An auteur’s reflections on a great contemporary

Kasaravalli’s documentary on Adoor screened

Kannada film-maker Girish Kasaravalli.— Photo: S. Gopakumar

It’s not often that filmmakers train their lens on one from their tribe, more so towards a contemporary who is bracketed with themselves. Quite often, documentaries on legendary filmmakers come from the younger crop of directors or sometimes even from virtual unknowns. Kannada director Girish Kasaravalli’s new documentary on Adoor Gopalakrishnan is thus rather unique in that here you have two great contemporaries interacting with each other through a medium which they have enriched in their own different ways.

The documentary, Images/Reflections ( Bhimbh/Prathibhimbh ), was screened at the Press Club hall here on Saturday. It is not the kind of work which takes one through the filmmaker’s career in a Wikipedia-like chronology and bombards one with facts, factoids and myths. In Kasaravalli’s words, these are his reflections on Adoor’s images. It is a series of recollections and reflections which at times tries to look into where Adoor’s imageries originated, why they were so shaped and later on, how prescient he was in making those films back then.

Locations

The film is divided into episodes, much like Adoor’s later films. One of the fascinating sections is ‘Naalu Pennungal’, where four women, including his daughter and cousin, share insights on him. His daughter, for instance, tells us that he likes

Aparajito the most from Ray’s ‘Apu trilogy’, for it reminds of an image from his personal life, which he later uses in one of his own films.

Kasaravalli takes us back to some of the locations of his films, like Adoor’s ancestral house where Kathapurushan was shot. One sees Adoor walking up the stairs of that house and the frame promptly cutting to a scene from Kathapurushan where the young Meenakshi is seen at the top of the stairs, running to wake up Kunjunni. Shorn from the context of the films to which they belong to, the sequences when seen in the documentary acquire quite a different meaning.

Kasaravalli says that he would not have been interested in making a film on someone who has trodden the same path as his.

Differences

So, in the film, he touches upon those very differences, especially in the way Adoor composes a frame. “Adoor excludes things and keeps the frame minimalistic, whereas I include things in making the frame,” as he says.

It also explores the pace and open-endedness of Adoor’s films, which happens to be the political statement of a filmmaker who otherwise shies away from any overt