It was just another weekday in August in just another theatre of Madras in 1992. Roja , Mani Ratnam’s first collaboration with A.R. Rahman, had released to packed houses. The audience rushed in to fill the seats in this most inelegant of theatres and the film’s opening credits started to roll. One name followed the other in a list that made up the director’s regular team. And then appeared Santosh Sivan’s name as cinematographer. The shuffle and noise stopped. Loud cheers and deafening whistles filled the hall.
This was arguably the first time a cinematographer had received such a welcome in mainstream cinema. The fact that it happened in star-crazy Tamil Nadu, and for an art form as technical as cinematography, made it nothing short of a miracle.
Twenty-five years on, Roja ’s images have endured. And like the film’s iconic music, Roja ’s cinematography heralded a movement of its own. “Cinematography, until then, was considered an invisible art form,” says K. Hariharan, national award-winning film director and professor of film studies. “The less noticeable, the better the cinematography. But Mani Ratnam was a mainstream filmmaker who believed in the craft of filmmaking. And he wanted his craft to be noticed, even by the lay man. It wasn’t just the storytelling that mattered to him, the aesthetics did too.”
As loud as words
Cinematographers, naturally, became co-creators of Ratnam’s films. It also became common for a cinematographer’s best work to be reserved for Ratnam. “ Roja was the best-looking Indian film I’d watched until then,” says Ravi Varman, the cinematographer of films such as Jagga Jasoos , Barfi and Ratnam’s recent Kaatru Veliyidai . “But as an aspiring cameraman, what affected me was the way these beautiful images were used. Back then, it was the norm for most films to rely solely on dialogues to move the narrative. But Roja was different. Its visuals spoke as loudly as its dialogues.”
In choosing to not repeat what was considered conventional, the team invented techniques of its own. Santosh Sivan recalls a specific demand from Ratnam for the visuals of Roja ’s tiny South Indian village. “Mani wanted the fields to look greener than in a Bharathiraja film. It was impossible to get that colour because we were shooting in the wrong season. So I just painted my reflectors green and pointed them towards the fields.”
These hacks extended to scenes set indoors as well. Back then, filmmakers waited for sunrise and sunset to capture that ‘golden hour’ light. “But all we did was use a series of mirrors to reflect sunlight inwards.”
Though a similar visual quality and meaningful use of images were commonplace in Ratnam’s earlier films, there was one thing that set Roja apart — the fact that its popularity was nationwide. “ Roja changed the perception of South Indian films in the North,” says Ravi Varman. “For the average Hindi film viewer, South Indian films were either the arty fare of Adoor or Aravindan, or the pot-boilers that Jeetendra would remake. With Roja , the audience discovered that relatable films were being made down south too. It ended the North-South divide, so to speak.”
The film’s visuals played an integral role in bridging this divide. “We were used to seeing Kashmir in Hindi cinema since Kashmir Ki Kali (1964), but there was a freshness to how it was shown in Roja ,” says Hariharan.
Just like an ad film
He describes the film as ‘picture perfect’. “Every frame was composed and shot so meticulously that it had attained the perfection of an advertisement. The film released in 1992, just when our markets had opened up to MNCs and cable television. Our audiences had quickly got used to the images of these new expensive advertisements and Roja was the rare film that could match that quality. In a sense, the positive response to Roja ’s visuals was a response to the aesthetics of the consumerist Indian.”
A still from Roja (1992)
The film’s nationwide success set off another kind of movement as well. The demand for cameramen from the South soared, and Bollywood blockbusters soon featured names such as P.C. Sreeram, K.V. Anand, Ravi K. Chandran, Santosh Thundiyil, C.K. Muraleedharan, Rajeev Ravi, and Natty. All this, while Bollywood was considered impregnable for Southern actors even of the stature of Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan.
Beauty within budget
Until Roja , Hindi films, thanks to their bigger budgets, could afford to emulate the cinematography of Hollywood. “But cameramen from the South never had that option,” recalls Varman. “Having worked with smaller budgets and its many constraints, our survival was linked to developing our own aesthetic sense and style.”
Completed in under 60 days, Roja managed to produce timeless images in a fraction of the budget and technology available today. “The only thing that was cutting edge about Roja was the use of hot air balloons to shoot ‘Choti Si Asha’,” Sivan laughs.
He wrought changes in other ways too. Roja ’s opening sequence, for instance, is set in the Himalayas, with the Army capturing some terrorists. “We could easily have opened with a beautiful static frame of snow-capped mountains to establish the location,” says Sivan. “But we didn’t. Instead, we chose to wait until half the film was over. The audiences see snow only when Roja herself sees it.”
The easy access to technology today has come at the cost of a certain kind of innocence, Sivan rues. “Even if we shoot the purest of visuals, the audience will dismiss it as “graphics”.
A fan of Subrato Mitra, the cinematographer notes how Mitra’s images have remained timeless even with the advent of colour, 70mm, IMAX and 3D. “ Roja too had some of that timeless quality. It recorded how light behaves across the entire length of the country. It is a film that could accommodate the tenderness of a young girl’s eyelashes as well as the ferocity of a machine gun. It’s a yin yang thing.”
All this, Sivan says, are lessons he picked up during his stint as a teacher in Arunachal Pradesh. “Good cinematography can be the image of a lone tree set atop a hill during sunset. Great cinematography is showing the same tree but getting you to see its roots as well.”
