Jenson Joseph
Commercial film enterprises of the 1940s and 50s operating from various production centres in South India had to address a peculiar problem: while it always made much economic sense to make films within formats that would address disparate audiences across South India and beyond, the producers simultaneously had to device means of convincing viewers in each regions that the films were indeed made ‘for them’ – by considering their tastes, representing them and their concerns, etc. The fact that cinema by then was no longer a rare commodity made it impossible for the filmmakers to ignore the audience feedbacks, or the voices that claimed to speak on behalf of the audiences from these regions. Moreover, the patronage of the literati – who often spoke on behalf of the respective region’s audiences, and whose opinions were to have significant implications for the future of industrial-cultural media – depended much on how commercial cinema reconstituted itself by responding to such demands.
One major challenge before the entrepreneurs in film business was to address the clamours from each region to reconstitute cinema as a modern medium that represents nativity and invokes historical time in frames. This essay examines how the practice of inserting ‘documentary/actuality reels’ within the bricolagian industrial format of ‘family socials’ allowed commercial filmmakers of the time to negotiate with this compulsion to certain extent. At the outset, the relation between ‘documentary/actuality footages’ and nativity or historical time looks rather obvious, and it would be platitudinous to say footages of real life events invoked closeness to real time, etc. The attempt here rather would be to probe into how inserting footages of actual local events, which evolved as an industrial practice during the 1940s and 1950s in regions that constitute the present Kerala, was sought to redefine a linguistic region’s relation to cinema.
The use of the category ‘actuality footages’ to describe the examples that we discuss in this essay needs clarification. In film history, the term ‘actuality films’ is used to refer to unedited early moving images, recordings of real-life happenings which were exhibited as one film from camera on to camera off, footages of events, rituals and dances, political protests or demonstrations, moments from the lives of important figures, spectacles like wrestling or demonstration of newly invented machinery, etc. These were also known as ‘topicals’. Commissioned films for industrial firms, war footages, movements of animals, and recordings of durbar events were other types.
In India, actuality films were commercially screened from 1898 (Dutta, 2013). Production companies across India made actuality films and exhibited them, while the British government, being apprehensive about their political/propagandist uses, closely monitored their exhibitions. The government would deny exhibition clearance for many such films in various regions, and would also revise the injunctions on them from time to time, as a Madras Presidency government order dated 25 March, 1938, indicates. The order says that the government had cancelled the notification declaring the following films to be uncertified in this Province: Mahatma Gandhi’s March for Freedom (produced by the Sharada Film Co.), Mahatma Gandhi’s Historical March – 12th March 1930 (produced by Shree Krishna Film Co.), Mahatma Gandhi’s March – 12th March 1930, Ahmedabad (Shree Ranjith Films Co.), Patriot (Produced by the Shree Ranjith Film Co.), Mr Patel’s Procession (produced by the Pioneer Film Co. Ltd.), Bombay Welcomes Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi’s Punargamam (of Sree Krishna Film Co.), Mr Gandhi’s return from England (Produced by B Bilimoria), and the film Gandhi meets the King. The examples that I discuss below are similar to these actuality films in the broad sense, but were not necessarily exhibited as independent units: sometimes they were additional attractions in a show, sometime they were inserted into films, often integrating them within the narrative structure. Here, the term is adopted to refer to film footages of actual events, which lent themselves to be noticed as recorded reels of actual events even when inserted in the middle of a feature film.
Signifying nativity:
The 1931 Malayalam silent film
Marthanda Varma (P V Rao), which was the product of the deliberations to make films based on local themes, opens with a five-minutes long documentary footage of the temple procession of Sri Chithira Thirunal – the erstwhile king of Travancore (see images below). The film was based on the 1891 Malayalam novel of the same title written by C V Raman Pillai; film historians have pointed out that the Travancore government took special interest in seeing the novel made into film, and that it appointed committees consisting of literary figures to work on preparing the screenplay based on the novel. Evidently, the desire was to nativise cinema – a medium that was capturing the imagination of all sections of society. However, since the aesthetic tools that would ingrain nativity on to celluloid was something that were to be evolved a few decades later, adopting a local theme did not easily result in nativity in images and frames on screen. For instance, what we see in Marthanda Varma is a cinematic rendition of the novel within the available resources of mythologicals, historicals and stunts – filmic genres the aesthetic conventions of which were familiar to audiences across the subcontinent by the 1930s. In other words, apart from succeeding in showing a few characters in Travancorean costumes, the film is unable to evoke nativity in its aesthetics. It looks as if the documentary footage of temple procession at the beginning, then, attempts to place the film within a new category that it aspires to: the native cinema.
See ClipThis practice of inserting documentary or actuality footages into film seems to have a long career in the region, enduring decades. For example, two decades later, in
Jeevithanouka (The Boat of Life, K Vembu: 1951) – a landmark film in the history of popular cinema in Malayalam, made by Udaya, one of the first studios set up in Kerala in 1948 – we see the actuality/documentary footages of a temple festival in Kerala inserted very early into the film. In almost all the shots in the above-mentioned sequence, the crowd in the frame keeps staring at the camera (see the images below), setting apart this sequence from the rest of the film, and letting the viewer notice it as a ‘real footage’. Incidentally, this is an aspect we notice in the documentary footage in Marthanda Varma as well, as some of the screenshots from it reproduced above demonstrate.
See ClipThese instances from two early Malayalam films let us explore certain practices that commercial filmmakers in South India resorted to, in order to address the challenge of coming up with new visual and aesthetic registers in response to the emerging cultural sensibilities in the rapidly changing political contexts of the 1930s, 40s and the 1950s – the defining decades for commercial cinema in the region. We would be specifically looking at how the practice of inserting ‘actuality shots’ seems to have offered a temporary solution for signifying nativity for filmmakers and distributors during the period. The rest of the essay would be discussing the following themes: does the practice of inserting outdoor ‘documentary shots’ into the film as independent units have a history that evolved over a time as an industrial response to pertinent cultural demands? What is the affective significance of the deployment of actuality shots in these specific cases? And what effect did the filmmakers seek to achieve by retaining the crowd’s inquisitive looks at the camera?
‘Kerala’ as a market for films
A brief account about the emergence of a market for films in the region would foreground the commercial contexts in which the filmmakers had to conjure up new affective relations between the audience and the medium from time to time.
Film business in the region, until late 1930s, was dominated by distribution-exhibition sectors owned mostly by Tamil Brahmins who enjoyed considerable government patronage in Travancore-Cochin princely states. Various accounts suggest that the distribution firms based in Madras and other towns in the South often leased the ‘Kerala-rights’ to smaller agents. The Malayalam-speaking regions, which now constitute the linguistic state of Kerala formed in 1956, were considered just a bonus market for these distributors. Films made in Madras, Salem, Bombay and Calcutta, along with imported films mainly from America and Britain, and also from Germany, Italy and France, were screened in the region until the 1950s.
The exhibition sector consisted mainly of travelling and temporary cinemas until the 1950s. According to a newspaper report, 209 exhibition centers operated across Kerala by August 1950 – 125 in Travancore, 43 in Cochin and 41 in Malabar. Of this, only around 10 were permanent theatres (Malayala Manorama, 8 August, 1950). Silent films were screened in semi-urban areas of the region at least until the late 1930s.
Coinciding with the gradual emergence of a cash-based economy, the late-1930s witnessed a booming film business in the region. A few pioneering Malayalee entrepreneurs entered the distribution-production sector during this period: In 1938, K. V. Koshy set up his film distribution company, Filmco; N. X. George started the distribution company Geo Pictures at Kottayam in 1939, which soon launched its production banner by the same name; T. E. Vasudevan, a major producer of low-budget films during the 1950s, started his distribution company – Associated Pictures – in 1940; P. Subrahmaniam, who set up Merryland Studio and his production banner Neela in the late 1940s, produced his first film Prahlada in 1941 which is considered the first mythological in Malayalam.
The marketing and business strategies of some of these distributing agents made significant interventions in redefining the region’s relation to cinema, and even determined the textual form of the early studio films in Malayalam of the 1950s, to the extent that these distributors partly invented the textual form that early studios adopted in their films.
The region’s relation to cinema:
The perception about Kerala as a ‘minor market’ by the production and distribution companies based in other regions was a crucial factor in determining the region’s relation to the apparatus of cinema. The formulations by Brian Larkin (2004) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2007) about how the address of the apparatus itself constitute the audience in particular ways – by promising something and then delivering it or failing to deliver it – are useful here to illustrate this relation and its different implications.
In his influential essay ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’ (2007), Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses how film theorist Christian Metz’s proposition, that the film spectator first and foremost identifies with “himself”, acquires distinct political implications in the India of the 1940s-and early 50s. He observes:
"The cultural role of the neighborhood theatre as a prominent institution of the new public sphere [during the 1940s and the 50s] is crucially accounted for by the fact that a ticket-buying spectator automatically assumed certain rights that were symbolically crucial to the emerging State of the 1940s-50s. (…) It is not important that these rights were not necessarily enforced on the ground. It is important instead to recognize that spectators were, and continue to be, symbolically and narratively aware of these rights, aware of their political underpinnings, and of their ability to do various things – things that constitute the famous ‘active’ and vocal Indian film spectator – that we must understand as a further assertion of these rights in the movie theatre. … [T]he many characteristics of film viewing in India – of vocal audiences, throwing money at the screen, going into trances during devotional films and so forth, were in turn characteristics of spectators identifying themselves through identifying the film’s address” (pp. 128-9; Original emphases).
In contrast, in his essay Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds (2004), Brian Larkin has shown how the “ubiquity of technological breakdown” in Nigeria produce a different sort of ‘identification’ among the audience by often serving as a reminder of their physical and cultural marginality in the global economy. For Larkin, “media technologies do not just store time, they represent it” (p. 303). Borrowing the insights of these formulations to a qualitatively different context as ours, we would be able to formulate a few basic arguments about how the experience of going to the movies during the 1930s and the 1940s determined Malayali’s relation to the apparatus of cinema as such.
The accounts of K V Koshy and N G John, about the scenario that prevailed in the region until the 1950s, provides insights into how the address of the cinematic apparatus constantly reminded the ‘Malayali audience’ their place as belonging to a minor market – a market of no much significance, having no much bargaining power, etc. Exhibitors would often realize that the prints of a newly rented film were too damaged to be screened; viewers constantly encountered poor exhibition facilities in temporary and touring talkies; instances have been reported when audiences in the region flung cow dung at the screen in protest. For example, when Kalasagar Films Ltd, a new production company, announced its launch in central Kerala in 1950 by inviting investors, its advertisement tried to foreground precisely this aspect as their raison d’etre: “Our theatres are often compelled to run third-rate outdated pictures due to the unavailability of quality films within the shortest time possible. (…) Film production is going to be a very opportune and highly remunerative business, especially at the present time when our cinema-loving people clamor for a better class of sensible pictures” (Nasrani Deepika, December 23, 1950).
An entrenched perception about cinema as an apparatus that fails to deliver the promises, and as an institution apathetic to the ticket-buying spectator’s entitlements at the very outset, reflects distinctly in such discussions and responses. These material conditions, constituting an experience of the constantly failing apparatus, determined the film-going public’s relation to cinema at large in the region of the 1930s and 40s.
Along with this, the generic and narrative elements in commercial films circulating in the region were perceived to be constituting the audience in certain ways as well. This aspect is more related to the ascription of attributes to cinema by the literati. For the literati, cinema as a medium represented certain time, and could bind the audience to that time. Often it was perceived that it is not the historical time (that a modern medium is expected to invoke) that cinema conjured up, and the mythological as the dominant genre served to reinforce this perception. Let me quote two passages from print media discourses on cinema to illustrate this point. The first one is from a ‘letter to the editor’ in Mathrubhoomi:
While cinema is being used in Russia for the betterment of human lives, in our country, it is being misused for invoking animal instincts. […] Our cinema halls have the character of brothels and the attraction of toddy shops. There will be dance sequences just for fun and vulgar scenes in the name of comedy, even though they don’t have any relevance to the story. Most of them are mythologicals. What would the audience feel when they see the sight of our supposedly most venerated mythological heroes running helter-skelter to get mates like massive stud bulls? (Mathrubhoomi, 21 December, 1937).
Similarly, a commentator wrote in 1952:
The business of selling mythological films is more prominent in North India. In Hollywood, the birthplace of cinema, there is no market for gods. In South India, Tamilians seem to excel in this. In fact, film viewers [in Kerala], for a long time, have been under the impression that Tamil is the mother tongue of gods! However, some Malayalis have now started importing gods from Tamil cinema in order to end the latter’s monopoly. Recently, one of my friends, after watching a Malayalam mythological film, said: ‘Finally, Lord Siva spoke in Malayalam!’ (P A Seythu Mohammed, “Our Cinema”, Vidyabhivardhini, January 1952).
The material conditions that constitute the experience of cinema viewing in certain ways in the region, and the discursive attribution of certain values to the dominant genres that commercial cinema made available to the viewers, together formulated a consolidated clear awareness about what cinema should do (anywhere in the world) and what cinema actually does (in Madras, in Kerala, in India, etc.), as these examples illustrate. The literate writing elites constantly expressed their concerns about popular cinema binding the audience into pre-modern narrative worlds (through mythologicals), and about the moral decay the medium could cause. The idea about ‘Madras’ as the iconic production centre, and the perceived notion about mythologicals as ‘the default cinema’ that Madras produces, engrained certain meanings deep on to the cinematic apparatus and preempted its ability to function as a ‘neutral’ technology.
The cinematic apparatus had to undergo a process of ‘de-familiarization‘, if it were to be rendered neutral; if its ability to capture contemporaneity (as opposed to mythical time) and nativity were to be demonstrated and ascertained. The patronage of the cultural elites and the Malayali middle class – a crucial market for the industry at the time – depended mainly on the bourgeoning industry’s ability to effect this de-familiarization of the apparatus. The industry had to device means to render cinema as a neutral, secular technological apparatus so that it could gain certain legitimacy as a cultural institution.
The conditional patronage of the middle class literati towards cinema clearly echoes in what Pallathu Raman, a renowned poet, said in a meeting during the campaigns for Aikya Keralam (United Kerala):
The film industry is an institution that comes like flood waters and steals money from the pockets of Malayalis. Cinema is well suited for the promotion of music and literature. Fire can be used to burn down a house, but also to cook food. Similarly, cinema also has two aspects. Cinema should propagate moral values. Don’t we [Malayalis] have beauty, culture, music, and women who are experts in dance and other arts, in our land?” (Malayala Manorama, 4 May, 1948).
Spelling out quite vividly what cinema industry in the region has been doing and what it should instead do, Nasrani Deepika, in its editorial on 13 September, 1949, wrote:
The [distribution] companies in Kerala concentrate only on securing the rights of Tamil films, and the exhibitors here focus only on their business. In short, profit is the only motive for those engaged in film business in Kerala. (…) It is important that we make good films in Malayalam. It is also important that we make them within our region. The first aspect is related to supporting our own aesthetics and culture through films, and the second is related to the economic aspect. (Emphasis added).
Distributors inventing a form
This desire, emanating from the cultural elites, to inscribe the native images on to cinema was partly accommodated into the dominant operational structures of the film business in the region. In other words, certain initial steps were being taken to formulate a cinema for Malayalis; a cinema that would indeed respond to some of the desires of the local audience. Distribution agents shooting a local event with the help of the technicians from Madras, and screening them independently or along with a popular Tamil mythological film, emerged as a practice by the early 1930s, as the film Marthanda Varma indicates.
Here are some examples other than Marthanda Varma:
• The first Malayalam talkie Balan (S Notani, 1938) was screened along with a newsreel on the birthday celebration of the Maharaja of Travancore (Mathrubhoomi, January 15, 1938).
• In 1949, Gopalakrishna distribution company, Kottayam, with the help of the Tamil director K Subrahmaniam, shot a boat race that took place near Kottayam and exhibited the film at Central theatre, Kottayam, under the name ‘Akhila Kerala Boat Race’. The film was advertised as “a chance to see yourself and your friends” (Nasrani Deepika, December 2, 1949; emphasis added).
• Central theatre, Kottayam, arranged the screening of the 150th Anniversary celebrations of the Church Missionary Society (Mathrubhoomi, December 10, 1949).
• In 1950, the distributor Geo Pictures, Kottayam, shot the funeral procession of a catholic bishop and exhibited the film along with the Tamil film Vazhkai (Nasrani Deepika, January 19, 1950).
If this loose format was invented by the distributors and exhibitors as a convenient strategy to bring cinema closer to historical time and space for the local audiences, this format was directly adopted by the early studios. For example, after two weeks of screening, Udaya studio added a “side reel” to its first film Vellinakshathram (Silver Star, d. Felix J. H. Bais, 1949) showing visuals of the pilgrimage to Sabarimala and its landscape, and advertised it as an added attraction (Nasrani Deepika, January 28, 1949).
Arguably, what we identify in the footage from Jeevithanouka – Udaya’s third film, and Malayalam cinema’s first major box office hit – is an instance when this format of screening footages of ‘native images’ along with a typical popular Madras-made film was formally incorporated into a single film. In that sense, the textual form of the early studio films was partly invented by the distributors – in response to the cultural demands emanating from the middle class Malayalis (especially in the context of the campaigns for Aikya Keralam), but by operating within the commercial constraints set by the industry in Madras.
Indigenous filmmakers’ maneuverings
Studio films however did not simply adopt the format invented by the distributors; they appropriated this ready format, and experimented with it to conjure up new affects. These maneuvers, I try to argue, were closely linked to cinema’s attempt to acquire legitimacy and patronage from the vocal cultural elites, seeking to respond to the cultural demands placed on the institution of cinema in the political context of linguistic nationalism.
The cultural elites hoped that the setting up of an indigenous production base would bring an end to ‘the economic drain and moral decay that Tamil films cause in the region’. Besides, it was hoped that the films made by Malayalis would result in the emergence of a ‘native cinema’. The publicity strategies for Udaya’s first film Vellinakshatram (Silver Star; Felix J. H. Bais, 1949) is testimony to how the studio films attempted to directly address some of these concerns, as they advertised the film as “the Malayalam film, made by Malayalis at a studio set up by Malayalis, in the Malayali land” (Nasrani Deepika, 10 February, 1949; emphasis added).
The patronage of the cultural elites was however very tenuous: they quickly realized that indigenous production centres did not effect an aesthetic shift they desired – a marked shift from the familiar aesthetics of the mythologicals and ‘cheap thrills’, to that of a “native cinema”, signifying nativity in theme and images. For example, Udaya’s second film (Nallathanka, P. V. Krishna Iyer, 1950) was a remake of an already popular Tamil film with almost the same name – Nallathankal. The critics’ enthusiasm waned; the same contempt with which they would dismiss any Madras/Tamil film of the time was extended to the new Malayalam films made in Kerala studios. What was expected of the first studios in Kerala was to detach cinema from the dominant uses that it has been put to in the ‘Madras industry’.
The apparatus had to go through a process of ‘neutralization’ and secularization (denoting historical time, as opposed to mythical time) if it was to be deployed for the ideological tasks expected of a cultural institution in context of the advent of modernity. Strategic deployment of Actuality/Documentary Shots seems to have been identified as one of the solutions, as the sequence in Jeevithanouka illustrates. A close look at the sequence we discussed in the beginning invites our attention to two things that are at display here:
1. Native images (“See yourself and your friends”),
2. The apparatus itself (“Camera placed amongst you and your friends, on your behalf”)
The curious look of the crowd into the camera placed amidst them, in these footages that we see in films from Marthanda Varma to Jeevithanouka seems to be crucial in this process. It is as if the screen has transformed itself temporarily into a transparent mirror, enabling the gaze of the audience and that of the crowds in the footages to seep through it and encounter each other. Perhaps, the inquisitive looks on to the camera emphasize and reiterate the presence of the apparatus in the native land, binding it to historical time. The looks into the camera inscribe historical time on to the apparatus, by reminding us – the audience – of its presence right out there, “among people like us”. This strategy attempted to effectively neutralize the apparatus and render it a bare technology, stripping it off its previously-ascribed (pre- or anti-modern) attributes.
Moreover, as the producers in South India until at least the mid-1950s catered to a market transcending regional and national borders, retaining the loose format of bricolage allowed the native images of one region to be replaced by those corresponding to another region, depending on the demands of the exhibition contexts.
References:
Larkin, Brian. 2004. ‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’. Public Culture, Vol 16, Number 2, Spring 2004, pp. 289-314.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2007. ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’. In City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, (Ed.) Preben Kaarsholm; 111-137. London: Seagull.
Dutta, Madhusree. 2013. ‘From Narrating Actuality’. Frontline October 18, 2013: pp. 139-146.