Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities… much more so than music or language.D.O.P is a technician who tells the storytelling with the flow of images. He uses the camera as a weapon.”Cinematography is the writing with images in movement and with sounds” said Robert Bresson. Sure it is. Tollywood is now celebrating a new era of storytelling. Movies like Arjun Reddy, Care of Kancherapalem, Awe, Kshanam proved this. Not only with brilliant stories and talents but cinematography also took a new evolution in Tollywood. Mahanati and Rangasthalam are such movies in 2018 that left the audience imagining few snaps even long after watching them in theaters. Few of my observations are now being shared with you. I hope you’ll like reading them.
Mahanati
“Not knowing the language actually helped me. Because I have to tell the story through the subtext of what the actors actually mean through my camera work”
the Spanish cinematographer Dani Sanchez-Lopez ( D.O.P of Mahanati)
Dani Sanchez-Lopez saysv thatUper 16mm and Alexa with V-lite anamorphic and Master Prime lenses as well as a progression of diffusion and different vintage lights were used for Mahanati to bring back Mahanti Savitri Garu back to life in our silver screens.Usage of vintage equipment is really brilliant to take us back to the 1960s.
Use of Colours
As the story begins with the childhood of Savitri there are a lot of greens and brown shades as they are the colours of the earth. Once Savitri starts growing as an actor more hues of gold are introduced. When she becomes superstar more gold and shots are brighter. When her downfall began it’s all blue ( being colder colour) contrasted by layers of darkness. The love story track between Gemini Ganeshan is filled with red, the colour of love and the colours around Ganeshan gets greener to represent envy. This is really a brilliant play of colours.
Madhuravani sequence has shots that the main subject out of focus, lot of noise, less sharpness and irregular diffusion of light to create the vintage feel of the 1980s.
Movies like Arjun Reddy, Awe also have a similar way of storytelling using colours.
Rangasthalam
Rangasthalam’s story revolves around a made-up place with brilliantly written characters. And these characters and locations were shot beautifully which helped Sukumar to involve the audience into Rangasthalam in no time.
Rangasthalam got beautiful colour pallets. Observe that 1st screenshot everything is filled with white or shades of brown. Whether it be a shirt or wall everything is in relative contrast.Similarly the other two screenshots.
I was shocked that they used to smoke and dust to blur the background. The clear background helps the subject or the character being more focused on the play. But Rangasthalam is a place where people are in groups( like in villages) and the set needs to be constructed in a disordered way. So the background of most of the frames is with more unnecessary elements. But they are covered with smoke and dust of shades of light(Sunlight). I felt this was brilliant.
Not only these films there are few other special mentions like the use of square aspect ratio in Care of Kancherapalem which helps in focusing on the character in storytelling, rapid focus shifts in Mahanati, macro shots in Manu etc.
Cinematography being important for cinema, it’s great to have a lot of improvement in Tollywood. Though young cinematographers like Karthik gattamaneni, Shaneil Deo, P.S.Vinod are inspiring with their works few D.O.P’s high budget movies like Bharat Ane Nenu, Jailavakusa disappointed with best camera equipment and production design. Recently KGF challenged new way cinematography where frames are with high contrast, sharp and darker shades but it failed to maintain it all along with the movie and resulted in discomfort for the audience sometimes during the movie.
This new evolution is impressive and is making me glad that Tollywood is growing bigger and better.
Hope u liked this article 🙂
Nerd Writer 