The Hindu Business Line : Beyond the rat-trap

Adoor's patience, his ability to let time play its cards is a part of his style of working. And it has brought him worldwide acclaim, including the recent Dada Saheb Phalke award.

There is an air of serenity enveloping Adoor Gopalakrishnan's home in a suburb of Thiruvananthapuram. The faint swish of a broom as its sweeps away fallen leaves, the tinkle of chimes in the wind and the insistent cawing of a crow punctuate the quiet. I am early for my appointment with Adoor, so I watch as he patiently fields queries and requests from a television crew recording an interview.

This patience, the ability to let time play its cards is a part of his style of working. So an idea sometimes takes years to grow into a film. Similarly, an idea does not remain the same as it evolves into a script, a screenplay and ultimately a film, he explains. "It may get transformed a lot in that process. In my case I allow all my ideas this kind of organic growth."

From germination to fruition, ideas also have to keep this auteur excited. "I should feel that it is well worth doing. That is why my rate of rejection of ideas is very high," he explains. And while developing ideas into films, he allows them to be set a little in the past because then "you have a proper perception of things".

It is this perception of things that has brought worldwide acclaim his way, including, most recently, the Dada Saheb Phalke award. "In the beginning I thought maybe it's a bit early for me to receive this award because all the others who have received the award so far have been very senior people," Adoor remarks. Yet, he also points out that the award is important because it is recognition for the "so called non-mainstream cinema", the sort of cinema that does not lower itself to the lowest common denominator in terms of taste.

The catch, however, is that cinema can exist only with popular support and appreciation. So, for the filmmaker, it's a conflict between avoiding a compromise on what he believes in and providing the audience with real entertainment. "You want the audience, at the same time you are not making concessions to the audience," Adoor emphasises. "I personally value those people who hold on to the real things they believe in, in which they have absolute conviction," he adds.

For Adoor, a film is not about talking down to the audience, but engaging it in a conversation — as equals. But the challenge is that most audiences in India have been blunted by a diet of cinema that makes no demands on their intellect. Or as he puts it: "By convention, the audiences think that they don't have to think. This is the problem." The key, therefore, is to create films that tap into people's unconscious and the local ethos, making it possible for the audience to respond very naturally, he adds.

Over the past three decades, Adoor has made over 30 documentaries and nine feature films including his landmark first film, Swayamvaram, that brought him the National Film award and Elippathayam that won him an award from the British Film Institute.

His documentaries have mostly been on the performing arts of Kerala. "I enjoy making them because during my study and research on these projects I get to learn a lot... I get to know many more things about our life and culture," he explains. However, India does not yet have a culture of viewing a documentary as a film, as a source of entertainment, he points out. In India, documentaries have conventionally been made solely for information dissemination and education. This, perhaps, contributes to the erroneous belief that films and documentaries are two separate things, he adds.

Currently working on a documentary on Kerala's traditional dance form — Mohiniyattom — for a French company, Adoor says all his energy is focused on it. "Big or small, when I am doing one film, I don't think about the next," he adds.

Adoor is also convinced that language is not a constraint to appreciating films. "It's a very wrong notion, because it's not for the language that a film becomes popular in other parts of the country," he declares. Today, with sub-titles, a film can be shown anywhere. Indeed, in that sense, cinema is a universal language, he adds.

Commenting on the work of the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), of which he is Chairman, Adoor says it is a small effort towards sensitising a small audience that cares. Most of those who are commissioned to make films by PSBT are young filmmakers, often on their first film. PSBT gives them the creative freedom they require, he adds.

Those who make films need to have an attitude towards filmmaking — a clarity of purpose, he believes. And it is because most commercial films in India are made without conviction that they end up as box-office failures, he says. Today, commercial films are often a kichdi or mishmash of conflicting ideas, which audiences reject, he adds.

Hollywood, for instance, has been able to make very successful films by adopting a scientific approach backed by inventive techniques and good technology. And these trends are noted and studied, even by those who do not approve of the corporate style of filmmaking, he points out. However, much of India's commercial cinema has not learnt these lessons and "bear the stamp of imitation on their face", he adds with a wry smile.

Picture by C. Ratheesh Kumar

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