Thirty-seven years have passed since Bharathiraja showcased Sivaji Ganesan, Radha, Vadviukarasi and a host of other actors in Muthal Mariyathai. The 1985 hit, with a lilting folk music-tinged score by Ilaiyaraja, is often considered the best in Sivaji’s contemporary repertoire of roles as a leading man.
The ‘nadigar thilagam’ (pride of actors) plays Malaichami, a village head married to his shrewish cousin Ponnatha (Vadivukarasi). As the story progresses, he falls in love with Kuyil (Radha), a young boatwoman despite the yawning gap in their age. Woven into the backdrop are sub-plots that examine caste tensions, gender parity, romance and marital relations, besides crime and punishment.
Muthal Mariyathai is coming back to screens soon in a digitally remastered version, hoping to draw a new viewer base. “This is among those rare films where Sivaji ayya acts without acting. Its themes were far ahead of their time. ,” says Rama P Jeyakumar, who has bought the rights for the digital remastering from Bharathiraja, and has spent over two years getting it ready for Qube theatrical releases.
Diehard fan
Director Bharathiraja with Sivaji Ganesan. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Jeyakumar, an engineer at the Chennai Airport’s baggage scanning section, is an ardent Sivaji Ganesan fan. “He has been my matinee idol since I saw him play VO Chidambaram in the 1961 film Kappalottiya Tamizhan, because my grandfather worked for the shipping magnate. I was a young lad then. I am 62 now, and my admiration for Sivaji ayya has just grown stronger,” he says.
But the digital conversion was not an easy journey, admits Jeyakumar, who has ploughed in around ₹21 lakh into the process so far. “Though I bought the rights from Bharathiraja, he himself did not have the negatives of the film. We finally found a set of Muthal Mariyathai reels in a Tiruchi film distributor’s storage, which we had to purchase separately,” he says.
For the tech work, Jeyakumar roped in K Ramu, a Chennai-based specialist in film and video restoration, who has already digitally remastered Sivaji’s earlier movies like Karnan and Veerapandiya Kattabomman, among others..
Restoration tech
“Despite having a prolific film industry, very little has been done to archive the reels and negatives properly in Tamil Nadu. When theatres started switching over to digital technology in the state in the 1990s, studios simply shut down their storage of celluloid products. Many of the reels were thrown away or burned because nobody wanted to spend money on maintaining them in temperature-controlled premises,” says Ramu.
A veteran of over 300 movie projects, Ramu was among the first batch of technicians to be trained in the Austrian Diamant digital conversion software by post-production major Prasad VFX in 2006. “There are many more options available for colorising movies today, but for a professional result, one needs to work frame by frame. We cannot simply use the software for remastering, because it cannot differentiate between dust and detail. This is where manual artistry comes in. With at least 24 frames per second, we have to sit and compare 86,400 frames with the originals per hour to add the finer details. The grains in the old pictures, are the life of the movie,” says Ramu., who now runs his own restoration company (Film Vision) in Chennai.
Manual input
In the case of Muthal Mariyathai, Ramu spliced in sections from Beta tapes of the movie used by TV channels wherever several crucial scenes had gone missing in the reels, after stabilising their picture quality. “Today’s audience is far more tech-savvy than before. We have to give them a product to justify the ticket cost,” he says.
For the audio conversion, the mono-track was split into six and re-recorded to get a more natural sound. “We have to do it without changing the original ethos of the production. It has to fit into the visuals seamlessly,” he says.
Jeyakumar, who holds the Qube rights up to 2035, plans to release the remastered Muthal Mariyathai in mid-November this year to avoid clashing with big-ticket movies. It had a soft launch last month in Chennai’s Albert theatre, in the presence of Sivaji Ganesan’s sons Ramkumar and Prabhu, and some of the cast members. This was followed by an orientation talk in Tiruchi last week for the Sivaji Film Club. “I don’t think anyone other than Bharathiraja could have made Muthal Mariyathai. There’s a thin line between lust and love, and in this film, love is portrayed beautifully,” he says.
