Scripting Dravida cinema
M. Karunanidhi had a 70-year-long successful run in the film industry. His excellent screenplays and fiery dialogues, driven by his deep commitment to the Dravidian ideology, are unmatched in Tamil cinema.
A YOUNG MAN LED A FRAIL OLD MAN TOA cinema hall in Tiruvarur, a town in the erstwhile Tanjore district of the Madras Presidency, to watch a movie. The year was 1947; the film, Rajakumari. Jupiter Pictures of Coimbatore had produced the film and M.G. Ramchander (as M.G. Ramachandran was known then) had made his debut as hero in it. The young man, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, had written the film’s script, and he wanted to fulfil his father Muthuvelar’s wish to “see” it. Muthuvelar’s failing health had impaired his vision; so he had to be content with the possibility of “hearing” the movie, that is, its dialogues. This act of “hearing” the dialogues in a significant way symbolises the Dravidian cinema, which reverberated in the Tamil cinematic space and the Tamil public sphere for the next few decades and went on to become the soul of Tamil cinema and the Tamil people. The champions of resurgent Dravidian nationalism, who had captured the imagination of the masses with rhetorical discourses delivered from makeshift stages in street corners, had now moved to the screen space. The timing of the move was spectacular.
The film scholar Rajan Kurai Krishnan shows in his article “From songs to speech” (Seminar, June 2009) how the transition from song to speech was effectively handled by C.N. Annadurai (Anna), M. Karunanidhi and other Dravidian scriptwriters. This he has done by delineating the complex movement image and time image concepts of the French philosopher Giles Deleuze.
Rajan Kurai Krishnan writes: “While the DMK used its powerful new rhetoric in writing, public speaking and in drama, the use of the rhetoric in cinema had an enhanced value for politics owing to the nature of the film sign.”
The possibility of theatre and cinema being potential tools of propagation of political ideas and programme is