Verbosity in Tamil films
On 29th February, 2020 I attended a workshop session by Sreekar Prasad curated by Anjali Menon. I got a full day listening to the brain of a renowned film editor. He spoke mostly about the things that went hay-wire during pre-production or production and how much was re-invented during the editing stages to make-up the mistakes.
Do you know the famous song “Mental Manadhil” from ‘OK Kanmani’ film, it was not originally conceived as we see in the final cut. This is what happened. Mani Ratnam went ahead to shoot the montages even before AR Rahman delivered him the song track. Mani sent the footages to Sreekar with a specific note saying he shot the post-card like footage of the city in 6 fps, (a film is generally shot in 24 fps and a 6fps will have more blur in motion creating a strobe effect). I am thinking Mani was bored to go for the establishment shots of Mumbai city - roads, churches, statues, railway terminus, though he cannot avoid them he found an interesting way to keep them. Remember the 6fps shots were only for the city landscape highlights and the remaining portions of Dulquer and Nithya Menen wandering the city in bike were shot in 24 fps. And now AR Rahman sends a track “Mental Manadhil” and Sreekar plays it to the assembled version of the footage (of Dulqer and Nithya Menen) and finds the track tempo doesn't match the shot tempo. He calls Mani and says what you have shot doesn't work. They move on to edit the remaining parts of the film. Sreekar comes back and randomly starts playing the footages, this time he sees the city establishment shots which was shot with 6fps somewhat matches the rhythm of the track. He gets a spark, calls Mani and says
I think i have got an idea, I am thinking to apply the strobe effect for all the regular shots by reducing the frame rate to match the 6fps and digitally recreating it
You should also remember when Mani handed over his initial notes, Sreekar was not that excited about the strobe effect for the city shots but he did not reject it rather he elevated the idea and came up with something that is a now a part of history.
If you are interested in knowing how the frame rate affects the visual perception watch this excellent scene from ‘JFK’ film here where the assassination of John F Kennedy plays in reduced frame rate to match the original Zapruder Film. One more test footage comparing 24fps vs 6fps here
So the main take-away Sreekar gave us is not to reject any wacky ideas even if it sounds so silly or stupid, try to see if you can go in the direction and think if you can do something more than blindly rejecting it.
The titbits above was to keep you engaged. And it is definitely not the tone of this piece. Lets dive into some serious talks. If you wish you wanted to attend a master-class from Sreekar Prasad and you missed it, I would say you have lost nothing. IMO, the 25 minutes of his speech (link) given for BOFTA students is rich and intriguing. It is definitely a MASTERCLASS with so many insights. I rarely see people working in Tamil films are articulate about their process and ideologies and here Sreekar doesn’t shy away in expressing the things we have been doing so wrong. As soon as the word ‘wrong’ pops up I have seen people who strongly defend these are not wrong and the answer they give you - ‘it is part of our culture that runs into the film medium’. If you are someone who subscribes to the notion then what I am going to discus here might not be your cup of tea. Out of many things discussed, one of the main criticism he makes with Tamil film narrative is verbosity. I have extended his views on ‘verbosity ’with my observations put forward.
This is what the dictionary says about verbosity
verbosity /vəˈbɒsɪti/
noun
the fact or quality of using more words than needed; wordiness
Let us see the different faces of verbosity that is floating around in our films.
1. Verbosity in the aspect of narrative structure — One of the main element I observed is the amount of exposition the narrative takes to establish the set-ups to an extent the inciting incident is introduced only during the interval. With due respect to the films and the film-makers, the points I discuss here are not an attempt to bring them down but a retrospective of why the good or great films of ours cannot stand as good or great when they cross the geographical boundaries. A ‘Parasite’ or ‘Memories of Murder’ or ‘In the Mood for Love’ is celebrated by an American, Indian and a Korean. The narrative sucks the viewer into the story world irrespective of the culture, language and geography divide and this cannot be told the same for Tamil films. Take this example, In Roja, the story is about Madhubala (Roja), her unexpected marriage to the ultra-urban Rishi and just as she eases out the differences, he is kidnapped. The kidnapping comes as a pre-interval block. So you see the problem here, we take too much time so that the audience is aware of who is he, who is she, what he/she wants, what they don’t want and only just before the interval these characters are thrown into a situation. The same can be said for ‘Kannathil Muthamittal’, the premise is about a girl’s search of her biological mother. We take too much time in seeing how she was born, how Madhavan married Simran, their love story and his ideologies, this continues till interval and we get to see the girl’s actual search and journey only after the internal. Sreekar mentioned in the workshop that people did not receive Kanathil Muthamittal’s second half well, I feel this was because the film is divided. When asked, Mani Ratnam tells Baradwaj Rangan that Amudha is the viewpoint, the film uses her as the vehicle by which we travel and her speaking to the camera. I would say the viewpoint angle is on and off. It switches often. Though this question of doubt was raised by Baradaj Rangan in the book (Page 216) and the answer from Mani Ratnam is somewhat convincing but it still doesn’t stick to the promise of the structure where it started. Now as a contrast study, if we consider ‘Kumbalangi Nights’, we see three brothers, we do not get a flashback of their troubled childhood, we do not know how her mother abandoned them, only when they wanted to bring a girl into their house we start to see the obstacles and we learn about them as the story progresses.
The film tracks an event and through the event we learn and understand about the characters and their backstories and this to me is first-class writing and a challenge. The exposition is still dramatic but not in the usual way and not as as an information or explanation so the audience need to know before the actual premise begins. It’s a discovery and not information.
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2 . Verbosity in the aspect of flashback — Look at the recent blockbuster ‘Asuran’. The film takes off with a narrative, “Will the father and son get away with the murder or will they get caught” and all of a sudden we get a pause in the middle of the main narrative and the father explains about his past to his son and the flashback runs more than 30 minutes where the main narrative’s tension and the mood is dissolved by the time we return. Take ‘Ratchasan’, another hit, the film runs around 3 hours, the last 25 minutes is a flashback of why the killer became a killer and that to me is lazy writing. We do not see why John Doe become John Doe in David Fincher’s Seven with a flashback. The climax car scene acted brilliantly by Kevin Spacey explains John Doe’s ideologies which saves 25 pages of screenplay which we are trying to reveal with the usage of flashback tool. Ok wait, i am not against flashbacks, David Fincher also used flashback as a tool in Gone Girl and here is the excerpt of the interview.
Question : What was your first reaction after reading ‘Gone Girl’?
David Fincher: If the person who wrote this can find a way to do these flashbacks in a way that doesn’t seem like we have to stop the entire narrative, then she would be doing us all a great service.
And we get these flashback episodes of Amy’s voice-over cutting to the past that are structured in a way it returns to the main narrative less than every 5 minutes without dropping the main narrative tension of ‘finding the lost wife’. The entire flashback could be packed in 15–20 minutes and it would be great but that would drop the main narrative mood of the film.
Take another example of a Malayalam film “Mayanadhi”, the past love story is stuffed effectively in a single song “Uyirin Nadhiye” and we do not get any more flashbacks, even the troubled childhood of Tovino comes as a dialogue (less than 2 minutes) in the best dramatic way. So we do not see the main narrative pausing to reveal his troubled childhood or their past break up episodes and that to me is absolutely great writing. We learn and discover about the characters as the main narrative progresses.
3. Verbosity in the aspect of dialogues — This is the most obvious and something which we have never tried to understand and change. When i tell people its too much of exposition in the name of dialogue, they fight with me telling our culture is full of talking and our films reflect that. I would take a minute and ask them, our culture is still of speaking more words and yet every now and then we get buried to our mobile phones . Why don’t we reflect the same in the films for the sake of culture and authenticity. X talks to Y, Xlooks at his mobile, Y hits a likes for Facebook post and replies to X. Now again X looks at his mobile and let’s keep cutting like that. When I ask them this question they don’t have an answer. I am reminded of a funny incident which Stanley Kubrick mentioned in his interviews.
“The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play. Too many people over thirty are still word-oriented rather than picture-oriented.
For example, at one point in 2001 Dr. Floyd is asked where he’s going and he replies, “I’m going to Clavius,” which is a lunar crater. Following that statement you have more than fifteen shots of Floyd’s spacecraft approaching and landing on the moon, but one critic expressed confusion because she thought Floyd’s destination was a planet named Clavius. Young people, on the other hand, who are more visually oriented due to their new television environment, had no such problems. Kids all know we went to the moon. When you ask how they know they say, “Because we saw it.”
So you have the problem that some people are only listening and not really paying attention with their eyes. Film is not theater — and until that basic lesson is learned I’m afraid we’re going to be shackled to the past and miss some of the greatest potentialities of the medium
An Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication”
Again I want to revisit the Malayalam film “Mayanadhi”, the popular scene where Aishwarya Lekshmi says “Sex is not a promise”, Do you think the scene worked well for these four words. No, the subsequent screenplay study is important. After she says this, Tovino causally tells her, ‘Appu, don’t talk like a prostitute’ and Aishwarya who kept twirling the strands of Tovino hair till that point suddenly freezes and withdraws her hand from him. This makes her reaction statement so powerful and this comes in the form of gesture and not word-oriented. Those four words are powerful only because we see this gesture later.
I might sound phony and you don’t need to buy all my observations. We can make films as we are doing in the past ignoring all these, we can have hits and blockbusters, we can win the hearts of 2 crore TN people, we can join 100 crore and 200 crore clubs, we can get Vijay award, we can get multiple Behindwoods gold medals, but remember we will be locking down the film’s accessibility when it crosses our geography and as time passes we will be limiting the accessibility for the new generation even in the same region it catered before.
To reiterate the words of Kubrick
Film is not theater — and until that basic lesson is learned I’m afraid we’re going to be shackled to the past and miss some of the greatest potentialities of the medium
