WHO is he?
Kerala-born film and theatre director, screenwriter and music composer
who made over 15 feature-length fictional and documentary works during
the seventies and the eighties. Aravindan was a noted cartoonist before
his foray into theatre and cinema. Chidambaram (1985) fetched him the National Award for Best Feature Film.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Aravindan’s films certainly have a leftist political bent, but they do
not trade philosophical curiosity for ideological commitment or formal
experimentation for polemics. He is more often than not content with
playing the detached but astute observer — no doubt a satirist trait
that harks back to his cartoonist days — chronicling the foibles and
fallibility of the people he depicts. Some of the major themes in his
body of work are the construction and perpetuation of myths in a
society, the persistence of the spiritual and the magical in everyday
life and the transformative power of class guilt.
Style
Aravindan was a singular Indian filmmaker in how he was almost alone in
working entirely in the poetic mode. The best of Aravindan’s cinema is
free from the theatrical tradition of performance and mise en scene and
the literary tradition of narrative and character psychology. These
films rightly reinforce the idea of film as a medium of surfaces by
emphasising the physical and material aspects of the world we see rather
than its ethereal and idealist dimensions. Aravindan’s career as a
cartoonist had a deep influence in his visual sensibility, with his flat
and balanced compositions, regularly set against the horizon.
WHY is he of interest?
To classify him as a member of the relatively dogmatic Parallel Cinema —
as has been widely the case — is in itself a disservice to the
philosophical and aesthetic foundation of his cinema. Arguably the
greatest filmmaker the country has produced, Aravindan made films that
opened the doors to unexplored expanses of the filmic medium — doors
that, rather unfortunately, have rarely been used since.
WHERE to discover him?
Esthappan (1980) is presented as a series of testimonies —
reverential and derogatory — by the members of a fisherman community
about the eponymous, mysterious wanderer and his alleged supernatural
powers. A magnificent embodiment of Marx’s theory of religion, Esthappan is
a work that is at once prophetic and atheistic, an intelligent portrait
that both understands the economic roots of religion and yet refuses to
reduce to a convenient theory.
Courtesy- http://www.thehindu.com
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