(Unmadiyude Maranam poster and Director, Sanal Kumar Sasidharan)
Those who know how the senior artist A.Ramachandran does his
paintings may find no difficulty in understanding the directorial efforts of
Sananl Kumar Sasidharan’s highly personalized interim film ‘Unmadiyude Maranam’(Death
of Insane-2018, produced by Shaji Mathew of NIV Art Movies). A.Ramachandran
keeps two canvases ready on the frames; one, a twelve feet by eight feet huge
canvas and two, a four by four feet one. The artist’s focus is on the large
format work for which he needs a lot of loading on the brushes with colors. A
stroke here and one there, still the brushes are color ‘full’. Having spent his
formative years under legendary but parsimonious artists like Benod Behari
Mukherjee and Ram Kinkar Baij, Ramachandran too had learned the art of saving.
The smaller canvas on the side is for the loaded brushes. He uses the same
brushes to create another painting, not a smaller version of the bigger
painting, but a painting different in theme and intensity but no less than what
is being unraveled on the bigger canvas. By the time he finishes his big
painting the small one too is finished, perhaps with more intensity. Sanal
Kumar Sasidharan has been working on his star-studded feature film ‘Chola’ but
in the meanwhile he has worked on ‘Unmadiyude Maranam.’
(Unmadiyude Maranam promo)
‘Unmadiyude Maranam’ though officially translated into
English as ‘Death of Insane’ I would like to call it ‘Death of a Mad Man’.
Ringing in the famous Chekhovian title ‘Death of a Clerk’, this film (with this
title) has all the eeriness and absurdity of the Russian short story but with a
difference. In the story, the clerk begets his tragic end by diligent though
absurd pursuit but here in Sanal’s film the tragedy occurs not only to the madman
but also all those who have been infected by a special trait of that madman,
dreaming. So long as he was dreaming alone he had been hugely neglected by the
people. But the day his dreams start moving from his sleep to the slumber of
others, the very act of dreaming becomes offensive. One day the
dreamer/madman/poet/filmmaker is found dead on the seashore; a scene that
evokes the memories of G.Aravindan’s film ‘Esthappan’ (1980). The whole film
somehow harks back to the magical abilities of Esthappan. However, Sanal is not revealing a local myth
but a universal reality during the days of right wing extremism.
( still from Esthappan by G.Aravindan)
Dreaming is an act of surviving. Children overcome any kind
of trauma by sleeping tight in the hands of their parents or caretakers. The whole
world comes to that one point of dark oblivion. Dreaming is not dark but
instead soothing the dreamer it gives him a bigger responsibility. It is so
ironic that the madman through his dreams makes a society alert. He makes other
people ‘dream’ and overcomes the local pressure by dreaming. It is interesting
to contrast Sanal’s movie with Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s ‘Mukhamukham’ (Face to
Face 1984). In Mukhamukham, Comrade Sreedharan once back from his underground
life is seen sleeping to overcome the new situation he has found himself in.
The disavowal that he faces in the society and from the erstwhile comrades
puzzles him. Once he is dead, the comrades from both sides come together to
celebrate his martyrdom. In Sanal’s film the madman sleeps to overcome the
social trauma but he has not lost his agency. He passes his dreams to other
people. If Adoor shows the losing of faith in Mukhamukham, in Unmadiyude
Maranam, Sanal focuses on the need for hope and resistance.
(still from Mukhamukham by Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
One day the madman is found dead. In the social life, he is
seen caught by the police and interrogated at the station, in front of his
confused father. Sanal suggests that the young people’s dreams are not in the
hands of the parents/tradition. But the State is not going to let the
youngsters have their way. The State interferes in their lives in all the
possible ways. By the time the State imposes its oppressive and punitive
measures on the dreaming youngsters, a new element appears in the form of moral
police. The moral policing are not done by the fringe elements anymore. Now it
is handled by the mainstream middle class in collusion with the Police/state.
Sanal has dealt with this issue in his movie ‘S Durga’ where an eloping couple,
Kabir and Durga are stopped on their way, harassed and threatened at various
stages by the middle class people, State and the fringe elements. Sanal, in a statement
confesses that ‘Unmadiyude Maranam’ is an outcome of the trauma that he had
gone through during the ‘Sexy Durga’ controversy. Incidentally, ‘Kismet,’ a
Malayalam movie also had dealt with the State’s and society’s interference in
the lives of young people.
(Still from Unmadiyude Maranam)
In ‘S Durga’ there was a tangible problem for the people to
interfere; both in the lives of the characters and with the title of the film
itself. But in ‘Unmadiyude Maranam’ people have neither of these. Here the
problem is an intangible thing called ‘dream’. Once the madman is dead and gone
the dreams migrate in to the sleep of different young people. The dead man
manifests at some places and beckons the young people to follow him. Both in
the fantastic sequences and the real sequences within the film, we see young
men clandestinely selling dreams as if it was a contraband stuff. The more
people dream the more the state becomes alert and it does not leave the people
to be. Like the night raids during the Nazi days in Germany and the custodial
torture in any unkind state we see youngsters being hunted down in alleys,
homes and even in the burial pits. In one of the last scenes we see an
exhumation process underway by the Police only to find the dead body of yet
another dreamer missing instead they find a book saying that he has been ‘resurrected.’
The Biblical reference of resurrection has been used effectively to say that
resurrection is meant for the dreamers, not for the faithful. Each dreamer goes
down receiving bullets or swords of the right wing extremists, departs with this
satisfaction that ‘I am a dreamer but I am not the only one,’ as John Lennon
would put it.
(Still from S Durga)
The director uses an experimental structure and form in
order to build the narrative, which in fact is a heap of broken images like in
Wasteland by Eliot, that could be thread together to form a comprehensive narrative
provided the viewers are aware of the socio-political and cultural changes that
have been taking place since the arrival of the Right Wing Extremists into
power in India. The film opens with a red man moving at the horizon line speaking
about dreams. The camera them migrates to various architectures and sculptures
that reveal nudity and sexuality of gods and human beings alike. Then the
camera goes into the hills and valleys where a lonely individual play with his
horse in gay abandon. Between the historical setting and the absolute
individual freedom, Sanal places his dreamer who is destined to sleep and dream
in the present days. Interspersing the cinematic narrative with news footage
showing the atrocities committed by the right wing forces against lovers,
youngsters, Dalits, inter-caste couple, thinkers, artists, social activists and
so on, Sanal says that the dreamers are madmen (mad women as well) and mad men
are dreamers. They are simply punished for having dreams; dreams for a better
world. At the same time those people who have fallen victim to the right wing
atrocities find their comrades among the living and director tells himself and
the world that if they kill one dreamer there will be thousands of them coming
out from each drop of blood spilled in the streets, forests and lock ups.
(Gowri Lankesh)
People have always dreamed about a better world. They have
registered their thoughts on the walls of the caves. Sanal makes a survey shot
through the historical caves where wall paintings are done by the early tribes.
Their imagination stays inspiring us to live on. May be their use value is zero
now other than documentary curiosity but they have a different story to tell.
In a clever shot while exhuming the grave Sanal shows a lot of analogue film
spools lying entangled and making the digging difficult. Isn’t a dreamy way
that the director telling the viewers that the films may be of no use now (as
the world of cinematography has gone digital) but they are the primary mode of
a watchful society that dares to dream and register it for the posterity to
remember and understand. The film rolls may have gone out of use but another
dreamer, the digital camera has come to its place taking the dreams of the mad
men forward. Sanal Kumar Sasidharan shows a Kafkesque world in this film but
unlike K in Kafka’s work the mad man doesn’t die ‘like a dog’ but he is able to
transfer his dream to other people. For the time being Sanal knows that he will
not be given certification by the CBFC and he is not trying either. He is
determined to show his films in private screenings or through online release.
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