Getting back to reading

“We like lists because we don’t want to die”, says Umberto Eco.

Not sure if that’s the reason I am writing this post but then the apocalypticaly tagged 2012 is also hanging close, so who knows what the subconscious mind may be cooking.

Anyhow, coming back to the title of the post, I actually didn’t read the whole year, save for the last two or three months. Part reason was the miserable business of life and also i didn’t much look beyond the few good writers I had read some years ago. A small opening, reading one or two previously unread but only heard voices led to a resurgence of sorts and am pretty glad for that. So without much further ado I’ll just list(Yeah, Mr Eco must be grinning now) some of the good titles.

Solo – Rana Dasgupta

Coincidence is what comes to my mind as I think of this book now. Though i read it now, I had in fact brought a copy some two to three years ago, when it was yet to be the winner of prestigious commonwealth prize. Going back home as I stayed over at a dear friend’s place, a book on his shelf caught my attention with its title and I decided to read a few pages. It was The Case of Exploding Mangoes and after having read some I decided to trade the book for Solo, with the intention of taking it back while coming back from home, though it never happened. Incidentally The Case of Exploding Mangoes later that year won the Commonwealth First book prize and Solo won the Commonwealth Best book prize the next year.

Solo is a story narrated by a hundred year old blind Bulgarian, Ulrich, who reminisces over his past and often daydreams. Overtly ambitious in its scope it tries to capture the life of a common man, an everyman, torn through the upheavels of the last century, which forms the 1st part of the novel, named – First Moment : Life. The second part, named- Second Moment : Day Dreams, takes few characters, with certain similarities to the cast of the 1st part, through the much changed landscape in the later part of the century, though the fate of these characters remains overpowered by the sociocultural and political forces of historical magnitude. A brilliant read.

Tokyo Canceled – Rana Dasgupta

It was imminent that after having read Solo one would seek his other novel, which is a collection of short stories, narrated by passengers stranded on an airport after their flight got canceled.  Though the tone and character of these stories remains the same through out, for which the author was pointed out by numerous critics, but nevertheless the inventiveness and imagination behind them sails the book through many a miles. The stories are often surreal imbued with elements of magical realism. A highly recommended read.

The NewYork Trilogy –  Paul Auster

The books contains three stories City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room. All three are one of the initial works of Auster and were published individually, though they have been clubbed now as the Trilogy. Told in the form of detective fiction they are essentially existential tales of certain individual in search of certain identities, which often merge with their own identities blurring the lines of reality. I had some time ago read the Travels in the Scriptorium by the same author but it didn’t enthuse me enough to explore him further. I guess now I’l read few more of his works.

The High Window – Raymond Chandler

This book was another highlight of the year.I had never much liked detective fiction before, but after reading about Murakami’s inherent indulgence in his works, I was tempted to see what was being offered there and that check proved to be a rewarding experience. Its now easy to see from where the stylistic influence in Murakami’s fiction comes from.

The protagonist, Marlowe is the perfect hardboiled detective. He’s a tough, clever, contemplative chap who’s always ready with a wisecrack up his sleeve. Effortless in holding his own in any tough situation. A literary influence on many a crime fiction writers after Chandler. Another of the best thing about Chandler’s writing style is how beautifully things, places, faces or people are described.  A delight to read. Quite a savoury experience.

Lady in the lake by Chandler is what am reading now.

Will you be quite, please? – Raymond Caver

The obsession to check the writing influences of Murakami made me read Raymond Caver too. Will you be quite, please? is a shot story collection. These are stories of common people, of their everyday mundane encounters, bordering on some quirky, eccentric upheaval, though mostly the tension is built but never released. The stories end usually with a tantalizing feel.

One Last Story and that’s it – Keret Etger

After having read Caver and Dasgupta’s short stories, reading some article about contemporary short story writers got me to check out Keret Etger and what a delightful experience it turned out to be. Etgar writes in a playful, mundane manner. The stories are often 2-3 pages long. All starting with everyday people or situations that are ready to take sinister tragic turns. There’s a tragicomic hint to every situation. At times things have their dreadful fated ends, though on others times events unfold to leave a smile on your face.

While Mortal’s Sleep – Kurt Vonnegut

While on that short story reading spree I also tried this. A great Humanist as Kurt was, these stories too mostly serve the purpose of telling a moral or driving home some point, though this implicit push robs the stories of their sheen. These stories are from his early times and were published posthumously this year.

Open – Biography of Andre Agassi

Whatever was seen over the years on and off the court was filled by this book with a heart wrenching as well as uplifting story of a great human. If Tennis is music to some, then he’s the Jim Morrison who’s survived through. These stories are once lived and then only told afterwards.

Also read some literary essays from Stranger Shores by J M Coetzee.

Read some in poetry too. Currently half through Rumi’s Selected Poems, Penguin edition. Also got hold of The Great Enigma by Tomas Transtormer and Charles Bukowski’s The pleasure of the Damned.

There were few currently half read, ready to be finished ones also. Orhan Pamuk’s The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist and Coetzee’s Elisabeth Costello top that list. Though there were few other’s too but i don’t see my self completing them except these two.

Currently reading Murakami’s 1Q84,  apart from few mentioned above.

Lets see what 2012 has in store.

Setting men apart.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning towards dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes like air, and every deep drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in your brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and the trees of him dark and somber. The events, even important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and the number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates to us in the world. It is the mother of all creativness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

– From East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Murakami on Writing

So what do you do when you have a sudden urge to read Murakami, knowing pretty well that the urge is because of the date, of his latest magnum opus 1Q84‘s english release coming closer?

Well, if you are one of a character from his world, ironing clothes will be a good idea. Or may be cooking spaghetti will do the trick. Or may one should consider listening to some Beatles tune or some Mozart’s piece. Or just check the road outside for some cat to follow. Or may be do nothing and just wait for the phone to ring, hoping for some strange women to call.

Anyhow, I decided to read his interviews. There were many out there and he’s quite candid about his ways and reasons of writing. Below are few excerpts from his interviews.

I write weird stories. I don’t know why I like weirdness so much. Myself, I’m a very realistic person. I don’t trust anything New Age — or reincarnation, dreams, Tarot, horoscopes. I don’t trust anything like that at all. I wake up at 6 in the morning and go to bed at 10, jogging every day and swimming, eating healthy food. I’m very realistic. But when I write, I write weird. That’s very strange. When I’m getting more and more serious, I’m getting more and more weird. When I want to write about the reality of society and the world, it gets weird. Many people ask me why, and I can’t answer that. But I recognized when I was interviewing those 63 ordinary people — they were very straightforward, very simple, very ordinary, but their stories were sometimes very weird. That was interesting.

[..]

..subconscious is very important to me as a writer. I don’t read much Jung, but what he writes has some similarity with my writing. To me the subconscious is terra incognita. I don’t want to analyze it, but Jung and those people, psychiatrists, are always analyzing dreams and the significance of everything. I don’t want to do that. I just take it as a whole. Maybe that’s kind of weird, but I’m feeling like I can do the right thing with that weirdness. Sometimes it’s very dangerous to handle that. You remember that scene in the mysterious hotel? I like the story of Orpheus, his descending, and this is based on that. The world of death and you enter there at your own risk. I think that I am a writer, and I can do that. I am taking my own risk. I have confidence that I can do it.

But it takes time. When I started to write this book and I was writing and writing every day, then when that darkness came, I was ready to enter it. It took time before that, to reach that stage. You can’t do that by starting to write today and then tomorrow entering that kind of world. You have to endure and labor every day. You have to have the ability to concentrate. I think that’s the most important ingredient to the writer. For that I was training every day. Physical power is essential. Many authors don’t respect that. [Laughs] They drink too much and smoke too much. I don’t criticize them, but to me, strength is critical. People don’t believe that I’m a writer because I’m jogging and swimming every day. They say, “He’s not a writer.”

– From The Salon, a 1997 interview titled The Outsider.

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

[..]

When I make up the characters in my books, I like to observe the real people in my life. I don’t like to talk much; I like to listen to other people’s stories. I don’t decide what kind of people they are; I just try to think about what they feel, where they are going. I gather some factors from him, some factors from her. I don’t know if this is “realistic” or “unrealistic,” but for me, my characters are more real than real people. In those six or seven months that I’m writing, those people are inside me. It’s a kind of cosmos.

[..]

Please think about it this way: I have a twin brother. And when I was two years old, one of us—the other one—was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since. I think my protagonist is him. A part of myself, but not me, and we haven’t seen each other for a long time. It’s a kind of alternative form of myself. In terms of DNA, we are the same, but our environment has been different. So our way of thinking would be different. Every time I write a book I put my feet in different shoes. Because sometimes I am tired of being myself. This way I can escape. It’s a fantasy. If you can’t have a fantasy, what’s the point of writing a book?

– From The Paris Review, from a 2004 interview.

Few other intervews – When I Run I Am in a Peaceful Place, Roll Over Basho: Who Japan Is Reading, and Why & this page has a collection of other articles and interviews on Murakami.

And yeah, I forgot to mention, that urge that I talked about in the begining, was fueled further after reading his new short story The Town of Cats in The New Yorker, which apparently is a part of 1Q84.

The Best of Youth

This was my second viewing of The Best of Youth, though I totally skipped the 1st part this time. And also a bit of 2nd part’s carview.php?tsp=beginning. It was that urge which somehow has parallels to the childhood desire to grow up quickly. I just didn’t want to see the characters in that 1st phase of their lives, may be because that’s the stage I am currently in.

Anyhow, its an epic. Yes, a relatively unseen and unknown epic. More unseen, then unknown if one may say. Primarily because of its long six hours duration, which is the greatest thing about it and also the very thing which will keep it unseen for the rest of its life, or rather the life of we human race.

A great review will be a good tribute I guess, and which in turn will be a great reason to watch it again.

Though it feels suspect, but I guess I can welcome myself to blogging again.:)

 

In the Mood for Love

It is a restless moment.
She has kept her head lowered,
to give him a chance to come closer.
But he could not, for lack of courage.
She turns and walks away.

That era has passed.
Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.

He remembers those vanished years.
As though looking through a dusty window pane,
the past is something he could see, but not touch.
And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.InMoodLove

There’s something strange with Wong Kar Wai movies, the more I watch them the more I happen to like them. Some time ago Chungking Express was my favorite movie, and I had happened to watch it three times. Then came the second viewing of 2046 and it seemed to push Chungking Express behind. And now there’s In the Mood for Love knocking up there, as I watched it one more time.

The magic of Wong Kar Wai’s just seems like a gorgeous dream that just keeps repeating itself, making you remember it more vividly then ever.

The male protagonist, Chow Mo-Wan, once tells his friend that in his country when people want to unburden a secret, they go up a mountain and dig a hole to bury the secret there. But its not some secret that Chow Mo-Wan wants to get rid of, but several feelings and emotions that could not could not reach their rightful conclusion. That’s the end of the story, which begins with Chow Mo-Wan and his next door neighbor So Lai-zhen slowly discovering the infidelity of their spouses and then starts the playful enacting of scenarios of how their spouses could have started that very something which now has brought them together. Little they realise, or may be they fully do, about what has started brewing between them but something hold them back, keeping them form doing what their spouses did, by painting their relationship in colors that their spouses soiled. Well, that’s actually the story, which I guess was all Wong Kar wai had in mind when he would have concieved the idea or rather when he started shooting, as it’s charactersic of his style of never working with any script and developing the story with each scene, often shooting more and then carving the story while final editing.

The movie’s a veritable mood peice, fleetingly moving from one scene to another,  shifting between different hues and colors, yet always blending with the overall melancholic and at times melodramatic texture.  The colors, the music, the different directions. In one scene, titled Last Reunion, both meet in Angkorwat, then there’s another scequence titles Room 2046, where their relationship reaches the level which they always seem to shy away.  hese all threads look to be the remnants of his movie making style but then there was this comment by Wong Kar Wai himself, “the role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it’s very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters – and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, ‘This guy is really weird.’ It’s the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick“.

Here’s a video reflecting upon the music of the movie.

That annoying feeling

So what does it mean now?
nothing has changed,
not the stars, not the colors,
not even the toads.

is it just me?
or just the the air around me,
even i doubt that,
i guess it was always there.

what has changed is just the moment,
with that just the flip of the grey cells,
and accompnaying them is, some always obeying something,
resonsible for this unassuming, yet arrogant smile.

I hate it,
but can’t escape it,
need it,
but can’t own it.

Gandhi, Guha and the Moolah

Contemporary history’s best-known ‘fakir’ has landed his latest biographer the fattest kitty in the annals of Indian publishing. Penguin India has offered an advance of Rs 1 crore to bag historian Ram Guha’s two-volume project on Mahatma Gandhi in a quiet but stunning recession-era deal that has wowed the competition and pitched Indian book industry into the global league.

From here.

Well, what more can one say!

Ulysses and Us

In August 1924, the long-suffering Stanislaus Joyce sent a letter of complaint to his brother, James, in which he mentioned his difficulties with Ulysses. “The greater part of it I like,” he wrote, before adding with characteristic bluntness: “I have no humour with episodes which are deliberately farcical… and as episodes grow longer and longer and you try to tell every damn thing you know about anybody that appears or anything that crops up, my patience oozes out.”

from here

I have been meaning to read Ulysses for quite some time now, so much so that the book has been lying on my bookself for the past year and half, but to be true the only thing that brings my enthusiasm down is that Joyce talks about anything to everything there, and often laced with puns, allusions and hidden meanings, so the fear being that I may not be able to understand and appreciate everything.
Well, let’s see, may be this summer.

Weekend Movies

The ReturnThe Return is a moving drama about two brothers whose father returns back after twelve long years. The brothers Ivan and Andrey, aged around twelve and fifteen respectively, live with their mother and grandmother. While Andrey, has an amiable, going with the wind attitude, younger Ivan is much more stubborn and deeply emotional. As they run back home after a fight between themselves, they are shocked to know their father is back, whom they then confirm from an old faded photograph. Slowly the strains of the long absence start becoming obvious as the father fails to show any enthusiasm towards them. Then he tells them of the fishing trip they will be doing a day after. So begins a difficult journey, which slowly becomes emotional as well as psychological in nature as, on one hand Andrey strives to please his father despite his cold demeanor, whereas on the other hand their begins a battle of sorts between Ivan and the father, with both adamant and resentful as ever towards each other. Their journey then takes them to a mysterious island, while the strain between the three almost increases even more.

The movie has a keen elliptical quality as it’s never made clear where the father had been for those years and why he went to that island. Though the father and Andrey deliver their performances very well, it’s Ivan who becomes the soul of the story, capturing the seething undercurrents of the movie. The movie is also cinematically quite accomplished but not that much to earn comparisons with Tarkovsky, as few critics had done.

Quite sadly, the kid who plays Andrey drowned in a lake shortly after the shooting was over.

The movie won, Andrey Petrovich Zvyagintsev, the director, a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

****************************************************************

Girl on the BridgeAt times how well a movie finally comes out to be depends entirely on its lead character, or may be it appears so because of certain performances. Vanessa Chantal Paradis, acting as Adèle, delivers one such performance in The Girl on the Bridge. Adèle is one visceral as well as unlucky girl, who hopelessly falls in love with every guy she meets and as luck has for her the meetings always end as an act of promiscuousness. The opening scene, a monologue by Adèle, addressing as it looks to some jury, almost sets the tone of the movie. Disappointed by her failed love affairs Adèle has decided to end her life, so as she’s about to jump from a bridge she’s stalled by a knifethrower, who talks her out to be his target girl in the knife throwing act. Hesitatingly she agrees and thus begins their journey of luck and adventure.

The movie’s shot in black and white, saddled with swooping camera movements, which give the movie the fleetingness it desires. With echoes of La Strada, the movie may not be that original but Vanessa portrayal of Adèle does adds freshness to it.

Here’s the opening scene.

Cannes 2009, Awards

Palme d’Or : THE WHITE RIBBON directed by Michael HANEKE

Grand Prix : A PROPHET directed by Jacques AUDIARD

Award for Best Director : Brillante MENDOZA for KINATAY

Award for Best Screenplay : LOU Ye for Spring Fever

Award for Best Actress : Charlotte GAINSBOURG in ANTICHRIST directed by Lars VON TRIER

Award for Best Actor :Christoph WALTZ in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS directed by Quentin TARANTINO

Jury Prize Ex-aequo :FISH TANK directed by Andrea ARNOLD &  THIRST directed by PARK Chan-Wook

Vulcain Prize for an artist technician : MAP OF THE SOUNDS OF TOKYO directed by Isabel COIXET

Lifetime achievement award : WILD GRASS directed by Alain RESNAIS

**

Complete List Here

NYT Article

On Memory

We tend to be sad at loss of things.
What about memory?
Don’t we forget also?
How about memory’s pain,
it’s sadness,
it’s strive to remember,
it’s act of burial.

****

Is melancholy an act of memory weeping?
Weeping and keeping things to itself.

What is melancholy? a sense of sadness without any reason,
just like cold caressing wind on a dry summer night,
with the sky venting out it’s cry somewhere else.

****

The most faithful act memory can do is to keep a secret by forgetting it.

****

Isn’t memory the most faithful mistress ever,
always there, keeping together every shred of our existence.

but a casual whim and we could lose ourselves for ever.

may be schizophrenia is an act of euthanasia,
an act of memory, relieving us of it’s burden.

but then is memory a burden on us? or the other way round.

The courtyard

It was that time of the day when a little rain and few clouds make the sun give everything around a dusty look. Sitting at one end was Grandma enjoying the weather and watching the mundane everyday affair. Children were playing in the courtyard, with Mala shouting, asking them to go and play outside.

“Shanu! Go outside and play, your father is about to come. And I won’t be saving you from the beating this time”, Mala shouted again.

“Ma today’s saturday. He won’t be back till 9”, came the retort.

“SHANU!!”, she came out with a broom in her hand, threatening to sweep aside the kids as if she’s had been transformed into Gulliver or they into Lilliputians.

The kids ran away, but then stopped again just outside the main door, turning back to ascertain the resolve in their mother’s eyes. But there she was, just an arm’s length from them, still marching towards them. With a loud shout, mixed with laughter and thrill, they ran again, this time not turning back till they had left 4-5 similarly constructed houses behind.

The courtyard is pretty small, though big by any standards in their locality, as few seasons ago Mala’s family and theirs decided to bring down the wall separating their houses so as to increase the courtyard.

Today Grandma was alone at home as Biju, her son, had taken his wife and their son to the nearby Circus. It was Biju’s father and Mala’s father in law, who had struck the deal. Both had been partners in the Pan-Bidi shop they had been running together for 15 years. And since most of the time one was at other’s house, one fine day they decided to bring the wall down. People around were filled with envy when they heard the news, not that they didn’t envy their friendship before but the thought of an increased courtyard added weight to it. So much so that grandma considered their death, after an unruly drunk driver ran into their small pan-bidi shop during night, to be the bad omen brought by covetousness of the community. Now she seemed to have gotten over the incident, partly by the fact that both would be together in the after world.

Grandma was looking across the sky, may be hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband in some formation of the clouds, or may be wondering how many rains it will take for his memories to wash away.

There was a knock on the door, as the door was open the men outside were peeking inside. They were in bit better clothes, or rather far better clothes going by the standards around the slum they were living in. As is the instinct always, Mala sensed them from some government office. May be they are in there to give the compensation for the accident that took three seasons ago, grandma wondered. She looked at them and then turned her gaze away as she saw Mala marching towards them. Of late she seemed to be quite detached from anything that seemed to happen around her.

Grandmother looked at them again, as the noise of their chattering grew. She saw Mala and the three other men coming towards her.

The one in black shirt asked, “AuntyJi, Who is eldest of the family?”

“Tell them Ma, who is the elder one Biju or Shyam”, added Mala.

Grandma looked at them with a blank not understanding what they were asking. The other two men looked impatient; one in white shirt muttered something to the one in black.

Mala rephrased the question again, “Ma Isn’t Shyam elder than Biju?”

Grandma shaked her head, though nobody could decipher whether it was affirmation or she just wanted them to ask the question again. Mala looked worried, managing a smile she looked at the officer in Black. Slightly nodding his head, the officer said, “Alright, it ok now”, and he wrote something in a paper, then asked Mala to write something, then nodded again saying something to grandma, which she again couldn’t understand.

Fifteen minutes later she was still sitting at the same spot. It was getting dark now. She could hear the chirping of the kids, they were coming back. Shyam had been back home, few minutes ago and she had been hearing him and Mala fighting again as usual. Suddenly there was a big bang at the main door, Binu came jumping in and as he caught glimpse of grandma he came running towards her.

“Ma I saw a huge Lion there. A man was making him do things as if the  Lion was a cat.”, said Binu with excitement. Just then he saw the other kids and ran towards them.

Shyam had come out now and was taking to Biju. Biju was now shouting at Shyam. They looked to be fighting over something, but grandma couldn’t be sure, she dismissed it as a daily chore and turned her gaze towards the kids. Mala had also joined the fight, and then suddenly Shyam slapped her. There was silence for some seconds. Grandma looked at them more attentively now, though again she couldn’t understand much but they seemed to be talking about some Municipal Officers, doing some legalization, and the land on which they were living now now was in Shyam’s name.

As Shyam moved his eyes from Mala to Biju, his expression of hatred slowely turned to be of being ashamed. Grandma now understood what had was happening. With her eyes watery now, she turned her gaze again towards the sky, hoping to unite with her husband soon.

The Last Life in the Universe

Kenji is a librarian, living in clean house stacked with books. He has been attempting suicide for some time but something or the other always saves him or rather something always happens just before he is about to commit it. Then one day as he’s about to attempt another suicide, he witnesses an accident of a girl named Nid. He then lands up in the hospital, while helping her sister Noi, and then eventually at Noi’s home. And there begins a small friendship, which distracts Kenji from his habitual attempts of suicide as he ends up spending few days at Noi’s place.

Kenji is also obsessed with the story of The Last lizard, which is about a lizard who one day realizes that he is the last of his species left on earth. This is from where the tile of the movie comes from. Though it’s not mentioned explicitly but somewhere inside Kenji believes himself to be that lizard.

LastLife

The most sublime thing about The Last Life in the Universe is its pace. Even when suicide almost is a daily chore, three people are killed just like that, fourth one dies in an accident, yet life is unhurried at best there. Things move as if in unison, even while they are moving towards opposite ends. While Kenji is a cleanliness freak, Noi’s place just has a look of abandonment. Kenji is Japanese and Noi a Thai, with none knowing more than a word or two of each other’s language. Even the English they speak is broken. Noi slowly turns into Nid and then back to Noi again. One scene Kenji is caught for murder that he did commit and the next we see him back to Noi in Japan. Things do move, but it’s all very calm and quite, it’s not even that there is an underlying stretch of restrain which may break everything if something is disturbed. It’s just like dripping in abandonment, something that someone may feel, if he’s the last life in the universe.

Existentialism is a Humanism | Sartre

One of the plights that existentialism as a philosophy has endured over time is multiple interpretations as well as multiple meanings. One of the main reason is that though the term was coined in 20th century, it was then pinned on the works of some previous philosophers who wrote about some questions and problems that it sought to answer.No one really knows how much those philosophers would have ascribed to it. One pretty apparent example is Camus, who many a times is associated with existentialism, owing to certain similar problems that he sought to address, but never really propagated it. So much so that he even openly refused the connection.

Existentialism is a Humanism was one of the early works of Sartre and was written soon after the term was coined and was starting to become popular. The essay is more of a reply to some of the arguments put against it at that time; also it’s an attempt of rescuing it from multitude of different easy-as-per-convenience definitions, as associating with existentialism became a kind of cool things that time. The main intent of the essay, as evident from the title is the Humanism connection which Sartre puts but committing that when a man chooses an action or performs a deed he’s not only responsible for himself but also of everyone else. Few snippets:

When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.

[….]

But the subjectivity which we thus postulate as the standard of truth is no narrowly individual subjectivism, for as we have demonstrated, it is not only one’s own self that one discovers in the cogito, but those of others too. Contrary to the philosophy of Descartes, contrary to that of Kant, when we say “I think” we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are.

Sartre in the essay ends up talking about this individual-humanity connection in two aspects. First one is more of a moral binding, which I don’t know how many of the other existentialists would aggree to. Second one is more interesting as it has some hues of phemenology, but still it seems distant from the any humanism what so ever. but going strictly by the defination of Humanism it ideally has to be moralistic. Well, existentialism though looks pretty plain in a general understanding it certainly does have lot more beneath it. I have a copy of Being and Nothingness with me now, but it looks pretty daunting.  Here the link of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard & the Existential Philosophy. Looks to be an interesting read, though Shestov’s writing is said to be paradoxical at places.

Sharmila Tagore on Cannes Jury

Well, there’s the surprise, Sharmila Tagore had been added to be the nine and final member of the Jury that will be deciding winner of the Palme d’Or this year. I do have childhood memories of seeing her in Indian movies, but haven’t seen any of her movie in the recent past. I guess I’ll be watching Satyajit Ray’s Appu soon, where she appears as Apu’s wife.

Link

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Unbearable Lightness of beingI read the book some two years back, liked every bit of it but somehow it felt hurried then, or maybe I read it so. And because of this I had been a bit apprehensive about watching this movie since then, but guess I was proved wrong. The movie’s quite stunning. The actors perform so seamlessly, so amazingly, in such an unassuming way that you wish the movie to go on and on. The role of Thomas is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, whom I must say I didn’t recognize until I decided to google to see who’s that guy giving such a fantabulous performance that I haven’t seen or heard about. And Voila! He’s Daniel Day-Lewis of There will be Blood fame, this year’s winner of Oscar for Best Actor category. It’s not only Thomas but also roles of Tereza and Sabina played so well that the movie becomes forthrightly a character study trying to unravel its central motif.

The book revolves around and explores Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return which Kundera writes, as below, in the first chapter:

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every mood we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

So this is what is explored through the three characters (actually four in Book, Franz gets too little of screen time in the movie).

Thomas, the main protagonist is a surgeon and a philanderer who takes love and sex to be two separate things and maintains a balance between the two. Sabina is his mistress with whom he shares a special relationship of understanding; or rather one could say she’s the one who understands him well. This view of his  is not some weakness of heart or of character but it’s his belief. This is quite supported by the stance that he takes against Soviet pressure after writing a political article just for fun. Thomas’s role presents the ultimate see saw between the Lightness and Weight as while staying true to his passions he marries Teresa. As when he had allowed her stay with him, he says to Sabina,  You think I am doing something silly. But how can I be sure about. If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life’s so light. Like an outline we can’t ever fill in or correct… make any better. It’s frightening.

Teresa, played by Juliette Binoche, marries Thomas after one day she unexpectedly lands up at his place following their casual meeting at a bar. Tereza knows bery well about Thomas’s ways but instead of condemning him blames herself to be too week. She even once in a attempt to act on Thomas’s ways ends up spending a night with a stranger but later ends up regretting it and hating herself even more. She loves Thomas even with his infidelities and that becomes her heaviest burden.

Sabina, played by Lena Olin, is the opposite, showing the true essence of lightness. She’s a painter, loves mirrors and understands Thomas well. She loves Thomas but there’s no attachment of her towards him. When Franz leaves his family for her and shows up at her door, though she loves him, she ends up running away. Also she even leaves Thomas and Teresa as Teresa’s unrelenting love for Thomas and the pain form that could have become a burden for her.

The movie stays open to multiple interpretations as weight and lightness are concerned. Kundera says, what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all, stating the insignificance of our decisions and so ultimately our life. This is lightness and heaviness simultaneously, because if decisions don’t matter they can’t cause suffering, but yet on the whole this stance makes make life insignificant, thereby causing misery.

I feel like reading the book again and I guess these characters will stay with me for a long time.
Few reviews: here, here n here(of book). And yeah the movie is 100% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes.

1Q84

Yeah, the title looks interesting and one can only imagine how interesting a book by the same title is going to be, as it is the latest offering by Haruki Murakami. Yup, the master’s done with his new book and it is due for release in Japan this May. It will take some time for the English translation to come and also for the fact that its going to be his longest book till date so some more translation time I guess, but nevertheless how can one complain, it’s Murakami. Title actually means 1984, n its a homage to Orwell. Orwell wrote it looking into the future, whereas Murakami will plumb the depths of the past.

Few links: Here, here, n here .

On Reason

I don’t know why people have a inherent distrust of Reason. Or a tendency to take it in conflict with emotions, feelings and experiences. Reason is what? A mental exercise or tool, or a certain way of dealing with anything that registers in our brain be it emotions, feelings, thoughts or anything else. And what it does? Tries to make sense or build a coherent reality. Yeah it has limitations. Limitations coming from the fact that it acts on facts, thoughts, emotions, feelings and experiences and these things in any case have too many a variables, and too many interrelations among those variables. And our mental faculties cannot register them all, and even whatever that may get registered may not be comprehensible, or comprehensible but conflicting to earlier perceptions. So in all reason may assist us but can never give us something compete in all sense.

Also reasoning about anything comes after these thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Yeah but prior reasoning may influence these processes. It was Kant who opposed Humes assertion that reason doesn’t influences experience. It does. A human life builds using reason, consciously as well as subconsciously, on these sensory experiences. Thats how a child, who’s blank while coming to life, grows. Had there been no subconscious process of reasoning( i.e judging, predicting, inferring, generalizing, comparing) a child would not have grown to be what we are now 25 years down the line.

An emotion or a feeling will always be more truer than any articulation of it, yeah but it may be then conflicting, confusing,  or frightening. A prior reason may influence this emotion or feeling in a positive or negative way and reason may again come into play after that emotion or feeling but in doesn’t rob you of it. Now this prior reason that influences people is what creates this distrust, but isn’t it our own fears and inhibitions at work here. And isn’t that a subconscious process. A child also shows that but he ain’t reasoning(consciously) anywhere anytime. So why blame conscious reasoning when its the subconscious way of human mind at work here.

We human are made in such a way that we keep on adding anything that comes our way. We keep on storing emotions, feelings, thoughts, experiences, views etc all along our life. Or simply put only two things, sensory perception and ideas of mind as Kant would have liked to put. Its a baggage  and it needs to present a coherent reality, things need to be in sync and reason’s just a tool.

One could say that we can still function effectively with a certain level of rationality. Yeah we can but isn’t that subjective now that you want to trust your leap of faith, am not denying it nor am leaving it just that am not leaving reason also and am not scared of it. Lets take homosexuality as an example. A century ago the concept of it was non existent. But what is it? Ain’t it bound by emotions and feelings? And these emotions and feelings are not felt the same way by all. So would you also see it with distrust as its something alien to your sensory percept? Doesn’t reason here save us all? Isn’t it by an act of reasoning that we understand and approve of it?

Its human tendency to simplify things. Our language is full of these simplifications. What is pain? What is love? Can these tiny four letter words do justice to everything that these words may try to mean? Can these words mean the same to any two persons? No. But we still use these words, fully aware of their limitations. Isn’t reason far better than that? Actually it looks, but it’s on the same level ground as language. A simple act of 2+2 looks so pure and amazing. Point two birds to a child and then another one joins then and you say 2+1 equals three and the child accepts it so very convincingly. Why? Because it’s simple. It’s reason but very simple. A human emotion or feeling is not that simple, so reason may not do justice to it all but then its not its fault, it’s just human condition. How simple and beautiful were Newtons laws, but then along came Einstein and they became complex. So can’t one say that Newton’s laws were actually approximations? And don’t they still stand useful to the same extent in our day to day lives.

Man is social being and as Language is medium of communication, reason can be viewed as a medium of aggrement. This thing called subjectivity at once makes it immensely difficult for any two beings to understand what the other means by anything. Language provides a medium of exchnage of thoughts but to still agree and understand one needs to bind these things with reason as every emotion or feeling by every second individual is different.

Some say reason is just a mean to an end. We use reason to justify what we anyways will do. But isn’t that touching a blind spot now? Attributing our decisions to subconcious mind and then saying reasoning is just an after thought. Can’t it be said that prior experiences and reasoning based on them influences our current decisions. Yes, it does. So what’s the point?

I guess biggest fault of ours is to say that reason interfears with our emotions, experiences and feelings. It doesn’t.  It acts on them and may have something to say before one engages in similar sensory perceptual acts again. So what’s the fuss? I’ll watch a Wong Kar Wai movie the same way even if I tried dissecting the last movie after watching it. Would it make me enjoy the colors less the next time I watch a Wong Kar Wai movie, if I know now that Christopher Doyle uses vanguard color grading techniques. No! I guess not.

Cannes ‘09, Official Selection Revealed

The lineup is studded with some big heavyweights of the likes of Almodovar, Lars Von Trier, Tsai Ming-liang, Resnais, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, and Haneke. French actress Isabelle Huppert heads the feature film jury. The jury also has Nuru Bilge Ceylan, who won the best director award here last year for Three Monkeys. Interestingly the jury also features the writer Hanif Kureshi.

The festival begins May 13, and goes till May 24. And as usual and expected, no Indian entry there.

Here‘s the fesitval’s official website.

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The 2009 Cannes competition lineup:

“Abrazos Rotos” (Broken Embraces), directed by Pedro Almodovar
“Antichrist,” directed by Lars Von Trier
“Bright Star,” directed by Jane Campion
“Enter The Void,” directed by Gasper Noe
“Faces,” directed by Tsai Ming-liang
“Fish Tank,” directed by Andrea Arnold
“Kinatay,” directed by directed by Brillante Mendoza
“Les Herbes folles,” directed by Alain Resnais
“In The Beginning,” directed by Xavier Giannoli
“Inglorious Basterds,” directed by Quentin Tarantino
“Looking For Eric,” directed by Ken Loach
“Map of the Sounds of Tokyo,” directed by Isabel Coixet
“A Prophet,” directed by Jacques Audiard
“Spring Fever,” directed by Lou Ye
“Taking Woodstock,” directed by Ang Lee
“The Time That Remains,” directed by Elia Suleiman
“Thirst,” directed by directed by Park Chan Wook
“Vengeance,” directed by Johnny To
“Vincere,” directed by Marco Bellocchio
“The White Ribbon,” directed by Michael Haneke

Opening Film:
“Up,” directed by Peter Docter
(out of competition)

Closing Film:
“Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky,” directed by Jan Kounen
(out of competition)

Out of Competition:
“Agora,” directed by Alejandro Amenabar
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” directed by Terry Gilliam
“L’Armee du Crime,” directed by Robert Guediguian

Midnight Screenings:
“A Town Called Panic,” directed by Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar
“Drag Me To Hell,” directed by Sam Raimi
“Ne Te Retourne Pas,” directed by Marina de Van

Special Screenings :
“My Neighbor, My Killer,” directed by Anne Aghion
“Martin Manila,” directed by Adolfo Alix, Jr.
“Min Ye,” directed by Souleymane Cisse
“L’Epine Dans Le Coeur,” directed by Michel Gondry
“Petition,” directed b Zhao Liang
“Kalat Hayam” (Jaffa), directed by Keren Yedaya

Un Certain Regard

“Mother,” directed by Bong Joon Ho
“Irene,” directed by Alain Cavalier
“Precious,” directed by Lee Daniels
“Demain Des L’Aube,” directed by Denis Dercourt
“Adrift,” directed by Heitor Dhalia
“Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats,” directed by Bahman Ghobadi
“Los Viajes del Viento,” directed by Ciro Guerra
“Le Pere de mes Enfants,” directed by Mia Hansen-Love
“Tales from the Golden Age,” directed by Hanno Hoefer, Ravan Marculescu, Cristian Mungiu, Constantin Popescu, Ioana Uricaru
“Tale in the Darkness,” directed by Nikolay Khomeriki
“Air Doll,” directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda
“Dogtooth,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
“Tzar,” directed by Pavel Lounguine
“Independence,” directed by Raya Martin
“Politist, Adjectiv,” directed by Corneliu Porumboiu
“Nymph,” directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang
“Morrer Como Un Homem,” directed by Jao Pedro Rodgrigues
“Eyes Wide Open,” directed by Haim Tabakman
“Samson and Delilah,” directed by Warwick Thornton
“The Silent Army,” directed by Jean van de Velde

From

French New Wave is 50 now, almost

The French New Wave, 50 years old today, was the greatest criminal enterprise in cinema history. A gang of filmmakers led a raid on the Bank of Tradition. They emptied its funds with the sole purpose of closing a near-bankrupt heritage, so that a new art could begin. Drawing aid from their own fund of resources (literature, Italian neo-realism, vérité documentary, the Hollywood B-movie), they created a new syndicate in screen culture. Cinema, almost overnight, became an organised bandit art, united in sedition, steadfast in rupture, forthright in innovation, enduring in immediacy.

Link

Well, the article is dated April 4th, not sure if that date  is actually the date. Usually Le beau Serge is recognized to be the first new wave feature. It was first featured in Locarno Film Festival around late 1958 and then officially released Jan 1959, in both France and US. Or may be the writer above referred to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, but then it was released in Nov 1959. Anyway, pinning down to one date won’t take away anything from how it shaped the world cinema.
Guess, I should get down to watch some movies of Chabrol, Rohmer or Varda, though less famous but still the great proponents.

Anurag Kashyap Interview

Q: Is there a method to the madness then?
AK: No, I do not like to storyboard at all. Mostly, my method of directing a scene is to tell my actors what their basic actions within the scene are. And then, I mostly call the steadicam operator, let the camera roll, and let the actors move within the environment, as I follow them. For instance, in a scene between Abhay and Mahie for Dev D., I merely followed Mahie around, till she reached Abhay, thus allowing the camera to include both of them within the frame. As the dialogue progressed, Abhay walked out of the frame, and then, as a director, I am not concerned with what he is doing. Mahie, who is left alone in the frame, leaves it too, and just as she does, Abhay enters it. So it is all very instinctive. Also, I sometimes like to keep my actors unaware of the exact spot where the camera has been positioned, thus allowing them to be completely at ease.

Complete interview here.

Flight of the Red Balloon

flight_of_the_red_balloon_ver2Hou Hsiao-hsien’ Flight of the Red Balloon starts with a kid named Simon trying to coax a red balloon to come to him. The balloon’s up there on a tree, away from his reach. After failing in his attempt, the kid boards a train back his place. Then curiously enough the balloon starts following him, which it keeps on doing the entire length of the movie. Simon, the kid, lives in a bohemian home with his blond, gusty mom Suzzane, who is a voice over actor at a Puppetry Troupe. As the movie begins Simone meets Song, his new Babysitter, who is a foreign student in a Film school and is currently making a movie on red balloons.
The movie meanders through the day to day life of these characters without probe, almost free flowingly as does the balloon. The tangential brisk distractions of life that seem to fill the space keep the movie as a humming song that anytime may turn into a magnanimous sonata. There are moments of sadness and loss, as subject of Simone’s Dad or irritating Tenant comes up but they all are kept at bay, somehow giving them a tone of sudden uprising in a sonata. These moments go quite nimbly just as they come.

imageSong is quite and unassuming, like a spectator of this medley of life. In one scene she points out to Juliet that the green man in her movies carrying the balloon all the time is there in green so that he could be easily filtered out later. It almost as a metaphor suggests that the seemingly free flowing life that this movie looks has its underpinnings in something else, the elusiveness of which is what is giving this all that quality. The role of Juliette Binoche as Suzanne comes as a breath of fresh air, as she walks in and out of the frame as a butterfly may tease a child following her. Her emotional upturns, the frizzy makeup, the virtuoso dazzling performances and the voice over artist just make a delight to watch.

In one of the interesting scene Juliet is appreciating Song’s film Origin and then starts narrating how it reminded her of her childhood, the old home, parents and other things. Curiously as there had been no hint or knowledge of it in the  movie, the scene becomes immensely interesting as, as a viewer you try to get an idea what the movie was ac04balloon-600tually about. In another scene towards the end Simone is in his class which is on a trip to a exhibition where the teacher is asking students what they see in the painting, if it’s dark or light painting. All children come up with different answers thinking of all possible explanation. At the same time Simone is shown elusive to all that discussion busy watching the balloon which as usual shows up in the ceiling glass pane of the center, telling the viewers that no matter what we may interpret of the movie the lyrical quality, the profused hum, the brisk lightness that’s there is not going to vanish.

The movie is actually a tribute to 1956 children classic short film by Albert Lamorisse, The Red Balloon.  The director makes use of glasses and shadows extensively. Things move in reflections. There’s one scene where you gaze outside a moving train onto vast open lands, which fuses with a sunset which is partially reflected in the window pane. This mirroring effect even goes further as we see the balloon standing along with a painted image of another red balloon. The music, the everyday hum of things around, the tinkering of a piano repairman all add to the free flowing austere quality of life.

Few reviews: here n here. Below is the theatrical trailer of the movie.

The Spirit of Beehive

There’s something mystical about The Spirit of Beehive, something fragmentary that never confronts you directly but leaves a desolatory feeling. The film brings out to reel, rather marvelously, the inner subjectivity of a kid whose trying to come in terms with the outside world. It’s a tale of growing up where the facts, fiction and fantasy all form a seamless reality. To bring home this difficult subject matter Victor Erice uses the story of Frankenstein, with it being a parry of the story line as well as adverting towards it in several parallels. The story begins with Ana and her elder sister Issabel watching the movie Frankenstein in the village’s makeshift cinema hall, along with other kids and adults. The younger sister Ana is immediately stuck with the haunting premise of the story. Not that she’s scared but a lot more beehiverev01mystified and allured. Of some scenes shown, there was one where Frankenstein is shown playing with the girl. What she doesn’t understand is why Frankenstein kills the girl in the movie and why then further he himself is killed by the people. She asks her elder sister Isabel (elder only by a year or two) about this. Isabel beguiles her by saying that the monster is actually a spirit and meets only his friends, on being called. Isabel being elder and having past that tender age which Ana is in, understand the difference between fact and fiction. Ana is stuck with Frankenstein and Isabel still playing with her, points her towards a deserted house in a barren open as Frankenstein’s living place. Ana still hold with the whole idea visits the place several times and one day confronts a runaway fugitive there and immediately takes him for Frankenstein. She visits him once or twice with food but then later as reality clashes with her convoluted reality, the fugitive is killed by the local police. And as she visits the place next he’s not there but only few drops of blood. Startled and unable to comprehend and also as her father comes to realise her curious endeavors as he receives his timepiece and shoes from police as retrieved from the fugitive, she runs away. As she’s on her own at night, while the whole village searches for her, she had a mystical experience, having parallels to the Frankenstein’s story. Later she is found by the father along with police, and spends next few days without sleeping, talking or eating. The movie ends as she wakes up from her sleep and remembers what her sister told her about summoning Frankenstein, but she returns without calling for him. The ending in a way notes towards the end of age of innocence for her.

Though Ana takes the centre stage, the character of Isabel is also explored. Though bit elder than Ana, I610xsabel is still a child, though her feet are in firm grounds of reality, she’s still coming in terms with her sexuality. There’s one scene where she, while playing with a cat, accidently cuts her finger and then playfully, though consciously she smears the blood on the lips and looks at herself in a mirror.  Isabel mischievous doesn’t ends with her fueling the innocent curiosity of Ana, but there’s also a scene where she plays dead in order to frighten Ana.

The movie is set in the post war era where the town is shown reeling under the after effects of the war. The place is unassumingly quite. Ana’s father who’s a beekeeper is also shown writing something, fragments of which are spoken in a voice over.
“Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock, someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious, maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endless varied and repetitive labours of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the repose to death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs. Someone who observed these things, after the initial astonishment has passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror. . . ”img_current_295_035

The voice over above interestingly appears twice in the movie, once in the beginning and then towards the end. At one level it seems to point out towards the monotone monotonous aspect of life, where we humans keep on performing the seemingly same activities all over again without having any cue about the higher plan.  The title The Spirit of Beehive also seems to point towards this inconsequential aspect of human life. Though the war is not shown in the movie but  in its after effects, the need of moving on after it and also the  elusive meaning of it as its over now, is what the spirit of beehive is all about. On another level the voice over points towards the loss of ‘innocence of childhood’ as the end of any fascination whatsoever towards life that one could have had.

Apart from the arresting world of facts, fantasy and realization, what makes this movie exceedingly special is the  austere cinematography, the scenes are often long and almost empty with two or three characters filling the space, even the landscape seems to follow that rule. All the village seems to be painted with that dusty beehive like color. Even the window furnishings have a beehive like structure. Also the flute based music seems to rhyme with the background. All this add a sad, melancholic hue to everything.

The performance by Ana (by Ana Torrent) has to be the one of the greatest performance ever by any child actor. The great performance also stems from the fact that she was playing her age at that time. As per the director the questions that Ana asks about Frankenstein are actually the ones that Ana Torrent asked during the movie production as she watched the movie for the first time. Other comparable performances that I can think of come from Pan’s Laybrinth, 400 Blows and Where’s My Friends Hose?.

Here’s an informative review about the historical background and overtures about the background of the movie.

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Remembrance of Things from Past

2110Ah, its no Proust post, and you already know it seeing the book cover on the left, anyhhow am just reading Bill Bryson’s A short History of Nearly Everything. It’s been two days and am more than halfway through and its been a pleasure till now. Every second page you turn and some name from the past tumbles up. One page you are reading about John Dalton and the next there’s Ludwig Boltzman, and then next Rutherford, followed by JJ Thompson and so on. Its such a delight to read about these men, their background and their eccentricities who filled all those elementary school days. The near misses they had or how simple plain luck paved their way to greater discoveries. The sudden delight learning actual names, sample this Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quarequa & Cerreto, remember Avogadro’s Number or Avagadros Laws. Or even Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, reading whom you are suddenly wondering about  The Karmazovs, then The Last French Open and finally the Periodic Table. Ok I made that this one up. Anyhow the writing style is smooth and its a ride down the memory lanes. Am enjoying it.

Not so Funny Games

Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games (US version) is a self reflective, metacinema intended to shock the audience ,alongside denying them any thrilling experience. The movie is more of a critique on how we see violence in movies, how a user takes an emotional stance towards it whereby in the process distancing itself from it, how viewer longs for characterization in order to nail down his own understanding so as to sympathize or rather hoping to empathize. Haneke doesn’t provides any of this. He tantalizes, draws you in but to leave nowhere close to anything and slowly it becomes irritating and disappointing but nevertheless you carry on.

funny_games

The plot is simple enough. There’s an urbane family who’s spending their vacations on a lake side farm house. There appear two young men, who are somewhere in their early twenties and they start to slowly torturing the family. Initially it looks like a small altercation which seems to have landed the family in that situation but no clear reason or motive surfaces. The young men make some references towards their reasons, say as Peter, the more in control smooth talker type, says that Paul after having a disturbed childhood, involving incest turned into a psychopath and as he tell that he starts crying but soon to start laughing. Later he gives passing reference to void and emptiness in ther lives, all too with a conscious mocking air. Haneke keeps on teasing the viewer to all ends. As the husband says, ‘why are you doing this? Why don’t you kill us’ and Paul Replies, ‘for entertainment, what else’. The scenes of brutality or direct violence are not shown but rather their after effect but that too always from a distance, denying the viewer even any chance of sympathising or empathising with the victims. Not that it’s the intention to close all channels but to deny user of the conventional identification with the character and thereby altering the emotional response and optimistically to invite the user to take a reflective, critical view of the things.

I did had an idea what the central motif was about so may be more than experiencing all these emotions I was rather concerned about how he will do it. There arises another question about whether the audience is self-critical enough to raise these questions afterwards. Imagine one being confused, irritated and shocked but this will be somewhere in the beginning but later a sort of emotional distancing would have formed. May be it’s the intention on the director’s part as he keeps on asking questions as Peter and Paul keep on addressing the audience.

I would have loved to watch the original but nevertheless. Anyhow, check these good articles here and here. And a rather detailed profile and interview here.

Fallen Angels | Wong Kar Wai

fallen_angels_coverTo be true I didn’t like falling Angels that much. Not from the general standards but from Wong Kar Wai’s. The movie was more on lines of Chungking Express, probable coming from the fact that the storyline of the movie was meant to be a part of Chungking Express. Still it was a fair enough movie coming from Wai’s stable infused with his usual elements of visuals, music, and a storyline at times eccentric, obsessed with past, and trying to overcome a self inflicted yet inevitable loneliness.

Now I have a longing to watch 2046 instead. Anyhow, few good articles here, here and here.

Bergman on Persona

A sort of truth-crisis that made me feel suddenly that I had to take a stand. What is truth and when does one tells the truth? It became so difficult that I thought the only form of truth is silence. And in the end, going a step further, I discovered that it, too, was a kind of mask. The need is to find a step beyond.

– Bergman on Persona

My Turkish Library – Orhan Pamuk

I regret that I have not been able to shake off the enlightenment utilitarian idea that books exist to prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer’s life in Turkey is proof that they are. But it also has something to do with the fact that in those days Turkey lacked the sort of large library where you could easily locate any book you wanted. In Borges’s imaginary library, every book takes on a mystical aspect, and the library itself offers intimations of a poetic and metaphysical infinity, echoing the complexity of the world outside; behind this dream are real libraries with more books than can ever be counted or read. Borges was the director of one such library in Buenos Aires. But when I was young there was no comparable library in Istanbul or all of Turkey. As for books in foreign languages, not a single public library had these. If I wanted to learn everything that there was to be learned, and become a wise person and so escape the constraints of the national literature—imposed by the literary cliques and literary diplomacy, and enforced by stifling prohibitions—I was going to have to build my own great library.

Link

Now the summer has passed

Now the summer has passed.
It might never have been.
It is warm in the sun,
But it isn’t enough.

All that might’ve occurred
Like a five-fingered leaf
Fluttered into my hands,
But it isn’t enough.

Neither evil nor good
Has yet vanished in vain,
It all burned and was light,
But it isn’t enough.

Life has been as a shield,
And has offered protection.
I have been most fortunate,
But it isn’t enough.

The leaves were not burned.
The boughs were not broken,
The day clear as glass,
But it isn’t enough.

– Arseny Tarkovsky

Good news for Bolano lovers

Two new novels by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño have reportedly been found in Spain among papers he left behind after his death….[…]..It follows the discovery of another novel, entitled The Third Reich, which was shown to publishers at the Frankfurt book fair in October.
Publication of the books would add to the number of works by Bolaño due to appear over the next few years; the English translations of three novels and four collections of stories are already scheduled for the end of 2011.

Link

Remorse For Any Death

Free of memory and of hope,
limitless, abstract, almost future,
the dead man is not a dead man: he is death.
Like the God of the mystics,
of Whom anything that could be said must be denied,
the dead one, alien everywhere,
is but the ruin and absence of the world.
We rob him of everything,
we leave him not so much as a color or syllable:
here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see,
there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait.
Even what we are thinking,
he could be thinking;

we have divvied up like thieves
the booty of nights and days.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Hiroshima My Love

Whenever one talks about Alain Resnais, his exploration of subjective memory of past events takes thiroshima_mon_amourhe centre stage. I haven’t seen any of his movies except for Hiroshima My love. It’s not only subjective memory of the past but also subjectivity as a whole which concerns him, coupled with fragile nature of time n memory engraved in existential dilemmas.

The opening sequence shows an extreme closeup of a pair of naked torsos of two lovers embracing each other, with a glint of snowy ash  n sweat on them. As the scene progresses images of the aftermath of Hiroshima bombing are shown. A female voiceover emerges talking about Hiroshima as the images appear on screen. The voiceovers n the images give the opening sequence a poetic rhythm. As she talks about the images, which could be her memories also, the male (or the lover) repeatedly says that she “saw nothing of Hiroshima”. The poetic narrative is cut short as the camera moves to show the faces of the lovers.

The lady is in Hiroshima for a movie on ‘Peace’ and the young man was an Architect from there. Their rendezvous extends as the young man requests her to stay or at least meet again before she leaves tomorrow. Then they meet again at her work place after her work is over. Images of Hiroshima and its aftermath visit again as a procession pass though. She experiences few uneasy moments during that procession. Now after that they sit at a restaurant, drinking, where she starts telling him about her past, her first love in the city of Nevers in Paris. Earlier the young man had complained her of him not know much about her also. Their relationship till now had been fleeting yet bordering on something serious. Now the main intent of the movie comes forward.

She begins her story, talking about her German lover during the war and the subsequent traumatic experience after his death. The narration by her moves in a non chronological fashion, at times she confuses the young man as the German lover during the traumatic events in the cellar that her family imposed upon her part due to embarrassment and part due to her behaviour at that time. The experience as she presents to the young man is more of an analogy of our, hers or anybody’s understanding of Hiroshima or any other event. The present and past submerge, with things moving in a non chronological manner make time looses meaning. Perceptions and memori es, layer together to, produce an experience that constantly moves in time. The scene where the young Architect rejoices on the fact that he’s the first person whom she has told the Nevers tale, refrences to our own jubilatio n of coming to know and understand something in past which we may have never experienced ourselves (or may be we have), something like say Hiroshima. As things move in the night she tries to leave, but the young man keeps on following her. Interesting to observe is the distance that befalls between them even as they sit in the same place. Be it the old women separating them at the railway station or both sitting on separate tables in the restaurant (different one from the earlier restaurant) as the dawn approaches. This distancing more or less refers to the gap between ones understanding/perception of anything vis-a-vis the actual happening, or even the subjective understanding of something by two separate beings. Till the end she doesn’t agrees to stay back. The movie ends with her telling him that “Hiroshima. That’s your name.” And his reply “That’s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Nevers in France.”

A good review talking about the film’s contrivbution in the French New Wave and the impact on cinema coming after that.

A Lie

At the dawn of 24th century the world had gone very advanced. Advanced to the level that science fiction as genre had ceased to exist. It all started a century back with the success of Richbard Downking’s Neural geneprop project. It paved the way for successfully transmitting information via genes to the next generation. Simply put, now a child could be born with all the information in the world. There were few apprehensions about how a new born will respond to that sort of information which were proved true as the correlation between the mental and the physical quotient went haywire. Also this achievement meant the end of childhood and growing up. It was Dawnking who again came to the rescue of the world and swept the popular vote in favour of saving the childhood. The Neural Geneprop project went to a new level wherein a mechanism was devised so that the information was decrypted from genes as per a set pattern as the age progressed. The rate and pattern of decryption was such that it always satisfied any curious question even before it took form in the child’s mind.

The world by then had reached the pinnacle of technological advancement in almost all respects. There was no scope for further improvement in anything. Owing to the high levels of advancements, things seldom changed.
As a natural outcome of this people had stopped communicating as there was no need to know anything. Everything followed set patterns, known to everyone. Just the mention of a few features of a person’s life and you could tell almost anything about his past, present or future.

One day there came a man in a city, of almost mute and disinterested people, called Indostralia. Some say he didn’t come from anywhere but was there all the time, it was just that he wore a uniform which used to give away his profession, which was enough to know everything about him. So nobody bothered knowing him.

Then one day he started something which was then to change everything about the world around. He started calling people randomly, giving them false names and false information. Everything he talked about was a lie, a fantasy, a figment of his imagination, miles away from the actual reality. Initially most of the people used to bang the phone down, but he didn’t stop. Every day there used to be few people who sort of liked the light hearted exchange, since this came as a welcome break from their monotonous existence. These people then also started calling randomly.
Slowly this phenomenon swept the whole city. People were now seen on their phones almost all the times, talking hours in and out, cooking up things. Nobody saved anybody’s number, which almost went as an unwritten law. People started changing their number every second day, which was then superseded by mobile companies providing the option of dynamic number which changed every time somebody called somebody. Understandably people didn’t do this while meeting one another as the benefit of anonymity would then be lost.

The identity of the person who started all this is still unknown. May be some people did know him in the beginning but it got lost in this whole cooking up business. Though there’s a long standing rumour which most of the people believe. It says that he was then, when it all started; the marketing trainee and now the CEO of AirYell, who single handedly revived the almost dead Mobile telephony market.