Writing

Fading Realities: The Films of Rafeeq Ellias

At a time where opening any app leads you to a ten-second reel of an interesting place, person, culture, or cuisine, Ellias’ films seem to have also fallen under the wheel of an algorithmically constituted digital modernity where content creators dare not linger on a moment beyond a tightly prescribed limit. His films are usually accomplished by an intimate familiarity with their subject and an unspoken appeal to the audience to spend more time with such subjects. While the new mode of content production might have brought so many more people, cultures, languages, and things to mass audiences than we could ever know what to do with, Ellias’ filmmaking reminds us that it is always worthwhile to scratch beneath the surface.

Running Away and Hiding: B.V. Karanth at the Movies

B.V. Karanth’s legacy can be read in a pretty straightforward manner: upon graduating from the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi, he set up a roving theatre group named Benaka and dabbled in the emerging parallel cinema movement. He went on to translate Girish Karnad’s play Tughlaq (1964) into Urdu, despite a tenuous grasp of the language—Karanth’s expertise lay in Hindi and the various languages of the Dakshina Kannada region, be it Tulu, Konkani, or Kannada. He later became the director of his alma mater, taking students to the countryside to acquire various folk traditions by osmosis. Following an infamous stint at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal that led to a media scandal, he finally retreated back to Karnataka to set up Rangayana, a repertory in Mysore, where he lived a pretty discreet life until his demise in 2002.

Furtive Naivete: Seeing Udupi Hotels Like Stig Toft Madsen

In an obscure corner of YouTube lies Stig Toft Madsen’s channel, with its three videos clocking no more than 3000 views cumulatively. In 1991, the year India declared its unambiguous participation in the neoliberal global market economy, Madsen had descended to South India to research Udupi hotels. As an institution with its roots at the end of the colonial era, it has endured well into our times. Shot on a rudimentary camcorder and edited in the now-defunct Reflections Studio in erstwhile Bangalore, the footage is refreshingly amateur. With a rotating cast of cameramen for the three disparate locations—erstwhile Madras, Bangalore and Udupi—the directorial authority fell with Madsen himself.

Kathapurushan: The Story of a State

Gopalakrishnan also conveys an uneasy alliance between the products of colonial administration and the secular labour market that replaced a system premised on the inherited access, not ownership, to land and the profession of one’s forebears. The police force is at constant loggerheads with Kunjunni, breaking down his printing press in a stunning montage sequence and intentionally delaying his visit to his mother’s funeral. Gopalakrishnan’s politics, or liberalism, is not the garden variety, corporatised do-gooderism we have seen and grown accustomed to. It is truly made of sterner stuff and films like Kathapurushan leave one with more questions that the filmmaker will most likely never answer.

Kathai Thiraikathai Vasanam Iyakkam: Parthiban’s Idea of Tamil Cinema

R. Parthiban’s education in cinema began in the single screens of Madras, present-day Chennai, where he would often go for multiple shows of strange and obscure films in various languages. In an eye-opening interview with Baradwaj Rangan, Parthiban spoke of some of these films, their unique qualities and how they nonetheless flopped at the box office. Parthiban also outlined his desire to “cut his teeth” in cinema by assisting either the auteur-actor K. Bhagyaraj, known for his utterly distinct style and great comedic instincts, or K. Viswanath, who had the unique ability to imbue blockbusters with social messages. Parthiban eventually landed under Bhagyaraj’s guidance, learning the rather tricky art of being an auteur-actor, the technical aspects of filmmaking, and the importance of dialogue, a critical feature of Tamil cinema.

Selar Sabu of Mysore: Revisiting the Elephant Boy

Mysore-born actor Selar Sabu’s foray into Hollywood represented a phase of primitivist oriental obsessions. Born in 1924 on the banks of the Kabini river into a family of mahouts of the erstwhile Mysore kingdom, Sabu arrived in the West on the same figurative ship that brought stories of Tarzan and King Kong. While in the West, Sabu starred in adventure films like The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and The Jungle Book (1942), both directed by Hungarian-born filmmaker Zoltan Korda; Arabian Nights (1942); White Savage (1943); and Cobra Woman (1944). "Sabu Dastagir", as he was often credited in films, caught the attention of British filmmaker Michael Powell, who said there was a “grace” about him and cast him in the Powell and Pressburger classic Black Narcissus (1947). Sabu also served in the Second World War and married Marilyn Cooper, a little-known actress, settling for a quiet suburban life in the San Fernando Valley in California before his sudden demise due to cardiac complications at the age of 39.

Ethnonationalist Impulses: Shankar Nag and the Cinema of Karnataka

While most of these actors get their fair share of real estate on the many autos that ply in Bengaluru city, Shankar Nag’s presence diminishes most other displays of fandom among the city’s working class. It leads one to wonder how a Konkani-speaking Brahmin born in the coastal town of Honnavar—which, as another native writer and playwright Vivek Shanbhag noted, has closer ties to Mumbai than Bengaluru in terms of economic dependence—came to be the predominant visage one sees on Bengaluru autos?

From Majestic to Gandhinagar: The Slow Decline of Bengaluru’s Kannada Film Industry

One can walk around the area now renamed as Gandhinagar in Bengaluru and find no trace of any of these single-screen cinema halls that once dictated the fortunes of films released across the four dominant industries and languages of South India in Bengaluru. Earlier, a cinema hall named Majestic lent its name to the central transport hub of the city as well as its surrounding residential neighbourhoods, and what remains now in the theatre’s place is an empty plot. Majestic was also to Sandalwood—the centre of cinematic production for the regional Kannada film industry—what the neighbourhood of Vadapalani in Chennai is to Kollywood. This past is easily evidenced, much like an industrial ghost town, in the scattered presence of abandoned studios, distribution offices, poster printers and post-production studios. In the digital era, Gandhinagar rents out video equipment to all manner of independent directors, vloggers and short-film crews at all hours of the night, a service advertised in local dailies.