Reconstitutive Aesthetics and Fight Scene Choreography in Malayalam Cinema

Abstract

The particularity of fight scenes in shaping popular cinema in India is hard to ignore.  As spectacles, fight scenes in a film assure its entertainment value. As a component of the film form in the Asian subcontinent, they affirm its non-Western, heterogeneous composition. Drawing on Ambedkar’s interpretation of cinema as holding the possibility of reimagining a conceptual space taken over by Brahminical religion in India, the paper examines fight scene choreography in Malayalam cinema as a component that challenges its avowed social realism in multiple ways. The choreography of these fights occurs within a community of non-dominant players consisting of the stunt artistes, kalari teachers, fight choreographer, and the stunt coordinator, other than the actors and the production team. These technology-aided spectacles, composed meticulously through the convergence of the sonic and the haptic, embody a dynamic space of becoming. The resonstitutive resonances of these spectacles will be elaborated with reference to their backward caste implications. The first part would examine Unniyarcha (Kunchako, 1961), the first Vadakkanpattu (ballads of North Malabar) film, and also one of the earliest films in Malayalam to present kalaripayattu-based fight scenes. The second part elaborates on the instrumental role of the actor-turned South Indian stunt choreographer, Mafia Sasi, in fashioning the cinematic in Kerala through his choreography of fight scenes in a career spanning three decades.