The problem with film posters is that no one will come to watch a film whose promo depicts an albino kid or a new born girl with invisible face or a child rolling about in and as a gender free fruit green. And yet, imagine in Lennon stylistics, what it could have been. Put that soury gourdy albino - or is it an albinic gourdy soury - in a basket a patra a drona of woven bambwomb splits and float it down river and suddenly it starts pumping blood into our so so so much later - chronologically marking and anthropologically speaking - mythological veins of two of humanity's greatest so so sanitized epics....but with the ostracism intact...that bane of all civilizations. So, this is exactly where great cinema like KOTHANODI ('K') falters. In its promotion.
A film maker is not expected to know
just what will be the impact of his or her film, or where...which is why film
making is the riskiest business in the history of mankind , closest to the risks of prehistoric survival
of the human race- beset by predators and cannibals of every kind, more
dangerous than loan sharks, including one's very own suicidal self.
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| A Still from Cindrella |
But the advertising man or woman must
know how to predict the response...if not the results, given a set of predictable
advertising slogans and circumstances...which is why advertising by virtue of
its relative cocky sureness is considered a lower art form than film making by
virtue of the latter's totally immeasurable unpredictability...measured on
mankind's survival scale of uncertainty, where the less predictable art of
imitating life and proposing vice versa is rated higher than the lower form of
commercial creature life of selling goods & services...ha ha ha, what an
innuendo of a definition - aka advertising. I once asked the legendary David
Ogilvy if great promos for a faulty product will kill the product
faster....pitting as i was intentionally one kind of industrial art against
another. He hummed and hawed and preferred to stick to the more traditional tale
of how bad promos can completely stifle a good proposition. And , of course, we
all agree with that. Because 'K's promo and alas Barua's pesticide-seeking film
appraisal Almodovar driven of urbanised
female anxieties that is a false promo by any other name - because film
criticism in India died a long long time ago -
just may have connived to grind to death the greatest Indian
multi-coiled cinematic mythological event ever let loose in recent times...
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| Kothanodi: Movie Poster |
That Assam & Awesome (some
pronounce the two as Ossom) have a phonetic connect comes as no surprise to me
having visited Guahati, experienced 'K'ama'K'shya Devi and yearned to break the curfew at the
bewitching hour of night to dip in the Brahmaputra known for breaking its
curfewing banks of imprisonment (financial pun intended) over and over again
such that it is a river of many anaconda widths that could shame the Amazon.
That 'K's serpentinian stories emerge from the gorging regurgitating belly depths of the palpable
ossomness of Ossom, that you can only pay tribute to it, not tell it nor tale
it nor trail or tail it not narrate it not spiel not spin not mastermind not
cut paste not emasculate but let it merely meander flow run through the
corri-doors & channels & sluice gates of your mind, your mastis'K' ,
your pythas like a prehensile
unpremeditated growth swelling distending akin to a pressurised vein
splitting blood flood alongside a simultaneous nerve wracking sap-drip-drop
drip-drop drip- drop, because vegetarianism and its non-version have not at
this time been invented, and so you let both the mangshashi and the
shakahari seep through your unique
consciousness, your shared conscience-mess, your collective psyche, your
collective unconscious. And you wonder in the blackness of the auditorium, oblivious
to everyone else, lost in the dark recesses of your sometimes ticking mind
& sometimes thrib-throbbing heart if this isn't the reason why cinema was
invented....to imagerize metaphorise metamorphosize symbolize iconize totemize
our special intertwining 'K'athas that have kept us mesmerized and together
through aeons of immeasurable time. No linear paged novel or print product
could possibly catch the stark complexity of the internecine argument of
incursive, insidious intent,flowing like many currents in a single river.
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| Gustave Dore's illustration of Little Red Riding Hood |
And 'K's Director does well to stand
at the end of at least two screenings that i have watched and take in the
praise and the criticism in equal measure trance-like. Because with 'K' we are
here celebrating the trance and the transition and the transportation that
comes from tripping from the pre-civilizational tribal to the post agricultural
rural to the near nature starvation urban. Anyone who confuses the fairy with
the folk with the fable with the tribal is bound to completely miss the movie
as the poster does and as does the grim- faced faceless effort. (What are four
women's faces doing here with four feminine institutionalised conventionalised
constitutionalized Red Bindiyas chamkoing... these poster women are not of the
film, because in 'K' they are beyond the pale of our imagination of our
constitution of our institution of our formalisation...these are formless wild
energies...in their trance-fixed primeval unform...of whom some will lead us to
our current state....and some beyond....because this is not 4 stories and one
epic ....this is ONE PRE-EPIC BEFORE THE EPIC WAS BORN! So, why are the
domesticated faces laid out mystery stripped cut- pasted air brushed banal
beheads in Bollywoody box-office smoke machined sequence? Where is the magic,
where the realism, where is the fine balance that 'K' so successfully achieves
in the film - in the acting method and the madness, the superstitious sanity,
the numbskull sadness and skullnumbing sadism reeking with primeval phallic
eroticism? Have we not missed the jungles for the wood here, the wood for the
trees, the copious dense undergrowth for the mono(agri)culture? In the promo, I
mean...not in the movie....though definitely in the interpretation of it). As
an aside, Robert should never have allowed the Frost to settle on Nehru's
imagination and allowed him to explore the woods dark & deep instead of
turning away to keep promises he could never possibly hope to keep.
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| A Still from Baby's Day Out |
'K' is, therefore, in the betrayals
it portrays and the mind bending, nay cranium crushing sovereign torture it
depicts, mashing rice white with blood red, not a movie about some intellectual
sailing down the river of knowledge...this is not the masalaic Mississippi nor
the Conradian Thames, the dainty preserve of urban university education, though
it is that, too, but it is a much much more severe river Brahmaputra ,
sometimes cloaking devilry in the merchantry - not poster-boy commercialese,
mind you, thanks to a powersoft Adil - sometimes cloaking the deep sea of
heaving emotions in silent waters, at times turning into the Styx that ropes in
a psychic crossing, at other times becoming the conjoining conjugal medium for
dip and a float and then an unfathomable
fishing territory....and at most times much closer to the Amazon, but so
intercoiled with the Outengist - truth will Out, that is in the Gist- the
circular, the congealed, the ingrown, the claustrophobic, the crushing the
strangulating the cyclical the foetal the fatal the seminal the menstrual the
spiral and the rotational edges and edginess of our philosophy and philology that in a
predominantly agricultural land of today bihu-ornated weaver decorated metal
and gold plated money-price estimated & Brahminical morality debated 'K'
gently at first and then vigorously bye and bye sets us off on a primordial
Pangean journey to Gondwanaland, into a prime-evil past when, it is believed,
we may have been connected with the deepest most terrifying most mysterious
magical jungles of the then South American continent where human life swallowed
by the reptilian, crushed and strangulated , choked and suffocated, struggled
to emerge and silently gave up, acquiesced to the defeat and began to evolve
only later in the somewhat less steamy, less constrictopian, more savvy,
savannahic regions of Africa.
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| A Still from Anaconda |
That Gabriel Garcia Marquez
recognized this in his Solitudinal Psychopathic 100 years and told the
Europeans that if you think Africa is the
heart of darkness you ain't seen nothin' yet and gave us the courage to
go past Naipaul who himself went past Fanon's wretchedness to call India a
wounded civilization, to now have 'K' which may be the poultice for our
subliminal angst, because it is at 'K', the sutradhar, and connected collated
narratives of similar hypernature, where our evolutionary 'K'atha suddenly
becomes so rich and succulent and so culturally nutritional that some may see
in it all of India's pre, current and post-civilizational reincarnation,
transmigration, transition and rebirth.So, is their a solution for the world
here, where we can overcome, not bypass, the wretched quality of our zero-sum
fate? (My analyses of Nandan Saxena & Kavita Behl's documented economic
alternatives is still pending). And are we struggling too much in our films
with coincidence, which is why they fail, when we could actually be addressing
Fate as our ancestors once did...and 'K' reminds us?
 |
| A Still from Ratatouille |
That nature can be so pernicious
before it becomes evidently plentiful, that much before the cornucopia, before
the dream of utopia, came the harrowing and haranguing nightmares of
constrictopia, the mystical magic reality of coping both with your mind, you
think you have one , and the mind of the universe, you think it/s/he has one,
and the physical spirit that both have one and the same will to survive!
'K' takes all this in and
superimposes it, pans it across our middle class middling morality, on our put-
puttering life of mundane faked emotions and roti flattened spirit,
circumscribed by the insincere passion of faked religiosity, and succeeds
miraculously to extract therefrom a meaning more painful than a drilling in our
dental gums, to find the teeth of a new meaning that should give us now a
powerful jaw for our future.
 |
| Marquez and Shakespeare |
Marquez would have been proud to see
'K', Eisenstein surely moved by its montage and Stanislavski prepared to
rewrite his treatise on acting method. For Shakespeare it would be a HEAD
turner, as the cauldron boils and kadhai bubbles and witches toil to make human
trouble and the foul-fair fair-foul dichotomy takes a pernicious pun turn on a
perfectly sun drenched day, which is really a tribute to how Hazarika uses
light outside to convey the impending darkness inside and vice versa.
As for the Aristotlean definition of
tragedix and apparently a comedix he wrote alongside his poetix, they would after
'K' simply fall into disrepute if not on deaf (y)ears.... all thanx to awesome
Assam (Ohom,Ohmm,Om), and the reason why everything about her tells us she is
definitely limb-coiled with mainland India, not for the economy, not the
political boundary, not for the facials, the race or colour, but the myths, and
the dreams, the nightmares and the evolutionary screams that we all share as
Indians! The middle-man who appears to have travelled down from much much
further up from the faraway text-styled North, notwithstanding!
 |
| The History of Editing, Eisenstein, and the Soviet Montage |
Don't miss ''KOTHANODI" - it is
a Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Maleficent churn without the prince, the
woodcutter, the fairy god-mother, without a pumpkin and the ratatouille, but
Baby's Day Out nevertheless with Outenga!
Digital release of the film is
awaited across Eastern America in September. Unaffordable costs of dubbing
forbid the film from getting into at least 14 Indian languages to make a
national pitch. But that is not necessary.
Release in the languages of Assam and
our North Eastern states, Bengal,
Odisha, Jharkhand, Bangladesh, and among the Bhils, Munda, Gond, Oram, Juanga,
Bhuiyan, Saura , Dharua, Bonda, Koya, Mohali, Loharas, Oraon , Ho, Ojha,
Paraja, Gadaba, Bhuiji who it is now discovered speak about the same language, should
be enough, but I would personally love a Kui dub:
 |
| Tribals learn they can file reports in their own native languages |
"Tribals From Different Regions
of India Find They Speak The Same Language – And Now Share Information By Cell
Phone | ICFJ - International Center for Journalists,
http://www.icfj.org/blogs/tribals-different-regions-india-find-they-speak-same-language-–-and-now-share-information-cell
Consider this. Odisha alone has a
population of 30 million ruralites, with 62 tribes. If the Govt. were to give
our 'K' men ₹10/- per capita entertainment, 'K' would make ₹30 crores in just
one Indian state.
If an audience cannot find a film,
the film must find its audience. And that is what advertising -- whether of product or picture or brand and fixture -- was invented to do!
All the best, "K". Let 30
million kathas float.
About Author -
Nataranjan Bohidar has 40 years of teaching, training & transformational expertise. His interests are socio-cultural symbiogenesis & citizen positioning. His current initiative is to position India as a democracy within a continuum where cinema is a key subtext.
Readers, please feel free to share your views/opinions in the comment box below. As always your feedback is highly appreciated!
References:
IMDb
Wikipedia
Kothanadai - The River of Fables (2015) Trailer
Readers, please feel free to share your views/opinions in the comment box below. As always your feedback is highly appreciated!
References:
IMDb
Wikipedia
Kothanadai - The River of Fables (2015) Trailer