the present, upsetting the easy progression of time by proposing that time is simultaneously haunted by past and future. This spectral nature of the past haunts Malayalam cinema as well and, over the last five years, has prompted the production of four films that employ a similar thematic to look nostalgically back at the lost lives and narratives of the silver screen. This trend becomes instrumental in re-projecting and bringing to the limelight moments relegated to the trashcan of history by pumping new energy into the process of memorialising. This return of the ‘revenants’ of Malayalam cinema has a disquieting quality to it as it is driven by an obsessive and repetitive momentum.
The cluster of films we examine here are Vellaripravinthe Changathi ( The Friend of the White Dove, Akku Akbar, 2011 ), Naayika (The Heroine, Jayaraj, 2011), Thirakatha (The Script, Ranjith, 2008) and Celluloid (Kamal, 2013). All four films take on a ‘retro’ mode right from the pre-production phase, interspersing fact and fiction with memory and loss. We approach this cluster of films from two perspectives. The first examines how the ‘disappeared’ figures and forgotten events of Malayalam cinema are brought back to the realm of visibility by being part of film narratives and publicity posters. Alongside this, we focus on the role of the ‘creative film historian’ employed by these films in their retro-journey into the past of Malayalam cinema; this figure, we reckon, can mediate “discursive stratifications and ephemeral formations” (Miller, n.d.) to produce new discourses.
Narrative Exorcism: Recalling the Spectres of the Past.
To be haunted by a ghost is to remember what one has never lived in the present, to remember what in essence, has never had the form of presence. Film is ‘phantomachia’… the future belongs to ghosts.
- Derrida, Stiegler et al. (2002)
The use of retrospective orbits to answer the call to remembrance given by the spectres of the past is a prominent device used in all these films. In Thirakatha, we see Akbar, a film director, in search of Malavika, an actress of yesteryears, whose disappearance from both onscreen and off-screen life was a sensational story in the 1980s. On the other hand, Naayika takes on the narrative of Aleena, a documentary filmmaker, to trace the sudden disappearance of Grace, who ruled the silver screen in the 1960s and 70s. In both these films, there seems to be a constant interplay between pre-production publicity, which clearly and vocally assigns a referent to the storyline, and post-release controversy, undergirding the filmmaker’s reluctance to subscribe to the earlier positions. In most cases, the imaginary referent becomes the ghost figure haunting the lives of not just one, but many, both onscreen and off-screen, thereby flattening all attempts to identify the real source behind the story.
Thirakatha ( 2008 )
For instance, Thirakatha, publicised widely as a tribute to the late actress Sreevidya, became in a short time an “unpleasant controversy” and gave rise to much speculation and misgiving. Ranjith, the film’s director, writer and co-producer, had to convene a press conference in Kozhikode to clarify that the film was not a real story fictionalised, but was intended in homage to many actresses of times gone by who vanished from the vellithira (limelight) as they found themselves caught in the interstices of a hero-centric production industry. On a closer look at Thirakatha’s pre-production phase, however, we have a different narrative altogether. More than the ‘tribute’ Ranjith claims his film to be, there were allegations of his tarnishing the memory of Sreevidya, whose life was marked by a series of tragic happenings. From the publicity posters showing Priyamani (the film’s lead actress) alongside Sreevidya, with the text, “For the heavenly beauty, who has loved cinema and left us midway”, to the strategic use of an opening slide before the credits to foreground Sreevidya as the film’s inspiration, there were instances mobilised in the narrative to connect the ‘real’ and ‘reel’ lives.
{ Publicity poster for Thirakatha showing Sreevidhya on the left and Priyamani on the right. The text above the main title loosely translates as “For the heavenly beauty, who has loved cinema and left us midway” }
The tumultuous butshort-lived romance between Sreevidya and co-actor Kamal Hasan became the cornerstone for weaving the narrative into a ‘pastiche’, liberally borrowing from the gossip columns familiarto film viewers. The inter-textual references to film texts were such that it brought a vibrant community of online bloggers to open up the interpretative possibilities which the film offered when read alongside the off-screen references. In the words of a blogger who uses ‘Vids’ as his/her user name, the viewing experience of Thirakatha was tantamount to a guess game, putting the viewers on toe, right from the first shot. Events, sequences, people whom we have seen or known appear in a glimpse, vanishing from the frame within seconds, so fast that even an avid film buff finds it impossible to draw the connections. This can be seen, for instance, in the use of Mohanlal’s mannerisms in the character played by Anoop Menon, and in the naming of his debut film as Kazhinja Manjukalattu [The Last Winter], which closely resembles the title of Mohanlal’s debut film, Manjil Virinja Pookal [Flowers that Blossomed in the Mist] – all part of the popular memory associated with the 80s.
Mohanlal debuts in Manjil Virinja Pookal (1980)
Another webpage exploring similar questions was Old Malayalam Cinema, where the respondents stressed through the comments thread the need to memorialise ‘forgotten’ moments, conjoining it to the dominant narratives. What actually triggered the ‘controversy’ was Ranjith’s revealing that he had first conceived the film’s plot after a visit Kamal Hasan paid Sreevidya during her battle with terminal breast cancer. Ranjith was quoted as saying, “When Srividya was ill, she wasn’t willing to meet anyone from the film industry. The first thought of Thirakkatha came to me when I heard of her one-hour meeting with Kamal” (ibid.). This instance from real life seeped into the film narrative as well. A statement from Ranjith, who is believed to have had access to Sreevidya’s personal documents, on her influence on the film was taken as a tacit admission to his role as a ‘retriever of lost narratives’ and of the film as the culmination of such an endeavour. Ranjith even appears in the film as Aby Kuruvila, an associate director whose old letters and diary entries become the lead for Akbar to trace Malavika’s life. But more than Aby, who appears in just five scenes, it seems more likely that Ranjith is taking on the persona of Akbar, the successful director in search of a convincing script, as a last ditch effort to give the spirit its due.
Naayika (2011)
The next film under consideration, Naayika, takes the retro-journey to a new level. Starring Sarada, one of Malayalam cinema’s nityaharita naayikas (evergreen heroines), and promoting the film as her return to the screen after a career break, Naayika is projected in its pre-production publicity as a tribute to silver screen actresses of yore. This is seen not only in the interviews given by Jayaraj and Deedi Damodaran, the film’s director and scriptwriter respectively, but also in the opening credits, which feature photographs of movie heroines from the 1960s onwards, accompanied by an evocative soundtrack from films of that era. Ms. Damodaran was quoted as saying that “none of the reel women [of today] seem to have anything to do with real women… Naayika will be a woman of flesh and blood, not the novel woman who inhabits our films”, while Jayaraj said, “The efforts have been to bring back the memories of those old times in the minds of the viewers”. In a way, it seems as if there lurks behind such statements a desire to delve into the past of Malayalam cinema in search of a ‘real’ person who will vouch for the imagination associated with the female lead. But here too, off-screen and onscreen lives coalesce as past, memory and nostalgia are mobilised as markers to revisit times gone by. The most prominent instance worth mentioning is the incorporation in the narrative of the events leading to the suicide of the 1970s actress, Vijayashree. In the course of filming her last production, Ponnapuram Kotta (Kunchacko, 1973), there was a sequence captured that showed Vijayashree’s dress falling off, partially revealing her bare body. The subsequent appearance of this scene in the film appalled her and is widely believed to have been the prime reason for her suicide.
The trailer of Naayika ( 2011 )
What Naayika gets at, through scattered references throughout, is to hint at the real life figures allegedly behind Vijayashree’s tragic end. There were even rumours that the film’s director, Kunchacko, had had a role in her death, with the film going so far as to suggest that he murdered her. Avoiding any direct reference to Kunchacko, the film instead brings forgotten narratives back to the limelight by recreating Vijayashree’s wardrobe malfunction with a cast selected for its physical resemblance to the real people involved. In the film, the character of Stephen, the producer of a movie named Kunnathoor Kotta (a word play on Vijayashree’s ill-fated last film), is played by an actor who resembles Navodaya Appachan, a film producer and brother of Kunchacko. While Appachan’s Navodaya Studio features as Greenland Studio in the narrative, the most crucial part of the narrative is constructed by mobilising another event from the recent past – Appachan’s receiving the J.C. Daniel Award, the lifetime achievement felicitation instituted by the Government of Kerala for outstanding contribution to Malayalam cinema.
{ Publicity poster for Naayika with Padmapriya and Jayaram in the foreground. Padmapriya plays the role of a young Sharada in the film while a picture of Sharada in the present, looms large in the background. The visual style of the poster emulates the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the 1960s.}
If in real life Navodaya Appachan was the recipient of the award in 2010, the film narrative in a knee-jerk response shows Stephen being arrested from the venue of the award ceremony when his role in the death of Vani (Vijayashree’s filmic equivalent) is brought to light. If in real life the perpetrators of Vijayashree’s death went scot-free, redemption is made possible in the film narrative by deflecting the loss into Stephen’s being made to reckon with the gruesome murder he was responsible for. The broader framework within which Naayika places itself is, in a way, a continuation of the quest for the lost heroine inaugurated by Thirakatha, thus making the revisiting of the past a running thread. We see the ‘lost figure’ conjured up as if she is guided into the present moment and has let herself be led in the process of retrieving forgotten stories.
Celluloid (2013)
The same quest for the ‘lost heroine’ links the earlier two films with Celluloid, a biopic on J.C. Daniel, director of the first Malayalam film, Vigathakumaran (The Lost Boy, 1930). Celluloid brings before us the lost narrative of Vigathakumaran and also the forgotten life of its lead actress, P.K. Rosy. Turning away from the mythology-related themes on which early cinema in other parts of the country thrived, Vigathakumaran was rooted in social reality. For
{Publicity still from Celluloid. The picture on the placard on the left shows the poster of the original film in front of a set made to look like the entrance of the old Capitol Cinema. The poster has the title of the film in Malayalam and the English translation along with the name of the director in Malayalam. In the foreground, actor Prithiviraj as J.C. Daniel.}
Daniel, who had donned the role of producer, director, script writer, editor and lead actor for the film, it was a crucial venture, a do-or-die situation, one that could either win him accolades or sink him into oblivion. Sadly, it was the latter that transpired. The Thiruvananthapuram audience that thronged the Capitol Theatre on 23 October 1930, the day of the film’s opening, had been drawn by the publicity posters that claimed to have, for the first time, a woman on screen. The mostly orthodox Hindu audience, however, was outraged at the sight of Rosy – in real life, a Dalit Christian convert – in the role of the film’s female protagonist, a Nair. The film was instantly mired in controversy, triggering off a series of disruptions that affected the professional and personal lives of all involved. Daniel had to single-handedly bear the film’s financial losses, leaving him in utter penury; later, his application for a government pension for indigent artists was rejected point blank. The post-Independence linguistic reorganisation of states had its part to play here: the black-and-white rules of bureaucracy could not accommodate someone born in what was now deemed Tamil Nadu as a ‘Keralite’, notwithstanding the fact that he had spent more than 50 years of his life in the part of the country now called Kerala. For Rosy, too, Vigathakumaran changed the trajectory of her life to a point of no return. Disowned by her community and under the double ostracism of caste and gender, she fled her hometown, Thiruvananthapuram, to take refuge in a remote part of Nagercoil in present-day Tamil Nadu, where she remained under the alias ‘Rajamma’ until she died. Inadvertently, the film’s title, Vigatakumaran (The Lost Boy), became thus an evocative marker for a string of losses – Daniel’s financial loss, the loss of Rosy’s narrative in public memory and the subsequent ‘loss’ also of the film’s print. If the depiction of the hero (Daniel) kissing a flower in Rosy’s hair was what started the uproar, Vigathakumaran strangely inherited the same fate as its protagonist. The pelted stones that destroyed the Capitol’s screen were not just a rupture but a catalyst that initiated debates as to what would constitute a Malayalam film and who would qualify as a Malayali.
Director Kamal on Celluloid’s conception.
The pre-production phase of this film had its genesis in its director, Kamal’s, futile efforts to find the lost print and negative of Vigathakumaran, and to track down someone who had seen the film. With the films discussed here so far, we have referents upon which the storyline can constantly draw; Rosy’s story, however, is marked by a complicated absence of any such. How would one trace the life of Rosy when she lived in anonymity after her debut, not leaving any traces, even in photographs? These questions drive the narrative of Celluloid and were the core engine of its pre-production machinery as well. The film’s script, in fact, is based on Vinu Abraham’s 2008 novel, Nashtanaayika, a speculative, fictional account of what might have happened to Rosy – but speculation is all that remains. Indeed, her story, and those of J.C. Daniel and Vigathakumaran, would otherwise have been consigned to oblivion but for the determined efforts of Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan, a film historian specialising in early cinema, who crusaded to bring to notice the government’s apathy and mindless inaction towards Daniel’s plea and the orchestrated silence around what was the first Malayalam film.
After decades of effort, a nod of acknowledgement for Vigathakumaran finally came, with the Kerala state government attempting amends by instituting the previously mentioned lifetime achievement award in Daniel’s name in 1992.
The Trailer of Celluloid(2013)
It is between the ‘losses’ of these two figures of Malayalam film history that another important figure emerges – that of the ‘creative film historian’. In fact, this appears as a recurrent trope in all four films here discussed, not just Celluloid, wherein the use of the ‘film within- a-film’ format and the figure of the ‘film historian’ together reassemble the film medium to trigger dormant memories. If, as Derrida says, “the future belongs to ghosts”, then the past possesses the present. These films are indeed instances of historical exorcism through narrative, and the creative film historian appears, in our analysis, as the medium via which this act of chronological transcendence manifests.
Tracking ‘Lost Narratives’: The Creative Film Historian as Exorcist.
Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan
In these films, the figure of the creative film historian becomes proactive in unearthing lost threads once thought ‘irretrievable’. With a deft handling of past and present, and a selective deployment of strands from both, even to the point of speculatively working his way out, the ‘creative film historian’ acts as a facilitator to salvage and re-project the lost fragmentary archives to the present. By flaking off the ‘dead skin’ of the past, he penetrates to the flesh of an earlier temporality and reinstates the impulse to retrieve the connection between two moments separated in time. Individual recollections here evoke forgotten moments which then get re crafted into cultural scripts or templates. Here film as a medium itself acts as a ‘time machine’, retrieving fragments from the past to build an alternative archive. Such an archive can withstand the demands of ‘factual’ appropriateness and logical coherence and bring to light the contradictory impulses it contains. This template of ‘loss’ (lost narratives, figures, objects) and ‘search’ (for the long tradition of Malayalam cinema) seems to be a strong influence, governing both the diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds of these films. It seems as if these films push for the need to place Malayalam cinema as an ‘organic entity’ which has ‘matured’ long enough to be nostalgic about its own past. Just like a clock that suddenly begins to tick after months of hanging silent on the wall, the past comes gushing in, validating a “persistence of a present past” (Derrida and Stiegler 1996) as the historian retrieves the lost data from the contingencies of life.
Celluloid does not limit its concerns to J.C. Daniel and Rosy, but uses their story as a peg to trace the trajectory of Malayalam cinema to the early 2000s. Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan’s quest for the lost history of Vigathakumaran becomes the backdrop for the narrative to explore the journey Malayalam cinema underwent from the 1930s onwards. It was Gopalakrishnan who was instrumental in Vigathakumaran being recognised as the first Malayalam film, an argument he advanced in his biography of Daniel, J.C. Danielinthe Jeevithakatha (The life story of J.C. Daniel). His claims were at first heavily contested; Balan (1938), the first Malayalam talkie, was previously held to be the originary point for Malayalam film history, as per the dominant accounts on cinema. The appearance of Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan as a fictive character in Celluloid is an instance carefully calibrated to accommodate the seepage of present into past. While Malayalam cinema is projected to be reckoning with such an influx in productive ways, the production of Celluloid is shown as an instance which carries the spirit of such an endeavour. Another instance of such a move is presented towards the end of the film when we see simulated shots of the documentary filmmaker R. Gopalakrishnan (in real life, the maker of an award-winning film on the life of J.C. Daniel) being facilitated in the presence of past and present directors and producers. Both R. Gopalakrishnan and the ensemble audience are played by their real-life personas. In our analysis, this ensemble is created in order to illustrate how far Malayalam cinema has moved from Daniel’s disrupted exhibition at the Capitol theatre.
Sreenivasan as Chelangattu Gopalakrishnan in Celluloid (2013)
In the film, Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan becomes the ‘creative historian’ invested with the task of conjuring apparitions from the past to enter the present. Unlike the fictionalising of the narrative seen in Naayika and Thirakatha, the use of the referent figure in Celluloid is distinct. This is primarily because Chelangatt’s association with the ‘lost film’ (Vigathakumaran) in real life was a fairly well-known fact, and the narrative mobilises this to move beyond the fictionalising of real events, on which the other two films rely heavily. Even as this becomes striking, it somewhere blunts the radical potential wielded by the figure of the creative historian, who here is forcefully asked to become an alibi for ‘authenticity’ and ‘facticity’. Promoted as Kamal’s offering to Malayalam cinema in his silver jubilee year as a film director, it successfully withstands the temptations of being clubbed into a period film, all the while doubling up as a peep-hole to take a glance at the present moment.
Vellaripravinthe Changathi (2011)
Vellaripravinthe Changathi, the last film that we focus on, brings to light the 1960s film era through the lost reel of a fictional unreleased film (also the title of the film) retrieved by, the ‘creative historian’ Manikunju from the isolated quarters of the Chennai-based Gemini Lab, which houses old film reels that are yet to be destroyed. It is telling that this quarter of the Lab is informally referred to as the pretalayam or ‘ghost house’.
The Trailer of Vellaripravinthe Changathi ( 2011 )
Therefore, in discovering the lost film reel, what is recovered is not just ‘celluloid’. Rather, alongside it, the muffled voices and unrealised dreams of those who were part of the production of the film are also exorcised from the deep caverns of amnesia and anonymity. As Manikunju watches the unreleased film (made by his father, Augustine Joseph) in the preview theatre, one among the many reels in the ghost house waiting to be re-called back to life, he embarks on a journey to find the film’s lead cast who enacted the roles of Ravi and Sulekha, lovers doomed to separation.
As in the other three films, real life incidents become part of the film narrative here as well. Ravi’s broad daylight murder of Sulekha, a sensational case which took place in Calicut in the 1970s, is woven into the narrative of the film-within-the-film quite dexterously. The shot of Ravi holding Sulekha’s lifeless body and weeping helplessly is an image mobilised to conjoin the past with the present moments. There is a redemptive potential inherent in the discovery of the lost reel as the final shot of the film shows Shajahan and Mary Varghese (in the lost film, the actors who play Ravi and Sulekha, enacted in real life by Dileep and Kavya Madhavan) brought together after years of separation. Here the present is mobilised into the narrative as an uninvited guest whose entry is so stark that it cannot be missed. The contemporary moment becomes the ghost that watches us, someone by whom we feel ourselves being observed or surveyed.
{Publicity poster for Vellapravinthe Changathi with actor Indrajit, seen in the background handling film reel. Indrajit plays the role of Manikunju in the film – the character that retrieves the fictitious lost film of the title.}
Aleena’s unfinished project on the ‘lost heroines’ of Malayalam cinema in Naayika is a trace which haunts our writing as well. This project is intended as a creative exercise to look at what happens when the present slips into a historical past. Does it also bring one to revisit the crystallised memory, where remnants of what has been forcefully weeded away could return? Memory seems to be in a state of permanent evolution. Even while it is unconscious of its successive deformation and is vulnerable to manipulations and appropriations, it is also susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. It thus nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic. Maybe the search for the lost heroine, nashtanaayika, is caught somewhere in between.
Notes.
1 See “Ranjith Finally Confesses the Truth”, in One India Entertainment, 9 September 2008. Available
at: http://entertainment.oneindia.in/malayalam/news/2008/thirakkatha-ranjith-controversy-190908.html (last accessed 16 November 2012).
2 See “Thirakatha: Some Questions” (2008). Available at: http://srijithv.com/blog/thirakkatha
3 See http://oldmalayalamcinema.wordpress.com/
4 See Saraswathy Nagarajan, “Writing Change”, The Hindu, 17 December 2010. Available at: http://
www.thehindu.com/arts/cinema/article958726.ece . Also, “Urvasi
Sarada is Back as Naayika”, Rediff Movies, 28 June 2011. Available at: http://www.rediff.com/movies/report/urvashi-sarada-is-back-as-nayika/20110628.htm
5 Bindu Menon’s work on Rosy’s life also looks back at the disappeared heroine and is one of the few
attempts at retrieving the lost narrative of Rosy. “Chronicles of a Disappearance: P.K. Rosy and
Contemporary Malayalam Cinema”. Paper presented at ASA conference held at JNU in 2012. http://
www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2012/panels.php5?PanelID=1203
References.
• Abraham, Vinu. Nashtanaayika (Current Books, Thrissur, 2008).
• Derrida, Jacques. “Learning to Live Finally”. Available at: http://www.studiovisit.net/SV.Derrida.pdf
(last accessed 12 December 2012).
• ———————————-. Spectres of Marx, (trans.) Peggy Kamuf (Routledge, 1994, New York), p. 118.
• Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, (trans.)
Jennifer Bajorek (Polity Press, 2002, Cambridge).
• Miller, Nchamah. “Hauntology and History in Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx”. Availalbe at: http://
http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/taller/miller_100304.pdf .
• Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”. Available at: http://www.
history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/201/articles/89NoraLieuxIntroRepresentations.pdf