Kummatty · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He comes down out of the hills wearing grass. Beard unshorn, beads at the neck, a stick in one hand, a song already going. The children fall in behind him the way children do, without deciding to. For the next ninety minutes G. Aravindan films what happens with the patience of a man watching weather.

The figure has a name in Kerala. Kummatty is the bogeyman parents use to frighten children into behaving, and Kummattikali is the masked dance of the north, performers in painted wooden masks and suits of grass moving through villages at Onam. Aravindan copies the costume exactly and withholds the mask. His magician has a human face. So the question the synopsis poses, that he may be Kummatty, never closes and cannot.

Why bring a French philosopher of cinema to a Malayalam children's film funded by a cashew exporter and made by a man who kept his day job at the Rubber Board? Because Gilles Deleuze's two books on film turn on a single break, and Kummatty walks through it from a direction he never looked. In most movies a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. Deleuze called that the sensory-motor circuit, and it powers nearly all commercial cinema, children's films above all — the lost thing found, the lesson learned, order restored. When the circuit snaps, something else floods in: time, felt directly, rather than time as the measure of how long the action took. Deleuze located the snap in post-war Europe, in rubble and exhaustion. Aravindan reaches the same place from a form that never had the circuit installed. Folk narration doesn't run on consequence. Episodes accumulate, motifs return, the tale ends on an image. He had no machine to break. He declined to build one.

Watch what fills the space. Shaji N. Karun's camera sits wide and low on available light, holding hill, paddy, path and courtyard past the moment the shot has delivered its information. Deleuze's name for those stretches is dead time, temps mort: passages where nothing advances and the everyday is held anyway. The children are directed toward behaviour rather than expression, running and watching and being bored, and filmed at a remove, the way you would film animals, with none of the coverage-and-close-up grammar that normally announces "child protagonist." What that produces is what Deleuze calls pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns: moments where looking and listening are all that is on offer, because no action is available.

The soundtrack is the film's other author, and here a national handicap becomes a method. No Indian production of the period had synchronous sound; dialogue and ambience were assembled afterward onto a mono track. If sound must be built anyway, it need not be naturalistic. M.G. Radhakrishnan's folk-derived score is not accompaniment and the songs are not interruptions. Song is the medium of the magic. Kummatty sings the children into his orbit, then sings them into animal bodies. Deleuze has a term for an utterance that performs rather than describes: the speech act, acte de parole, a voice that does something instead of explaining something. The role went to the poet Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, whose actual vocation was public recitation, verse built on folk rhythm and incantation.

And the transformations? There was no effects budget. No optical printing, no dissolve-heavy conjuring. A cut, a frame, a real animal, and your willingness. This is the film's sharpest formal move, and Deleuze names it: the irrational cut, the interstice, a join made across a gap rather than by continuity. The change occurs in neither shot. It occurs in the black between them, which is to say it occurs in you. Nothing on screen asks to be admired as a trick, and that is exactly why it convinces. Bazin argued that cinema's power lay in preserving reality rather than slicing it into meaning: real light, real places, unbroken duration. Aravindan uses every one of Bazin's means to make a sorcerer real.

Then one boy, turned into a dog, bolts before the spell can be lifted.

Here the film changes altitude. The camera drops to the ground, to animal eye level, and landscape stops being surveyed and becomes something traversed. That is a shift in the perception-image, the film putting the angle of seeing itself in play, and it has a precise address: Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, which framed a donkey at its own eye level and let the animal carry the film's moral attention without a shred of anthropomorphism. Aravindan switches into that grammar the instant the boy is on four legs. What the boy becomes is what Deleuze calls a seer, a voyant: not an agent but a watcher, one who perceives everything and can do nothing. He moves through a village that no longer recognises him. He can see his own house. He cannot get back inside it.

The long span he spends that way is never dramatised. It is elided. The film's most radical edit is an absence: we arrive on the far side of the ordeal, and his restoration lands as a shock of elapsed time rather than as a rescue. Deleuze's word for an image that hands you time directly, instead of as the duration of an event, is chronosign. Here it arrives by subtraction. The year is real because it is missing.

The tale's other joints are missing too, and on purpose. The transformation is not punishment. The boy did nothing to earn it. There is no antagonist, no moral test, no restored order the film endorses. Deleuze's phrase for causality gone this slack is weak links: scenes joined by juxtaposition instead of cause. A stranger arrives, disturbs, departs: it is the western, and Teorema, and a thousand folk tales. Aravindan keeps the shape and strips out the consequence-logic that usually makes it mean something. What remains is one gesture. The boy, restored, releases a caged bird. Having been an animal, he cannot keep one. Nothing underlines it, which is why it holds.

Underneath all this is what Deleuze would call the gest: a body's bearing exposing a relation it never states. The grass suit, the gait, the Kummattikali given its own unbroken length instead of being trimmed to an exotic insert. Nirmalyam (1973) had shown the way, letting the velichappadu's possession dance run at the rite's own tempo inside a fiction. The refusal to psychologise the supernatural comes from Mani Kaul's Duvidha (1973), where folk song narrates rather than decorates. The child-height visual logic comes from Pather Panchali, where Ray and Subrata Mitra pegged the camera to a child's attention and let itinerant figures stand in for plot; Aravindan puts a sorcerer in the travelling performer's slot. Even the bird has a source: Kes (1969) filmed a boy handling a captive kestrel in long available-light takes and made the bird's fate the structuring wound. Kummatty runs that backwards, and release becomes redemption.

Forward, the line travels through a person before it travels through films. Shaji N. Karun shot most of Aravindan's work and then made Piravi (1989); the contemplative, landscape-forward Malayalam image traces back unbroken to these hillsides. He became the permission-granting figure for Indian filmmakers working with ritual and myth; critics keep placing the recent Malayalam resurgence in his shadow, Lijo Jose Pellissery's crowds and animals above all, though that is inheritance rather than documented debt.

For four decades the film barely circulated. A National Award gave it an institutional home, then poor prints and festival retrospectives gave it a half-life, until the 4K restoration by Scorsese's Film Foundation put it before an international audience in the early 2020s, where it landed as a first-rank film about childhood. What it proves is that the cinema of duration, and the direct image of time, were never European property and never required a war to produce them. Aravindan got there through Kerala's oral and ritual inheritance, on a budget that could not buy a dissolve, at the moment Gulf migration was emptying and re-funding the villages he was filming.

Watch it once for the story. Watch it again for two things: the altitude of the camera, which tells you whose world you are in, and the cuts, where the magic actually lives. Aravindan opens one question and never touches it again. If a boy spends a year as a dog and no one in the village knows, what exactly came back?