Manorama Six Feet Under

Anurag has been pestering me to watch last year's critical Bollywood hit Manorama Six Feet Under for quite some time. I finally managed to see it a couple of days ago. It is indeed an excellent work which really makes you interested in the director Navdeep Singh's career, specially after you realize it is his debut work. I don't want to add to anything Anurag has already talked about on his blog (see also Jabberwock's review), just a few disjointed comments.

First many people, specially fans of Roman Polanski's Chinatown from which it derives its basic template, were let down by the ending. They felt that it was a cop-out, in the way it condescended to the audience's need of closure and happy ending. I didn't feel the same. It made me think about something which I keep coming to in many discussions and readings. It is a general point but not entirely unrelated to the film. The despair and nihilism which is staple of so much of modern western art is a result of something that is intrinsic to western civilization at a particular point in time. The crisis of faith and the loss of meaning which marks so much of modern art was the final step in the historical process which started with enlightenment. We in India never had any enlightenment. Our modernity is borrowed second-hand from the west. Deep down the basic assumption - the faith in the order of the nature, the belief that everything makes sense however the facts may contradict this belief - remains intact and continues to guide everbody's response to the world. The hero of Manorama is product of this very culture. If he summons God to his rescue and spouts some cliches about fate in the end, that shows he really belongs to this way of life.

Another thing about the film which I liked very much was its portrait of small-town India. The sights, sounds and the landscapes felt all real and authentic and never condescended to. It wasn't used just to create an "exotic" background to the story, it was an essential part of the story in the sense that one can't see those characters and the story outside that particular context, which is something very rare in Bollywood. Often you have a generic and cliched background which admirers of Bhansali and his ilk call "beautiful." It was also not another generic Bombay or generic New York or generic Switzerland. I also loved the way Singh used mostly extended takes rather than rapid cuts to artifically speed-up the action. The camera then becomes a tool of discovery and despite slow pace results in many surprises. I specially loved the long tracking shot from the crane which opens the film.

Hmm. What else. I also totally agree with Anurag's description of Raima Sen ("poor man's femme fatale"). I know it is very insulting and harsh but you just have to see one scene towards the end. It was supposed to be repuslive and horrifying but it only made me giggle. This brings me to another point. Can we ever have a truly Indian femme fatale? Please don't tell me Mallika Sherawat and the whole sisterhood. I mean someone like Barbara Stanwyck, Louise Brooks? Okay that's impossible but you know... in the same ballpark? May be it is again Indian culture thing. Is femme fatale also an essentially western category?

Stranger Song

He is so gloriously depressed...

The Tyranny of Experience

One of the most annoying things about discussions of books and movies is how often the complaint - "I couldn't relate to it" (or its affirmative version, if it is a praise) - comes up. I once got involved into a heated discussion with a friend over Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (a film I love very much) because he was so intent on dismissing it by saying that I have never known any woman like that and I don't understand why anyone would behave like that or that it doesn't make sense or worse, it is not logical. Lars Von Trier's Breaking the Waves engendered a similar discussion but in this case I was able to convince him of its worth (even though it is a film I love to hate).These responses are symptomatic of a much deeper and a more serious malaise which is the fear of venturing outside one's own domain of familiar experiences. Even when one comes across something genuinely new and unfamiliar, one is quick to mould it to fit into some preconceived and familiar notion. The whole idea of life for them is just an endless cycle of repetition. How boring can this get? It gets even worse when you realize that people like my friend (and indeed people like myself) have led such a sheltered, insulated, privileged and trauma-less life so far that it becomes absolutely ridiculous to judge other people's experiences and dismiss them as illogical or nonsensical solely based on the yardstick of one's own experience.

Now comes the other part. Let's assume there really is someone who is aware of the essential zombie-ness of his own life and is very eager to learn and understand what it must be to really live through such deep and stirring experiences (painful or joyous doesn't matter) and then in the process of learning invites censure from people who feel privileged to have experienced suffering. This is actually a common theme in Holocaust literature and memoirs for example. The argument goes that you really can't hope to understand or even imagine what it was like to live in Auschwitz. In fact the very interest one has in it makes one suspicious of some deep moral rot within. So finally we get experience-snobs on one hand and experience-vultures on the other. And yet I don't understand why the notion of second-hand experience should invite such contempt. Isn't the whole notion of art (at least the representational art) is that private, subjective and unique experiences can be represented in a communicable form, in other words to achieve a degree of intersubjectivity? Even if the aim is pure self-communion, there can be no detached reflection without representation, even if it is purely an internal representation.

I know, it all sounds a little naive in philosophical terms even a bit gobbeldygook but the final point is that one should be willing to venture out into the world beyond the familiar, be open and curious towards the new and the unknown. End of lesson.

The Problem of Consent

I randomly picked up this book by author Alan Wertheimer about legal issues with consent in sexual relations in a book sale sometime back. I have read only a couple of chapters so far and it is really a fascinating subject. I realize it must be old hat for people who are into legal studies because consent is really one of the key concepts in any contractual law but I had myself never given it much thought, specially not in the context of sexual relations. I think this has really become a very important issue because of growing cases of "date rapes" and the mainstreaming of "hookup culture" and reading this book only made me realize why legal brains are having such a tough time formulating appropriate laws.

In the introductory chapter of the book Wertheimer explains the main issue. It is not whether no means no but whether yes means yes i.e. what is the basis of a valid consent so that it is legally and morally permissible for the other party to have sex. He says that the basic philosophical problem is whether one defines consent as a state of being, that is state of an inner consciousness or something that one does. He believes it is the latter because the former wouldn't make any legal sense and this is where the problem of whether yes really means yes comes in. He takes up many different situations and shows how hard this problem really is. For example we all agree that physical coercion will deem any consent invalid but what if coercion is implicit. Like when the man threatens to terminate the relationship if the woman refuses? Or worse, what if this threat is implicitly conveyed, as is actually quite common? Another quite common situation is intoxication. How drunken must one be so that one can give a valid consent? What about mentally retarded people? If they can't give consent do they not have the right to intimacy and sexual pleasure either? Then there also is a possibility of fraud. What if one persuades the other party by reciting poetry or promising marriage without really meaning it? Just thinking about these things makes one realize why lawyers and lawmakers are having such a tough time framing laws for these crimes and at the same time preventing their misuse. In most cases it ultimately comes down to "rape without the rapist" that is, you can morally hold a person culpable and yet can make no legal case against him (or her?). Catherine Breillat Fat Girl brilliantly explores some of these issues too. I would make it mandatory for every teenage boy and girl only if it were not so nasty and explicit.

The central model for the argument that Wertheimer follows was first formulated by Immanuel Kant. To put it in simple terms Kant wasn't too keen about sexual desire. He saw it as inherently objectifying, one person using other as a means to an end - his or her sexual gratification - which violated one of his most famous categorical imperatives, which is that every person should be treated as an end rather than means to some end. He thought that only through the institution of marriage that people can be given rights to mutually use each other's bodies for their own selfish purposes. When one marries he is willingly entering into a contract in which he is giving the other person the right to use of his body in return of a reciprocal right.

Only when one sees a sexual relationship as a contract, one realizes the importance of consent. I know this sounds terribly unromantic on surface but at the implicit level this is what it ultimately boils down to. Thinking in these terms also made me clarify some of the ideas behind the moral and legal status of prostitution. Two people who enter into a sexual contract need not have exact same symmetrical aims. A woman may just want to please her lover without feeling the least bit horny herself or a wife may be looking for some expensive gift from her husband for the anniversary next week. Similarly a prostitute may enter the contract with the sole intention of earning money. In moral or legal terms it is no different. Now I am the last person who would cheer any such objectification but the fact is that it is in the nature of capitalism itself - the process of commodification (or reification as I had mentioned in the last post.) The fact that a prostitute has willingly allowed herself to be objectified doesn't diminish her status as an autonomous human being and in no way justifies moral censure let alone physical violence. (Of course I am talking about only those prostitutes who are able to give a valid consent, which now that I have written it sounds like a circular argument because it was exactly this problem of determining when a consent is valid that initially led us into this territory.)

There are lots of other fascinating things to say on the topic. More when I finish reading the book. For now here is a long review which discusses these ideas in more detail. This is another nice article about a Kantian defence of Prostitution.

Jia Zhang Ke's The World and Some Thoughts on Tourism

Seeing Jia Zhang ke's The World last week made me realize once more why I feel so ambivalent about tourism. First a few words about the film. The film is set in a real-life theme park at the outskirts of Beijing which houses scaled replicas of famous monuments of the world - Eiffel Tower, Leaning tower of Pisa, Taj Mahal etc. The loose narrative follows a bunch of characters as they go on with their daily job of creating and sustaining the required effect of hyperreality, simulacra and spectacle. Girls for example wear traditional Indian skirt and blouse and dance in front of Taj Mahal to the tunes of popular music. (Pretty weird, it actually made my head spin. Jia uses a tune from the classic movie Disco Dancer. I believe it was this song.) There are very few dramatic moments but even in its quiet and understated way it makes its point about slow erosion of identity and authenticity and the toll it takes on interpersonal relationships very emphatically. "The World" becomes a living metaphor for the thriving capitalist society itself. Matter of fact dialogues acquire ironic meanings. For example when they tell each other that "I am going to India" while knowing that they are not free to go anywhere. All they have is the illusion of the real.

It also made me think about the nature of tourism, at least the kind which is sold over the counter in ready-made packages. (Paris in seven days, India in two weeks!) Entire places and entire culture is reduced to a few symbols and monuments completely decontextualized and turned into products so that they can be marketed and sold to the consumers. Paris for example becomes synonymous with Eiffel Tower and a bunch of other things. There is a specific term in Marxist theory for this called Reification. Tourism is a major driving force behind this cultural reification, which is actually one of the hallmarks of advanced capitalist societies. The most extreme manifestations of this reification phenomena are the so-called theme parks, the very idea of which I find insulting. It is not that I have never indulged in vicarious pleasures myself and taken delight in things I know are simulated and false, but this is of an entirely different magnitude.

I don't want to give rationalized justifications for my own apartment-bound existence. There is also a different kind of tourism which is motivated by curiosity and eagerness to learn about the culture and discover new things, a tourism which is more authentic and less superficial, which is not just a series of tick marks on the discovery channel travel guide (saw this, done that kind).

A nice review from Village Voice and the trailer of the film:

from Wittgenstein

Continuing from the previous post and discussion about science and ethics, a few paragraphs from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (link goes to the hypertext version of the book)

6.4
All propositions are of equal value.

6.41
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value -- and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental.

What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.

It must lie outside the world.

6.42
Hence also there can be no ethical propositions.

Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.43
If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.

In brief, the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.

The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

6.44
Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

6.45
The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni* is its contemplation as a limited whole.

The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.



{* from the point of view of eternity}

Nothing happens in life

One of my favourite scenes from the movie Adaptation. Also, eagerly waiting for Synecdoche, New York, the latest by Charlie Kaufmann.

Reactionary (Pseudo-)Science

Okay, I am still wandering the life & style section of newspapers and found another disgraceful and infuriating article. Apparently some "research" somewhere has shown that women prefer breeding and rearing babies more than climbing corporate ladder. I have absolutely no interest in getting into the details of this so-called research but this has become part of a very annoying trend so I thought I will vent some of my irritation here.

First of all the abuse of scientific method and the dishonest way the researchers in humanities try to piggyback on the prestige and the certainties associated with "hard sciences". To be fair, the original research paper generally would make (it has to, actually) the methodological assumptions very clear before stating any conclusions but the same can't be said of journalists who report it in the popular media or the scientists themselves who write popular books for mainstream consumption. Now, I am not denying the possibility of the use of scientific method in these subjects even though they most certainly fall far short of standard criteria of verifiability, falsifiability, repeatable experiments etc which are the hallmarks of scientific method. After all, there are many different levels of certainties. It may not ever reach the certainty of laws of physics but still there are different gradations of truth. But still you just have to think about the good old problem of induction to see the essential ridiculousness of any such research which observes a sample size of few thousands and concludes for the entire human race. I wonder what would Hume have made of it? He even doubted common-sensical causation as logical invalid. (The fact that causation can never be concluded just from spatio-temporal adjacency and succession of two events!) And not to mention the irony of the whole thing! The same arts and humanities people never miss a chance to belittle claims of objectivity and superiority of scientific method by using fanciful theories (Thomas Kuhn et.al.)

As I said I am not arguing against the use of scientific method in these subjects but the essential limitations and assumptions should be properly stated when one is advertising the results. That brings me to second and even more important point. The way science is being used more and more to make normative judgments about social policies. The job of science is to explain phenomena, and not to tell us what we should do. If we confuse facts with values we will be prone to both factual error and also doubtful ethical judgments. Doing otherwise would be to commit what is called naturalistic fallacy - that is, what should be doesn't imply from what is. They are both two very different things. So even though by some truly remarkable and groundbreaking research one "proves" that women indeed prefer breeding and lack the will to succeed in a career, it still doesn't justify the wage differentials between the two genders. Again, it is generally not the scientists but the journalists and popular science writers who abuse science in this manner to set their own personal political agenda.

There is standard problem in philosophy of science called the demarcation problem, that is, finding the principles on the basis of which we can differentiate science from non-science and pseudo-science. Science and Philosophy are two very different things. If you mix both of them together it will create confusion in both camps. Just to take the example of gender, science can explain how male and female sexual organs work but it can't say anything to the ontological questions about the existence of gender as a category. Science can't help us in finding the meaning of what we mean when we say "X is a Man." Science can't help us decide which of the two is better, whether we should see ourselves as "men" and "women" or simply as "persons" - simply because it is a normative question which should be decided based on normative goals of individuals and society as a whole. There can be both conservative and progressive arguments which require persuasion and sustained thought and that's what these journalists and pop-science writers should focus on rather than crying eureka every second day.

Mr Good Enough?

Is it some zeitgeist thing or am I reading too much relationship crap these days? There is a truly disgraceful article in The Atlantic advising single women in their thirties to settle down with the next idiot who shows an interest in them. Okay, a bit unfair but not much.

Just to balance, another article which indulges in some male-bashing. It covers the same Knocked Up territory - "Postfeminism and crisis in masculinity" (that sounds like an essay topic) but is pretty comprehensive. What I don't understand is why is shopping considered more edifying than playing video games?

Philip Glass

This is one of my favourite film scores. There is also a piano solo version on youtube which is also very good. Glass composed the music for Woody Allen's latest film Cassandra's Dream too. It is characteristically heavy and ominous, though ultimately wasted on a mediocre film. The best part of the film was the credit sequence in the end.

Finding Mr Right

Nice amusing article in The Times about how hard it is for women to find Mr. Rights these days. Don't miss the comments of the male readers at the end, filled with frothing-at-the-mouth schadenfreude.

My own two cents. First, I think the whole sexual liberation thing has probably increased the net suffering of people in the west, and by people I mean both men and women. You really don't need to be au fait with the Frankfurt School philosophers to realize that the issue of "freedom" becomes very tricky in the context of life in advanced capitalist societies. More than freedom from taboos, it is the freedom from responsibility that people now long for. The only people whose lives have become easier and happier are the advertising guys, who found the laziest short cut to sell everything on the planet by appealing to and exploiting the basest and the most dehumanizing instincts in both men and women. Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles (also translated as Atomised, link to reviews here) is probably the most powerful and certainly the darkest denunciation of this aspect of sexual liberation.

Recently I also caught up with last year's hit comedy Knocked Up. Despite my extreme prejudice against (contemporary) romantic comedies, I actually found it rather interesting and revealing, though not as funny as I had expected it to be. It brings me to the second point. Feminist movement has succeeded in raising the consciousness of women but men really haven't changed much. I am not saying all men are insensitive and chauvinists or a bunch of idiots like in the film but most of them really do find it extremely difficult to live up to the high-expectations of their female partners. The film provides a very interesting commentary about the fears, anxieties and insecurities of men living in the "post-feminist" age and also shows why they are so wary and fearful of domesticity and long-term commitment.

Lastly, I don't know, may be I move in extremely conservative circles because even though all these theories sound very plausible and logical to me, I don't see any of these in my immediate circle. Most of my friends and acquaintances (including a few women) who got married in the last couple of years or so, have never been happier. I know they are not pretending. They are really happy. May be things will change a few years down the line (though I really hope it doesn't, despite my obvious envy) or probably it won't.

Anatomy of Melancholy

It's been long since I posted an extract from The Melancholy Book. ("spleen weak by nature, and not able to discharge his office" LOL!)

--------

As before, the cause of this kind of melancholy is inward or outward. Inward, [2449]when the liver is apt to engender such a humour, or the spleen weak by nature, and not able to discharge his office. A melancholy temperature, retention of haemorrhoids, monthly issues, bleeding at nose, long diseases, agues, and all those six non-natural things increase it. But especially [2450]bad diet, as Piso thinks, pulse, salt meat, shellfish, cheese, black wine, &c. Mercurialis out of Averroes and Avicenna condemns all herbs: Galen, lib. 3, de loc. affect. cap. 7, especially cabbage. So likewise fear, sorrow, discontents, &c., but of these before. And thus in brief you have had the general and particular causes of melancholy.

Now go and brag of thy present happiness, whosoever thou art, brag of thy temperature, of thy good parts, insult, triumph, and boast; thou seest in what a brittle state thou art, how soon thou mayst be dejected, how many several ways, by bad diet, bad air, a small loss, a little sorrow or discontent, an ague, &c.; how many sudden accidents may procure thy ruin, what a small tenure of happiness thou hast in this life, how weak and silly a creature thou art. Humble thyself, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, 1 Peter, v. 6, know thyself, acknowledge thy present misery, and make right use of it. Qui stat videat ne cadat. Thou dost now flourish, and hast bona animi, corporis, et fortunae, goods of body, mind, and fortune, nescis quid serus secum vesper ferat, thou knowest not what storms and tempests the late evening may bring with it. Be not secure then, be sober and watch, [2451]fortunam reverenter habe, if fortunate and rich; if sick and poor, moderate thyself. I have said.

Louise Dombrowski

Louise Dombrowski dancing with a flash light. From Twin Peaks. The girl playing her is Emily Fincher, the sister of the now-famous director. The imdb says it is only role to date, so it is unlikely one would ever know what she looks like! She was actually director's assistant. This scene was not originally in the script but they just made it up and shot it on the set. I love how Jerry speaks, "Lord, What's become of us!" One scene out of nowhere and a couple of rogues, villains and idiots are humanized, even made to look tragic.

Vienna Blogs

Lots of interesting discussions about Hofmannsthal and Musil over at the Vienna 1900 blog.

I wish more academic departments would follow the same model.

The Man Without Qualities Confusion

Totally inconsequential article. Needless to say, I don't share his disinclination towards literature in translation. I think the art and craft of translation is seriously undervalued and under-appreciated and on the other hand authorial intention (whatever that means) is often unjustifiably treated as sacrosanct and final but what really got my goat was the way he so completely misunderstands the meaning of the title of Musil's novel:

"At the moment I'm reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I've been meaning to read it for ages, mainly because of the title, which I've always thought a fabulous slap in the face for all those Amazon commentators who complain about disliking novels because the central characters are not exciting, or nice, or interesting enough."

This is such a complete misreading of the title (to his credit he seems to have just begun reading the book but still). Being a man without qualities is actually an admirable thing because it implies freedom and independence of spirit. It means living not by a sense of the real but a sense of the possible. In other words, it is not what you are that is important but what you can be because what you are is defined and imposed from the outside by the society and the institutions and they are almost always arbitrary, without any real foundation. A man with qualities is not a man at all, because by agreeing to define himself by an identity he has also allowed himself to be dehumanised. A character like Ulrich becomes even more admirable in our time when it has become so hard to transcend and live outside our given identities, whether they be of culture, nationality, gender, language or anything else. And even if all this strikes a mumbo-jumbo to some amazon reader, Ulrich is still a hero easy to feel jealous for. All the female characters (all impossibly beautiful, totally hypersexed and a few forbiddingly intellectual too) in the book are crazy about him and are dying to sleep with him!! (Ulrich is actually a satirical self-portrait with elements of wish-fulfillment too, even though Musil was himself quite a ladies' man in his youth.) Ulrich is one of my favourite heroes in all literature, in fact somewhat of a personal role-model.

Clarice Lispector

Like The Complete Review, I have been meaning to get to the works of Clarice Lispector too. There is a nice article on Nextbook full of fanboyish enthusiasm. There is not much about her books but surely these two lines are enough:

"eerie, existential vignettes, savant-like parables and prophesies of modern angst seared by the Brazilian sun. Her work called to mind a tropical, female Kafka with sensory overload."

Don't miss the first comment at the end of the article. It seems one can't even praise a writer's good looks without being called a sexist!

Meanwhile Kubla writes about another writer who has been on my to-read list for long : Marguerite Duras. I haven't been able to read much lately. Been a little busy. Actually more than time, you need peace of mind which is in short supply too.

The Devil's Backbone Trailer

I like this trailer. I also like the definition of a ghost - "a tragedy doomed to repeat over and over again", "a feeling suspended in time, like an insect in amber"... there is more in the film.



Another trailer with less dialogues and more sound effects here.

The Orphanage

I saw The Orphanage a few weeks back but didn't write about it because I was a little ambivalent. It suffers from the regular problem of horror genre - it tries too hard to be scary, too many creaking doors etc - so much so that one begins to doubt if the writer/director himself had doubts about the story or else they just didn't trust the sensitivity and the intelligence of the audience. It is a shame though because the film has a terrific story and is very powerfully anchored by the Spanish Actress Belen Rueda in the central role who gives a stirring performance as a woman trying to come to terms with soul-crushing maternal grief.

It is actually very similar to films like The Others and The Innocents (both magnificent films), both haunted house ghost stories with kids seeing ghosts and having imaginary friends. What I liked in this film in particular was the way it interprets the story of Peter Pan. The boy who refuses to grow up and the gang of "Lost Boys" both acquire dark and sinister meanings in the context of the story of this film. Refusing to grow up comes across as a reaction to the knowledge of impending death and lost boys becomes souls lost in the hereafter. It also has quite a lot in common with Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone which is similarly set in an orphanage and revolves around the ghost of a young boy. Del Toro by the way produced and "presented" the film. The way his name was splashed all over the posters and credits it felt like it was cashing in on his post-Pan's Labyrinth fame but it does stand up on its own. Worth watching, that is after you have watched the three classics I mentioned already. Actually Spaniards seem to be an expert in kiddie-horror genre (that is horror with kids in it, not horror for kids). Both The Spirit of the Beehive and Cria Cuervos, while in no way horror films, use similar narrative devices too. And of course the greatest kiddie-horror of all - The Night of the Hunter.

More Heidegger

Via Bookforum a review of a book about Heidegger's philosophy. I liked the reference to Pierre Menard Author of Quixote, the famous short story by Borges. (I have to read it sometime, I keep coming across its references at so many places. It seems to be available online.)

Anyway, back to Heidegger. I thought the comparison was very appropriate and quite astute. I spent a lot of time last year with Rudiger Safranski's biography Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil but couldn't get very far. The biography part was okay but when he came to discussing his philosophy Safranski had to fall back on Heidegger's own terminologies, neologisms and linguistic formulations.

J-Horror

An article in NYT about recent Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films. I have so far seen only the first The Ring (which I thought was excellent).

I love horror films. More than any other genre they are far more suited to exploring subjective mental states under extreme situations (I am talking at the level of genre, not individual films), a subject that personally interests me very much. It is specially galling then to see so much crap being produced in the name of horror films. Rather than sensitively and intelligently tackling serious subjects of death, madness, despair and the feeling of utter helplessness when pitted against uncertainty and unsurmountably evil and malignant forces, these horror films instead trivialise these.

Anyway, here is a list of a few very good J-Horror films that I like. In order of preference...

Audition (Takashi Miike): It loses some of its shock effects on second viewing but sadness and despair remains. It is a penetrating (and very pessimistic) portrait of gender relations, specially of masculine desire, paranoia and guilt. It is gory but also poetic. Lines like "Words create lies; Only pain can be trusted" will have you running for a copy of Wittgenstein, that is, after you get over the impact.

Dark Water (Hideo Nakata): Horror movie as a tragedy, it is much better and much more effective than his more famous and now iconic Ringu series. The NYT article says that the American remake was very good too, though I remember it didn't get good reviews at that time.

A Tale of Two Sisters (Kim Jee-woon): This is actually a K-Horror but it shares a lot of same tropes complete with recurring images of a young girl with her hair over her face. The poster of the film is one of my favourites. Another version of the poster has this tagline: "Fairytales have never been this Grimm."

Ringu (Hideo Nakata): A popular horror film which is also very good. The Hollywood remake is excellent too.

Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa): I need to see this again because I couldn't connect all the plot points the first time around but this definitely deserves a place in the list.

Walter Benjamin Reviews

More linking for now... two reviews of English translation of Walter Benjamin's scraps, notebooks and other miscellany in Guardian and Financial Times.

And to brighten up the evening, an excerpt from his essay "The Storyteller." (PDF) I like the first two paragraphs too in which he talks about how the art of storytelling has declined in the modern age in commensurate with a parallel decline in the ability to exchange experiences. I need to find Nikolai Leskov's Lady Macbeth of Mtensk District too...

"It has been observed for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness. In its last stages this process is accelerated. And in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not died. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs. It is, however, characteristic that not only a man's knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life - and this is the stuff that stories are made of - first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end - unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered without being aware of it - suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. The authority is at the very source of the story."

Islamic Science

A nice article in the TLS about the history of Science in Islamic societies.

There was also an interesting review by Michael Dirda in Washington Post of Robert Irwin's book about Orientalism and its critics. Irwin wrote the above review.

Another review in the same TLS talks about the works of Tariq Ramadan. Bit too technical for me but might be of some interest.

"Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is as something that is. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance - as this being of truth in the work and as work - is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth's taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object. The beautiful does lie in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the isness of what is."

- Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days

After reading so many raves I was a little apprehensive about watching it, thinking whether it would live up to all the hype and inflated expectations. After having watched it today I can only say it really deserved all the awards and acclaim all around. It really is a masterwork - riveting throughout and leaving one with deeply unsettling thoughts as the credit rolls in the end.

The film is set in Bucharest of 1987 when Romania was still a few years away from overthrowing the regime of communist dictator Nicolai Ceausescu. When it starts we see two young college girls named Otilia and Gabita preparing for something. Only later do we learn that Gabita is pregnant and that her friend is helping her get a backstreet abortion since it is illegal in the country. Through a common friend they manage to find a creepy looking man, impossibly named Mr. Bebe (it might be a real Romanian name but it adds to the extra creepiness in English), who agrees to risk prison sentence (that's what the law was under the Ceausescu regime) in return of money and when money falls short he demands something more terrible.

Like The Death of Mr. Lazarescu it is also set on a single day with events unfolding in almost real time. We don't get character expositions or lengthy flashbacks. For example we never learn about Gabita's boyfriend or the reasons why she had to delay it for so long. Like any film with enough integrity and intelligence it trusts its audiences to make their own conclusions, while giving a few hints here and there. Like in one scene when Otilia herself finds out that her own boyfriend is reluctant to even talk about these messy things in their relationship. She knows (and through her we also get to know) that when she gets into trouble she will be on her own. This is also one of her motivations for going to such extreme lengths to help her friend too. If she is in trouble it will be Gabita's turn to sacrifice for her.

The film (wisely I think) doesn't get into the abortion debate - No technical discussions about the inalienable rights of live foetus or sentimental homilies on motherhood and nurturing life. The fact of abortion is already a given, it is more about how to negotiate and find one's way through bureaucratic insensitivity and in a society without trust, compassion or moral responsibility. It also doesn't explicitly points its finger at the authoritarian regime but it doesn't take too much to understand where all the corruption and darkness of ordinary life stems from. It is somewhat similar to the German film The Lives of Others in this respect, only here the grimness is not relieved by a cathartic burst of humanism in the end. If at all one wants an ideological label, I think the only label that can fit it is the feminist label. May be it is an extreme reaction from my side, but it really brings one face to face with the horror of what it really means to live inside a woman's body and as a consequence how monstrous it is to deny women the rights over their own bodies.

This is reportedly the first in a series of films titled "Tales from the Golden Age" (rather heavy-handed in irony I think) that the director Cristian Mungiu plans to make. I can only say more power to him. During the cold war there was so much talk about censorship and restrictions on artistic expression but bringing down Iron curtain didn't really result in unleashing of great artistic talent from these countries as was expected. Or perhaps the more likely reason is that these countries are now no longer on the radar as they were before the Berlin Wall came down. I hope this recent spate of Romanian films redresses the situation to some extent. May be we get to see good stuff by young directors from Poland, Hungary and Czech republic too. Meanwhile hoping it is available on DVD soon and widely so that more people can see it.

More reviews from the rotten tomatoes and a trailer here.

New Bookforum

New Bookforum issue is online.

Some review-essays of interest: an article on Knut Hamsun, whose novel Hunger is a huge personal favourite (as perhaps I have mentioned many times before on the blog).

An extract from Roberto Bolano's forthcoming book Nazi Literature in the Americas.

And a short review of the praise of melancholy book I had mentioned a few days back. The review in New York Sun is more straightforward. Looks like the author is against morons rather than all around happiness...hmmm.

An extract from The Star Diaries

Below is an extract from Stanislaw Lem's The Star Diaries. A specialist in "Mechanical Psychiatry" presenting his findings before a committee investigating an incident involving a computer gone mad... (the part about how the electronic brain was seduced by a mathematician's wife really cracked me up!)

-----

"Gentlemen! he said in a quavering yet still resonant voice. "For some time now it has been known that electronic brains must be not only constructed but educated as well. The lot of an electronic brain is hard. Constant, unremitting labour, complex calculations, the abuse and rough humour of attendants - this is what an apparatus, by its nature extremely delicate, must endure. Little wonder then, that there are breakdowns, and short cicuits, which not infrequently represent attempts at suicide. Not long ago I had, in my clinic, one such case. A split personality - dichotomia profunda psychogenes electrocutiva alernans. This particular brain addressed love letters to itself, employing such endearing terms as 'relay baby,' 'spoolie,' 'little digit drum-dump' - clear proof of how badly the thing needed affection, a kind word, some warm and tender relationship. A series of electroshock treatments and a long rest restored it to health." [....]

"There are certain insensitive natures who have no sympathy for this. They provoke the brains out of all patience. An electronic brain, gentlemen, wishes us nothing but good; however the endurance of coils and tubes has its limits too. It was only as a result of endless persecution from its captain, who turned out to be a notorious drunkard, that the electronic calculator of Grenobi, designed to make in-flight corrections, announced in a sudden fit of madness that it was the remote-control child of the great Andromeda and therefore the hereditary emperor of all Murgalandria. Treated at our most exclusive institution, the patient finally quieted down, came to its senses, and is now completely normal. There are of course more serious cases. Such for example was a certain university brain, which, having fallen in love with the wife of a mathematician professor, began out of jealousy to falsify all the calculations till the poor mathematician grew despondent, convinced that he could no longer add. But in that brain's defense it must be stated that the mathematician's wife had methodically seduced it, asking it to total up the bills for her most intimate undergarments."

Adam Kirsch on Heidegger

There is a great essay by Adam Kirsch in the latest poetry magazine about Heidegger's conception of language and poetry.

Only poetry in this larger sense—only the art of language—makes possible a full understanding of an artwork's "world." Language, the distinctively human possession, is what allows "stone, plant, and animal" to be fully perceived, in a way that they can't perceive themselves. "Where there is no language . . . there is also no openness of what is," Heidegger writes. "Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance." Only by talking and writing about something can we really understand what it is and what it means.

I am obviously not well-read enough, but it seems to me to be an extreme position - the idea that language is central to any conception of consciousness i.e only when you name things that they come into being in your head.

Anybody knows a good introductory book on the subject? Apart from Heidegger or Philosophical Investigations of course?

Romanian New Wave (?)

There is a nice long essay-reportage by A.O Scott in the latest New York Times Magazine on the recent crop of films from Romania which have grabbed one award after another in various film festivals in the last couple of years. The only film I have been able to see so far is The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. It is very grim (as you can probably guess from the title) but, as Scott says, it is also full of life. Its concerns are not metaphysical but the ordinary goings-on of daily. It brings us to face not the horror of death but the horror of a certain kind of death - an impersonal death. I will try to find the other films too, specially the new abortion movie which won the Golden Palm last year.

"locked into separate phases of inwardness"

Looks like another tirade on the internet culture. I loved that phrase from the book though. It almost makes me want to pick it up even though I don't think it is true. The problem of our culture surely is exactly the opposite, there is too little inwardness, too much interaction (blogs, social networking sites, cellphones etc).

In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.”

Readings...

A nice autobiographical essay by Eric Hobsbawm about Weimar Germany in the London Review of Books. Also an old review of his autobiography Interesting Times in New Yorker.

Adam Kirsch on the difference between eloquence and rhetoric in new york sun (first is good and the other not so good according to him)

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate pondering over the question whether Dmitri Nabokov should be allowed to destroy his father's unpublished manuscript.

Reading List

I haven't been able to read much lately. A few bureaucratic distractions of real-life coupled with vague uncertainties about the future and I am finding it hard to pick-up a book and concentrate. I managed to find a few interesting books though...

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan: I thought after seeing the excellent film version the book would be redundant, specially given the fact that it was written by (shock! horror!!) an eighteen year old girl (sexism plus reverse ageism alert) but I was proved wrong. While not an earth-shattering masterpiece by any means, it is a very engaging, thoughtful and perceptive book, certainly much wiser than what her age would lead one to believe. It is also a relief to read a simple and straightforward book after a long time.

The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch: Last year it was Musil, this year his friend Broch? Frankly, I don't intend to finish it anytime soon. I am just curious to know what is inside it. Will update once I find something.

The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem: This is a Swiftian take on the Science fiction genre. If you remember the academy of Lagado section of Gulliver's Travels you know what to expect. (It can be read in its entirety here.) Like Solaris, once you get the drift, it gets a bit tedious but mercifully the book is actually a collection of short narratives. Like Gulliver, it is structured as a travel account in the form of diaries of one space traveller named Ijon Trichy. Lem riffs on all sorts of intellectual ideas, not just scientific but also religious and political. The back cover of the book compares Lem's writing to "intellectual rock throwing" which is a pretty accurate description.

I did open the new year account by reading the celebrated short fragment Lord Chandos Letter by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal. I will just point to Disquiet Thoughts for a nice overview rather than reinventing the wheel myself. Hoffmansthal's Letter describes very eloquently what most of us have felt from time to time - the failure of language to mirror the inner world of experience in any meaningful way. Lord Chandos Letter puts this idea in a wider philosophical and literary context by showing it to be the essential part of what it means to live in the modern world. The way it stresses the fact of uncertainty and doubt involved in any artistic use of language, it is often seen as some kind of manifesto of modernist literature.

It seems to be available here though I am not sure of its completeness or accuracy (it does look okay at a glance though). The NYRB edition is, as usual, a complete delight. It contains quite a few of his other short works too which I have not yet read.

I'll be there

A great scene from The Grapes of Wrath. Too bad, Fonda didn't win an Oscar for his role. His friend James Stewart got it for The Philadelphia Story. The restored DVD looks and sounds much better than this clip.



I like this song a lot too.

I was looking around on the net and found this review of My Darling Clementine, which I saw a few weeks back, by Michael Atkinson on the TCM site. Before praising the film, he fires a few scattershots:

"He is generally a hallowed filmmaker, and worshipful encomiums have landed at his feet for decades, praising his pictorial beauty (which often seems merely that), his sureness of storytelling (often as shapely as a dime novel, and in any case rarely his screenplays to claim), and his mastery of iconography (which requires no mastery). It’s an argument still happening; for every vague hosannah I’ve heard sung for Ford’s meaningfulness, I could count a hundred examples of clumsy staging, booze-sodden sentimentality, militaristic fetishism, vaudeville overacting, bar brawl camaraderie, and racist war-mongering. (Among his last projects before he died in 1973 was a pro-intervention documentary for the USIA titled Vietnam! Vietnam!) For Ford, Manifest Destiny was never out of fashion, Native Americans were malignant pests, and women were too often pink-cheeked cartoons."

In Praise of Melancholy

nothing new but worth reading.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that melancholy can be superficial too. In fact that's the only thing to conclude given how popular misery memoirs and similar reality TV, talk shows and other varieties of emotional porn really have become in our culture. It is not melancholy we should praise but rather authenticity, autonomy and truthfulness.

Meanwhile on Guardian books blog Nicholar Lezard is asking: "Does melancholy literature deepen depression?"

Well, if one is really depressed, most likely he wouldn't feel like reading. Julia Kristeva in her book Black Sun talks about "asymbolia" as one of the side-effects of chronic melancholia i.e. a state of mind in which familiar signs and symbols lose their original meanings with a concomitant loss of faith in the communicative and representational power of language. But yes reading indeed helps if one is experiencing mild sadness by providing vocabulary and expressions using which one can detach oneself from one's feelings.

Val Lewton Blogathon

Head over to The Evening Class where Michel Guillen is hosting a Val Lewton Blogathon. To my slight embarrassment my own two bit comment expressing my slight disappointment with the new Kent Jones directed (and Martin Scorsese narrated) documentary on Val Lewton The Man in the Shadows was selected as one of the entries. I should have added that I was disappointed only because with such high-profile names attached I was expecting much more than an A&E style talking-head documentary interspersed with clips. It still is a very informative documentary and a good place to start. Another reason was that I was too excited to have got a chance to see I Walked With a Zombie on big screen which was scheduled to start after the documentary and as a result I was feeling a little too impatient. Anyway, I gather that this is now being packaged with the new DVD box set of Lewton's films. The documentary "Shadows in the Dark" (can't escape shadows) that comes with the Box set right now is quite good as well. In fact it has many more interesting talking heads - Guillermo del Toro, William Friedkin, Neil Gaiman and others, all expressing their enthusiasm for these films.

While you are at Michael's blog, don't miss the amazing and mind-boggling number of interviews he has done with directors, actors and film people from all over the globe, all linked on the right side-bar. You may want to start with these two long ones with Guillermo del Toro here and here.

Memories of Murder

Writing and thinking about Zodiac reminded me of this Korean film which I saw a couple of years back. It is a similar police procedural about a real-life serial killer who was never caught. Unlike Zodiac, which is about the impossibility of making conclusive decisions when subjected to a barrage of facts and information, specially within the intricacies of insitutional liberal justice system, Memories of Murder points its fingers at the crisis of whole Korean society itself. It doesn't just remain a story of two detectives brought to the brink of madness and despair by their inability to catch the killer but about the wider moral apathy endemic in the society. It even hints at the idea of a disembodied, transcendent evil (Twin Peaks style) haunting the verdant paddy fields of Korean rural scape giving the story a metaphysical edge. It is guaranteed to disturb and haunt even the most jaded of viewers. Don't miss it if you get a chance.

I don't remember all the details of the plot so I will just point to some excellent reviews instead:- in Sight and Sound, New York Times and village voice

Nice Trailer here:

Bonjour Tristesse

Can we have a movie which makes a moral case for hedonism please? I am such a moralistic person (in an anti-fun loving sort of way) that whenever I see a film like Bonjour Tristesse, rather than feeling sorry for any of the characters or having a shock of recognition of the emptiness of my own life, I instead feel an intense deja vu, even schadenfreude. More seriously, I thought Otto Preminger's film was really very good, a masterpiece even. I have wanted to read the original novel of the same name by Francoise Sagan for a long time but never got around to doing it. May be watching this movie will spur me to locate a copy.

In the way it portrays upper class European bourgeoisie Bonjour Tristesse anticipates films like La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura both of which came a couple of years later. It complicates (or dilutes, depending on one's perspective) the social criticism by introducing Freudian elements into the story. I thought it made the film more interesting. It works on both levels - as a specific story about emotionally troubled characters and as a more general sociological critique.

Jean Seberg is fantastic in the main role. What's even better is that she cavorts around in swim-suit in most of the film. Even the generally prim and prissy Deborah Kerr (that is not meant as a criticism, she is one of my favourites actually) shows a lot of skin. That said, I would have preferred if it had French actors. All three feel a bit out of place in the setting.

A nice review here. Incidentally Godard was one of the champions of the film when it first came. He even cast Seberg in his film Breathless so that she could continue to play the same role in it too.

Last Year at Marienbad

An article about the film in the new york times.

“Marienbad” either does or does not tell the story of what may or may not be a love triangle that does or does not end violently, though the movie could also be presenting shards of a dream, a memory or a fantasy. What transpires among the three nameless principal characters is, the filmmakers have always maintained, up to you to figure out.

Film Forum link here with more quotes and details.

David Fincher: Zodiac

I had a somewhat ambivalent reaction to David Fincher's Zodiac when I first saw it early last year. I admired its style, attention to detail and most of all its restrain but so densely packed its (160 minutes long) narrative was that it left me completely exhausted much before it actually ended. Reading the reviews did help me realize what Fincher was trying to achieve. Since then I had been waiting for it to come on DVD. I just saw the new director's cut (nine extra minutes! yay!!) and I now feel that this certainly is the best and the most important American film of last year, much more satisfying than either No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood.

Zodiac was a box office disappointment, which is not surprising at all given how it consciously rejects (or "unexpectedly repudiates", to use a phrase from Manohla Dargis's review) the standard Hollywood aesthetic, as seen in the serial killer and police procedural genres. Fincher himself directed Se7en, though not entirely conventional but still a standard Hollywood product. By contrast, in this film there are no heroic characters, or for that matter no villain, though we do feel his presence even though he is absent from the surface. We never see the killer, though Fincher does show the murders, some in his typical grisly style. The killer is of course never revealed or caught, though we do feel we are tantalizingly close to him at a few occasions. There are no shootouts, no macho cops, no funny, smartass dialogues which is the staple of cop movies. And most important of all it rejects psychological realism, thus denying any easy opportunity for identifying with any particular character, in order to concentrate more on the investigative and legal process - in all its mundane, undramatic, even tedious detail. Having said that, last section does become a story about the Graysmith character which I thought didn't fit well with the rest of the film. A more radical approach would have opted for a style used by films like The Battle of Algiers or Salvatore Giuliano. Even the New Hollywood movies of 70s, which are obvious touchstones for Fincher, do this very successfully - they show more interest in institutions and processes than human beings which are anyway shown to be too weak to have any character or any authentic motivations of their own. It is also important to keep in mind films of Alan Pakula's (All the President's Men, The Parallax View), Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation) or Sidney Lumet (Network) to really appreciate what Fincher is doing in this film.

At the heart of the film (and the thing that interested me the most) is the idea of epistemological despair - the profound desire for knowledge yet understanding that it might be impossible even if you bury yourself under an avalanche of facts and information (which this film does). It shows the limits of rationality and taking from there the limits of our liberal justice system which takes rationality and the possibility of knowledge as an implicit assumption. We may never be completely sure about what we really know or can know. But it is to film's credit and its political integrity (and it shows how far Fincher has come from Se7en, Fight Club or Panic Room) that it never wavers from its faith in the rule of law and liberalism. We know that bringing the guilty to justice is important but it is equally important to make sure that no injustice is done to any innocent. The film makes repeated references to Dirty Harry, thus clarifying its own position relative to that. It makes Fincher's past films, and indeed any standard hollywood thriller, which all essentially work on the principle of wish-fulfillment fantasies of meting out violent justice look illiberal, if not downright fascist. It is specially important in these times when so-called "preemptive" ways of handling crime are becoming more and more acceptable. An excellent essay in Slate goes in more detail about it. There is a scope for a much more involved and detailed discussion on this topic. Somewhat reminds me of essays collected in Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. You can allow truth and reality to be contingent and yet build liberal institutions on that foundation and indeed there is no other way to be liberal in this postmodern age.

I have been thinking about these philosophical questions about assumptions of rationality in the context of detective stories even since I saw Twin Peaks. In fact watching it second time the Zodiac killer reminded me quite a bit of Windom Earle from the second season. One uses code cyphers and other uses chess positions to communicate - both consciously making a point about limits of rational, logical deduction when it comes to identifying and weeding out evil. I am sure Agent Cooper would have cracked the Zodiac case with his unique mind-body technique and the Tibetan method! But its really hard work for ordinary detectives.

I know most people missed it when it came but the two disc special edition more than makes up for the lost chance. I haven't been able to explore extras or been able to listen to the two commentary tracks but will try to find time for them soon. Anyway, Zodiac definitely deserves a place high on your to-watch queue.

Trailer to whet the appetite:

Witchfinder General

Michael Reeves's 1968 film Witchfinder General is an acknowledged cult classic of British Horror. I don't think it rates as high as other British horror classics of the same period like Peeping Tom or my personal favourite The Wicker Man in purely artistic terms, but that said, I found it extremely disturbing and deeply affecting, despite many obvious objections. At more than a few occasions I even thought of stopping but couldn't do so because it was so powerful. It is gruesome, graphic and unusually sadistic but one can't doubt its sincerity or moral seriousness. The film ends with the hapless heroine screaming in anguish and despair and one feels like adding one's scream to hers too.

If the focus would have been only on physical torture and pain, it wouldn't have worked like that. It is a proof of the artistry of the film that one doesn't realize when physical torture and pain have segued into spiritual anguish, as one realizes the indomitable power of evil. Reeves was only 24 when he made this film and he committed suicide (in dubious and unexplained circumstances) shortly after. This fact, which admittedly is external to the film, nevertheless gives it an added feeling of sincerity which makes it even more disturbing. Did he really believe there was so much evil in the world?, you begin to think. Another factor which adds to the overall effect of the film is the way Reeves used the actual locations. The story is set in the Villages of the East Anglia region of England (the same setting of W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, places I really want to visit sometime). The way the spare and peaceful pastoral landscapes are used as backgrounds for the staging of a purely human evil, makes it particularly affecting and unsettling - almost as if human beings befouling the purity of nature just by their presence. It is also interesting to compare it to The Wicker Man in this respect, which is a work of pastoral horror too but which works in an entirely different way.

The Wikipedia article on the film is pretty comprehensive so I won't go into the same details here. As I was watching it I was also thinking of Carl Th. Dreyer's masterpiece Day of Wrath dealing with the same subject - the persecution of witches. Unlike Dreyer's film (which is no less gruesome and horrifying in its depiction of torture), Witchfinder General is not about the nature of faith or religious doubt (or power of human emotions, of course). The titular villain, played by a genuinely terrifying Vincent Price, doesn't believe in Satan, or for that matter even in God. He is just a cynical opportunist, inebriated with power and abusing it to gain what he really wants - money, political favours and sex. It is not surprising that the narratives about persecution of witches have been so easily and powerfully appropriated as political metaphors. Arthur Miller's The Crucible is the most famous and the most obvious example. The word "Witchhunt" itself has taken political overtones signifying abuse of power, systemic injustice built on collective delusion and irrationality and moral panic exploited for political ends. Jim Hoberman in his short review also calls it "an extraordinarily bleak story of political evil." As the description might have made it clear, this film is clearly not for everyone's tastes but those who are looking for something unusual and very strong may like. It certainly should be much more well-known than it already is.

Bibliotherapy

I found this article about self-help uses of literature in The Guardian pretty annoying, though not surprising.

Incidentally there was a column by Stanley Fish in The New York Times on the same subject - asking "Will the Humanities Save Us?", a couple of days back. He goes to the other extreme.

It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.

Tropical Malady

Tropical Malady is a good example of what I call the whatsit genre of films - the kind in which at the end you wonder, pointing at the screen - what was it that just happened there? I had wanted to see it for quite sometime but never got a chance until recently. Meanwhile Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (who goes by friendlier name "Joe") new film Syndromes and a Century has found a place on many a top-10 lists from the last year. (It came at number 4 in the indiewire list.) It is already high up on my to-watch list.

Coming back to Tropical Malady, it is actually very simple if you think only of the plot. The film is divided into two parts. The first part tells the story of a blossoming romance between two young boys. One of them is a soldier stationed in the Thai countryside and the other works in an ice factory in the nearby town. The two guys are very bashful so their courtship remains very chaste too, they mostly just hold hands and smile at each other. Just when you think it is getting too much, along comes a mutual declaration of love. They lick each other's fingers and then the young guy goes away and disappears in the darkness. Then something weird happens. The screen goes blank for may be more than a minute, at least long enough to make you think if something went wrong with the player or the projection system. After the blackout it seems like we are watching a new movie altogether about shamans, forests and shape-shifting beasts. The same soldier is now in the forest, alone in the dark hunting a tiger who may or may not be his lover in disguise. We also meet a ghost of a cow and monkey who dispenses aphorisms about memory and desire. Actually it doesn't talk. We just see it on the trees and hear the voice-over. Finally he comes face to face with the tiger itself and thinks about surrendering to it. It may sound comic as I describe it here but the film itself is dead serious. You just have to listen to what the monkey says or see the final confrontation with the tiger. There is something magical and deeply evocative in those scenes which is difficult to articulate in words.

What happens in the second half is not that difficult to explain, at least not at the lever of a general idea. Tropical Malady of the title is of course love itself - a malady which makes one see the world in a magical way. For someone in Love, specially when confronted with an absence of the loved one, the whole world becomes a collection of signs and symbols, ready to be deciphered and interpreted, in the hope that they will give away some proof of love. In the film Keng (the soldier in the forest) is looking for and interpreting the signs of his lover's presence - the footprints, the claw marks on the trees - in the hope of finding the object of his desire again which has become elusive. His lover meanwhile has been transformed in his own imagination, again under the influence of the same malady (Somewhat reminds me of the title of Bunuel's film That Obscure Object of Desire.) I don't have a copy of Roland Barthes' Lover's Discourse with me right now but many of the ideas and aphorisms in the book, specially about love and its relationship with semiotics, will help explain the film much better ("Signs are not proofs of love," one sentence that I remember from the book).

In short, a marvellous film. Actually a perfect date-movie for the thinking types. Just keep a copy of Lover's Discourse handy. A nice review by Dennis Lim in Village Voice, which mentions Barthes too, though in a different context.

Carlos Saura: Cria Cuervos

Cria Cuervos takes its title from the Spanish proverb which says, "Raise the ravens and they will peck your eyes out" - sort of Spanish version of "As you sow, so shall you reap" applied to families and bringing up of children. In the context of the film it also captures the way traumatic memories of childhood work. You can wish them away, but the repressed memories will keep coming back in newer and more unsettling forms, however strong your will to forget may be. Again in the context of the film, the personal experience gets merged with the collective repression of trauma resulting from the experience of Spanish civil war and the dictatorship that followed it.

As the description makes it clear, this film shares a lot with Victor Erice's masterpiece The Spirit of the Beehive, a film which is very close to my heart. The fact that they both feature Ana Torrent, the miraculous child actor, at the center of the story only makes the parallel between the two even more clear. Carlos Saura was actually inspired to make it after watching Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive. He had to wait until she was available again to act in his film. Watching both of these films together in a double-bill will be a perfect introduction to these films, such is the level of inter-communication between the two. Or may be, if triple-bill is your kind of thing then round off these two with a screening of Pan's Labyrinth, which in so many different ways communicates with these two films too. In fact there are some really striking similarities with this film and not just in the way the two mothers look and suffer.

At the center of the story is young Ana (her character was named Ana in Beehive too) who has seen her mother succumb to cancer after suffering extreme physical pain. She is convinced that it is her father, who is a military officer in Franco's Spain, who is responsible for her mother's suffering and death, contributing to it by his philandering and emotional brutality. After he dies in a heart attack, Ana mistakenly begins to think that she has poisoned him. She becomes obsessed with the thoughts of death and dying and even concocts plans to dispatch her frosty aunt, who has come to take care of her and her two sisters, and her catatonic grandmother in the same manner. Meanwhile her mother continues to haunt her imagination by appearing out of nowhere. The film doesn't distinguish between reality and fantasy in the visual sense, thus avoiding the pandering to child's imagination which ruins most of these kinds of films. Saura respects Ana's imagination and it is through her subjective experience that we see the reality. It is actually this factor that makes the film succeed so well more than any other.

The narrative of the film is very elliptical. The story is narrated by a grown-up Ana (played by Geraldine Chaplin who plays her mother too) reminiscing about her childhood. The flashback itself contains many flashbacks and "fantasy" sequences. The way Saura withholds information and makes the narrative unfold slowly is absolutely masterful. Only after a while do we learn that the figure of mother played by Geraldine Chaplin is in fact dead, and that she is present only in Ana's imagination. The subplot of the poison becomes clear only towards the end as well, when we see her cleaning the glasses after a similar attempt.

The political critique is much less oblique in this film than in The Spirit of the Beehive. The father figure obviously represents the fascist, military leadership of Spain and the bitterness and despair at the way Ana's mother (who in a way represents Spain) suffers is evident and obvious too. In one aspect it is quite similar to The Spirit of the Beehive - in its quietness and a complete absence of anger. It is full of despair but there is also an understanding of what happened and a feeling of resignation. We wait for some emotional catharsis, a scene of extreme violence or opening up but it never comes. It is actually only natural in a film which deals with repression of traumatic memories as the main theme. (Luis Bunuel's Viridiana has its share of anger and cathartic violence alongwith bitterness and despair. Bunuel was Saura's artistic mentor and it is interesting to compare parallels between these films too.)

The film is very well-acted by its all-female cast. Ana Torrent is of course magical in this film too. The way she stares at the camera, her dark sad eyes and her abrupt pronouncements about death are sure to haunt anyone who has seen this film for days after watching it. The film also uses music very imaginatively, specially two tunes. One a muted classical piano score and the other a chirpy pop tune called "Porque Te Vas" (Because you are leaving) - they both evoke a feeling of loss and sadness in totally different ways, one from an adult perspective and another from children's.

Like I said in my post on The Spirit of the Beehive, it is extremely difficult to capture children's subjectivity without pandering, paternalising or making it seem childish. The fact that both these films succeed and succeed so well speaks volumes about the skill, sensitivity and intelligence of both the filmmakers. I don't think one can ask for a more perfect and a more beautiful film than these two. If you haven't seen them, you should leave everything you are doing and run to the nearest rental library. Both these films are available in excellent double-disc criterion collection DVDs with lots of interviews and background documentaries. It is again a relief to see Ana Torrent grown-up into a normal woman. Watching these two films you start worrying for her emotional well-being. In an interview Erice says that he felt sorry for robbing her of a few years of her childhood. Ana's interviews are actually very disquieting - she herself, like the rest of us, seems to be searching for Ana of the two films who seems to have vanished somewhere. Moreover she says that she doesn't remember much from the time and she didn't understand what she was doing anyway. Whatever it may be, no one can deny that she is a miracle personified. There are few haunting presences in film like the figure of Ana Torrent in these two films. Like I said, not to be missed. A trailer here. The foot-taping Spanish pop song "Porque Te Vas" in full here (English translation here.) Also a nice essay on the film at the criterion site.

Claire Denis: Beau Travail

Claire Denis's The Intruder must be one of the most confounding films I have ever seen in (admittedly short) film-going life. After having seen her earlier effort Beau Travail ("Good Work") recently, I can now, to an extent, understand what was it that made the experience of watching The Intruder so difficult. It is a much simpler work than The Intruder, one reason being that that underlying narrative itself is very threadbare and obvious but the two films do have a lot in common in form and technique. Denis isn't interested in dialogues or in structuring her story in a conventional manner aiming for dramatic payoffs. She also avoids psychological realism, or in other words "character development", which is the main staple of conventional narrative cinema completely. And most importantly it is the way she edits the scenes. There is no continuity in time and space, again something that is assumed in a conventional objective storytelling. Instead there are disparate images bound together by a "poetic" narration (or rather a reverie) which may or may not have anything to do with the images on the screen. This is a radically different way of portraying subjectivity in cinema. Actually it somewhat reminded me of films like Last Year at Marienbad or even films of Terrence Mallick, specially his most recent The New World, which used similar narration to join disparate and discontinuous images together and at the same time functioning as a counterpoint to it. I was also thinking what would the screenplay of this film look like. It seemed to me manufactured entirely in the editing room.

The main problem I had with the film was that the underlying narrative didn't interest me much. Specially if you are going to do away with all dramatic structures, at least there should be some elemental ideas, which should keep you interested in the goings-on. Beau Travail doesn't have any such thing. The Intruder probably was more interesting in this respect. Now that I am a little wiser I should check it out again. Who knows, may be this time I will understand what is it really about? The way male bodies are eroticised in this film is also quite remarkable. It can be accused of eroticising militarism but that would be unfair in my opinion. The way she shoots the landscapes is also exquisite. Actually it is a bit of a sensory overload.

Two long essays on the film here and here.

Slate Movie Club

Slate Movie club is back with lots of amusing and insightful comments, as always. There is something in the format perhaps which makes reading it so much more enjoyable. The links to past movie club roundtable are also on the same page in the left sidebar.

Some amusing comments...

On No Country for Old Men
'It blows a hole in our brains, over and over again, without explanation, and then asks us to walk out going, "Wow, that was quite a hole you blew in my brain. Thanks." '

On I'm Not There
"The movie has experimental balls, but I couldn't get the zipper down to really feel them the way other people seemed to be able to. "

And more seriously Scott Foundas about some of the "unresolved", and certainly unconventional, endings of many of the most acclaimed American films of the year..

"What does all this mean? Well, if you follow the logic of Movie Clubber alumnus Jonathan Rosenbaum in his controversial No Country for Old Men review over at the Chicago Reader, our unresolved state of affairs in the Middle East may be partly responsible for the sheer number of psycho killers, psycho evangelists, and psycho oilmen who've been lighting up our movie screens these past 12 months. And perhaps, by extension, it applies to the endings—or lack thereof—of those stories too, as the title of one acclaimed Iraq documentary (No End in Sight) succinctly posits."

Future

From the third and last chapter of "Time Regained" ... looked apt to me as something to think of when a new year starts, with thoughts and fears about what future might have in store for us:

"How many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only means of enjoying beauty, could not be applied to it by virtue of the inevitable law which only allows us to imagine that which is absent. And now suddenly the effect of this hard law had become neutralised, held in suspense by a marvellous expedient of nature which had caused a sensation to flash to me—sound of a spoon and of a hammer, uneven paving-stones—simultaneously in the past which permitted my imagination to grasp it and in the present in which the shock to my senses caused by the noise had effected a contact between the dreams of the imagination and that of which they are habitually deprived, namely, the idea of existence—and thanks to that stratagem had permitted that being within me to secure, to isolate and to render static for the duration of a lightning flash that which it can never wholly grasp, a fraction of Time in its pure essence. When, with such a shudder of happiness, I heard the sound common, at once, to the spoon touching the plate, to the hammer striking the wheel, to the unevenness of the paving-stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes’ mansion and the Baptistry of St. Mark’s, it was because that being within me can only be nourished on the essence of things and finds in them alone its subsistence and its delight. It languishes in the observation by the senses of the present sterilised by the intelligence awaiting a future constructed by the will out of fragments of the past and the present from which it removes still more reality, keeping that only which serves the narrow human aim of utilitarian purposes. But let a sound, a scent already heard and breathed in the past be heard and breathed anew, simultaneously in the present and in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, then instantly the permanent and characteristic essence hidden in things is freed and our true being which has for long seemed dead but was not so in other ways awakes and revives, thanks to this celestial nourishment. An instant liberated from the order of time has recreated in us man liberated from the same order, so that he should be conscious of it. And indeed we understand his faith in his happiness even if the mere taste of a madeleine does not logically seem to justify it; we understand that the name of death is meaningless to him for, placed beyond Time, how can he fear the future?"