This site has a great collection of posters of classic films. Here is a selection of classic film noirs.
Poster above via Dave Kehr's blog. I am glad to see Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood" being selected for preservation. I saw it once on big screen and it was an unforgettable experience. Gripping and actually quite frightening. Surprisingly it is not very well known, even after the success of the recent films about Truman Capote.
I didn't read a lot of fiction this year. Nothing like last couple of years when I discovered Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Alberto Moravia, Italo Svevo and others for the first time. (Last year's list here.) I spent more time reading non-fiction and even there, mostly essays and fragments, the most provocative and disturbing of which was "Modernity and the Holocaust" by Polish-British sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. After this I tried reading his other works on consumerism and modern societies and found similar provocative insights. Basically he explains how the scientific-technocratic-instrumentalist worldview which defines our modern world poses grave problems to an ethical life though he ultimately, like most philosophers, is better at diagnosis than at treatment. One of his essays is titled "Does Ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?" He is quite pessimistic about it. I have probably become oversensitive to the whole issue now. I just bristle when I see the language of science, technology or economics being applied in the domain of personal human affairs. I am looking forward to exploring more in this direction, specially the work of Jurgen Habermas.
I also spent a lot of time this year struggling with Heidegger's philosophy though without much success. Still from whatever I read and understood, he had me convinced that the story of (so-called) human civilization was actually a story of decline and disaster and that we all have probably come to this earth a few thousand years too late. I didn't understand his ideas about the various modes of being, authenticity etc totally but they kept moving around in my head for most of the year. His essays on the origins of the work of art and on technology were also provocative and in fact startling (and it is true for his other writings as well) in the sense that it showed me the nature of the process of thinking itself rather than just the result of some thought. George Steiner's short monograph on Heidegger was specially brilliant.
The three best books of fiction I read this year were all from Latin America. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis was without any doubt the most entertaining book I read the whole year. Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was a strange, evocative and densely layered ghost story which stayed with me for a long time. Senselessness by Carlos Moya was no less strange. It kept me thinking about what to really make of it.
The most disappointing book of the year for me was Journey to the End of the Night by Celine. I had wanted to read it for such a long time but found it tame and boring. A slog through and through, absolutely contrary to its reputation. I was also extremely annoyed by Cultural Amnesia, the essay collection by Clive James. Sartre was an idiot. Neruda was a fascist. Brecht was a moron. And on and on. It had me actually depressed realizing that just reading a lot and having an opinion on everything doesn't make you wise, interesting or open to different ways of looking at the world and yourself. A great lesson to learn, specially for bloggers.
I have been reading Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates these days. Initially I thought it was quite conventional and straightforward in style and the theme of ennui and quiet despair of suburban life pretty hackneyed but it really sucked me in, to the extent that I found it really unsettling, even terrifying. Most reviews of the movie talk about pressure of conformism in the America of the 50s but it is much more than that. It made me think of what the underground man says in Dostoevsky's novella, that for ordinary life in modern cities the consciousness of an insect would be more than enough, that one doesn't need the consciousness of a human being (he further says that he wants to be an insect). The tragedy of the Wheeler couple is that they have a human consciousness with all its romantic aspirations and intimations of potentialities but they lack the spiritual and moral strength to take action. I am quite eager to see how the movie turns out to be. I wish Fassbinder would have made a movie out of it, though many of his films did tackle the same subject.
There was an essay by James Wood in the new yorker about Yates and Revolutionary Road.
Will be back in a few weeks. Or sooner.
To keep you company here are David Lynch (words), Angelo Badalamenti (music) and Julee Cruise (voice)
A brief note on Synecdoche New York which I saw today. The basic theme seems to be the melancholia of "being-toward-death" but otherwise it is too fragmented and too full of small and seemingly chaotic details. It definitely needs more than one viewing, extra careful and attentive ones at that. There are some funny moments, in that awkward and absurd way which made his earlier films distinctive, but which don't really work here. There is no mistaking the sincerity and seriousness of intent though. He shouldn't have too many hopes for Oscars though. It will definitely go over their heads.
I came across this website which collects the writings of Lev Shestov, a Russian religious-existentialist philosopher who also wrote books on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The basic motif of his thinking seems to be that accepting 2 plus 2 equals 4 is accepting a spiritual death. Well, almost! The website also contains lots of articles and essays written about him. This review by Emmanuel Levinas is a good short introduction and contains this nice summary of existentialist philosophy.
"In a world clarified and explained by reason, only the general counts: my destiny is nothing important, my pain is nothing exceptional, my despair is nothing unique; if I carry a sadness or a shame in the depth of my soul, that does not trouble the universal order. My speculation assigns to these things a place in the whole, and my only wisdom can only consist of my submitting to its laws. But before speculating, I exist. My existence goes on precisely in this pain, in this despair. Far from arranging themselves in a whole that would embrace them, that are all mine. They have their history, their truth, their weight, their own exigencies. I can drive them back, but I can never fully suppress them. Their voice tears my being in spite of my submission to universal necessity. My speculation, itself, is it wholly independent of them? Can it be legitimately abstracted from the human condition, for its destiny, for its death? Whatever the response that one gives to these questions, it is important to pose them, it is important to respect the internal meaning of the events that constitute our existence, before interpreting them through the universal order constructed by reason. This is the task of existential philosophy."
There is also a very good article by Czeslaw Milosz:
"The "I" has to recognize that it is confronted with a world that follows its own laws, a world whose name is Necessity. This, according to Shestov, is precisely what lies at the foundations of traditional philosophy—first Greek, then every philosophy faithful to the Greeks. Only the necessary, the general, and the always valid will merit investigation and reflection. The contingent, the particular, and the momentary are spoilers of unity—a teaching that dates back to Anaximander. Later Greek thinkers exalted the all-embracing Oneness and represented individual existence as a crack in the perfectly smooth surface of the One, a flaw for which the individual had to pay with his death. From a Shestovian perspective, Greek science and morality both follow the same path. The sum of the angles in a triangle equals two right angles; the general, eternal truth reigns high above breeding and dying mortals just as eternal good does not change whether or not there is a living man to aspire to it."
I really hope I get a chance to see "Synecdoche New York" before I leave but it seems unlikely. Most American reviewers are complaining about how glum and joyless it is (further adding to my excitement!). I don't know, it is like asking Woody Allen to keep doing the same "early funny ones" (as one of the characters says in his "Stardust Memories"). Kaufman's earlier films as screenwriter were funny and quirky but one couldn't but notice a deep seriousness of intent and engagement with Life, something very rare in mainstream Hollywood. Reading the reviews, even the critical ones, it seems he has only gone one step further. Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich were already five out of five stars masterpieces.
"A shard in your own eye is the best magnifying glass."
-Adorno, Minima Moralia (full text here)
Nice thought even though in real life pain often becomes a smokescreen, hiding from us the truth rather than magnifying it.
In other news, I am dismayed by this new advertisement promoting atheism. I do think it is very important to counter all sorts of religious propaganda so this is definitely a good idea. What I don't like is the second line which smacks of smug and petty-bourgeois hedonism to me which I strongly disapprove of. It should rather have been "There is probably no God. Now read Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and most of all START WORRYING!"
The TLS has a review of a book by some right-wing nut who says that literary critics are unjustifiably hostile to market and commercialism and argues for something called "commodity aesthetics" (do words really mean nothing anymore?). The review itself is quite good and really worth reading.
"It is paradoxical for an advocate of the Western cultural tradition to laud market capitalism. For in the very brief period in which it has held earthly power, market capitalism has essentially destroyed that tradition – profaning everything sacred, evaporating everything solid, and directing its destructive might with particular intensity against the autonomous individual. It has instituted the rule of appearance over essence, of signs over things, of things over people, of dead labour over living labour. It exploits base appetites and fosters insatiable desires, giving rise to epidemic addiction and depression. There have been many societies in which large numbers of people dedicated their lives to the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market. But there have been no societies in which the pursuit of economic self-interest through the market was held to be an admirable way to spend one’s life. Our society is unique in having produced that philosophy. One of the reasons to read the literature of the past is to learn how anomalous our society is in its self-interested single-mindedness. "
"[T]he desire to have one's own death is becoming more and more rare. Shortly it will be as rare as a life of one's own."
- Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
I saw Paul Schrader's Mishima a few days back. I haven't read anything by Mishima yet but watching the film reminded me of this line from Rilke. I don't really like this morbid romanticization and fascination of death. A lot of suicide bombers are probably inspired by the same belief too - having a death of one's own. Ironically (and tragically) their religion makes it sure that they never live a life of their own.
I like the idea of Memento Mori. We should be mindful of our own end without which we won't have any perspective to life. But this idea that death is the realization of life and life gets meaning only in death - this I find hard to accept.
A good illustration of this idea is in Heidegger. Below excerpt is from George Steiner's book on Heidegger ("rationalist quacks" made me chuckle!):
"The inalienability of death - the plain but overwhelming fact that each must die for himself, that death is one existential potentiality which no enslavement, no promise, no power of "theyness" can take away from individual man - is the fundamental truth of the meaning of being. Dasein is always a not-yet, an unripeness. To be is to be incomplete, unfulfilled. But at the same time, all authentic being is a being-toward-its-own-end. "Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes upon itself as soon as it is." And Heidegger quotes a medieval homily which instructs us that "as soon as man enters on life, he is at once old enough to die." The essence, the motion, the meaning of life are totally at one with being-toward-death, with the individual's "assumption" (Sartre's derivative, key term) of his own singular death. Thus "death is, in the widest sense, a phenomenon of life"; indeed, it may well be the identifying phenomenon, though it cannot itself "be lived" (a point on which Heidegger concurs explicitly with Wittgensein). The point to be stressed is at once existential and logical: the possibility of Dasein depends on and makes sense only in respect of the "impossibility of Dasein" which is death. The one cannot be without the other.
[...]
Holding before itself the constant and total possibility of death, the possibility inseparable from its thrownness into the world and process of individualization, Dasein "is in anxiety." Angst is the taking upon oneself of the nearness of nothingness, of the potential non-being of one's own being. "Being-toward-death is, in essense, anxiety," and those who would rob us of this anxiety - be they priests, physicians, mystics, or rationalist quacks - by transforming it into either fear or genteel indifference alienate us from life itself. Or, more exactly, they insulate us from a fundamental source of freedom. The passage, to which the entire death-and=freedom dialectic of Camus and Sartre is no more than a rhetorical footnote, is a famous one: Angst reveals to Dasein the possiblity of fulfilling itself "in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARD DEATH - a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the "they," and which is factual, certain of itself and anxious." We can see now that the very meaning of Dasein is "in time." Temporality is made concrete by the overwhelming truth that all being is being-toward-death. The taking upon oneself, through Angst, of this existential "terminality" is the absolute condition of human freedom."
Weltflucht: nice word to know. Quite simple actually - it means flight from the world - but it is still nice to have it as one word. Somewhat similar in intent with the hindi word "Vanaprastha" which means departing to the forests before final sanyas (renunciation). My favourite word still remains Weltschmerz ("world pain" or pain of being in the world). Basically Weltschmerz leads to Weltflucht.
Actually I found it in this article which I got to by randomly searching something. Looks like some German philosopher has written a book called "Critique of Cynical Reason." Certainly a very interesting and relevant subject since cynicism is the default mode in which most of us operate in the world now.
Amitava Kumar has an essay in Boston Review about debates surrounding the problems of thinking about authenticity in Indian Writing in English in the context of the recent booker win of Arvind Adiga's novel The White Tiger:
"Since then, I have wondered whether my choice of the journalist as a protagonist is not itself a symptom of an anxiety about authenticity. Was it the worry of an expatriate Indian, concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject? To invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage was to build banks against the rising tide of that worry. I know now that this worry informs my reading of all novels about India."
*****
Some more tangentially related thoughts...
I haven't read Adiga's novel and don't feel excited enough to read it either. In general Indian novels (specially those in English) are low on my reading priorities and further because I have only a finite amount of energy and time which I can devote to books I rarely get to them. One reason for putting those on low priority is my fear and distaste of any kind of parochiality or even "insularity" (to use a much discussed and debated concept recently, after the nobel committee chairman's comment). In my case this feeling is further compounded because I grew up in a provincial small town (that would be Patna in Bihar which both Adiga and Kumar talk about) and not in the "centres" like Delhi or Mumbai. This is not really a repudiation of my origins (which would be purely negative) but rather a positive longing to know about other ways of looking at things, the desire to enter the world of thoughts and ideas which are new and foreign. I had quoted Susan Sontag earlier saying that writing for her was a means of self-transcendence and not self-expression. I think of reading in the same terms too. I feel dismayed when people while reading look for experiences which exactly mirrors their own (expressed in commonly heard sentiment "I could relate to this or that"), this to me is a severely disabling way of reading. Reading itself should open pathways to new and uncharted territories of experiences, only then one can "grow" or change oneself by reading.
About authenticity in Indian writing in English, I think Kumar mentions exactly what I find so boring and uninteresting in most such writings (including probably his own novel "Home Products" which I haven't read either). This is the definition of authenticity which he thinks is some kind of fidelity to the external world of facts and people's behavior. This is a shallow authenticity, it belongs not in art but in journalism. In fact it is not even authenticity at all, it is just another version of Heideggerian "idle talk" which journalists and op-ed experts are so good at peddling. (This is not to say that shallow reportage doesn't serve any purpose but we shouldn't confuse it with art). The authenticity that interests me is being authentic to your Self, to your way of thinking and feeling, to your way of looking at the world and your own self, in short to your own way of being itself. Truly remarkable novelists and artists take it one step further, they try to understand being from a historical and intellectual perspective and try to place it in a number of different contexts and think through these. This to my mind what makes something like "The Man Without Qualities" a sort of uber-modern novel. (If I am not mistaken Musil doesn't even mention a single street name or any such thing throughout the novel and yet it profoundly belongs to its place and time. This to me is real authenticity.)
Coming to another point which Kumar talked about in excerpt above - the so-called anxiety of expatriate Indian, this fear of losing touch with India, which means the fear of losing a part of your self, which gives rise to anxiety which then leads to fetishisation of naive realism. This is all okay but somehow I am not convinced that Indian-ness can be reduced to those naively captured details no matter how strong your "observational integrity" (as Kumar calls it) is. The very fact that the writer feels insecure about being perceived as inauthentic gives the game away. One could of course be self-aware about it and write about the same anxiety in fiction but I don't think these novels do that. There is a lack of self-awarenss and a lack of doubt which goes hand in hand with a devotion to a naive journalistic realism. Another irony is that these writers have left India because they were lured by academic and material success abroad but still feel guilty and are not ready to reconcile it with their new life. Just compare the musings of these so-called expatriate writers with someone like Nabokov who was in the same position in America and you will see the difference. I understand Nabokov is surely setting the bar ridiculously high but one can still see how a longing for lost home and lost past gives rise to this fetishisation of detail in Nabokov but since the longing and the pain are authentic, so is the writing. These sundry assistant professors and journalistic correspondents on the other hand should stick to writing reportage, rather than lamenting about losing touch with real India.
A bunch of thinkers and experts give their opinions on whether "free market corrodes moral character."
Surprisingly none of them (of the ones I read) touch on what I would think is the main issue - the problem of alienation. Are human beings who participate in market really and truly autonomous moral agents? More often they merely follow the preset rules, exercising moral judgments often leads to inefficiencies which market can't tolerate. Of course the recent crisis has made the profoundly undemocratic (even anti-democratic) nature of financial markets pretty clear too but that is probably a separate issue.
This is an excellent video introduction to the ideas of philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse.
His book One-dimensional Man is also available here. I remember buying a copy a few years back with a nice cover featuring a lone and sad looking computer monitor, thinking it was some philosophy book about the alienation of computer programmers, which in a way it is, but never really read the book. Like most philosophers readability isn't really his strong point. The book is mainly a critique of "technological rationality", the dominant mode of thinking in advanced industrial societies, which he says has turned these societies into authoritarian and conformist. Rationality originally meant differentiating what is from what appears to be and in this way to get to the truth of being and reality but in the technological age rationality is about efficiency and how to get things to work, or in economics sense, how to maximize one's utility function. Further this thinking is standardized and existence of any other alternative is denied through propaganda. (Like, if you don't buy and spend money economy will crash etc.) Advertising, media and other organizations decide and manipulate discourse in such a way as to not leave any room for negation. The end result is that we are trapped in a prison and only have imaginary, trivial or inconsequential freedoms.
This is the Underground Man ranting against the tyranny of mathematics and the laws of nature. This is something which troubles me and fascinates me more and more - this paradoxical nature of human freedom. We know that we are free and we feel compelled by the need for self-assertion to prove it and at the same time knowing fully well how utterly futile it is. What Underground Man says is of course an exaggeration (if still a logical extension of the argument) but we still should try to protect our inner and subjective life (which means our identities) from the intrusions of logic and science. As Musil humorously says in The Man Without Qualities, "What is a soul? It is easy to define it negatively: it is simply that which sneaks off at the mention of algebraic series." (Actually Musil's comment is intended ironically to poke fun at "spiritually" minded and pretentious people who are hostile to mathemtics in a shallow way but more on that later.)
*******
"The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.
“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so on.”
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength."
The latest new york review of books has an essay by Adam Kirsch on Austrian critic and satirist Karl Kraus. It is behind the subscriber wall but this bit is interesting... (in short, beware of journalists and op-ed experts)
"But if Kraus were simply a press critic in this sense—pointing out errors and clichés, or even exposing biases and conflicts of interest—he would not remain such a significant figure, seventy-two years after his death. He would be merely a kind of blogger avant la lettre, appending his "glosses" to newspaper items in the way that bloggers today post hyperlinks along with carping comments. The analogy even extends to Kraus's working methods: as Timms writes, he would compose an item for Die Fackel by "pasting a newspaper clipping on a larger sheet of paper, to define an opponent's position. That position would then be encircled—penned in by Kraus's minute handwriting."
But Kraus was a critic of the press in a deeper and more problematic sense as well. During World War I, his longtime feud with the Viennese newspapers took on an apocalyptic character, as Kraus began to blame them for causing the disaster on which they so complacently reported. In November 1914, as the Western Front settled into stalemate, Kraus gave a public reading of his essay "In This Great Time," which appeared in Die Fackel the next month. Though it was his first public statement since the war began, Kraus did not address the war's political and diplomatic causes. The real origin of the world war, he argued, lay not in Austrian expansionism or German belligerence, but in a continent-wide failure of imagination, which allowed the nations of Europe to rush into a catastrophe whose dimensions they could not perceive. "Things are happening," Kraus said in his long, dazzlingly constructed opening sentence, "that could not be imagined and...what can no longer be imagined must happen, for if one could imagine it, it would not happen."
The agency responsible for this atrophy of the imagination, Kraus continued, was his old adversary, the press. "Through decades of practice, [the reporter] has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself." This logic is what allowed Kraus to argue, in a paradox worthy of Wilde, that the reporting on the war was more important than the war itself: "Is the press a messenger? No, it is the event itself. A speech? No, life itself." He even predicted that "some day people might find out what a trifling matter such a world war was as compared to the intellectual self- annihilation of mankind by means of its press and how at bottom it constituted only one of the press's emanations." "
I was reading about "commodification" and I was thinking how smiling face has become a commodity in our culture, which would probably explain the baffling indifference I feel when I see a smiling face. I exaggerate a little here, but you get the idea. Of course one can't deny the existence of a real smiling face but how is one to make sure it is authentic and not one of the smiling faces of advertisements, media, hospitality & PR people which surround us and assault our senses from every side?
In The Man Without Qualities, Musil says that (I paraphrase) in our modern world experiences have made themselves independent of people. They have gone on stages, in books, into reports of research institutes and explorers..and even when they are not objectified in this way, they are always up in the air; who can say today that the anger one feels is really his or her anger? Musil calls this "a world of qualities without a man". So the smile doesn't belong to the person who is doing the smiling. It is just a borrowed smile, plucked from the air.
The first step is the thingification of thoughts and feelings which the capitalist culture then transforms into mass produced commodities and cliches. From human experience to hallmark cards, that is the trajectory of so-called "late capitalism"! I suspect Pain would be hard to commoditise and sell, so there is probably one refuge if one wants to own one's experience. As the female character in the Japanese film "Audition" says, "Words create lies, only pain can be trusted." Though I think if you see too many art-house movies these days you will realize that even pain is being marketed and sold to cater to the discreet masochism of the bourgeoisie (exactly the sentiments about pain I expressed above). All this is exaggeration of course, but only slightly.
Not entirely gratuitous picture above is of Sandrine Bonnaire in A Nos Amours. She occasionally smiles too.
I came across this essay by Georg Simmel, the German sociologist who is considered (along with Marx, Weber and Durkheim) to be one of the founders of the discipline. What he says in the essay is quite similar to the idea of rationalization of society and resulting problems of alienation and loss of individual identity as developed by Weber and the philosophy of commodity in Marx.
"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technology of life. The fight with nature which primitive man had to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. "
"Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of life-elements - just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. "
First one is from an obscure euro-thriller ("giallo") Short Night of the Glass Dolls directed by Aldo Lado. It is a very interesting concept-thriller. In Prague an American journalist is is declared dead after a murder attempt but in reality he is only under some sort of coma. While in "coma" (or whatever state it is) he tries to remember and piece together the events leading to it. Pretty good. And this Morricone score is just fantastic.
Two other favourite Morricone scores:
Man with Harmonica from Once Upon a Time in the West
And the score for the sleazy and brutal slasher film What Have You Done to Solange? (which I wrote about here).
From George Steiner's book on Heidegger:
"Martin Heidegger is the great master of astonishment, the man whose amazement before the blank fact that we are instead of not being has put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious. His is the thought which makes even momentary condescension toward the fact of existence unforgivable."
I think it is true for most great writing, not just Heidegger's philosophy. They all put radiant obstacles in the path of the obvious and make us rethink what we otherwise take for granted as commonsense or commonplace (including our own existence).
Another nice phrase I learned from the book : "Deken ist Danken" or "To Think is to thank".
It is an excellent introductory text. I will try to post some of my notes soon.
