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At the 30-hectare Chitranjali Film Studios — which Adoor helped found, like almost everything else that has to do with cinema in Kerala — we discover that the first print of his autobiographical masterpiece, Man of the Story, has disintegrated in the tropical heat. Adoor shakes his head and laughs gently. "When you see the print degrade like that, you realize what you do is ephemeral," he says. "It's something you spend so much effort on, but it dissolves so quickly."
We manage to find some prints that have yet to join the cinematic afterlife, and the two of us screen them in Chitranjali's cavernous — and, thankfully, air-conditioned — theater. Adoor watches as intently as I do. After we screen 1990's Walls, a gritty take on an imprisoned political writer, I ask Adoor if he would have done anything differently. He shakes his head. "Whatever I thought now would be very wrong," he says, "Because of the distance, I would not know now as I did then." Since Adoor depends utterly on himself, on his own instincts, he has to trust himself completely. That trust doesn't expire, nor does it buckle under criticism.
The next day we screen his latest, Shadow Kill. The print has no English subtitles, but Adoor provides a running translation, whispering the laconic dialogue in my ear. "A film like Shadow Kill demands many viewings to be understood," he says. An antideath-penalty parable with the pacing of a Greek tragedy, Shadow Kill is also visually rich, steeped in the verdant colors of the postmonsoon tropics. A veteran village hangman, who lives on the fringes of society and is haunted by the memory of an innocent's execution, is called into duty one last time. He is a killer, no doubt, but the consecrated rope he uses to hang his victims also has the power to cure sickness. Is he an agent of karma? A mere government functionary? Or a willful sinner whose well-paid job trades in the blood of the blameless? The film is vintage Adoor, a picture-perfect set piece that entertains eternal questions of human responsibility and freedom. (Shadow Kill "has the stamp of a master," according to film critic Chidananda Dasgupta.) The film is more beautifully shot than the rest of Adoor's oeuvre combined.
It is also Adoor's most accessible work, but don't dare suggest that he's compromising to expand his audience. In fact, it's best not to offer any criticism at all, especially if it's about the wind. The auteur can be awfully sensitive about the wind. After finishing Shadow Kill, Adoor and I — along with his longtime colleague and friend P.K. Nair, former director of India's National Film Archive — adjourn to Adoor's house for lunch. Over dessert in the director's spacious office Nair gently points out that one of the core images in Shadow Kill — wind rustling through fields of lush grass — may be a cinematic cliché. Adoor does not take this as constructive criticism.
"If you think that scene is stereotypical, then you are very stupid, very corrupted," Adoor says to Nair. "That is very unfair!" Adoor vibrates with indignity. Nair, unruffled, makes a few attempts at qualification, but the director is unsoothed. Finally, Nair gets a chance to make a point, arguing that Adoor's audience, steeped in mainstream movies even if he is not, would not differentiate between his artistically windblown grass and any other. "The audience can't go back to 1941," he argues.
Adoor takes issue. "Stupid audience!" he says. "I am making a film based only on conviction. When I make the film, I am not acting on behalf of the audience. I expect them to see the film on my terms."
For a moment, he seems close to tears, but Nair soon changes the subject and the artistic tempest passes. It's not that Adoor truly thinks segments of his audience are stupid (he prefers the term "uninitiated"); again and again he tells me that he wants more exposure in India. It's just that he refuses to take the audience, or anyone else, into consideration when making a film. If that means the ideal audience for an Adoor Gopalakrishnan film is ultimately Adoor Gopalakrishnan, so be it, and let no one question him.