On July 5, 1965, the Sreekumar Theatre in Thiruvananthapuram opened to a full house. Being screened was The land of Angels , a Hungarian film.
The event was beyond just a film screening though. Chitralekha Film Society, the State’s very first, was marking its debut to usher in a movement that would shape Kerala’s panache for good cinema in the coming years.
The makers of the society were Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who had just returned after his course at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), and his friends.
“The plans for the film society were made a year before at the FTII. I was inspired by my professor Satheesh Bahadur, who ran a film club. From 1962 onwards, I was discovering cinema from across the world, and felt our people were being fed trash in the name of cinema. A few of us got together and prepared a detailed pamphlet with which we intended to change the scenario. Three of the major aims were to start a Malayalam publication for good literature on cinema, to start a film society and then to produce good films,” says Adoor Gopalakrishnan.
The Chitralekha film souvenir came to fruition first, with translations of exclusive articles by Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, and others. The Chitralekha film society soon followed.
Ray and Chidanananda Dasgupta had started the first film society in the country in Calcutta in 1947. The Federation of Film Societies of India came into being in 1959, with Ray at the helm.
“In the initial days, we used to hire 16mm projectors and screen at VJT hall or YMCA hall or any available space. The federation used to circulate films. I also wrote to the embassies of East European and other countries, which all readily provided their films. We could even screen the East European films before their release, as the prints used to be sent to embassies much early,” Adoor says.
Adoor used to preview the films to prepare the programme notes for the screening. He also ran the projectors. He recalls an instance when he heard of the presence of a copy of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel according to St. Matthew at a seminary in Trichy.
“I wrote to them and they sent the prints. But it did not have any subtitle. Since the dialogues were taken from the Gospel of Matthew, I printed and distributed the original gospel to the viewers. Even without understanding the dialogues, it is a powerful film,” he says.
With Chitralekha’s success, the movement spread across the State, with film societies cropping up even in far-flung villages. In north Kerala, the activities were anchored by Chelavoor Venu and group, who were the earliest members of the Ashwini film society, which is still active.
“It was Adoor’s classmate Rama Varma who started Ashwini society. The shows used to happen on Sunday mornings at a rented theatre. We organised one of the first film festivals in the State over 14 days at Kozhikode. Film-makers such as Aravindan, Pavithran, Backer and others, were part of the movement. Inspired from us, societies were started across rural towns. I remember, most of them had Ghatak’s Subarnarekha as the inaugural film,” says Chelavoor Venu.
The movement spawned a whole host of filmmakers and critics. Film critic V.K. Joseph attributes many of the positive changes in cinema in the State to the societies.
“It was due to the influence of film societies that a Chalachitra Academy was formed here and later the International Film Festival was started,” says Joseph.
Though the societies went through a slump in the late 1980s, it has in the past decade witnessed a revival.
