Continued from part 2

Part 3

How can one describe the exquisiteness of the beauty pervading all around, if one cannot feel the sense of it visually? How can one describe of the nature of the beauty that envelopes the every day life, if one cannot aurally express the emotion? The challenge that the director had taken upon himself to take out the two important facets of the motion picture - the visual and the aural aspects, and then try to describe the nature of the beauty, the cause and its effect, through the characters that have no access to those important faculties, talks a lot about the immense faith that he reposes in them to convey his audacious idea, without the view and the word, but simply with the feel. With "Sirivennla", Viswanath has taken one more brave step towards finding an interpretation, a way to explain, a way to totally abstract the idea of beauty, that he started off with "Sirisiri muvva". The title of the movie, which in itself is quite poetic, is about a sheer grace of the stillness of the night in full bloom, which one character has no idea what it looks like, and which the other character has no idea how to describe it, but which the audience feels, both the characters understand it at a much deeper level. As some poet who once quipped aptly, if mathematics is the only way to explain the nature around us using the mind, art is the only way to feel the nature around us employing the senses, Viswanath takes the latter route and endows his blind hero with a great feel for the world around him and his mute heroine with the ability of communicating through her art.

He accepts the challenge of using silence for communication, instead of words, and takes it to an entirely different level, when the mute heroine draws up the portrait of the hero, not in a typical fashion of stroking the silhouettes and shading the sides, but in an abstract way of drawing up the "ucchwaasalu" and "niSwaasalu" and shaping up the entire picture as an embodiment of a "sampoorNa maanava moorthi", who feels the "vaekuva raagaalu" in his "vaeNu gaanam", who feels the expressions of "kavanam" and "gaanam" in his life process, who feels the eternal sound of sustenance ("aadi praNava naadam") in every breathing moment of his life thereby encompassing the entire nature in himself. Viswanath moved beyond the realms of drama, beyond his usual comfort medium of scripting and depicting human emotions using art as his canvas beyond using simple, but heart-touching, metaphors to drive home his point and instead ventured into a new arena, where simple answers do not quite suffice when explaining that a blind person could feel, perceive and enjoy the bounty of nature just as any regular person blessed with sight, where simplistic situations, like the heroine has to have admiration and thereby fall in love with the hero only because of cinematic considerations, are completely replaced with the struggle that both face while explaining the true natures of their love, where payoffs in the end occur, not in a normal way of the hero and heroine united in the end as the culmination of their love, but rather depicting the confluence of sensory perceptions progressing towards the common goal of "rasa siddhi", thus moulding "Sirivennala" as a true work of art.

Though Viswanath has taken up the subject of art devoid of normal means of expression much before "Sirivennela", in "Sirisiri muvva", he treated the latter more as a drama concerning the struggle of a mute lady, communicating with the world through the expression of her dance. By the time he moved on to "Sirivennela", Viswanath has done away with the (self-)pity, the condescension, the sympathy that he had for his physically challenged characters and started to delve into the struggle that concerned their minds. Examine his take on love from the hero and heroine's perspectives. Hero adores the beauty that he can only perceive through sound and feel. Heroine admires the extent of the hero's vision (avalOkanaa vistruthi) and is in love with him for what he perceives is beautiful. The metaphor of likening the hero's life to the instrument he excels at, the flute, by suggesting the wind, that blows through the flute, breathing life into it, causing it to flutter and creating such a melodious sound, is the same force of inspiration that the hero feels for his muse. Hero's interpretation of love is one that is based on inspiration - one which would inspire him to rise to higher levels, one which would force him to achieve greatness, one which would make him in the process make him a better person. On the other hand, the heroine does not get drawn towards the hero just because they share a handicap. She understands his true affinity towards his art, his respect for his muse, and his humility towards his greatness. While Viswanath creates the muse as the one that breathed life into the hero to mould him for what he is, he shapes the other who shares a kindred feeling as the one that would mould the hero for what he would be (refer to the heroine's skill as the sculptor and a painter).

If it is tough to move forward a scene without words, it is sheer bravery to plot an entire movie around non-communicating characters and yet establish a semblance of communication, if not via the normal mode, but through the much difficult and different way of using art. Viswanath tries to outdo himself by setting greater goals through out the movie, by trying to describe "vennela lO brundaavanam" to a blind girl, or trying to explain why the hero loves his muse even when he has no idea of her physicality nor knows anything about her past, or when the heroine sees the hero celebrating his unison with the nature (in the song "ee gaali") and starts to develop feelings for him ("ee swathi vaani lO naa aatma snaana maaDe") depicted through the excellent visual of the ink mixed with the rain, flowing through his flute and ending up in the paper in her lap.

gunDe lOtula bhaavaalu bayalu chaeyu baadhyatala alasi solasi
kanulu alasi pOvaa? gontu mooga pOdaa?
kanTa imaDani soundaryam paluka naeraani santOsham
taeTa parichi parichi
kanulu alasi pOvaa? gontu mooga pOdaa?
manasu kanna kalalu panchukona panina murisi murisi
kanulu alasi pOvaa? gontu mooga pOdaa?
jaeravalasina majilee yeTTakaelaku kaLa chaerinaaka
kanulu alasi pOvaa? gontu mooga pOdaa?

(Cont'd in the next part, Viswanath's poetic best - Swarna kamalam)

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