In this sense, the photograph aims to overstate its difference from the film itself. In The Great Indian Kitchen, the photograph is not merely a mute and intransigent object from the past, but also a constant reminder that the happy couple whose photograph hangs on the wall is starkly different from the couple we see in the film. The last time we see it is as part of the montage, reminding us that it is but another marriage like the many before… almost.
The third time we see it, the photograph stays in-focus as the wife closes a door behind her differences between them have now become irreconcilable.
Here, the photograph hangs on a background wall between the couple, as Suraj confronts his wife for applying for a job without his permission. By the time it reappears, the tensions have already become much more visible. The first time, we see it positioned on the wall as the couple have their first fight. It appears thrice in the film before this scene, each time reflecting the changing nature of the marriage itself, as tensions simmer between the couple. This is not the first time their wedding photograph is shown to the audience. The photograph from Vadakkunokkiyanthram has etched itself in popular imagination The wedding photograph from Bangalore Daysĭineshan and Shobha’s (ruined) photograph from Vadakkunookiyanthram Narendran lays out photographs on a table in the climax of Innale (1990) The wedding picture in Kumbalangi Nights poster (left) seen printed on a calendar in the film (right) But my interest in this piece is on a very peculiar type of photograph that have made their presence felt in Malayalam cinema-that of wedding and/or couple photographs. 20, Madras Mail (1990) and FIR (1999) also see a similar use of photographs as “evidence”. A photograph, here, is both the evidence-and as we discover eventually-the decoy. When the Chief Minister is assassinated in the classic Malayalam thriller The Truth (1998), the inquiry revolves around a camera and photographs found at the spot of a woman presumed to be the assassin. This reading of a photograph as ‘evidence’ is most commonly seen in thrillers, detective movies, and melodramas. The most common use of photographs in cinema tend to dwell on the photograph as a mute and intransigent object from the past, providing a disputable/indisputable proof of an event that has occurred. If we concede that a photograph is given its meaning-its punctum-through a text (caption), how can we begin to think of a cinematic adaptation of this? What can a photograph offer to cinema? I recently happened to revisit this question of the relationship between photography and cinema while watching (and re-watching) some old and new films from Kerala. It was an attempt at understanding the relation between photography and/in cinema. Her attempt was, as she concedes, to try and find/ascribe meaning both to the photograph, and through it, to her own oeuvre of film-making. With little luck in finding anything concrete (Varda traces down both the humans in the picture only to find out they have no recollection of the image, and she shows the picture to a goat who eats it), she concludes that “nothing appears in the image”, and that the picture itself could have been clicked any other time and the people in it could be anyone else. Two years after Barthes’ Camera Lucida was published, Agnès Varda made Ulysse (1983), a documentary where she retraced a photograph she took three decades ago, in search to find its meaning-a punctum, as Barthes would have called it, or a caption, as Walter Benjamin describes it in his A Short History of Photography (1931).
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