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Lights, Camera, Conversation — The prize is right

May 06, 2011 05:05 pm | Updated 05:05 pm IST

The recent announcement of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award indicates that honours do, sometimes, reach the right hands

Director K. Balachander. Photo: R. Ravindran

An award named after the father of Indian cinema has found its way to the father of modern Tamil cinema — if there's something called poetic justice, this is it. There were pioneers before K. Balachander — giants, after all, need the shoulders of other giants to reach for ever-increasing heights — but few of their films are relevant to the modern day. You could point to this film as the first to employ songs in a non-Carnatic music mould, or that one as the first to corral hundreds of extras for a dance sequence. Ever since the first Tamil movie was made, there have been a number of firsts, long before KB — as he's known — knew he wanted to make movies. But those films, today, are curios. They don't walk like us. They don't talk like us. They don't live like us, love like us. They exist as signposts on a long winding road, one we often take, with nostalgic and indulgent affection, to re-live the past — a real-life flashback.

Even KB's early films carry the whiff of mothballs. Arising from a Tamil cinema of rhetorical theatricality and anticipating the terseness of the Mani Ratnam era, films such as “Neerkumizhi”, “Major Chandrakanth” and “Thamarai Nenjam” are stranded in a limbo between stage and screen. But, they are watchable even today, and that's because of KB's peerless gift for attention-grabbing characterisation. This is why he is the father of modern Tamil cinema, because he crafted an astonishing range of characters who are still seen on screen today — as the libidinous inhabitants of Selvaraghavan's films, as the outcasts of Bala's movies, as the English-spouting urbanites from Gautham Vasudev Menon's cinema. KB was there first, if not quite with the depth and detail of these latter-day filmmakers, then certainly in grabbing a trowel and a bucket of gravel, and paving the path.

Again, this is not to say that no filmmaker before KB had a character speaking in English or that sex was a stranger or that MR Radha was not rendered an outcast in “Ratha Kanneer”. But, KB was the first Tamil director to consistently impart a signature to his films that comprised these elements (among others), and in this sense, he could be called Tamil cinema's first auteur. He is an auteur both in the authorial sense (a KB movie is uniquely his) and with respect to his vast oeuvre, tracking which it is possible to locate utterly personal concerns and obsessions. He was the first director of Tamil cinema to put himself up there on screen, a vital creative force whose consciousness spilled over into his stories.

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Many of his films centered on women, and were therefore tarred and feathered with that terrible sobriquet “sensitive” — as if masculinity has nothing to do with sensitivity — but their engine was a seething emotional violence whose gaze was entirely male. His films may have been about women, but they are certainly not feminist tracts so much as the stories of women as perceived by a man compulsively fascinated by them. KB's finest phase was the 1970s through the mid-1980s and he presided over a ‘golden age' that witnessed the arrival of Mahendran, Bharathiraja and Balu Mahendra. This is when Tamil cinema grew up, really, to encapsulate an ethos that could be classified as both ‘Tamil' as well as ‘cinema', and to contemporary eyes, the films of these filmmakers may be more accessible, more immediately exciting — but KB was the giant whose shoulders they stood on. He built the bridge between yesterday and tomorrow.

(Lights, Camera, Conversation... is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films)

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