Screenplay - Dialogue - Tamil Cinema

This post is regarding how Tamil Cinema lacks quality screenplay writers and the understanding of the writing for film medium

First thing first — I do not understand the credit system followed so far which has two parts — “Dialogue by” (வசனம்) and there will be a another main credit where the director name appears under “Screenplay by” (திரைக்கதை). A screenplay format consists of action (description) and dialogues and how can you separate the dialogue component and still call it a screenplay ?

Let’s move on to the next issues — we have been engaging the novel writers as screenwriters in Tamil Cinema. No doubt they are the “KING” in the novel writing craft and their stories are regarded with high standard in par with world literature. They do not understand that film writing is a different medium. This medium involves cinematography and editing into consideration while writing. I am not saying you should be writing the shot division and cut details but there is something called as “Cinematic writing” which requires a basic understanding of how to tell a story through images, words and cuts (and not just words).

I read a piece written by Baradwaj Rangan (not in his main reviews, but somewhere in his comment section). And i feel this is the main reason why Angadi Theru or Kaviya Thailavan cannot achieve its cinematic beauty. Because you are just filming the dialogues (வசனம்) written by Jeyamohan

//But that is kind of what Vasathabalan does. His films run around 2.5 hours, and yet, he doesn’t seem to care about establishing characters through scenes rather than through expository dialogue (like another internationally renowned filmmaker we shall not name at this juncture )

Take “Angadi Theru.” So you want to establish the fact that standing for long periods of time makes you get varicose veins. Great.

Now, how do you do it? Maybe you’d write a scene where the character (let’s call him X) stumbles and falls in the presence of the hero, and then the hero learns about this condition. (Not the greatest of scenarios — but just bear with this example.)

But in the film, the hero is walking home after a hard day of work and X calls out to him and hikes up his lungi and shows him the varicose veins and says “this is varicose veins…” So it’s all revealed through dialogue rather than incident. Put differently, instead of making us learn something, we are told something directly.

And that is just information, not dramatisation, which is why these characters don’t stick.

Something very similar happens in the scene in “Kaaviyathalaivan” where Kaali is in jail and decides to stage patriotic plays. A bunch of men gather around him and tell him to stage patriotic plays, and — BAM! — he decides to stage patriotic plays. Again, it’s just information, not dramatisation. It’s dialogue over incident.

And had there been an incident, we might have actually known WHY Kaali made this decision, or for that matter, WHY Kaali never thought of this despite that out-of-nowhere scene in the first half where he suddenly bursts into a patriotic number on stage. These are character shades, but we never get them, because all the film cares about is action — not what one THINKS but what one DOES.//

So now you see where the problem is. This is going to continue until our novel writers understand the film medium and its writing or the directors have to work in tandem to re-construct the information with images, words and cuts. Look at Malayalam Cinema, The films such as Maheshinte Prathikaram, Mayanadhi has such cinematic beauty is because the screenwriter Syam Pushkaran understands the medium and their directors know the possibilities of film medium.

A lot of our Tamil literature meeting speeches talk about how Russian literature influenced them, how Anton Chekhov was the the father of short story writing etc etc. And there are amazing studies and inferences done by our Tamil writers about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I wish when they transition to screenwriting they do the same with the film medium. I wish they study Hitchcock, Orson Welles. I wish they watch Mindhunter and Better Call Saul. I wish they understand what Kurosawa was trying to convey to the young film-makers in these lines

“There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present in a film for that film to be a moving work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particular deep emotion while watching that film. I believe it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place. In other words, I believe that the essence of the cinema lies on cinematic beauty.”