by SI blog reader Racer44
(Readers: SI’s comments follow this essay)
Having completed over 92 years since its inception (the first silent Tamil movie Keechaka Vadham was released in 1917), it is only obvious that we ask ourselves, where is Tamil Cinema headed? (ignoring, of course, naysayers like SI who say that it’s headed from deep shit to deeper shit).
The decades gone by have rung in many changes, the immense technological advances not the least among them.
As Tamil cinema progressed from the silent era to black and white talkies and later to Eastman Color and the present digital age, the kind of films made also diversified, from period dramas involving rajas and ranis which had their origins in religion and folklore to stories that are more grounded in the reality of today, drawing their inspiration from the life of the common man, whose trials and tribulations they served to document and whose mundane love-stories were blown up into larger-than-life romances on celluloid.
But for the sake of identifying Tamil Cinema’s current course, it should be sufficient if we restrict our gaze to the last 2-3 years of its existence.
Many would agree that these are the heydays of Tamil Cinema, what with Kollywood’s first forays into the adventure-fantasy genre with the much-feted Aayirathil Oruvan, its first full-length spoof in Tamil Padam and very soon, its first science fiction film in Enthiran.
While these are significant milestones in themselves, what is truly heartening is the emergence of a new breed of directors keen on experimenting with hitherto untouched themes and spinning innovative and absorbing narratives out of them.
Arivazhagan’s Eeram, Samuthirakani’s Nadodigal, and Pandiraj’s Pasanga: each of these films is special, in that they not only strike an off-the-beaten-path approach in their story and storytelling but have also struck gold at the box office. None of the aforementioned films had any big name on the credits, and two of them (Eeram and Pasanga) were directed by debutants.Yet each of these found an audience willing to embrace the envelope-pushing. The advent of the multiplex has contributed, in no small degree, to these films’ success.
In times when an ever-increasing number of movies vie for the same pie, it is the bloated “masala” movies which find themselves forced to adapt in terms of story and setting in order to stay relevant. Audiences worldwide have shown little patience at nonsensical movies like Villu and Kutty causing them to quickly bite the dust once word-of-mouth spreads.
As the average Tamil-movie-goer would say, Matter irukkanum. Continue reading »
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