Sunday, February 12, 2012

The Tragedy about the Tragedy

Cinema, fiction are very different from our real life. Real life has a lot of irrational things. But fiction, cinema are technically rational, these mediums present the ‘edit’ version of real life.
2 characters meet and they speak about a point and they speak so that the reader/ viewer understand sthe context. This can never happen in real life.
Take this example
“Do you really have to go?”, asks the mother
“Yes amma. This is educational tour and we are going to Udhagamandalam to study the tribes life”, replied the daughter
Do you see how crystal clear the dialogue is? But can you be sure that this is how the incidents happen in real life? The woman and her daughter would’ve spoken the same things, but it would have been lengthy exchange and could’ve happened over a period of week. But for the sake of Fiction/ cinema the creator has given the distilled information.
Now there is this craze in Tamil Cinema to take a rustic story with a tragic end. But what is tragic in this tragic cinema is the tragedy is irrational!
Take for example ‘Vennila Kabadikulu’, the movie goes for a smooth finish, but the director decides that he needs a tragedy. Nothing works like tragedy, the sympathetic wave of the crowd is extremely important.
So the hero dies accidently. Yes! Accident happens in real life too! Life is so irrational that suddenly a person dies in an accident. But in cinema you cannot do it. You should be as rational as possible.
It’s ok if a character dies of an accident and then the story can be how the people around come terms of what happened. The story can provide space for how rationally the characters react. But abruptly ending a story with a tragedy is a ‘tragedy’ of creativity.
In ‘Valmiki’ the hero is a thief and he finally turns a new leaf and all of a sudden someone snatches the gold chain from the heroine and she gets cut in her neck and she dies. Come on! Be creative, it’s easy to make people cry but it’s difficult to make the tragedy rational. And it’s the duty of the creator to make it rational.

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