Cinema and the political in Kerala: On Mukhamukham and Amma Ariyan

Abstract This article contrasts two seminal Malayalam films from the 1980s to understand the fraught relations between the Left politics and cinema in Kerala. The first part of the article argues that Mukhamukham ('Face to face', 1984) is a film in which its auteur director Adoor Gopalakrishnan identifies the Left political discourse and the medium of cinema as two powerful-popular epistemic tools at disposal in the region, but ultimately elevating cinema's resources as superior in taking us closer to truth. In the second part, I look at John Abraham's iconic Amma Ariyan ('Report to mother', 1986), to argue that the film came to be accepted widely and undisputedly as a political film mainly due to its (symbolic) privileging of the energies of collective affect ‐ inalienable to both the Left politics and cinema ‐ over contemplation and endevours of distanced intellectual knowledge production.