Summary:
Writings on cinema follow different trajectories in Malayalam today. The insights and provocations this book provides definitely extends and enriches the lingua franca of Malayalam film criticism and, one hopes, will also invite serious and critical engagement. On the one side, we have many books on film criticism approaching cinema from an ideological point of view, analysing various strands and layers of dominant, oppressive and oppositional ideas running through the text. Ethiran Kathiravan’s work Cinemayude Samuhyavelipadukal strides a path of its own; it doesn’t strictly stick to any particular genre of criticism, but combines many approaches and lines of thought. The prose of the book is densely inter-textual and replete with cross-references as diverse as film texts, literary works, historical facts, film songs, kathakali padams, film gossip, and scientific terminologies and theoretical categories..