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Film 2009: The List

2010-01-16T23:01:00.008-04:00

What is point of doing year end lists? Vanity for one, or may be a logical demarcation of time and effort, a scale to weigh in goodness and greatness over days and dates, and may be an excuse to name what you think should be seen by all and even more importantly to reveal false gods and fake idols (by omission or admission), and if you are lucky, get a discussion started by someone somewhere about movies - their heart and health.

This year was particularly eventful for me. I met Himani in June and married her in Oct. Moved to a small town in New Hampshire, with limited access to films. There are few good theatres nearby, which show good films, if you are willing to drive a little. These developments made watching movies little more difficult and a lesser priority in the sundry list of things to do.

In Dec, I managed to catch most of the movies, locked myself and saw movies back to back, and was very glad to find some great films. As last year, my emphasis still is silly, weak, futile, hysterical heart rather than boggling mind and more importantly the therapeutic power of films. Not a brilliant jig-saw puzzle and its oh-so-brilliant final solution, but a flow of many rivers, their turns, the trees nearby and a delta of fertile silt and soil, and the Man who still is human and its handling by an artist infused with humbling power of spirit, moral inquiry and quiet rapture.

I have intentionally waited for few weeks to post this, so that the newly watched films are digested properly, but there will always be second thoughts and re-evaluations. Here you go, as vanities toss and turn.

Top 12 (in rough order)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann)
You, the Living (Roy Andersson)
Two Lovers (James Gray)
A Serious Man (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim)
Moon (Duncan Jones)
Bright Star (Jane Campion)
Lorna's Silence (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)
24 City (Jia Zhangke)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis)
The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Honorable Mention
Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosowa)
Coraline (Henry Selick)
Julia (Erick Zonca)
The Cove (Louie Psihoyos)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Where the Wild Things are (Spike Jonze)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson)
Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)
Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
Of Time and the City (Terence Davies)

Disappointments (of various degrees)
Tetro (Francis Ford Coppola)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
In the Loop (Armando Iannucci)

Worst Film
(500) Days of Summer (I haven't seen Up in the Air yet)

Notable Performances
Jeremy Renner - The Hurt Locker
Abbie Cornish - Bright Star
Juliette Binoche - Summer Hours
Diane Krüger, Christoph Waltz and Mélanie Laurent - Inglourious Basterds
Michael Stuhlbarg - A Serious Man
Johannes Krisch - Revanche
Tilda Swinton and Kate de Castillo - Julia
Joaquin Phoenix, Vinessa Shaw - Two Lovers
Sam Rockwell - Moon
Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier - Lorna's Silence
Gina Pareño - Serbis
Hee-yeon Kim - Treeless Mountain
Kyôko Koizumi - Tokyo Sonata

Blind Spots
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
The Beaches of Agnès
Sherlock Holmes
Adventureland
Tulpan
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
Broken Embraces
Antichrist

See last year's list here.

Film 2009: Treeless Mountain

2010-01-16T22:49:00.004-04:00

A lesser film would have used its time and space to build a feel-sorry deposit box for our precocious young heroines (Jin and Bin) who are abandoned (left with their drunkard aunt) by their mother, but Treeless Mountain (like brilliant Nobody Knows)is more concerned to evoke a world that Jin and Bin inhibits from their POV, often giving this realistic film a dreamlike quality with simple observant close-ups in natural light, laced with brief shots of panoramic scenery showing passage of time, as they come in terms with loss and abandonment. The best thing about Treeless Mountain is two young precocious performers (a case can be made if they are actually performing), and something special always comes out when the camera stays on them observing their face as they observe the surroundings around them, these are the scenes where cinema comes close to a clear-slighted reading of a young, enduring mind and soul.

Film 2009: 24 City

2010-01-16T22:46:00.002-04:00

24 City chronicles 9 first-person recollections (out of which 4 done with professional actors) of their lives and times in a state-run military factory complex in Chengdu, China that is being demolished to erect luxury futuristic apartments (eponymous 24 City). Jia Zhangke, a master of composition, records passage of time by juxtaposing the old and the new - a lady retelling an old story as the new constructions overlooks in the background, a modern young girl in designer clothes chokes while telling about her parents, getting a breath and strength by saying "I am the daughter of workers". Also Jia Zhangke takes notice of how fast landscape of China is changing. One thing which cinema is good at doing is preserving past. It should be noted that where as in Still Life Jia Zhangke was trying to preserve a collapsing landscape though camera, here in 24 City, it is mostly memories (untold and soon to be forgotten) attached to the factory complex. And when you deal with memories there is always a re-creation of past, and which involves imagination. So it is no wonder that 4 of the 9 interview are fictional accounts. It is not a post-modern approach to make it a pseudo-documentary but its like connecting unfinished story segments (Jia Zhangke took numerous interviews) and use fiction and imagination to fully comprehend and convey the feelings of the people involved. It also connects with the Jia Zhangke's use of pop culture to evoke collective memory of their times. Also, Jia Zhangke does something which I coined as "moving portraits". Moving portrait is a shot created when a subject stands for a still portrait but the portrait is captured as a moving image. The worst thing about photography is its lack of depth in terms of time, usually I am more interested in the space and time before and after the pose. Jia Zhangke does exactly that in his "Moving Portraits". It captures the sublime - the uneasiness, the pre and post-pose person, and by definition if camera lingers, it invariably captures some truth. The pose in the moving portrait is a hint of unreal but it helps reveal something real. Jia Zhangke’s 24 City too reveals more than it shows.

Film 2009: The Silence of Lorna

2010-01-16T22:42:00.002-04:00

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, is a part of a immigration scam - a sham marriage with a Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier) with a plot to get rid of him to marry a Russian mafia-boss to get him Belgium citizenship and her lots of money so that she can marry her boyfriend and start her own business (a snack bar). The plan goes almost alright but our heroine gets all weak and human. Here the director duo follows the cracks of humanity in an otherwise perfect scheme, which as the title suggests, opens as Lorna's moral and human silence breaks away slowly. More suited for my taste, Lorna's silence is more static than handheld (unlike Dardenne Brother other films), helping us to understand our heroine's psyche and her slow inner change, and her final (almost dreamlike) act of revolt and redemption. There is something painfully true yet consoling in the Lorna's journey of humanity and liberation showing a slight hint of madness.

Film 2009: You, the Living

2009-12-30T22:37:00.004-04:00

You, the Living is the big mama of A Serious Man. While A Serious Man opens with a zoom in, it ends with a massive zoom out. Like Roy Andersson's last masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living is a collection fifty absurdist, loosely connected long shots of Swedish life. What emerges is, to use a cliche, bigger than sum of its parts - a sincerely-sad, bleakly-funny and enlightening human concoction. Something here to be said about how bleakness of vision not translated into screen dullness like last year's Synecdoche, New York which totally failed to do so. This year both You, the Living and A Serious Man showed us how vital emotions like sorrow and humor are connected with a dotted line.

Film 2009: Bright Star

2009-12-30T22:12:00.002-04:00

Bright Star is about Keats (Ben Whishaw) love affair with Fanny Browne (an excellent Abbie Cornish) during his last 3 years (Keats died at 25 of tuberculosis). Bright Star is an oddity, old-fashioned, apologetically romantic - about dreamers and their heartfelt love. Any sniff of wits is of no use here. The brightest moments in the film are where the lovers are together and feel the bliss, sometimes reading poetry and sometimes doing nothing, these quite moments of romantic ecstasy are deeply felt and treasured by lovers. Jane Campion creates elaborate period details without fanfare and her use of nature (all four seasons, bees, butterflies, flowers, fruits, lush trees, lakes, snow, rain, countryside, sounds of the nature) and poetry as a backdrop gives it a distinctive contemplative mood, a whiff of immortality (Fanny walks and disappears in woods as Whishaw read Keats' poetry in the last reels) to this unusually passionate and brutally short love affair.

Film 2009: Moon

2009-12-30T22:03:00.005-04:00

Although a good sci-fi is about a sci-fi concept, but it usually tells about the human experience in the wake of it. Its like changing a parameter in the equation of human existence and then dipping a human fish into those waters. It sinks, it swims, it flaps or it survives because it evolves. But as we know them, human needs and emotions are much more complex and the human equation is unimaginably elaborate. And wait, what about dreams and memories - the signposts of being. A good sci-fi movie can tell us the privilege of a deceptively simple human experience by altering these variables. Moon takes place in future when earth power sources have run out and a company (appropriately named Lunar Industries) sets up a base on Moon to extract Helium-3 there and bring it back to the earth. Sam (Sam Rockwell in an great solo(?) performance) is on 3 year contract to look after the base leaving behind his wife and daughter on earth. The good news is that his contract is ending in few days and he will be back to earth, but there is more he should know before it should get happy about it. Sam experiences a new reality, and acts in its wake. Moon is not a bleeding style sci-fi. With all the moon stations and gadgets, it does not look much different present reality, Is it saying that future is same, but just little more out of our control.

Film 2009: 35 Shots of Rum

2009-12-30T21:51:00.002-04:00

Claire Denis' tone poem observes a father-daughter duo, with the knowledge that she has grown up and will leave. Denis films the routine of their lives so precisely that this upcoming transition is almost a new world order for both. Characters talk about trifle but images talk otherwise. In the films finest scene, in a rainy night four main characters end up in an Afro-bar and start to swirl to the tune of music. Dance, like alcohol is a cinematic equivalent of x-ray in the hands of able artist. So not only we get little under skin of each of them, but also the insight of ethnic-urban tensions of the scene. An excellent visualist, Denis works her way though daily life short sketches up to a roadtrip (before her going out, they both should go together) and earns the emotional power of the their bond. The final shot of two rice cookers might be the most economical image of the whole year (Ozu did the same with the ending image of old man peeling a fruit by himself in Late Spring, inspiration for 35 Shots).

Film 2009: Julia

2009-12-30T21:44:00.004-04:00

Well, its easy to say that Julia excels because of Tilda Swinton titular performance, but if we feel that our flawed heroine eventual loss after several failed attempt to gain a fortune in a kid-snatching scheme is not a compromise but a genuine transformation, it is as much for Swinton's brave performance as it is a nod to film's engaging narrative structure and its emotional power. Erick Zonca's Julia is both a mediation on Greed in this post-moral world and a search for something admirable in heart of a incorrigible person.

Film 2009: Two Lovers

2009-12-30T21:41:00.001-04:00

James Gray is called old-fashioned for a good reason. His films are endlessly compassionate and understanding of people's foibles. In a world loaded with ironies and tropes, it not just the otherness of his films to the rest that draws us to them, but its their closeness to the lives we live. Gray's Two Lovers absorbs its hero's trauma, rage, love and life into its big heart. It understands that human weaknesses, and human compromises cannot be shrugged with one shoulder and empathized with other. Gray's complexity is not in the method or technique, but in the characters he draws. There is no specific vision (can there be an intentional vision for an artist?), no terrific shot or a bleeding style, but an undeniable sense of human handling of characters and their quotidian yet valued lives and loves.

Film 2009: The Hurt Locker

2009-12-30T21:38:00.003-04:00

I loved The Hurt Locker a lot when I watched it for the first time, second time around I was not too sure about two things - The opening quote "War is a drug" and was slightly disappointed by little too explanatory ending. Only one of them was sufficient for a movie which invests itself so brillianly against easy categorization into ideas. That said, the most brilliant thing that The Hurt Locker does to fuse two genres - war film and action movie, without any misplaced guilt or fanboyish indulgence into violence, and the result is something which makes us think about all the bravery and gore and fury that goes into a war. With multiple tense conflict scenes, The Hurt Locker respects the bravery of the men in uniform and their actions but does not disrespect life at any point, on either side.

Film 2009: A Serious Man

2009-12-30T21:31:00.006-04:00

A Serious Man starts with a quote - "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you", but our luckless hero (Larry Gopnik - Michael Stuhlbarg in an absolutely brilliant performance) dares to ask what if he does and still be miserable, and yes, our poor hero is text book miserable kind - with his student black mailing him, his son is smoking weed, his daughter stealing his money for a nose job, his jobless brother living with him and getting in trouble and to give an extra kick, his wife having an affair with his best friend and asking for a divorce because its the "reasonable" thing to do. Given this unusually downbeat plot, its a wonder how Coen brothers keep it up so strongly that there is not a dull moment. A Serious Man can be easily mistaken for a smart guy making fun of somebody in utter despair, but for the Coens undeniable empathy for Larry and their sincere quest to find an answer to his misery gives this film both its soul and its humor. Although there are no answers to our hero's plight, but Coen's lends a hand of understanding and reflection to their bleakest comedy (their beautiful vision of God expectorating on us). After Larry's search, is he wiser now or is he more hopeless (because he is wiser) is Larry's new dilemma. He should, as a rabbi advised him, "Accept the Mystery".

Film 2009: Revanche

2009-12-30T21:26:00.004-04:00

Revanche alters the noir-trappings of a failed heist plot into a meditation on love, guilt, revenge and family, elevating itself to a Greek tragedy but ultimately distills various tensions of existential struggle and relaxes them. Our hero's attempt to save his girl from a brothel owner and to gain himself a fortune goes bad. He gets the money but loses something more dear, or so he realizes later. He sets out for revenge. Director uses this simple context to beautifully examine human motivation, fate and purpose, but also to find understanding between his few acutely detailed characters, and what I may call, a tranquil redemption, not a zero-sum game. At the end, we know nothing is solved but we also know, without fanfare, that there are some nobler human traits which make this world possible.

Film 2009: Inglourious Basterds

2009-12-30T21:18:00.003-04:00

Of all his films yet, with Inglourious Basterds Tarantino shows signs of that bloody lump that romantics call heart, for it has at least one real woman. Mélanie Laurent's Shosanna is that full-blooded creation - with Women-with-past, Revenge-Doll and Lady-in-Red rolled into one. Working in his usual chapter format, Tarantino creates some of the most taut and dramatic scenes, building the tension through witty dialogues and camera movement (sometimes by lack of it). The first chapter, although a full blown homage to Sergio Leone Westerns, is something that works as a mini film in itself (a warming up exercise, if I may say so) and it lets the viewers (who are misled by Tarantino imitators that he is all about action) realize that slow build up pays off big. In the first few minutes, if any such viewer thought that nothin' happenin', is duly shut up by its dénouement. Also, this film lets Tarantino to face his Film-Fetish head on. Fuming a theatre full of Nazis with ghostly image projected on film-stock smoke is anyday better than film references when one would talk about power of cinema.

Film 2009: Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things are.

2009-12-30T20:46:00.006-04:00

These three films collectively caught up with the child within us. Their handmade craft and quirky imagination shows us a world which is not Pixer perfect. Films like Walle and Up are great, but un-child-like, they are films by adults (and I dont mean it as a compliment). One of the biggest eureka moment of my movie watching career was a realization after watching Kiarostami's Where is my Friend's Home. I realized that none of the adult in that film understood our little hero's state of mind, and that was the whole point. He was like a zombie cruising through an adult non-caring (When I say care, I certainly dont mean food, clothes and general nagging by moms and dads) world. Kiarostami treats him as a full grown human being with his own world around. His world is not incomplete, its just unlike ours. Max of Where the Wild Things are is one such creature too, with a different world and imagination, and his journey into the wild is his own exploration into his own imagination. Director Spike Jones gets that. Second thing about this trio is the hand crafted quality which is infinitely innovative (Mr Fox is so story-book-flat and its so amazing that way) and endlessly spooky (could Caroline be so spooky if it were pixered? Could Mr. Fox be so playful and rollicking otherwise, Could Wild Things be so child-like wild in an adult animated world), and to a kid, this craft looks somehow achievable - sew a button for an eye, make a puppet to dig a burrow, make a monster deadly but not without the possibility of friendship. How can an able child match the perfection of an able adult, that is cruel. Up has perfect balloons and chubby baby, quantum of nostalgia (or are they just fucking cute) for me and you, but plain quotidian for a different world. This trio is all about prolific puerility, a blue pill for the kids.

2009-10-17T02:39:00.002-04:00

Films I am dying to see
35 Shots of Rum
White Material
Where the Wild Things Are
Lorna's Silence
You, the Living
A Serious Man
The Milk of Sorrow
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Book I am dying to read
The Original of Laura

The Hurt Locker

2009-07-14T17:57:00.002-04:00

One of the best action films and one of the best films on Iraq, The Hurt locker is highly recommended. Jeremy Renner and Kathryn Bigelow, both are now on my high alert list.

Kate Bush - The Sensual World

2009-04-16T13:22:00.000-04:00

I dreamed a dream - Susan Boyle

2009-04-14T13:56:00.002-04:00

Even Reality TV and Talent shows have their moments. Does not she remind you of one of those chirpy women of Terrence Davies' films who sing their life away. Wonderful. Here you go!

Delhi 6

2009-04-08T12:44:00.005-04:00

Few things about Delhi 6.

1. If an artist wants - a confident and cocksure artist, the type we all know - he can make a miniature painting with bold strokes and still feel good about it. Similarly, for the directors who cant help but think big, everything becomes mini-India, so we have standard Hindu-Muslim characters, standard dadima, standard sweet-bitter relatives (large hearted ones have big breasts or big smiles), standard kids (two types - with glasses, without glasses) and other associated clichés but remember that the mini-India of our serious and good-hearted directors is not quite complete without the holy grail of goodness and that can only come from an NRI (preferably man, preferred age 25-27, must be good at heart and good looking too - as they go hand in hand - , must be doing quite well in US, preferably a software engineer, scientist or son of an Indian male, who is doing very good in US, preferably a doctor and married, - as they go hand in hand). He comes, he sees and he reforms us. Whether he stays back or carry on his journey is quite immaterial (or rather depends on whether he gets a girl here. The girl should be fair, preferably long hair. She should be of a kind which should make India look cool - now coolness really depends on director's definition of it. There are basically two types of coolness - Traditional coolness and hip-coolness. Typically girl adjusts to whatever NRI wants. The romance between NRI and girl must follow normal Bollywood standards. The first encounter must be little rough (The only tussle they have is whether they should kiss Bollywood style or Hollywood style, here the guy loses usually), rest goes smoothly. I repeat girl should be fair or become so in due course of romance). We all know and understand that an NRI is the closest approximation to a white man you can find in our family, so it is nothing but natural for us and our film makers to be drawn to them. They are as white as we can ever get. "Son of an NRI" is even cleaner than the NRI, in moralistic terms. Technically he never left the country. He is godlike- if I may say so - with no Original sin. He is a kid, he observes with a zeal of a teenager. He is so young, innocent and beautiful that the whole theatre must feel bad if someone slaps him tight. His voice of reason, his ok-ok Hindi (like the dubbed Tamil and Telugu of South Indian heroines exported from Bombay), his untainted ideals and his open-minded feminism (and he will definitely get chance to show it few times in the film), his goggles, cell phone, laptop and a wiser and purer (if not cleaner) brain. No wonder, he becomes friends only with Dadima and kids, he is beyond (or out of) his time, just like god. His inability to express hints to his innocence, his childlike gaze becomes his purity of observation and his smile becomes the mirror of his pure white soul. NRI (or son of an NRI) is at once, pristine and philistine - a godsend for Bollywood.

2. Nothing irritated me more than the use of Ramlila sketches to push the tick-mark narrative points forward. The worst abuse was made of Sabri's story. Its was like watching a low-intellect children story where references to an age old saga are so badly needed to validate the point that it does not fear from trivializing the story itself. The last best use of Ramleela was done in Rajkumar Santoshi's Lajja where drunk Sita (Madhuri Dixit) refuses to go to Agni Pareeksha and argues onstage with both Ram and Lakshman. It was one of the last instances of feminism in commercial Bollywood. It was much better than when ramlila was used to extreme ends to bring director's point across like in Deepa Mehta's Fire. Attempts like Fire or Delhi 6, use the epic for their narrow ends, but efforts like Lajja's ramleela scene flip-flops it to make us think.

3. Surprisingly, I was alright with the Kala-bandar theme. I know its more or less like Panchtantra, that we all have a kala-bandar inside (Banality of evil for kids and toddlers), but it was done with some humor so it works in parts. But I was most embarrassed by Amitabh's role. Do Bachachan's come in a package. ek ke saath ek free. One can not help but think of Abhishek's reply when the director/producer asked him to work in this film, "Papa ke saath", he would have replied. Amitabh and his tribe (who so ever calls him Amitji, Amit Uncle or Papa) are in so many films now-a-days that one can safely say that there is a Kala-bandar inside every film.

Short Notes on 2008 Disappointments and a Recommendation !

2009-04-07T00:29:00.005-04:00

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt). Very honest and one of the most serious films of 2008 but so cold that it could not even justify the use of medium. The stack of stark images does not bundle up into something that seems to strike an emotional chord here or there as if the director is scared of emotions. I am more disappointed here because it is otherwise a glorious attempt in a sober voice.

Milk (Gus Van Sant). In preparation to watch Milk, I saw Rob Epstein's excellent documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk and in the commentary track of the documentary the director says that they consciously did not name it The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, because they wanted to capture the struggle in times of Milk not his life per se. The motion picture Milk tries to capture both and thats where it fumbles because it is not necessary that the personal life of a person be as interesting and important as his political life.

My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin). For me, Guy Maddin's films work when he mixes nostalgia not only with genuine sadness but with irony, surreal humor and perverse fantasies that are uniquely his. My Winnipeg works great in pieces but what spoils the whole experience is Guy Maddin's overemotional voice over, it pampers and plunders the images and their irony. You never know what to believe, Maddin or his images.

Alexandra (Aleksandr Sokurov). I am not too sure about this film but this is definitely Russian version of hate the war but support the troops, which is nothing wrong, but the grandmother character is overly patronizing and when we get the feeling that she is actually supposed to represent both mother Russia and director’s alter ego, the whole exercise, even if heartfelt, looks not only nationalistic but rather simplistic.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog). This is one attempt where from the very beginning director promises to explore the other side of the world "differently", there is supposed to be nothing usual here (Herzog himself says that he is not here to film penguins) but even if it is not arrogant its immodest promise and more length of the film is devoted to ridicule others than to show us things with new eyes. It is definitely a minor effort from Herzog. May be thats why it was nominated for Oscars.

Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant). Van Sant use of Christopher Doyle's excellent photography, Nino Rota's music and a cryptic narrative seems to cancel out each other in their stylistic excesses. It is one example where a bunch of good things does not result in anything better.

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan). Self proclaimed harbinger of chaos and menace, the anti-establishment Joker's big-budgeted explosions looks meticulously planned and staged. In a strictly back and white sensibility, Joker's irrational lunatic evil does not go hand in hand with the bigness of his sophisticated misadventures or vice versa. Its just too layered. On the other hand the two face metaphor is overly clean cut, The face, the coin, the film divided in two halfs. And thats the problem with this film. You just can not have it both ways. Also, the cut after Joker's fall was too abrupt.

Dear Zachary (Kurt Kuenne). This is a heartfelt personal documentary but highly manipulative so much that one starts feeling that the director does not trust his audience's emotional responses and so he packs them with enough arsenal to illicit a powerful but expected response.

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman). What you will think of a person who fantasizes of staging an artsy-fartsy funeral for himself. Thats exactly what I think of this film. Its self-indulgent in a very morbid way. But Samantha Morton's performance is quite good.

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas). This is essentially the textbook of art house cliches. This film reminded me of Cartman's Christian Rock Album cover where he asks Token to point away from camera because this is how album covers are. Also, the director should go to confession for trying Dreyer so poorly.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle). My biggest problem with this film is the end dance sequence. Its so shoddily choreographed, its worse than mediocre - a half-hearted sham, lip service to Bollywood.

Now the recommendation, Abdel Kechiche's The Secret Of The Grain is long and intense family drama that brings different ends of a family together when it engages in opening a couscous restaurant. And look out for marvelous Hafsia Herzi. Ebert compares her to Isaballe Huppert.

Best non-2008 Films seen in 2008

2009-02-07T22:37:00.006-04:00

This is the list of films seen in 2008 which I found very impressive and satisfying. In my opinion, a film like Beloved is 24 carat gold, a masterpiece of highest degree and cinema as piece of history and heart. Most of the films in this list unpretentiously strike a balance between the aesthetics and the reality in cinematic art and form. A film as film-scholarly as Who's Camus Anyway, tells more about human beings than about cinema and in its most sublime moments suggest them to be one and same manifestation. The documentary - The House is Black, To Be and To Have, Baleros and Near Death - either observes human condition with honesty or take part in it to evoke action. The Camp of Showgirls and Pussycat, and of course of Mike Kuchar's shorts is more telling, honest and probing than the seriousness of everyday Hollywood. In a Lonely Place, a film I saw several times last year, may be most profound film that examines love (or rather its impossibility) in the guise of a noir. As my personal change in trajectory of film-watching last year, I became more and more interested with the concept of films as therapy and for their humanity like in Ray's Devi and Sembene's Moolaade. I care less about lot of things which I used to care before. Awkwardly paced and clumsily acted but deeply moving, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein would have never gotten a nod from me before. What remains constant are the films that can make reality look like dreams and vice versa, some sort of poetry - films like George Washington and Killer of Sheep, and to some extent Nobody Knows - the films that transform music and image put together to breathtaking beauty. And there are some terrific performances here - the star performance of Holly Woodlawn in Trash, Dirk Bogarde in The Servant, Doomed beauty Gillian Anderson in The House of Mirth, Celia Johnson's housewife-in-love in Brief Encounter and many others. All these films are highly recommended.

1. Beloved (Jonathan Demme)
2. The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad)
3. George Washington (David Gordon Green)
4. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray)
5. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
6. The Servant (Joseph Losey)
7. Who's Camus Anyway (Mitsuo Yanagimachi)
8. To Be And To Have (Nicolas Philibert)
9. Balseros (Carlos Bosch & Josep Maria Domènech)
10. Moolaadé (Ousmane Sembene)
11. Trash (Paul Morrissey)
12. Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella & Pablo Stoll)
13. Freaks (Tod Browning)
14. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven)
15. Careful (Guy Maddin)
16. Nobody Knows (Hirokazu Koreeda)
17. The Intruder (Claire Denis)
18. Brief Encounter (David Lean)
19. Near Death (Frederick Wiseman)
20. Devi (Satyajit Ray)
21. Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi)
22. Mike Kuchar's Shorts (Sins of the Fleshapoids, The Secret of Wendel Samson & The Craven Sluck)
23. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (John Gianvito)
24. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer)
25. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies)

Pic: A crucial scene from Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri.

2008: Year in Film !

2009-01-11T18:30:00.014-04:00

Here is the list of my favorite films of 2008 (I tried my best but I am never sure of the order). I am late as usual and the excuse (as usual) is because I wanted to catch up with few films and revisit some. Please recommend if I am missing any good films of 2008.

1. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme)
Amidst the chop-shop of marriage and personal conflicts, the moments of reflection and reconciliation comes at the right time making the film an exercise in compassion, not in bitterness. Demme understands that narrative logic is not the soul of images, their emotional order is. With the backdrop of a faux-Indian musical wedding, past and present unveil and collide, moments are stolen, lived and lost, with the quicksilver performances of two daughters (Rosemarie DeWitt's elder Rachel and Anne Hathaway's Kym) and their mother (Debra Winger), the movie becomes a therapy of sorts. Demme sees the therapeutic power of confrontation, but also knows that sometimes words fall too short and there are times when nothing works. When Rachel gives Kym a shower after a rough night, it is not only a moment of reconciliation, but also a reflex of sibling love. Demme understands that familial bliss is somewhere rooted in selective amnesia - you forget mistakes of those you care - and somewhere in involuntary bond between family members. Rachel Getting Married is definitely the most soulful film of the year.

2. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
One of the reviews of Mike Leigh's Naked wrote that the film "tries to articulate what is wrong with the society that Margaret Thatcher claims does not exist". Leigh's oft-miserable characters living at the fringe of society are just trying to survive but even then one can virtually smell the human warmth off his characters owing to Leigh's compassion for them. In few respects, Happy-Go-Lucky's heroine Poppy (amazing Sally Hawkins) –non-judgmental, intelligent and caring for people – is onscreen Leigh showing genuine understanding and respect to his characters. Poppy's zest for life and empathy for others is born out of clear heart and understanding. There is no strand of smugness to it. She is one of those persons who get truly moved by other people troubles and offer a helping hand. (Do not confuse this with Bollywood goodness of heart where happiness of one man cruelly breaks in the safe sadness of others). Poppy is not naive like Fellini's Cabiria but has her resilience. If we overlap the penultimate scene where Poppy pensively walks after having a heavy argument with her driving instructor (Eddie Marsan) and the last scene where she takes a boat ride with her friend, we can feel something akin to the last scene of Nights of Cabiria, and it is no small feat.

3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
This film, like its muse - a red balloon - is free and floating. It is absolutely liberated from any notion of making a sensible narrative or any life changing epiphany. A dreamer duo - a curious child (Simon) and his baby sitter (Song, a passionate film student) - create a canvass on with reality taps in the form of child's mother (animated Juliette Binoche's Suzanne) and is absorbed within the calm of the canvass. Flight of the Red Balloon builds an awe-inspiring fantasy around the matter-of-fact reality, without trying too hard because it knows that it might break the spell. There is certain musicality to the whole film with calm of the dreamers and the resound of life outside their fantasy. Flight of the Red Balloon touches the idea of cinema as a tool to preserve past (Suzanne's asks Song to transfer her old 8mm movies to DVD) and also the idea that it reminds us of things and emotions forgotten ("Your film touches on very deep things I thought I'd forgotten," remarks Suzanne to Song after seeing her film). Emerging out of these basic ideas are notions of cyclic nature of cinema (you preserve and you revisit and you preserve again to revisit, its memory and past both) and its oddly magical way of connection and conveying emotions and ideas (Somebody preserves past, and someone else experiences it). Flight of the Red Balloon gently captures the crux of these ideas.

4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke)
Still life is set in a small village of Fengjie, on the banks of Yangtze River which is the site of infamous Three Gorges Dam Project. Jia Zhang-ke mixes fiction to this backdrop with story of two people (Shen Hong and Huang Mao) searching for their spouses. The social, political and emotional ramifications of the dam are filtered through lives of the fictional characters. With Zhang-ke 's excellent, almost uncanny, gift of composition, the backdrop and the fiction fuse together as a sensitive portrait of the history in making and unmaking. His unforced compositions have irony (shot of a demolished building collapsing in the cityscape behind the reunited husband and wife, a couple dancing with the backdrop of Yangtze), light-hearted humor (Workers sharing beer, cigarettes and toffees) and supernatural/absurd (A building like a Chinese alphabet becomes a rocket ship, a UFO flies over Yangtze River, the circuit board shorts as Hong Shen bandages an injured worker). But most importantly, Zhang-ke is talking about the power and control of money on the lives of his characters. People are moving away from their homes for money, there are debts to be paid, people changing after having a taste of money. In the biggest joke and irony of the film, workers show each other that their part of China on the banknotes. On the surface, Zhang-ke does not look very interested in the politics of dam (rarely in film we see any discussion about the dam), but the overwhelming rubble of a landscape is ubiquitous. Almost every scene has something going on in the background. Its like a play staged with a slowly disintegrating backdrop, everything here takes a new meaning.

5. Hunger (Steve McQueen)
Steve McQueen's Hunger may look like "protest cinema" because it documents Bobby Sand's Hunger strike in Maze Prison. Also because of the same reason it might even fall into "issue cinema" trap. In both of these labels - protest and issue - come before cinema and therefore Hunger, although about protest and issues is neither of them. With Hunger Steve McQueen joins the group of directors who know how to shoot human bodies and how to put them together to mean something bigger than the pieces. We all know Bresson did it again and again; several assorted shot of hands and pockets meant more than picking a pocket. But McQueen goes political with Hunger. Shots of bloodied knuckles of guards, corridors of Maze prison, wounds in skull, dark tiny prison cells, beating, shit smeared prison walls, stiff limbs, naked battered bodies, dirty fingernails and voice of Mrs. Thatcher are used to evoke a situation or rather how people are dealing with a situation. With these dispersed visual installments, McQueen captures the complexity and brutality of the situation on both sides. McQueen said in one of the interviews that his primary inspiration for the project was Goya and how to make the worst images engaging (nor sexy or numbing). As a testimonial to his success, the killing of a guard, in its shock, beauty and brutality will do both De Palma and Argento proud and the humanity of that scene is undeniable. The second act of the film is a brilliant argument (this argument reminded me of Pere Portabella's brilliant short El Soprar) between two ideologies - Bobby Sands and Father Dom Moran. The argument is about the new path for Republican's cause and the validity and need for hunger strike. Here McQueen hits all those questions head on - The questions that Bobby and Father ask each other, Is hunger strike heroic?, Is this good for the Republican cause? Are there other ways around and the questions which a viewer have in their mind, What is the ideology of the film? Does this film romanticize the terrorists, what is the moral center of the film, Is this film a protest or anger or frustration to a situation. Act three is the actual hunger strike and its brutal physical manifestations. Although dealing with a piece of history, McQueen works like an artist not a documentarian, and hence is freer. In his last minutes, Sands recalls a childhood memory of running in woods - a mysterious evocation of childhood freedom and fear, and is followed by a shot of birds flying at dusk - although a cliché of soul being free - becomes an simple expression of both exhaustion and release.

6. Reprise (Joachim Trier)
Reprise feels like a first film for all the good reasons - fresh, original, experimental, spirited and personal. With the audacious beginning sequence of pile of would-have-beens, the film establishes its tones of hit and miss, inspiration and block, success and failure for our two young writers (Erick and Philip), in their professional and personal lives. The film has an amazing insight into human mind and how it processes, remembers and uses information. If this film is a mess of if-then-else loops and what-ifs, the director understands the impossibility of sorting some things out and he also acknowledges that its style will work only once, after that the cult will be quotidian (which might save it from being a Hollywood fodder). Hovering all over is the young men’s aspirations and strive for professional success (the intro sequence even establishes that, although they want their success not to be the famous type but a cult-case) in writing which in some ways is against their passion for language and writing (Their favorite author, Sten Egil Dahl ,tells Erick that never to discuss art on TV) so in the film there is always a friction between creativity and fame (our heroes get writer blocks once they get famous). The added twist is their life outside their writing world - the reality in which they live in, their friendship and love life (Erick breaks up with his girlfriend so that he can devote himself to writing vaguely reminds of Kafka's love letter to his girl friend that writing is his first love), which provides an amazing flux of scenarios of joy, awe and sadness. We only hope that our young writers will someday balance their multiple worlds.

7. The Witnesses (André Téchiné)
If any film this year understands and captures the sentiment of loss in essence, this is it. This film understands loss (without ever turning bitter or melodramatic or morally rigid) because it understands its power on people's lives and it understands the human perseverance in the wake of it. Novelistic and classical, in all its lightness and vibrancy, the film feels like a heartfelt remembrance of people and a passage of time, not just a bunch of regrets and sobs of the time lost. André Téchiné fast and urgent narrative - divided into three chapters, "Happy Days,” “The War” and “Summer Returns” - has a fleeting power, and is directed delicately not because the memory is thin, but because it is subtle and still alive. If images of Manu drowning, Manu touching Mehdi’s back, ailing Manu asking for a kiss from Sarah, Manu kissing Sarah, Manu dancing with Sarah and Adrien, haunt us, we understand what his friends and lovers have gone through and on a larger scale what an era has gone through. Téchiné film feels like a whiff of fresh air from past, loaded with life and loss.

8. In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín)
In the City of Sylvia not only likens the act of watching faces, forms, people and poses to the art of filmmaking but it also plays out as the struggle of an artist to make sense of the rich and chaotic world around him. A quintessential romantic and artist type, El (Xavier Lafitte), visits cafes, wanders, and as we come to know, he is looking for a girl named Sylvia whom he has met in a nearby bar 6 years ago. The first third of the film is a very confident experiment in point of view, framing and composition. Shot in broad daylight, this sequence is extraordinary because it balances the reality and ordinariness of the real life and the romance and desire of a human heart. It is the same balance that an artist needs to strike - the balance between aesthetic and the psychological. This part ends in a high note when El spots a girl who he thinks is Sylvia. The second part is a hit and miss romantic chase which end in a disappointment. The chase is purely of a lovelorn wanderer kind, with only a little thrust of libido. The third part (my favorite) is the bar sequence which - for one - is the camp version of first act with cafe replaced by a bar and violin by Blondie, and also a fitting closure to a daydream where the director finally deconstructs male gaze into desire, disappointment and inaction.

9. Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris, tries to find the truth behind Abu Gharaib's infamous images through interviews with the various players, his signature recreations and dissection of images as never done before. Errol Morris is the most scientific and fact-based film-maker working today and his investigative zeal is not guided by a pre-determined goal or agenda (it is not to say that the film is crafted without foresight, but one can tell that the investigative research for the film was open-minded and unbiased). Morris is not quite interested in big questions like banality of evil or but in small-specific questions like "why was a portion of photo cut out", "who took the picture" and "what happened before and after the picture". Step by step, through such small questions and examinations Morris deftly crafts a portrait of morality, responsibility, corruptibility and truth, and takes us to a surreal climax where few of the most shocking images are marked Standard Operating Procedure by a US Official. In an effort to explain himself, the official says "People who have not been to places where I have been, I don’t expect them to see them in the same way", hitting right in your head that these procedures really are some sort of standard and routine in other such infernos. Standard Operating Procedure suggests that what happened in Abu Gharaib may not be the exact scheme given by top officials to these kids to operate but it is evident that they were sanctioned enough support and freedom (and of course \cover-up) for enough time with pressure of non-specific goals (like to get intelligence information for a Iraqi civilian) that one thing led to other, responsibilities of actions ("We were just following orders") were diffused and immoral humiliation and torture became the standard operating procedure. Haunting, persuasive and objective, SOP is an extraordinary example of building a big picture with small but precise stokes.

10. My Father, My Lord (David Volach)
The film told so gently and patiently as if its a tender past remembered with images, but at the same time so observant and compassionately close to its characters as if its meticulously conceived with feel of a dream. It must be little bit of both like any personal film is. Contrary to his own experiences, when young Jewish boy, Menahem is told by his father that animals do not have any souls, film gently suggests a betrayal to humanity by those who are trusted to protect it. The tragic climax becomes more hurting because one fears that pure experience and curiosity might have been drowned in the sea of rusted ideology in the name of faith.

Honorable Mention: WALL-E, Be Kind Rewind, Let the Right one in, Boarding Gate, Redbelt and Burn After Reading

Not Seen: The Wrestler, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Class, A Christmas Tale, Profit motive and the whispering wind, The Last Mistress, The Edge of Heaven, Trouble the Water, and My Blueberry Nights.

Notable Performances:
Sally Hawkins, Happy Go Lucky
Eddie Marsan, Happy-Go-Lucky
Juliette Binoche, Flight of the Red Balloon
Sami Bouajila, The Witnesses
Sean Penn, Milk
Josh Brolin, Milk
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married
Rosemarie DeWitt, Rachel Getting Married
Frances McDormand, Burn After Reading
Michael Fassbender, Hunger
Asia Argento, Boarding Gate

Disappointments and Letdowns (of varying degrees): Wendy and Lucy, Milk, My Winnipeg, Alexandra, Encounters at the End of the World, Paranoid Park, Dark Knight, Dear Zachary, Synecdoche, New York, Silent Light and Slumdog Millionaire. I will try to put my thoughts down soon on some of these.

Hindi Films: I really liked Mithya, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and A Wednesday in that order. I will try to write about them in a separate post. The most amazing performance of the year is Amrita Rao's (YES) fifteen minute scene in less-than-mediocre Shaurya. She makes tea and talks about her dead husband in horror and repulsion. Neat!

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

2008-11-27T19:43:00.005-04:00

I missed first 15-20 mins of Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. It all started with the trouble to reach the theatre. The listing that I checked showed 66th and 3rd Ave but it was actually 11th and 3rd (it is another story how I figured out that, in short it was not easy). When I reached panting, it was already 3:15 pm for a 2:50 pm show (I hope in the beginning they showed trailers of usual Bollywood crap like Dostana which was playing next door). All the trouble was worth it. I was just sad that I was the only one in the theatre, when the Dostana screen had so many people. No Kidding, it was sad.

Lets start with a customary one liner plotline. Lucky, the charming, (an astonishing Abhay Deol) is a superchor, who along with his childhood friend, Bangali (Manu Rishi), works for Gogi Bhai (Paresh Rawal), but owing to his oversized charm and intelligence, he outsizes Gogi bhai and along the way he finds fame and notoriety, falls in love ["Jugnu rehndi sheeshe paar"] and hopes for a happy family life ["jugni hasdi ve hasdi, ke dil vich basdi"]. In this standard storyline, the first and foremost thing that director Dibakar Banerjee does is to literally add Delhi(same as he did in Khosla ka Ghosla, remember quick rajma recipe ["main kenni rajma chawal chadha de, ke do di vajai chaar citeeyaan vaja de, vich thoda soda paade, kal kenda ni si khada khazana waala"] in the opening scene). So a standard scene of seduction translates to that marvellous scene where the girl says "by god, main touch ho gayi" and a dinning table conversation translates to something even more marvellous [ "yeh show piece hai aur yeh khana"]. What is more amazing is that it all happens without a single stereotype, if I can say so (and I mean it as appeciation), they are all humane caricatures written with lots of sympathy for them. One way to explain this is through one of the song in the film soundtrack "Tu Raja ki Raj Dulari", a soulful Haryanavi Ballad (raagni). With raw traditional voice and lyrics, the song is true its spirit but the techno beat (which never tempers with voice and lyrics) is the indication of the milieu where it is used. Our hero is not someone who will write and sing that song, but the one who feels the same emotion (and may be in the same language) just because of the fact that he has grown listening to such sound and music. It is an excellent way for a film to connect to roots of its characters and fly, never giving an impression that such music is "used" for just creating the impression of Delhi like shots of Chandni Chowk to India Gate are cheaply used as "establishing shots" for Delhi in much of Yashraj-Brand Filmmaking.

Not to put the film in any disadvantage of over-expectation, I think Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye! is even better than Khosla ka Ghosla (although I have see Oye Lucky! at least one more time to say anything concrete), and one aspect where the film clearly exceeds is performances (I think for the kind of films Dibakar Banerjee is making, he knows how important the performances are). I did not find any of the performance weak (I only wish that the triple role of Paresh Rawal can be distributed among more actors just in the hope of finding more of Richa Chaddas and Manu Rishis, also I did not find any reason (logical or illogical, something like Ayeshia Takia playing both wife and secretary to K in No Smoking) why they are played by same actor. May be something happened in first few mins that I missed). Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye ! is a treasure trove of performances. A performance like Richa Chadda's Dolly is great by any standards. It is not a central role but its pivotal in a way any character role can be. It is not by chance that when I gave two examples before of how similar situations are translated to Delhi lingo, I quoted both lines said by Dolly, it is because she gets it perfectly right all the time, little here or there would have made those scenes little funnier but much more dispassionate. If Neetu Chandra's Sonal (excellent by the way) is girl next door, Dolly is definitely girl few doors away, a more cinematic entity, a more vibrant character.

The romance between Sonal and Lucky starts with Lucky's usual charm but the director plays with it for Lucky's need to have a family and with the excellent glass door motif, without overemphasizing, he conveys the fragility of this love, and also the emotional distance between lovers. Every visit and every opening of the glass door is a new beginning for the lovers. In few beautiful shots we see Neetu Chandra standing in front of the glass door, both fearful and waiting to open the door. It looked as if the director touched the cornerstone of romantic love.

I should not forget to note the first rate and large-hearted humor of the film which makes it such an entertaining fare. I was time and again amazed by the clever use of Hindi/Punjabi/Haryanavi (remember the first meeting of Special branch cop with Gogi Bhai and his flip to Haryanavi). And do you remember why Bangali is called Bangali? And how can one forget the "Lady Doggy" sequence - the funniest celebration of canine love. It is so heartening to see that even if director is dealing with something dark at the core, but he never raises "its serious cinema" flag. It is heartening to see someone trust his audience that they will understand the void in Lucky's life amidst the flourishes of his adventures and his zest for life.

A word about music, although I have touched it before. I am a minority of the people whom I know who think that Punjabi language and music has an unparalleled emotional power and much of it is wasted in similar-sounding bhangra beat numbers. I still remember the days when I first heard real Punjabi music in a Spic-macay concert at my college, it was amazed how soul-stirring it was. This film gets its music and the tone right and how songs are used without interrupting the narrative and how the mix of folk and funk is just suited for it.

One way to show the life of Lucky Singh is to realistically portray every twist and turns of his adventures and the other way to mythologize (not idolize) it. I personally like the later approach especially when it is used for something where it should not be used in popular culture, partly because its deviant, risky and interesting, but more so because it rescues the film from the typical struggle between good and evil, inspiration and rebuke but puts its in the realms of storytelling and about the passion of the protagonist. I felt that Lucky does not have passion for stealing (although to his credit he never differentiated between big and small, stealing everything with equal love) but a skill for it. His passion was his aspirations (if he were good at anything else, he will use it to pursue his aspirations) which the director beautifully uses to reveal different aspects of society which he interacts with. To the distant, he is a notorious celebrity of India's Most wanted list, and for the near, he is much more complex, evoking awe, love, hate and envy at equal measure, to us film goers he is sort of a middle class myth and director does something in the last shot of the film [a pixelled black and white close-up of Lucky] which comes close to mythologizing him.

To tell the truth, I was little scared before I saw the film. It is usual scare a cinephile experiences when he goes to see the second film of a director whose first film was really good. It was the similar scare which I had when I saw No Smoking, and it will be the same when I will see the next film by Navdeep Singh. It is more than the feeling that the director may screw it (he has all the freedom to screw) but it is a feeling that what ever you so dearly liked about the film was something of a byproduct (may be a fluke) not director's main concern, he does not think the way you thought he does. A second good film reassures all that. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! does that.

Synecdoche, New York

2008-11-02T22:14:00.005-04:00

No doubt, Charlie Kaufman is a fertile mind, but in films, fertility is not the richness of ideas, but it is the richness of images. It is sad that a film about exploration of a complex artistic mind and his obsession with death and decay, is so devoid of color that the only color I remembered as I came out of theatre was green - the color of poo in one of the scenes. One does not expect death and decay to be vibrant but toning all the colors down so that it all looks like everything happens in a glare of white light is sterile. In films, Kafkaesque does not translate to black and white, nor seeking truth translate to a character shouting "I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth". Its a classic trap where darkness of an idea translates to aridity of images. Synecdoche, New York is a film where images are sacrificed for ideas.

It might be something personal but I am not very comfortable with films obsessed with self-obsession of an artist, especially when the central character is supposedly director's alter-ego. The only thing that saves such films is not honesty or truthfulness or brutality of self-examination (how bitter can an artist get), but irony and humor. That is why I am not a big fan of 8 1/2, but that film has anecdotes, images and irony, not just a bundle of ideas.

To its credit, Synecdoche, New York has many of Charlie Kaufman's brilliant themes which he explored in his previous screenwriting efforts. There is a very clear idea of the baggage of body that we carry with our mind and soul. But here too, Kaufman missteps because he forgets that he is dealing with film medium where images of faces and body are the index of ideas, if we do not take an easy way out of reading monologues and voice overs. And in the first 30 mins or so, Kaufman uses faces and bodies to show characters inner traumas, like a blister on the skin doubles for anxiety or decay. This ideas of body and mind, of self image and projected image, and their superimposition, become much more interesting later in the film where Kaufman use a cinematic device of using several actors to play a single character thus creating a playful drama, and pumping his big ideas in between.

I think, Synecdoche, New York has an excellent material for a film, but it is not such a good film. There are several moments of brilliance, like the episode where stories of two daughters merge (I do not want to give more details and spoil it) together so that we examine the life of one of the characters again, a character that we have written off long before because we were so into the central story, which in turn tells us the pitfalls of being self-obsessed, and ignoring the complexity of other human lives.

Do not be deterred by what I am saying (it is a very personal opinion), Synecdoche, New York certainly deserves to be seen at least once. I am just wary about the idea of film about ideas where images are considered secondary. Its like when you close your eyes after watching a film, what comes to you - an image or an idea. Even in Bergman's many monologues, the camera shamelessly scrutinizes the images of faces. A slight quiver or grimace on Liv Ullman's expressive face is more telling than the potent voiceover. Needless to say, I am not talking about shocking or pretty poster images, I am talking about the moving close up of Vera Drake sitting with her whole family at dinner table, when she comes to know that she is charged with a crime. I am talking about the end sequence of Suspiria where our heroine enters the mural maze. I am talking about the back view of Maggie Cheung as walks down the stairs in In the Mood for Love. I am talking about all the joys and zest of moving images surpassing words or explanations.

Koi Yeh Kaise Bataye

2008-09-30T23:36:00.001-04:00

Frank Borzage's History Is Made At Night

2008-08-31T19:49:00.004-04:00

Finally, I saw a Frank Borzage film. The title of the film might make the top ten list of best romantic titles ( That list will, of course, be topped by Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die). Known as a supreme romantic, Borzage here makes a film that definitely requires one to have at least a romantic faith, if not diehard romanticism. If you have that tiny bit, its quite certain that film will seriously engage you. At one point of the other, you will let fall your defenses, for sure, and want our romantic couple to have that spiritual paradise of love, which Borzage is working on for them for the whole film.

History Is Made At Night is a patchwork of many genres - juxtaposing melodrama with romance, humor and fun of a love affair with pain of its longing and fear of transiency, soft-focus evocative camerawork of close ups with a set piece of shipwreck, but it is at all the times, story of romance between Jean Arthur's Irene (married to a psychotically jealous millionaire, played to perfection by Colin Clive) and Charles Boyer's Paul (Headwaiter at a restaurant in Paris). The narrative here is not so important, but a series of tussle between romantic coincidences and evil plans to keep the lovers apart, but what is important are the scenes with the lead pair together, which with their chemistry and Borzage's conviction and keen sensitivity, play as believe as possible albeit fantastical situations. When puzzled by Irene's laughter on their second meeting, Paul doubts that she is making fun of him (the only dash of doubt in their whole affair), her matter of fact reply ("When people are happy, they laugh, you make me happy"), clears up all the tension between lovers and along with the them, viewers too move little more close to Borzagian spiritual paradise of love. Film's romance starts with that all-elusive concept of "love at first sight" and takes it to "lets never be apart" climax. Definitely over-used and very common romantic thumb rule, and that’s what I was talking about a viewer having "romantic faith". All said, film's first half gave freshness to that stale cinematic process of "falling in love". As Irene and Paul chat and dance and eat, we can "see" them falling in love.

If we look at it, Borzage's romantic paradise looks quite different from Nicholas Ray's. For Borzage its a destination, for Ray its a short-lived escape. Most of us (including me) believe in Ray's worldview but we must understand that before reaching to Ray's, we must have passed through Borzage's, and the fortunate ones must have stayed there and have accepted the innate childishness of adult romance.

One thing that spoilt my experience is the film's uncanny similarity to James Cameron's Titanic especially towards end, but it also provides us a comparison of treatment of the similar situations. In end sequence, while Cameron was interested in love with backdrop of misery and people flying off the deck, Borzage is at once more modest and more exquisite, as he lets the lovers talk in solitude where they get to know each other by asking questions like "how you looked when you were young". Borzage understands romantic love as not just passion but also a peaceful bliss of union where lovers sit and chat and never get bored.

Random Notes and Updates

2008-07-27T19:53:00.004-04:00

I am seeing fewer films now. Last film that I saw was WALL-E and there too I missed the beginning and ending so it does not even count. Last week I saw Mithya which I think is very good. I need to see it again to write about it in detail but I am already impressed by its handling of familiar Bollywood themes and narrative devices in a new way, and beyond that managing to be a moving (and sad) love story. Few months back I saw Hitchcock's The Birds and since then I am thinking on and off about it and mostly how Hitchcock manages to have two parallel films in one film - one narrative and one psychological - and what is amazing is that he never sacrifices one for others benefit, that is to say he respects all his audience and thats where I feel some of films lose confidence in cinematic medium by either mellowing it down heavily for audience or making assumptions that audience would never get that so why even try.

It is not the question of finding a middle ground. What Hitchcock shows is that both can be achieved. I understand that it is not applicable to all type of films but at least noirs and thrillers are tried and tested ground. I might not be making much sense, but I am just blown by The Birds, and I also saw Marnie few months before it and it was great too, but I am still not very sure about its end. It was too much explaining which I thought belittled Marnie's emotions and her past, and also the complex sexual relationships that the film builds. It almost came out as a Freudian medical document for a while. But visually it was flawless and then there are those great Hitctcockian scenes like the one where Marnie rides a horse and when it breaks its leg after falling, she shoots it. That is again an excellent example of what I stupidly referred to as 'parallel films'.

I was also reading Andre Bazin's book on Orson Welles with foreword by François Truffaut and an introduction by Jean Cocteau. It is very precise study of Welles' film, philosophy and legacy. I thought Bazin would be very scholarly and dry but he always keeps it interesting. Also, one more thing that I liked a lot is that Bazin never try to be an authority on Welles like these new age film writers who after writing a book on any famous director, and giving few DVD commentaries try to own the director. While explaining Welles cinema he freely quotes from other critics and directors. Along with it, I was reading Godard on Godard. It has collection of articles by Godard from his Cahiers de Cinema critic period and also essay on his films and on film medium in general. A very knowledgeable and critical book, time and time again, even without saying, it emphasizes to know history of cinema to really get it. Its involve pasts - of persons, of nations, or culture and of art itself.

Being one of the youngest art forms it gives us a unique privilege to see cinema grow in front of us and it is indeed a prism through which we can try to understand the growth of any cultural medium and how it encompasses both - the cutting edge crap and the ultimate beauty. I have not completed the book but reading the reviews by Godard excites one about possibilities of cinema and it definitely paints a portrait of a young man in love with cinema. His reviews are enthusiastic, sometimes even using hyperbole, especially when he passionately writes about films of Nicholas Ray (Those famous quotes “And the cinema is Nicholas Ray” and “If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing it, and what is more, of wanting to”). I, myself, am quite vary of over-enthusiastic reviews – reviews where critical facilities are either blinded by, or defensively used to justify personal liking (beware of the fanboys). Those reviews often seem to be exercises to prove reviewers opinion of the film – as if merely stating the opinion and supporting it logically is not good enough (Read reviews of last year’s No Country for Old Men and this year The Dark Knight might be the film). More often than not, Godard’s enthusiasm is for cinema and so quite healthy.

When we are at that, let me go little overboard and write something about the type of critics and criticism I like. My idea of a critic is foremost a moral being – it is a mandatory requirement – everything else follows next. If he is not moral, he will end up praising a Nazi Propaganda film because it is cinematically spectacular. Related to being a moral being, that person should have a strong and open heart. By strong and open heart I mean, he does not get carried away by emotional trickery but he does not miss the right note, when it strikes – no matter how low it is. It is that proverbial heart that cuts the crap and get the gem out. He should know the medium well – its history, its technique and its power – and to know it, he should be very diligent – read, eat and see films all the time. Also he should be able to foresee a film’s brilliance. It is an outcome if the critic has all the prior qualities and it is also to do with a critic’s ability to be brave and say what he feels like and his refusal to be part of “critical consensus” and admire the film for the right reason. And of course, he should love the medium.

As you must have noticed by now where I am going. In my stupid opinion, a film critic must be all moral, all knowing, all seeing entity, and if I may call him so without scaring folks, a god-like figure. And that’s where I fail, what where I forget that we are in a world which is run by people not gods. And that where I set a high bar and look up someone to give me opinions on how I feel or I should I have. Its little more tricky than this, you may like a bunch of critics or artists, which may collectively become god to you, the one who knows all, the one who sees all, the one who feels all, but it is certain that your god will fail you sooner or later, and it is same for you too. As one sees/reads more and more, he might think he raised his standards artistically, but most of the times we are just intelligent enough to distinguish between cinema verite and candid camera. Because of this itch to "get" the film sooner, most of the times, judging comes first, and feeling next, at least for me. I hope I can reverse it.

Along with it, I am seeing lots of South Park, and I really like it. I did not like the South Park film much which I then thought was quite uninteresting in second half, but few of the episodes are "super awesome", to use Cartman's phrase. I think two of the best episodes are about sports - Stanley's Cup and The Losing Edge - both of which satires the team spirit, sportsmanship and associated public hysteria for sports. My other two favorites are about our obsession with video games and its characters - Good Times with Weapons and Make Love, Not Warcraft.

Coming back to film, few weeks back I saw Jonathan Demme's The Truth About Charlie. May be I saw it wholly in a Hitchcock frame of mind and therefore thought of the whole plot as McGuffin. The director uses the whole plot as an excuse to show Paris and to show his idea of romance and romantic city. A beautiful woman, Regina (played with old Hollywood grace by Thandie Newton) is in Paris and gets involved in the criminal past of her recently deceased husband and the money he left, where she is helped by a mysterious man whom she falls in love without knowing his identity. Again this film falls in 'two parallel films' theory but here one of the film overpowers the other. The suspense and the thrill doesn’t hold up to the romance in the air, or may be its just for me. Looked to me as if Demme’s whole heart is in romance and he was just cheerleading the thrills.

And at last I saw Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic Showgirls and it is indeed an excellent film. I was so impressed that I saw two more of Verhoeven’s films – Starship Troopers and RoboCop – both of them are good, Robocop slightly better than Starship Troopers, but none of them is as good as Showgirls. All of them are parodies not so much of current culture of show business, media hype, nationalism and militarism, but of story ideas bred out of these concepts, so these films can even be considered as parodies of our ideas of narrative, where things fall in places at odd moments to augment our emotional responses and to give us a feel of a story. Like Showgirls is a parody of the story idea “a star is born” or “that sexy go-getter bitch”, RoboCop is of “a hero savior” and Starship Troopers is of “the world is ours” or “shoot that alien”. What Verhoeven does it to add lots of humor into it and its that kind of humor which is considered sick and enjoying it more so. During the audition scene in Showgirls, one of the male manager asks a topless girl “I am erect, why are not you?.” The sex and nudity of Verhoeven’s film is not without purpose, they are obviously for titillation and he does not mask his intentions. I think, he is one of most shameless and fearless directors we have, but if you watch carefully his parodies are not without moral center. Last year I saw some of his more open Dutch films. The Fourth Man is very good and some sort of a homoerotic version of Basic Instinct. Soldier of Orange is quite good too. I also saw first 20 mins of Black Book but I don’t feel too keen to complete it.

Other than that, I saw three short films by Mike Kuchar. Mike Kuchar is considered the master of camp by many and his films are act of Vandalism, a form of good natured sabotage, as he explains his idea of camp in an interview. It will take long to discuss his films and whatever little I saw of his work, he has some resemblance to Guy Maddin's work. It may not be at a thematic level but somewhere they both cross their paths and even walk together for a while. A good write-up on him and his brother George Kushar here. After seeing his films I tried to read Susan Sontag's celebrated Essay on camp, which did not make much sense to me, mainly because my basic idea of camp is a way to fight intellectual dissection of ideas and when Camp as an idea is intellectually dissected, its looks like homage to Bresson by adapting his film for theatre. Also, I recently watched Terry Zwigoff's thought provoking film on R. Crumb. I am now trying to get some Crumb comics in my library (I doubt it though) or internet. More on that later.

Pic: Illustration by R. Crumb. Image source.

Paul Taylor's Eventide

2008-06-30T22:54:00.007-04:00

Few weeks back I saw Matthew Diamond's Oscar nominated documentary, Dancemaker, which takes a look at ace choreographer Paul Taylor and his dance company. It has few amazing dances and their behind the scene stories. This one is called Eventide and is my favorite. I also like Paul Taylor's commentory during this dance.

The other favorite from the documentary is here. After seeing this docu, I also felt how criminally underrated Altman's The Company is. In the recent films which I have seen, none captures the pains and the pleasures of a Performance, on and off the stage, as The Company does. Now Dancemaker stands on the same podium. One more film about dance and music which is an absolute favorite is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes.

Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade

2008-05-28T10:35:00.004-04:00

I have said it so many times that it looks like a cliché now, but my blog is dead. I do not see movies and I don’t write about them. Even if I see something, I don’t feel like writing about it. Here I go again in an effort to rescue my blog. Another cliché.

Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade is story of struggle between sexes in rural Senegal. A bunch of brave women, lead by fearless and upright, Collé, fight against female circumcision. Like Sembene's other masterpieces, this one is rooted in its soil but has something universal to say about the condition of women everywhere. In some ways it is close sibling to all those films that honestly observe condition of women in different societies (Kiarostami's Ten, Ray's Devi, Ghatak's Meghe Dhaka Tara, Mike Leigh's Vera Drake) and also those grass-root efforts that try to propel change in society (like the one Vidya points out here). I wanted to write about Sembene’s Moolaade for long because like other Sembene’s cinema, it is didactic and made with an ambition that it will elicit ground-level action from his country-men-and-women., which is such an antithesis to my understanding of films. I have seen many big ships artistically sink preaching in their last reels. It will not be an overstatement that I am scared of cinematic preaching, because by nature, its simplistic and shuts the doors of complex understanding, which equips us to slowly develop our own skills of both subjective and objective understanding.

Watching Moolaade made me excited about the possibilities of honest didactic cinema (actually Girish wrote about didactic cinema in his blog sometime back and took films of Sembene as an example of that), a film art so devoid of irony and so in your face that it engages you like an activist for a cause (like the women-folk in Moolaade). It remains a mystery to me that how it is done (I must say at this point that Sembene does not sacrifice cinema of image because throughout the film we notice the simple compositions of segregation and boundaries, and images with metaphors [a pile of radios snatched from the women and set to fire, with a worshipping place in the background]) but at the end of Moolaade, I not only felt for the cause and its victims, but also about tremendous power of such efforts and the change that they can bring to our societies. I am not sure, but the key is not to speak for them, but speak through them. Women folks, lead by Colle, speak for themselves – as women and more importantly as active members of society – caught between lines of tradition, religion and family.

It’s obviously not a story told as reported in a women’s magazine, but Sembene takes special care about whose voice is it? It is not the voice of a Senegalese woman who witnesses her fellow countrywomen in distress, it is not voice of a liberal man who acknowledges the barbarianism of his society, and it’s the voice of a woman who has gone though it and witnesses kids around her go through it. I think, it makes a lot of difference when the final confrontation takes place between men and women. It is a highly charged sequence which is staged like a street play where every woman comes out of “her” space, to the forefront and performs with passion. It’s a magnificent display of solidarity that things can be better for the next generation if they act now.

In an earlier sequence – one of those sequences which justify the existence of cinema as an art form - a quietly weeping woman who has recently lost her daughter during circumcision, starts to sing as she remembers her child and is slowly joined by other consoling women folks. One can only imagine the reaction (and be happy with lumps in his throat), when the film would have been shown to the people of a Senegalese village. All the standing ovations should have stood to respect that moment of connection between life and image under the open sky, as mothers – on and off screen - would have grabbed their sleeping babies closer to their breasts.

Jaur Se Baaz Aaye...

2008-05-17T11:32:00.002-04:00

Jaur Se Baaz Aaye, Par Baaz Aayein Kya ?

One of my other favorite here. Lyrics here.

mujhe hum-safar bhi mila koi tu shikasta haal meri tarha
kai manziloo.n ka thaka howa, kahee.n raaste main luta howa

Be Kind Rewind

2008-04-29T12:30:00.007-04:00

If there exists some concept of two types of growths, vertical and horizontal, where in, lets assume, vertical refers to age and horizontal refers to creativity, then Michel Gondry has long back ceased to grow vertically but grows astoundingly on the horizontal bars. His vision is a vision of a hyper-creative 14 year old boy (or girl), so his dream world is handicraft factory which manufactures joy that is natural and young, sadness which is pure, personal but the one that never breaks the young virile spirit. Things can be done in his world and all people with creative passion are like kids with crayons and cardboards.

In Be Kind Rewind, Gondry uses his world view to wrap nostalgia into a community building exercise with child-like vigor and creativity. Although working in the same domain, but unlike his previous film (The Science of Sleep, which boasts of one of the most heartbreakingly romantic endings, which for me, even echoed Nicholas Ray's beloved theme, "We don’t belong here, lets find a peaceful home for us", but this time lovers run away from the world on a stuffed horse over an imaginary river during the sleep) which is, to put rudely, about the romantic escapades of a 14 year old hyper-creative boy, the dreamworld here is very firmly connected to the realworld. That connection is the movies. And thats where Gondry is making a brilliant statement about our connection to films in particular, and all creative arts in general - as an urge and freedom to go to that dreamworld (here characters re-enact that dreamworld like small community Ramleelas).

The plot is also like a story which one child will tell to another where eye balls roll, eyes brows rock with a tear or two towards the climax. A VHS store is outdated and is about to close (It does not meet the safety criteria, 'they' are planning to built a pretty building in its place, the owner has a month notice), the owner asks one of his employees to look after the store while he is away. During that time, one of employees friends (which the owner did not even want near his store) accidentally gets magnetized and erases all the tapes in the store. To mask their mistake, they try to remake those films (they call them "Sweded", as if they are from Sweden) and rent to their customers. To their surprise, the neighborhood likes them even better than the originals and they become stars in their neighborhood till the big companies come to book them under piracy and destroy all their work. The community comes together to make a biopic of the legendary Jazz Musician, Fats Waller, who was supposedly born in the same VHS store, and to raise money from the community to save the store.

The journey of making this film lets the director to explore several things. First and foremost is the very nature of collective creativity driven by like minded passion. While saying or seeing it, it does look like a mushy or sentimental idea (picture long ago when you were young and stupid, along with you friends sat together and said "let us do something", but it never happened), a place where passion for art overcomes mutual differences, but we need to understand that its Gondry's child-dream-world we are in, which may not be possible but it is not dishonest or forced. Secondly its about the change, from VHS to DVDs, from old store to new building, from old mindset to new blood, and how things change for good and for bad. I might be partial to the film because it touches one of my favorite themes, an old man looking old, down with nostalgia and without uttering a word, he is saying that people become old and body gets weak, things will change, new will come, don’t be too happy or too sad, its a rule. This is essentially an Ozu idea. Time Regained has an excellent scene too about old age where Le Baron de Charlus, now old and weak, walks in front of young Proust and his pain filters through Proust's sensitive eyes, which is very different from Ozu's stylistically, but nonetheless very elegant and says the same things. In Be Kind Rewind, there is a shot of Mr. Fletcher (the owner, played by Danny Glover) boarding a train. Lots of things go on in the same shot but excellent Danny Glover maintains a sadness of something lost (is it the VHS store, or the jazz era of his neighborhood, or a lost youth?) in his eyes all the times. Thirdly, it about the cultural unification of a community through a new found art (homegrown film) and the return to the roots of an old community legacy (music of Jazz maestro, Fats Waller). Yes, it is again little sentimental. In real adult world , as we know, you don’t get best of old and new, one crushes the other, but here too Gondry makes a honest and heartfelt case, which makes us a child for a while and let us think that it can be.

Hiatus... and Films...

2008-03-31T15:32:00.006-04:00

Its been over a month that I have blogged and in fact I never even thought of any need or felt any urge to blog. This sufficiently tells us the weak foundations on which this blog rests, or rather sleeps. Last time, when I started to write something to post with urgency but quickly discarded was about a brilliant film that I saw almost by accident. I had seen Who's Camus Anyway? laying in Chicago Library racks for long but never picked it up (now I think of it, I attribute this to its title (which in my opinion is the weakest thing about the film). I thought of it as an intellectual pseudo-serious student film). I am glad that I read Ed Gonzalez's (one of my favorite critics, he is thoughtful, incisive and unafraid to go wrong) praises of this film and I picked it over Makhmalbaf's The Silence (Nice film but little too beautiful, I should not say this I even smelt some bad breath of Theo Angelopoulos in few scenes).

One of the main reasons for not seeing as many films as I see and thus not blogging at all is the turbulence in my professional life. Since things were related to work, it was easy going, but also time consuming and uninspiring. As shameful as it seems, I did not even see 10 films in March, and I was always meek in my choices, trying to see easy going comedies or re-watching things passively. In the course of events, I left Chicago two weeks back and came to a small town in Indiana, thus further reducing my chances to see good films. Chicago, though not New York, was a place for film buffs, where every international film sooner or later hits either Gene Siskel, Music Box or Landmark Century Cinema, and backed with big Harold Washington Library DVD section, one can cover a lot. Gene Siskel was a great place and I saw three great documentaries there last year- Into Great Silence, Lake of Fire and Manufactured Landscapes - I liked them in that order.

Actually I liked them so much that I saw each of them twice. Lake of Fire turns brilliant in its last reels where director raises the film above pro-life/pro-choice voices and shows us how a woman going through abortion given all the support of the father of the child (at least at the time) and the care of the doctor feels. When after undergoing an abortion, she bravely starts weeping in front of the camera, pro-life/pro-choice merge and evaporate into something which is beyond such questions - the human trauma of being a mother in such a situation. Similarly, in Manufactured Landscapes' brilliant opening tracking shot of a Chinese manufacturing unit assembly line brings the main voice of the film - although highly beautiful and tightly composed these landscapes are manufactured and underneath them lies something free and natural. In one of the episodes which shows the construction of the biggest dam project in China and how it displaced thousands of people, the irony comes forth in a matter-of-fact way when people who were evacuated gets job for livelihood to break and clear away their own houses, to create these manufactured landscapes. Also, the pitch perfect photography of the documentary - anything from colorful landscapes of area overexploited for natural resources to the stack of computer waste piled like a modern art piece - makes us wonder what beauty means to us when we see these pictures segregated from their context.

On a visual level, Into Great Silence creates a space of peace and tranquility, and aligns itself to the rhythm of its subject, whether it is the repetitiveness of their day to day activities or their minimal interaction with each other. Into Great Silence, to me, is a possibility of such existence, which is very life affirming. Seeing this film second time (when you are not seeing it for anything but experiencing it on visceral level) was one of the highlights of my 2007 film watching.

Coming back to my favorite film this year (2008) yet, Who's Camus Anyway?, its film about a bunch of students trying to make a film on Camus' The Stranger. This film is as much about Camus' existential themes, as it is about film making, and to complete the arc, as much about the players involved in film making, on and off the sets. As you can see, all this gives the director, Mitsuo Yanagimachi, enough freedom to explore the idea of fiction, reality and their relation to film-making. In Fassbinder's minor effort Beware of the Holy Whore, he was more concerned with the manipulative master-slave relationship between the disinterested cast and sadomasochistic smug director and to some extent about how films are reflection of that but not how films represent reality or even better, how reality and fiction are inseparable when we talk about films. There are several high points in Who's Camus Anyway?, the first is the opening tracking shot which not only reminds us of Altman's The Player but even talks about it, and obviously the climax where film plays an is-it-real-or-not game with the audiences while the most crucial scene of the film is shot. It becomes scary and reliving breath by breath and I started questioning why I even liked the lame and one dimensional provocations of Haneke in Funny Games. The director of Who's Camus Anyway? is not punishing his audience or not even condescending them, but at that same time, with enough cinematic power, showing how the images lie but also how they are the only truth you have when you see a film - a free form experiment of both the powers and limits of cinema.

But my favorite scene from the film comes midway. Here one character playfully starts to read some sort of psychoanalysis report of film's lead character (based on The Stranger’s Meursault) and after few seconds other voice (this time a grim voice of a girl, with little music in the backgroud) starts to read the opening paragraph of The Stranger and slowly, with the dual voices reading symptom and analysis, the camera moves where a bunch of students are playing cello and flute and all these voices converge into a scariest snare, as the camera move towards darkness. For me, this scene works purely on cinematic level, it has no relation to the narrative or the character arc, but I must say this was my cinematic high of the year, yet to be topped.

Best Hindi films of 2007

2008-02-03T19:11:00.000-04:00

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize that only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more - Food Critic Anton Ego in his final review of Gusteau's in Ratatouille.

Excerpting this does not mean that any serious criticism is done in this space, but to bring the idea of "discovery and defense of the new". Of all the Hindi films I saw this year, the best ones were from the young directors (most of them making their first films). Also one more reason why Anton Ego's review is evoked here is the effect art has on its audience. When Anton Ego tastes Remy's Ratatouille preparation, something unexpected happens, in a very delightful (even Proustian) montage, Ego's simple childhood memories come back. Not only that they bridge the present to a past of smell and taste, but for that moment, a critic becomes an audience, he is not there to detach and judge, but to involve and get the pleasure. This is what happens when you see a good film. Also, Ego's comments on criticism bring about what I do not like in any art (criticism is a form of art) - arrogance. It is not exactly the arrogance of opinions, but it’s the arrogance of an artist that kill the art if it is reflected there.

Also this defense of new is also about new ideas, contents and approach to film medium. Also, as I have understood, it is not necessary for a artist to know and see and get inspired by all of the great cinema of the world, but it is indispensable to know the medium for what it is i.e. an awareness of the film as a medium of communication and what’s its toolbox. Although it can be both, but the film medium should not be confused either as a mass medium for entertainment or social medium for mass propaganda because (let me state the obvious but important thing) it is be first and foremost about images (or to be more correct, images in motion [motion pictures]) - the way they are associated with each other, the way they spark up in combination with other art forms like music, acting, lighting etc - i.e. its a visual medium, like literature is about language and theatre is about performance. Whenever a young director shows this understanding, hope for the medium surges. So here is my pick of five best Hindi films of 2007. I know, its coming a little late but I wanted to see few more films (and few films again) to make the final list.

5. Jhoon Barabar Jhoom (Dir. Shaad Ali)

Half of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom is about the fantasy of its two lead characters, but as they say that you can only imagine what you have seen, it is actually about real persons these characters know which they put in fantastical situation. Since it is a big Bollywood film, and true to its nature, the fantasies are all about love and marriage. Given all this, JBJ brilliantly manages to put everything that Bollywood offers to its benefit, be it song, dance, overblown fantasies of romance. Also, for the audience it is not only a guilty pleasure, but also tests any of those liars who say they like Bollywood song and dance but whine like morons if they are just given that without any excuse of lame narrative thrills. The song and dance of the film is brave enough to test our patience and throw any pseudo-bollywood fan out of the theatre. One of the songs goes "jo baanware se lagte hain, woh log bhale hote hain", it can be said about the film too. More on JBJ in this post.

4. Ek Chalis Ki Last Local ( Dir. Sanjay M. Khanduri)

It is the best Hindi comedy that I saw in 2007. Nilesh (brilliant Abhay Deol) misses 1:40 am local train. Since its the last local and he has almost no money (Rs 70) in his pocket, he has to wait for the next local (4:10 am). In the meantime, he meets a girl Madhu (Neha Dhupia who is coming back from her friend's engagement party?), few groups of gangsters involved in a kidnap, a trio of policemen (the senior most of them, Malvankar, is most brilliant who incorporates Bhagwat Gita into his day to day work, the other one, Naidu, is a Ranjikant fan, he even saves a girl when the other cop tries to rape her, in a true Rajni-style. The third, Tavade, is the loyal type who informs us "Biwi ke alawa sab baat-ta hai sa'ab ke saath"), an excellent Nana Patekar duplicate auto-wala, romance-on-the-run, a beer bar (where a middle aged women does an item number), few murders, a bag full of money and a lot of interesting dialogues (admittedly there are few old jokes here but there is more wit in this film than any of this year's comedies. Look for Abhay Deol talking to the mirror here ["Bhagwan bhi, saara charm ek hi chehre mein daal diya, vaise beer peene ke baad chamak aur badh jaati hai"] compared to Manorama ["har kissi ki jindagi mein ek aisa waqt bhi aata hai jab saale aaine ko such bolne ki bimaari lag jaati hai"]). What makes it so funny is that it is comedy of genres [especially of the gangster-genre] and B grade thrillers (even some of actors make appearance here, and one scene from classic B grade film Gunda is given specific homage [the one where a gangster weeps in compassion when his younger brother dies]). And there is a marvellous scene where Nilesh wonders "sahi kaha hai kissi ne, duniya aurat hi chalati hai... aurat-jaat tujhe salaam" and then the role-reversal where Nilesh learns a lesson or two. A comedy with several twists and turns of events and plots, makes us wonder not only about the flickering life of the people involved but also to think whether it really happened or its just a swirl of imagination while Nilesh took a dizzy nap on a local train.

3. Blue Umbrella (Dir. Vishal Bharadwaj)

The best thing about this film is a perfect childhood mood. The old and the young all are children here. Desire is childlike, the joy and the frustration too. When our heroine gets a big beautiful blue umbrella from Japanese tourist she becomes the princess of her small town, all persons - old and young - seem to be thrilled by this but Pankaj Kapur's Nandkishore is possessed by the wide-eyed desire to own it. But the beauty of his desire is its type. Its both childlike and of some Shakespearean proportion which leads us to the dark shadows of his craving and its outcome. Vishal Bharadwaj uses some great narrative eclipses, like only the negotiation of Blue Umbrella is shown but the actually transaction (or implied exchange of amulet and umbrella) is not shown. What we see is happy Biniya playing with the umbrella. Also, as I was stupidly thinking, it was not implied anywhere that the sadness fell upon our little heroine because she traded off her protective amulet for an alien umbrella. In summary, Blue Umbrella might be a simple morality tale for young minds, but Vishal Bharadwaj does not dumb it down, because of the fact that we feel pity for Nandkishore even when we are aware what he had done. Interesting both as the childhood fable and morality tale, but beyond that Blue Umbrella can very well be about compulsion of childlike desires. More on Blue Umbrella in this post.

2. No Smoking (Dir. Anurag Kashyap)

The flip-flop narrative of No Smoking can be mapped to few interesting themes, the foremost being everyday pressure to conform to accepted standards or rather group morality/mentality versus individual choice, but with adequate and valid stretch, even to question of validity of bourgeois arrogance and the reciprocating vengeance. Also we can interpret the film in the light of any organized sector like religion or govermnent, and even to realms where human rationality seems to fail like fate and death. Also one can take everything as a metaphor (an approach which I hate if done in totality. It’s like explaining a film, its boring) like Baba is a money sucking doctor employed by his wife, and cutting of fingers is cutting of urge to hold a cigarette and likewise. But it is already a good omen when a film is free enough to let us to think through, but while doing all this one must keep in mind the visual aspects of No Smoking and its first rate humor, which lets its themes sail smoothly without taking themselves too seriously. We all know that if concept were to be the only yardstick to determine the worth of a film, how one can even justify the use of film medium. This film does not get blown away by its theme's preoccupation that the fun in images is all gone. Also, after a long time I have seen a Hindi film where sub plots are not just a way to add yet another realization in the life of main character, i.e. to serve and suit the protagonist’s world. Here the sub plot, especially the one involving Ranvir Shorey's Abbas might actually be the life of K after the end credits roll. As good as Shorey in this role, Kashyap understands him as someone who has already lived K's life, he understands who is he - one of us, or one of them or as always the case when the day is done - no one.

One more interesting way (and sometimes to me, it looks like the only way) is to see the film from K's sole perspective, everything is tinted with his view of the world. His is ultra-sleek-masculine image, his wife is good, homely and dignified, his secretary is dumb and respectful of her boss, his friends are falling out, world is conspiring against him, he might lose, he might be part of the same world he loathes, he is different, but no more can he be so, he needs to survive, he will succumb, but he will try against it. When I saw the film for the first time I had some problem with the arrogance of K (may be I read somewhere that there is some Any Rand channeled into it which irritated me), but on a second look, I am sure that there is no arrogance of director in K's screen arrogance. Coming back to its humor part, the two flashback jokes (which can be loosely names as 'Puffs and Fags' and 'Newton smokes a cigar') in No Smoking are near great. Both are done in different styles, and have great visual flair. Even when the film works on a whole there are sequences which are dearer than the others. The Bob Fosse number, the scene where a man strikes a conversation with K and calls him the 'thinking type', the one rupee coin sequence, the New Year midnight freedom, and the same actress playing the secretary and the wife are definitely masterstrokes.

1. Manorama - Six Feet Under (Dir. Navdeep Singh)

Manorama's structural and thematic resemblance to Chinatown does not let it crumble in weight of the later, which can be primarily attributed to the marvelous job that debutant director Navdeep Singh does in building the small town atmosphere such that the plot borrowing is seamlessly assimilated in the coordinates director is working in. Its heartening to see that in the year Hollywood's so-called auteurs were busy giving shape to evil and ambition as Chigurh and Plainview, Manorama hit the nail right - on the rot and the moral decadence under bright clean surface, and the effort albeit hopelessness of one man to deal with it. Our failed-novelist, defeated, married, even corrupted hero's discovery of this malaise provides us with important social, political and even psychological commentary. Abhay Deol gives a marvelous performance as our first noir hero in recent times. The way he was able to convey how this endless investigation has become a passion of his otherwise bored life and how it consumed him affirms yet again how brilliant his is. Coming to important details in film, first of all I must bow to who so ever is the costume designer for the film. In the morning (especially when she comes upstairs to dry clothes), Gul Panag wears gowns that are midway between knee and feet, and the petticoat underneath shows. Abhay Deol wears hand woven sweaters and pants that suit a 30 year old. None of the folk in the background ever look odd one out. The dialect is almost perfect (Although both, Gul Panag and Raima Sen, are quite good, but still they need to work more on their voice. also Raima Sen was not able to bring the mix of brutality and vulnerability in last scenes - she played it straight like a poor man's femme fatale. Probably a slightly older actress would have carried the role better). The two menacing goons that are both funny and also serve as the minor visible tentacles of the huge fungus inside.

The fish motif (Note that Sheetal's fish is bigger and more beautiful that Satyaveer's many fishes), few of the after-murder scenes are mix of something you remember from Manohar Kahaniyaan and still from De Palma films are marvellous. The fate and 'everybody has his god' climax might not please the fans of Chinatown, but it puts the film in the Indian context which connects deed and fate and also Satyaveer's family reunion looked a very honest way of celebrating the life of small town India (things happen, life goes on) in general, and Indian family (Things happen, life goes on) in particular. In the beginning Abhay Deol's Satyaveer says "agar tarakki honi hai to pehle tabahi hogi", on the surface it is direct reference to the canal and the associated false promises, but on a psychological level any progress of mind steps on the ignorance/innocence of the person. Although, we know that Satyaveer is not innocent, (he is also part of the system, he thinks he knows what goes on inside, given all this, its not a story exact about his loss of innocence, but gaining of deeper understanding of degeneration and what goes behind the closed doors. As minister P P Rathore says when reminded of the corrupt system, "aap is system ka hissa tabhi tak rahe jab tak aapko suit kiya", it must be a realization for Satyaveer that his petty bribe too fuels (or rather masks) the bigger rot inside) but the revelations of moral rot he goes through not only makes him more cynical of the people and world he lives in, and also of himself and human nature. Whether it is a compromise, or a comfort, he run back to his family. On that day of return, in true Bollywood tradition, it rains in the desert.

Honorable Mention: Black Friday (Dir. Anurag Kashyap), Johnny Gaddaar (Dir. Sriram Raghavan), Dil Dosti etc (Dir. Manish Tiwary), Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd. (Dir. Reema Kagti), Chak De India (Dir. Shimit Amin)

Overrated: Taare Zameen Par (Dir. Aamir Khan) [Read here], Guru (Dir. Mani Ratnam) [Read here]

Worst: Eklavya: The Royal Guard : All along, I was blabbering about obvious things like cinema is images and sound, but films like Eklavya serve only one purpose - to tell us right images with wrong intentions are most dangerous. Eklavya, in a visual level, is much better than an average Hindi film but its silly climax opens up director's pristine intentions, and his medieval plea to return back to slavery and the age of loyalty, and to muster our frail voices and to sing in Shakespearean chorus "Hail the King". Eklavya is one of those clear instances where a filmmaker has lost his soul.

Ofra Haza - Im Nin'Alu

2008-01-31T22:56:00.000-04:00

I don't understand a word but I like this song a lot, and more so the girl who sings it.

Nick Drake's Day is Done

2008-01-31T22:27:00.000-04:00

Probably the saddest song I have ever heard, whenever I hear it it makes me sad (of exactly same flavor). I am trying this for at least six months, it always works.

boomp3.com

I am posting it as I learned that Nick Drake was Heath Ledger's favorite musician. He has done a small film on him too. It is shocking that his death made be little sad too (I have not even seen many of his films including Brokeback Mountain), and it is even sadder how some religious groups said "God has his ways". I understand that gay rights etc is a far thing for them, but one should at least respect death.

My other favorite song by Nick Drake is 'Cello Song.

boomp3.com

Claire Denis' The Intruder

2008-01-14T17:42:00.000-04:00

It is lazy on an interpreter's part to refer a series of images that does not fit the conventions of narrative as dreams or figments of imagination, as it is uncinematic on a film director's part to convey the internal thoughts of a person using voice overs. It is important to see that both of them work sometimes, but it doesn’t make them less lazy or less uncinematic. Many of the good films mix dreams, reality, imagination, memory, subconscious, past and present in various ways, in ways that intentionally separate them and the ways that tend to mix them inseparably, as per the requirement by the story they tell. Claire Denis' The Intruder tells the story of a heart transplant based on French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's memoir of his own heart transplant. The basic thing to understand about the film is how Denis is trying to tell the story - firstly using film as a medium, and secondly as a fictional account (although she claims that all the details come from Jean-Luc Nancy's 30 page book, she also says somewhere its 'adoption', not adaptation of the book). Since the medium is film, there cannot be any easy ways (like a Dostoevsky-ian monologues) to know the subconscious of the protagonist, and since its fiction, it can not show the "actual" operation in progress (and that will be boring too). Denis does invent a cinematic way to deal with these two problems. Every thing takes a physical shape here - the past, the old body, the old heart, the old world, the fear of death, regrets and relationships, the will to live, the new heart. They become simple replacements (I am using the word replacement because I don’t want to use "metaphor"), they no longer "represent", they "are".

To give a simple example - a man without a heart (or a ailing heart) is shown a heartless (unkind) man. There is something physical in the meaning of the common words we use. The emotion and the poetry that Denis drains from those words by giving them physical shape, she duly feeds them back by enigmatic/poetic images she attaches them too. It’s a cinematic bargain in favor of the medium she works in. Denis manages a sense of wonder and awe that can be equated to the feeling of looking in someone’s head (or rather heart). And, as somebody who has seen Beau Travail will know, how good Claire Denis and her cinematographer Agnes Godard are in filming human skin and bodies (other French director who knows how to film skin is Patrice Chereau), although here Denis is not interested in eroticizing toned bodies of crew cut French soldiers but here skin takes a special meaning as it is something that protects and encloses the home of heart (the ribcage), and it gets scared in operations. So, in a way, healing scars (a replacement, a metaphor for wound/recovery – emotional and physical) on the chest of our protagonist guide us to where we (and the story) are going.

One thing that I am most impressed by is the director's effort not to mess or consciously confuse. The film, in its impenetrable and fractured exposition, is in my view fairly chronological and if we try to see it in physical terms (and I think that’s what Denis intended) and get hold of one thread, it unfolds beautifully (actually it is a nice fantasy film too where dogs are the hostile environment for the new heart that has several physical motifs, one being a ticking watch [that will die one day], and doctor as a masseur cum magician fighting a beautiful and enigmatic angel of death) with spellbinding eclipses. Once we have something real and physical to hold on, other important thing like emotions and sentiments come easy and right. Of the two films I have seen by Claire Denis, the endings have surprising unleash of energy. Beau Travail ends with an exhilarating dance by Denis Lavant. Here too, the Queen of Northern Hemisphere rides high on a sledge run by dogs, with a wide winning smile on her face. Is it a victory of the bodily resistance to new or is it the intruding new heart on a plunge?

Juno

2008-01-10T18:25:00.000-04:00

Accidentally, I saw Juno last weekend, a cautionary note follows.

First on a positive note, the best thing about Juno is this dialogue

Juno: I think I'm, like, in love with you.
Paulie: You mean as friends?
Juno: No, I mean, like, for real. 'Cause you're, like, the coolest person I've ever met, and you don't even have to try, you know...
Paulie: I try really hard, actually.

This dialogue is "insightful" because it tells you all about the movie. Juno tries too hard to be weird, cool, peppy and hip but at the same time tries to hide all the effort using some witty dialogues so that the viewers are bought to an average teenager's level and are comfortably beaten there. Actually Juno reminds me of my pseudo-intellectual into-rock friend, who sounds intelligent only in the first meeting, after that he is an amusement park of shallow but cool cliches. Also, his way of overwhelming (or overpowering or even embarrasing) you is to ask what you like in rock or literature or films, and when you choose the most high-brow of what you know, then he adds up an esoteric fan-only name asking "Have you ever heard of it". His sole aim is gaining tips of nerdy icebergs (to add to his faux-charm, he hates usual cultural capital icebergs). Sooner or later, the titanic sinks.

Juno is exactly the film one should be beware of. Apart from being a hip teenager's self help book (or rather coolness-dictionary), it is moderately charming without being too saccharine. Its not too dishonest, its not too harsh, its not too feministic or anti-feministic, its not too motherly or fatherly, its moderately smart (or eccentric or weird), its a moderate basher of everything, its sufficiently rebellious and adequately tame, it is also little "deep" to complete the checklist, it has all the things which would not let an average movie goer to say that the film is particularly bad and will also give him/her a reason or two to believe in its goodness or worse relate to it. This film almost makes a formula for being everything for all.

As an antidote to Juno's teenage smugness, please rent the DVD of Ghost World.

pic: In order to "prove" that pregnant women eat more, it is not enough in director's world to let Juno eat more, but to "make" the contrast purer and clearer, Juno's friend must be starved just because she aint pregnant, its inhuman.

David Lean's Brief Encounter

2008-01-02T15:46:00.000-04:00

With this year's promise to see more of Hollywood classics, I started the year with David Lean's Brief Encounter. This film is based on Noel Coward's play Still Life (he wrote the screen play too) about a provincial housewife (Laura Jesson, played by Celia Johnson) who falls in love with a married doctor (Dr. Alec Harvey, played by Trevor Howard) whom she meets briefly on train station. I don’t know about the history of evolution of film language, but this film seems to have broken grounds on at least two levels - the use of flashback in narrative, and the use of music and sound. Usually in films, the use of flashback cuts narrative back and forth from past to present. There is "now" and "then" segregation, the rift between the immediate and the gone-by. Here, the use of flashback is not to "tell" the story, but to re-remember it, which makes it a dream and so the boundaries are blurred, the occasional transitions between now and then looks like blinks of eyes, a slight fog of present over past, or the other way round - the way you want to see it. The use of flashback normally suffers from the narrative bane that we know the ending in the beginning itself. Lean does show us the ending in the beginning, but hides from us what that ending meant to the hero and heroine, rather beautifully, and when we see the ending in the ending, we rediscover what we saw in the beginning. We think how our heroine must have felt at that odd hour. Lean achieves this without any trick. The ending in beginning is told from an observer (may be director) point of view, but the ending towards the end is the part of the flashback and told from the intimate point of view of Laura.

Similarly the use of music and sound is very conceptual. The sounds of train - whistle, train announcements, shrill sound as they run to the platform - are used as emotional signals which decides when the lovers meet and part. As a social critique, the time table of trains and the ethics of platform decide when and how they can show their love to each other. Other effects like the cutting of light on the face of the person standing on the platform as a train fly past him, the fog of smoke that blurs the vision, the wind from a running train are also used to create the right atmosphere (remember, we are in a dream of flashback).Before Laura dreams her past, she turns on the radio which was playing Second Piano Concerto by Sergei Rachmaninoff. In the flashback, at the most romantic and sublime moments, the music comes back (in one of scenes the flashback, our heroine imagines a dance with her lover, a trip to Paris and Venice, as Rachmaninoff Concerto plays in background, it is again something awesome - dream within a dream with out-of-dream music). The film uses a lot of voice over, which in the beginning looks odd, but smoothens as the film progresses. And after seeing this I know what they mean when they talk about onscreen chemistry. Both of the leads are no great lookers, but when they are together they spark the screen. An intimate and passionate film that is as much visually satisfying as it is emotionally.

Year End Post # 4 : Some Underrated Performances!

2007-12-31T23:16:00.001-04:00

Here is some of my picks of the undervalued performances of the year.

Ranvir Shorey: Last year, the truly moving scene came from a comedy, Khosla ka Ghosla, it comes when Khosla sa'ab is put behind bars and Ranvir Shorey's 'Bunty' Khosla weeps saying "yeh sab meri galti hai", and asks his younger brother to go to US, away from all this trouble. Aaja Nachle has no good scenes but one, which comes from Shourie. Its a dialogue less scene where Ranvir Shorey's Mohan Sharma weeps (with a big red heart in background) when he learns that his bride has ran away from marriage. What Shorey does in that scene is to elevate Mohan from a poor guy to a poor guy in love. Similarly, he plays a just-married Gujju with required sensitivity, in Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd whose wife runs off during honeymoon. In No Smoking, Ranvir Shorey's squint eyed Abbas is also a performance to watch for. Here again, his performance brings two aspects to Abbas - the unwilling cunningness required for survival and how people yield to it, and the frustration and helplessness of being in a situation beyond ones control. Also it is to director's credit that Abbas doesn’t just become a background character serving the main plot but a valuable addition to it.

Lara Dutta: I know I have soft corner for Lara Dutta and what ever she does, and I think she is a very good actress in mainstream Bollywood (In the star studded "Dewaanagi Dewaanagi" song from Om Shanti Om, she was only next to Tabu). In Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, she plays a French Hotel Manager and British-Indian Prostitute with the same verve and energy. Her performance surely adds to the guilty pleasure of the film.

Amisha Patel: It looks like Amisha Patel was born to play this. Although the character Pinky in Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd, is of a dumb girl who has this romanticized view of marriage and love but she plays it so naturally and uniformly that her dumbness does not irritate, but becomes a part of her charm.

Sonya Jehan: Playing Ratanbala in Khoya Khoya Chand, a Bollywood star of 50s, was all about screen presence, few precise gestures and good diction, and Sonya Jehan gets it all correct. In a year when everybody is singing praises of Deepika Padukone (and to a extend she deserves it), Sonya Jehan's classic act went unnoticed.

Ayesha Takia: Like Amisha Patel's, Ayesha Takia's casting as the dumb and big bosomed secretary of John Abraham in No Smoking is a wonder of casting and concept. But her dumbness is not her natural trait, but a made up thing, may be to please her boss, or it is an image that her boss want her to be like. To her credit, she does not miss a single step. Every move is a delicious treat in itself and a wonderful parody of all the fantasy secretaries of the world.

Tisca Chopra: Tisca Chopra's Maya Awasthi (Ishaan's mother in Taare Zameen Par) is one of most heartfelt performances of the year. Her portrayal of Ishaan's mother has care for the child, worrying about the child and attachment to the child - the things inherent in mothers, alongside a feeling that she is not able to understand her son. Tisca Chopra's performance never cries for attention. There was a scene where she watches video tapes of Ishaan from his childhood, I just hope that segment was constructed as a series of memories she had of him. I am sure that would have been more powerful than the taped ones.

Mithun Chakraborty: Mithun Chakraborty’s performance as an idealistic communist in Guru is one of the few times in Hindi films when a Bengali or an oldman or a communist are not stereotyped. It brings back the memories of some of his better performances, especially the marvellous Shibnath from Tahader Katha.

Pankaj Kapur: It can't be said that Pankaj Kapur’s performance is undervalued per se, but it is surely undervalued in comparison to what people say about Abhishek's performance in Guru or Shahrukh Khan in Chak de India (for note, SRK is better than Abhishek, and Abhisek is much better in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom than Guru). At a time when we see simplistic performances in so called adult films, Pankaj Kapur gives a multi-layered and deeply-felt performance in a so called children’s film. The last scene where he tries to dance in a marriage procession is again an example of art, i.e. beauty plus pity.

Year End Post # 3 : Notes on Hindi films

2007-12-31T22:47:00.001-04:00

I know I am late for Year End posts now, but to my excuse, I was keeping very busy for the whole last week (of course watching and catching up as much 2007 movies as possible, mostly Hindi films). Here are few notes on the Hindi films seen this year.

Aaja Nachle: Aaja Nachle is based on two major fantasies, and few minors. Major fantasies include - a small town girl marrying a good looking (preferably white) foreigner (but remember, this "myth" should be broken to make Indian male audience's fantasy alive that "their" women like them most, or on a broader level, Indian fantasy that matches in India are made in heaven, all others end up in divorces), second being the NRI fantasy . Minor fantasies are mainly about a small town life. Also, this film somehow suggests that the people who are born with and seen money for ages (rayees-jyade) are more honest than those who have seen it for the first time. But that is not the point; I am disappointed because it was hoping for a mad dance extravaganza, which it is not. For record, Shamli, where the film is set, is one of the town in the district of Muzaffarnagar, which is my hometown.

Jab We Met: A nice bubbling first half and a dull predictable second half (Imtiaz Ali's Socha Na Tha was better). This is one of those films where the proverbial irritating acting of Kareena Kapoor is put to good use. Shahid Kapoor acts best in the first scene, and from there its a downfall. The same self help gyan of the first half, look ugly in the second half when Shahid Kapoor "discovers" it and "implements" it in life and love. Kareena's happy go lucky charm of the first half comes partly from her youthful naivety and partly from her inherent happy nature. Shahid Kapoor's 'found' charm is straight from that monk-ferrari book.

The Namesake (Not a Hindi film, phir bhi): The Namesake has its heart at the right place, but only that does not make a right film. What keeps the film together, and at time moving, is Tabu and Irfan Khan. In whole of the film I was wondering how good an actress Tabu is. Think of this film without her or Irfan Khan, and it all falls flat. Also, the name thing doesn’t hold any water, it looks like a trick. Given that it means a lot to Ashok Ganguly, but as a narrative device its stilted and unconvincing. I know that most of the narrative flaws (like why Gogol's sister is nobody's concern) in the film will go back to novel, but on a visual level too it doesn’t break any new ground. Right from the first shot where camera shows a coolie carrying a suitcase with clearly legible name, A. Ganguly on it, even then the camera zooms on the name to let us read it more clearly. There are other such instances which are more guiding than required (when we have got the "message" that marriage does not necessarily work because of cultural backgrounds, Mausami says "It was not enough that we both were Bengalis"). Also, Mira Nair gets all the easy things right, but fumbles when something difficult, like identity crisis of second generation, is required of her. Kal Penn honestly tries but he has no screen presence (at least when Tabu or Irfan Khan are in frame). What is the point of acting when an itch or a disappointment can only be conveyed by saying it? But the film is worth watching for little emotional farewell speech that Tabu give towards the end, and for all the time she is in the frame.

Saawariya: Let me think what is good in Saawariya. There should be something. Actually there is even nothing bad about it. Its a tasteless, odorless, colorless, harmless, non-sublime liquid.

Taare Zameen Par: The usual theory that one should be extra careful while making a film about war is now extended to children too. War makes us overlook things because of its ugliness and gore, and it is exactly the opposite in case of children. The kid makes us overlook because of their inherent charm. So we need to understand and thus make a separation between the two facts - Is TZP a good film or Is the kid cute. One should be careful if, intentionally or otherwise, kid is used to mask the flaws of the film. This film too has that first half/second half problem. Good first half and reductive-didactic-simplistic-self-serving second half. Let’s talk about the first half only. There are many nice moments here where we are let inside the mind of a child, and they do remind us of their wonderful imagination (one of such sequences is directly lifted from Calvin and Hobbes, just that 'addition' changed to 'multiplication'). In other sequence, in which Ishaan bunks school and roams around is very effective in portraying the freedom and fearlessness of a young mind. It is shame that a film about understanding a kid's mind, turns into understanding about a particular disability (which many genius had in childhood), and worse, a quest to put them into mainstream like the "normal" children. However feel-good it was but it unfortunate that a film with a tagline "every kid is special", ends in a competition. The good thing is that this film boasts of one of the best performances of the year, which is not Aamir Khan’s, and which is except from Darsheel Safary’s Ishaan. Also there are some good lyrics.

Dus Kahaniyaan: After reading Saadat Hassan Manto who is master of twist towards end in his short stories, I felt that a real twist is not a narrative twist which makes us join threads of the story with an 'aha' feeling, but a twist that brings about something which is very delicate, which should be stored for an ending to make its impact, a touch of the realization that the character had at the moment. Its not a shocker, but a moment of contemplation and understanding (for readers and for characters). Most of the stories of Dus Kahaniyaan miss that point. The best is of the lot is Meghna Gulzar's Pooranmashi. Most of the others are passable but the real irritating one is Rice Plate, not because of story, but because of Shabana Azmi, who does such an absurd caricature of a South Indian woman (listen how she says 'pickle' a thousand times), that if there is any artistic conscience left in her, she should make a public apology.

It looks like the futile verbal diarrhea of year end posts might spill to the next year too.

The Cats of Mirikitani

2007-12-28T16:00:00.000-04:00

The Cats of Mirikitani is a documentary about a homeless artist of Japanese origin, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, living and working on the streets of New York near the twin towers. After 9/11, Linda Hattendorf, who was making a documentary on him at the same time and has become his friend, took him to her flat in the hope that she can help him get some benefits like Social Security, SSI, and housing. Slowly Hattendorf learns about the his past and his art, and why he draws same things over and over again - Childhood in Hiroshima, concentration camps, a mountain and a lake with prison cells in front of them, red flames, peeking whimsical cats. The Cats of Mirikitani is a documentary about past, the expressive power of art as a voice and the healing power of human connection and mutual sharing of experiences.

Jimmy Mirikitani was born in Sacramento, California but was raised in Hiroshima, Japan. As a young man, he refused to serve the army (he says "he was not afraid but he was born to be a great artist") and came to US to study art and to become a visual artist, who will as he puts, "combine the oriental and western art forms". But during WWII, after Pearl Harbor, people (including US Citizens) of Japanese Ancestry are taken to camps (there is a controversy in the terminology here too, some call then "relocation camps", some call them "internment camps" and others "concentration camps". Whatever be the case wiki says "A number of persons died or were permanently injured for lack of medical care, and several were killed by sentries". There is a documentary on the other such camp called Topaz). Mirikitani was interned to Tule lake camp in California (which was a segregation center where those deemed "disloyal") and was cut from his family (his sister was moved to a different camp, Minidoka camp in Idaho). After the camp, the interns were moved to a frozen food manufacturing plant near Bridgeton New Jersey for the forced labor. Later, they were released and returned their citizenships, but Mirikitani never received his letter for citizenship because he has moved so often. In his last job as a live-in cook, when his last employer died, he was suddenly left without job and home.

All this trauma and pain from camp to homelessness has, by now settled in the old man to bitterness for this world. His contempt for US can be trivial when heard (after hearing the Bush's speech after 9/11 and what is being done Arab Americans he says "that’s what they do"), but given his past, looks justifiable. But all these years, Mirikitani continued to make art, and we can say that it became a therapy for him to deal with his past. His childhood in Hiroshima, memories of the camp (especially of the kid who died in the camp. He used to like cats and used to follow Mirikitani), Hiroshima bombing that wiped his mother's family, separation from his sister, became subjects of his art. With Hattendorf's help, Mirikitani was able to find some of his lost things - his US citizenship, his sister but most importantly a visit to the Tule Lake Camp where he met other people who came there to commemorate the past, and where Mirikitani shared some of his memories of the camp with others. The last shot of the documentary shows stoically satisfied Mirikitani sitting on the return bus from the Tule Lake Camp pilgrimage. It’s a truly satisfying moment for us, as was for Mirikitani.

Ousmane Sembene's Xala

2007-12-27T01:18:00.000-04:00

Ousmane Sembene's Xala (pronounced as "Ha-la") is the perfect example that a film can be preachy and profound at the same time. A funny and ultimately bitter satire on the socio-political state of his country marries the best of symbolism and directness, but all time remains connected to the land it comes from. Xala starts as a bunch of businessmen, shouting socialistic and nationalistic slogans, take over the power in Senegal. The next shot sets the contrast (previously they were wearing ethnic dresses, now they are in suits) when briefcases of money are handed over to all of them by a foreigner and they all nod in approval. The switch of power, a social change is satired with amazing narrative brevity. In the meeting, one of those businessmen, El Hadji (working in Food Industry), extends the invitation to all for his third marriage. This is no coincidence that Sembene aligns a social/political change in Senegal to El Hadji's third marriage. Both the symbolic and the comical power of the film lie in charting the similarity of their destinies.

After the meeting, El Hadji return to his first wife where his free-thinking daughter have an argument with him and says nasty things about the polygamists, which El Hadji, the vanguard of African tradition, finds detestable and slaps her tightly. Obviously it is his day today; he is getting a new virgin wife. El Hadji's wedding is an opulent affair (later we come to know where the funds are coming from) with who's who is Senegalese bourgeois attending it along with his two wives, who obviously feel out of place. Till now things go fine but on the wedding night, El Hadji was unable to have an erection and thus realizes that he is suffering from Xala - a curse that turns its victim impotent. Rebuked by his third mother-in-law, ashamed and humiliated, poor Hadji runs from one witch doctor to other but to no avail. One of the witch doctor advises him to "attack" the girl on four legs with a magic claw-like object between his teeth (may be like a tiger or something), and so does El Hadji which horrifies the young girl so much that she cries out of horror which is mistaken for the cry of ecstasy by her caring mother. Later, to the caring mother's disappointment, doubts are cleared that Xala is not gone.

El Hadji is Sembene's prototype of a man with no qualities. He is appropriating his country's wealth in the hands of foreigners and getting superficially westernized, and in the places he should really progress, he is using African culture and tradition as an alibi to keep the status quo. He is a man who selfishly tries to have best of both worlds - French imported water and a young African virgin third wife. The strongest character in the film is definitely El Hadji's daughter, Rama, with her first wife. A university educated, free thinking girl she is only one who confronts her father (she is also Sembene's didactic vehicle to the women), replies (to El Hadji's irritation) in native Wolof to her father's French questions, refuses to drink imported water, asks her mother to divorce her father and causes all sorts of free thinking trouble to a patriarch. As a testimony to the fakeness of El Hadji, Ousmane Sembene does something quite brilliant. When he was charged with corruption and was rebuked by the council, El Hadji, in a defensive mode, says that he will speak in Wolof. It is a classic case of prostitution of language for personal protection in the name of country and culture. This scene becomes so powerful because we know he is the same El Hadji who disliked when his daughter spoke in Wolof (it is to say he has no love or respect for any of the languages or culture but for what serves his ends). A character can not be stripped off in a better way than this. The downfall of El Hadji is not a symbol of his country becoming free from corruption and post-colonial malaise and quagmire, El Hadji is just one corrupt person in the whole game, and we are given the hint that the people following him are equally corrupt.

Allegorical to the core - as one of the fakir says "what one hand removes, another can put back" - Xala's power lies in its understanding of a post-occupation colony in which the power is transferred but the status remains the same. The last scene of Xala, which is partly a sign of role reversal (a sort of people's revolution against the corrupt bourgeois) and partly an allegorical punishment for his morally rotten countrymen, is so powerful, angry and humiliating that Bunuel would have been proud of it.

The End of Summer

2007-12-20T15:20:00.001-04:00

Last night I saw, Ozu’s second last film, The End of Summer - a masterpiece of the order of Tokyo Story. I am not so taken away by a film in recent times, as this. It has all of Ozu's signature style (narrative eclipses [I am yet to see a death scene in an Ozu film], cyclic sequences [a farewell party sequence go like this - a shot outside the party inn with voice of people singing farewell song, inside the inn - people toasting, exchanging wishes, and finally a shot of outside inn with voice of people singing the same farewell song. There are innumerous examples like this], frame within frame within frame low-angle shots] and themes [marriage, inevitable change, death and family] and yet it is so fresh a work that one feels like seeing Ozu reborn. It looks awkward to say but this film is a surreal experience, not conventional surrealism but surrealism of conventions. What I mean to say - this film looks as a surreal experience in the way people behave, there is a veneer - the joy of seeing old man behaving like a child (the hide and seek between grandfather and grandson looks as if the old man is fooling his age and the death, The dialogue - "I m ready...Are you ready" - also echo this play of nearing death), a young girl preparing for a date when a person lie dead nearby and just before going out standing there in a one-minute mourning, the way a female relative first tries to joke about the old man and when remembers his joy for life, abruptly starts to cry at the funeral (a truly moving scene albeit the awkwardness), the shot of people in black at the funeral put next to black crows who come near the dead, the joyous moments of old man look more of the remembered past than present, the last words of the old man - "Is it this, Is it Really this !", everything makes some strange mixture of surrealism and social conventions, aided by a haunting musical score. Old man’s daughter in law , one of the most honest members of the family, later in film says something very insightful about the films and life both - she says " Father was so irresponsible, but some how he kept it all together". It is the old man who keeps the film together by his childlike charm and tantrums, and when he is gone what is left is a plain life. I also feel more comfortable with Ozu's pessimism now. It’s not a try-hard-feel-bad pessimism, and is therefore deeper down and stays with you. To put it pictorially, it is a canvass on which life, relations, human connections and interactions is drawn in an Ozu's film. Once they are gone, the bright fog (or light, like Ozu's films which are filled with sunlight) of pessimism and nothingness is left. It is nothing to be feared or run away from, it will be there always. Hence it resolves the paradox to see a film filled with life eventually pointing to its temporality and nothingness. Also, this film validates why Ozu made similar type of family stories over the years. To me, it looks as an exercise to understand how people behave in similar situations in different times. Women and men in Ozu's film might have gone wiser or more modern but are still trapped. They are trapped in "the cycle of life", as a paddy farmer says to his wife, seeing the smoke rise from the cremation chimney.

Year End Post # 2 : Italian Cinema

2007-12-19T17:36:00.000-04:00

Italian Cinema

It’s baffling to see the difference in the richness of Italian cinema of 60s and 70s, and the current dry days. This year I discovered some of giants and genres of Italian cinema.

Sicilian Comedies of Pietro Germi

I saw two films (Divorce, Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned) by Pietro Germi at Gene Siskel Film Center, both are excellent. Lots has been said about they being comic-satiric masterpieces, which they surely are, but one cant help but appreciate the sensual aura of heat, passion and lust that Germi creates. It looks as if the Sicilian weather (the way characters constantly perspire) resembles Indian June, and I wonder how similar Indian society is to theirs, just that our films treat the stories of 'Family and Honor' way too seriously, and are therefore turn themselves into monotonous and boring stuff. The death scene of Don Vincenzo in Seduced and Abandoned is a masterpiece in itself, as if in the whole film of farce, satire and comedy, Germi, who definitely loves his characters, pulls ups something very basic about a patriarch. Germi brutally satires his Sicilian society but his crime can be pardoned on two grounds - firstly its a crime of passion, and secondly he is intimately married to the society he deflowers.

Master Killings by Dario Argento

Lighting in a film is all about bathing the visuals and the characters into some mysterious light. Sound is to surprise or evoke the hidden. Color is a motif in whatever form it comes - Red Rose, Red Wine or Blood. There is no fun in reality. Background in a frame is more important than the foreground. Background can be used effectively to create fantasy and defy the reality. Only a coward artist resists silliness. A scene is noticeable only when Sound and Image are little off. Discontinuity in sound and image puzzles the mind, mystifies the narrative. Don’t shy away from explaining the unexplainable; it makes anything into fairy tale. Horror is anticipation. If killings are done so elaborately that they look unreal, that becomes art. Adherence to realistic conventions of killings in films makes them look ugly and monotonous. Women look more beautiful than men on screen, especially when being brutally killed. Blood in art is redder, screams are shriller, delirious exteriors mimic the state of women in danger and murderous hands are of an artist. These are few assumptions on which films of Dario Argento are based. As you can see, they do require some amount of leap of faith.

Movies like Suspiria at least try to mask off shams like Innocence. Made from the same source material, one might see the difference of approach between a filmmaker and wanna-be intellectual (of Formulative French Flavor). Suspiria does not bloat itself with pretensions of big meanings, while Innocence, in its marvelous aura building exercise, promises a ocean but ends up in a tiny fountain. The end sequence of Suspiria is the most beautiful sequence I saw this year, it looks like something that Lynch thought but Almodovar directed. And the music by Goblin is awesome.

Great in its own right but Deep Red is lesser masterpiece than Suspiria because it somehow rests on plot twists and turns rather than director's art. I mean to say that if the same script were directed by someone else (except the killing scenes which only Argento could do the way they should be), it might have been the same film. What I liked a lot about Deep Red is its gender awareness and how it plays with audience banal psychological knowledge that relates sexuality and violence when it comes to track down the murderer. Music, as usual, is great.

Each of these Italian films comes highly recommended from me.

Pic: Screenshot from the end sequence of Suspiria.

Year End Post # 1

2007-12-18T21:08:00.000-04:00

In Guy Maddin's Tales from the Gimli Hospital, patients are shown puppet shows during their operations to distract them from their immediate pain. Both tragic and funny, as Maddin's most sequences are, this one says much about our affair with entertainment. They distract us from something immediate, painful or boring. A good film uses that distraction for something worthy and a bad film wastes these moments. As one of the character in Yi yi says, "we see films because we can live three times as much in films as we do in normal life", we must also acknowledge that this extension is as imaginary as life, or as other character in Yi yi, who takes pictures of people from behind, says, "I am just trying to help you to see what you can't by yourself", films exists as a perspective of life which we might miss but for them. There can be several such arguments to support why I see films but nothing will be more honest a reason than smug escapism. I say this because I enjoy in a film what I abhor in real life. It caters to my need to observe from outside, on some higher platform but never get myself dirty. It is as passive as it comes. Yes, it’s a year end post and I should move in that direction.

I keep on fixating on the number of movies seen in a year (ostentatiously putting the year-wise list on side bar of the blog) but, as we all know, it really does not matter. What matters is the increase in the level of understanding and appreciation of the film art. On that criterion, this year was a failure for me. Not only did I not enhance my understanding, but most of the times, I felt confused after seeing the films. There were less and less Fat Girl or 3 Women or Weekend or Body Double moments where you knew that the film is a masterpiece as you saw. I know on one level it is a struggle between what you want to admire (based on accepted highbrow opinion) and what you really love, and on the other - between, what you understand/sense and what you don’t. Griffith's Intolerance only worked for me in pieces, not as a whole. In its worst moments, I felt it was preachy and propagandistic and it definitely lacked the charm of Silent Era. And I found some films like The Mist and Music and Lyrics good, may be because I had set too low standards for them (The Mist is directed by the same guy who directed super-shit Shawshank Redemption, which is the second worst movie of all time, the first being Benigni's unbeatable master-piss Life is Beautiful). A rather lesser known silent film, Tod Browning's The Unknown worked greatly for me, which I thought was well ahead of its time. When I saw No Country for Old Men, I was baffled a bit but gathered myself (and the film) after the end sequence of Sheriff's meeting with his Uncle. Later I felt both ways - The last sequence as a bravura film making which beautifully pulls all the loose ends without any awkwardness, and also - a sense of easy closing by an insightful scene. I felt same about Redacted too (but I have a higher opinion of film than most of people). May be, unable to drawn any clear cut conclusion about a film say not only about oneself distrusting his own tastes (which I believe one should, at least one should be critically aware of ones tastes) but also trying to align them to someone else' and may be, a late revelation that end result doesn’t matter to the extent we assign importance. Whatever it may be, it’s lesser and lesser that I eat with eye, i.e. enjoy films the way I feel one should.

Following posts will be small, random and insubstantial notes on films seen this year and some related topics which are written along the year, mostly on train. I wanted to make them a single consolidated post but opted for this serialized version.

Pic: Maya Deren looking out of window in Meshes of the Afternoon. Nice description of the image here (in first para)

Clip: Full Bollywood in one song. Palti kamar hai from Raj Kapoor's Barsaat.

2007-12-07T11:44:00.000-04:00

Year End Post(s) will come before the year ends. As of now, making list of films seen, directors discovered, some cinematic highs and lows, things read and things past. It seems that I have seen about 150-160 movies this year, three more weeks to go and with some holidays in hand, I am planning to touch 200. Lets see !

Redacted

2007-11-20T14:29:00.000-04:00

In Redacted, Brian De Palma dramatizes a real event - the rape and murder of a 14 year old girl in Iraq by five US soldiers. He constructs a base camp in Samarra with stereotypical soldiers, one of them read John O'Hara's 1934 novel "Appointment in Samarra" and the other reads Hustler, the wall behind them is covered with pin-up girls, they all look bored, one of them is photographing everybody else and as he adjusts his camera to shoot, he pompously proclaims "Truth is the first casualty of war".

The primary concern of De Palma has remained the point of view (I think the whole Snake Eyes is made to prove that a certain point of view has only a piece of truth, although there always exists a whole truth which eludes us just because we have the disadvantage of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Here the hunger for truth is given. If it doesn’t exist, nothing, irrespective of our place or position, will register to us. That hunger may be called humanity in one sense, morality in other). Redacted starts with one point of view that is from the video camera of Angel Salazar (definitely a stand in for the director's own guilt of filming a crime as an act of intrusion and exploitation), who is making a video diary of his experiences. He even tells the viewer his directorial preferences - "I will tell what I see", "There will be no logical narrative to help make sense of it". He is essentially a voyeur and even opportunistic. Even when his fellowmen decided to rape the girl, he didn't stop them but accompanies them to shot the crime. As the film progresses this single point of view gets lost in several such POVs, there are many opinions, images and fragments of truth and lies. Brian de Palma, the master of irony, stores pure seriousness for special moments. There is a moment later in the film where an Iraq returned army man, weeps when he is supposed to smile and pose for a photograph with his wife. But this image too, doesn’t capture the whole truth, just some of it, and of course it’s posed.

As always, in our complex minds and lives, a lazy logic works that looks for the arbitration of our roles, shedding of responsibilities and cleaning off our souls. A little gush of impolite wind gives us all the reason in the world for our missions to save our souls. The young boys in Iraq are soldiers are with no reason to be there other than get orders, get a valid passport to become the part of mission whole heartedly when one of their buddies gets blown up. Now an unjustified war against a nation is translated to a personal war between us and them, a revenge of sorts. But the point to note is that both of them are victims, or to use title of De Palma's Vietnam film, "Casualties of War". The wrong-doers of Redacted don't show remorse, rather they try to cover up and justify what they have done, the remorse is shown by other colleagues due to their inability and disappointment to stop them doing the wrong (here crime and remorse are not hard coupled, they travel across consciences, so its not a zero sum game as in films like Munich where the guy weeps off his crimes towards the end to come out cleaner) and here De Palma daringly suggests that whole of America share this guilt and frustration.

De Palma's technique and filmmaking choices here are kind of double-edge swords. De Palma's use of mixed sources (websites, chats, you tube, French doc, surveillance cameras) and techniques (hand held cameras, HV video, improvised acting, imperfect shots) looks both amateurish like a school play and urgent like an activist's campaign on one side, and also an act of desperation to find truth and sort it into some coherent thread (which, we know, is a lost cause in De Palma’s world) on the other side. One should note that these choices are not ad hoc, but precise assortment of the crap and the credible, which, in today’s world, are becoming increasingly difficult to sort out.

There are many surface flaws (Bad acting is definitely not one of them, there are few very good performances especially from Patrick Carroll, who plays the hollow-eyed sinister, Reno Flake) in Redacted like the incoherent plot device (one of the soldier is shooting the war so that he can apply for film school), naive dialogues, over the top reportage, in your face long rants etc but these are De Palma's usual trademarks, especially of his earlier political films. In Hi, Mom! , De Niro's Jon Rubin, a Vietnam vet (there are references of Vietnam in Redacted too, when an angry girl on youtube rants "You don't see the My Lai Massacre in the movies, because the truths of that fascist orgy, are just too hellish for even liberal Hollywood to cop to. Oh, but that doesn't stop them from making another movie about 9/11, because an American life is worth so much more than a Vietnamese life, a Palestinian, a Lebanese or an Iraqi life because we are the uber race"), rents an dirty apartment in front of a big building to photograph women, and even sets up a date (the funniest date in films I have ever seen) so that he can make a film of them making love which he can sell to a producer of pornographic films. Things go little weird when Rubin gets involved with a group of activists doing some guerrilla theatre (the famous "Be Black, Baby" campaign, which is a must-see). Here too, stupid plot device, rants and naive dialogues are used but they are not used in a similar way as in Redacted. In Hi, Mom! (made about a decade and half after the war), things were in post-mortem state and therefore director has the luxury of irony, surrealism and even comedy. Hi, Mom! has the post-war insight and irony but Redacted has the present-war frustration, anger and polarization (Redacted is not balanced and that’s why the cry from all over that it will harm the troops). Here these surface flaws are the flaws of the sources that De Palma borrows from and it create a fractured fuzzy picture - gritty, crude, true but ultimately posed.

It should be noted that Redacted is nothing near De Palma's masterpieces like Hi, Mom!, Body Double, Blow Out and Femme Fatale, but it also not a low point in director's career. A director, who has always dealt with dreams and fantasy and in the illusion when they are mixed with reality and truth, is definitely not in his safe territory, but it is also important to note how he uses his primary visual and moral concerns in filmmaking to explore how the war is presented to us and how we are made to consume it.

The film ends with real pictures of killings in Iraq war (a segment named "Collateral Damage"), with a final fictional image of the dead girl, brutally raped, mouth open and lying in the pool of blood. This image placed along with real footage is again De Palma questioning about the truth of images. It’s most ironic and disturbing that a fabricated photo is more terrifying to us than the real ones. The beauty of De Palma's art is its ability to generate true empathy from a faked image.

Few words about the music. De Palma never misses a note. The end credits are totally silent, and Handel Sarabande is used evocatively, and only wherever it is totally necessary.

The Absence of Soul !

2007-11-16T18:10:00.000-04:00

An extract from the important yellow book, Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America : Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent. Added few links for starters like me.

Ideological justifications were never in short supply. The bleeding of the New World became an act of charity, an argument of the faith. With the guilt, a whole system of rationalizations for the guilty consciences was devised. The Indians were used as beasts of burden because they could carry a greater weight than the delicate Ilama, and this proved that they are in fact beasts of burden. The viceroy of Mexico felt that there was no better remedy for their "natural wickedness" than work in the mines. Juan Gines de Sepulvedam a renowned Spanish Theologian argued that they deserved the treatment they got because their sins and idolatries were an offense to God. The Count de Buffon, a French naturalist, noted that Indians were cold and weak creatures in whom "no activity of the soul" could be observed. The Abbe De Paw invented a Latin America where degenerate Indians lived side by side with dogs that couldn't bark, cows that couldn't be eaten, and impotent camels. Voltaire's Latin America was inhabited by Indians who were lazy and stupid, pigs with navels on their back, and bald and cowardly lions. Bacon, De Maistre, Montesquieu, Hume and Bodin declined to recognize the "degraded men" of the New World as fellow humans. Hegel spoke of Latin America's physical and spiritual impotence and said the Indians died when Europe merely breathed on them.

In the seventeenth century Father Gregorio Garcia detected Semitic blood in the Indians because, like the Jews, "they were lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done them". At least this holy man did not deny that the Indians were descended from Adam and Eve: many theologians and thinkers had never been convinced by Pope Paul III's bull of 1537 declaring the Indians to be "true men". When Bartolome de las Casas upset the Spanish Count with his heated denunciations of the conquistadors' cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Las Casas dedicated his zealous life to defending the Indians against the excesses of mine owners and encomenderos. He once remarked that the Indians preferred to go to hell to avoid meeting Christians.

Indians were assigned or given in encomienda to conquistadors and colonizers so that they could teach them the gospel. But since the Indians owned personal services and economic tribute to the encomenderos, there was little time for setting them on Christian path of salvation.

Indians were divided up along with lands given as royal grants, or were obtained by direct plunder: in reward to services, Cortes recieved 23000 vassals. After 1536 Indians were given in encomienda along with their descendants for the span of two lifetimes, those of the encomendero and of his immediate heir: after 1629 this was extended to three lifetimes and, after 1704, to four. In the eighteenth century the surviving Indians still assured many generations to come of a cozy life. Since their defeated gods persist in Spanish memory, there were saintly rationalizations aplenty for the victor's profit from their toil: the Indians were pagans and deserved nothing better.

The past? Four hundred years after the papal bull, in September 1957, the highest court in Paraguay published a notice informing all the judges of the country that "the Indians, like other inhabitants of the republic, are human being". And the Center for Anthropological Studies of the Catholic University of Asuncion later carried out a revealing survey, both in the capital and in the countryside: eight out of ten Paraguayans think that "Indians are animals". In Caaguazu, Alta Parana, and the Chaco, Indians are hunted down like wild beasts, sold at bargain process, and exploited by the system of virtual slavery - yet almost all Paraguayans have Indian blood, and the Paraguayans tirelessly compose poems, songs and speeches in the homage to the "Guarani soul"

Morality

2007-11-07T18:17:00.000-04:00

There is a road named A-B Road, which goes neither to A nor to B. If one considers it even worthy of being a problem, there can be two basic solutions to it. First and the practical one is to change the name of road (may be to where ever it goes). Second and more convoluted solution is to bend the road and make it to go to A and B. In real life, first one is the only solution. In art, first one is absolute no. Thinking of the second solution and finding hurdles might be the one way. Thinking that some crazy person might implement the second solution, and to imagine the outcome of that may be other. Art may give impression that the first one is a better solution but its aim is not to give it. Its aim is to show what happens when right ways are not followed for what ever reasons, who are effected, how they are affected, why such things happen again and again. Yes, it all sounds moralistic, and it is too. I feel all art is deep down moralistic. It is the heart of it, which makes it alive. Art, for one, is a way to communicate, share and resist solitude. Art, for two, is to create. Art, for three, is to imagine and hope for a better world. We imagine a lot, we use some of it to create, and we communicate only some of what we create. What we consider worthy of communicating and sharing as art has some basic quality. That basic quality is artist’s idea of morality. Do not think of it as a stepwise filter as I made it sound like, it’s instinctive. A real artist don’t create a patchwork of morality, he does whatever his instinctive morality guides him to do. That is the intrinsic personal part of his creation. Art is one which tells us how people confuse between gardening (of the type generally practiced by bourgeoisie house wives or retired husbands) and ecology, and at the same tell us something basic about the ennui of those city-gardeners. It does not prison itself; it observes freely and reports morally. Even in a devil-may-care creation, artist cares (I think that’s why people feel safe in hands of certain artists). Even if there is no morality in the text, morality lies in the judgment of selecting things which an artist wants to communicate. Here also selection is not a conscious act. That’s why some of the follies in what and how an artist want to communicate do not amount to an error in judgment but to collapse of his entire human faculty.

Jeanne Dielman: Second Day Report

2007-11-01T00:58:00.000-04:00

I started to watch Jeanne Dielman 2 days back, after dinner. Jeanne Dielman is about the daily life of a widow living with her teenager son and is supposedly one of the greatest feministic works. Its 3 hours and 13 minutes long. First day I completed just above one hour and slept while it completed itself. The second day, I started earlier so that I can complete it fully. I couldn't but after 2 hours and 20 minutes, it has started to take its shape. It’s still about an hour from finish though but I am quite sure that it’s a masterpiece in itself. It does what I expect from great writings, to make a language and world of their own.

The perfection of Jeanne's activities, perfect multitasking of her daily jobs, the static schedule of her chores is reflected in the perfection of static framings, camera placements and most orderly editing. Camera is still and voyeuristic, strategically placed and observant, never interfering but always watching.

The film is justifiably 3 hrs long. The first half of the film is definitely an exercise to accustom the viewers to a certain pace, and this pace is not due to any technical or stylistic reason but is tied to the pace of Jeanne's daily world. As we become involved in its pace, we start noticing every detail. We notice that the sweater which Jeanne's son is wearing is small for him and the new sweater that Jeanne is knitting is to be made longer because Jeanne's son likes it so. Not to say that these details are important to understand the film or such observations will benefit us to understand the film better at a later point in any way, but to say that we become attentive and start to connect minute things. We observe the light switches turned on and off very carefully and wonder if they have something more than their usual function to light a particular part of house. Also there is some rhythm in all this, kitchen on, living room off, and so on. As camera follows Jeanne, light precedes her. Next time when she will leave an unwanted light, we will be the first one to notice and wonder what this slight break in routine might account for or amount to. We notice when Jeanne accidentally leaves one of her coat button open and we feel immensely relieved when she notices it and promptly buttons it up.

On the second hour (her second day) things starts to go slightly off the pattern they followed the previous day, successful multitasking which was on expert display yesterday go slightly wrong. The dinner is late, the potatoes burn. We slowly feel the tension due to this turbulence just because we have watched the first hour perfection.

There is a moment of absolute beauty in the second half, a moment which might have gone unnoticed or might have been overemphasized elsewhere. After the daily routine of Jeanne goes off the track and to confirm this, potatoes burn, Jeanne goes out to buy more potatoes, comes back, sits in her kitchen on the usual place, weary and little confused and anxious how today things are going out of her deft hands, begins to peel potatoes with a resigned face. Once she is done with one potato and is midway through the next, something happens, and her pace increases. She doesn’t cheer up, but her hands starts moving faster. A mild burst of physical energy betraying her mental state owing to her responsibility as a homemaker. It is a short moment where she mentally decides that she needs to complete her work. This is an unsung collapse and rise by our heroine - momentary and unvoiced.

Jeanne Dielman is amazing because it is so religiously straight but its effect is quite non-linear. As we begin to see the second day, first we try to compare it with the last day and while observing the differences, try to sort out something out of normalcy of Jeanne's life, and in a way, some of this tension is released when potatoes burn. It is, in all its modesty, as big an event as eruption of volcano in a Hollywood blockbuster. Now we smell there is something wrong under the surface.

Small Notes on Few Hindi Films

2007-10-31T16:58:00.000-04:00

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom: It is Jaan-e-mann minus the child and associated sentimentalities, also minus some of the Salmaan-only (self-bashing, self-referencing stuff, although Abhishek Bachchan tries it meekly) sheer fun, but is a logical follow-up to it, unapologetic dip into fantasy, fun and dance. And Lara Dutta is as brilliant in the film as Amitabh Bachchan is irritating. Also Gulzar comes out of fake-poetry mode (Geela paani (Satya), Geeli Hassi (Saathiya)) and rhymes France and Baans ("Tu raani hai France ki, main baasuri baans ki, apni society mein yeh chalta nahin"). He did the same excellent job when he rhymed Shaayari and Diary in Jaan-e-mann ("tooti phooti shaayari mein, likh diya hai diary mein"). Also last time, I smelt oral sex in a song; it was Namak ishq ka from Omkara ("Jabaan pe laaga laaga re, namak ishq ka"). Gulzar has finally found his calling. I used to like Gulzar as a child and still find some of his lines great but his clever wordplay is very thin in meaning. Meandering "sust-kadam raste, tez-kadam raahein" cannot stand the piercing directness of "Koi yeh kaise bataye ki woh tanha kyon hain", neither do his better lyrics on assortment of past, memory and romance like "Ek sau solah chaand ki raatien, ek tumhaare kaandhe ka til" age better than agelessness of "Tumhe yaad karte karte, jayegi rain saari, tum le gaye ho apne sang neend bhi hamaari". On gut feeling, his lyrics look artful, rehearsed, discontinuous and showy (see I know a word called "marasim" too. One heavy word in the shallow sea of trite letters. Its just one step better than those who translate Hindi to Urdu by replacing "Main" by "Hum"). Coming back to the film, I found it a very interesting entry in the new-wave Bollywood-musicals, where logic is sacrificed for songs and narrative is told through them, and director confidently makes such a mess.

Chatri Chor: A film that shows how love for a thing and desire for it can be mixed into good-evil madness, and how it (love + desire) quite never dies. The end of the film is quite Shakespearean. It would be too much to see the entry of a beautiful Umbrella in a small village both as an object of desire/lust for the simple folk and also as an object of foreign infiltration into simple lives, but one could not help himself making both the comparisons at some point. It doesn’t hurt till the scrutiny of human nature which seems to be director's main concern remains to the fore. Nice return to sublimity, unforced humor and right mood by Vishal Bharadwaj. There is an ingenious sequence where our heroine kills a snake and becomes Devi, and how the news runs fast through the small village. Its story telling, humor, montage and myth rolled together.

Johnny Gaddaar: Good, but lacking the atmosphere of the films it draws from. And who casts Rimi Sen as love interest. The lead actor is good, but I must say that he is too self-conscious, I mean he acts little too much in limits, in the end I dont know what I felt for him, which may be the exact feeling that director wanted to evoke but we need to feel something for a person portrayed as an evil doer without an evil heart. I also felt little uneasy when dead man's girlfriend was tortured, because I was never able to figure out what the director wanted out of it (may be some Tarantino stuff homage, may be, but the girl was so innocent and so in love that it was not funny at all). Cut the fricking finger!

Chak De India: Good reworking of all of sports clichés (and few others too), and a final embrace into fantasy that we won. A politically correct fairy tale meant to inspire and please. One might rightly argue that girls from each state don’t really represent their state but are symbols of North Indian stereotypes of those states (One girl from whole South like a Sardar can be used in a Tamil movie to represent the whole North India) including North Indian states (Bimbos from Chandigarh, Sector 16). But it is fun. If we see the last half an hour as fantasy and add a last scene where Kabir Khan loses again and returns to his old home, we can have our latest Bollywood noir hero :)

Two Films: One Good, One Horrible.

2007-10-25T21:20:00.000-04:00

François Ozon's Time to Leave is an effort to create some moments or to reveal some essence of life, which, as one discovers soon, is a failed effort, but this is not the reason why it fails as a film. This film is pretentious counterpart to its many heterosexual siblings. Do you know how illness mellows down a person and he/she tries to find a meaning to what is beautiful in life, he dies or he lives, either makes for a rewarding climax. This is just a recipe but what extra can Mr. Ozon add to this. Make the protagonist gay. Now there is something pseudo intellectual about it, which is not pretentious on the surface but ultimately a dip into clichés from both sides, the illness-death-new-life metaphor and the gay-outsider-exotic stereotype (add little spice up of self esteem, self pity, alienation and why-me stuff). There is one nice moment in the film when the father and son are sitting in the car and the son moves near the father (as if to kiss him), as his father moves slightly back, he asks - are you afraid of me. This is a scene which succeeds in drawing an invisible line between Romain and his family, just because of his sexuality. Other things are quite trivial like Romain's love affairs which play like a teenage naivety at times and I-need-to-move-on adult pretension rest of the times. To fill in one more cliché - let the gay man have a child, Ozon makes one woman and her sterile husband have a Ménage à trois with Romain ( doesn't it sound like a answer to a overblown heterosexual fantasy of two girls and a guy) in order to have a child (what a wish fulfillment !). The film end with a "message" that Romain has accepted his death, but in the end it just seems like a bourgeois guy accepting a horrible thing with the help is smug director and good cameraman. This film is a melodrama which is afraid of being so, which may very well classify as the worst sort of cinematic pretensions.

Patrice Chéreau's Son Frère (His Brother) is the story of two brothers, Luc and Thomas. Luc is gay and Thomas is straight. Thomas gets a dangerous disease and asks Luc for help. So the premise again can be stripped down to - Family (brothers, responsibility), sexuality (difference, acceptance) and illness (death, meaning of life and relationships when faced with death). Son Frère succeeds in maintaining a melancholy of physical and emotional distance and desire of human connection (both emotional and physical) throughout in a very unsentimental, yet in a compassionate way. We know that Luc cares for his brother but he is also aware of the past when he was not accepted by his brother (probably when he needed him most). There are tiny gestures that remind us that Luc is caring for Thomas more as a fellow human than as his brother. Both brothers have suffered and suffering, and in their human ways have let and are letting the other suffer. Luc has suffered a rejection in past from a brother whom he loved. His brother, now nearing death, has to deal with not finding a brother's warmth in Luc. One, who rises above the past wronging, is a better human being, but the one who doesn't let his real venom of past wounds out might just store them in to poison the whole body. May be, that's why, Luc decides (or rather shows) to help his brother as a human being not as a part of his filial responsibility. There is an excellent scene between Luc and Thomas' girlfriend where they kiss out of pure asexual love, may be an exercise of sharing and alleviating pain they both are going through. It is great how this scene works on a level of human connection far from any sexual flare. There Chéreau finds an unpretentious moment of transcendent bliss, a kiss relieving all the tension of the frame. Likewise when Thomas’ body is shaved by two nurses for operation, Luc, standing on a side, watches his naked body. Again there is no sexual attraction in the moment (although we have the knowledge that Thomas is the first guy Luc experimented with). There is only – a caring brother, a decaying body and pain on both sides. What we see is the pain of dilapidation of body of a beloved through Luc’s eyes. Here is a film that relentlessly probes into the minds of brothers, who are dealing with past and present. For one, it is a preparation of death, alongside knowing his brother afresh whom he dismissed years ago, for other, it is all sort of questions, a complex puzzle. Unlike Time to Leave, which condenses illness and death into one man quest to come in terms to it, Son Frère shows how illness effects a family – a relationship, how it brings the past to the fore, how illness is a metaphor for need and human dependency and (re)connect, how illness is not only a precursor to prepare for death, but a way to look at life as it eventually dies down, an alarm to revisit what we had done, a time to think back.

No Country for Old Men

2007-10-22T15:34:00.000-04:00

No Country for Old Men is a film that belongs to a specific geography - the wide expanses of Texan landscapes. Film starts with few shots arranged as if a montage from the Western films, hues of orange, barren lands bookmarked by mountains, dry and sunny, windy. The montage is supported by a monologue by Tommy Lee Jones (who plays Sheriff Ed Tom Bell), which tells us about the wrong and ruthless times we live in, laced with nostalgia of better old days. In the next scene the film jumps to introduce a cold-blooded murderer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who is on some mindless mission of mayhem. The third scene cuts to Vietnam war Veteran, Llewelyn Moss (an excellent Josh Brolin), who while hunting stumbles upon a place where a gruesome killing has taken place before ("a deal gone bad" as a cop later sums it up). Intrigued by the dead bodies lying (A dead dog lies along with the humans as if to visually say "people died like dogs"). He finds the drugs loaded in a van whose driver is just about to die and nearby finds a bag with money, which he takes home. He, as a man he is, at night realizes to make bigger out of it and goes to the place of shooting again, but this time gets ambushed by Anton Chigurh (who is hired to kill the person who got away with the money). Moss somehow escapes from there, but without respite as he is hounded by psychopath Anton Chigurh everywhere he goes. Ed Tom Bell also starts investigating the case, contacts Moss' wife to get hold of him because he is aware of the lunatic killer Chigurh. Moss, who is a tough one too, like a noir hero (not fully though), gets deeper into the spiral of chase of death.

As the film starts with the barren, lonesome and inhabited Texan plains with an eerie tension of evil lurking from sides, it also suggests a no morality land, a corroded place where violence and chaos are the rules. Anton Chigurh, who kills anybody in his way with shocking dispassion (he doesn’t even seem to enjoy all this), in a shocking way drains all the morality of the situation, suggesting everything is valid, anybody can be killed for nothing (each brutal killing made the shocked audience to burst into laughter which they duly contained in seconds out of embarrassment). The violence in the film firsts shocks you, then you expect it, laugh at it, and finally, it takes some strange existential meaning with chaos, randomness, unpredictability and immorality everywhere and people who expect that things will make some sense in moral framework are invariably disappointed.

Moss on the run to save his life and to get the money, is just a partial noir hero, as the film moves he hands over the baton to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who is growing old but trying to solve the case and stop the killing with his own methods which he is fully aware wont work for people like Chigurh. There is a moment later in the film which is reminiscent of the ending of Chinatown. Chigurh is an evil force that defeated the good this time too.

In the film’s final scene, which makes this film oddly meditative and which slowly builds on you, Sheriff has a conversation with his uncle, who is older and more experienced. Sheriff says "Age will flatten a man". For a moment we think, it will flatten Chigurh too and break him to become more human, but for the next moment we realize, it’s just a cycle.

Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee

2007-10-02T23:36:00.000-04:00

The beginning of this film is the re-enactment of that popular forwarded mail (by far the best!), where the loser in you is consoled because at one time, long ago (do you remember!), you were the fastest sperm (Success is sweet!). Its a cinematic foray of an over imaginative naughty kid (cute!) into psychoanalysis (hidden, sexual, shhh!) using outdated but fascinating gadgets (Be careful!). Inspired by silent films (inter titles!), German Expressionism and Eisensteinian montages (too much!), this film language is totally new (It's joy, joy, joy to meet someone new!).

Spoilers ahead (Beware!). A drop of Sperm (with capital S!) is placed under the microscope to find out the Players inside it. What is revealed (under the microscope!) are the crucial moments of an ice hockey match for the Winnipeg Maroons team, whose star player, Guy Maddin, along with his buddy, Shaky, help win the match (Success is sweet!). But in an dramatic inter cut of match, dressing room, men shower (naked!), a peep hole and close ups of hands and faces, we soon discover that Guy's girlfriend, Veronica (short hair, dark eyes!) is pregnant, who has to be taken to Liliom's (White face, white hair, dark heart!) Night Clinic (Beauty salon by day, Bordello by night!) for an abortion (shhh!) to be performed by old and evil looking team physician, Dr Fusi (Team Spirit!) who wears a corset and smokes pipe during the operation (Operation Veronica!). While holding Veronica's hands (hands!), Guy eyes on Liliom's daughter, Meta (Long hair, great breasts), who is licking sugar (sugary, syrupy, sweet!). He is instantly seduced by her (It was joy, joy, joy to meet someone new!). Even under the expertise of Dr Fusi (Team Physician!), Veronica dies, definitely not from the abortion (shhh!), but lost love (tsk, tsk!). Here Chapter 2 ends (10 chapters in total!). The story has just begin (attention please!).

We get a peek into Meta's Bedroom (wow!), where Guy (Meta's guy) try to touch her (her great breasts!) and Meta reveals that she won't let anybody touch her till she avenges her father's death (Family girl!) whom she loved so much (love thy father!), who was killed by her mother (Lady Liliom!) and Guy's Buddy Shaky (Shaky loves the lady!) and after killing him, father's hands (both!) were cut off that Meta saved in a jar. With the help of Dr Fusi (the expert!), Meta (Lady Meta!) drugs Guy (Guy in love!) and asks him to transplant her father's hands (Blue hands of jar!) to Guy's. Dr Fusi tricks Meta (father's poor girl!), throws away hands and does a transplant (fake, fake!) by painting Guy's (drugged!) hands to blue. Meta asks Guy to touch her (her great breasts!) by her father's hand (Love thy father!), but Guy's hand (fake but new!) can't (father's hands, daughter's breasts!). Disappointed but vengeful, Meta asks Guy to shampoo her mother (in the night clinic, by night!) and kill her with her father's hand (blue hands!). As Guy touches Liliom (Meta's mother!), memories (of hand, of honeymoon!) return, and Guy (Guy in new love!) makes love (with hand!) with Meta's mother (Liliom!). Veronica's Ghost (long hair, white clothes!) returns (meanwhile!). Guy's father (older guy!) comes to the Night clinic (Beauty salon by day, Bordello by night!) to give the news of Guy's mother's (old lady!) death, and meets (It's joy, joy, joy to meet someone new!) Veronica's Ghost, and hugs (tightly!) her (Love thy in-laws).

In the turn of events (too many!), Guy returns to the arena to play against Russians (tough commies!) where Veronica's Ghost ( Guy's old love, father's new love!) and Meta (dark eyes, dark lips, fuming) watches him (two gals, one guy!) and when prompted by Meta (vengeful!), he kills Shaky ( Liliom's old love, Meta's enemy!). Guy's hand (murderous hands!) takes control of him and when Dr Fusi (Family Doctor!) try to do abortion (again!) of Veronica's Ghost (Ghost's Child) as planned by Meta (Lady Meta!) and when stopped by Liliom (old love of Guy's new hands!), Guy strangles (murderous hands!) her, which confirms to Meta (inside the abortion room!) his love for new girl (Veronica's Ghost) and in her rage and fury, she demands her father's hands (loving hands!) back and Dr Fusi (the expert!) does the job (hand job!). Guy (with no hands!) can't hold hockey (and other vital things!) but returns to the arena one final time for the climax (shocking) which one should not give away (no, please!).

Pere Portabella's El Soprar

2007-10-01T16:37:00.000-04:00

Gene Siskel Film Centre is showing some films by artist, filmmaker, producer Pere Portabella, who is famous for producing Bunuel's Viridiana, which marked the return of the exiled director to Spain and an outrage by Spanish dictator and Catholic Church who thought Bunuel would make something pleasant and in good spirit(although Franco asked Bunuel to make whatever he likes), when invited with open-arms and freedom (of course of dictator type). Pere Portabella himself made few experimental films but most of them, made during Franco's censorship never saw the light of the day and were circulated as underground films. This Sunday, I went to see one of his films Nocturnal 29 (title refers to 29 black years of Franco's regime), but I will talk about a short which was screened along with it.

It is shown along with a short El Soprar which was excellent, I have not seen anything like it. According to Pere Portabella, the short film is about the state of political prisoners under dictatorship, but the film is definitely much more than that. Five political prisoners meet and start a discussion about the validity of the hunger strike by the political prisoners. The argument starts with an accusation that hunger strike is a passive weapon; it’s a act of submission, not an assertive or resistive action that one should take as a political prisoner. Also, if you expect any sympathy or something in return by this act, it is definitely silly. Experiences show that. Is it really an act of desperation? Talking about it as a desperate act, it also brought to the discussion when does a person do that. Is it done as a last recourse of resistance or just as an act of giving up? Is it justified either way? If it adds to the cause then it can be justified. So there should be a connection between the inside and the outside of prison, and the efforts of the political prisoners inside should fuel the movement outside, so in that case, hunger strike is perfectly justified because it helps leaders to give their message to the outside world and help keep the activism alive. But inside the prison, a political prisoner's main aim is to demand a better life, to resist the prison authority from treating them like a criminal. In that case, what good a hunger strike can do. The discussion went on as viewers are more and more allowed to enter the mindset of the people in the discussion.

The discussion moved to the effect of prison life on the person involved and eventually on the movement. Will a prisoner, after release, like to continue with the type of activism and resistance, he was associated to before. Does prison life breaks the will or in some ways (as one of the person says that in such hostility and repression, one becomes more sure that one has to continue to dissent with the status quo, and with all the time by himself there is more time to rethink and clarify the purpose of the struggle) enhances the passion. It is observed that lesser years in prison tend not to break and dissolve the passion that the cause they are fighting for is worth it, but longer years (like one of the person in the discussion group who served 20 years in prison was severed from his family life, and he told, as per his experience, that some of people who serve long sentences feel isolated and left out by the current development in the movement) may kill the flame. The best way, as one suggests is to keep in touch with the outside world and try to live in reality, not in a fantasy that we are fighting for a great cause (to know and have "Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will" as they say). The discussion slowly moved to the aim of the enemy (Franco & Co.) which they try to achieve by imprisonment, and were they able to achieve it. The beauty of the discussion, as always, is the set of people it has, which are all for the same cause, but have different ways to look at it and were allowed to do that. This is bunch of passionate people trying to think logically, not to arrive at any conclusion, but to see things more clearly. The best of them was a woman, who brought an altogether new perspective to the prisoner issue when she, in her very balanced solid voice, raised the issue how the female political prisoners are treated like the subordinate to the male counterparts, and how their experiences of prison are more traumatic for them and the a left out after-life even more, and when a fellow activist tried to use some cliché like we are correct and they are wrong then she positively blasted him for deviating from the point. In the last part, she gives a small powerful speech which leaves everyone speechless including the viewers (A thinking woman gives one hope, as Fassbinder once said, I know Fassbinder was bit satirical in saying that, but I am not).

This visually simple (extreme and medium close ups in black and white with cigarette smoke as a special effect) short is essential because more than the issue it tackles (my post leaves many of the interesting points and arguments, I must take notes in future), it shows an argument in the way it should be done - facts, rationality, openness and passion. The heated discussion, as it was, was never overblown or redundant or simplistic. The heated discussion, as it was, made few of us viewers to enter into it and (literally) speak out. Is it not what they call activism, may be at least the seed of it?

This Weekend

2007-09-25T22:09:00.000-04:00

A sad one, if I may say so. It was not boring though. But it had the heavy feeling that one experiences when one sleeps all day and wakes up at night - thirsty, hungry and alone. Not particularly sad though. But film wise, it was quite good. I saw almost 10 films. Here we go:

Two films, The Knight and Glass Lips, my Lech Majewski: All my fears came rushing back. Too serious and too masturbatory, although still better than Theo Angelopoulos' onanism, I tried a lot but none of them worked, except for few set pieces. I hated the sound in Glass Lips, it was like a RGV film. When the film finished, the person sitting next to me, clapped alone and said "Very Polish". It was like the laughing track during the Rabbit soap in Inland Empire.

The Devil Came on Horseback: An American marine captain, Brian Steidle, was sent to Sudan as an official military observer. He observed a horrible genocide of black Africans being orchestrated by the Islamic government using an militant army called Jangaweed (meaning " devil on a horse" in Arabic) taking place in the western part of Sudan, Darfur. Steidle send many reports to the UN and US govt, as a part of his job, which described the situation that was clearly a genocide but no action was taken. He quit the job and came back home with all the pictures he has taken of devastation and released them in press. Visually and aesthetically, there is nothing new in this documentary but it gracefully raises itself above the savior-white-man domain, because the Steidle's efforts are that of a passionate activist who understands the situation, not of a saviour hero. Read more about the film here.

Cinemania: Wrote about it here.

The Navigators: Ken Loach's comedy about the working class. Five men working in railway maintenance discover that now they are employees of a private company (East Midland Infrastructure), as the govt has privatized the railway maintenance. New set of rules come into play (cost cutting, working hours, redundancy etc), and the work and the personal life of the workers is affected drastically, leading to unfortunate events both at professional and personal level. The great part of the film is way it captures the effects of shortsighted changes, and the way Loach is able to portray how human core are emotionally and morally effected by them. A nice companion film to Human Resources.

The School of Flesh: A simple film raised considerably by Isabelle Huppert's performance (especially when she weeps through her glass eyes, it looks as if she is washing her face off any left emotion. Her face looks "cleaner" after that). An elder fashion designer, Dominique, falls for a young good-looking hustler, Quentin, who has an abrasive life. Her obsession for his flesh (he also knew that he got a rich woman because he looks great. In his moment of insecurity he asks Dominique if she would love him if he were ugly or maimed), drains her emotionally as she tries to connect to him on a non-physical level. Slowly, it becomes clear that the things wont work. The last scene is a cliche of sorts but it works. Lovers, married and with kids, meeting after long time, exchanging glances and few words, is something that always works for me.

The Best Way to Walk: In a French summer camp, a slender, beautiful music and theatre teacher, Marc, enters into child-like game of confrontation and humiliation with the virile sport teacher, Philippe, when he, by chance sees Marc cross-dressing. Philippe stereotypical masculinity takes a surge and he starts humiliating Marc at every possibility. Marc, disturbed by Philippe's behavior, calls his girlfriend to the camp but is enable to make love with her, which further presses him down. The humiliations increase and in his display of extreme machismo, Philippe throws, physically weak Marc in the swimming pool and later beats him hard. The story which is essentially a children's story (weak kid and the school bully), is quite consciously set in a kids summer camp where the adults still have the stereotypical ideas of sexuality, while the kids are still discovering it. The game ends in a costume party where Marc dressed as a Spanish dancer, invites Philippe, dressed as a knight, to dance. Philippe, obviously scared by Marc's daring of display(Marc even kisses him), acts weird and tries to run away. They later meet, years later, and it seems that they all are now grown up. A sensitive and funny look at inflated notions of male sexuality. The title of the film comes from a French camp song, "The best way to walk, after all, is ours...", which is sung by the young kids of Philippe's class

Careful: A very interesting film by Canadian auteur Guy Maddin. Planning to write about it, in detail.

Whisky: This one is awesome. The weekend best. Its rightly called comedy, even though it has no comic lines and you never laugh. It just warms you up. As economical as a film can be. Highly recommended. Will write about it more.

Other than these, saw about 3/4th of Cría Cuervos (stopped in middle because it was too good to handle, I ration good films to myself) and 1/4th of Platform. Will try to complete them soon.

Note: Picture from the "Whisky" moment from Whisky.

Cinemania

2007-09-23T21:58:00.000-04:00

Cinemania, directed by Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak, is a delightful little documentary about five people (Jack, Bill, Harvey, Eric and Roberta) living in New York, who have obsession of watching films, to a rather extreme level. All of them schedule their life around their film watching schedule, or more or less don't have a life except films. They talk about how to maximize the number of films that one can watch. They have elaborate mechanisms to plan their visits to theatres and schedule them with Subway timings. They have an average of 2-3 films a day. Some of them usually have constipatory diets so as not to get themselves disturbed during the film screening (One of them changes his underwear before the film so that there is no itching, and the other one make sure that he washes his specs and keeps a sweater in case he might feel little chilly, along with pills for headache, backache etc). One of them is thrown out of MoMa because she behaved badly with an attendant (grabbed her by neck and threatened) when she tore her ticket (needless to say that she has kept all the tickets of the hundreds of thousands films she had been watching since she was 15), later she tried to enter MoMa with a wig and weird makeup but was unfortunately caught doing so. One of them was put in prison for hitting a fellow audience because she came late and disturbed his movie watching experience (He completed the film after hitting her, because it would have been a betrayal to cinephilia if he had left in between the screening. In the end, he got arrested). The other has all the trivia about the character actors, the running time of films (different versions, director cut and all, he reports the curator if a scene from a film is missing), of the stars and related stories. Some of them are collectors of obscure items, brochures and cups etc. One of them is particularly enthusiastic about European cinema (mainly French cinema after the new wave) and thinking of putting a page length ad in a dating service to get a cinephile girl from Paris. Some of obsessives think that the others are rather deep in the obsession and few of them rather have a bad taste in films. In one of the scenes (or was it in deleted scenes, anyway don't forget to watch the deleted scenes, they are about 40 mins of fun), one of them jokes about Schindler's List (which is other ones' favorite film) as anti-Nazi propaganda, also they talk about some other Holocaust film that is so moralistic and backing the Jews that it forces the audience to sympathise with Nazis ;) The love life of younger lot is expectedly quite bad, since deep down they don't think they are normal (they discuss this too in one scene, defending that being normal means being similar. "In a prison, what is normal, rape or murder ?"). One of them once said to her date that it is very important to "act" that you are quite normal that left her rather amused. He says that he has only three things to talk to a woman - film, world affairs and his life events (like how he went to jail), and not many of them seem interested in them. He thinks he wants to make love to Rita Hayworth but only in black and white. Colors might disturb her shiny gray lipcolor. Apart from this, its a nice guide of the film viewing opportunities in New York, which are of course more than a "normal" person can devour. Although these people are not crazy and they see films because they like them (They cry during films, one of them said that he cried for few blocks after watching The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the other cried when she realised that the lovers didn't meet in the end because the guy loved the girl more than the God, who killed her simply because the cruel god could not bear it, others claimed that they discovered life through films), there is a definite bent of escapism to this, and their everyday loneliness and disconnect from "normal" society fuels their passion to obsession, so in some ways the documentary left me empathetic and scared!

Lech Majewski's Angelus

2007-09-21T17:35:00.000-04:00

How much I say that images make a film and one need to "eat with eyes", my top most fear with experimental, surreal, non-narrative films is that, at the end of it all, it might go no where. It is not much a feeling of waste of time and effort (we know both are anyway wasted), but that primitive feeling of getting lost in a jungle where although every image is unique, unseen and with a periodic potential of dazzling the senses, but it all ends up in confusion. Also like a jungle trip, it looks like a brave but aimless and once in life time adventure. May be owing to my inability to comprehend such an experience, they may seem aimless, with so many madly imaginative threads but no core. What you are left at the end of it is a sea of images, disconnected and wordless. We are human beings so we long for political, thematic or narrative insights in an experimental work and try to judge the true value of a documentary by the way images are composed, as they say, the keen eye for people and landscapes. How much we say that we don't like masala films, and how much we redefine word masala (like balanced, well-(g)rounded, congruous etc), we are sucker for them, we want everything there. Although a gentle dose of such films do condition us, as they say one acquires "taste", for what to expect and how to sense, but in the end such films are just temporary filmic experience. My second biggest problem is a feeling of self important artistic masturbation (can't you see how beautiful and serious this composition is, you phucking philistine !), that comes at times (pl. see Theo Angelopoulos' self-indulgent poem Ulysses' Gaze to get that exact feeling). This feeling is more excruciating and one does feel wasting time and effort.

This month, Gene Siskel Film Center is organizing a retrospective of the works of Polish writer, director, painter, composer and poet, Lech Majewski. As I read briefly about him, his films looked like all what I am afraid of. Surreal set pieces, ultra-exquisite frames, weird imagination, but something was quiet intriguing about them, the painterly compositions and the wry humor, and plots of some of his films are like folk lores. So I decided to try one of his films, Angelus, which inspired by events that happened in Silesia, a part of Poland located near Oder and Vistula rivers. The Silesian tale is about a commune (of painters and artists) whose master, while dying, foretells three things - The Great war, The Great plague and The annihilation of earth by a mushroom shaped death ray from Saturn. The first two prophecies comes true as World War and Communism, but the members of the commune, determined to save the earth, are worried more about the third prophecy. The most intelligent man of the commune, who likes to work in extreme cold (he even keeps his books in fridge, and sleeps with windows open on a snowy night), works out some calculations and finds out a way to save the world. They need to put a naked virgin boy as a sacrifice on the top is the communist head quarters. Need not to say about the fate of their plan.

The beauty of this tale is that it has a great historical resonance. It is as much a film about stupid but honest efforts of the unsung people, and as it is a tableaux of history as done by a surreal painter with wry humor. In certain ways this film broke my biggest fears about non-narrative, experimental and avant garde cinema. Here the dissociated set pieces are somehow joined by the undercurrent of both, history (factual, narrative) and its mystery (artistic, irrational). The way it shows the historical figures like Hitler and Statin are so loaded with irony and dark humor that they doesn't remain one person, but point to all idiotic rulers and dictators. The way it shows people dealing with censorship and repression is at once funny and filled with concern for them. There are moments of pure pleasure like a old woman dancing and singing, and the sexually over-active couple which is talk of the housing unit. One of the most beautiful examples of colored imagination is presented when Polish men fantasize of American beaches with nude women. Even in their fantasy on the beach, their imagination and women, with an exception of a black woman just for the exotic touch, remain essentially polish. There is also a portrait of a guy who has just discovered the power of a gun, and in the most funny scenes he uses that power on his children and wife. And there is one person who is not yet convinced that the war has ended, lives in a trench and is building a bomb. An obvious cold war metaphor, but its done such a absurdist style that it looks very interesting, and it also doesn't go on to imitate the full cold war pattern, its just a metaphor that happens to fit. Also the mushroom shaped bomb metaphor has shadows of Hiroshima in it, but it is not played like a trump card. The guy who is chosen for the sacrifice is the narrator of the story and is a ghostly presence, a young, almost expressionless guy with a melancholy demeanor. His love story with a very beautiful girl is so downplayed that it almost hurts when we come to know he has to die a virgin, again a symbol of love sacrificed for "greater goods" of the world, and again quite understated.

The visually exquisite surreal set pieces work here because they are not forcibly serious and they doesn't impel us to "see". They doesn't take themselves too seriously, but the pain of people is not anyway belittled or undermined. As young Angelus walks towards his fate, it is a solemn moment that director understands. It is quite early to say the Majewski is a master on the same lines as Sergei Paradjanov or Fellini, but he is quite a discovery for me. I plan to see as many of his film in the retrospective now. There is one at 8:00 pm today.

Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World

2007-09-19T20:30:00.000-04:00

Vanaja

2007-09-16T15:00:00.000-04:00

Vanaja is the story of 15 years old eponymous heroine, who due to her desire to learn dancing starts to work in the household of rich land lady, becomes enamored by landlady's America-returned son, who, after few misgivings, rapes her, which is as much a punishment, as it is a token of his male and caste supremacy over Vanaja. The film is better than I expected it to be. With all its flaws, its is not devoid of any merit, and that should be highlighted. An attack on caste system and a cry for position of women in society, Vanaya is not altogether stereotypical or simple minded, but it is definitely weak in its melodrama at times, may be because of the oft-used situations (specially the ones with Vanaja and her father) or the guiding background music. The best part of the film is that it improves at it progresses, and there are at least two strong points in the film. One comes early on. When landlady's son arrives, Vanaja, partially burdened from the charm of the his status and partially attraction to the opposite sex, first sets eyes on him. It dismantles two things which are celebrated in Indian films as a rural legend, one that the innocent village belle never ever has any sexual feelings, and more importantly the man from outside is a pervert casanova. So when Shekher rapes her, its is not at all a sexual act, but it is an act of aggression and supremacy, and also Vanaja is not shown at fault for being more free with her sexuality than she is supposed to be. In an excellent scene, she gets the shit out of Rambubu -the postboy, while little Yadigiri threatens them both. The second good thing is the end. Its a semi-fantasy. Vanaja is promised something by the land lady and her son, which we are told wont happen in future, its a false promise. Also, since we know more of Vanaja now, we can assume that she too has the knowledge that it is a false promise but she understands that at the moment this false promise seems a best compromise. Since the film does not end where Vanaja is in "safe" arms of Rambabu or Shekher or in the protection of Landlady with her son in her lap, or with a weeping face with the question "who will marry me now", or as a weeping victim whose child is taken away from her or a tale where little Vanaja wins the big battle - it seems a nice end, slightly comforting that she is back to childhood, but not sugary or melodramatic. The dances sequences are quite good, but my only point is about the composition and camerawork during dance sequences. In the last dance sequence, Mahishasur Mardini, the director was busy capturing the angry closeups of Vanaja as a metaphor of her rage, which is not only a big cliche for those who have seen such Durga dances of rage, but its uncinematic and too guiding. In dance sequences (and in some other sequences) what one needs is compositional camerawork, not narrative a camerawork, wide angles, long shots, not the emotional closeups. Also when it comes to locales, dances and culture, director need not show off, but relax because there is always a danger that it all becomes a export of exotica from a far off land.

मंटो की कहानी 'खोल दो'

2007-09-10T22:05:00.000-04:00

मंटो की विवादित कहानी 'खोल दो' आप यहाँ पढ़ सकते हें।

१ अनेक ,२ उमड़ता , ३ बूढ़ी , ४ गायब , ५ शुन्य , ६ लटका हुआ, ७ मस्तिष्क, इज़ार बंद = कमरबंद

List From Lists

2007-09-08T12:31:00.000-04:00

Alok's Top 25 Non-English Language Films post, prompted few of us to post our lists too. My affection to these type of lists (a function of time and taste) -which are at best when most personal - is more as an information source than as a part of consensus on the status of classics, or inclusion of all type of films to make a representative list of film canon across the globe with restrictions like one-director-one-film etc.

So, out of these five list, here I choose one from each list that I should see soon. Most of these films are either new to me or neglected by me for a long time. Jai's list has a nice pick of French films and Vidya's inclination towards Chinese melodrama are the things which make their list both personal and informative - that is - the best one can get. Here my list from lists goes.

Since Otar Left - Julie Bertucelli (Vidya's list)
The Battle of Algiers - Gillo Pontecorvo ( Alok's list)
La Belle Noiseuse – Jacques Rivette (Jai's list)
The Adventures of Prince Achmed - Lotte Reiniger (Cheshire Cat's list)
Memories of Underdevelopment - Tomas Guttierez Alea (Space Bar's list)

If some wants few more or something else to be picked from their lists, please let me know. Its like, if someone picks Late Spring from my list (and I know (s)he has seen Tokyo Story (or any thing by Ozu), but has not seen anything by Jan Svankmajer, I would recommend him Little Otik).

Here and here are some nice compilation of Top 10s.

Random Respite : Sum of Parts

2007-09-07T20:11:00.000-04:00

As I look back, I smile at my mother's intelligent ways to tease my father, me and my sister in the same sentence, or rather tease her in-laws, with me or my sister as a weapon. The comments were of varied degree, from "aalsi to apne papa jaisa hai", to "gussa to bilkul dadi ka aaya hai isme". Some times, insults were more ambiguous and artsy, as my mother would say seeing my hindi handwriting, "chalo, papa ki ek to achchi aadat aayi", or when I will hit my sister, my mother and father will show occasional unity to scold me, and my mother, while slapping me, will even sentimentalize the matter by saying, "kal chali jaayegi, tak yaad karega" and I will murmur, while being slapped, "usse to koi kuch nahin bolta". I am used more often for this inheritance comparative study than my sister because she once wept inconsolably when her greed for sweets was compared to a distant relative, and that too in front of my Dadi, who hated that relative and attributed every wrong in the world to her.

Whatever be the case, my Dadi always took my mother's side, her only regret was that my mother is "saawali" (a bigger regret was that none of her fair son got a fair wife and like a family joke, none of her fair/dark grandsons got either. She had no hope from the few unmarried grandsons, as she says "saaro ko saawali hi pasand aave"). Her way of throwing sweet insult was saying "Saawali hai, par photo achchi aati hai", that statement used to take an extra dimension when she will comment so while seeing my parent's marriage album, and will hold the statement till we reach the page where the pictures of my mother and father, which were exchanged before marriage, were pasted. But the best part was to ask my Dadi about the reaction of whole village when she came there after marriage. She knew that we had asked that a thousand times, but her every reply had the same exactness of detail and pride. Ours was supposedly a village that has never seen someone so fair. According to her, she never worked in sunlight, till my dadaji was alive, lest she might get dark. She is always in praise for her mother-in-law who cared for her more than her own mother, who married her in a far off village (none of her relatives were even in the same district, she always regretted that she didn’t go to her mother’s place at her first Holi). She used to say "agar tere dada hote to yeh karte, woh karte", my mother would quip "aap hi bhatera laad karti ho, phir to pata nahin kitne bigadte", hearing this, my fair Dadi will look up to her saawali bahu with an old-worldly praise and pride while stroking my hair and asking my fair sister not to play in sunlight.

I revolted much later to these ancestral comments but by then I had the realization that its more for fun and sarcasm than for any hurt to anyone, and by then I would team up with my father and sister to invent sly comments on my father's in-laws, which my mother resisted by saying "bacchche bigaad ke bahut khush ho rahe ho, bilkul apni maa pe gaye ho". But the hell broke when I commented on my mother's treasured possession, the sewing machine, which she brought with her as marriage dowry. It must have been one of those occasions when my mother was again telling the story how my Nanaji did research to get her the best sewing machine in the whole town and when my father came that night, I proudly announced "aaj phir machine-chaalisa thi ghar mein" and my sister giggled sinking her head in my father's lap, but to our utter surprise, my mother started weeping in the most silent way (and that meant she meant it, in this particular kind of weeping she will keep on working her chores while weeping and we all knew this is the danger zone), and although we were little and immature, we knew for sure that no talking will undo what we did, so my sister and I, half thinking and half instinctively, started sobbing and slowly changed side moving near to my mother. Getting the signal, my father, to fill in a lighter mood to an all-weeping scene, softly said, "ab bachche majaak bhi na kare kya?", and getting the signal back, half-thinking and half instinctively, we both started weeping more freely, as if little relieved that the father spoke for us. My mother got up without saying a word, leaving the exhausted weeping kids behind, went to the kitchen to make dinner. When she came back, we had slept, but not fast enough not hear my father say "Dekh bhukhe hi so gaye", but fast enough not to hear my mother's reply.

Jan Svankmajer's Darkness, Light, Darkness

2007-08-28T00:56:00.000-04:00

25 Favourite Non-English Language Films

2007-08-26T12:02:00.000-04:00

The title of the post is stolen from here.

The list is intentionally uneven, and some films may not look like the best for that director, more like a second best or an effort to have a different list for the sake of it. There is definitely some truth in all these allegations.

1. Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman)
2. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)
3. Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
5. Little Otik (Jan Svankmajer)
6. The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
7. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel)
8. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
9. Ordet (Carl Th. Dreyer)
10. Fellini's Casanova (Fedrico Fellini)
11. Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (R W Fassbinder)
12. Woyzeck (Werner Herzog)
13. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)
14. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
15. Amores Perros (Alejandro González Inarritu)
16. Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak)
17. Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)
18. Yi yi (Edward Yang)
19. Weekend (Jean Luc Godard)
20. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar Wai)
21. ~~Where's the Friends Home (Abbas Kiarostami)~~
21. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami)
22. Dairy of the Country Priest (Robert Bresson)
23. Medea (Lars von Trier)
24. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)
25. A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Amores Perros - Lucha De Gigantes

2007-08-17T21:21:00.000-04:00

I like this song a lot. If I remember correctly, one of the lines translates to "paper monster..."

(NOT safe for work)

Movie Amateur Talk #1

2007-08-17T17:16:00.000-04:00

I have tried, but failed to understand films as just the sequence of images, carefully shot and put together, which, I understand, a film - in flesh and blood (and bone), if not in spirit - actually is. Bresson said that a pianist presses specific keys (don't confuse this pressing with the emotional/sensual button pressing that Haneke brilliantly spoofs in the family pool sequence of Code Unknown) at right moments, for right duration, very precisely, without any emotions, but the music thus created, brings forth extraordinary sensations to us (This goes with his theory that says ‘Let feelings bring about events, not the contrary’). When someone says that the beauty of this shot was its length (Look, such a long shot !), I feel rather stupid to not even notice that simple thing. At times, I try to figure out why it is elongated or truncated thematically, but not so much so philosophically (Long shots brings truth and integrity, do they ?) and technically (how many times did they rehearse it, how the camera moved, how difficult it would have been to achieve this).

I mean to say that I have lot of times felt that the camera should have stayed there for few more or few less seconds. But the decision was purely to enhance an ‘expression’ that has emerged so beautifully at the moment that any hurry or delay might crush it like a soap bubble. At times, the decision was more of the type where I wanted the director to trust me, not to show the obvious or more importantly, not to show just only the obvious. Technically, I only find myself, to certain extend, understanding only few things, like when a switch should take place between shots. I recently saw Beau Travail where I found all the switches were as if I supervised them (please don't laugh :), actually I found the film very poetic (I am planning to write about it for a month but its becoming is more and more difficult with time). The switch between scenes, as I think of it now, is also a very strong thematic element, the choice of images that you want to sit near each other, interact and talk. There is a scene in Kinsey where after the kiss between Kinsey and his male friend, scene cuts to Kinsey's weeping wife, which is surely more of a narrative decision than anything else, but there are times where the cutting is purely artistic (I cant think of a singular good example, but Color Trilogy has a lot of interesting artistic cuttings).

Other than switching/cutting, another thing I really appreciate is composition, yes, compositions like those in Ozu's films, but again too much of it is really off-putting. Ozu's Floating Weeds (in color) was too perfect in composition that it is really distracting. Ozu didn't care about the continuity when it comes to composition (things moved from left to right in consecutive shots, and than replaced duly back to their original position so that the composition is just perfect), which is just fine, but too much of it sucked life out of the backgrounds. Also, when I talk of style it is not to do entirely with inventiveness or frenetic pacing (like Snatch or Lock Stock films) laced with unsubtle glibness, often forced. But it is something on the lines of Far from Heaven, aligned to theme, like the chaotic style of Weekend married to its theme of upcoming apocalypse, like Chungking express, free and flowing. I saw Yi yi recently where apart from the glass reflection photography, I was not even interested in any other technicality or camera work, and which is not to say that it was any bad, I was more engrossed in the film and was just not interested in camera angles.

Other movie, that I recently saw, Rebel Without a Cause, is something of a surprise to me. Actually in Rebel I noticed both, the very elegant visual design, the repetition of themes and the repetition of similar shots of the three teenagers, blend together very well visually and conceptually. But eventually I was more busy drawing parallels between Jim Stark and Travis Bickle and Jon Rubin (I felt that the character played by De Niro in Hi, Mom!, is the younger version as Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, I think of him as a budding-Travis. Jon Rubin in Hi, Mom! is still not disillusioned, but we come to understand that he soon will be. Similarly, after watching, Rebel Without a Cause, I felt that the James Dean's Jim Stark is the teenage version of Travis Bickle, and to certain extent explains his rage, his anger against order, and his repressed sexuality too. This disillusioned male, alienated and absurd, unsure of everything, ready to try everything, rising and falling without cause, is possibly the our modern day Greek hero, the most cinematic male character).

Apart from this, I never get the grammar of long shots and the short ones, what should be used when and why. I have tried to think about few scenes as to what they might look in long shot or short shots or wide or close up, but I was not able to make any considerable judgment of one better than the other. I have considered the fast-cut introduction scene of Catherine in Jules and Jim, in long shot, but it does not give me any clues, though I liked the fast-cut sequence for its obvious show-off-y-ness and a point of highlight that our femme fatale has arrived but not so much for its technical brilliance. Also, I feel 'tricked' if I notice a long shot for its longness (correct usage: length), or a close-up shot for its closeness, as if I was forcibly made to do that. As old-school as it sounds, I am more for those ancient concepts of gentleness and neatness of an artistic expression, and as hippy as it may sound, I find myself admiring slaughter of any imposed modesty, good-nature and political correctness. As much I admire Beau Travail for its poetic beauty, I admire it more for its lack of interest in showing-off its style coda. Actually, Beau Travail is so unique because it doesn't do away with narrative cinema by rebuking, disregarding or dismantling it (there is a story in place and its not any meta-story), but by soaking the film in poetry of images that the narrative, although there, takes a comfortable backseat. And when you are into style and inventive film language, and when your preoccupation is not to prove that style works or to prove that narrative cinema is dead, film expression comes out in its natural bloom, as it comes in films like Beau Travail. Also the visual mastery of Rebel is not anti-narrative, but over-and-above-narrative, so the films works both for a novice like me and a film buff, and definitely helps an interested novice to see Nicholas Ray's stylistic genius in his strong visual power that gives narrative an extra dimension. Like wise films of Wes Anderson have a great story-book look and feel which enriches the narrative tremendously.

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son, which, according to him is his effort to dismiss the fraud of third dimension in cinema because cinema screen is essentially two dimensional, is a very interesting film. He intentionally flattened the images to look like 19th century Russian paintings. The effect is mixed, sometime extraordinary, especially in the end sequence (note the muscles and veins of son's neck stretch in pain as mother's throat dries out for eternity) and sometimes stilted as in the places where Sokurov forcefully trying to stop the moving image to fit it in his premise of two-dimensional canvass and staying in one frame till sine-die, long after we have seen and duly acknowledged its beauty or purpose. One aspect is to work within constraints and one is to put in constraints - Sokurov seemed to try the later in few scenes - to my stone-age mind, style is not putting constraints but finding a language that suits the film. A stylistic decision (or the director's own patent style) must not force an artist to shoot a film on war or sex or spirituality the exact same way (although it interests me immensely what will be the result of such efforts, but the point is that an artist must not be a slave of style, although we know several of the greats were and are)

But to me, what stayed of Mother and Son is a thematic undercurrent of love, care, past and pain between the mother and son which is so well established in the opening scene where the son describes a dream to his ailing which she also dreamt - the common dual dream, like sharing the same mental space. It is a point where magic of the uttered word and the associated emotions overpowers the flattened images and the associated style, same as the choreographed military dances of Beau Travail that subtly gleam over narrative without any hollow spectacle of avant-garde or ostensible declaration or display of cinema as visual art, but by a heart-felt and soul-filled, may be even illogical or absurd (I am tempted to refer to Bollywood musicals here, Jaan-e-mann and the likes :), celebration of that very fact.

Bergman at Chicago

2007-08-07T16:34:00.000-04:00

This weekend Chicago Cinema Forum has a two day tribute (Aug 11-12, '07) to Bergman at Chopin Theatre. First film at the tribute, Sawdust and Tinsel, will be introducted by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who only yesterday trashed Bergman's whole career in New York Times. World is full of irony. Anyway, if my fever is ok, I will be there, at least for the first day, because it shows two of Bergman films that I haven't seen yet.

And please vist Greencine Daily Bergman Link, it is a nice compilation of the recent articles and posts on Bergman.

मंटो की कहानियाँ

2007-08-07T09:36:00.000-04:00

इस सप्ताहांत मैं सआदत हसन मंटो की कुछ कहानिया पढ़ रह था। शिकागो library में हिंदी की किताबो का अच्छा संग्रह है। वहीँ मैंने एक किताब देखी, जिसका शीर्षक था - मंटो की यथाकथित विवादित कहानियाँ। इस संकलन में मंटो की सात कहानिया हें, जिनमें से छः पर अश्लीलता का मुकदमा चला था। मंटो सभी में बरी हो गए थे। संकलन के शुरुआत में मंटो का लिखा एक लेख है - मंटो अपनी नज़र में - जिसमे सआदत हसन, मंटो का हमजाद (जिन्न) बन कर , मंटो की पोल खोलता है, बताता है की मंटो अफ़साने कैसे लिखता था, और वोह एक नंबर का फ्रोड क्यों है, पर असल में वो कहता है की चाहे मंटो बुरा आदमी हो, उसे अव्वल दर्ज़ा उर्दू ना आती हो, पर वो अपनी कहानियो में वो ही दिखाता है जो वोह अपने आस पास देखता है।

मैं मंटो की कहानियो पर कुछ लिखने की सोच रह था पर उनपर तर्क वितर्क लिखना थोडा मुश्किल सा लगा , कहीँ सही शब्द नहीं मिले तो कही सही तरह से उन्हें बताने का कोई तरीका नहीं सुझा। मंटो की कहानियो में अश्लीलता केवल शब्दो तक है, पर उनके पीछे जो भाव छुपा है वोह बहुत संवेदनशील और इमानदार हें। मंटो की कहानियो को खुरदुरा कहा जा सकता है, उन में जिस भाषा और बोली का इस्तेमाल है, जिस तरह मानसिक और शारीरिक स्थिती के वर्णन को मिला दिया गया है, उस से एक विशेष प्रकार का अनुभव होता है, जो इन्सान के जिस्म से जुडा है और उसकी भावनाओं से भी, उसी तरह जिस तरह एक अच्छी कहानी दार्शनिक होकर भी मिटटी से जुडी रहती है। मंटो विभाजन के दुःख से कोई सस्ती सहनाभुती नहीं बटोरता , पर बड़े ही कम लफ्जो में उस क्रूरता को दर्शा देता है। बिल्कुल उसी तरह वोह किस्सी वेश्या को उसके काम से नहीं देखता, पर उसके इंसानी इच्छाओ पर चिन्तन करता है। मेरी नज़र में इस संकलन की सबसे बेहतरीन कहानी 'हतक' है, जिसमे हमारी नायिका सुगंधि एक ग्राहक के नापसंद किये जाने पर जिस पीड़ा और अपमान के गुजरती है, वो मंटो ने बहुत सही चित्रित किया है। जब सुगंधि , सेठ के जाने के बाद, अँधेरी सुनसान सड़क पर आधीरात में खडी होती है, तो मंटो ने उसके मन में आने वाले एक एक विचार को किस्सी रहस्य की तरह खोला है, जो अंत में उसकी नियति की और इशारा करता है। मंटो की एक और कहानी 'काली सलवार' में मंटो ने मन में चलने वाले विचारो और आस पास के वातावरण को यु बुन दिया है जैसे वास्तव में वो एक ही हो, और उसपर ये भी जाहिर कर दिया है की यह सब आज ऐसा इसलिये लग रह है, क्योंकि सोचने वाले के मन की स्तिथी आज ऐसी है। मैं और कुछ ज्यादा नहीं लिख पा रहा हूँ , तो अंत में मंटो की कहानी 'हतक' से यह अंश लिख रह हूँ, जो साफ साफ मंटो की छाप लिए हुये है।

वो रूपये जो उसने अपने शारीरिक परिश्रम के बदले दरोगा से वसूल किये थे, उसकी चुस्त और थूक से भारी चोली के नीचे से ऊपर उभरे हुये थे, कभी कभी सांस के उतार चढ़ाव से चादी के यह सिक्के खनकने लगते थे, तो उनकी खनखनाहट उसके दिल की बेमेल धडकानो में घुलमिल जाती , ऐसा मालूम होता की इन सिक्को की चांदी पिघल कर उसके दिल के ख़ून में टपक रही है।

मंटो की बहुचर्चित कहानी टोबा टेक सिंह आप हिंदी में यहाँ पढ़ सकते हें। यहाँ मंटो की पांच लघु कहानिया पढ़ सकते हें।

Random Respite...

2007-08-06T20:40:00.000-04:00

When we have nothing much to write, we usually tend towards two basic things, one is nature and the second one is childhood. Both, in their unique way provide momentary respite from our self-induced ennui and boredom. To write about nature requires exceptional skills and a good knowledge. So the lesser mortals turn towards their childhoods, in a attempt to relive it as we did it then, and sip some more nectar, attach some more nostalgia with self serving imagination of the good old past. I, as a child, had always met with the feeling of other worldliness and wonder, when I used to see the pictures of the loved ones taken before my birth. Whatever we may call it, it was a feeling that it all existed when you didn't. Although a Hindu upbringing try to put things in perspective with you being somewhere else in your earlier birth, but those photographs were a proof that you are just new entry to the whole system. In my stupid imagination routine, I have wondered what it would be like when we die, will we hover over the skies and try to find out what every body felt about the loss (?), or just die out and be as non-existent as we were before our birth. I know that memories will last in the minds of certain people but it cant help but wonder at the exactitude of the childhood feeling of you being not there at some point in time, and the world was, as you saw in those picture, same and as good.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of a wedding in Moradabad, and I remember very vividly that it was all crowded and my mother was always leaving me with some old lady. When I ask about that wedding now, I am told that I was just over one at that time, but it is one of most clear of the childhood memories, the next clear one is not till I turn three, and then comes the school and a whole new world into picture. I wonder how some authors remember things with such exactness, with names and colors and flavors. I only remember the collections of memory, like a bunch with all the morning walks to company garden and a bunch with all the mosquito-filled nights. I have never thought what time and stuff means to me, but I know, although it feel like free flowing ,its like an arrest in a big prison. Except for some exceptional times, you never cross the same thing in the prison park, the same way the second time, but you can, with time, relate to the vicinities and identify them with smell, color and touch. Any attempt to trace back to the same old happy point, results in chaos and the knowledge that its not possible.

The first dream, or the most recurrent dream of childhood is quite vague and as I try to recall now, it happens to be a cold foggy early morning and our village house is attacked by some weird ghostlike people. I get out of my bed and go to the first floor and stand near the point where I can (over)see them but they cant see me. They roam and from my strategic position, I try to call my parents and grandmother to be alert, but no one listens to me. The monsters, after the inspection, go away. The later dreams involve face to face encounter and the sudden break of sleep and finding by mother nearby, and the versions where monster took faces of some of the deadly teachers and some of beautiful ones standing by me. Later in life, I have stopped dreaming, the sleep looks like a blink with the waking point mixed with the tension to go to work, and actually I have even tried to redream (my mother told me as a child that what you think just before your sleep come to you in your dream) the monster dream, but without success. Now dreams are an occasional affair and they are more convoluted, they don't follow a pattern and I am not a hero fighting monsters in house with beautiful teachers backing me.

We are Morons - Lovers of Death and Depression !

2007-08-03T11:31:00.000-04:00

And here are reasons why Bergman and the likes never mattered to some.

An apt reply here, where he coins a term called Derrièrism defined as following:

Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult. They don't see the need for new narrative structures when the old ones work just fine. They believe that films should be as literal and clear as the Bible. They are tired of movies that always focus on the bad news the way the media always focuses on the bad news from Iraq. And they prefer clearly resolved, preferably happy, endings.

(Links via)

I didn't find on youtube but there is an excellent scene in The Seventh Seal where the knight sits with a family and have milk and strawberries and says "I shall remember this moment: the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre. I shall try to remember our talk. I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk. It will be a sign to me, and a great sufficiency". Mr Podhoret should see that scene because he claims that the entire oeuvre of Bergman does not have even a single happy moment. I know it wont help, his "happy" ass still might not fit the seat.

Final Sequence of L'Eclisse

2007-07-31T11:00:00.000-04:00

Also, The Passenger will be playing in Gene Siskel Film Center on 2nd August.

Michelangelo Antonioni (September 29, 1912-July 30th, 2007)

2007-07-31T10:30:00.000-04:00

is dead.

The Dream Scene from Wild Strawberries !

2007-07-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

Ingmar Bergman (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007)

2007-07-30T10:55:00.000-04:00

Its a sad day !

Some links here and here .

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

2007-07-27T15:48:00.000-04:00

The thing that I have always appreciated about Japanese films is what I call 'the acting of smiling faces', whatever emotional upheaval characters (especially women) go through, they smile and smile, although we are always aware that under this veneer of smile, there is a hidden sadness, hinted by subtle facial expressions (even at times hinted by actors turning away from camera, trying to get a moment of respite for the characters they play). Its a great metaphor of facade required for everyday life and obviously its stylistic cinematic interpretation may not be taken for general Japanese behavior but it does definitely hint to their culture in particular and human nature in general.

If I try to brief the plot of Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, it will look like a run-of-the-mill melodrama - a tragic story of an epic, unfortunate heroine, misunderstood and unable to get true love, but Naruse's treatment has sensitivity and fluidity that makes a usual story become sublime and evocative document of hopelessness of a woman trapped like our heroine is.

In all its differences, I can't help but say that When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a sister piece to Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. Obviously, Naruse's film is more interested in the scrutiny the post-war Japanese society and the place of women in it, unlike Fellini's heart-felt fascination for primarily one character - Cabiria - and her search for love, it plays more like the story of bar girls . Cabiria is looking for love, and fails, Naruse's heroine, Mama ( played by Naruse's regular Hideko Takamine), who works in a bar in Tokyo's Ginza district, is surrounded by potential suitors, has no dearth of love on the surface, but she too is a woman looking for love, and like Cabiria, unable to find it. Mama, unlike Cabiria, is not gullible and also unlike Cabiria, she is quite a standard character - a graceful polite experienced bar girl, aging and fearful, looking for a career along with love. Naruse's mastery - in part - lies in the fact that he makes such predictable character interesting. Naruse's movie also has the shadows of past, the war-torn economy booming, the economic divide, the so-called modern man caught in traditions and stereotypes, how surface boom and money didn’t translate to happiness in lives - all this serves as the harbinger of modern-urban ennui and alienation which has obsessed the minds and hearts of most modern film makers.

Also, the film is unmistakably a feminist work where heroine goes through all highs and lows, trying to survive by her own, the men around her provide occasional respite or drama but they are more or less extras to her story, and its feminist also in the way it shows that all the wars and progress made and staged by man (or our notion of masculinity) eventually has the toll on women, forcing them to gather a new life from debris every time. Along with Mama, we see several bar girls struck in maze of bars, trying to deal with it in their own ways. Unlike Nights of Cabiria, where the last scene celebrates the human spirit, the last scene of this film is undeniably the celebration (and at the same time crushing also) of the female spirit. Unlike Cabiria, Mama, doesn’t smile though tears, she just smiles the Japanese way, but we know they both mean the same.

The Boss Of It All

2007-07-18T02:15:00.000-04:00

Most of the problems in the world arise due to the fact that everyone likes to be loved even if they are more or less horrible people, and everyone has his unique definition what it means to be loved. If we translate this to a corporate guy, his definition of being loved may well be the straightest one. He wants to be loved and held in high esteem and integrity even if he has to pose what he is not, which comes very close to the definition of being loved by a normal person too, just that a corporate person is bound to a corporation, and in a way detached to what he does. The basic problem that all of these smiling, smart and sophisticated corporate people face is to manage and rule and at the same get the love of their subject, make them feel cared when they are being used. We have faced and we have used the big management D, the deference, which in this case means the deference of the responsibility of anything bad to someone else. The only glitch in that is, eventually it goes to a physical person, and that person may not get the love, may not be in the pool of the loved ones, and in that case will be unhappy corporate boss, which is not at all an admirable situation. There is heaps of self-help for both the loved ones and the lovers in the corporate world, but eventually the loss of innocence of the lovers happen and they all get the bitter truth about the loved ones (as you can see we are here taking a sort of ideal situation, the sycophant-gene is altogether neglected, but that can be neglected as its always good for the boss, which is our main concern here). There should be a better solution; there should be a better and easy world for our bosses. The Boss of it all gives that fine solution.

The owner of a Danish IT firm, Ravn, has that terrific idea. He hires a failed actor Kristoffer to pose as a made-up "boss of it all", and makes him responsible for making all the sensitive decision of the company and finally the decision of selling the company to an anti-Dane Icelaner and firing all of the six company's founding members except Ravn. But this foolproof plan has a small but basic problem, the problem that hired actor also wants to be loved. For an actor, the act of getting love is to please by his performance, to get the attention, for a director, it is a approval that someone got jolt and kick by seeing his stuff, which makes him feel something, something similar to being loved. What can be more dangerous than an artist who wants to be loved?

Like other films by Lars von Trier, this film is also an irony, and he spares none (von Trier believes that a film should be like a stone in your shoe :)), just that this time the mood is lighter, the camera is more playful, there is more air to breathe. This breezy irony, plays with the intentions of viewers, as if director is improvising against it, and a comic voice over always keeps things in a light mood and its director's simple way to say that its just a film, and that too a comedy, a irrational one. Film in its goofy irrationality and absurd setting, also examines the relation between the actors, directors, camera and the related ethics. Like the philosophical fool of Dogville, the actor in this film is also director’s doppelganger in particular, and artists and intellectuals in general. As a good satire is only on oneself (otherwise its bitching or criticism, and that is why Altman's The Player is an excellent satire), a good comedy becomes true only if the better jokes are reserved for oneself. Film’s end in which an actor shows what he is good at, is a potent joke on the creative urge and the related admiration that might follow from the performance, because whether it is a corporate cow or a creative crow, its all about being loved.

A Thin Blue Line

2007-07-16T12:24:00.000-04:00

Errol Morris' A Thin Blue Line examines a case of shooting of a police officer in Dallas and the procedure followed to find the culprit. 28 years old Randall Adams, who was with a 16 year old kid, David Harris (who becomes the chief prosecution witness against Adams) in his blue comet, was convicted of murder of a Texas Police officer, while all the evidence pointed elsewhere. Made in a style of re-enactment of the crime scenes, although it seems outdated due to the flush of TV crime reports on similar lines, this documentary is a very honest effort, both in terms how justice suffers from self-interest and wishful thinking, and also how the procedures of justice are not about truth finding, but just finding something/someone and closing the case. The conviction of Randall Adams was overturned when after the release of the documentary.

Here is a very interesting interview with Errol Morris. He says few things about truth, and how physical truth is absolute. And how style doesn't guarantee any truth. And to me this observation seemed quite true

I looked at Rashomon about a month ago. I re-watched it, and much to my
surprise, Rashomon isn't Rashomon. Rashomon is not a movie about the
subjectivity of truth. That there's no objective truth, just subjective truth. A
truth for you, a truth for me. On the contrary, it's a movie about how everybody
sees the world differently. But the claim that everybody sees the world
differently, is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of
claim. What really surprised me on re-watching Rashomon is that you know what
really happened at the end. It's pretty damn clear. Kurosawa gives you the
pieces of evidence that allow you to figure out what really happened. So, it's
not what many people imagine it to be, but it is a very powerful story about
self-interest, about wishful thinking, about self-deception, about people
imagining scenarios at variance with the truth. And so I found Rashomon to be
far more interesting than I had remembered it. With an underlying theme very
much like The Thin Blue Line. Truth exists, but people have a vested interest in
not knowing it.

Here is definitely a bifurcation, between the types of truth - the physical and the more complex metaphysical(I don’t know, is it the correct term but I am talking about something more abstract like truth about love and truth about life). What I feel at this moment that most of the times the efforts to find a wrong doer on physiological terms results in some gross generalization of evil (with phrases like "all man are dormant portals of evil") and that in tern results in lot of everyday injustice. Like in this case, Randall was thought to be a evil doer because, according to the police, he showed no remorse (like one of the police officer says "He overacted his innocence"). At this point, I should also see that when David Harris accepted his crime, he too showed no remorse. Actually, he was even more rational and cool headed as he said that Randall would have been saved if he had a place to stay, a perfect logic, but without a trace of remorse. I mean, if its so vague then how can “lack of guilt and remorse” can be generalized as a symptom of a criminal mind. Harris David also says some more direct and ironical in this last interview. He says "Criminals always lie", and its ironical because he is one, and it is also ironical because whenever any interrogation of a potential convict happens, it is invariably assumed that the he is a criminal, so does it matter whatever he says. I think, evidence gathering is a balance between doubt and rationality. And then comes the people like forensic psychiatrist, Dr. James Grigson (who was called Mr. Death after having testified in more than 100 trials that resulted in death sentences, actually Morris went to Dallas to take his interview but stumbled on Randall Adams case, who was one of Dr, Death's victim), and his vague psychoanalysis of Randall and his proclamation that if left free, he will be grave danger to society. It looks jarring that these types of analysis take precedence to any physical evidence. Even Errol Morris goes on to show a blurred picture of Harris' troubled childhood. I know these things matter, but my question always remains, what should be given more priority in an investigation. And the most interesting of all is Emily Miller, whose testimony finally results in the conviction of Randall. Its the most frightening interview, you can see, where the face of Emily glows when she says that she always wanted to be a detective, or else wife of a detective, and she is so watchful that sees murders everywhere.

And this part of the Errol Morris' interview of also very insightful. Here he talks about the fine line between reality and fiction.

When Capote wrote In Cold Blood, he called it a non-fiction novel. I remember
when I was a little boy and In Cold Blood came out, I got very depressed,
because I would read these long, long conversations that he supposedly
remembered in their entirety. I thought: how can he do it? I need a tape
recorder. I can't remember when I'm talking to someone for 10 hours what they've
said verbatim. I just can't do it. I can't do it. I'd like to be able to do it,
but I can't. And here was Capote writing pages of this stuff. And I thought, I'm
never going to be able to do that, and I was right, I'm never going to be able
to do that. And of course the question is whether Capote was able to do it.
Whether he was just able to write extremely well about the conversations after
the fact. Whether he was making stuff up.

Ordet

2007-07-05T11:09:00.000-04:00

As we all know that there is a thin line between a great excellent film and a masterpiece. The thin line is that is transcendence, to use a cliché. It’s the line where the images coerce themselves into one whole and go beyond. We feel free. A film that makes us feel free is itself utterly independent and fearless, of the people who want to kill it with the censorship of the so called profane, or to neglect and ridicule the so called trivial and also those who want to limit it to the worship of so-called good, moral and "useful".

Ordet is so fiercely austere and heart rending. Not a film has moved so much as this one in long time, both emotionally and intellectually. The impact of few films is so deep and elemental that writing about them becomes a clumsy clichéd exercise. This film does not particularly try to express the human condition and expand the human conscious, the prime theme of the film is faith, but it’s not the half-boiled, half hearted faith, but a mad magical love. Since here, even faith has true passion, the things which we might have thought to be slight and stupid, become both lifelike and magical. I, myself, have wondered the way people "use" faith, as one of the way, not "the" way, which defies the very notion of it in spirit. We all have seen, and we all have been, sometime or the other, fearful of faith, but still use it as and when required (As the film patriarch Morten Borgen puts it "But I prayed only because it was worth trying.").

Ordet is a story of Morten Borgen, owner of Borgen farm, and his family of three sons, Johannes, Mikkel and Anders, and Mikkel's wife Inger. They are all dealing with their faiths. The link between them is Inger, who keeps the house alive. The film starts with the scene where each of the family member go out to search for Johannes, who has again ran out from home, thinking he is Jesus. Johannes, who according to Mikkel has gone mad not because of love, but because of Soren Kierkegaard, enters the leaves the frame like the wavering faith of the characters. The way he speaks is prophetic and terrifying. The most terrifying of all is the scene where Johannes sees the beam of headlights of departing car and envisions the death. It is also very excellent use of lighting as a thematic element. Mikkel has lost his faith totally, but according to Inger, he has faith because he is good at heart. Morten, played wonderfully with a mix of old snobbishness and aged wisdom by Henrik Malberg, is also having problem with faith, especially because his prayers for Johannes are going unanswered. Anders is in trouble because he is in love with the daughter of the tailor, who has a different faith.

The main difference between Ordet and films of Bergman, especially Winter Light, with which is frequently compared is essentially the difference between the one still looking for any possibility of faith (faith in faith) and the one who has looked and found nothing, and how to come in terms with it. Actually, it quite unfair to compare the two, in spite of the common theme, because although they seem to be on same continuous line, but it requires a "leap of faith" or a "retract to reason" to jump between the two. Ordet is exemplary in its refusal to reason and rationality because it doesn’t look premeditated. One more film, Ordet is often compared to, is Breaking the Waves, primarily due to its final sequence, but to me Breaking the Waves tryst with faith is like an ironical kiss, but in Dreyer's Ordet, it is a full carnal affair. [Spoilers Ahead] In one of the most striking end scenes ever, as Inger wakes up and passionately kisses Mikkel, we can see the line of Inger's saliva that sticks out from Mikkel's cheek, gloriously celebrating the bodily resurrection along with the soul, and hence when Inger speaks “Life.. Life”, it’s a sensual feeling, not particularly a spiritual one. [Spoilers End]

Dreyer's film is as much about the nature of and our relation with faith, as it is about the limitations of rationality. The vision of Dreyer, as it comes of the film is neither of a cynical nor of a devout. The film, in the end does comfort, but that comfort owes the great burden, the burden of pure and unflinching faith.

Few Links, Few Lines

2007-07-05T00:23:00.000-04:00

1. Manasi pointed to this awesome essay by Virginia Woolf. The Woolf's Middlebrow is quite like the Nabokov's Poshlust-guy. In a way, there is nothing so new in this essay but it does put lots of things in place.

2. Bruce Baillie's short Valentin de Las Sierras was amazingly poetic and lyrical. Here are some of his films including his most famous short Castro Street.

3. A very nice review of a bad film, insightful and never going over the top or banal. I liked the phase "Our Lady of Humanitarian Narcissism". Here is the poster, this review talks about.

4. This is a nice piece of music.

5. A long discussion about American Film Noir. I haven't read it fully though.

6. Saw three excellent films, Ordet, Beau Travail and Do the Right Thing. Planning to write about them. Nice writeups here, here and here, resp.

7. I have been planning to see Battle in Heaven for long, here's a long interview with the director.

8. Gene Siskel centre is screening Boss of it all on Friday. I am looking forward to it. It will be showing Inland Empire two times this month, one would have to go both times to make something out of it. And here is my chance to see Mulholland Drive on big screen. Other film to look forward to is Into Great Silence.

9. If you have Internet than you cant make any excuse not to watch the excellent documentary The Corporation (Part 1 and Part 2). And if you still have any guilt while using p2p file sharing, see this :)

10. On the same site, you can find most of Byomkesh Bakshi too.

11. Film Director Edward Yang died of colon cancer last Friday. I have Yi yi in my collection for long, will see it on this weekend. GreenCine Daily has lots of links about him.

Notes on Hiatus...

2007-06-20T10:32:00.000-04:00

I am not able to blog for sometime now, as I am trying to settle in a new place. I am trying to see films, but not much. In last few days I have only seen two good films Rope and Late Marriage, and apart from that I saw Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums for a second time, which I think is a great film. I blurbed about some films in my last post, but I didn't write about few other films that I saw then, mainly because I was not able to get anything in them. The front runner in those films was Daisies. I still don't understand it after reading a bunch of reviews. Visually, it is very innovative with novel use of colors and cutting. Thematically with its pure negation to narrative and structure, I initially gathered that the film is against order and convention of any type, till I read an interview where the director, Vera Chytilová, herself refuted that. I think, I should see the film again. The other film which I tried to see, but did not complete was Sergei Parajanov 's Color of Pomegranate. Whatever I saw of it, I liked it. Its a series of set pieces, more controlled and less populated than a Fellini film, and with great folk music. This is the film I need to complete, when I have some time for myself. Due to this general uneasiness of settling down, I am not able to see the remaining De Palma ( Blow Out and Carlito's Way are still pending) and remaining Altman (no McCabe & Mrs Miller, no The Long Goodbye for me) which I promised myself last year. Still not opened account for Visconti, De Sica, Naruse, Mizoguchi and Lang. Apart from that, I have four pending series, Scenes From a Marriage, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Sátántangó and The Best of Youth. I have watched only one or two episodes of each of them. I feel like a stupid kid who likes a secondary subject, which is of no importance to grades and is generally considered waste of time. In the real world we live in, there are always more important things to do. I know, I should not crib like this, we should get two basic-bitter codes of society as soon as possible - Films are just for fun and you should grow up - but, at the same time, in our own capacity we should try to fight both of them everyday !

Notes on Few Films.

2007-06-06T20:08:00.000-04:00

Waking Life, Richard Linklater, Clip

Waking Life is filled with philosophy nuggets and musings but what makes us float through this dream is the ever-changing, ever innovative animation (It uses a technique called Rotoscoping). As the protagonist moves from one dream to other, one alternate reality to other, we see the tone and texture of the animation change, which creates a hallucinatory effect with the transformation of the static filmic space to some free floating dynamics of planes. And on top of that, all the talk makes sense too, as overlapping philosophies of heterogeneous world views which are buried in our minds. The film moves from Post modernism to existentialism to quantam mechanics to freewill to film theory to posthumanity to reincarnation (Here it is seen as "a poetic expression of collective memory") to realms of sub-conscious. In one of most entrilling episodes, one of the character discusses a story by Philip K. Dick. With a film providing so much of theories, but it rightly hints that "active thought is nothing without active action".

Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki, Trailer

A little girl, Chihiro, whose parents get transformed to gluttonous pigs, is lost in the world of the dead, where in order to survive and get her parents back, she has to remember her past, the tiniest of the memory will help because if you forget what you are, you can never return. As much the brilliance of the film lies in creation of Alice's wonderland - the world from a child's perspective, so as in its fable of goodness of a child, an uncorrupted human soul. Visually the film is filled with set pieces, but it doesn’t overwhelm, and condense to a series of experiences with little messages hidden inside. The bath scene of the dirty river has so many things to notice, foremost is the mastery of the visuals, also "washing" of a river and the way it "throws out" the waste point to the ecological pollution, and third and the finest is Chihiro's uneasiness with the river, may be some reminiscence of her past. Of all the subtle teachings, the most important is to remember the tiniest of the past particle. Also, in all these Japanese films, in their happy ending and smiling people, they manage an inherent sadness of moving on. When Chihiro leaves the amusement park, the close up of her hands with Haku’s, is a little reminder that this farewell will haunt her all her life, like all good and bad experiences that serve us to perceive and feel what we live through today. Chihiro may have come out wiser from the ordeal but she is still bound to her past.

Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon, Trailer

An actress tells her story from childhood to fame, along with her unending journey to find her love. The film is a blend of reality of her story and the fantasy world she created in her films, and vice versa, we never know for sure, it is a film in a film or her life story. This blend is delightfully warmed up with Satoshi Kon's deep affection and love for her diva and the film medium. Although I haven't seen many Japanese films, but one of the character she plays closely resembles the type of character played by Setsuko Hara in Ozu's films, particularly the hair style. From such observations, it seems that the film also tries to pay tribute to all the leading Japanese actresses, and in itself through the life of a actress traces Japanese cinema history. The story starts with a very vivid montage, as our young heroine walks and the background show the history vignettes. The film has few references of the politics and rebels of the post war Japan. Also we can see some really fantastic animated sequences, especially a chase sequence which comes later in the film, where the actress is shown chasing her lover over time, in different costumes and it different places. As I said earlier, this scene can be viewed as a montage of her films, or as a glowing snippet of her life.

Little Otik , Jan Svankmajer, Trailer

[Spoilers Ahead]This was my first encounter with Czech animator, Jan Svankmajer, but it doesn’t contain much animation, arguably the best is the penile hand animation animizing the pedophilic gazes of an old man. But there is enough surrealism in straight images here. Karel and Bozena, a couple incapable of conceiving, see the images of children every where, in the food market, inside water melon, in flooded prams. Once, in an attempt to comfort (or rather amuse) his wife, Karel carves and polishes a tree root to make a baby figure, and gives it to Bozena but to his own amusement, our Virgin Mary takes it for her real child and starts breast feeding him. The real trouble starts when the tree truck comes to life and becomes an ever-hungry monster-baby, Otik, who in time to come will not even spare his creator. The most interesting character of the film is young Alzbetka, daughter of Karel and Bozena's next door neighbors, who observes the young parents and in them see striking similarities of Otesanek fable (which probably is known only to her). Alzbetza is the all-knowing heroine, at least she thinks her to be so. The wicked matchstick game she invents, the way she uses her charms as bait to get Mr Zlábek in the net, the way motherhood springs in her are all fantastic episodes of the film, and of Alzbetka hyper-conscious psyche. One of my friends used to say - even on risk of hate-gazes from both sexes - nature has played a cruel trick on woman to give her maternal instincts, otherwise with all the trouble she takes, she would have killed the baby. Once he got married and became father, he showed severe maternal instincts. I don’t know, was it societal conformity that mellowed him down or maternal juices did actually flow. Little Otik surveys not the desire to multiply but this desire to be called parents, which is more of a societal acceptance need, than the true animal instinct. The way the whole apartment building becomes interested in Otik-family and the way Bozena creates a perfect pregnancy, did result in havoc afterwards. Jan Svankmajer's take on parenthood is not only how-to-react-if-you-bear-a-monster, but the very romanticism of becoming parents, and as we can see no one, not even little Alzbetka, can escape that.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait , Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno, Trailer

I am not of fan of football, but you need not be so to appreciate this documentary. Great music, on and off the field. As Zidane mutters and yells something in a language I don’t understand, as he toes his feet on field scuffing grass with his boots, running, constantly looking for the football, his faces charts the aggression and tension of the moment, and the spirit of the sport. Highly recommended.

The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry , Trailer

The Science of Sleep charts the same waters as Waking Life does. If Waking Life, in its punk philosophy and drunk images, creates a dreamlike world, The Science of Sleep tries to do the opposite. It creates a real world from the figment of dreams, and using an unique visual design and animation, an animation that you could make by cutting papers and sewing stuffed birds, directly out of arts and craft workshop, it brings about a tangible world. Its a film born completely out of imagination of the director, but more so from the child-like imagination of the Stéphane, who befriends Stéphanie, his next door neighbor. Soon he falls in love with her, but is unable to communicate that to her, except in her dreams. So he has devise ways to get in her dreams and say what he wants to. The problem with Stéphane is mix of shyness and the ever hovering fear which rejected lovers can promptly understand - the fear of rejection, which lovers try to reduce by looking for the right way, the right time and the right person. Stéphane, for sure, knew that he has got the right person. So Stéphane keeps on giving wrong hints, on and off the dream. In a perfectly unnatural and dreamy sequence, Stéphanie, who shares Stéphane's ideas of creation and world such that she shares his dream world, understands him. The ending is so sad, because it’s so dream-like.

What Time Is It There?, Tsai Ming-liang, Trailer

Along with his mother, Hsiao-kang, a roadside watch seller, living in Taipei, is mourning his father's demise. He meets a tourist from Paris, Shiang-Chyi, who wants the dual-time watch that Kang is wearing. Kang refuses first, but later, on insistence, sells it off. The girl goes to Paris but takes along with her the feeling of dislocation and displacement. Kang's mother becomes obsessed with the return of her husband's spirit, and starts making food at the time which is more comfortable to him, starts blocking any light to enter the apartment because she thinks his spirit will be more comfortable in darkness, which irritates Kang, because after his father's death, he has become afraid of dark. After the return of girl to Paris, he himself starts living in Paris time and watching French films. He tries to set the time of every watch; he can lay his hands on, to Paris time. In Paris, the girl with her fair share of ennui and loneliness stares at fellow people on the subway and sits in her apartment in her solitude. Tsai Ming-liang's frames are so devoid of any geographical trait that it seems that alienation and loneliness are not place specific, they are universal. Preceding climax, the film bursts into three duals; Kang gets hooked with a prostitute in his car, Shiang-Chyi with another Asian girl in her apartment, and the mother with her husband's spirit. After the sexual burst, every thing comes back to where it was before, but we see that the characters are little relieved but still painfully aware of the their loss and loneliness. In the very symmetrical frame of the last scene, an old man walks towards a big circular ride, which looks like a big clock, as if getting engulfed.

Sadaat Hasan Manto

2007-06-05T13:09:00.000-04:00

The writings of Sadaat Hasan Manto, Urdu short story writer, are characterized by sharp wit and cynicism, compounded by his personal vagaries (some of them he invited himself) and the turmoil of his times. Some of his writings are available online in English translation. We know that much of the Urdu melody and irony is lost in translation, but even then Manto's caustic ideas and world view comes forth beautifully. In his famous short story, Toba Tek Singh, he describes the transfer of "lunatics" between India and Pakistan, as they exchange war prisoners. Some of the lunatic behave like political leaders, some don't want to go anywhere and others have lost the idea of which part of the world they are in. In an adsurdist plot, Manto points to the trauma of the displaced and how it will live for ever. The story can be read here. If you can read Urdu, you can find the Urdu pdf on the same page.

Manto wrote nine letters to Uncle Sam between 1951 and 1954, out of which four are available online in English translation. These letters are witty and a sign of what is about to come as US imports to the developing countries, the ill-fitted modernizations, the arms and ammunition, and the wars and battles, that will reduce these nations as "small" players in the big game. These witty letters are filled with references to persons and events, which can be read as his sense of future for the new-born nations - political hopelessness and cultural-devastation of his folks through the hands of the Uncle, which no one can see then. The Urdu pdf of one of the letters can be found here.

A short biography of Manto here. More translated writings here and here.

Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Some Stray Thoughts

2007-06-02T19:54:00.000-04:00

Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's film about the Nuremberg Rally of Nazi party is widely known for two reasons - the sheer artistic mastery and the propagandist intentions behind it. It was made in 1935 and with most modern technical skills, it tries to capture the "greatness" and "majesty" of the event and force behind it. The film starts with the aerial shots of clouds and then hovers over the city of Nuremberg, follows the Führer and the cheering crowd and the gallant speeches, all with a soaring musical score. For a viewer, its foremost importance is as a film document to show that how the effective use of film making techniques can makes one soar, even if there is nothing up there. The series of virile speeches look like the audition for the part of Hitler in some future film. The various shots of Hitler, larger-than-life messiah, are lofty as the zeal and number of the crowd cheering him and the men at his service. Its all about the promise of a nice near future, provided you be good. Its all about the smug hypothesis that we are better than others, and we have some mission in life. All is big and beautiful. All is about power and being powerful. In a way, its all what we usually like. But before turning into one of the following - Riefenstahl's apologists or Riefenstahl's detractors - we must think that in Führer-times, is anyone left with any choices other than his, can there be political innocents in such time, can there be any independent film making possible to make a purely historical film in such times and if it can, what cost and courage it required. And in addition to it, we must always have deep faith in the human soul which is by nature, essentially corruptible especially with the charm of power and the powerful.

While watching this film I began to think on some line which are not exactly related to the film but closely brush by (beware, incoherent rant follows!). And that is partly related to what Tarkovsky said about cinema, he said "Cinema is a sad art because it requires lot of money." In present times, where we say and hear all the time that we are free and we are not living under any dictatorship, how should we see studio films? Is it a freedom that we get as a resultant vector of artistic urge, commercialization, cultural conservatism, and current political ambiance or just a more wholesome form of dictatorship? How far a director has gained any freedom from the system, and more importantly, as an artist of his times, with the urge to create, is an artist justified in fulfilling his epic dreams. Imagine Michael Cimino making his epic Heaven's Gate with Nazi backing, as preposterous this thought may seem, but it looks that the artistic urge to create grandeur might let one suck money from any source and accept patronage from anybody. Is it justified to work like a court-artist (rather a corporate artist), even if one is able to save ones art (Leni’s work is almost flawless too, especially for her times), or in present times, is it the way to save art and give back some ideas to the society, as Altman confesses in the commentary track of The Player, “we all are just 'players' in this big game” and something at the end of documentary, The Corporation, also points to that. How far can an artist go? Does this artistic urge, can overpower ones morality, or obscure ones sense of judgment, as long as it fills the art-shaped-hole. Are these film makers not Little-Eichmanns? Is artist answerable to his/her art and nothing else? Is ambition of such pricey perfection, in films and its execution, equivalent to artistic Nazism, and does it come natural to an artist to achieve and communicate a particular thought or idea. Do we have to accept it as a demand of the medium? As you can see, such stray thoughts go no where, toggling between extremes, fading to acceptance. But these “art-sans-morality” and “big-ticket-art” thoughts do make us, as a viewer, realize that all artistic triumphs are not true and all art is not divine.

United 93

2007-06-01T16:45:00.000-04:00

There is something purely uneasy about the connection between viewers and the films of certain type. We know that even if the film is not inherently manipulative, but due to its particular type, its effect on viewers, who in his natural instincts take everything emotionally, become little dangerous. For such films, it is not good enough to be non-manipulative, but to consciously resist and check any easy response by the viewer. The mastery in film making is not in exactness of camera angles and editing, but in the ability to make a decision, a moral artistic decision, of the effect they can have on the viewers and is it what a director wants. This is one of the main areas where United 93 disappoints.

When I was talking about the effect of the film on a viewer, I was not talking about other viewers, I was saying that based on my own experience, i.e. one particular experience. But, the point I was trying to make is quite general though, the point that whether this film grips you to an extent that you stop thinking, which is not a response we expect from a film based on such a issue.

I am purely against that a film should have any moral teaching, but I totally want a film to have a moral center (mystically we can call it 'soul'), I don't expect an alien with hi-tech know-how making it. It is no denying fact that United 93 is impeccably designed and executed, but it lacks that moral center because the fragment of recent history which the film so immaculately re-creates loses any meaning, what so ever, in its monumental aloofness to the space it is derived from, with no umbilical chord joining it to the rest of humanity, and that's why what we experience in this film are our basic animal emotions - fear, anger, pity, horror, hatred and repeatedly getting excited - which without any moral fulcrum falls flat as an excited angry fist pounding the chairs in the cinema hall.

As a film that sets out as a tribute to the lost, unintentionally(?) ends up being a two hour high octane thriller, providing all the cinematic thrills for general consumption, United 93 and the films of its neighborhood, need to do some serious thinking. United 93 makes history more painful for those who were connected to it directly, and make it more thrilling for the others. If at all, it just says one thing in all its gritty realism - see it all happened to us.

200th Post

2007-05-30T00:29:00.000-04:00

Thanks to you all for coming here and reading. Spl. thanks to Alok for always helping me out with discussions, and Ram for reminding me about this milestone :)

Keep visiting !

Sans Exotic !

2007-05-29T23:52:00.000-04:00

Here J. Hoberman writes about Wong Kar-Wai's latest film My Blueberry Nights, and makes this statement, which I have felt for many foreign films.

But akin to seeing Wong without his trademark shades, watching the
movie unavoidably inspires two mental exercises. The first: imagining it in
subtitled Chinese, recast with Chinese actors (Tony Leung in place of the
too-eager-to-please Jude Law). The second: replaying Wong's greatest hits sans
Orientalism—were the performances in 2046 as mediocre and the dialogue as trite
as in My Blueberry Nights?

Should we actually remove the flavor of "exotica" from the films and judge them ? I know the answer again will be, it should be "honest, well-meant and unforced exotica" !!!! Not Again !

The Art of Translation.

2007-05-29T23:17:00.000-04:00

This is Nabokov's essay on the art of translation, that appears in his lecture book on Russian literature. It ends with a tutorial on translating one line of Pushkin :)

sample this:

But masking and toning down seem petty sins in comparison with those of the
third category; for here he comes strutting and shooting out his bejeweled
cuffs, the slick translator who arranges Scheherazade's boudoir according to
his own taste and with professional elegance tries to improve the looks of
his victims.

and this

Now comes the authentic poet who has the two last assets and who finds
relaxation in translating a bit of Lermontov or Verlaine between writing poems
of his own. Either he does not know the original language and calmly relies upon
the so-called "literal" translation made for him by a far less brilliant but a
little more learned person, or else, knowing the language, he lacks the
scholar's precision and the professional translator's experience. The main
drawback, however, in this case is the fact that the greater his individual
talent, the more apt he will be to drown the foreign masterpiece under the
sparkling ripples of his own personal style. Instead of dressing up like the
real author, he dresses up the author as himself.

Poshlust : The Blond and his Swans…

2007-05-29T22:50:00.000-04:00

Here Nabokov explains intricacies of poshlust using a story.

To exaggerate the worthlessness of a country at the awkward moment when one is at war with it — and would like to see it destroyed to the last beer-mug and last forget-me-not, — means walking dangerously close to that abyss of poshlust which yawns so universally at times of revolution or war. But if what one demurely murmurs is but a mild pre-war truth, even with something old-fashioned about it, the abyss is perhaps avoidable. Thus, a hundred years ago, while civic-minded publicists in St. Petersburg were mixing heady cocktails of Hegel and Schlegel (with a dash of Feuerbach), Gogol, in a chance story he told, expressed the immortal spirit of poshlust pervading the German nation and expressed it with all the vigor of his genius.

The conversation around him had turned upon the subject of Germany, and after listening awhile, Gogol said: "Yes, generally speaking the average German is not too pleasant a creature, but it is impossible to imagine anything more unpleasant than a German Lothario, a German who tries to be winsome. . . . One day in Germany I happened to run across such a gallant. The dwelling place of the maiden whom he had long been courting without success stood on the bank of some lake or other, and there she would be every evening sitting on her balcony and doing two things at once: knitting a stocking and enjoying the view. My German gallant being sick of the futility of his pursuit finally devised an unfailing means whereby to conquer the heart of his cruel Gretchen. Every evening he would take off his clothes, plunge into the lake and, as he swam there, right under the eyes of his beloved, he would keep embracing a couple of swans which had been specially prepared by him for that purpose. I do not quite know what those swans were supposed to symbolize, but I do know that for several evenings on end he did nothing but float about and assume pretty postures with his birds under that precious balcony. Perhaps he fancied there was something poetically antique and mythological in such frolics, but whatever notion he had, the result proved favorable to his intentions: the lady's heart was conquered just as he thought it would be, and soon they were happily married."

Here you have poshlust in its ideal form, and it is clear that the terms trivial, trashy, smug and so on do not cover the aspect it takes in this epic of the blond swimmer and the two swans he fondled.

[…]

Literature is one of its best breeding places and by poshlust-literature I do not mean the kind of thing which is termed "pulp" or which in England used to go under the name of "penny dreadfuls" and in Russia under that of "yellow literature." Obvious trash, curiously enough, contains sometimes a wholesome ingredient, readily appreciated by children and simple souls. Superman is indubitable poshlust, but it is poshlust in such a mild, unpretentious form that it is not worth while talking about; and the fairy tales of yore contained, for that matter, as much trivial sentiment and naive vulgarity as these yarns about modern Giant Killers. Poshlust, it should be repeated, is especially vigorous and vicious when the sham is not obvious and when the values it mimics are considered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest level of art, thought or emotion. It is those books which are so poshlustily reviewed in the literary supplement of daily papers—the best sellers, the "stirring, profound and beautiful" novels; it is these "elevated and powerful" books that contain and distill the very essence of poshlust. I happen to have upon my desk a copy of a paper with a whole page advertising a certain novel, which novel is a fake from beginning to end and by its style, its ponderous gambols around elevated ideas, and absolute ignorance of what authentic literature was, is and always will be, strangely reminds one of the swan-fondling swimmer depicted by Gogol. "You lose yourself in it completely,"—says one reviewer;—"When the last page is turned you come back to the world of everyday a little thoughtful, as after a great experience" (note the coy "a little" and the perfectly automatic "as after a great"). "A singing book, compact of grace and light and ecstasy, a book of pearly radiance,"—whispers another (that swimmer was also "compact of grace," and the swans had a "pearly radiance, too"). "The work of a master psychologist who can skillfully probe the very inner recesses of men's souls." This "inner" (mind you—not "outer"), and the other two or three delightful details already mentioned are in exact conformity to the true value of the book. In fact, this praise is perfectly adequate: the "beautiful" novel is "beautifully" reviewed and the circle of poshlust is complete—or would be complete had not words taken a subtle revenge of their own and smuggled the truth in by secretly forming most nonsensical and most damning combinations while the reviewer and publisher are quite sure that they are praising the book, "which the reading public has made a (here follows an enormous figure apparently meaning the quantity of copies sold) triumph." For in the kingdom of poshlust it is not the book that "makes a triumph" but the "reading public" which laps it up, blurb and all.

The particular novel referred to here may have been a perfectly honest and sincere (as the saying goes) attempt on the author's part to write something he felt strongly about—and very possibly no commercial aspirations assisted him in that unfortunate process. The trouble is that sincerity, honesty and even true kindness of heart cannot prevent the demon of poshlust from possessing himself of an author's typewriter when the man lacks genius and when the "reading public" is what publishers think it is. The dreadful thing about poshlust is that one finds it so difficult to explain to people why a particular book which seems chock-full of noble emotion and compassion, and can hold the reader's attention "on a theme far removed from the discordant events of the day" is far, far worse than the kind of literature which everybody admits is cheap.

Excerpt from Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov.

And here is its companion piece.

PS : After typing this to some extent, I found the full text here.

Ghost Dance Sequence

2007-05-28T20:54:00.000-04:00

Ghost Dance Sequence from Ray's Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (via)

Grave of the Fireflies

2007-05-27T21:21:00.000-04:00

It may be sheer chance that I heard about this film, when I was more or less disillusioned by the depiction of war in films. Though I haven’t seen many war films, the disillusion was to an extent that I felt that any film that shows war or its direct effect on people is, to a certain degree, false and useless. It is a same trick that is applied by mediocre filmmakers to put their innocent characters in adverse conditions to extract the last ounce of emotion from the viewer, and since we know it is war and real people were involved, we understand any re-creation of it for any emotional gratification is grossly disrespectful. Slowly, I started suspecting all those war-as-background films too. A love story, a poor soul, survives in the brutal war. They look fearful of war, but quite ready to "use" it as a prop. Any film solely trying to answer the question, whether war is good or bad, is of no use, because we know the answer. So how to capture, except in documentary and war footage, those war images by facing them directly and at the same shunning any easy torture of the dead and past, how an artist deeply wounded by its effects (personally or on a human level) create it to express himself. And more importantly what to create, show suffering and pain or the personal triumphs, or in most cases a formulaic mixture of all such emotions. I don’t know any answers, and I also don’t want to enumerate what little I know so that it looks like some sort of a recipe. It looks that in such cases its better to go by instincts. You have to rather personally (and emotionally) judge the morality of the image projected. I know, it is true for any experience, but in these cases, a viewer need to be extra careful, lest the dead might die again.

Grave of the Fireflies is the story of brother Seita and his little sister Setsuko, who lose their mother in an air raid, have to live by their own, because their father was serving Japanese naval force and the other relatives, especially a paternal aunt, have gone indifferent as a direct result of war (the live action version of the film tells the story from the aunt’s perspective). The story, on an emotional level, is about the loss of the dear ones, but since it unfolds in wartime, in its most sublime moments, it contemplates on war.

Graves of the Fireflies, according to me, works extraordinarily as an anti-war film. Stylistically, the film has some important things that make it work. The most significant is that it is an animation film. Animation, as we know, can create powerful magic of mixing beauty and grotesque, graspable and distant, fairytale and surreal, and Japanese seem to have mastered it. Secondly, the film is essentially a recollection of past, told by a dead boy, who brings in two main themes of the film, one is that of the haunting memories of loss, and second is some sort of voice of the dead, and that too not from an adult's perspective. Its not a story told by the survivor, but by someone who is consumed, emotionally and physically, by war. The mix of these two, the animation and reminiscence of past by a victim, makes the film, at once - both direct (thats why very emotional too) and dreamy, a type of, if I can say so, amine-realism, where your emotions are as much for what you see on screen, as for the idea of such act.

When we see the malnourished body of Setsuko lying with a piece of melon on her chest, it is a powerful image of the human offering to the war god. Many such powerful images appear in the film, and with all the dread of doom, there are moments of childhood fun and pure aesthetic brilliance on the canvass. At times, the film rests on water color scenery with an evocative music in the background. One wonders at the very accurate facial expression on face of Setsuko and that childhood gesture of moving shoulders, standing at a place and looking down, when Setsuko wants to meet her mother, an expression a child uses to convey denial and demand, and a successive attempt (Seita starts doing gymnastics) by the big brother to cheer her up, with an extraordinary background score.

Akiyuki Nosaka, whose novel the film is based on, wrote it to come in terms to his sister’s death during wartime, which he blamed himself for. Nosaka, as a survivor, suffers with its guilt, which he doesn't try to absolve, but we must know that the death of Seita in the beginning of the story is some sort of spiritual and emotional death, not the physical one, and the recollection of images of past is an amalgam of what he wanted to do, and what he actually did for his sister in the inhuman time of war, and what he tries to tell us is something about the endless suffering of a survivor.

In an interview, Akiyuki Nosaka talks more about the novel. A review here.