Filmmaker, teacher Venkat Siddareddy’s Telugu book Cinema Oka Alchemy reflects the author’s cathartic approach towards filmmaking and film viewing. Through words, he brings the cinema viewing experience to life and elaborates on how it transports you into a world where there are no rules, where storytelling occupies equal significance as the story or the genre.
Analysis replaces judgement
Succeeding in its attempt to blur between the reel and the real, this book features essays on 30 hand-picked films from the columns (called ‘Batukamma’) he had contributed to a Telugu daily. Celebrating the best of global cinema (Iranian, Japanese, Russian, English, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Telugu to name a few), Venkat doesn’t pass judgement on the film as a whole, but elaborately analyses the role that a particular (perhaps significant) situation plays in the film, on how it has been filmed or why it is important in the broader scheme of the film. The author structures his writings on the lines of a spectator’s passionate discussion. He doesn’t tell a reader, ‘This is the way I look at cinema’, but rather says, ‘This is how you may look at it’.
The author in the foreword clarifies that he didn’t intend the essays to fall under an umbrella. However, there’s an invisible thread that connects them in the way he approaches every film , with language posing no barrier. Every essay ends with his favourite sequence in the film which sums up the narrative. As he dissects world cinema, each essay comes with impressive thumbnail caricature designs that captures the film in a stroke.
It doesn’t matter if a reader hasn’t watched a particular film that’s mentioned in the book. An essay on the Chinese film Getting Home is proof of that; it’s the quest of a man who carries the dead body of a co-passenger whose last desire is to be buried at his hometown. In his writeup on Kate Winslet-Leonardo DiCaprio starrer Revolutionary Road, he talks of a couple that merely exists and not lives, all trapped in mundaneness.
Holistic approach
What lends the book depth and helps sustain its leisurely setting is its universality and the holistic approach. Venkat observes that the life of an average middle-class citizen is similar universally. In the author’s discussion on Pankaj Kapoor -Shabana Azmi’s Ek Doctor Ki Maut (based on the life of scientist Subash Mukhopadyay), he talks of how human history is always dominated by greed, jealousy. Here, it’s the life of a scientist who’s crippled by a system he can’t escape and becomes a butt of many jokes for his invention of a medicine that could possibly cure leprosy.
The films in the book are selected on the basis of how best they reveal the signature of a particular technician or actor (even if they aren’t classics). For instance, he states that though B Nagi Reddy’s Pooja Phalam may not have been the filmmaker’s best, the protagonist’s character sketch bears a resemblance to the filmmaker in real life.
He also discusses cinematic techniques; that a camera placed on the ground can give you an earthy portrait of life . It also gives insights into near-death experiences that actors had faced to bring alive a filmmaker’s vision. Yet, the book is not only for a film-fanatic, it talks of the opportunity the medium gives to observe social backdrops and timelines. Sometimes even they don’t matter.
Venkat Siddareddy’s perspective is one you wouldn’t want to miss.
Cinema Oka Alchemy
Author: Venkat Siddareddy
Publisher: Perspectives
Price: Rs 180