Writings on cinema follow different trajectories in Malayalam today. 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. On the other, there are writings that focus either upon the director as auteur or on the text, often explicating upon them as aesthetic creations or narrative structures. During the past two decades, the approach to cinema has been hugely influenced by cultural studies, looking at film texts and narratives from feminist, subaltern, queer and other angles, delineating the workings of power and cultural prejudices, various kinds of presence and absence. 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 attempt is to read film texts against the grain as social constructs and look at the various ways in which they relate to the socio-political and psychological dispensations and desires of its audience. Among others, one major motif that runs as an undercurrent to all these texts is its engagement with and explorations into the Malayali psyche, with all its historical baggage, psychological dilemmas and political complexities. It is a collection of articles about films from different genres and languages such as Baahubali, Bhargavinilayam, Kuttikuppayam, Karutha Pakshikal, Volver, Kutty Srank, Leela, Nirakar Chhaya, Pranchiyettan and Elsamma Enna Aankutty, and short films like Angulichalitham and Frog. The insights drawn are also as varied. For instance, the article on A. Vincent’s Bhargavinilayam is about how the film narrative reflects and recreates the very creative process of writing and writer’s imagination. Analysis of Kutty Srank, Pranchiyettan and Elsamma Enna Aankutty shows how these film narratives grapple with masculinity and the political imagination and the history of Kerala, sometimes through parody and metaphor, other times through obsessions and exclusions. Another interesting analysis is that of Kuttikuppayam, which goes back in time to trace the history of impotency of the male hero in Malayalam cinema, where one encounters a protagonist — played by Prem Nazir – who realises and admits to his lack, something unthinkable in the later decades. 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. Ethiran’s writing also often resorts to unconventional usages and compounded sentence structures that at times clutters the flow of ideas as well as readability. It would have been useful for a reader not familiar with theory, if there were explanations or footnotes about unfamiliar terminologies and terms. Likewise, though the presence of pictures in a film book is an additional attraction, in this case, the photographs included are placed randomly and are unaccompanied by description, leaving it to the reader’s guess, like the name of directors of the short films, which are also not mentioned. However, with regard to its eclectic approach and inter-disciplinarity, the book is a welcome and significant contribution to film literature in Malayalam, which is bogged down by hagiographies and ideological polemics. 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.

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