(from TK Harindran's Movie)
Images stand free yet are not frozen. They are called
painterly or photographic images. Mental images can be frozen and still but as
mind does not stand still they always show the possibility of a motional
picture. Images that do not stand still or frozen are called cinematic images.
And interestingly a moving image always anticipates a moment of stillness; a
chance to be frozen beyond all its intrinsic nature to move. Today, we have
mechanical devices that could freeze a moving image and technology has also
developed devices that could move frozen images. In both there is a sense of
logic defying anxiety and for a creative person this anxiety is always a part
of his/her creativity. Hence a moving image stopped in motion abruptly
resulting into an awkward stillness engenders a new reality often beyond the
conception of a logical mind. It defies at once form and objectivity; it
dissolves shapes and colours. The real (image) changes into a sort of unreal or
surreal. Same is the possibility when a still image is forced into action; the
mechanical intervention functions against the image and the human mind that
often likes to see still as stillness for deeper perception and contemplation.
Stillness is that human minds always seeking for but it is the same that evades
its perpetual pursuit.
(artist and filmmaker TK Harindran)
When a still image is made to move without challenging its
stillness but let it float and flow through time and merge it with other images
without resorting to montages, it leaves a small lacunae between the two
images, unperceivable and intangible yet unavoidable. Technological precision perhaps
could diminish the gap between the merging of one still image and the emergence
of the other without juxtapositions but still it exists asking for the viewer
to delve into it and to ask what lies between them and what makes them appear without
conflicts or a seeming continuity without disruption. This is not just in the
case of an image going into another one, asserting its progression or
underlining a painful transition from one moment to another or a much awaited
escape into another frame but it happens between two words uttered with or
without the intention to make sense; like a gap between a kiss and the parting
of lips. It is as tender as well as terrifying like two disparate words making
a bearable or unbearable meaning. When we fail to see these minutest gaps we
live with a sense of security; for us the world remains the same as the scenes
before our eyes remain the same. We do not notice how one scene becomes
another. Terror changes nor just the physical landscape, it changes the mental
scape too.
(from Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera)
When TK Harindran, the artist who has been doing art for the
last thirty five years make a ‘movie’ titled ‘’Bay Image Now Part I’, I feel he
does nothing but capturing this ‘terror’ that hides between two still images.
It need not necessarily be terror always; it could be tenderness, it could be a
resolution, a parting and a rejection. Through these evolves history and as an
artist Harindran takes notice of this transition; this silent whispering
between two images. Harindran travels from the bay of Arabian Sea to the Bay of
Bengal and captures the images of his liking with his analogue camera. When he
clicks a picture, he does not know what comes next. Unlike the digital camera,
one cannot be trigger happy when one uses a film camera. There is always a
sense of optimising the limited number of frames. But as one knows that any
kind of optimism means the proper use of twenty six frames or twenty nine
(whatever be the number) that itself poses the maximum limitation. It puts the
photographer into an unprecedented predicament; to click or not to click. One
clicks freely only when one knows that if clicked once there is always an image
registered however faulty or grainy it could be. That is a surety that experimental
photography artists happily use; they like the chance findings; a blur, a shaky
feel, an over exposure and so on (I am reminded of Pablo Bartholomew developing
his fungus infested negatives and coming out with a magical world of images).
Harindran too does that to certain extent but as parsimonious as he is with the
films, paints and food, each frame for him is a commitment made to the republic
of art.
(from MF Husain's Through the Eyes of a Painter)
These photographs were taken, as I mentioned elsewhere during
a trip and they were lying in his personal archives till he decided to make
this thirty seven minutes long movie. The cynics of the scene could maximum say
that it is/could be a slideshow with a sound track. But the intelligent one
would see the ruptures and reconciliations, the transition of images and their
terrors and intoxications. Harindran is extremely conscious about the ways in
which two images are separated from the other. They are not supposed to make a
narrative exactly the way a set of paintings is not supposed to make a
continuous narrative. But together they are supposed to make sense. The images
in the ‘’Bay Image Now’ are not done to make a continuous narrative. They are
supposed to protect their autonomy but that moment of transition, that moment
of merging and emerging, that moment of transition without montage makes the
viewer to look for continuity that only could give him/her the solace of
watching. Seeing is a solution as well as a resolution. Anything that breaks
both could be bringing violence into the act of viewing. Harindran contains the
violence of singular images within this transition gaps that are non-palpable.
The sombre sound track leads the viewer from one scene to the other. One could
at times ask whether the artist could have increased the pace of this
transition in order to minimize the tension or decreased the pace considerably
so that it no longer looked like a movie.
(from Tyeb Mehta's Koodal)
TK Haridran, who would be known in history as TKH may not
clear such apprehensions of the viewer. But the viewer him/herself could
virtually or imaginatively increase or decrease the pace of the transition;
suddenly he/she comes to know that the increased or decreased speed of the
images would not make any sense at all. The increased pace would have made the
transition feel like a spin and the reduced pace a drag. The three or three and
half second existence of images before the eyes, suddenly we realize that is
the basic tolerance s/pace of any human being when it comes to a single note of
a sound or a single image. If one has to look at something more than three
seconds there should be a movement in that image or rather the image should
show the possibility of a movement. That is the logic of a movie. One may
suddenly be reminded of the many hours long dragging movies of Andy Warhol.
There, the image does not move but the people move when knocked out of their
tolerance level. Harindran does not play a Warhol here for many have played it
already. The subjective position that often a camera holding person asserts
(directly or indirectly) is almost nil here because these could be images
culled from elsewhere too. When such a possibility is always there, Harindran
decides to be literally an absent presence than a present absence.
(Andy Warhol's Sleep in a Gallery)
Moving with a still or movie camera has fascinated many a
creative person in the world. In 1929 Dziga Vertov, the Russian experimental
film maker made a movie named ‘Man with a Movie Camera’. This movie shows a man
moving around with a camera and following made up and natural events, at times
presenting himself within the frame in difficult angles, even putting himself
into dangerous positions. This film had made a benchmark in documentary making;
a sort of non-intrusive or non-judgemental registering, which later in the last
century had given birth to movie styles like Camera Verite which could be akin
to Art Povera in fine arts. A sort of stark realism that almost reduces art
from an art work. M.F.Husain when worked on his movie titled ‘Through the Eyes
of a Painter’(1967), I am sure he must have been familiar with Vertov’s path
breaking movie. What makes Husain different is his preoccupation (feverishly
romantic preoccupation) with the moving images that he captures with his
camera. Just after three years Tyeb Mehta does his documentary of images ‘Koodal
where too we find his preoccupation with non-narrative images though they are
culled from the possible narrative actual events.
(Baraka film poster)
Harindran stands closer to the American film maker Ron
Fricke who had done his fantastic movie of images titled ‘Baraka’. Baraka is a
visual treat as if it were a touristic feast but Harindran’s Bay Image Now is
not a visual feast. He places the images exactly the way he would look at them
in an album. For the artist, the images are ‘image possibilities’ also; he could convert
them into painterly images. But they are not just painterly images either; they
are the disjointed alphabets of a language that still seeks the rest of it
strewn elsewhere by fate or by history. They are alphabets of different languages
seeking to become one language. It is a Babel, an unfinished project, showing
human perseverance and plight. It is a language that has lost its meaning but
still had a meaning at some point of time remote. For Harindran these images
are the meanings that have not yet found their language. Bay Image Now could be
a meeting point where meaning of another word meets an absolutely strange word.
A must watch movie it is.
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