CINEMA CULTURE IN SOUTH INDIA – Manjunath S.
We have lost the magic of various still visuals’ capacity, while
positioned in sequence, behaving like moving images. The specific
experience of what they communicated is unique and already
historicized by now. It was an age of the archaic age of technology in
the Indian context. However, the digital age of today can be arguably
claimed as a continuation of that.
In the Southern part of India, Kannada and Malayalam movies
are yet to match the number of movies made in Telugu and Tamil.
Yet, the individual specifications preserved by each one of these four
languages are retained intact. These specifications have effectively
evoked the imaginations of the audience accordingly. This, I believe,
is because the evocations inherent in these language films are heavier
and stronger than the other cultural representations like literature,
art and performative fields. Finally, the daily, mundane, domestic
lifestyles are almost dictated by the cinematic representation of these
people on silver screens.
The Tradition of Watching Cinema
The touring theatre came to the mass as ‘touring talkies’. However,
till the television came to everyone’s houses, rather literally, the
cinema–as a screening phenomena and audience’s performative
participation–retained an inherent distance from the common
man. The gap between the television and cinema was filled by the
same touring talkies. No matter what the cinematic representation
contained as contents, it retained the idea of cinema as a media-ofwonder
in the eye of the beholder. This aspect, instead of being a
mere entertaining aspect, almost took the form of a neo-religiosity in
Telugu and Tamil films and their audiences’ psyche. The old stories,
myths, folklore and historic anecdotes so much availed to him through
the ages into the South Indian psyche was ‘formulated’ as visuals/
visuality in the theatre dramas. Since the actor who enacted those
roles was also a domestic acquaintance, there was no hero-worship
of that actor (mostly male) in the audiences’ mind. Cinema rectified
all these shortcomings, as we perceive it from today’s viewpoint.
What was viewed on screen was not true. Yet it was believable. They
are unavailable but never forgettable. The new forms of onscreen
representation became a new reality, once for all, through a media
which lacked a historicity unlike painting, novel and theatres, and
was a twentieth century phenomena. These were some of the aspects
that made him get addicted to cinematic representation. Television
almost came as a kind of archive or a container of cinema–a pest-
-of the same cinema, only to be added with an idea of independent
media, after a while. Yet, even today, we don’t see Television as a
media of self-reliance like cinema did and does.