Singeetham Srinivasa Rao dies at 94 in Chennai, after finishing Sing Geetham

Singeetham Srinivasa Rao died on Saturday night at Kauvery Hospital in Chennai. He was 94. The hospital had been treating him for age-related illness after his health worsened in recent days.

He was born on 21 September 1931 in Gudur, in what is now Andhra Pradesh. He started as an assistant to L.V. Prasad and directed his first film, Neeti Nijayiti, in 1972. From that debut to a musical fantasy finished this year, he worked in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Hindi, often on stories other commercial directors would not attempt.

The film most viewers still name first is Pushpaka Vimana, released in Tamil as Pesum Padam, a comedy with no dialogue. Kamal Haasan plays a man who finds a body and a trail of money, and the plot is carried by sound, framing and performance. Rao made it when silence was a risk at the box office. It became the reference point for anyone arguing that an Indian mainstream film could drop speech and still hold an audience.

Aditya 369, released in 1991, sent a group of characters through time, from a present-day heist to the court of Krishnadevaraya and on to a future city. It was a Telugu science-fiction film made before the genre had a local industry behind it. The effects are of their year. The structure, a closed loop of past and future tied to a stolen diamond, is still taught in film schools as an early Indian attempt at the form.

With Haasan he kept choosing parts that broke the hero's outline. Raja Paarvai put the star in the role of a blind violinist. Apoorva Sagodharargal shrunk him into Appu, the dwarf character audiences still quote. Michael Madana Kama Rajan split him into four men. Dikkatra Parvathi, adapted from a story by C. Rajagopalachari, won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil. Later Tamil work included Chinna Vathiyar and Little John. The range is the record: award film, star comedy, time-travel adventure, a film without lines.

He did not stop at the age when most directors have long since left the set. Sing Geetham, a musical fantasy produced by Nag Ashwin, was completed earlier this year. That made him, at the time of the wrap, among the oldest working filmmakers anywhere. The film is the last finished work. It is also the proof that the late career was not a round of tributes. He was still delivering a cut.

Tributes on Saturday night came from across the southern industries. Jr NTR called him a visionary who thought ahead of his time, and said the films still feel fresh across generations. Composer Devi Sri Prasad wrote that the techniques and the ideas in the films were lessons for later directors, and that he had been glad to work with Rao. Those notes sit beside a filmography that does not need the praise to be legible. A director who removes dialogue, who builds a time machine out of a Telugu studio budget, and who asks a star to play four roles in one film has already left the method on the screen.

The funeral arrangements were not settled in the first reports from Chennai. What is settled is the body of work. Pushpaka Vimana still circulates as the film you show someone who thinks Indian commercial cinema cannot do without speech. Aditya 369 still circulates as the local origin of a genre the big studios entered much later. Rao died at 94 with a new film already finished. The open question is only when Sing Geetham reaches a screen.