Wednesday, 3 February 2016

As a structuralist critic, here is my analysis of the movie Drishyam

This blog is a response of our classroom activity.

Structuralism focuses on the study of literature with focusing upon work as self - organised linguistic structure, it analyse the narrative material and examine the underlying structure. Gerald Genette defines structuralism as a method is based on the study of structures
           
With the view point of a structuralist I would like to analyse a bollywood movie "Drishyam" with the gener of mystery and thriller, written by Jeetu Joseph and directed by Nishikant Kamat. The general narratology has an order of A1(a murder occurs) B2 (the circumstances of murder revealed) C3 (At the end murderer is caught) but the movie has a 'novelty value' with quite different and interesting narratology as it starts with the ending part of story but the beginning scene of the movie and the protagonist flows in flashback sitting in a police station and a murder occurs and in B2 part where the circumstances are revealed to the audience properly but not to the detectives, they know the mystery of murder but there is lack of evidence. In the C2 part the murderer should be caught but in the movie murderer has successfully escaped and living happily.

There is a repetitive frequency that an event is occur once and narrated by almost all the characters in movie with the same manner. The duration between the murder and narration is around 20 days. The voice of the narration is Intra-diegetic, all the characters who are connected with the incident.
Perspective of the narrator is internally focalized.
Here we could realised the versatility of stucturalism that it's not important that always a murderer is caught.
Here is the concept of sign signifier and significant we could take struggle between truth and visual memories "Drishyam" as a sing, the signifier is the efforts has been done by the protagonist to save his family and it signified that you always remember what you have seen and narrated repeatedly. The referent could be given by a critic that a very little educated person with a very powerful general knowledge can gain victory over the well educated police officers is quite a new structure and concept but could be more unrealistic.

Ferdinand de saussure has given three terms on which structuralism based, They are
1] Langage- the entire human potential speech
2] Langue- the system that each of us uses to generate discourse that is intelligible to others
3] Parole - our individual utterance. In the movie three Languages have used, English, major part in Hindi and as parole there is Marathi. Here Saussure has given an idea of sign, signifier and  signifie. Every sentence has this three parts and in Drishyam we could say that a sign is the visual memories (a tv serials and movies which the protagonist watch) and signifier is the knowledge he got, and the way he used that  knowledge is signified. Here the another point by Saussure is applicable that there is a relationship between signifier and the signified is arbitrary(with respect to nature but not with respect to culture) as in Drishyam he used the knowledge for hiding the crime which has done by his daughter, nature could understand the emotions of father but culturally it is not good, as per culture hiding a crime is like supporting a crime.

The movie has 'rules and convention of different signifying system', the process which should be used in solving the case or should be used for caught the murderer has used for hide the crime and criminal.
As a structuralist, it can be said that the movie is very Logically structured the situation is very perfectly handled by the protagonist and his family but as far as realistic point of view is concerned the circumstances like that is rarely happens.


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