Some Hindi Books and a Poem by Amitabh Bachchan

Vacation over and I am back from the ancient city of Pataliputra (link to Wikipedia entry. Has this great line, "In spite of the very bad press, Patna has a moderate crime rate." Hmmm.) Anyway, it was a regular home visit. Attended a cousin sister's marriage. And for those who were worried(!) my own marital status is not changing anytime soon!

Now for the main thing. I was reading lots of Hindi books at home. And since the online world contains so little information about Hindi literature (I am sure it is true for other Indian languages too) I thought I should add something to the blogosphere. More detailed posts will follow.

Will start with a book which both shocked and disappointed me. Rahul Sankrityayan was one of the most important and widely travelled scholars of his time. He spent most of his life travelling to far off places, learning different languages, collecting manuscripts and translating them into Hindi and other languages. His most important contribution was to the study of ancient and medieval Buddhist literature. He went to Tibet and spent many years there, mastering the Pali language and translating ancient Buddhist texts into Hindi and English. He was also known as Mahapandit (the great scholar). Now the shock and the disappointment part. I was reading his biography (actually it should be called hagiography) of Stalin and was shocked to see the level of ignorance and muddle headed propaganda in the book. It doesn't come as a surprise that his main sources are the "official" histories, interviews, memoirs and other documents published in the Russian language (he was obviously an expert in Russian too). He paints the portrait of Stalin as Mahamanav. He skirts and sweeps issues like the horrors of multiple famines, gulag, Hitler-Stalin pact etc under the carpet. He extols the ingenious five-year plans, the rapid industrialisation, Soviet Union's remarkable progress on the journey towards a classless society. Most of this praise is interspersed with merciless invectives towards the capitalists, Trostykites, Mensheviks, the Nomenklatura, the Kulaks and other enemies of the proletariat and the Soviet Union. I was surprised because I hadn't expected such language from a scholar, specially from someone who was known for his literary sensibilities. In the foreword to this book he mentions his desire to pen similar biographies of other "Mahapurush" like Marx, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung too. A look at his works informed me that he indeed wrote all of these, all within a year!

Anyway, all of this is written in a really high-falutin (in a nice way) and fluent Hindi and I read the whole book just for its prose. Also, I think the general euphoria was kind of understandable given the time when he wrote the book, Stalin had just died and the historic Khruschev speech, after which the official communist line tried to distance itself from Stalin, was still a few years ahead. Earlier I had picked up his Volga se Ganga Tak, the book for which he is most widely known. The book recounts the story of the Aryan Migration in a novelistic manner. I didn't finish the book because I soon got bored with it. (It was many years ago.) I was looking for it this time at home but couldn't find it. Anyway here is the wiki entry and here is another article about his life and works.

Peeli Chatri Wali Ladki by Uday Prakash is one of the most widely discussed Hindi stories (it is actually a novella) of the last few years. I hadn't read anything by Uday Prakash before and it was a nice surprise. I look forward to reading more of his work. It is a very intriguing story with lots of surprises. I will write in detail about it later. Incidentally I later came to know that an English translation of the story won the international PEN award last year for best translation into English. The English version is called The Girl with a Golden Parasol. The award sounds justified. I would have definitely called it "yellow umbrella" which sounds a little too banal! Some information about Uday Prakash here.

I also read an anthology of modern (as in "modernist") short stories and was pleasantly surprised to discover a few stories and writers which I had not read before. One of them was Mannu Bhandari whose story Yehi Sach hai (this is the truth) is a delightful account of a love triangle. The summary would sound banal. It is actually about a young girl in her mid-twenties who is unable to decide which one of her loves has "the truth". The one who dumped her years ago when she was a teenager, who she meets again and her old feelings are reignited or her current boyfriend? The story is told in a series of diary entries and offers brilliant insights into the mind of the girl and explores the problems of indecision and uncertainty that goes with every romantic relationships, at least for people who are a little too self-aware of their feelings and character, like that girl in the story. Easily one of my favourite love stories ever. I later came to know that the story was made into a Hindi film Rajnigandha. I think I have seen it but don't remember anything about it. Anyway, I don't think any film can capture the introspective tone and inner struggles of the mind as well as a written story.

I then jumped onto her story collection and found another gem titled Stree Subodhini (roughly, Lessons or Wisdom for Women) there. It is a hilarious first-person account by a woman who is now in her early forties about a love affair that she had when she was young with her middle-aged and married boss, who also writes (guess) romantic poems! It is very funny and is brilliantly insightful about how our ideas about gender roles come into conflict with any idealized notions of love or romance. It is a brilliant put-down of romance, that too without being cynical, rhetorical, dry or smartassy. It is very funny and very playful. Certainly a lesson all young women should learn. Hahaha!

Then there was this massive autobiography of the great Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan. It is in four volumes and I read bits and pieces from all fours. It is indeed beautifully written, very honest without being either a self-advertisement or self-flagellant. It is a gentle, unintellectual yet insightful about issues of literature and life and very touching at various moments. Actually, I have never liked his most famous poem Madhushala (The Tavern. Or is it The Pub? Or The Bar?), whose romanticism I always find a little too naive and youthful (ahem!) for my tastes. Bachchan discusses (and manages to defend too) Madhushala and other poems of the same period, which were all about the praise of life of escape into love and alcohol, very well. He wrote Madhushala at the peak of the nationalist struggle in the mid thirties. Gandhiji was predictably very pissed off with him because of this. What I was actually looking for was the episode of the death of his first wife Shyama and as expected it was really very well done. Bachchan was extremely attached and devoted to his wife and after her death he went into an inconsolable creative stupor which lasted few years. After that he wrote his best poems (my opinion of course). Nisha Nimantran (Invitation to Night, or is it Night's Invitation?), Aakur Antar, Ekant Sangeet and a few others. He also wrote poems about moving on and getting on with life despite losses like Jo Beet Gayi So Baat Gayi and Need ka Nirman Fir (which is also the title of one of the autobiography volumes). He soon met a sikh girl named Teji Suri and promptly fell in love. They got married couple of years afterwards and soon Amitabh and Ajitabh were born. This episode is also very interesting. Bachchan and Teji Suri meet at a common friend's house and request is made to Bachchan for a poem recital. He chooses one of his poems which express cynicism about love, titled Kya Karoon Samvednayein Lekar Tumhari ? (what do I do with your sentiments?). They were obviously attracted to each other from before but soon after the poem they were both in tears and they knew they were in love. I am making it sound childish and cheesy but you have to read the book (Need ka Nirman Fir, the second volume) to get the real thing. It works there, I assure you!

Okay so now coming to what I promised in the title of the blog. A poem by Amitabh Bachchan. The final volume also contains the episode of Amitabh battling for his life after he was injured while shooting for Coolie. While recovering at the Breach Candy Hospital in Bombay Amitabh scribbles the following lines in his notebook. His father translates those lines in Hindi. The Hindi version follows (in non-standard transliteration of course)

Breach Candy Hospital
ICU Room No. 1, Bombay
29th August 1982

Outside-Inside

Outside

Black
Granite ugly rocks
Turbulent mud-laden sea-
Dark frightening clouds hovering above-

Inside

Whiteness, purity
Clean sheets, soft pillows
Gentle care, soft words
Solitude
And my agony-

--Amitabh Bachchan

Bahar-

Upar mandrate, darpate
Andhiyala chhate se badal
Neeche, kali kathor bhaddi chattano per
Uchhal, matmaili jaladhi-tarangon ki kreeda

Bheetar-

Sab ujjwal, shuddh, saaf
Chadar safed, komal takiye,
Dheeme-dheeme swar se sinchit
Mamtamay sari dekh-rekh
Au' meri ekaki peeda

With the connection between "jaladhi-tarangon ki kreeda" and "Aur meri ekaki peeda" the Hindi translation works better in expressing a feeling of contrast between "outside" and "inside" than the English version by Bachchan Jr. Thats what I think. It is also comforting to know that even Amitabh feels lonely when in pain, that too when millions were ready to do anything for him. Anyway here's a link to Wiki entry of Harivansh Rai Bachchan.

I think this post has already become a little too long. I wanted to write about Yashpal, Phanishwarnath Renu, Nirmal Verma, Krishna Sobti and others too but all those for later posts.

On Vacation

I am off on vacation from tomorrow. I am planning to keep it internet-free. So no posts for a couple of weeks. Bye.

Short Notes on a Few European Films Seen Last Week

I have been watching a hell lot of movies in the last few weeks. The film society has gotten really active and there is a European (mostly French though) film festival going on too. I have been to back-to-back screenings before but this time I am just feeling too tired. Perhaps it was because of this that I found most of the movies disappointing (even the "difficult", "arty" types which I automatically would have called a masterpiece!). Here are some of the more prominent ones which disappointed me.

1. Ulysses' Gaze by Theo Angelopoulos: I had seen Eternity and a Day by Angelopoulos earlier which was so bad in its perceived self-importance that it was literally embarassing to watch. It shamelessly traded in those typical art-house cliches -- those Tarkovskian long takes, fog, melancholy people reciting bad poetry etc. (Jim Hoberman cuts it down to size in the village voice really well. worth reading.) Ulysses' Gaze is not so bad. It still looks like a derivative of Tarkovsky, specially The Mirror. The movie puports to tell the entire twentieth century history of Greece and the entire middle Europe. Just like Tarkovsky Angelopoulos adopts a "poetic" style over a more realistic documentary approach. It was perhaps just my ignorance of history which got me disinterested soon with the events being portrayed on the screen. After that it was just an endless wait for the end credits to roll, a wait which lasted almost three hours. I think the film does make some serious point about things like history, collective memory and the role of artist in turbulent times but it never convinced me to put an extra effort to decipher all the different strands and images, so pompous was its tone. The main thing which irritated me, and which differentiates him from Tarkovsky, is that Angelopoulos latches on the elements of emotional drama in the overall narrative. His style is more suited for a sustained mood throughout rather than for providing emotional jolts to the reader. For example, no one ever cries in a Tarkovsky film whereas there are many scenes where characters break down in this film, all embarassing to watch. Erland Joesephson who starred in some of Tarkovsky's later films is present here too. I had no clue why Harvey Keitel was cast though. The role was so against the type. Link to Rotten Tomatoes reviews.

2. Songs from the Second Floor: Songs from the Second Floor is a surrealist Swedish film which won the grand jury prize at the 2001 Cannes film festival. Like all surrealist films it doesn't have a plot or a conventional narrative. There are just fragmented and independent set pieces and sight gags which ultimately do cohere into a whole in a thematic sort of way. And at the end of it all, the film does make a few powerful points about the collapse of the capitalist society, which in the film's vision means collapsing stock market, endless traffic jams and business executives taking a self-flagellating procession on the street. A couple of episodes do stand out. After a businees of selling crucifixes fails (and we see a big dump of christ paraphernalia in the junkyard), another character tells the businessman, "how could any one have made money from that crucified loser?". That was I thought very funny. Also a comment on how religion has been turned into a commodity being sold and bought in the spiritual marketplace. There are also many other such funny scenes. An erstwhile poet who is now in a mental asylum, his dad who has burned his own furniture company, a ghost wandering since the second world war, another ghost who had some financial troubles. Overall I admired the film but at the end of it all it left me significantly underwhelmed. Perhaps I wasn't paying the attention that it deserved. Link to Reviews here.

3. The Barbarian Invasions by Denys Arcand: Okay, this isn't from Europe but from Quebec Canada, but it is in French. It also won the academy award for best foreign film in 2003. I am a big fan of the dying-with-regret-and-disappointment genre of films (like Bergman's Wild Strawberries) and I loved this one too. It is about how the people from the sexual liberation generation, brought up on politics of radicalism, end up with disappointment and regret at the end of it all. It is brillianty written and acted piece of drama and the grim humour was fantastic too. There were a few sentimental and manipulative scenes and Arcand's politics of defeatist conservatism, his philistine anti-intellectualism and a naive sense of history softened my enthusisasm a little bit. But otherwise an excellent entertainment. Link to reviews here.

4. Lemming: A beautiful and smart french couple are living a happy and contented life, that is, until the husband's boss and his strange wife come to dinner to their place. The dinner soon turns into a scene of bizarre confrontation. In the meanwhile the wife finds a live lemming in her kitchen sink and soon irrationality takes over and the film moves into a David Lynch territory. I found the symbolism a bit heavy-handed, if not obvious and they didn't reveal much about the themes or character much either. I know, sexual desire and insecurity can work in mysterious and powerful ways and it is often strong enough to alter one's perspective and sense of reality. The idea was good, the actors were great too but overall it doesn't work out very well. Link to more reviews.

There were a few more movies. But this post has already become too long. Later, or never.

Susan Sontag on The Melancholy of Resistance

I was looking for some information on the Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai and his book The Melancholy of Resistance (what a delightful title!) and came across this praise for the book from Susan Sontag:

"An inexorable, visionary book by the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville. Krasznahorkai's novel is both an anatomy of desolation, desolation at its most appalling, and a stirring manual of resistance to desolation - through inwardness."

I don't know if it is on the blurb of the book, but for me it is enough to convince of book's greatness !

Although after reading more about it, the book really looks a little too highbrow for me. As cheshire cat also informed in the comments to the previous post, Krasznahorkai doesn't believe in paragraphs and I also learned that the first sentence of the novel is one hundred seventy four words long!

A post on the book on Waggish blog and an article on the Bela Tarr movie adaptation in Sight and Sound

Damnation by Bela Tarr

I first heard of the avant garde Hungarian film director Bela Tarr early this year when his mammoth masterpiece (it runs over seven hours) Satantango was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The New York Times had an ecstatic write up about the film and somewhere else the MOMA screening was called the "cultural event of the year". I was intrigued after reading about the film and his other work. So, I was naturally very excited when our film society decided to show Damnation this Friday and after seeing it, I don't hesitate a bit to call it a Masterpiece (yes, with the capital 'M').

This article in Kinoeye website has an excellent overview of Tarr's career so far. It also has this following plot summary of the film (although the film is essentially experimental, it also has a fairly conventional, if pared down, plot):

Damnation is close to being a genre film in its story of love and betrayal, a theme that Tarr has described as being very simple, —even "primitive." Karrer lives a withdrawn life in a mining community where his evenings all end up in the Titanik bar. He is offered a smuggling job by the bar's owner but passes it on to Sebestyn, husband of the singer at the bar. In Sebestyn's absence, Karrer and the wife sleep together and Karrer seeks a lasting relationship. He considers denouncing Sebestyn to the police. On Sebestyn's return, there is a confrontation between the two men and the bar owner takes the woman to his car, where they have sex. The next day, Karrer denounces them all. In the final scene, Karrer approaches a waste tip in the pouring rain where he confronts a barking dog. Getting down onto his hands and knees, he barks at it until it is forced into retreat.

What is most remarkable about the film is its style. It is shot in long, really long takes with the camera always tracking in extremely slow motion. And what exactly does the camera capture? Well, it is very difficult to say in words. Suffice to say that the end feeling is of relentless despair, defeat and irredeemable gloom. In fact Tarr's pessimism is so deep and his sense of futility is so profound that the film overall doesn't depress at all. Rather, it makes your own sadness look petty, boring and unartistic! There are few dialogues in the film but whenever some one speaks, it is some apocalytic aphorism. At one point Karrer confesses that "nothing scares him more than children with their bright eyes and cute little faces, because they swindle mankind into going on with this charade and condemn us all to an eternity of horror." A little later, in the same scene he muses, "if it made any sense to speak at all". Moreover, he is disgusted by the will to survive that animals, including human beings, show and condemns love as "that pathetic clinging"!

It is really very difficult to write anything about this film. It is incredibly rich in visual detail and it is not easy to reduce its subject matter to few thematic issues either. By the way, this was also one of the favourite films of Susan Sontag, the great American critic, who championed Tarr's films in her essays and lectures calling them, "some of the very few heroic violations of cinematic norms of our times".

I will just point to some articles on the net. Other than the kinoeye article, here is an overview by Jonathan Rosenbaum and a capsule review of the film here. Another review from the Guardian website (from where I took the quotes) here. Link to Tarr's interviews here and here.

I can't wait to get my hands on Werckmeister Harmonies and Satantango. The later though is still unreleased on DVD.

In which I try to explain why I like Antonioni in pseudo-intellectual terms

My fanboyish ejaculations on Antonioni's films a couple of posts earlier drew startled responses from a couple of friends (Bhaya and Anurag, this is for you!). They felt that it deviated from the norms of pseudo-intellectual pretentions that this blog generally displays. And after all, being a pseudo-intellectual, how can you just "like" something without giving a proper theoretical justification or dropping a few names, preferably from the western tradition? Also, my saying that I like depressed and beautiful women was found to be shockingly childish. So this post is an exercise in damage control, an attempt to restore the reputation of being a pseudo-intellectual. In what follows I explain why I like Antonioni (specially those three films, L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse) in a very pseudo-intellectualish way of course:

First, depressed beautiful women. Let me put it this way. I love the portrayal of a profound sexual melancholy in Antonioni's films, in his female characters specially. Sexual melancholy, as in, when you are feeling completely isolated, disconnected and alienated from your surroundings and yet deeply long for a serious erotic union with the Other. Or, in less pretentious terms, you are feeling sad, alone and horny all at the same time. Antonioni connects sexual desire with a general anxiety and uncertainty that the characters feel about everything and which gradually eats away at their souls. No wonder that Monica Vitti after being depressed in all these three films finally reaches mental asylum in Red Desert, which is a continuation of the trilogy.

Second, getting away from the classical concerns of character or narrative. Antonioni took narrative cinema away from straight storytelling, towards a realm where he could explore ideas in a more direct manner. People looking for narrative closure and clean-cut explanations for character behavior will be disappointed with his films. What is important there, is the "mood", which Antonioni creates and sustains by employing very stylish camera work and scene compositions. And through this he explores the ideas in a purely visual manner. But what exactly are those ideas? Feelings of radical alienation and disconnection from the surroundings and from other human beings, that have become an inevitable part of modern urban life, find a potent expression in his films and specially in the face of Monica Vitti and Jeanne Moreau. His films are a critique of the idea of modernity and document the costs of material prosperity in terms of wasted human lives and potential for genuine happiness and fulfillment. The most common symbol he chooses to show this is that of modern architecture. All those empty buildings, which in their weird geometric shapes, just seem to be completely devoid of any human element whatsoever. As if the world itself is trying to reject humanity. The same is for the emptied streets on which Monica Vitti spends most of the time just walking aimlessly. It's the streets and roads which have deserted human beings, not the other way round.

Third, his concern with the mise-en-scene and scene composition. Antonioni was perhaps the most stylish filmmaker of his generation. What is most remarkable is how he composes his scenes specially how he chooses what to put in background and what in foreground. Normally, in a scene the protagonist will occupy the centre of the frame and the entire focus will be on him with the background there only to supply the context, or as in Hollywood films, to make the scene look "beautiful" (in the most cliched way of course). In Antonioni's films the background is a character in itself, sometimes even more important than the protagonists in front of them. For example, in that brilliant island sequence of L'Avventura, it is that landscape which occupies most of the frame, with the characters there only in corners, or else, shot in such long shots as to make their personality relatively unimportant as compared to those landscapes. It creates a weird disorienting effect in the viewer. Also remarkable is the scene where Claudia and Sandro make love in an open field. It is shot in such an unconventional style, that just by watching the sex scene, you get the idea that it is an empty sexual connection, one that is not going to last.

Fourth, cinema of absence. What troubles many people when watching these films is why do the characters just walk and walk on those empty streets? Why are the buildings always vacant? And in general, why is there so much of open space everywhere? I think it is a very radical idea, the idea that you can comment on something by NOT showing something where it was expected. It is in this context that the brilliant ending of L'Eclisse makes sense. The two lovers in the end promise to meet once again to continue their affair but looking at their faces and the way they utter those words, it becomes clear that it is an empty promise after all. What follows is a long (seven minutes) sequence of silent shots of the place and its neighbourhood where they were supposed to meet. It is by the emptiness in those spaces that we find out that the spark of love has indeed died and that it is truly THE END in every sense of the term. The final scene is that of a street lamp which resembles an eclipse, perhaps signifying an apocalypse or the end of the world itself.

Fifth, cinema of silence. There is a general tendency in people that when there is no sound coming from the screen they shut down their sensory perceptions. That's the reason why background score is so ubiquitous in Hollywood movies, or for that matter any cinema which relies solely on "action". In contrast, Antonioni's cinema is a cinema of thoughts, moods and ideas. What makes these films even more masterful is that Antonioni relies solely on visual style. Dialogues can never get you inside the head of the character, specially when the characters in question are feeling alienated, that's why there are so many silent scenes and even when someone speaks something it does nothing to propel the plot forward. So on the surface you get the feeling that "nothing is happening" but it is inside the head of those characters that things are happening which is like it is in the real world too.

Sixth, the impossibility of love in the modern world. These three films are some of the most eloquent essays on the phenomenon of the breakdown in human relationships, specially in the advanced and modern societies. What makes these films so disquieting and despairing is that Antonioni doesn't treat it as a problem which has anything to do with the individuals in question but rather treats it just as a symptom, a symbol signifying a far deeper malaise in the society. It is in this context that the final reconciliatory scene (or is it?) in L'Avventura makes sense.In modern societies we have done away with the moorings of tradition, family, religion or community but haven't replaced them with anything substantial. Eros in itself isn't powerful enough a force to keep people together, that's what Antonioni suggests. In a remarkable scene in L'Eclisse towards the end, sensing that her relationship with her stockbroker boyfriend is going to end Vittoria says, "I wished I didn't love you or I loved you much more". It is this uncertainty towards everything which has crept in our consciousness, because we have forsaken the certainties, false of course, of religion or tradition, that is creating havoc in our lives, ultimately leading to unhappiness, ennui and anxiety.

Finally Antonioni's influence. Antonioni was easily the most stylish and radically innovative filmmakers of his generation and it his style and thematic questions that concern most of the great filmmakers currently working, specially those exploring the phenomenon of alienation and urban isolation and dislocation like Michael Haneke, Wong Kar-wai, Tsai Ming-liang and others. They all trace their pedigree to Antonioni. He has been responsible for freeing narrative cinema from the pre-modern shackles of conventional storytelling and brought cinema back to the level of literature (well, almost) of its time.

Anyway if you are in New York, don't miss the Antonioni retrospective which is on at the BAM cinematheque all this week. Details here. I can only imagine what kind of experience it would be to watch L'avventura on the big screen for the first time. I had earlier linked to the articles about the retrospective in NYT and Village Voice.

I had earlier written a post on L'Eclisse. You can find it here.

International Film Week in Bangalore

It might sound incredible but it is happening. A bunch of award winning French and other European films are getting released here in Bangalore just like commercial films -- in the film theatres, not on some dvd projection or any esoteric film society. And not only that, the film festival will also tour smaller towns in Karnataka like Hubli, Mysore, Belgaum and Mangalore. This news report has more details about the event. It also says that people behind it are planning to take it to (gasp) Patna, my home town!! Anyway, whoever are the people behind it, I can only say, more power to them! I hope it becomes a regular event.

I was at the inaugural ceremony and the screening of last year's Golden Palm winner L'Enfant yesterday. It's a brilliant film, totally deserving of all awards and the critical acclaim it has received. Although it has been compared with Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (to which it is an obvious homage), the film is not as abstract as its predecessor. It works very well at the surface level too. It is a fast paced thriller (it even has a chase sequence) and an affecting emotional drama. It is also magnificently acted, something you won't find in Pickpocket. Towards the end, it rather alarmingly moves into the "triumph of human spirit" and "easy redemption" territory but it all works out very well in this case.

It was a very satisfying experience overall. And yes, I was sitting in the row next to Girish Kasaravalli (the director of award winning films like Ghatashraddha and Dweepa) who was quiet all throughout! On the stage it was the commercial Kannada cinema all the way. A really slovenly looking "film star" (and a politician too) Ambarish was the chief guest. Did he come right out of a film set, playing some drunkard or something? Also another star of yesteryears Vishnuvardhan (the promotional booklet called him "Abhinaya Bhargava") was given some life time achievement award.

Anyway, I am looking forward to watching The Barbarian Invasions, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and other movies in the coming days. Hectic days ahead ;)

Love in the Western World

I have got hold of a very interesting book called Love in the Western World by some Swiss writer named Denis de Rougemont. It was originally published in French. I had heard of this book first in one of Woody Allen's films (was it Crimes and Misdemeanors?) and when I saw an old copy in a used book store, I picked it up. Now, I know, reading all these books about love is not going to do anything to change my life, which remains profoundly single, but I find Love to be a very interesting natural phenomenon which deserves to be understood in scientific, detached and objective manner(!!).

This book is actually a cultural history of romantic love in the western civilization. Yes, its cliched, vulgar and baser manifestations (Valentines day, Bollywood, Chick lit et al ) are surely products of culture or rather, of the capitalist system. I have read only a few chapters so far but I don't really agree with its central idea, and I don't think it is true either, the idea that romantic love as we know it today was an invention of the western culture, in particular the medieval lyric poets (also known as troubadours) who wrote songs about courtly love. Rougemont also claims that it was troubadours' idealization of passionate love that changed the social system, which was earlier based on arranged marriages. Marriage in noble classes was considered on opportunity to increase wealth and improve social standing (much the same as we have in our country prevalent even now). He also tries to explain the fascination adultery had for western writers and poets and tries to connect it all to one theory.

I don't think the idea of romantic love is a cultural construction. It is very definitely a human universal, that is it springs from basic human nature. It is also widely accepted by the currently fashionable branch of evolutionary psychology. We had for example, in our Eastern culture, an honourable share of poets who sang praises of love too. In fact there is whole genre (Shringar Rasa) dedicated to the celebration of love. Although there was very little psychology involved, most of these poems either objectified women and celebrated the beauty of their organs or otherwise confused it with religious ideals. But yes, the idea of conflating marriage and romance has been missing. That might be because of the deep-rooted feudal mentality which treats women as private property, sadly still so widely prevalent in our culture.

Will write about it when I finish the book, although it is a little difficult to read. It seems Rougemont had read all those books present in the Don Quixote's library! There are so many references to medieval literature and myths of which I know nothing about.

Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni is one of my favourite film directors. His "trilogy" of L'Avventura, La Notte and L'Eclisse are three of my favourite European films. I can watch them over and over again and never get bored. Yes, I just love those beautiful and depressed women. Depression has never looked sexier after these films :)

The New York Times has a nice, short article on the occasion of a retrospective of his films currently being shown in new york. Here.

And this is a nice article on his movie The Passenger which has just been released on DVD.

The Decline of Eros (?)

First, sorry for the faux-academic title of the post. I wrote it one sleepless night sometime last week and don't want to reread or edit it now. Long post and may not make enough sense!

I have been reading some gender and feminism related posts on the blogosphere and coupled with Elfriede Jelinek's Lust, some of whose phrases and sentences have stuck in my thoughts, have set me thinking about these things--in particular a book which I read a few months back, at least parts of it. The book was Love and Friendship by the University of Chicago professor and an eminent conservative intellectual Allan Bloom. Bloom is famous for his iconoclastic manifesto of cultural conservatism, The Closing of the American Mind in which he lambasted lots of currently fashionable "isms" without caring for political correctness. He was also a close friend of American Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and role model for the eponymous character of his novel Ravesltein.

Love and Friendship is basically another conservative polemic against trends in contemporary culture but unlike most conservative rants it is quite sophisticated and shows deep learning and understanding of the entire western tradition of the author. The basic argument in the book is that egalitarianism and its various manifestations like individualism, feminism etc. have gone a little too far. And he traces the problems of isolation and atomism of the bourgeois society to this. He claims that these isms have devalued the role of Eros (as in its classical meaning) as the basis of human connection. He argues that we live in a world where love and friendship are withering away. Scientific reductionism and related materialist philosophies have reduced eros to sex. In particular he rounds up Freud and Kinsey (who claimed that sexual practices normally considered deviant were common is American society) as suspects and gives them both a thorough dressing down. He perhaps wasn't familiar with the currently fashionable breed of evolutionary psychologists, who are much more sophisticated in their methodologies and claims, but reach essentially the same conclusions, at least at an abstract level, namely, all our noble feelings, emotions etc. which form the basis of any romantic connection have an essentially functional role, which is to propagate our genes in the gene pool of the next generation. Some of these emotional behavior seem anachronistic in the current culture, but that is only because these behaviors were adapted during the hunter-gatherer periods. Bloom, of course, finds all these reductionist attitudes to Eros loathsome. He makes the traditional humanist claim, that is, we are different and superior to animals. So sex in human beings, coupled as it is with thought and imagination, becomes far more complex than pure animal lust. It gets transformed into Eros and becomes the basis of a profound connection between two human beings.

Bloom then advises us to turn to great writers and thinkers of the western tradition to understand this phenomenon. The book is actually a long critical study of Rousseau's Emile, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Flaubert's Madame Bovary in the light of understanding how Eros works and how our understanding of this has changed over the course of history. There is also a very long discussion of Plato's Symposium and how ancients viewed Eros. There are also very learned expositions of Shakespeare's plays, which I didn't read, unfamiliar as I was with the plays in question (Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra et al).

All of this was okay with me, although I do think he slightly misreads the doctrine of reductionism. To reduce something to understandable small units is not to devalue the complexity of the original whole. Mystery and beauty, be it of love or any other natural phenomenon (for that is what it is), shouldn't be based on ignorance of how it works. Understanding the optics of how a rainbow is formed should not, and indeed does not, devalue its beauty.

What brought me thinking about the book was what Bloom had to say about feminism and contemporary trends in thinking about gender. He, rightly, treats gender as a fact of nature, which is entirely okay, but is extremely sceptical of our attempts to transcend this fact through political means (which is what feminism is all about). But he doesn't cite the usual conservative argument ("it is utopian, it will never work"). Moving human relationships to a gender-neutral territory, just like in so many other areas, is one of the ideals of feminism and I think it is a very worthwhile ideal. But he calls such attempts, exercises in "pathologically misguided moralism" which turns "such longing [for the beautiful] into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality", adding that, "love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism". He lambasts and ridicules feminist aims, for example, Male and female are no longer to be reciprocal terms, and male habit of supposedly forcing women into such reciprocity is what must go. And because of this "misguided moralism" what used to be understood as modes of courtship are now seen as modes of male intimidation and preying on the weaknesses and anxieties of women. He then moves on the Nietzsche and his pessimistic philosophy that all human relations, and specially the sexual ones, follow from one motivational principle in man, the Will to Power. Everything is power relationships, crude power, the will to dominate, to have things one's own way. This is what turns love into a power struggle and romantic relationships into contractual matters to be litigated. In fact Bloom bemoans how pseudo-scientific words like "relationships" and "commitment" have highjacked the original lovers' discourse. Also related is the demonization of male lust which is seen as an oppresive force (as in Jelinek's book) from which women must be protected and set free.

The best part of the book was where he traces the history of Eros (or Romance) in literature. Specially in the discussion of The Red and the Black and Madame Bovary, two of my favourite novels. (I haven't read Anna Karenina or Rousseau's book and find Pride and Prejudice very boring). Stendhal masterfully showed the hypocrisy behind any act of courtship. Julien Sorel uses the language of war to make his moves against the "enemies" and finally "conquers" them. So much for nobel feelings of love. And Flaubert, he pretty much made sure that no one could use the word romantic and be honest at the same time. And in the twientieth century literature it was as if there was race for who had the most terrible things to say about human condition and surely the word "romantic" itself became a term of abuse, supposed to mean "naive and stupid fool".

So now what do I think? I think, there is some substance to the claim that divorcing sex from the platonic ideals of human connectedness, the goals of sexual liberation, has resulted in the loss of something which is something very human. This also explains why pornography has become so mainstream and even respectable, at least something that is not frowned upon and in modern contemporary society which is so full of sexual opportunities, individuals still remain disonnected, like isolated atoms completely adrift. (Btw, there is a brilliant and utterly horrific portrait of this phenomenon in Michel Houellebecq's novel The Elementary Particles.)

What I don't agree with are his claims about egalitarianism, individualism or feminism. I think the recognition of individual rights has been a matter of great progress, even though it has meant the interference of law and state into the private world of human relationships and redefinition of those relationships in legal terminologies. Also I think the transcending of gender in the name of the higher goal of equality is a very worthwhile goal. We have achieved it to a large extent in so many sectors of life and I don't think why human relationships should remain exempt. Surely Eros or the longing for the beautiful can't be the only basis of love. There can be so many other gender-neutral things which can supplant the conventional Eros. And giving your body to earn other's trust and respect (isn't that what it is?) anyway sounds a little too primitive to me!

But yes having said this, I think Bloom was getting a little paranoid about the whole thing. The radical feminism, individualism and demonization of male desire is still not mainstream. The courtship rituals continue as usual, women continue to aspire to become more and more beautiful, often at the cost of great personal discomfort, to attract male attention and gain an upper hand in the game of courtship (what would Stendhal have thought?). Most women still derive their world view from Mars and Venus type books rather than breaking their head over what people like Nietzsche, Derrida or Jelinek had to say. And I don't see things changing at all. I personally would like things to change towards a more egalitarian society but I don't see the current status-quo as a cause of despair either.

Horror and Respectability Deficit!!

A book review article on Horror fiction in the latest New York Times Book Review starts with this hilarious paragraph:

BECAUSE most right-thinking — i.e., literate, educated, professional-type — people consider horror fiction repulsive, juvenile or plain stupid, it's probably a good idea for me to acknowledge from the start that the genre's respectability deficit is fully deserved and even fundamental to its nature. The emotion horror stories strive to evoke — fear — is one that civilized folks are inclined to think of as low, primitive, animal. And it is, just like hunger, thirst and sexual desire. These are impulses that in most religious and many intellectual traditions derive value only from being controlled in the pursuit of piety or reason or whatever higher ideal of human behavior you happen to aspire to. Horror is, it's fair to say, pretty determinedly nonaspirational, which is perhaps why it appeals so strongly to teenagers, slackers and fatalists, and hardly at all to normal, functioning adults, who are busy keeping the more pressing everyday anxieties — disease, financial ruin, loss of love — at bay and who may fail to see the benefit of adding vampires and zombies and poltergeists to the list.

The rest of the article is quite good and insightful too.

Ian McEwan's Amsterdam

My McEwan binge continues. This is his third novel I have read in the last month! It was easier to read than the others, unlike Atonement its scope is very limited and it doesn't dabble in the clash of grand ideas like Enduring Love or Saturday. It is also a very slim book, it took me just a few hours to read the whole thing. The subject matter is grim as usual--the basic plot is about a euthanasia pact (assisted suicide will be more apt)--but the touch is always slight and tinged with humour, of the black variety of course. It is also a witty satire on, well, lots of different things. The best of which is the insight into the mind a really vain artist full of delusions of grandeur. The music composer Clive has no trouble thinking of himself as "genius". And McEwan has this to say explaining his dubious moral behaviour and how they justify pleading a special case on account of being "artists":

These types - novelists were by far the worst - managed to convince friends and families that not only their working hours, but every nap and stroll, every fit of silence, depression and drunkenness bore the exculpatory ticket of high intent.

And the best is how he portrays the inner working of a newspaper office. This is the editor addressing his team:

It's time we ran more regular columns. They're cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You've seen the sort of thing. Goes to a party and can't remember someone's name. Twelve hundred words.

Ha! Do the TOI editors (or whatever they call those people there) think the same about Shobha De I wonder! Hahaha!!

Complete Review page of the book here.

And the Bravest Actress Award goes to...

...one of my favourites, Naomi Watts. According to news reports, she has been signed up for lead roles in Michael Haneke and David Cronenberg's next projects. Two filmmakers responsible for some of the most disturbing and violent films of recent times. Also two filmmakers who take themselves seriously and deservedly so. I was slightly disappointed to learn that Haneke is remaking his own German thriller Funny Games. I hope the new American version is different because I don't know if Funny Games can be improved in any sense. It is already as nasty as it can get. Cronenberg's next project, titles Eastern Promises, sounds equally dark. It is a story about illegal sex trafficking and prostitution in underground London. Viggo Mortensen is playing the other lead role. I hope Watts shines in both of the movies and so do the two directors. It was such a shame that Watts was ignored for her performance in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.

Link to the news item.

Short Notes On Some Winners of Golden Palm

Last weekend the Collective Chaos film society had organized a mini-festival of five films which had won Golden Palms at the Cannes Film Festival in previous years. One of them was The Tin Drum, of which I wrote about here.

First, two really boring and rather uninteresting films. Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha was a disappointingly shallow epic story about Samurai warlords in medieval Japan. When a powerful warlord dies in one of his wars, a poor thief, who is his double, is asked to impersonate him. The thief finds it difficult in the beginning and clashes with the "spirit" of the warlord but eventually gets into his new role. Kurosawa attempts to give the narrative some depth by getting into the philosophical questions about what really constitutes human identity and things like that but his efforts in that direction remain essentially half-hearted. And at around three hours, it really tests your patience. Btw, I was surprised to see the names of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas in the list of the executive producers of the film. Was this the Hollywood movie Kurosawa trying to make? Perhaps that would explain the shallow spectacle part.

Another boring film was the (former) Yugoslavian film Underground directed by Emir Kusturica. The film recreates the entire Balkan history, from the second world war to the eventual dissolution of Yugoslavia into small states, using really outlandish fantasy narrative. I had seen the film before and I had no desire to sit through all the childish sequences again. The film does make you feel at the end as if you have seen an entire life time of those bunch of characters but Kusturica is so busy creating those fantastical set-pieces that he neglects actual historical events which underpin the narrative. So after the film you are as clueless about the history of the Balkan states as you were before. There are a few funny moments but they never work as a part of the whole. I ran out in the middle of the film.

Now two interesting, if still boring, films. Lars von Trier plumbs new heights of melodrama and absurdity in his Golden Palm winning Dancer in the Dark. In my opinion this is von Trier's weakest film (of all that I have seen so far). Perhaps the Cannes jury were undoing the damage they did in previous years by awarding genuine masterpieces like Breaking the Waves and Europa second rung prizes. But still I liked the song sequences specially when Bjork croons, "I've seen it all"! At least the deconstruction of the musical genre, although childish and simplistic, was interesting. Anyway the film ends tragically, which redeems many of its shortcomings (at least to me)! That's what persuaded me to sit for the second time for the film :)

The best of the lot was undoubtedly Abbas Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry. I was seeing it the second time too and I was just floored by its simplicity. This film manages to raise big metaphysical questions without sounding pretentious for a moment. For more check out this essay on the film.

This weekend it is the set of three Guru Dutt's films. I have seen them all, but never on the big screen. Should be good hopefully.

Elfriede Jelinek's Lust: Random Thoughts

Finally finished reading Lust. It took quite an effort to do that. Both at the level of form and that of content the book is a challenge to read. Now at the end of it all, I must say I was slightly disappointed with the book. I like what Jelinek is trying to do in the book and also how she goes about doing it, but the book seemed more like a hurried rant built of trenchantly aphoristic asides, a rambling and incoherent essay on the war of the sexes told in a stream of consciousness style which never coalesces into a structured whole. It is also extremely repetitive. Same scene of rape and violence get repeated over and over like some tune in a musical piece. Perhaps that's what the Nobel academy meant when they pointed "musical flow of voices and counter-voices" in their prize citation!

Now I have absolutely no problem with novels written with a political agenda. I am not too fond of the philosophy of "art for art's sake", which as someone once said is the "philosophy of the well fed". I like books with "messages". I also don't look for story or plot in a novel, nor "psychologically well rounded" characters. I am entirely okay with political propaganda, it should just be written in a stylish and evocative prose and should be passionately argued.

I am also not a sentimental, romantic or a lovey-dovey kind of person and I am okay, in fact I whole-heartedly welcome it, when someone treats topics like sex, romance or love as subjects of political investigations and exposes fascist undercurrents, rampant hypocrisy and dishonesty beneath these supposedly noble feelings. Love as an instrument to exercise power and control? Bring it on, I say!

So it is in this context that I found Lust slightly disappointing. The book tells the "story", if it can be called that, of a Director of a paper mill who is also called "the man" who treats his employees with the same violent impunity as he treats his wife at home. The book is basically an endless series of violent and explicit rape scenes written in a cynical and evocative style. All these rape scenes are interspersed with cynical asides on how the director runs his paper mill. That is, like a true fascist autocrat. Perhaps Jelinek thinks that this gangster capitalism is the true capitalism. It is not hard to imagine why she will call bullshit if you give her a copy of Capitalism and Freedom! Or perhaps she is just trying to draw a symmetry between capitalism and marriage as they are both founded on the notion of private property, or that is what she thinks. After all these rapes the wife meets another man and has another series of brutal sexual encounters. Well, what do you expect? He is after all a man! She also has a kid but he is dirty little fascist himself who is always thinking of me-me-me and asking for presents. Even the woman is not exempt from Jelinek's contempt. She flays her for her preoccupation with her looks and perhaps for her stupidity which makes her believe the "romantic nothings" with which men exploit her body.

In the Jelinek-land all sexual relationships (or is it just the heterosexual ones?) are inherently relationship of unequals and lend themselves naturally to fascistic power play. She also doesn't think very highly, to put it mildly, of romance and related feelings. I-Love-You's for her are just "awkward nothings" that the man "slobbers into the warm earhole" of the woman while he "batters her hole between her legs". Shocked by the language? then sample this, taken randomly from the book (caution very strong language!):

The pallid bags of her breasts sag on her ribcage. Only one man and one child have ever made use of them. The Man back home ever bakes his daily impetuous daily bread anew. If your breasts hang right down on the table at dinner you can get an operation. They were made for the child and for the Man and for the child in the Man. Their owner is still writhing in her excreted fluid. Her bones and hinges are rattling with cold. Michael, racing down the slope, chomps at her privates and clutches and tugs at her dugs. Any moment now God-given sap will rise in his stem, his cup will overflow. Hurry up, stuff that prick in its designated slot, no loitering. You can hear her shrieks , you can see the whites of her eyes, what are you waiting for?

Or just a paragraph later and you can understand why one of the members of the nobel academy resigned protesting against awarding the prize to Jelinek calling her work, "whingeing, unenjoyable, violent pornography" :

The young man is suddenly alarmed at the totality with which he can spend himself without being spent. Again and again he reappears from within the woman only to bury his little bird in the box again. He's now licked Gerti from top to toe. His tongue is still tart with the taste of her piss. Next her face. The woman snaps at him and bites. It hurts, but it's a language animals understand. He grabs her head, still by the hair, pulls it up off the floor and slams it back where he first found it. Gerti splays her mouth wide open and Michael's penis gives it a thorough go...The novelty of this has worn off, unfortunately, since he did it the same way last time...An endless chain of repetitions, less appealing every time because the electronic media and melodies have accustomed us to having something new home-delivered every day...

What I liked about the book was the way in which Jelinek plays with words, it does create a slightly weird, jolting effect in the reader. But overall the book disappoints because it is extremely repetitive. She could have made her points more powerfully in an essay of few pages and it would have been more effective. But anyway I am glad I read the book, just because I had never come across anything like it before. So why should one read this book? Well, other than the curiosity value, if you are feeling desperate because of unfulfilled romantic and sexual cravings, it can offer some consolation! Also if you are pissed off with all those chick flicks and romances and think that these are seriously damaging the worldview of young and naive people, you can read it as an antidote. Also if you are a manhating feminist battling in the war of sexes you can use this book as a source of ammunition! Or like me, if you think that revelling in negativity, hatred and full-throttled cynicism and misanthropy is a nice way to spend the weekend, this book will have plenty to offer.

An article from the nobel prize site here and a profile from The Times of London

The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum, the German novel by the Nobel prize winner Gunter Grass, is one of my all time favourite novels. It features one of the most extraordinary first-person narrators ever -- the "dwarf" Oskar Matzerath who recounts his story from a mental asylum. His narrative voice is what gives the novel its strange artistic power. It is darkly satirical and also fantastical, as if it were some kind of a grotesque fairy tale. But fairy tale it certainly is not. Rather, it is actually a dark tale of indictment of the role of German society and of ordinary men and women in the rise of National Socialism and their easy forgetfulness of their guilty past in the post-war economic miracle.

Okay, all of this because I watched the Volker Schlondorff's film adaptation of the novel last evening. The good folks at collective chaos film society are organising a short festival of films which have won Golden Palms at the Cannes film festival (so more posts are in the offing). I had seen the film before but I didn't remember all the details from the book or the film so went ahead.

The film is a very faithful adaptation of the book, although it handles only one half and in doing that it already clocks almost two and half hours of running time. Now making a faithful adaptation in this case in not as straightforward as it would seem because the book relies on so many over-the-top set pieces. Schlondorff's literalist approach to all those Rabelaisian scenes actually works in this case. So we see in the first scene of the film, how the narrator's mother was conceived in a potato field when his grandmother hid his to-be grandfather inside her "four skirts"! Although we never learn of the smell of rotten butter which is ubiquitous in the book. Or the scene where Oskar recounts his experience of coming out of his mother's womb or where he is made to drink the "evil soup" or the "muff diving" scene with the young Oscar (okay, in this case it is more vivid than in the book!). And the secret about the white powder is not revealed even in the film. Whatever it is, the scenes are quite erotic. And yes the most powerful scene involving eels and a horse's head. Cautionary warning here: If you are enthusiastic about eels or are ignorant of where they come from, don't read the book or watch the movie!

The film is of course a commendable piece of work but I think it would work better as an effective companion piece to the book rather than in independent work. Which is I think, exactly what a literary adaptation should aim to achieve.

This is a short essay on the film. Posters and stills from the film here.

Elfriede Jelinek's Lust: Some Quotes from the Blurb

Lust is a German novel written by the recent Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek. I picked up the book reading the quotes on the book's blurb. Here are some of those, I just had to buy the book after reading these!

'Elfriede Jelinek's Lust is an unrelenting look at the bleak correspondence between marriage, capitalism and sex. Every sentence slams home a truth so trenchant that it's difficult to read Lust in large doses. An almost unbelievably confrontational and blunt writer, Jelinek dares her reader to wince and turn away from these pages: it's testimony to her witchy skill that one can't...' Voice Literary Supplement

'A thorough rubbishing of romantic love, Lust is intricately written with a tumbling pace, sustained and effective wordplay and plenty of sharp, cynical authorial observation. More than good.' List

'Sport, capitalism, male penetrative sexuality, bourgeois consumerism, the family--are pilloried in between the ceaseless rapes, buggeries and other adventures. Extraordinarily well written, with many brilliant turns of phrase, this remains in my mind the most disturbing European novel I have read this year.' New Statesman

'An angry, distasteful but compelling examination of marriage as a sexual war zone.' The Sunday Times

'In Lust you can hear the axe falling. No wonder every page hurts' The Guardian

'An extraordinary, violent book...Lust is the unmasking of of sex -- all "innocence of privacy" -- as power' The Observer

So this is what it is. The Will to Power is the key to unlocking reality. Specially the reality about sexual relationships. Although when it comes to sex, I am personally more drawn to Schopenhauerian view of sexual desire as a manifestation of the malignant will behind the suffering of life than the Nietzschean Will to Power. I sometimes think what a bunch of losers these two guys were (and I am sure Jelinek is one too) and I should rather read about the conquests of Don Juan and Casanova or the memoirs of Fanny Hill or watch a good porn movie rather than spend time on Lust. Okay, will do those things after I am done with the book!

Bono is having a hard time defending Nike and Gap at Comment is Free. Its a long series of rants against Bono and the evils of corporations in the comment section. Check it out here.

The Conspiracy of the Idiots

One of the things that annoys me most with people is their sheer credulity. Do we grow more credulous and less sceptical as we grow up? Most of us certainly do, if the popularity of these utterly stupid conspiracy theories are anything to be believed. I mean I can understand Da Vinci Code, it is a work of fiction but what about the theories about 9-11. Just take a look at this wikipedia entry dedicated to the conspiracy theories surrounding 9-11.

Is it just the information glut that is fuelling this thing? When forwarding emails or publishing on the internet or sending smses has become totally free, the junk and the authentic have both been democratized (such is the leveling power of internet!) to a common level. So when you ask some idiot of the proof of his theory he will promptly send you a link to a shady website or forward you a chain mail. While internet has certainly fuelled the trend, I think there is an inherent predisposition in human nature towards believing in these conspiracy theories. It is just extremely difficult to digest for people that extraordinary events can be caused by perfectly ordinary reasons. Or perhaps this is just somekind of reverse scepticism. We distrust our governments, mainstream media, political figures and other authorities in our system so much that any information coming out of them becomes ipso facto suspect. I personally think it is the most important reason.

Michael Shermer, the sceptic extraordinaire, debunks some of the theories in Scientific American.

And this is Shermer's manifesto for scientific scepticism. Really worth reading.

Triumph of Human Spirit or Triumph of a Cliche?

Slate has an article on the new Hollywood film United 93 by columnist and writer Ron Rosenbaum. He raises a few excellent points in it:

Could it be that the three films are a symptom of our addiction to fables of redemptive uplift that shield us from the true dimensions of the tragedy? Redemptive uplift: It's the official religion of the media, anyway. There must be a silver lining; it's always darkest before the dawn; the human spirit will triumph over evil; there must be a pony.

That's always been the subtextual spiritual narrative of media catastrophe coverage: terrible human tragedy, but something good always can be found in it to affirm faith and hope and make us feel better. Plucky, ordinary human beings find a way to rise above the disaster. Man must prevail. The human spirit is resilient, unconquerable. Did I mention there must be a pony?

Now I have nothing against hope, optimism or faith in the future but the way the culture industry and media package these things as products and sell them to unsuspecting masses who eagerly devour the "message" and generally feel good about themselves and the world -- it just troubles me. This particular film might have some artistic value but it sure is being packaged and marketed as the "feel-good 9-11 movie". Rosenbaum gives some examples from interviews and press releases related to the film and proves this point.

What a shame it is that "triumph of human spirit" has become such a dishonest cliche! It is perhaps better if the subject is completely fictional but to use historical events like 9-11 or worse, Holocaust to drive home such banal message is just plain unethical, just plain wrong. I mentioned Holocaust because it is perhaps the most "profitable" historical event in this sense. Incidentally I remember reading an article by Rosenbaum titled something like Chaplin and Benigni: The Arrogance of Clowns in which he lambasted such movies like The Great Dictator and Life is Beautiful. It was an excellent and very provocative read. I can't find the article on the net now.

Godard in his film In Praise of Love raises similar questions. In the film a couple of Americans representing "Spielberg and Associates" visit an elderly French couple who fought on the side of French resistance in the second world war to "buy their story" and make a Hollywood movie about it, starring Juliette Binoche, no less perhaps indicating another instance how another "artifact" of European high-art is being appropriated by the monster of Hollywood popular culture.

I was also thinking whether a genuine tragedy is indeed possible in any art form in this age. I really don't think so, at least not in Hollywood or anything related to popular culture. Such is our need for hope and faith and such is the power of the ubiquitous culture industry! This is perhaps the real "death of tragedy" critics and philosophers talk about.

Not having seen United 93, I really don't know how "Hollywoodian" the film is but I am not very hopeful or enthusiastic about watching it. I hope I am proven wrong when I get a chance to watch it.

A Good Lawyer's Wife

The Korean film A Good Lawyer's Wife is as racy as its poster on the right would suggest. What the poster doesn't show is how painful and how funny the film is. It is basically a black comedy (and it could hardly get blacker than this) about the discontents of family and marital life in upper middle class Korean society, almost in the same vein as American Beauty, although considerably more hard hitting, perhaps even funnier. It is certainly not for faint hearted audiences, it depicts scenes of sexual discontent and frustration, illness, death and dissolution of relationship with such brutal frankness that it becomes literally painful to go on watching it, even when you laugh or are aroused by individual scenes. I was reminded of another American black comedy, Todd Solondz's Happiness which was perhaps more painful to watch but which more or less failed because of extreme and posturing misanthropy on part of Solondz. Im Sang-soo, the director of this Korean film, obviously cares for his characters and never passes any moral judgments unlike Solondz.

Moon Soo-ri, the amazing actress who plays the wife of the title is a former dance teacher who has now accepted a life of domesticity. With her husband busy at work or with his mistress, she has to take care of the entire family--her adopted son who has just come to know about the fact of his adoption, her father-in-law who is dying of liver failure after an entire life of alcoholism. Also the sex between husband-wife is tepid enough, in fact so tepid that she masturbates after doing it and worries whether she is losing her capacity to have orgasms! There is also an important subplot of an emotionally unstable teenager stalking her. Soon a family tragedy happens (shown in such an absurd and even a comic way that it is to be seen to be believed) and everything hurtles relentlessly downward after that.

What is remarkable about the film is how it avoids becoming another sentimental melodrama about the collapse of a family. The absurd and blackly comic tone works in a fantastic way, and unlike Happiness (which had a similar tone) you actually care for the characters because they remain human throughout precisely because of their shortcomings and inability to channel their desires in meaningful ways. Also a few words of praise for Moon Soo-ri who plays the character of wife... This must have been an extremely difficult role, she has to not only shed all her clothes but also all her emotional protective shell. It is simply unbelievable how utterly natural and effortless she makes those painful scenes by her totally unself-conscious acting.

In short, A Good Lawyer's Wife is the best Korean film I have seen so far. Not for the squeamish or prudes, this is a family soap-opera which truly rocks.

Some Links:
IMDB entry of the film.
Filmbrain's review (Unlike him the movie didn't make me cry although I did avert my eyes in at least one scene and tried to think of something else other than what was on screen!)
A review from the DVDTimes website

P.S.It was a nice surprise to see Moon Soo-ri reading a Korean translation of Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (it has the same cover as in English) in a scene, with even the subtitles informing what the book was. I wonder what it was supposed to mean!

Houellebecq

John Updike reviews Michel Houellebecq's latest novel in New Yorker and doesn't like it.

A much better essay on the book was published in TLS sometime back. Check it out here. Worth reading and it is a good introduction to his work too. Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles is one of my favourite contemporary novels. It has this to say about that novel:

It starts from the premiss that in our post-faith, commodity-rich culture, personal gratification has become the highest good. The pursuit of pleasure prioritizes the self and, in the process, promotes separation and dispersal. As a result, society has reverted to its fragmented, pre-civilized form and is filled with unlinked, unfulfilled, unhappy egos, the elementary particles and unconnected atoms of the title. The novel explores the implications of this diagnosis through the lives of two brothers. Bruno succumbs to his inability to make meaningful connections, while Michel, a philosophically minded microbiologist, develops genetic theories which, in the century following his death, lead to the systematic removal of the destructive human traits of selfishness and violence. Genetic engineering and cloning offer the only way of eluding the barbarity to which economic materialism, the sexual free market, the sidelining of emotional needs, extreme liberalism and sloppy moral values are herding us.

I have linked to it before but it is worth reading again. The Times profile of Houellebecq.

Another Worthless Horror Movie

I don't consider myself a horror movie fan. Amongst all genres it has perhaps the worst signal to noise ratio. For every genuinely good horror movie there are tons which are just plain crap, shamelessly pandering to stupid teenagers and their adult manifestations. The fanboy mentality that generally grows around a horror director doesn't help matters either. One of those cases is the Japanese cult film maker Takashi Miike. I remember being completely floored by his classic Audition when I had seen it a few years back. It still remains perhaps the favourite horror movie of all time for me. After Audition I tried a few of his other movies, none of which replicated its successes, at least for me.

Miike was in news a couple of months back, and I am not talking of the subscribers of the fangoria magazine here. It came in mainstream newspapers. The American cable channel Showtime had commissioned a series called Masters of Horror in which they asked some renowned horror filmamakers to make one hour long independent episodes for the TV series. Some of the episodes created lots of buzz. One of them being the satirical Homecoming in which zombies of US soldiers in Iraq come home to vote in the presidential election. It predictably pissed off the conservative press in the US. Anyway, so Miike was also assigned one of the episodes to direct but when he handed over the final product the series producers developed a fright and refused to air it. So I was generally browsing and came across the bit torrent file of the episode and even though I didn't really want to see it, my curiosity got the better of me. Now after seeing it I realize it was a wastage of time and bandwidth both. It is disgusting (in a bad, unartistic sort of way) and a shoddy piece of work. It made me seriously think how he could make such technical brilliance of Audition look so effortless. Perhaps it was just a fluke.

Imprint basically tells the story of an American who goes to a brothel on an Island to find her long lost love. There he meets a deformed prostitute who tells him the horrific story of what happened to his love, alongwith her own life story. Basically it is like Memoirs of a Geisha plus torture, pedophilia, incest, aborted fetuses, floating corpses of pregnant women etc. Thoroughly unpleasant all the way. Perhaps it was the English language that created problems because it is difficult to explain such hammy acting by the actor playing the role of the American. It was just plain ridiculous. The rest of the cast was good although Japanese people speaking in English definitely struck a discordant note. Subtitles would have worked better perhaps.

One of the main problem I have with most of the horror movies is the way they rely just on horrific images to create the effect. Whereas the true lasting horror comes when you situate those images in a context and invest your characters with real emotional resources. That's where films like Audition succeed and those like Imprint fail. Some social, emotional context would have really helped the movie. As it is now, it is strictly meant for people who equate horror with the depiction of taboo images on screen. See it through your fingers and then forget all about it when the movie ends!

Some links for curious souls: Audition as I said is very highly recommended. Don't read about it if you plan to see it. It is one of those genuinely alarming movies. It manages to combine the best of Lynch, Cronenberg and Polanski, and believe me it is not a hyperbole.
News entry about the canceling of the show.
The IMDb entry of the episode.
And Miike's entry on the wikipedia.
More information about the series.
This PDF file has a fine survey of the history of the genre.

From Enduring Love

Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn't always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn't have to defend myself against the usual flotsam, the scraps of recent memory, the takens of things-not-done, or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean.

I am off to work now and my goal for today is to spend at least one hour in this state, free from regrets of the past, free from the fears and anxieties for the future, floating weightlessly in the constant present. And I love that phrase, "ghostly wrecks of sexual longing"... so no leering at pretty women in office too! :)

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

I spent the entire day today reading Ian McEwan's brilliant novel Enduring Love. I recently finished reading his latest novel Saturday and was itching to read his other books (next in line is his booker winning Amsterdam). It is a gripping, suspenseful novel which is also a fascinating exploration of conflicts of ideas related to science, faith and love.

The novel's protagonist Joe Rose is a man of science, a hard-boiled rationalist and reductionist. He tries to explain everything around him in terms of physics, chemistry and biology of things. In the beginning of the novel he is attending a picnic with his wife Clarissa who is an expert on romanticism in literature and doing some research on Keats's life. Together they witness a bizarre and tragic balloon accident after which the novel turns into a story of sexual obsession. One other witness of the accident Jed Parry is a deluded erotomaniac who gets obsessed with Joe and starts stalking him when his advances are spurned. He is also some kind of a Jesus freak who has found some very personal ideas about God and religion based entirely on emotion and subjective feeling. Gradually the stalking takes an emotional toll on the rationalist hero and fissures appear in the relationship between Joe and Clarissa. It is interesting how McEwan develops tension with the three main characters who together represent science, arts/romanticism and irrational faith.

McEwan uses these three characters not just to propel the plot or to create suspense but also to explore the nature of rationality and its (supposed) antipathy towards faith, love, madness (McEwan thinks that these are the same or at least different only in scale). More importantly he shows that this conflict or antipathy is not there just inside the pages of philosophy books but rather these are deeply ingrained in our psyche and our inherent nature. This is not an original idea but he situates this theoretical conflict within the context of fiction and makes it startling by his gift of psychological realism. He also tries to show that human rationality is a highly contingent form of rationality, far removed from the textbook version. Rather than being rational we have got an infinite capacity for self delusion and retrospective rationalization.

McEwan is obviously enamoured with science and its possibilities and also its limitations vis-a-vis our nature. There are long passages in the book which seem to be taken direct out of some book on Evolution and human nature, only it is beautifully written. For example this passage about our ability for endless self-deception:

I felt a familiar disappointment. No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favour and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half-truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track--when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why this statue of Virgin Mary weeps blood, and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn't save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity.

Some links: An article from Slate. Interview with McEwan about the book. Details about his life and career so far here.

Happiness and Amoeba!

Have been (slightly) busy but actually far more confused, so blogging has taken a back seat. Perhaps things will continue like this for a while now.

Just a random, rambling entry (provoked by V's comment on the last post)...

I had an interesting conversation with my flat mate this morning about the "scientific detachment" that I always claim to have towards everything in life, something like "my relationship with this world is exactly that of what would be between a scientist and his specimen" or "I am an anthropologist from some other planet. Other people and their happiness etc for me are just subjects of study, a way of gaining knowledge" or "my job is to see and to understand as an impartial observer, with absolutely no stakes and absolutely no desire to participate in the proceedings".

Of course this is all as stupid as it sounds. I am still attached to so many things (and thank god for that) like family, (few) friends, career etc but yes I have gotten over so many other things... Like money (to an extent, minimum required for a respectable bourgeois life) and more importantly, the omnipresent, the bane of modern life, the status anxiety. Jealousy or envy just doesn't bother me at all. Other people's success or happiness, professional, spiritual, material, romantic, sexual (I am being honest here!)...any kind, just doesn't do anything to me. Stories of those so called successful people (you know, the types who grow from humble backgrounds to become an investment banker) just bore me to death.

I think I am reasonably detached from my surroundings to have a scientific approach towards life and live with it comfortably but it is only sometimes that things get hazy and messed up and that's when it is the time to see "inside" as V asked me to do. Okay, so off to do some introspection now. Bye!

Simply to See

The British philosopher John Gray ends his book Straw Dogs with this line:

Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal can not do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

I don't want purpose in life. I don't even want peace. But just one thing -- can life be a little less confusing? Can someone tell me how things really work here, in this world?

Dispatches Turns One!

This blog turned one last Friday!

Around 200 posts in a year. Not so bad.

Michael Haneke's Code Unknown

Michael Haneke's Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys is a profound look at the questions of communication (or the difficulty, perhaps even impossibility of), xenophobia, isolation and breakdown of community in modern, post-industrial societies. The concept is somewhat similar to the last year's hit Hollywood film Crash (it was released in the year 2000) but rest assured, it is not hard to guess why it didn't get anywhere near to winning any Oscars. It is a difficult film to watch, in not only the difficult questions it raises or its bleak dissection of contemporary society, but also because of the structure of the film itself. Like his other films Funny Games and Cache, Haneke makes sure that audiences know that they are watching a movie, that is, it is a representation of reality and not the reality itself. Each of the scenes is shot in one take, some long others short, and each ends abruptly, sometimes even before the dialogue ends, to a blank screen. There is absolutely no illusion of continuity, that we generally expect from a movie. Also the lead character, played with her usual brilliance by Juliette Binoche, is an actress who is acting in thriller film. There are a few scenes from the movie within the movie and Haneke shows in those scenes how easy it is to provide what audiences want -- thrills and chills. In the rest of the film he makes sure that audiences don't get any of these conventional satisfactions!

I won't attempt to write a comprehensive summary or review of the film. You can read some of them here. The sight and sound magazine also has a long summary of the film. I will just say that after watching it Crash would feel like a kiddie movie.

Just some stray thoughts. The film begins with a pantomime game being played by children. One girl makes a body/facial gesture and other kids guess what that gesture could be. Some of the guesses are, "Alone", "Sadness", "Imprisoned", "Hiding Place", "Bad Conscience". To each of these guesses the girl answers No but perhaps we the audience know better. It is all these emotions that the film that we are going to see will be about. This is a perfect introduction to the film.

Also the first regular scene of the film is a masterly long take (almost ten minutes) in which the camera tracks as the character played by Binoche talks to her brother in law. In it we see how a black man is victimised when he comes to avenge the insult to a woman beggar (who we later know is an illegal immigrant). As if to balance this scene (blacks are victims and white people are victimisers), we later see an arab youth gratuitously taunting Juliette Binoche about her race, class and gender. It is an extremely powerful and unnerving scene and I won't spoil it by describing it here. You just have to see it. Also the seen, with the collage of still photographs, first from the war scenes in Kosovo and then faces belonging to different race, culture and nationalities while the narrator recounts his experiences in Kosovo and Kabul, is quite eerie. I didn't know what to make of it. Reminded me of Godard's In Praise of Love.

Interestingly I was also reading Amartya Sen's collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian(which is brilliant by the way) this weekend. After watching Code Unknown, Sen's ideas and historical judgments looked hopelessly naive and optimistic to me. I know, I am being unfair to both Haneke and Amartya Sen when I say this. They are both looking at the same things from two different angles. While the situation in multicultural cities of Europe isn't something that we can be optimistic about, it can never be denied that we still have a long tradition of inter-community dialogue and communication and it is not impossible to continue the same tradition of heterodoxy and openness even in this age. I don't know, if it is naive to believe that human beings can transcend the barriers of class, race, nationality, religion, gender, age or just plain psychological fear, uncertainty, paranoia and anxiety and reach out to other human beings. Perhaps it is naive.

I had earlier written about Cache, Funny Games and Seventh Continent. (Yes, I am a big fan of Michael Haneke!)

A long essay on Haneke which discusses Code Unknown, Funny Games and The Piano Teacher.

Fat Girl by Catherine Breillat

Fat Girl is a French film directed by Catherine Breillat, who according to the New York Times is, "France's most impassioned correspondent covering the war between the sexes". Actually the original French title of the film is A Ma Souer, which would translate to "To My Sister". And as this title suggests the film is about two teenage sisters and their sexual awakening. The story, about the two girls' quest for love and sex, on the surface seems picked up from a typical coming-of-age film or even a chick flick but nothing would be farther from truth. Breillat's earlier film had a massively ironic title of "Romance". There was little romance there but plenty of unsimulated sex, all shown in clinical and deeroticised manner and as if all of it was not enough there were a few scenes direct from the gynaecology room towards the end. I don't have any particular problems with sex, specially if it comes wrapped in some intellectual mumbo-jumbo but the film was extremely pedantic and many dialogues and situations were just plain silly. One of the scenes was where the girl muses her Sartrean musings aloud while holding her boyfriend's penis in her hand (something like, "I am a hole, I disappear in proportion to the dick inside me"). Fat Girl isn't that explicit, but still it is as brutal and confrontational as Romance, perhaps even more. Also while not as pedantic as Romance, Breillat makes it clear that it is not a "realistic" film and the aim of the film is less to tell a story than to drive home an agenda, a polemic against the traditional notions of romance.

I won't say any more about the film. You can read about it in Salon or New York Times

I was reading Breillat's interview provided in the DVD booklet. She makes this provocative, perhaps even absurd, statement. (May not make sense to those who haven't seen the film):

They [Girls] have been brought up to be receptive to sentimentality, not to opportunistic desire. They themselves have this same desire, but they deny it in the name of "sentimental ethics". It is a social factor that throws everything off. On one hand, one could argue that the rapist is the most sympathetic male character in the film. He is the only one who presents himself as he really is. He doesn't make any romantic promise. There's almost more respect and more love in this final scene than in the previous ones. This is true of the film, not of the reality of rape.

Hmmm. I thought, I knew which was worse, dishonest and manipulative (aren't they all?) seduction or an honest (yes, aren't they all?) rape! Or perhaps illusions aren't that useless after all. The illusion of having gifted some pleasure to someone she loved must have soothed away Elena's pain in the earlier scene of anal sex. The only thing is to keep these romantic illusions intact... I am sure it isn't that difficult!

Also in the interview she mentions that she copied the Anais's gesture of holding her rapist in her hands from Robert Bresson's Mouchette which had a similar scene. Now after having seen the film, at least by association, the rape scene takes some deeper philosophical meaning. Although I think it would be a serious folly to compare it with Mouchette which is truly a sublime masterpiece.

The film, though not entertaining or even erotic despite being drenched from top to bottom in sex, is worth watching for the difficult questions it raises. All the characters and situations are still buzzing in my head and refuse to let go. And yes I didn't say anything about the truly morbid song sung by the Fat Girl in the film... It is something like, "I have taken out my heart and placed it on the windowsill, If crows come and peck at this raw meat, let them do that" (something like that)... and in the beginning she sings another song, again something like, "I am bored in the day, I am bored in the night, I will be bored even after I die, I need a body, I need a man, or even a woman, even animal, or even a werewolf"... (again not exact lines)

More on it some other time.

Entry of the film on Rotten Tomatoes website.

Loves of a Blonde

Loves of a Blonde is a Czech film directed by Milos Forman. Forman later moved to Hollywood where he made such Oscar winning films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It is a very simple and spare film but it captures the feelings of romantic disappointment and life's injustices very eloquently. I was reminded of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria after watching it. Only it is funnier, quirkier and as the still above would attest, quite sexier too!

Some informative articles about Czech cinema of the sixties (also called the Czech new wave) here and here. I think this is the only Czech film I have seen so far.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Few other contemporary novelists understand the feelings of regret and loss better than Kazuo Ishiguro and he confirms this in his latest novel Never Let Me Go. It was published and nominated for the Booker prize last year but I managed to get around to reading it only last weekend. The novel is great but it never reaches the sublime heights of the earlier Ishiguro's masterpiece The Remains of the Day. Those who are familiar with Ishiguro's style will find nothing new in this novel. The same understatement of emotional aspects of drama, elision at crucial narrative moments and the narrator's almost pathological fear of exoposing one's true self to the reader by means of convoluted and digressive story telling. Perhaps it was this familiarity that left me somewhat unmoved at the end of the novel, although the ending here is even more downbeat than his earlier books.

The novel tells the story of a school meant for human clones who are being raised as organ donors. The narrator is a thirty-one year old Kathy H. who is reminiscing about her days at her childhood school Hailsham and specially her relationships with two of her friends Tommy and Ruth. The novel also recounts her attempts to confront the truth of her own existence and that of her friends (which turns out to be quite horrible).

I thought the novel was quite good. It makes some powerful points about the importance of love and friendship, the brevity and fragility of human existence and the inevitability of the feelings of regret and loss while confronting memories of times gone by. The language and the style, although on surface extremely emotionless and spare, is highly evocative. But still I finished the novel with a slight sense of frustration. Never in the book I felt that Ishiguro was even cursorily interested in the science and ethics of cloning. I mean, I understand that the novel is a kind of allegory and those superficial things are not as important but still the cloning aspect just seemed like added from the outside just to make the novel "different". There was this aspect about artistic instinct and creativity being used to prove the existence of soul. It seemed easy and tired as an idea or thematic construcy. Perhaps Ishiguro meant it to be only a narrative and plot device. Also it was hard to believe how the clones have the exact and entire emotional make-up of a normal human being but what they don't have is a basic self-preservation instinct. or, perhaps Ishiguro was trying to make some point about the benign acceptance of the fact of the finitude of human existence. Very fatalist and very sad!

Pick up the book if interested in a nice melancholy weekend :)

Reviews from Slate and London Times.

Complete Review page of the book.

Kazuo Ishiguro's page on the contemporary writers website.