For someone who had called the shots during the early days for film awards and who was at the centre of many a storm for the stern positions he took at the time, an award instituted in memory of a doyen should be a fitting recognition.
Thottam Rajasekharan, the former director of Public Relations, would receive such a recognition when he receives the award for the best work on cinema, instituted to commemorate Kozhikodan, celebrated yesteryear film critic, here on Friday.
Mr. Rajasekharan, author of several books, gets the award for his magnum opus ‘Cinema: Kalayum Jeevithavum' which gives a sprawling view of the world of cinema from across the globe. The book that runs into 723 pages in crown size with hard cover is a virtual encyclopaedia of world cinema written singlehandedly. The book, which focusses on the art of cinema and the narrative style of each filmmaker, covers as many as 3,000 films and over 1,000 filmmakers. It is a work that took shape over five decades.
The book takes a panoramic sweep of the early masters such as Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Eisenstein, moves into the world of the New Wave, flashes by Hollywood, and goes deep into the cinema of nearly two dozen nations. All this is topped by a detailed, often subjective, evaluation of the different strands in Indian cinema.
Mr. Rajasekharan's approach to cinema is one moulded on the sensibility of an era gone by, but he makes up for this with the massive volume of information that he packs into his book.
