Merleau-Ponty,  the famous French philosopher, called Paul Cezanne a philosopher.  Cezanne was never a trained philosopher but was a painter. Merleau-Ponty said that Cezanne was doing with colors what the philosopher was doing with concepts. I think that Adoor is a philosopher in this sense.  He is doing with images what the philosophers do with concepts. I think that there is no other filmmaker than Adoor who knows that mental landscape of human beings. Michaelangelo Antonioni is another film maker who explored the disordered minds of twentieth century Western culture. This article is an attempt to highlight the philosophical psychology of Adoor Gopalakrishnan who raised Malayalam cinema to the international standards.

Concept of Self-Deception and Liberation in the films of Adoor:

Adoor discusses the possibility of an awakening from depersonalization and meaning crisis, through his major works like: Elipathayam, Kodiyettam, Mathilukal, Vidheyan, and Anantharam. We encounter depersonalized protagonists who have the lost agency and selfhood. As a result, the protagonist feels disconnected in a world with a different meaning-making mechanism.
Multiple levels of disconnectedness result in anxiety, alienation, and absurdity.
Unnikunju in Elipathayam, Sankarankutty in Kodiyettam, and Thommy in Vidheyan, are typical examples of disconnected individuals living with outdated meaning-making mechanisms. Basheer in Mathilukal, and Ajayan in Anantharam, create alternate realities when they get disconnected from the real lifeworld. As a result, these protagonists fail to give us a coherent picture of life.
Even though these films are based on the socio-cultural context of Kerala, the scope of these films are universal in nature. Through these films, Adoor gives a phenomenological account of the world of a mentally suffering individual. The focus of this study is on the theme of depersonalization or the diminished agency, and its relation to the experience of time. In his films on depression, Adoor portrays the way in which the depressed person becomes unable to transparently cope with the world in which he/she lives. His protagonists in the above five films, give us the different shades of depersonalization in mental illness. I will be looking at Adoor’s representation of depersonalization from the point of view of contemporary phenomenology which is rooted in Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology as a method of doing philosophy, emphasizes the role of the lifeworld which considers human being as a being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s account of Dasein, which is being-in-the- world, is radically different from the Cartesian ego which is a disconnected individual subject. I think that both Cartesian worldview and the Phenomenological tradition, are necessary for a holistic perspective of the experience of human being in mental illness. An interesting aspect about Adoor’s work is that he represents multiple levels of disconnectedness of human beings through powerful metaphors. Adoor, just like a phenomenologist, gives us a careful description of the inner world of experience of the suffering human being.

My aim in this series of writings on Adoor, is to highlight the phenomenological approach of Adoor which enables him to explore and understand the experiences of people who encounter meaning crisis. Adoor communicates a lot through images,
silence, and choice of color. According to the phenomenological tradition, our experience of time, plays a major role in coping with the world. Both Heidegger
and Husserl explain the way in which present, past, and future come together in
a unique way in order to meaningfully exist in the world. As we consider these five films, we see that Adoor carefully plays with the aspect of experience of time in order to generate effects in us. In this series of essays, I will be exploring the link between the experience of time and depersonalization in the case of suffering protagonists of Adoor. This series concludes with a critique of Adoor’s conceptualization of depersonalization in mental illness from the perspective of contemporary phenomenological psychopathology.

Dr. Shibin Joseph, IIIT Delhi

(This is the first entry in a series of essays on the films of Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Please stay tuned for more updates.)