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Indian Express
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Opinion A boat in the mist: The quiet eloquence of Shaji N Karun's films
Some filmmakers tell stories. Some chase moments. And then there was Shaji N Karun, who listened to the world breathe, and shaped cinema out of that deep silence. You didn't watch Karun's movies the way you watch most Malayalam movies. You lived inside it, like walking through a memory you couldn't quite name. A father endlessly looking for his son. A Kathakali artist slipping between roles and realities. A mother holding on to the air because there's nothing else left to hold. In his movies, time slowed down. For Karun, cinema was never about commanding attention. It was about tending to absences: What remains unsaid, what remains unseen. His characters didn't just perform their emotions; they bore them, carrying them like secret injuries. And in doing so, they let us glimpse something raw and rare: The texture of endurance itself. Before he became a director, Karun was one of Indian cinema's finest cinematographers. He learned early that sometimes a shaft of light across a wooden floor could say more than a hundred lines of dialogue. Working alongside masters like G Aravindan and M T Vasudevan Nair in films like Thampu, Kummatty and Manju, he found a way of looking at the world that was both tender and unflinching. In his lens, rivers, mist, sea and human faces didn't just decorate the story. They became the story. Each shot felt composed with the patience of an oil painting, where a scene was not just captured, but contemplated. He used the camera like a patient hand tracing the textures of a world already full of stories. Light, colour, and silence were not accessories in his films. Sometimes a still glance, a waiting corridor, or the hush before a ritual had the whole weight of the themes handled. By the time he made his own films, the instinct to find emotion inside the image had deepened into something unmistakably his own. His movies were meditations on loss, longing, and the brittle dignity of survival. In an industry where loudness often passes for emotion, Shaji N Karun gave us something infinitely harder to capture: A cinema of listening. Shaped by forces deeper than plot, Karun's movies become elemental. Loss, exile and the ache of unrealised dreams aren't just themes. They're the water his characters swim in. Piravi (1988), for instance, begins with a father, played by Premji, searching for his missing son. But what lingers isn't just the search. It is the way hope itself begins to decay, quietly, like fruit left out too long. In Swaham (1994), a mother fights against the indifference of the world with nothing but the stubbornness of her own love. Vanaprastham (1999) collapses the distance between art and life, mask and man, until everything becomes unbearable and beautiful at once. It also captures the core of Mohanlal's flexibility, bringing out one of Indian cinema's most intense performances. And Kutty Srank (2009) blends the mythic storytelling with a distinctly local sensibility, the rugged landscapes of the sea and forest becoming extensions of Mammootty 's title character. There is always a performance at the heart of his films, from the characters themselves, struggling to hold together some dignity in a world that threatens to unmake them. Grief in these films is not loud. It settles, heavy and wordless, across your chest, because Karun offered something very few filmmakers dare to: A mirror to our wounded selves. It is tempting to place Karun neatly alongside the other giants of Malayalam parallel cinema — Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Aravindan and John Abraham. But he arrived when their art had already opened the door. He walked through it carrying grief, separation and silence and a camera that knew how to wait. Where Adoor examined social structures and Aravindan conjured riddles, Karun stayed with something more fragile: The emotional residue of living. This sensibility gave him a global voice. Piravi earned him a Caméra d'Or mention at Cannes. Swaham was in the running for the Palme d'Or. Vanaprastham was selected in the Un Certain Regard section. But even as the world recognised him, Karun never became part of the noise. He stayed close to the ground, close to Kerala's soil, to its myths and music, its silences and losses. His films feel like they're happening somewhere close by, just beyond the next door. This isn't a curtain call. Karun's cinema was never meant to conclude, only to echo. His frames will stay alive in the quiet corners of our minds, like embers that never quite die out. Somewhere, a boat still drifts through mist. Somewhere, a silence still holds a story. And years from now, someone will definitely stumble upon one of his films and feel, without knowing why, a lump in their throat.
New Indian Express
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Shaji N Karun: A framer of stories who minted magic from world of reality
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The setting is quite in keeping with the dim-lit, aesthetic and poignant frames that To filmmaker and film archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Shaji was the mentor he could call up for any advice. Their familiarity dates back to Dungarpur's student days at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). The bond deepened when Dungarpur shot Celluloid Man, a documentary on veteran archivist P K Nair. 'It was my first interaction,' says Dungarpur, who went on to restore two of the movies Shaji worked on as a cinematographer — Kummatty and Thampu. 'Both those movies bore his stamp so much that I would say Aravindan's brilliance as a director shone forth due to Shaji's camera work. The films lived in his frames; they spoke the story emphatically,' he notes. But, what he would miss the most is Shaji's guidance, the way he was hand-held during a workshop on film preservation that he organised last November. Dungarpur wants to explore ways to preserve Piravi, Shaji's directorial debut that bagged several awards. The film's originals are lost but Shaji himself has spoken of copies preserved at the Fukoka Archives in Japan. 'We need to look into it,' says Dungarpur, excusing himself to mourn his friend and mentor. For Girish Kasaravalli, his recollections of Shaji are from their student days at FTII, where Shaji was one year his senior. 'His room at the hostel was next to mine and every morning, I would go to him for coffee powder. We became good friends. He was respected even then for his aesthetics. Later, they got translated into mesmerising frames that have defined cinematography in India. Plots came alive in his frames that spoke the theme of movies — brilliantly and silently,' he observes. 'I began admiring him as a director too, after watching Piravi. It showed his full calibre,' Kasaravalli says. The Kannada veteran met a 'fragile' and 'frail' Shaji at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) last December. 'Malayalam cinema owes a lot to him,' Kasaravalli notes. Music composer Sreevalsan J Menon, who worked on two of Shaji's movies — Swapaanam and his final directorial venture Olu — feels the filmmaker had aesthetics that were way different from others. For his friends and associates, Shaji will always remain a pleasant memory; his demise an irreplaceable loss. But they take comfort in the certainty that his legacy will live on.
The Hindu
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Shaji N. Karun, creator of everlasting images, passes away
Prolific is a word one would not associate with film-maker and cinematographer Shaji N. Karun, who passed away in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday at the age of 73, after a prolonged battle with cancer. Over the five decades that he was active in cinema, he has made only six films and done cinematography for close to 30 films. But, almost every time he cranked the camera, everlasting images were born, deeply moving stories were told and the films won accolades on the world stage. In G. Aravindan's Kanchana Sita (1977), one of his first major works as a cinematographer, he had to make the images speak, for the characters had hardly any lines to utter. It was the beginning of a fruitful partnership, which reached its pinnacle in Kummatty (1979), in which Shaji evocatively captured the innocence of childhood and village life in rich colour palettes. A recent restoration of Kummatty by the Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, a programme created by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, became a testimony of the timelessness of those images. Aravindan's Esthappan (1979) also had some of his magical images. With K.G. George Most of his best works as a cinematographer were in the independent and middle of the road cinema that elevated Malayalam cinema in the 1980s. He also forged a memorable partnership with K.G. George, especially in capturing the complicated bridge collapse sequence in Panchavadippalam (1984) and in portraying the film industry's dark underbelly in Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback (1983). Shaji shot M.T. Vasudevan Nair's Panchagni and Padmarajan's Koodevide as well as Arappatta Kettiya Gramathil, along with Venu. Darkness of 'Piravi' After over a decade as a cinematographer, he made his directorial debut with Piravi (1988), a moving portrayal of the real life story of a father's search for his son whom the police detained illegally and later murdered during the Emergency. Although the filmmaker later denied the connection to the real life story of engineering student Rajan, the film is still counted among the best cinematic portrayals of the Emergency. Piravi became a landmark for Malayalam as well as Indian cinema, winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes and the Silver Leopard Award at the Locarno International Film Festival. Steeped in sorrow A deep sense of sorrow ran as a common theme through most of his films. Swaham (1994), his second film, had a mother and sister grieving for the loss of a young man, who goes for military recruitment to save the family from poverty. The film was chosen for the Palme d'Or competition at the Cannes Film Festival 1994. Shaji scored a hat-trick at Cannes when Vanaprastham (1999) was chosen to compete in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. He inspired Mohanlal to bring out one of his greatest performances, as the backward caste Kathakali artist whose art is pushed into darker territories, forced by trials he faced in life. The National Award-winning Kutty Srank (2010) turned into an interesting experiment with multiple narratives about a dead man, set against the colourful background of Chavittu Nadakam. His later works Swapaanam (2013) and Oolu (2018) did not quite manage to touch the heights attained by his first four films. As important as his achievements as a filmmaker and cinematographer are his contributions as an institution builder for the Malayalam film industry. Along with film critic V.K. Joseph, he prepared the draft model for the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy in the late 1998, the first such government initiative in any State in India. He helmed the Academy during its initial years, when he also played a key role in the organising of the first few editions of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). At the time of passing away, he had been helming the Kerala State Film Development Corporation for six years. The stint was marred by controversy after he faced criticism for the way he handled the government's project to promote films by women filmmakers and those from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. His last public appearance was to receive the J.C .Daniel Award, the Kerala government's honour for lifelong contributions to cinema, two weeks ago in the capital. In a way, it was a fitting finale for a life dedicated to cinema.
