About Lohithadas, movie maker

Movie Director and script writer Lohithadas died today due to cardiac arrest. I don’t know how old he was, the news did not state that, perhaps that’s nice too, artists have no age.

I feel sad about it, this guy had touched my heart in some ways, he had evoked wonder in me which most others, more renowned and capable, had failed to do. My delight was with the way he portrayed the human element on screen, bringing out the fleeting nuances of life with wonderful adroitness. It’s not easy to do that, to convey hidden layers of emotional experience in a visual medium.

Movies deal in images; images can be very suggestive, but not enough to go deeper than that. D.W.Griffith ( Very much in disfavor now because of the racial connotation of his movie “Birth of a nation” and his general sexist and old world attitudes) once remarked that the visual media cannot depict true philosophical content with what it can work with; there are limits to what images can convey. I do not remember the full contents of his essay but it seems to be more or less on that lines.

Those were the early days of movies, and Griffith was a pioneer in it. He is said to have invented the close-ups, trolley shots and parallel editing. He also proved that by cutting from a close up to the object of the characters thought the audience would assume the connection between the two. These may appear all too evident to the modern mind, but at that time they were nothing short of inventive.

May be Lohithadas knew about the aesthetics of film making or maybe he did not. But what he tried was to capture that which lay behind, in the sub conscious and unconscious levels of the mind, going beyond what movies could do. He seemed to have believed with Ingmar Bergman that,

"The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion' I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect."

Lohithadas certainly new about this inner music, he even tried to do the impossible in his scripts, to raise very subtle questions by relating and juxtaposing images and often winning hands down. Or that is what I feel by watching his movies. There was a subtle element in them, mostly indefinable, but eminently graspable. I can’t classify it in any manner. It seems to be his signature.

Other than his first movie Bhuuthakannadi (The Microscope) he did not really try anything artistic with his film making. He was working in the main stream and produced movies which entertained rather than aiming at sublimation. But there was always that difference in him, something introspective, something watchful and withdrawn. That came out all too evident in those movies he created.

He was a better writer than a movie maker. May be before he ventured into directing movies himself he was more exacting on the content of the story than the possibilities for its picturization. I believe he worked with the hidden parts of the mind then rather than that is visible on the outside. It was palpable to the audience, his scenes asked questions that everyone has asked sometimes.

This is not always realizable in a medium like the movies. He had gifted actors and technicians like Mamooty and Sibi Malayil who could bring them out in mind when he etched those nuances in his script.

I have heard that in his scripts everything would be written down to their last details, he was not merely creating a movie script, he was trying to bring out deeper layers of meanings with it . This was impossible without minute attention to details. He must have known the dictum

"...however tiny and however short the pieces of film are- they must be written down in just the same a composer writes down those little black dots from which we get beautiful sound."

He worked with subconscious or unconscious nuances of experience that had direct access to our hearts. He was not what you call an intellectual; he was raw man, a restless man, but a very artistic one.

It’s sad that he is no more now.