At the age of fifteen, Don read ‘St Augustine’s confessions’, something that deeply affected him. Since then, the problem of evil is something that played with his mind.Don’s childhood was spent in Idukki, one of the most beautiful parts of Kerala, the southern-most state of India. The hilly terrain, the harsh landscape brought a kind of gritty fatalism amongst its people. Most of his childhood, Don lived amongst his closely-knit extended family: His grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. His parents were well respected teachers in the small town of Karunapuram, something which protected him as well as bound him down to social expectations. He was bared to an unremitting social gaze. His childhood was seeped in religious fervor. Coming from a pious catholic family, Don grew into an unquestioning teenager until he gave a serious thought to religion. Science, especially physics seemed to provide him the answers and he chose to pursue it further.
After School, Don left his Village to study in a nearby town, Thodupuzha. He rented a room and lived alone for is undergraduate course. For his Degree, he joined SB College in Changanasherry, a much bigger town. It was during this time that Don speculated on his own religious beliefs and toyed with the idea of atheism as a more rational cosmic view. After completing his degree, Don decided that he needs to go out of the country to experience life but then to balance priorities, he chose to take up a post-graduation course in IT in Sydney. By then he had already decided to take up filmmaking as his pursuit of passion. To sustain himself, Don worked not only in the IT sector but also as a baker, taxi driver, photographer and security guard before he enrolled himself for a two-year filmmaking course in Sydney. During this time, he goes through a contemplative phaseover his ideology on filmmaking. In 2014, he chooses to come back to make films in his own country.
The witness spectator ….Shavam was Don’s foray into filmmaking. Earlier, he had done short films as part of his education but when he returned to India, he instinctively moved to the independent film movement in Kerala and understands its underlying dynamics. The learnings came in handy when he got down to making the film. Two old acquaintances came forward as producers who gave him a little cash and unlimited freedom to make his first film. Don decided to make his first film parsimoniously, with a DSLR and minimal lights. The final sound mixing was done in a small room.
In a way, the film is a homecoming for the filmmaker. A society that he had left sometime back and now seemed eccentric and distanced. A dead man’s body is brought home for the burial. Hiswife, mother and son seemed not much in a shock as they adhered to the social convention of mourning.The film ambles around the house as the kith and kin perform the roles prescribed to them. A slight aberrance appears when a mournful young woman comes in, unwelcome. Amongst the mourners, nature is on its dutiful ways, the ants scrambling along a predestined path, the praying mantis, and the spider spinning its web.The filmmaker sees the whole proceedings in a veil of sarcasm.
Somewhere in the beginning, a videographer appears who sets about his duty. He gives directions to people; he decides the settings, prunes the plants which come his way and moves closer to the mourners. He strives to capture the most poignant moments, the histrionics happening in the house to raise his film to the dramatic table. But then there is another one, the spectator who also moves around, albeit nonchalant. The hand-held shots in the film resonate in the kinesics of the videographer. There are two films being made here and the filmmaker makes it clear that his ideology of filmmaking is far removed from that of the videographer who seeks drama in the mourners and expressionistic lenses. Don has even desisted from using music in the film.
The film only peeks into the happenings around the burial ritual while leaving the plot open ended. Where was the body brought from? Was the dead man separated from his wife? One can’t fail to notice the nonchalance in the mourning son. Was the dead man into an illegitimate relationship with the other woman? Was he living with her? The film makes no attempt to seek a plot but dutifully chronicles the rituals as it finally follows the procession to the burial ground.
The hostage spectator…. The most enduring image in the film happens in the beginning of the film as a bald man, faced away from the camera, prays to the religious icons placed in the bare wall as the spectator sits just behind him in the prayer. The bald head reminds one of the Christian monks who shaved their head to proclaim themselves as ‘slaves of Christ’. The narrow crown of hair on the bald man strangely looks like the crown of thorns, placed on Christ’s head, as he prays for the deceased. The single shot runs for an uncomfortable 3 minutes as the spectator becomes an unwilling hostage to the sonorous chant, invoking all the saints from the pantheon. Is it a foreboding of the young boy to be held hostage to his fate?
The film begins with a young boy, Jose who comes back home, leaving behind a job, a security, a promise of a better life which is how his father sees it. The father is a loner who lives in the past and survives on cow rearing. The son becomes an uncomfortable intrusion into his staid, agrestic life as the generation gap widens in this little village. The son stakes a claim to a life here but the father makes him unwelcome.
Don understands his milieu very well and is comfortable with them. His films meanders around the Catholic Christian families, sometimes skimming around it, sometimes delving into it. Vitth has abundant Christian iconography, ecclesiastic and parsonical references in most of the scenes. The film doesn’t allow you to forget the presence of a looming religion around you.
The film moves from one laconic scene to another, connected reluctantly through a mise en scene cut, a cut of convenience. Jose exchanging looks with a teenaged girl remains buried under stratified wide shots. Even the brutal killing of the dog is denied its drama due.We see Jose looking at the dying dog offscreen, with an expression which betrays nothing, allowing us to fill in anguish, rage and helplessness.
In this film, Don makes us aware of time, every moment, the pace of the shot, the character’s kinesis, and the impending cut. The only time when the filmmaker breaks this wholeness of time is in the end when the boy walks to a cliff. In an unlikely move, Don has used jump cuts to jolt us out of this somnolent narrative. The son and the father wrestle with each other, amidst grunts, intercut between three different locations, further breaking the sense of realism. With this cinematic intervention, the filmmaker makes a conscious effort to express the internal conflict of Jose. A rare effort from Don.
Jose remains nonchalant and distant to his environment through the course of the film. The dramatic crisis that the killing of the dog is deemed to be is a dim allusion to the holocaust where Jose becomes an unwitting collaborator to the killing. This incident turns Jose’ insouciance to passive aggression, again, something that the poles and the French turned to during the German invasion. The last shot of the film is hazy landscape which clears slowly to show windmills trundling laboriously, a signifier of modernity and change in that sleepy village,Karunapuram.
Mythmaking spectator …. Don grew up, hearing stories from his grandfather. Stories of struggles of the bucolic Christian community in the erstwhile central Travancore which now consists of Kottayam, Idukki, Alapuzha, Kollam and Pattanamthitta,stories of dare devilry, land usurping and debauchery persists. But amidst all these dangles the fear of divine retribution exists. 1956, Central Travancore is a complex film within a very simple plot.
A narrator begins to tell us a story of four men who go on a spiritual journey to a distant village where an actual crucifixion is heard to be enacted every year. They are sorely disappointed to see nothing of that happen and the disenchanted pilgrims break away from the solemn Christian procession to march resolutely to a nearby arrack shop where they proceed to drown their miseries.This sets the filmmaker’s implication on myths and its meanings. If we believe in a myth in its literal sense, we may be sorely disappointed but if we see the metaphor behind it, it would be rewarding. As Veenapani Chawla, a noted theatre practitioner said ‘Myth is a seed to knowledge that has to be unpacked over time …. It tells and retells stories according to the time it is unpacked.’
Onan, disillusioned with the pilgrimage, sets out now to go on a hunting expedition with his wayward younger brother and a few others in an otherwise naive story that Don’s grandfather told him with his own embellishments. An interesting scene ensues where the brothers meet an old man to borrow his gun. Instead, the old man regales them with stories of their ancestry before he hands over the gun, something he could have done in the first place. The filmmaker seems to plug in stories and myths of no consequence in every scene, unless the viewer would want to open these packets.
Onan and his brother, Kora embark on a hunting expedition with a shooter and a couple of helpers. They plan to hunt a wild buffalo so that they can sell the meat and make enough money to go back to their families. Having set camp, the shooter sets out with the gun to hunt. The others make sanguine plans but then fate has its own plans. The shooter comes back, badly injured as he tells them that a buffalo gored him and stomped the gun to pieces but he was lucky to have escaped. Onan and Kora go back to their struggles as hope and faith fail them as always.
While the film reflects on the nihilistic approach of the filmmaker, it is replete with myths and lore. The filmmaker turns back to his memories of the time spent listening to all those aggrandized stories from his grandfather. This story too would eventually become part of the lore but then the last shot of the gun hidden between the rocks belie the story which makes it a myth, like all the others before it.
The filmmaker’s communication with the viewer is not always straight. Sometimes the shots that represent what is being said are not shown at that moment but later. The filmmaker doesn’t follow the editing conventions but allows the characters to complete their conversation and then cut to the representative shot. In another instance, Kora thinks of his estranged wife and her plea to take her back home. This is shown through a shot of a play in which a similar conversation ensues which he is witnessing from the wings. His wishful thinking is represented through an imaginary letter being read by him to his wife.
The film captivates the viewer at different levels but then the film has a deep Christian ethos embedded in it. It beautifully portrays Onan, Kora and the others as pilgrims as they trudge along tediously, appearing at one point as triflings across the skyline, the gun slung over Onan’s shoulder could be easily mistaken for the cross. Just as Onan didn’t see the metaphor in the myth in the beginning, he seems to not see the hunting expedition as a pilgrimage and a spiritual quest. A quest that deems to have failed but that which continues in his torment and endurance.
Unreliable spectator…. Don contends with ‘the narrator’ in his films. Shavam has a covert narrator who witnesses the proceedings from a distance while ‘1956, Central Travancore’ has an omniscient narrator who leads us through the maze of myths. In his latest film ‘everything is cinema’, Don brings in an overt narrator, a homodiegetic one.
The film is about a filmmaker, Chris who is in Kolkata with his actress girlfriend to make a film on the city. But half way through the shoot, the lockdown takes place and Chris is stuck in an apartment with his girlfriend. The days together slowly brings out the inquisitive filmmaker who starts to stalk his girlfriend, slowly revealing the nasty side of his own. Rough, amateurish hand-held shots simulate the home video as we slowly wonder at the observations of the filmmaker that turn vicious, sexist and downright derogatory. The woman responds rebels and finally walks out of this unrepentant misogynist. The film is a classic instance of an unreliable narrator.
Don’s oeuvre spreads across four films but in them we can see reflections of his idea of cinema. Tarkovsky, Bergman and Antonioni were filmmakers which molded him during his days of learning but then other filmmakers came into his horizon… Tsing Ming Liang, Lav Diaz, Sharunaz Bartas, Bela Tarr, Sokurov, Kiarostami. For Don, mise en scene starts with the choice of black and white over color. He feels that the perfection and control that he seeks would be difficult to achieve in color presently and so black and white becomes an obvious choice. He sets wide shots which unfold multiple layers of action and it is left to the viewer to seek in it. He rarely uses movements. In ‘Vitth’ he uses only statics with the father but when the son comes in, there are some delicate movements in the shots. In 1956, Central Travancore, again he has used static shots with an occasional pan and a track-shot. His sense of editing could be traced to Tarkovsky who said that the long take brings in boredom after a point but then slowly that boredom gives way to curiosity and then the shot comes alive. In 1956, Central Travancore, Don has used long takes to this effect. In Vitth, he has resonated the ‘post 2000’ Kiarostami who says that he doesn’t mind the viewer going to sleep. Rather, he would be happy if he can supply them good slumber. For Don, the duration of the shot lasts till sleep set in. Slow cinema has found its space in Don’s films. He sees this kind of filmmaking as an act of rebellion against the mainstream ideology of cinema being one of action and a flurry of events.
Don’s films are highly insular. They only reflect the catholic life in the alpine terrain in southern Kerala. One is struck by the abject disregard of the majoritarian Hindu community. But then he knows any reference of the majoritarian community would bring in the politics of the land hence he would remain resolutely personal in his films. For Don, his films are embodiment of his self-reflection, his religious dichotomy and his spiritual journey.
Unni Vijayan is an alumni of FTII and has been a film editor before he turned to direction. He has earned two national awards, one for editing and the other for his film ‘lessons in forgetting’. Today he teaches film studies and scriptwriting while working on scripts with other filmmakers.