Shaji Karun: An architect of stillness

Pokkuveyil is Malayalam director Aravindan’s most underrated film, but its haunting quality can stay with you for years and years. There is a slight disorientedness about it, a slight hesitation of a man who is desperate to find his way out of the mess he is in, but is lost in the thickets of his vast sadness. Shaji’s camera is like the mental fog that slowly envelops a brain whose consciousness is turning hazy. You are alive yet you are lost; you are here yet are not in the now. Shaji’s camera enfolds protagonist Balachandran Chullikad in a tight embrace and never leaves him till he lies in a foetal position, a tabula rasa waiting to be rewritten again.

Poet of images

Shaji Karun was arguably India’s best cinematographer after Subrata Mitra, who managed the camera for Satyajit Ray until Charulata and whose association with the Bengali master director produced a string of brilliant films. Shaji teamed up with Aravindan and came out with a bevy of films that still resonate for its visual richness and poetic quietness. If Aravindan was the troubadour of silence, Shaji, as his cameraman, was his poet of images. Together they birthed a cinema that still retains its distinctive touch.

Alongside them, Adoor Gopalakrishnan kept on producing his austere films, whose sensitivity is still unmatched in the annals of Indian cinema. But Shaji’s contribution was special because he brought into this world a visual language that had many acolytes.

For a long time, Kerala, an incredibly garrulous and culturally active society, remained at the forefront of Indian cinema with its auteur films that spoke loudly to India with a silence that haunted and mesmerised everyone. Kerala still makes the best films in the country, but that silence — which was the hallmark of Shaji’s and Aravindan’s association — has somehow got lost to a verbal abundance that, like consumerism, has forcefully made its way into the cultural ethos of the state.

In his style, where his camera first lingered and then caressed and — when needed — probed, Shaji’s work seemed very close to Sven Nyqvist, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer. In his lighting, he could achieve the sublimeness of Gordon Willis, the legendary American cinematographer, and, in his exterior work, he could achieve the quickness and suppleness of Nestor Almendros, the French New Wave cameraman. But Shaji, gathering all these influences and insights, developed his own unique style — unhurried and full of silent strokes. His camera was like a bee hovering over a flower, first flirting with it and then dipping into it for its nectar.

Montage of growing pains

In a country like India, which is a visual cacophony, only two cameramen in India developed a visual style that conveyed a meaning that was fully in tune with their directors’ visions of India. Subrata Mitra, working for Satyajit Ray, started out when the country was trying to find its feet after independence and his black and white work for Apu Trilogy and films such as Jalsaghar reflects that trepidation and anxiety that the nation was afflicted with. In Charulata, a period film, Mitra’s camera was more freewheeling, unrestrained by the growing-up pangs of a nation. Later, in the late 60s and early 70s, a wave of documentary filmmakers such as SNS Sastry and Sukhdev caught the hectic nation-building of that time. By the time Shaji came around, in the 70s, the country had gone through some upheavals.

But Shaji, under the tutelage of Aravindan, largely stayed cocooned from those crises and worked on films such as Kanchana Sita, a feminist retelling of a part of the Ramayana story on the banks of the Godavari and Thampu, which explored what the arrival of a circus and its eventual exit does to a village on the banks of the Bharatapuzha.

Thampu won Shaji his first National award, shortly before they turned to colour. Then came Kummatti, the story of the Pied Piper-like bogeyman set in Palakkad where Shaji's camera feasted on - in the words of restorer Cecilia Cenciarelli - a rich palette of skies, grass, foliage and fields. Their association lasted well over a decade, through films like Esthappan and the Smita Patil-starrer Chidambaram, and ended around the time Shaji turned a celebrated director.

Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being, said the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Shaji, in his heartfelt Piravi and long association with Aravindan, worked on films that were far removed from the hodgepodge and abysmal taste of Bollywood’s mass culture.

His camera was like a conscious, sentient — almost metaphysical — being bringing you up close and personal with the human spirit where the humdrum did not intrude and where silence spoke eloquently and powerfully about humanity and its small triumphs and its big frailties.