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‘Spotify: Cinema with BR’ Episode 15: Viduthalai, violence, Vetrimaaran, etc.
Posted on April 14, 2023
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9 Responses “‘Spotify: Cinema with BR’ Episode 15: Viduthalai, violence, Vetrimaaran, etc.” →
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‘Spotify: Cinema with BR’ Episode 15: Viduthalai, violence, Vetrimaaran, etc. - The Times Of Bollywood →
April 15th, 2023 → 16:42[…] Source Link […]
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Caesium
April 14, 2023
Why not a lighter / happier topic on a festive occasion? (For e.g., best movies portraying festivities on screen)
Well, you’re the artist – you pick the art! I get it..
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therag
April 15, 2023
It is obvious that what you see in the film is what the filmmaker intended, and that the audience is going to react to it one way or the other. The question is why does the audience react the way it does.
Consider this. Slavery and pre-civil rights injustices is a huge topic of discussion in the states. There have been tons of instances of brutal violence and riots of all kinds. See the case of Emmett Till, the 1920 Duluth lynchings, the Black Wall Street bombings etc etc. While these incidents have been described/depicted in some fashion in the media over the years, I cannot recall any mainstream film that depicted the violence in graphic detail. A film like 12 Years a Slave was considered oscar bait and cannot be considered a mainstream success. Reason is that Black people probably don’t like watching Black people get beaten up and, frankly, I don’t blame them.
IMHO watching violence and sex really only desensitizes you to more of it. They are potent weapons, and my respect for a director goes down multiple notches when they resort to the whole “the film requires this because this is how it happened” narrative. We pay you to figure out how to convey this without going all blood and gore on us.
Even Steven Spielberg has shown gore on screen, but really only when it was absolutely necessary AND the setting of the film itself warns the audience about the violence to be expected. Case in point, holocaust and WW2. I suppose you could make a case that any Tamil film involving the police is now in this category.
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therag
April 15, 2023
FWIW I also did not like the ending of both Once Upon a Time In Hollywood and The Hateful Eight for the exact same reason. I felt QT had not really earned the right to display that much violence on screen. I thought the narrative simply did not warrant it, and it was simply QT indulging himself and also giving the audience what they wanted. Upto Inglourious Basterds, I did not feel this way. Django was where the problem started becoming apparent (that hallway shootout scene).
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hari prasad
April 15, 2023
It has become a staple like that grandious set song in a Shankar movie.
Love or hate it , people made it his signature and he’s gonna place it no matter the reception it would get.
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hari prasad
April 15, 2023
“It is obvious that what you see in the film is what the filmmaker intended, and that the audience is going to react to it one way or the other. The question is why does the audience react the way it does”.
For example , take 7G Rainbow Colony.
I rewatched it some years back and I took home the message that I should not act like a creepy , shady guy to a girl under the guise of ” true love”.
Some people went , ” Anitha romba paavam , she deserved someone better” and some went , ” Anitha madhiri ponnu kedacha , life settle da”.
But we really don’t know what Selva’s true intention was.
It’s mostly up to us to interpretate or analyse stuff and come to our own conclusion that the director told this.
Same with Viduthalai , some get emotional seeing that brutality while some get annoyed of seeing these innocents get punished and for them it would come across as cheap manipulation.
Unless Vetri tells us what he actually tried to convey through it , we would interpret our own thoughts on it.
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subsri99
April 15, 2023
Sorry but just to follow through on my earlier comment:
– when i mentioned titillation, I actually meant perversion.
– the biggest problem with this violence is filmmakers misreading the market and audience and racing to the bottom, by showing more and more violence. I strongly believe that with all such filmmakers (Tarantino through Vetrimaaran/Mysskin or even Lokesh), their films worked with the audience/market in spite ofthe excessive violence and not because of it. But the real danger is them misreading that it is *because of it (for instance, with Vetri, it could’ve been Asuran’s success) and dialing it up even more. I know this is not the case anecdotally because all my family/friends who watch such movies like it ***in spite of***the violence, that is, they would rather not see such violence in an otherwise good movie.
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subsri99
April 15, 2023
Sorry – this was my first comment which did not make it – not sure why, and trying to re-post
I write this with a lot of respect for Vetrimaaran as acraftsman. The big difference I see between Visaranai’s violence and the laterfilms’ is the sincerity in the former, and the exploitation aspect of the latter.For instance, in the police torture whiplash scene in Visaranai, literallyevery lash “felt” sincere and there wasn’t one too many. Contrast this, say,with the hotel murder scene in Vada Chennai, where I could feel that thefilmmaker went exploitative – the number of stabs “felt” too much after werealized the person would’ve been dead way earlier. It wasn’t earned in thesense that it did not feel like the gang members would actually do that inreality.Again, this is a very visceral response, but I trust myvisceral instincts, as a sincere and serious movie watcher – and by verydefinition of watching films, that’s what we should base our opinion on. I felt almost the exact same visceral contrast with Mysskin’sworks too (who I am also a huge fan of): while I have observed that untilPsycho, he was very conscious of crafting violence as well astitillation without ever showing it onscreen, for instance, the Thupparivalanwhere a body is shredded – we only hear the sound and finally the villaincoming out all bloody, but never the actual act – which was, “bloody” great (punintended) as well as responsible filmmaking. I can name so many other instancesin his oeuvre (another example, by way of titillation, is the mirror reflectionscene in Anjathey, without showing the nudity itself). Contrast this withPsycho, where everything is shown as-is. I think this is a big step back for such filmmakers as faras their craft is concerned. The challenge for them is to responsibly craftviolence, without showing gore, but making the audience feel what they wouldwant them to feel. The earlier examples in both these filmmakers’ work did exactlythat.Unfortunately, with the latter examples, I think they havetaken the easy way out by way of their craft. It is unfortunate even more becauseI, the audience, feel repulsed by the violence rather than empathize with thevictims – perhaps exactly the opposite of what they intended, because it takesme out of the story telling. Let’s please not glorify or justify this violence by allthis analysis paralysis, and call it simply what it is – the respectivefilmmakers taking the easy route and in that process, also exploiting theaudience. I dare them to take the challenge of crafting the violence withoutbeing exploitative, as they have demonstrated earlier that they are capable of that.Beyond the social impacts and what-not of the violence, itis just a huge loss of craftmanship per se, and that should be the biggest areaof debate and feedback for them. In simple words, “please do not take us out ofthe movie which we know is the last thing you want”.
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madhusudhan194
April 15, 2023
@BR: I don’t quite agree with your take on “how” violence can be shown. The violence in Viduthalai isn’t simply excessive. It’s downright crass. It is clearly sadistic. When a point has already been made, he just goes on and on and on relentlessly. Like Anuja highlighted in the other thread, he isn’t content with showing one woman being stripped and experience horrifying things. He has to show every woman in that family (along with 100 other women) go through it and show all of it in gruesomely explicit detail. It’d be no exaggeration if someone tells Vetrimaaran the same line GVM tells Chethan – “Unga perversions ku avangala exploit pannadheenga”. Since when did perversion or sadism start becoming art? If a video on pornhub cannot constitute cinema, the violence in Viduthalai cannot make for cinema either.
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