The Portrayal of Epic in Director Maniratnam’s Films (Special Reference with Ramayanam and Mahabharatha)

Abstract

Director Maniratnam has a specialty in dealing with the realistic and emotional issues like caste, religion and language that many people are afraid to talk about through the Mass Media of film. Maniratnam has expressed his ideas through several techniques as storytelling, visualization, and characterization to evoke the inner emotion through his films. The objective of this research is to shed light on the portrayal of Epic in Maniratnam‟s Films. The research focuses mainly on two films of a particular director Thalapathy and Raavanan. The prime focus of this study is to find out the portrayal of epic stories Mahabharatha and Ramayana respectively in his films. According to that this study investigates that, how director Maniratnam portrays the Epic themes in his films? And how director handles his characterization as a gradual shift from epic story to his film? The researcher has used descriptive content analysis to analyze the selected films of director Maniratnam and employed the sociological approach to analyze the qualitative data. As the theoretical framework of this study, the researcher used the Auteur Theory, which examines the control of the author over his/her media productions. The research found that the director Maniratnam uses film as a tool to reflect not only the story of epic but also to construct the political subtexts in every available point of views. Through a visual analysis of the approach the portrayal of characterization and themes are more different from epic. Director Maniratnam shows the epical story through his films in his own way. And he made a huge impact on the gradual shift from epical character to film main character. Manirathram tries to take the main ideas from the epic and adopting it to the lifestyle of ordinary people. Director used films to portray the political themes to convey the real issue to their audience.