Celluloid (Kamal- 2013)

Written & Directed by Kamal
Starring Prithviraj, Mamta Mohandas, Chandni, Sreenivasan
Cinematography Venu

I have a hunch that more than telling the story about a long-forgotten pioneer in Malayalam cinema, director Kamal (not to be confused with actor-director Kamal Haasan) wanted to take his viewers through a journey to the times when films where made on film and projected through film. Though 35mm screenings have remained the norm until a few years back(I'm talking about India),  the movie going public were largely ignorant of how a series of 24 still pictures flickered on the silver screen to create movement ever since they were bombarded with several video formats like the VHS, VCD, DVD and now the Blu-Ray. Nostalgic crap, you would say, but it is also evident of the attachment an artist can have with his tools.

This feeling for a fast-dying tradition is evoked throughout the movie, right from the first scene when a child burns an entire reel of film down to the last scene, where JC Daniel's last son, Harris (Prithviraj again) confesses that he had burned the only copy of Vigathakumaran (The Lost Child), the first film made in Kerala, by a Keralite. Several such glimpses abound in the movie, like in the scene where he holds out a strip of film to his wife Janette (Mamta Mohandas) and explains how the illusion of movement is created. Another moment is while  he lovingly rewinds a reel of Chaplin's The Kid and briefly dwells on Chaplin's image embedded on each frame.

One of the disappointments I encountered with Paresh Mokashi's Harishchandrachi Factory, which documented the making of the first Indian film Raja Harishchandra, was that despite the better quality in the acting, the filmmaker hardly touched upon this aspect, and worse, treated silent films as an anachronism. Celluloid, on the other hand, dwells on its protagonist JC Daniel's (Prithviraj) initial fascination with the film medium and is more respectful of the early films, as seen when the local townspeople witness a screening of The Kid which is held in high regard by our protagonist. If the film is to be believed, JC Daniel had set his ambitions higher, and unlike the staple mythological films made in the country at the time, wanted to make a "social drama" that could stand on a par with Chaplin's masterpiece.

The first half of the films are laden with a lot of humour, when Mr Daniel begins shooting his film and has to handle actors who have never seen a motion picture camera before. The social context of the times is also an important sub-plot in the film, especially the despicable tradition of caste oppression, which Daniel boldly defies by roping in a lower-caste woman Rosamma (Chandni) for the role of a Nair woman in his film. This will turn out to be the nemesis for Vigathakumaran, the film whose fate turns out to be exactly that of its title.

The film's second half chronicles how Chelangatt Gopalakrishnan (Sreenivasan), the writer, catches up with an aged, impoverished and forgotten Daniel and writes his biography, the only source of reference for anything related to the pioneer, and we follow his struggles as he tries to get the government to give the forgotten pioneer credit as the father of Malayalam Cinema. Though not as interesting as the first half, it still is an interesting watch, thanks to a decent script by its director Kamal.

I would, however, not call the film a masterpiece, especially not when you have Prithviraj, the lead actor, delivering an uninspired performance, which is the same of all his films. But you take it for granted that there are no other actors in the industry young enough and can get the Travancore accent right, besides the fact that you need a familiar face to bring the audience to the theatres. Equally unimpressive is Mamta Mohandas' performance, though she does better in the second half as the aged wife. This handicap of the film is given redemption by a strong supporting cast and by some impressive production design.

Despite its flaws, Celluloid is still a recommended watch since it is, to me, more original than what normally passes for as "new generation" cinema in Kerala and the downplaying of musical numbers as seen in a handful of recent releases is indicative of a sort of recovery in Malayalam cinema, which, for more than a decade, was hell bent on churning out stuff that looked like its counterparts in Tamil and Hindi.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles-1941)

Directed by Orson Welles
Written by Orson Welles and Herman J Manciewicz
Cinematography by Gregg Toland
Edited by Robert Wise
Music by Bernard Herrmann
Starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dorothy Comingore, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick

A shot of a wired fence with a No Tresspassing sign on it and a castle in the distance dissolves into another shot that takes us on the other side of the fence- we have defied the warning.

The very opening shot of Orson Welles' debut feature Citizen Kane strangely evokes his own non-conformist  nature. He was, in a way, signifying through the very first couple of shots that he was going to break all the rules that hitherto existed in the Hollywood tradition of filmmaking.

The film, as we all now know it, is a character sketch of Charles Foster Kane, the newspaper baron and pioneer of yellow journalism, from the perspective of a newsreel, Kane's guardian Mr Thatcher's manuscript, and testimonies provided by his associates and partners, interviewed by a journalist who wants to know what Rosebud, Kane's dying word, is all about. While neither of them has a clue, the audience finally gets to see at the end of the film what it is all about.

The story of how George Orson Welles, an amateur theatre and radio artist, grabbed a Hollywood project at age 24- a deal which most people could only dream of -is the stuff of legend. Welles had already gained fame and notoriety for staging Shakespeare's Macbeth using a team of Afro-American actors, and for his radio adaptation of HG Wells' War of the Worlds, which drove an entire city wild with panic. His approach to his first movie project was also in the same spirit of rebellion, and that is exactly what makes Citizen Kane such an enduring film.

Another fact about the film that is enshrined in legend is that the film takes several digs at William Randolf Hearst, the real-life press baron still living at the time, who made a marketable commodity out of journalism. Another side of the mogul that was extensively caricatured in the film was his relationship with his mistress, actress Marion Davies, who was portrayed as Susan Alexander, a singer in the film.

While the premise in itself had enough to give it notoriety, Welles looked for more. Another factor that gave Kane its notoriety upon its release and which is one of the reasons the film is celebrated today is its technique. The film made extensive use of fragmentary flashbacks, cunning editing (the abrupt cut from Kane's deathbed to the obituary newsreel; a 10-year-old Kane wishing Thatcher Merry Christmas to Thatcher wishing Happy New Year to a 25-year-old Kane), expressionist lighting, an unconventional soundtrack, deep focus photography and single take coverage of scenes. All this, packed into a two hour movie, seemed too much for the audience of 1941 to take in, and Citizen Kane failed at the box office.

But this notoriety turned into renown in a few years' time, thanks to the critics' championing of the film (Andre Bazin, especially, was bowled over by the film's use of deep space, so was Bosley Crowther of the New York Times), and especially by the interviews delivered by Welles and his DP Gregg Toland. That, and  the relative oblivion of non-Hollywood films in the international film scene helped Kane in being reputed as the first film that made use of the effects mentioned above. It also won acclaim as being the first film that showed the ceilings of sets.

But as time has now proved, several of these innovations were already in place in other filmmaking cultures. Post-50s, the proliferation of film festivals and international film culture revealed that Mizoguchi and Ophuls were already pioneers of the long take, Renoir had perfected deep focus photography in The Rules of the Game, and Yasujiro Ozu was showing the ceilings of sets years before Kane was released. Despite these revelations, Welles' film continued to be voted as the greatest film ever made for over 50 years, until Hitchcock's Vertigo toppled it in the Sight and Sound list of 2012.

This surely does not mean that Citizen Kane is not a great film, for it truly is one of the twentieth century's great works of art that demands analysis yet defies it. While the several innovations the film is credited with was already in place in several filmmaking traditions around the world, Welles, as he himself admitted in an interview, had the advantage of total ignorance of their use by other directors and hence, made use of them in his own, original way. Besides, he had the expertise of cinematographer Gregg Toland by his side, to whom he would ever remain indebted.