Chinnaraj Joseph Jaikumar
Founder and Director
The founding of the Madurai Media and Film Studies Academy (MMFSA) is no magic coming from the whiff of thin evening breeze. Personally for me, it is more than ten years of dreaming, experimenting, getting disappointed and starting it all again. For long, media and communication studies remained as the privilege of the metropolitan cities like Chenna
i, Kolkata and Mumbai. The easy excuse was the physical proximity of academic institutions to film and advertisement industries. Though considerable talent for the film/media industry came from the rural hinterland and small towns, ‘walking on the knees syndrome’ kept many academic institutions of second-tier cities not to risk with anything like film or media studies. Visual Communication at American College in 2007 under autonomy curriculum, using my privileged position as its Principal and Secretary. Then in the next three or four years, from very close quarters, I could watch how the curriculum, pedagogy and academy-industry interface worked. There were three important lessons to be learnt. First, media and visual communication studies like any other professional education demand certain ambience and ethos that could better come from specialized institutions exclusively dedicated to the purpose. Secondly, it calls for a core faculty who, beyond possessing academic qualifications, must possess practioner’s experience or exposure to industry. Thirdly, there needs to be a perfect balance between technical training on one hand and art history, aesthetics, theory and philosophy on the other hand. (The neglect of the latter has made poor caricatures of visual communication courses to ‘technician’s training’). The next opportunity for me came, after I left American College and joined a motley crew of artists, film technicians and young graduates of Visual Communication who got involved in the project of preserving a few thousand art works left behind by Prof. Vasanthan and of course more importantly in the making of a feature film length documentary on his life. In the next two years, the intensely close interactions with young graduate-technicians, on-field and off- field observations, discussions across editorial desk etc., only strengthened my conviction further. Every provocative discussion on media education with the youngsters would always result in conjuring up the dream of setting up an ‘ideal institution.’ This was the real trigger finally for me to go to senior academician friends, friends in the industry and well-wishers mooting the idea of starting an institution in Madurai. Madurai Media and Film Studies Academy (MMFSA) became a reality in no time.
