Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of DMK Film

Timestamp:

May 25, 2012, 12:27:26 PM (13 years ago)

Author:

Parth

Comment:

--

DMK Film

@@ +1 @@
+
+== DMK Film ==
+
+Unique and extraordinarily influential type of
+propaganda cinema pioneered in Tamil Nadu
+by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).
+Histories of the DMK trace the party’s ancestry
+to 19th C. reform literature in the erstwhile
+Madras Presidency, where writers like
+Subramanya Bharati (1882-1921; sometimes
+considered the greatest modern Tamil poet)
+extended their reformist politics to advocate a
+specifically Tamil nationalism. After the
+establishment of the Justice Party aka the South
+Indian Liberation Federation (Est: 1917), this
+nationalism retained a strongly anti-Aryan
+thrust in its claim to represent the indigenous
+cultures of South India, attempting e.g. to
+rewrite Indian history to trace the Tamil
+influence back to the Indus Valley civilisation.
+The Justice Party had a strategic alliance with
+the pro-imperialist landed élite but also
+advocated bourgeois-democratic reformism
+opposing e.g. caste oppression. 
+
+The party
+broadened its base in Kerala and Andhra
+Pradesh, esp. when contesting the provincial
+elections after the Montagu-Chelmsford
+reforms (1919) on an anti-Brahmin platform.
+The Party was transformed in the post-WW2
+era by one of the most influential politicians in
+20th C. Tamil Nadu, Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy
+Naicker (1879-1973), a former Congress Party
+member who founded the Self-Respect
+Movement (1926), a social action group aimed
+at eradicating Untouchability and caste and
+advocating an atheist politics. According to
+Charles Ryerson, at that time the movement
+deployed five principles: no God, no religion,
+no Gandhi, no Congress and no Brahmins. In
+1944, Periyar transformed the Justice Party into
+the separatist Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) and
+later called for India’s first Independence Day
+in 1947 to be declared a day of mourning, since
+his demand for an independent Dravida Nadu
+or Tamil state remained unrealised. In 1949, his
+chief disciple, the playwright and scenarist
+C.N. Annadurai broke away to found the
+DMK. The DMK was elected to the TN state
+assembly in 1967, mainly on an anti-Hindi
+platform, repeating their victory in 1971
+through a conditional alliance with Indira
+Gandhi’s Congress. The DMK split once again
+when its most famous member, film star MGR,
+was expelled for indiscipline and launched the
+Anna-DMK (ADMK) in 1972, which later
+became the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra
+Kazhagam (AIADMK), winning power along
+with the Congress in 1977 and making MGR the
+Chief Minister. The DMK under Karunanidhireturned to power in 1988 after MGR died, but
+was dismissed by the Congress (I)-backed
+minority government in 1990 and then
+decimated in the 1991 elections following Rajiv
+Gandhi’s assassination which brought into
+power MGR’s former heroine Jayalalitha as
+the new AIADMK leader and Chief Minister.The
+DMK Film genre is the most spectacular of the
+party’s propaganda fronts and helped make
+five film personalities Chief Ministers
+(Annadurai, Karunanidhi, MGR, his wife and
+former star V.N. Janaki, and Jayalalitha)since 1967. Annadurai launched the genre adapting
+his own play Velaikkari to the screen,
+followed by his script for Nallathambi (both
+1949). The films, esp. Nallathambi, were major
+hits and spawned many more as the party
+decided to use film as its main propaganda
+medium with writers like A.V.P. Asaithambi
+(dialogue for T.R. Sundaram’s Sarvadhikari,
+1951), A.K. Velan and the DMK poet
+Kannadasan who also produced the
+propaganda hit Sivagangai Seemai (1959).
+Karunanidhi scripted Manthiri Kumari
+(1950) as MGR’s first folk legend for directly
+political purposes. He also wrote and
+contributed lyrics for the most famous DMK
+film, Parasakthi (1952), Sivaji Ganesan’s
+début. A string of hits followed, often starring
+MGR or Ganesan: Marmayogi and
+Sarvadhikari (both 1951), Sorgavasal (1954),
+and the MGR-directed Nadodi Mannan
+(1958). Annadurai had codified an elaborately
+plotted and highly charged melodramatic idiom
+promoting an iconoclastic ‘rationalism’ and an
+anti-Brahmin, Tamil-nationalist ideology. The
+films incorporated numerous references to
+Party symbols and colours, anagrams of Party
+leaders’ names and characters reciting whole
+passages from Annadurai’s speeches (cf.
+Pandharibai in Parasakthi). These devices are
+part of a very rhetorical visual and literary style
+as the hero, usually in the courtroom at the end
+of the film, presents his (and his Party’s) case in
+a speech that could last up to 30’. The success
+of the DMK Film idiom has been linked (see
+Bhaskaran and Sivathamby) to the fact that the
+cinema was an important social equaliser in
+Tamil Nadu, where the other performing arts
+traditions were rigidly demarcated along class/
+caste lines. The old Congress Party’s attempt
+(e.g. by C. Rajagopalachari) to continue that
+élitism in the cinema allowed its DMK
+opponents to present cinema as a people’s art.
+
+Numerous studies have been devoted to the
+DMK Film: K. Sivathamby’s The Tamil Film as
+a Medium of Political Communication (1981);
+Robert Hardgrave’s When Stars Displace the
+Gods: The Folk Culture of Cinema in Tamil
+Nadu (1975); Hardgrave and Anthony
+Neidhart, Film and Political Consciousness in
+Tamil Nadu (1975); S. Theodore Baskaran’s
+The Message Bearers (1981) which deals with
+the pre-DMK history of political film; Ka.
+Thirunavukkarasu’s Dravidar Iyakkamum
+Thiraipada Ulagamum (1990); M.S.S. Pandian’s
+The Image Trap: M.G. Ramachandran in Film
+and Politics (1992). For histories of the DMK
+Party and Tamil politics, see Margaret Ross-
+Barnett’s The Politics of Cultural Nationalism
+in South India (1976) and Charles Ryerson’s
+Regionalism and Religion: The Tamil
+Renaissance and Popular Hinduism (1988).
+
+[[Studio]]