A stranger arrives in the dead of night, transforms himself into a charismatic trade union leader and organizes a strike in the local tile factory; the same man later declines into an ineffectual alcoholic. This—crudely put—is the basic premise of Mukhamukham (Face to Face, 1984), and the outsider, who is at its center, remains an enigmatic figure, his origins shrouded in mystery. In fact, during the course of the film, he becomes increasingly opaque and unreadable until we even begin to doubt his existence. This sense of unreality is in keeping with Gopalakrishnan's investigation of a community in a state of deep crisis that prefers to invest in the imaginary rather than in the hard facts of their failure. Refusing to acknowledge responsibility for their own actions, they turn to an illusory hope of redemption. By setting the film in Kerala during the politically turbulent '50s and '60s, Gopalakrishnan captures both the euphoria of radicalism as well as the fallout that is inevitable. The crisis he describes is not merely ideological but relates to all levels of a society paralyzed by its own incapacity to live up to its cherished ideals. Even more distressing is the community's inability to forge new values and create a concrete agenda for change. Subsequently, the stranger is expected to sustain their illusions and, in the process, becomes one himself, put on show by a people who have compromised their sense of reality.

The film covers two important periods. The first half ends in 1955, when the Communist Party had made major gains in the state and was poised to win the elections in 1957. The second half is set in 1965, at a time of great disillusionment following the 1964 break-up that led to the formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI-M). The split created a divided society that Gopalakrishnan describes as “spiritually inept and morally confused,” with each faction accusing the other of being “revisionist.”

Kathapurushan (Man of the Story, 1995) is arguably Gopalakrishnan's most ambitious film, epic in scale, intimate in tone and covering nearly forty-five years of Kerala's history through the eyes of his protagonist, Kunjunni. He has called the film “an emotional journey through time and history” to distinguish it from a socio-historical document, which it superficially resembles. Accordingly, all key historical events are kept off-screen. It is thus a personal film that draws on Gopalakrishnan's life and memories of the time, although it is not autobiographical in the strict sense of the term.

Kathapurushan begins with Kunjunni's birth and ends with the publication and subsequent banning of his first novel, The Hard Consonants. The film is primarily a cinematic Bildungsroman that charts the emotional and psychological evolution of a man and his consciousness and is framed by some of the key events that have shaped Kerala's modernity. Kunjunni belongs to an old feudal, land-owning family that is in decline as a result of the momentous reforms that have dramatically changed Kerala's political landscape. Thus we have another narrative about the vestigial life, except that its subject is not human decadence. Kunjunni is neither apathetic like Unni nor malignant like Patelar, nor does he hold himself aloof from the forces of modernity. Instead, he displays a progressive outlook that he uses to align himself with the historical forces that are transforming his home state. He is helped in this respect by his family, which practices an enlightened form of feudalism— feudalism with a human face. Thus Kathapurushan is Gopalakrishnan's most upbeat and optimistic film, where the dream of emancipation seems to be within our grasp. Mukhamukham was about the abject failure of that dream in relation to a demoralized community hopelessly stuck in time, but Kunjunni's choices enable him to move forward with time into a future that contains the potential for personal growth and meaningful action.

Elippathyam (The Rat Trap, 1981), which won Gopalakrishnan the coveted British Film Institute Award, features men in the grip of a moral and existential crisis. It is the first of a loose trio of films that focus on a life lived within the vestiges of feudalism, the other two being Vidheyan and Kathapurushan. All three feature males from landowning families who grapple with the challenge of living in a post-feudal era where they must radically reconfigure their senses of self, identity and home. While Kathapurushan is a fable of affirmation and acceptance, the protagonists of Elippathyam and Vidheyan choose not to integrate themselves into the processes of history. Put differently, they refuse to budge from a space that history, with the decline of feudalism, has emptied out, but instead make a mockery of keeping the past alive. This inevitably propels them toward neurosis and even death. Instead of aligning with the forces of modernity, the men regress to states of apathy or violent excess as they cling to the remains of structures that once sustained them. Denied the material resources and legal sanctions over which their forefathers once wielded authority, they find themselves hopelessly adrift in a new and unfamiliar world. As they continue to live within the brittle, eroded foundations of their ancestral legacy, the concept of home becomes complex, unstable and paradoxically synonymous with homelessness. Their liminal existence as outsiders stuck between past and present constitutes the subject of these films. This unreal in-between space becomes the site of their psychic dislocation, which takes the form of a neurotic obsession with power that they exercise either on their immediate family members or the community at large. And yet, officially, the men have no real access to power. This strange contradiction—power within powerlessness—only confirms their perverse otherness.

Set in the early 1960s in rural Kerala, Elippathayam features the middle-aged Unni, who lives with his two younger sisters in their sprawling ancestral house.

There are primarily two dominant tropes associated with women in Gopalakrishnan's cinema. One, as we've seen, is food and feeding, which is linked to nurturing and the role of the provider. The other is the doorway against which women are often framed. Both tropes are, of course, not mutually exclusive and often appear in conjunction with one another in the same film. We've already encountered strong nurturing women like Sita, Santhamma, Rajamma and Saroja, who are also identified with the doorway. And then there is the tragic Omana, whose life seems to revolve around it. In Gopalakrishnan's most recent films, Naalu Pennungal (Four Women, 2007) and Oru Pennum Randaanum (A Climate for Crime, 2008), it is the doorway that tends to assert itself both literally and metaphorically (when it is not invoked visually). This is especially true for the first film, in which women seek voice and visibility within a society that often seeks to silence and marginalize them. The doorway embodies their sense of insecurity, exclusion and otherness.

Although Kerala has had a long history of matrilineal communities run by women, Gopalakrishnan's films are mostly concerned with the aftermath, when such communities have declined and men have gained ascendancy. The woman in the doorway exemplifies this change in status. Standing on the edge of what is often the public space within the house, she is at best a witness to what men discuss and decide. Social convention has taught her to be circumspect in their presence, for it would be deemed unseemly to step forward and join them in their deliberations. Thus she stands, listens and observes. The men, in turn, acknowledge her presence, but always with a certain ambivalence: she is visible and yet invisible, present and yet absent.

Her domain is the space behind and around her—the domestic sphere of kitchen and bedroom—where she is granted a large measure of autonomy as long as it does not conflict with the agendas set by the men.

Swayamvaram (One's Own Choice, 1972), Gopalakrishnan's very first feature, was an immediate sensation. It swept practically all the major national film awards in India. Hailed as a landmark in the history of Indian cinema, it self-consciously sought to assert its otherness as a new form of cinematic discourse intent on breaking all the rules. It was a call to arms against the crude, melodramatic, formulaic films of the south, especially Kerala. It bristled with innovative visual and auditory effects and boasted a complex narrative form—a mix of documentary, fiction, and fantasy—that sought to interrogate film as film. It also subscribed to an evocative poetic realism drawing on metaphor and symbol, which was unprecedented in the history of southern cinema. Many of these innovations became staples of the New Wave when it evolved into a pan-Indian phenomenon a few years later.

The story is deceptively simple. Sita and Viswanathan, both from the middle class, are runaway lovers who come to Trivandrum to live together as an unwed couple. They start out dreamy-eyed but watch their hopes flounder in their struggle to survive. On one level, the film covers well-trodden terrain about the fight to stay alive in the harsh and unforgiving environment of a small town. (Unlike most states in India, there is no rural-urban divide in Kerala, and hence no metropolitan centers. The area is best described as “rurban.”) Like Kodiyettam, Swayamvaram also features a marriage, except it has no legal sanction and is based entirely on mutual trust, love and commitment, which sustain the couple as they deal with their hard lot. When Viswanathan dies from an unspecified illness, Sita, now alone with their child, must make a choice with regard to her future. The film thus begins with a choice and ends with the possibility of another one.

The couple's decision to live outside wedlock is, of course, a radical one within an orthodox society where women are taught to prize their virginity and marriages are arranged by parents, especially the all-powerful father.

Kodiyettam (Ascent, 1977) is set in the 1970s, at a time when the Nehruvian dream had floundered in India and there was widespread discontent in the country. The 1964 split in the Communist Party along with the failure of political reforms in Kerala had led to a loss of faith in all governmental institutions and state-sponsored initiatives. But other than a few cursory references to political rallies and the expulsion of a Party member, the film makes no allusion to the events that were being hotly discussed and debated. Instead, Gopalakrishnan focuses on a village in Kerala where an unrepentant, regressive patriarchal culture has turned its back on modernity and all forms of progressive reform. Shaped by the legacy of feudalism, it is a culture of wasteful self-indulgence and degrading machismo. The men live suspended in a time-warp, outside all norms of productive social living—a community of outsiders. They are repeatedly associated with mindless consumption and a demeaning corporeality that symbolizes their depraved form of otherness. Some are callous fathers and husbands; others cheat on their wives. A few have short fuses that ignite suddenly and unpredictably. Most of their pathetic displays of power are directed at women. Emotionally and morally stunted, these men blindly subscribe to an oppressive ideology of self-serving excess.

Gopalakrishnan's critique of masculinity, then, is directed at an entire culture, a whole way of life. Since the people in the film are incapable of any collective form of redress, he invests in the individual's potential for emancipation and makes him a symbol of hope for the community at large. His protagonist, Sankarankutty, is an orphan in his early thirties who clings to an infantile state, refusing to grow up and become a man (as his mother-in-law subsequently laments). In relation to the other males, his symptoms are relatively minor, but they can be traced to the same malaise that has infected them all. Compared to these men, he is merely simple, foolish and naïve.

Made more than a decade after Elippathayam, Vidheyan (The Servile, 1993), based on Paul Zacharia's Bhaskara Patelarum Ente Jeevithavum (Bhaskara Patelar and My Life), also features outsiders—men in crisis—occupying a liminal space in a post-feudal world. And it too focuses on the relationship between power and powerlessness within the contexts of abuse. What has changed is the representation of such abuse. The earlier film adopted an understated poetics of symbol and metaphor, but Vidheyan describes, in vivid detail, the brute force with which power aligns itself to terror and violence. In fact, it is Gopalakrishnan's most graphic film in which he portrays oppression—both physical and mental—in all its intense rawness. The master-slave relationship at its center is far more venal and sordid than the one implied between Unni and Rajamma.

During the intervening years, Gopalakrishnan's vision had darkened as India's track record of social inequality and injustice had worsened with its entry into the free market economy in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and the spread of ethnic and communal violence had made the problem of the Other even more acute. There is thus a new directness with which Gopalakrishnan describes the abjectness of the human condition. At the same time, the issue of transcendence acquires a new urgency, placed within the contexts of religion and faith and linked to a vision of human innocence and goodness.

Vidheyan's protagonist, Bhaskara Patelar, clings to the vestiges of a bygone era but, unlike the diffident and reclusive Unni, is a full-blown, malevolent villain who keeps a whole village in thrall. The innocent are not spared as they become the victims of some of his gratuitous displays of aggression. His well-aimed kicks send them crashing to the ground, after which he pummels them into submission with his feet. The most powerful and feared man in the village, Patelar is also known for his alcoholism and voracious sexual appetite—no young woman, married or single, is safe from his clutches.

In the 1980s, there was a shift in Gopalakrishnan's work as he sought to locate otherness in an interior space that he associated with the creative process. It was an extension of his lifelong fascination with human interiority, which was now given a new context: creativity. Mathilukal (The Walls, 1989) and Anantaram (Monologue, 1987) feature men who, like many of his protagonists, are physically or psychically displaced but invent and inhabit a complex imaginary world, thus reconfiguring their sense of difference. Such is their immersion in this world that it acquires a perfectly convincing reality that is more compelling than the one that lies outside it, thus leaving the question open as to what constitutes the real. We have already seen how in Mukhamukham an entire community collectively authored an image that, at the end of the film, turned out to be more real than the man on which it was based. In these films, as well, the imaginary comes to take the place of the real and exceeds it in terms of veracity. In each case the power of the human mind and its creative potential is affirmed.

In Mathilukal, Basheer is a political activist and author who finds himself in jail, cut off from the contexts in which he functions as a writer. The film focuses on how he engages with the creative process from within while virtually isolated from the rest of the world. Anantaram also describes an inner process. Its subject is a young man with a serious psychological condition who invents alternate realities that are at the heart of his complex narratives. To these films of the '80s, one must add Gopalakrishnan's Nizhalkkuthu, made in 2002, which features an older man—an outsider in his community—whose power of empathy enables him to reinvent the story he listens to in the second half of the film. If, so far, we've encountered men who were actively engaged in the creative process, in this later film, the protagonist serves as the receiver or recipient of an oral narrative that triggers a radical rewriting of the story.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, who has been making films outside India's mainstream commercial film industry since 1972, is widely regarded as the country's most distinguished contemporary filmmaker. Despite his fame in India (where he is often described as Satyajit Ray's worthy successor), his films remain virtually unknown to audiences and film scholars in the West, although he has been honored with complete retrospectives at prestigious venues such as the Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian, the Paris Cinematheque and the Munich Film Museum. His 11 full-length features (he has also made over forty documentaries and shorts) have won major awards including the FIPRESCI prize (six times), the British Film Institute award and the UNICEF prize at the Venice Film Festival. France has conferred on him the Legion d'honneur. And yet Gopalakrishnan remains one of the most neglected artists in world cinema. Even in his native country, where he has been fêted with virtually every major film award including the coveted Dada Saheb Phalke award and has received India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhusan, there has been no sustained effort to promote his work or even preserve his films.

The critical writing also remains sparse and mostly untranslated in his mother tongue, Malayalam, a language spoken by about thirty million people. Gopalakrishnan's four books on cinema have only recently been undertaken as a translation project. The critical canon in English consists of an uneven collection of essays published in 2006 and followed by a standard biography in 2010. The large number of reviews, write-ups and interviews that exist in the popular press tend to revolve for the most part around a fixed set of issues and concerns, the most prominent being that of Gopalakrishnan's status as a humanist. Critics tend to applaud his “broadly humanistic” compassion, his refusal to adopt an ideological position and his avoidance of “the wooly sentimentalism of nostalgia.”