vedic elementalism – the films of velu viswanadhan
Viswanadhan spent his formative years in the 1940s in Kerala and belonged to a family of Visvakarmas (a Hindu mythological concept with Upanishadic roots meaning “architects of the world”) who were potters, blacksmiths, and sculptors. His father was a painter and architect, involved in the rituals of Mandala, a graphic confluence of spirituality, religiosity and art.
Viswanadhan, famed as a painter more than a filmmaker, came to Paris in 1968 for an exhibition of his works. There he started frequenting the Cinémathèque in Paris where Jean Rouch revealed to him the possibilities of small-gauge filmmaking and its appropriateness for making “travel films”. Between 1976 and 2002, Viswanadhan made a series of five films in India about the elements that form the material basis of the universe (Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether) according to the ancient Vedas. These films combined the artist's unwavering observational and non-intrusive documentary interest in religious rituals and mechanical labor with a painterly interest in landscapes.
Aesthetically sensual, the films eschew ethnography in favor of an exploration of the encyclopedic visual and aural signatures of the filmed topography; sometimes combining recorded sound with Indian Classical and electro-acoustic music, descriptive shots with near abstract renderings. The epically ambitious films at one level are deeply informative, in ecological, postcolonial, mythological, historical, or even philosophical terms, but are not fraught with information (four of the five films have no speech on the soundtrack). They inspire an act of primordial looking and hearing, moments of contemplation, and an experience of the elusive poetics of the mundane – a genuine cinema of sensations. Viswanadhan’s films capture the world in its immanence where history whispers in its ears as everything continues on its destined journey.
( Arindam Sen )
sat 07/09 14:00 | vedic elementalism – the films of velu viswanadhan pt. 1: ganga (l'eau) (screening at dff)
Viswanadhan ventured into filmmaking almost accidentally. Having met a serious car accident in Germany in 1976, he returned to India on an existential quest, in his words, to discover who he was.
He collected sand from the coasts for his sand paintings and began to shoot footage on Super-8 for what was to become the first film in the pentalogy, Sable. L’Eau, shot on 16mm, follows Sable where Viswanadhan traveled upstream along the Ganges River, setting out at Sagar Island in Bengal (at the confluence of the river and the Bay of Bengal ocean) and traveling to the origin of the river at Gomukh in the Himalayas. The film is a sensorial exploration of life that prospers on the shores of the most significant river of the Indian subcontinent, its civilizational lifeline. At various points we encounter shots of religious rituals, architecture, fishing, craftsmanship, each of them autonomous and self-fulfilled, without feeding into an overarching narrative, documentary shots that bestow poetry to the mundane. On the soundtrack we hear singing, chanting, and field sounds that densify our reception of the image.
The shots often emanate abstractly in details of objects or living creatures before widening out and revealing the surroundings. The film evokes history and philosophy, myths and poetry, murmurs of the past resonating through the life on the banks pointing to its perpetuity, always alert to its transformations without conceding to romanticization.
( Arindam Sen )
Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen. Many thanks to Centre Georges Pompidou (Enrico Camporesi and Cécile Zoonens-Peigne). 16mm print from the collection of MNAM-CCI, Centre Georges Pompidou. The work belongs to the National Collections.
Ganga (L'Eau)
D: Velu Viswanadhan, 16mm, color, sound, 153 min, 1985
sun 08/09 16:00 | vedic elementalism – the films of velu viswanadhan pt. 2: akaash (ether) (screening at pupille)
Ether is the final film in the pentalogy. It opens with a close-up of colorful threads, the tana (warps) of looms stretched out, the camera slowly zooms out revealing the act of weaving. At some point in the film, waves of migrant laborers walking towards the Kolkata city are filmed on the Howrah Bridge from a car moving in the opposite direction. While the camera gently fondles the exterior of temple architecture, we hear the sound of stone-sculpting. Near the end of the film we encounter an enchanting dance sequence, featuring women from the Siddi ethnic group, a tribe whose history in the subcontinent dates back to the 16th-century migration of South East African slaves under Portuguese colonialism.
Viswanadhan’s camera focuses on the bright garments, the rhythms and choreography of the body, the harmony of their existence, the lush green texture of the leaves and the blue of the water. Color remains integral to Viswanadhan’s shot compositions where many such vignettes of existence unfold, leisurely, devoid of any pronounced rhetoric, sensating its prosaic nature. Ether elucidates the gaze in its many forms, through reflections, through secondary frames such as the car windshield, through characters looking straight back at the camera, and through shots of eyes. A subtle yet powerful gesture, affirming that Viswanadhan is by no means oblivious to either the complexities of representational politics, or the power dynamics at play between the spaces in-front and behind the camera.
( Arindam Sen )
Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen. Many thanks to Centre Georges Pompidou (Enrico Camporesi and Cécile Zoonens-Peigne). 16mm print from the collection of MNAM-CCI, Centre Georges Pompidou. The work belongs to the National Collections.
Akaash (Ether)
D: Velu Viswanadhan, 16mm, color, sound, 101 min, 2002
