Andha Naal | Difference between inspiration and copy | Video Essay Script | Moving Images

Hi, my name is Kishor and this is MOVING IMAGES. What is the difference between true inspiration and “Inspiration” within quotes? In the recent years, Tamil cinema audience have come to label certain films, scenes, and even style as “inspiration”. While the word inspiration has a different meaning, in this context the meaning is more in line of copying. The term has been used so freely by certain directors that it has become a sorry excuse for blatant plagiarism. So what is true inspiration and what is not?

Tamil cinema being a massive industry, churns out at least 5 movies every week. With so many movies being released, filmmakers are bound to run out of ideas. And when they do, they start looking elsewhere. This leads to countless scenes and even whole films being directly copied without giving due credits, leaving a very bad taste with the audience that now even genuine inspirations are being derogated as copies.

While calling out copies might be a good thing, we should also learn to appreciate inspiration that stands true to its meaning. Filmmaking is an art and like any art it needs to be learned and practiced. Countless aspiring filmmakers have been inspired by other stalwarts in the field and have learned the craft by watching their work, only to infuse them with a style of their own and give us a truly unique product. I would like to talk about one such aspirer, Director S. Balachander and his film “Andha Naal”. Director Balachander was truly a visionary and one of the rare filmmakers to truly respect the intellect of his audience and subject us to stimulating ideas through his movies. In “Antha Naal”, he recognized the genius in Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon and adapted the now famous “Rashomon effect” even before it got the moniker. The Rashomon effect is contradictory interpretations of the same event by different people. Sounds familiar? Well you might’ve seen this effect come into play recently in a movie called “Virumaandi”. But S. Balachander appreciated the plot structure way back in 1954, a mere 4 years after the original Rashomon released. He did not however, copy the storyline, which was a crime-mystery about the murder of a radio engineer during World War II and the various contradictory accounts from the suspects. Now did S. Balachander copy the “Rashomon Effect” from Kurosawa? Did Kurosawa copy the effect from the book his movie was based out of? And what about the author of the book? Where did he get that idea from? All I’m saying is great ideas has to be inspired, and Andha Naal was inspired from Rashomon. But it was also the first Tamil film noir, and the first Tamil cinema to have no song, dance, or stunt routine. It was truly a revolutionary film and far ahead of any other film being made in Tamil at that time. Now, would you call this a copy or inspiration? Suffice to say, S. Balachander knew what to learn and whom to learn it from which he so beautifully did while giving it a life of its own. That is true inspiration, and so is he to many aspiring film aficionados like me. Until next time this is Kishor signing off saying…