I want to die a filmmaker: Resul Pookutty

Resul Pookutty says silence is not the absence of sound, "it is something I arrive at."

CHENNAI: TAMIL NADU: 13/11/2017: Indian film sound designer Resul Pookutty t an interview to The Hindu Cinema Plus in Chennai. Photo: V. Ganesan.

Silence, to Resul Pookutty, is not the absence of sound. “It is something I arrive at,” says the Oscar-winner sound designer. He was speaking on ‘The aesthetics of sound in cinema’ on Day 2 of the Animation Masters Summit organised by the Toonz Media Group at Technopark on Saturday.

There should be sound to experience silence, Mr. Pookutty said. Silence was the landscape where sound could be sculpted and then sometimes removed so that the landscape could again be seen, he said.

'Part of space-time continuum'

Explaining the importance of sound, he said cinema was part of a space-time continuum , and if a movie image was the space one saw, the sound one heard decided the time factor. Everything that one experienced in a film — be it birds or sky or day or night or seasons — was determined through sound.

Sound had the ability to give meaning to a movie image, to take the audience inside the picture. This experience of the meaning was immersive in nature, courtesy the technology in use, he said. Mr. Pookutty, a proponent of sync sound recording, said various elements were used to control the emotions of the audiences. One was to record the actors’ performances on location using sync sound. Another was to build a parallel narrative with sound. Layers and layers of ambient sound were used to place people in various spaces. Sound was also used to create an experience of emotion that went in concurrence with the narrative graph.

Asked about the trade-off between art and market, he said in the Indian tradition, the pursuit of art was to find oneself. Market had always dictated, but at the same time allowed him to find new technologies and expressions. So, he did not believe art and business were at loggerheads. Scandinavian countries were the only ones that supported the art market by heavily taxing liquor and casinos. The Kerala government could also follow the model, he said.

He said he owed a lot to the Western countries for method and technical knowledge, but his aesthetics were Indian. “I will never leave India as working here has given me everything.” Technology, he said, was a tool, a language, to achieve oneness of mind, to create a work that transcended time. On the education of sound designers, he said cinema was a language and no sound school teaching how to operate a software or learn an operating system could give the right training. students were being robbed by the schools. So he was thinking of a tie-up and of designing his own curriculum for budding sound engineers. About his future plans, he said he was trying to make a film of his own for the past three years. The eighth draft of the script was ready, but each time he was caught up in some interesting project or the other. “I want to die a filmmaker.”