It’s almost like watching Vinod Kambli gut-wrenching over boyhood friend Sachin Tendulkar. The world of Malayalam cinema has been agog for a few weeks now with the soap opera of its only Dadasaheb Phalke award winner, the well-known auteur Adoor Gopalakrishnan, choosing to question the artistic and cinematic merits of the work of his former buddy G. Aravindan, considered by film scholars like Chidanand Dasgupta to be “the Shakespeare of Indian cinema”. Aravindan has been dead and gone for almost 20 years now and this retrospective pooh-poohing of the man’s work and worth has compelled an anguished Malayali intelligentsia to speak up for the departed filmmaker.
Jayachandran Nair, editor of the respected current affairs weekly Samakalika Malayalam and self-confessed Aravindan loyalist, exclaims, “You need to be enormously ignorant to claim that Aravindan’s films have no value...and that is what Adoor seems to be publicly confessing about himself.”
The history of contemporary world cinema has had, at each of its significant moments, confrontation and dialogue between two contesting ideas of filmmaking. From the dialectical sparring over montage between Eisenstein and Pudovkin in early Russian cinema to that over gesture and ritual between Rossellini and Pasolini in Italian cinema or the one on structure and meaning between Godard and Bresson in French cinema, to our own squabbles over the dramatic-realist and the melodramatic modes between Ray and Ghatak, cinematic progress has ever needed such rows.
Unfortunately, in India, such creative ‘arguments’ narrowed down post-1970s to a standoff between those who went to film school and those who didn’t. In Malayalam cinema, in particular, this was to emerge as a frequent sore point. Adoor claims to be the voice of a band of filmmakers and technicians from Kerala who graduated from the Pune film institute. Adoor has been dismissive in the past about people who imagine they can just up and make a film. He has emphasised that the medium requires study, involvement, theory and method, and that those who follow the ‘spontaneous’ school of filmmaking are mere dabblers.
The present controversy broke with an innocuous news report in the Mathrubhumi daily in December. It said that in a programme called Thuranna Manassode (With an Open Heart) on DD Malayalam the previous day, Adoor, while conversing with prominent journalist R. Ajithkumar, had dismissed Aravindan’s films as being of little value. Adoor was quick to issue a denial. But the damage had been done. The rather volatile camps that had formed around the two filmmakers in the 1980s regrouped.
The Aravindan camp was the first to retaliate through a long piece by Jayachandran Nair in the January 19 edition of his weekly, in which he not only passionately defended Aravindan’s cinema, but said that Adoor’s dismissal of his achievements was churlish, born of deep-seated jealousy and abusive of Aravindan’s memory. Compared to Aravindan’s inspiring poetics, Adoor, he said, was but a pedantic craftsman.
The following issue carried Adoor’s rejoinder: “I have already denied in the press of ever having said any such thing” (about Aravindan’s films having no value). The magazine was prepared for this. The next week it reproduced the unedited transcript of Adoor’s original interview to the channel. It was out in the open. In this interview, Adoor admits to his early friendship with Aravindan and to a cooling of relations later. The noted writer M. Govindan called them over for a patch-up, he recalls. Aravindan said a few uncharitable things, upon which Adoor retorted, “You might be my friend but I can’t respect you as a filmmaker.” Aravindan held a full-time job and made films in between, availing of ‘earned leave’. But cinema, Adoor argues, is not a casual thing. And he does say in the interview: “I don’t see his films having any value or worth.”
Writer and former editor of Mathrubhumi Publications, O.K. Johnny, says: “What’s the point of denying something everyone has seen you do live on TV? Adoor’s denial is a big lie, as proved by the full transcript. We hope he does not meet the same fate (of ending up irrelevant) as the character Unnikunju in his film Elipathayam (The Rat Trap).”
Adoor’s opinionated comments do serve a purpose, though. They draw our attention to the pathetic absence of critical discourse in our cinema, made more ironic by the fact that this October Kerala is planning a major festival to commemorate Aravindan’s 75th birth anniversary. We realise—with a start—that we don’t even have an accepted critical evaluation of his work.
