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Indian Express
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Why Gen Z, with its Instagram doomscrolling and short attention spans, needs Guru Dutt
An almost still room, its shadows longer than its silences, its characters speaking with pauses that felt heavier than their words. Watching Guru Dutt's Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) felt like stepping back into that forgotten classroom of childhood. The one you only realise was serene once life outside had turned noisy and hurried. It wasn't just a film. It was a reminder of what cinema once used to be: Slow, searching, and unafraid of silence. A world where characters lived beyond the frame, where pauses revealed more than plot, and where thrill was found in the turning of a face, not the twist of a script. Growing up watching Malayalam cinema, I thought I had already seen the many shades of patience, silence, and unhurried observation. With the measured poise of Ramu Kariat in the '60s, the social ironies of Adoor and Aravindan in the '70s, the human warmth of Padmarajan and Bharathan in the '80s, the moral intricacies of Lohithadas in the '90s and the emotional worlds of Blessy in the 2000s, Malayalam cinema had taught me that cinema is not about rushing to the next beat. They taught me that pauses are not absences but presences, that silence is not emptiness but depth. Their grammar was silence, breath, gaze. And watching Guru Dutt for the first time healed many wounds caused by doomscrolling, with a grammar of cinema that was far more human. Today, the grammar of cinema is changing in ways both exciting and troubling. Yes, shorter attention spans demand tighter edits. Yes, social media has trained us to expect a high point every thirty seconds. A filmmaker cannot ignore this new rhythm entirely. But what happens when rhythm becomes frenzy, when scenes exist not to unfold but to explode? The cost is depth. Hindi cinema in particular seems trapped in its maniacal obsession with grandeur. Bigger sets, louder soundscapes, shinier stars. The kind of cinema where the camera swoops endlessly, yet the story goes nowhere. But what use is grandeur without gravity? What remains of Guru Dutt's spirit when his shadows are replaced by neon, his silences by noise? This is not to say the industry has forgotten entirely. There are still moments, rare, and hence precious, that remind us of cinema's older elegance. Take the intimacy of Vikramaditya Motwane's Lootera, where a leaf falling from a tree held more tension than most gunfights. Even in mainstream spaces, a filmmaker like Shoojit Sircar can gift us the quiet tenderness of October and the therapeutic Piku. Small salvations but loud victories. And yet, one cannot shake off the unease. The younger audience, myself included, has been trained to consume thrill as the dominant flavour. Even Malayalam cinema, which once trusted the slow burn, is now churning thrillers with assembly-line efficiency. And they sell because adrenaline rushes are bankable. But that surge does not push aside the calm and tranquil treatment it once valued. More business for thrillers does not mean less audience for others. Think of Kumbalangi Nights with its slow-burning family reconciliations, or Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, where Mammootty slips into dreamlike stillness. These films do not surrender to the tyranny of the 30-second high point. They trust the audience to wait, to watch, to feel. And the audience, remarkably, has responded. These films have travelled far beyond Kerala, winning not just awards but affection from viewers weary of noise. And that is the optimism worth holding on to. Because it means the audience still hungers for cinema that values detail over distraction. A sigh, a gesture, or a hesitant glance are not outdated. They are more radical now than ever. The promise lies in the fact that cinema is not consumed only by algorithms. A film, in 2025, can still be shared in whispers, recommended as an experience, not as a must-watch scene. And the challenge is not whether audiences can handle silence. The challenge is whether filmmakers dare to offer it. Guru Dutt dared. Padmarajan dared. Today, a handful of filmmakers still dare, whether in Mumbai or in Kochi. They still think good art is born when the artist dares to challenge the sensibilities of an audience. As a memory machine, cinema is a keeper of glances and gestures. The question is simple: Do we want to remember only spectacle, or also silence? The grammar is shifting, yes. But grammar is not destiny.
The Hindu
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
How Ramu Kariat's Chemmeen Helped Malayalam Cinema Reckon With Caste, Desire, and Class
Published : Jul 17, 2025 09:11 IST - 7 MINS READ This year marks the 60th anniversary of the making of Chemmeen (Shrimp), which may be said to have first brought Malayalam cinema to the notice of the rest of the country. The director of the film had a short but crowded and creative life: Ramu Kariat was born in 1928 and died in 1979, a life of only 51 years. Much water has flowed down Kerala's picturesque network of palm-lined canals since the making of Balan in 1937. The film was greeted with enthusiasm but, for one or more mysterious reasons, the Malayalam film industry refused to take off in the following decade or so. I use the word 'mysterious' because it was a time: the 1930s and the 1940s, when people in other filmmaking centres in the country were crazy about 'the moving image that also talked. Be that as it may, with due respect to the earliest pioneers of Malayalam cinema, it must be said that the first truly creative spirit on the scene was the maverick Ramu Kariat. Notwithstanding his penchant for combining commerce with art, Kariat set many an original trend, and inspired more than one young filmmaker to aspire for the out-of-the-ordinary. In 1952, Kariat directed Neelakuyil, which brought a touch of maturity and confidence to an industry that fought shy of so-called 'forbidden subjects'. Narrating the story of an affair between a schoolteacher and a so-called untouchable woman, the film caused many tongues to wag and imaginations to wander. As anyone conversant with the southern regional cinemas knows only too well, in matters of choice of subject, if not always in matters of treatment, Kariat anticipated a hundred other films, which were to follow in the four major languages of the South. For instance, many of the Young Turks of the Kannada 'New Wave' who made their reputation critiquing caste in varied manifestations, materialised years after someone like Kariat repeatedly entered the world of social taboos and the 'hazards' of intermingling between the so-called lower and upper castes, particularly Brahmins. Some 13 years after Neelakuyil, Kariat was to make a film that will always be used as a reference point in any serious evaluation of the growth and development of modern Malayalam cinema, which was till the other day the most important regional cinema in the country in terms of both artistry and social exploration. Also Read | New trails of discovery The film in question is Chemmeen, adapted with great visual energy from the legendary Thakazhi's moving odyssey of forbidden love. Marcus Bartley's camera contributed in no small measure to bringing home to viewers not just the tragedy of the doomed lovers, but also the deceptive nocturnal beauty of the long, foaming Kerala coastline, or the way of life by daylight of the fishing community. Added to this were Vayalar's lyrics, Salil Choudhury's music and Manna Dey's singing which, together, gave a soulful twist to the narrative; and last but not the least, the acting of Satyan, Sheela and Madhu. I have yet to come across a Malayalee, especially of my generation, who does not get carried away whilst recalling what Chemmeen did to him in his youth and even long after his salad days were over. Today, when I see Chemmeen in the quiet of my drawing room, I cannot fail to notice the high-pitched, improbable drama in many passages. Obviously, these were meant to move impressionable audiences and thereby do well at the box-office. But when I first saw the film in a south Calcutta theatre, Menoka by name, in the late '60s, surrounded by sobbing Malayalees and Tamilians, I remember having been moved in a strange sort of way. The life of struggle of the coastal fishing community, enacted on an almost epic scale by professionals endowed with rare gifts of expression, stirred one and all. But it was the tragedy of unrequited love that made the Sunday morning audience, living at least a thousand miles away from home, cry like children. The love of melodrama In a discussion of this sort, it is important to consider that every film deserves to be assessed in the backdrop in which it was made, or is made. I say this because sometimes I get to hear that Chemmeen was so successful because large sections of the viewing public love melodrama more than anything else. Truth be told, it betrays a lack of perspective to compare Chemmeen with, say, Kodiyettom or Oridhathu, or some other well-known films of more recent origin. The subjects are different, the treatment is different, the aesthetics or social discourses are different. The conditions in which Kariat and his contemporaries worked were vastly different from those in which Adoor, Aravindan, John, or K.G. George, who learnt much from Kariat, worked. In the days of Kariat, audiences were less developed in their understanding of the film medium than they are today; the film society movement as we know it today, did not exist then; most of the technical collaborators were self-taught, having learnt their craft (or 'trade', if one were not to question the haughtiness of some filmmakers privileged to attend film school); film equipment were often ancient and unpredictable; actors and actresses were in many cases professionals no doubt, but frequently given to tell-tale mannerisms and exaggerated, stylised rendition; and finally, familiar sources of official largesse, such as the National Film Development Corporation of India, Doordarshan or the state film-financing bodies, were to make their appearance years later. It is in this context that we must consider Chemmeen, which won the President's Gold Medal for best film for the year 1965, or Bimal Roy's Udayer Pathay, or Ritwik Ghatak's first film, Nagarik. We ought not to forget that the efflorescence of talent that we were to witness in the course of time in Kerala, Bengal or Mumbai had much to do with the exertions of the pioneers who did their kind of work in difficult conditions, only to set an example for those who followed. If, in certain years, Malayalam films are still seen filling the lion's share of slots in the Indian Panorama, one of the reasons for it is surely that the pioneers had stretched themselves so boldly in what were once the backwaters of Indian cinema. In time, Kariat's melodramatic treatment of individual traumas and collective aberrations paved the way for the arrival of such individualists as Adoor, Aravindan, John Abraham, K. G. George, Shaji Karun, P.A. Backer, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, and a host of others of varying artistic sensibility or political persuasion. Despite working in difficult conditions with equipment that could hardly be described as being sophisticated, Chemmeen extracted the highest of praise for its technical excellence in important international festivals such as Cannes or Chicago. At Cannes, Marcus Bartley was awarded the gold medal for best cinematography. If anything, achievements of this stature go to prove that there is no substitute for innate genius. While volumes have been written on the holy trinity of Adoor, Aravindan and John, joined in time by Shaji following the enormous success of Piravi, we should not be indifferent to the existence of a Malayalam middle-of-the-road cinema of considerable volume and some undeniable importance. This body of work was propped up by directors such as George, Bharathan, Padmarajan, Sethumadhavan and others. Many of their films may seem to have been made with an eye to box-office possibilities, but they were nonetheless characterised by able storytelling and an impressive grasp of the technical aspect of things. Also Read | Aravindan at 90: A legacy outside the market At this point, a story George told this writer many years ago in Delhi following a screening of, arguably, his most important film, Kolangal, is worth mentioning here if for no other reason than that it has a bearing on his own un-uniform career graph, qualitatively speaking. Soon after graduating from the Film & Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, his head buzzing with film theory, film aesthetics and classroom lectures on varied modes of storytelling, George went into independent filmmaking. But after the failure of his earliest ventures, chiefly because of the public's refusal to accept the terms and idioms of the new kind of cinema, George found it tough going. Thereupon, he decided once and for all to combine as little commerce as he could with as much art as possible and joined Ramu Kariat as an assistant. Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics. For several decades now, he has pursued New Malayalam Cinema with great devotion.
