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Adoor: Quality over quantity
He is a colossus among India's celluloid poets, says Saibal Chatterjee.
Malayalam cinema stalwart Adoor Gopalakrishnan may actually have a point when he says that he is "too young" for the honour, but the coveted Dadasaheb Phalke award could not have gone to a more deserving filmmaker.
Adoor, 64 years and nine outstanding feature films old, is a colossus among India's living celluloid poets. As anybody who is familiar with Indian cinema is aware, he represents a rare breed. He is incidentally the first film personality from Kerala to win the Phalke award.
Adoor's cinema, which seamlessly blends a deep understanding of life, emotions and politics with exquisite cinematic craftsmanship, has as much worldwide currency as it has artistic and seminal here-and-now relevance.
Of the post-Satyajit Ray generation of Indian exponents of truly personal cinema, Adoor probably enjoys the largest and the most influential following among international cinephiles.
Although his films draw strength primarily from the fact that they are firmly rooted in the ethos of his native Kerala, with all its political complexities and historical nuances, Adoor's work is a marvellous synthesis of culture specificity on the one hand and communicative universality on the other.
The reach and power of his cinematic language is so extraordinary that Adoor has needed only nine feature films to win an award that the less gifted take tens of releases to do. Sadly, given the current domestic distribution-exhibition scenario, Adoor is better understood and appreciated abroad than in India. The loss is entirely ours.
Hence, the bestowal on Adoor of India's highest award in the field of cinema is a reinforcement of the real value of the prize, especially since it has come just a year after the honour went to yet another non-mainstream master, Mrinal Sen.
During the rule of the right-wing NDA, the Phalke award had lost some of its lustre - it was handed out all too easily to flag-bearers of a world that believes more in the business of making money than in the art of sculpting permanent patterns on the face of cinematic time and space.
Few filmmakers in the world are as inimitable as Adoor. Although in the early years, he was influenced by the cinema of the east Europeans, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, it became apparent pretty quickly that he was too individualistic an artist to make a living off borrowed ideas and styles.
