But my interest in this piece is on a very peculiar type of photograph that have made their presence felt in Malayalam cinema-that of wedding and/or couple photographs. 20, Madras Mail (1990) and FIR (1999) also see a similar use of photographs as “evidence”. A photograph, here, is both the evidence-and as we discover eventually-the decoy. When the Chief Minister is assassinated in the classic Malayalam thriller The Truth (1998), the inquiry revolves around a camera and photographs found at the spot of a woman presumed to be the assassin. This reading of a photograph as ‘evidence’ is most commonly seen in thrillers, detective movies, and melodramas.
The most common use of photographs in cinema tend to dwell on the photograph as a mute and intransigent object from the past, providing a disputable/indisputable proof of an event that has occurred. If we concede that a photograph is given its meaning-its punctum-through a text (caption), how can we begin to think of a cinematic adaptation of this? What can a photograph offer to cinema? I recently happened to revisit this question of the relationship between photography and cinema while watching (and re-watching) some old and new films from Kerala. It was an attempt at understanding the relation between photography and/in cinema.
Her attempt was, as she concedes, to try and find/ascribe meaning both to the photograph, and through it, to her own oeuvre of film-making. With little luck in finding anything concrete (Varda traces down both the humans in the picture only to find out they have no recollection of the image, and she shows the picture to a goat who eats it), she concludes that “nothing appears in the image”, and that the picture itself could have been clicked any other time and the people in it could be anyone else. Two years after Barthes’ Camera Lucida was published, Agnès Varda made Ulysse (1983), a documentary where she retraced a photograph she took three decades ago, in search to find its meaning-a punctum, as Barthes would have called it, or a caption, as Walter Benjamin describes it in his A Short History of Photography (1931).