The Auteur Age

Cinema, citizenship and the promise of the internet

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:28:00 +0000

You can now read my write up on piracy, film culture and citizenship here on openDemocracy.

Year 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:20:00 +0000

Year 2012 is leading me back to my emotional atlas: Pinter and Beckett, Bergman and Welles, these are going to be my mainstay. #writing
— Salik Shah (@salik) January 19, 2012

Read my latest post here:
The Capra Hyperbole: One Man, One Film

David Foster Wallace on Literature

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:26:00 +0000

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: Misleading commercial of the Orient

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 10:10:00 +0000

Meditations on a film on the film

What is the significance of an embrace? A touch? In the Orient.

What is suffering: the buffalo, the monkey or the man?

180 degree: Beauty is the limit of truth. Solitude is Knowledge.

Time is constant: There is no arrival. There is no departure.

When you try to meditate on a film on the film, no matter how illogical or narrative-less you are, the soul of the substance is your subject.

Spirituality is an all pervading mood.

Joe can dissect the body. Cleanse it.

And all that could be is a misleading commercial of the Orient.

— The Auteur Age

Comments and Criticisms from the criterionforum.org:

There Is No End

What is spirituality? What is the essence of faith and belief? Who is God? Does life end?

Life doesn’t end, consciousness does. Life is cyclical; you live, you die, you decompose, and your body is then recycled back into living material. Therefore, the essence of our spirituality is not the knowledge of a physical end, but knowledge of the end of consciousness. God is the knowledge that there is a God. Faith is hope that our consciousness doesn’t end.

In this line of thinking death becomes God; death becomes life. Therefore, life is God.

This is what Apichatpong Weerasethakul understands; this is what his works represent; this is the use of repetition, and duality in his works. Spoken stories are repeated film to film, storylines repeat, characters, and actors are used over and over, they all die and come back to life. There is no end; his next film is his previous film is his current film.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the distillation of this ideology. The name alone tells you life doesn’t end; Boonmee tells us stories of his previous lives, his knowledge of a place from his past, and the realization that that place was his first birthplace (or so he believes).
His son tells us of the influence his father’s photography had on him, his search for the ‘monkey ghosts’, and ultimately his life as Boonmee’s son becomes in itself a previous life as he becomes his the subject of his own search (identity? truth? love?).

His wife treats him, and asks questions about the present. [“How is your husband?” She asks her sister. “I got rid of him.” Laughing] Thanks them for praying to her. She is an aberration; a literal ghost; a literal past life (her own and Boonmee’s).

The place is a past life. Nabua; communists murdered by the government… it’s violent history a distant memory (or not so much, given Thai current history… nothing ends), and betrayed by the peaceful, quiet setting.

The “Monkey Ghost,” and “fish sex”: Thai comic book character? Monster? Or… man as a previous form. If the theme of the film is the continuity of life (or rather that life never ends), then indeed it seems incredibly plausible this “monkey ghost” (even the name carries the weight of a possible evolutionary form) is the missing link… or some stage in evolution. If this is true, then the theme is doubled by Boonmee’s son; who has now devolved from man to apeman, through mating.Evolve, devolve, evolve… it doesn’t end, but continues.
Indeed the “fish sex” scene builds upon this idea; life, evolution as cyclical, repeated processes. A woman, a princess, has lost her beauty, but Boonmee still sees the beauty of her past life; age. He seduces her. A catfish… fish as some of the earliest complex beings (and the Mekong specifically dating back to the Miocene). She has sex with the evolutionary past; we evolve, devolve, and evolve again.

Life doesn’t end. There is no end.

— Wu Yong (mubi)

Death of Cinema

According to Apichatpong, the film is primarily about “objects and people that transform or hybridise”. A central theme is the transformation and possible extinction of cinema itself. The film consists of six reels each shot in a different cinematic style. The styles include, by the words of the director, “old cinema with stiff acting and classical staging”, “documentary style”, “costume drama” and “my kind of film when you see long takes of animals and people driving”. Apichatpong further explained in an interview with Bangkok Post: “When you make a film about recollection and death, you realise that cinema is also facing death. Uncle Boonmee is one of the last pictures shot on film – now everybody shoots digital. It’s my own little lamentation”.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul says that a man named Boonmee approached Phra Sripariyattiweti, the abbot of a Buddhist temple in his home town, claiming he could clearly remember his own previous lives while meditating. The abbot was so impressed with Boonmee’s ability that he published a book called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 1983. By the time Apichatpong read the book, Boonmee had died. The original idea was to adapt the book into a biographical film about Boonmee. However, that was soon abandoned to make room for a more personal film, while still using the book’s structure and content as inspiration. The stories and production designs were inspired by old television shows and Thai comic books, which often used simple plots and were filled with supernatural elements.

Filming took place between October 2009 and February 2010, as the weather conditions allowed, both in Bangkok and the northeast of Thailand, Isan. 16 mm film was used for budget reasons and preferred over digital video to give the film a look similar to the classic Thai cinema of the past.

— Elias Nahmias (mubi)

Theory Falls Flat On the Screen

“I consider it to be a work that never goes beyond the theoretical intentions of the director and which uses dramatic arbitrariness as an artistic posture.” —Eric Libiot

That’s the major flaw of this work which can be regarded as partly a further development of Apichatpong’s style which combined experimental cinema and national mythology, and partly an unsuccessful concretization of theoretical ideas which he didn’t manage to combine to a coherent whole. The problem in regards to the princess/catfish scene is definitely not its sexual weirdness, but the missing functionality of this interspersed episode in the overall film. The disjointed coherence of the film is mostly camouflaged throughout due to mythological devices, but a penetrative look at the interaction of separate scenes makes it clear that “Uncle Boonmee” is a less successful cinematic construct than his masterful previous works like “Syndromes And A Century.”

Also:

The fish fellatio scene is [] has to be understood as a mythological tale which Apichatpong adapted from the Polynesian legend of Tuna-roa. Tuna-roa, the father of all eels, lived in a swamp near Tami home. Tami’s spouse,Suki, visited the swamp daily to fill her calabash with water. One day, as Suki was filling her calabash, the eel-god leaped from the water and raped her.

—Apursansar (mubi)

Pure Cinema

Although it’s always clear just what’s happening on screen… the significance of what’s going on is as deliberately elusive… There’s such a rich correspondence and intricate relationship between the ideas represented by the film’s many different aspects that it seems to me that Weerasethakul is less concerned with delivering a specific Buddhist allegory with neatly decipherable symbols than he is with putting his audience in a state of mind where they will be susceptible to pondering the notions of transience, transition, transference and transformation in which the film traffics.

The film is preoccupied with crossing borders, be they political / geographic (Laos / Thailand), social (princess / subject), biological (human / animal), or existential (freedom / captivity; ugliness / beauty; self / other), and the biggie, lying within and behind all of those, is the border between life and death, upon which the film dwells for much of its running time. In fact, not knowing on which side of that particular border we are from time to time is part of the film’s strategy.

It’s an utterly gorgeous film, so see it in a cinema if you can, as it’s the kind of beauty that will be extremely hard to capture on domestic formats, since many of the compositions are extremely low contrast and Weerasethakul requires a large screen to deliver certain effects (in the sense that ‘dead’ sectors of the screen can be alive with possibilities, such as subtle movement in the undergrowth or the slow materialization—or not—of something).

— zedz

Ignorant. Indifferent. Inhuman.

[Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives] is better than his past two efforts. AW's staunch refusal to play his own game makes his films all the more annoying. He seems to be playing a comedic fairy tale, but he is unable to convince primarily through his inability to make human characters. This is especially telling in the one good on it's own scene in the movie. There's an interlude that I can only assume is one of the past lives of the title involving an ugly princess (more on that later) and a catfish. It plays the comedy and fairy tale nature perfectly and it was only toward the end I realized why I separated this scene from the others. These character's reactions and behavior's work because there is no human element to them and it's pure fairy tale 'nonsense'. He managed to find that sweet note that makes other adult fairy tales like Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast work. The problem with the main story is that he tries to add human weight to the characters and almost feels embarrassed by the fairy tale element which makes the dinner table scene not work. If the other characters had reacted much like the Laotian immigrant or had been fairy tale people like the princess this and later scenes with the ghost would work on some level, but they don't. Even stripped of these fairy tale elements though I find the main story unsatisfactory because the attempts at making humans fails and all we're really left with is grotesque shapes. Much like Chomet, but without the benefit of the distance of animation AW just loves to wallow in ugliness and tends to create caricatures to fit. There's something hateful or at least massively ignorant that I sense in these portrayals. Going back to that horrible dinner, which is in some way the centerpiece of the film, there's a disgust with the way AW shows the Laotian to lack spirituality by being the only one who doesn't accept a ghost and sasquatch thing at first glance. Also this isn't a critique so much as a nitpick, but why was the aunt so accepting of these magical creatures, but considers Boonmee crazy for accepting the his death is near? That's a strange set of priorities. I have a few more complaints in that direction, but it points more to how unconvinced of the situation I was rather than a straight up flaw in the film.

[] This is Ed Wood and (more closely) Ray Steckler territory. A number of the shots are plainly on set with the monkey ghost acting out of character (I believe it supposed to be the same monkey ghost from earlier). What's worst is that the on set photos clearly show a different species of creature and the plastic making up his face is plain. There is no attempt to make this fairy tale real or at least involving. While I can see someone getting enjoyment out of the other sections I can't understand what this interlude could provide to anybody. AW makes Noe look competent.

I do hope to eat my words some day, but today that is not going to happen.

While I see him as trying to make an enigma I don't think he actually succeeded at being particularly cryptic. Maybe it's my own lack of imagination, but I found the film, even the last sequence, surprisingly straight forward. I had just assumed that the final section was some time in the future, though Swo's hallucination suggestion is far more fun. The only sequence that I thinks manages to be cryptic is the still sequence. As for that, and I realize this is terribly dismissive, but I don't care how many things AW was trying to do if he can't succeed in presenting any of them well. It just comes off (and I did rewatch this sequence yesterday) as a lazy attempt to say things that he doesn't even seem to have a grasp on in an arty way. Rather than being artistic though it just comes off as incoherent for incoherence sake. That's a condescension I don't need.
As for I character I don't see any celebration. There seems to be none of this curiosity and definitely no wonderment you speak of. There doesn't seem to be any attempt I can see to present humans, but he's too afraid to go into the full metaphors or archetypes that he seems to be craving. Every portrayal reeks of cowardice or in the case of the none spiritual disgust.

—knives

Honest Criticism

I began with the short film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, which is surprisingly good. The unseen presence at the core of the film could equally symbolise the historical injustices carried out against the indigenous population of the north-east ('Isaan'), and, specifically, against residents of Nabua in 1965, as it could a spiritual or ancestral presence and, as such, the short gains a resonance and relevance previously unseen in AW's work. As is often the case, however, he pushes the experimentation too far, to the detriment of the overall clarity of the piece. We are given, for example, an unnecessary and rather ugly shot of a lens being changed, and a somewhat pretentious, navel-gazing voice over, where an interview with the owners of the house and/or survivors of the Nabua massacre would have drawn the piece into sharper focus, and it is interesting / notable that some international commentators (eg. MUBI) have failed to pick up on the political underpinnings altogether. Still, this is both AW's first genuinely political film and also his most aesthetically stimulating, filled from beginning to end with roving lateral dolly shots that recall Tarkovsky, and a menacing sound design that make wonderful use of a poorly-oiled fan. In short, it's the best thing he's ever done, albeit a little slight - a suggestion of a larger, more important work to come.

A shame, therefore, that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives fails to live up to that promise. We may still be in Isaan, but AW shifts his focus, once again, to a wealthy character set ('landed gentry', as Boonmee is half-jokingly referred to at one point within the film) - unwilling, or perhaps simply unable, to indentify with the poor subsistance farmers who make up 99% of the population. As a result, we have a film which sentimentalises life in an extremely poor region of Thailand whilst failing to engage with the problems the inhabitants of that region have to deal with on a daily basis - extortionate lending, economic exploitation, corruption, poverty, violence against women, etc. Instead - and this is where it gets genuinely troubling - AW gives us Uncle Boonmee.

Uncle Boonmee is a nouveau riche Isaan landowner, a man in a position of power that could only be obtained through extreme cowboy capitalism and, almost certainly, through corruption and violence. Boonmee is the guy who would be doing the extortionate lending - and then sending in thugs with knvies and guns when the peasants fail to pay their 10% interest a month. Uncle Boonmee is also, we are informed, a killer of communists. He may even symbolically represent 'the Nation of Thailand', or something similar, a potentially interesting allegory that is never fully explored. Instead, time and again, AW goes out of his way to paint Uncle Boonmee as a nice and gentle guy, the worthy focus of our sympathies. Accepting his imminent death with a serene calm, never a harsh word escapes his mouth, let alone an order to kill. Pauly from Goodfellas has been disingenuously transformed into the Dalai Lama.

Then we have the red-eyed monkey ghosts who haunt Boonmee from the woods, which are hard to interpret as anything other than the ghost of the communist movement, by way of the modern-day UDD (red shirt) movement. In the short film, this barely-glimpsed presence felt organic, inevitable, there is a sense of the pheasants coming home to roost, of past injustices which have yet to be laid to rest. In the feature, however, this presence becomes simultaneously more threatening and more comical, and also, crucially, more 'primitive' (as the overall title of the project suggests) - a troubling representation of a workers movement, coming as it does from a member of the oppressing class. This possibly naive misrepresentation then flourishes into out-and-out racism in the character of Tong - Boonmee's younger, better-dressed relative, visiting from Bangkok. Whilst Boonmee may draw the audience's sympathies, Tong is the audience's gateway into Boonmee's world, perhaps even AW's alter-ego. And Tong is the only character in the film to speak Thai, not Isaan, even in the presence of his relatives. To understand how improbable this is, you have to understand that the ruling Chinese-Thai/Siamese and the indigenous people of Isaan are not just two different classes but also two different races - think of the English and the Irish in Northern Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Isaan people are capable of speaking Thai, however, understandably, Isaan is their language of choice (Isaan being a regional combination of Lao, Thai and Khmer, different enough from Thai that the film required subtitles when screened in Bangkok last year). Whilst Tong might speak Thai in his day to day life in Bangkok, it is completely improbable that he would speak Thai in private conversation with his Isaan elders - indeed to do so would show a lack of respect. One must ask then, why AW has made this entirely unnaturalistic choice. The only conceivable answer is that Tong, and the Siamese language, are supposed to represent modernity, whilst Boonmee and the Isaan language represent the 'past' or the 'primitive' - a shockingly racist conceit.

On the other hand, yes, the film is well made, formally cogent, sporadically imaginative and provides effective lightweight entertainment for unengaged international audiences. On these terms, and these terms alone, it is undoubtably a succeess. The catfish sequence in particular makes for a pleasant interlude, recalling Mizoguchi by way of Borowczyk, yet without the burning sense of social injustice expressed by those master filmmakers. Boonmee's death within the cave is also a powerful, almost moving, sequence when detached from its context. However, none of this can or should distract from the inate prejudice that AW has yet to overcome, despite perhaps his own willing, whilst A Letter from Uncle Boonmee suggesta that he is potentially capable of so much more. It is a pity, therefore, that his premature anointing in Cannes will almost certainly stunt the self-criticism that his work still so sorely requires.

— nothing

Incredibly Political

"For fifteen years I had lived in a town called Khon Kaen at the centre of the region (Isaan), but I had never explored it as a whole. I doubt that many of the north-easterners do. This dry and arid land, despite its rich history, is quite off the map as a destination. I remember visiting various places with Khmer influences. But that's the limit of my exposure. Many of the people here seem to abandon these ruins and migrate to Bangkok to work as cheap labor. Once there, they are looked down upon because of their darker skin and a dialect that resembles those of our Laotian neighbors, presumed to be an unsophisticated bunch."

- Apichatpong Weerasethkaul, "The Memory of Nabua: A Note on the Primitive Project"

So I think the jabs at the Laotian provide a peek into the social hierarchy, and the "victims" (for lack of a better word, I'm doing this on the fly) becoming the "victimizers." And I think it's the ones who have moved to Bangkok who really complain about the Laotians.

It also points to how much history and tradition is being lost. Uncle Boonmee (the real one as well as the character) continually reincarnates in Isaan. Uncle Boonmee has the deepest ties to the area and the traditions. No one else seems to come close.

And I revise what I said before: a combination of the 1965 violence being more or less a slaughter of the villagers in search of Communists (some were Communists, many were not), plus an area legend that states that a 'widow ghost' abducts any man who enters her empire - takes them to join her other husbands in an invisible land (plus a couple other things about the current-day village not emphasized in the film), makes me think that the monkey spirits are broader than just hidden Communists.

— lady wakasa

References:
There is No End
The Film Experience

The Human Condition Trilogy

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:06:00 +0000

Kurosawa vs. Kobayashi:
The Futility of Exposition

After watching The Human Condition (1959-1961), one gets the feeling that Akira Kurosawa was like the quitter(s) in Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy. They called Kurosawa a coward (he tried to commit suicide). They accused him of not confronting the enemies of his times (he preferred ghosts of the national past to living devils). They said he didn't give his villains a face or put on too tough a battle. But then the Russians or the commies don't come across as the real villains in The Human Condition. The real enemies of the people of Japan are the Japanese themselves. Kurosawa makes exactly the same point over and again in most of his films, doesn't he? Take The Bad Sleep Well (1960) or Red Beard (1965) for instance, aren't they similar to The Human Condition in their themes minus the political exposition?

While I enjoyed the sword fight in Harakiri (1962) (it was otherwise a dull movie), I think Sadao Yamanaka's Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) is far superior in its representation of the reality of a Samurai family fallen on difficult times. If Kurosawa does seem Hollywoodish like Satyajit Ray (another filmmaker accused of being 'too Western'), Kobayashi's dependency on novelistic device to use space and time doesn't necessarily mean that he makes an impact as one would expect from such a great polemic. Perhaps that is what David Thomson means when he says Kobayashi isn't quite original like Yasujiro Ozu or Kenji Mizoguchi (and Kurosawa is not as great as both of them).

>>Further Reading: MUBI

मर गया देश, अरे, जीवित रह गये तुम

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 07:30:00 +0000

सतह से उठता आदमी, गजानन माधव 'मुक्तिबोध'

ओ मेरे आदर्शवादी मन,

ओ मेरे सिद्धान्तवादी मन,

अब तक क्या किया ?

जीवन क्या जिया !!

उदरम्भरि बन अनात्म बन गये,

भूतों की शादी में कनात से तन गये,

किसी व्यभिचारी के बन गये बिस्तर,

दु:खों के दाग़ों को तमग़े सा पहना,

अपने ही ख़यालों में दिन-रात रहना,

असंग बुद्धि व अकेले में सहना,

ज़िन्दगी निष्क्रिय बन गयी तलघर,

अब तक क्य किया,

जीवन क्या जिया!!

................

भावना के कर्तव्य त्याग दिये,

हॄदय के मन्तव्य मर डाले!

बुद्धि का भाल ही फोड़ दिया,

तर्कों के हाथ ही उखाड़ दिये,

जम गये, जाम हुए फंस गये,

अपने ही कीचड़ में धंस गये !!

विवेक बघार डाला स्वार्थों के तेल में,

आदर्श खा गये.

अब तक क्या किया,

जीवन क्या जिया !!

बहुत-बहुत ज़्यादा लिया,दिया बहुत-बहुत कम

मर गया देश, अरे, जीवित रह गये तुम !

The History of Art

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 06:59:00 +0000

Jan Vermeer

Peter Greenaway

Madadayo : Akira Kurosawa's Sketches

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 16:53:00 +0000

Storyboard for Madadayo (1993)

When I'm drunk...

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:35:00 +0000

"Like a man with one foot on the bridge of one boat and one foot on the bridge of a second boat. One boat is going straight ahead and the other is turning right. Little by little I realize that I am falling into the water. Humanity is in this position right now. I see a very dim future if man does not realize that he’s fooling himself. But I know that sooner or later he will realize. He can’t just perish like a hemophiliac in his sleep, bleeding to death because he scratched himself before he went to sleep. Art should be there to remind man that he is a spiritual being, that he is part of an infinitely larger spirit to which he will return in the end. If he’s interested in these questions, if he simply asks himself these questions, he’s already saved spiritually. It’s not the answer that’s important. I know that from the moment man begins asking the questions he will be unable to live as he has before."

From Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky:

Filmmakers can be divided into two categories—those strive to imitate the world they live in—to recreate the world that surrounds them—and the directors who create their own worlds. Those who create their own worlds are generally the poets. They are Bresson, above all… Dovzhenko… Mizoguchi… Bergman… Bunuel… Kurosawa—and however strange it may sound, the most prominent in film-making. That is a why they have trouble getting their films out. Because the audience is used to a symbolic, non-existent film world—the result of the audience’s own interests and tastes. The directors I named have all opposed this—that the taste of the audience should be the deciding factor. Not because they want to be obscure—but because they want to listen secretly. To give expression to what is deep inside those we call the audience.

From Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews:

There are two kinds of filmmakers: those who see film as an art form and who ask themselves personal questions, who see the work as a kind of suffering, a gift, an obligation; and others who see it as a way to make money. That’s commercial filmmaking. E.T., for instance, is a story designed and created to please the greatest number of people. Spielberg accomplishes his goal with it, and so good for him. It’s a goal that I have never looked to reach. For me all that is devoid of interest. Let’s take an example—in Moscow there are ten million inhabitants, including tourists, and only three classical concert halls: the Tchikovsky Hall and the grand and small halls of the Conservatory. Very little space and yet it satisfies everyone. Still on one says that music no longer plays a part in life in the USSR. In reality, the very presence of this great spiritual and divine art of music is enough. For me, populist art is absurd. Art is above all aristocratic. Musical art can only be aristocratic because at the moment of its creation it expresses the spiritual level of the masses, that to which they are unconsciously drawn. If everyone were capable of understanding it then masterpieces would be as common as the grass growing in the fields. There would not be this difference of potential that engenders the movement towards it.

Two films

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Fri, 28 May 2010 22:53:00 +0000

Robert Bresson

Anurag Kashyap

Writing Ikiru (1952)

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:43:00 +0000

Kurosawa [thought] visually, and he [spoke] in concrete terms, not theoretically. The best example of that is IKIRU. So he and I started writing the script together. Another writer, [Hideo] Oguni, was late joining us. When he arrived, we had already written 30 pages, so we showed him what we had done. He said, "This isn't right," and he gave his reasons. Kurosawa got very upset. He shouted, "What do you mean, Oguni?" But Oguni stood his ground, so Kurosawa tore up the first 30 pages. We started again from scene one. It broke my heart ... we had worked so hard ... but because we started again from the beginning, the hero dies midway through the film. If he died, the story would be better, Oguni said. Initially, the script ended with his death. Oguni said that wasn't good, he should die mid-film. Oguni was older than Kurosawa. Kurosawa respected him; he was the command post. Oguni did not write one word for IKIRU. Kurosawa and I wrote the script, but we went with Oguni's opinion. That's how we wrote SEVEN SAMURAI, too. Oguni didn't write a word on that either, but his role as a command post was invaluable.

This is how the Kurosawa [writing] team worked. Even if there were three or four writers, no one was allocated a section to write. Simultaneously, we all start[ed] writing the same scene, all seated at the same table. Then we [took] the best of the lot. It [was] obvious which script [was] the best, and we use[d] that. So Kurosawa never [said] how he want[ed] things done. It [was] like a race where we all start[ed] writing at once. For a writer, it [was] the hardest way to work. There [were] times when what you [wrote] [didn't] get used for days. Of course for the scenes that were chosen, we did get to correct or add somewhat to it. So did Kurosawa have the last word? I don't necessarily think so. The film itself seemed to decide what was best.

—Shinobu Hashimoto

Further Readings:
Senses of Cinema
Kurosawa: Life and art

12 Years

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Sat, 22 May 2010 06:55:00 +0000

Ajantrik (1958)

After twelve years of procrastination over the story, Ritwik Ghatak made Ajantrik in 1958.

“Unfortunately for its director and screenwriter, this internationally praised film did very poorly at the box-office. In the story, the poor Bengali Bimal has an unusually intimate relationship with his broken-down old taxi and goes so far as to give it the name Jagoddal. The other residents of town hate to ride in it because it is so old, but are amazed that it is still running. For the viewer, as well as Bimal, the taxi is alive, returning Bimal’s affection by running on almost no gasoline (among other things). For his part, Bimal will tolerate no disparaging remarks about Jagoddal and routinely ejects passengers who essay them. This tender relationship is upset when Bimal meets a young woman whom he falls for and the jealous taxi tries to come between him and the girl.” – Mubi.

>> Pathetic Fallacy: Man and Machine
>> Ritwik Ghatak: Senses of Cinema
>> Interview with Ghatak: IndianAuteur

Yojimbo (1961)

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Sat, 15 May 2010 13:55:00 +0000

Shooting stills from Yojimbo (1961)

The Artist

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:27:00 +0000

Walk On

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Walk On is about a filmmaker's journey to his dream.

A lovely confirmation

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:40:00 +0000

Read more: Sanjay Mehta's blog

Read about the struggle behind the film:
Harischandrachi Factory

Road, Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:17:00 +0000

Releasing on March 5, 2010!

Jar of Fools

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:58:00 +0000

There Will Be Blood

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:58:00 +0000

Harishchandra’s Factory

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:19:00 +0000

Paresh Mokashi: I believe serious and important work need not always come out in a serious way.

Read>> Harishchandrachi Factory

The Crime of Kaspar Hauser

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:49:00 +0000

Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

A wounded Ajmal Kasab looks
too much of a Kaspar Hauser.

This is not a comparison that will please Werner Herzog. Kaspar Hauser’s story, Herzog says, is about what civilization does to us all, how it deforms us by bringing us into societal line. Kaspar was 16 when he was ‘set free’ from the dark dungeon where he spent all his life tied to the ground with a belt which he thought was a natural extension of his body.

All that Kaspar knew, before being horrified by buildings and bourgeois existence of the world outside in 1828, was limited to a loaf of bread and a glass of water, and that he should become a gallant rider like his father before him, though he hardly knew what it meant. This man, without any culture, would inspire awe. Yet, he was harmless. He was one man who had no sense of danger or death.

Kaspar wasn’t trained to kill, and they didn’t turn him into a killing machine. Well, that was also Germany. A wounded Ajmal Kasab, being interrogated by policemen in a hospital ward, looks too much of a Kaspar Hauser. These young men were dispatched on a suicide mission to Mumbai. While they were executing their ‘job,’ they were also communicating with their handlers. These confused boys were promised a paradise upon the successful completion of the mission with their death. Kasab and his friends were operating by their mentors’ logic, not their own. Yet they showed some sign of humanity. They were lost and enamored by the grandeur of the city.

The idea of justice is a very odd one. Bruno S., who ‘transmitted’ Kaspar Hauser’s character, had spent all his early life in homes, institutions, asylums and prisons. Werner says by the time he met him, Bruno’s treatment at the hands of the authorities had totally destroyed even the most basic human functions within him, including the desire to take care of himself. After the death scene in the film, Bruno desperately wanted to have the autopsy table used in the film. Bruno insisted it was the table of justice: One day you will put me on the table and I will die, and you will all die, the rich and the poor. This is justice. And all those who have done me wrong will confront justice here.

In a scene with the professor of logic, Werner mocks our sense of law and rationality. The professor believes there is only one question to solve a particular problem. The professor is not willing to accept any other question besides it. He insists there is ‘one question, and only one, to solve this problem of logic.’ The professor says he can’t accept Kaspar’s question.

“That’s no logic; logic is deduction, not description. What you’ve done is describe something, not deduce it. Understanding is secondary; the reasoning is the thing. In Logic and Mathematics, we do not understand things, we reason and deduce: l cannot accept that question,” the professor says. What Kaspar says is not important, for there is no other question, 'by the laws of logic.’

What was Kasab’s crime? We didn’t want anybody to take up Kasab’s case in the court. Which one is a bigger crime? Kaspar left an autobiography, so we know, two years and a half outside in the cruel world, the only place he felt really happy was in his bed. ‘It seems to me that my coming into this world was a terribly hard fall,’ Kaspar would say about himself, and perhaps for people yet to be born and brought up this way. Kaspar was murdered. Kasab? The poor guy is probably my age, and now, perhaps, a little afraid of death.

>> Also published on PFC.

Promoting good cinema

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:22:00 +0000

Without serious film criticism in
the media, we can’t promote good
cinema. Without good cinema, we
can’t produce good film criticism.

“Who is to blame when good cinema does not do good business?”

The audience is to blame, of course. But our filmmakers who have ‘corrupted’ the taste of the mass must take the moral responsibility of the same. The audiences were fed bad films for a really long time in the name of puraa entertainment. Similarly, the media culture in this country also supported this mindless masala culture. Without serious film criticism in the media, we can’t promote good cinema. Without good cinema, we can’t produce good film criticism.

I think the absence of film clubs or cinema movement can also provide some clues to today’s problem. I was surprised to know that Godard and Bergman are common names in villages of Kerala, thanks to the popular cinema movement in the area led by people like Adoor Gopalakrishan in their youth. We, as a nation, chose to ignore and sideline serious issues; many actually believed ‘India Shining.’ Those responsible for promoting good cinema have lost their prominence and have become elusive.

Reaction to Kay Kay Menon's post on PFC

A break from work

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Rajabali: You’ve to find
your own formula

After doing a month-long film appreciation course at FTII, Pune, I returned to Bombay on Sunday. I had not taken any break from my work in the last three years. If you’re a cinephile or someone interested in cinema by chance, go check it out for yourself. I’m sure you’ll love it. If you’re lucky and your passion for cinema is really strong, you’ll get selected. [Out of around 2,500 applications, only 70+ were selected this year, they said.]

I’ve not found time to write about the whole experience. But I posted some of the real gyaan that I got there and which I think are worth quoting on my PFC blog:

“What do you suggest someone who hasn’t really begun?” I asked Anjum Rajabali outside the class. It is silly, I guess, to be honest about lack of experience.
“Start first!” our scriptwriter said.
When I discover my characters, their names become very important to me. Sometimes all I have is a name. Sometimes even when I know my character well, I am not aware of his name.
“I had asked you, if you remember, about how to name characters. You’d said, ‘Just name it.’ But I find it very difficult to name them.”
“What do you want then? I’ve my formula . . . You want me to tell them?”
“Yes . . .”
“I don’t want to,” Anjum said. “You’ve to find your own formula . . .”

Read A break from work.

Critics’ fight and fury

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:52:00 +0000

It really is a wonderfully exciting field to write about when the movies are good. When they’re not so good, it’s to despair.

“It really is a wonderfully exciting field to write about when the movies are good. When they’re not so good, it’s to despair. The really bad movies you can write about with some passion and anger. It’s the mediocre ones that wear you down. They’re disgusting to write about because you can feel yourself slipping into the same mediocrity and stupidity.”

— Pauline Kael

While I was doing the film appreciation course at the film institute in Pune, I tried to learn more about the craft of film criticism. I have posted some of my notes about film criticism in India and elsewhere on my new blog on Passionforcinema.

Read Critics' Fight and Fury.

“You cannot really reprehend mediocrity, you can only regret it. But you can and must condemn the gifted filmmakers who has it in him to combine artistic integrity with a consciousness of dual responsibility to the viewing public and to keep the man who backs him but who yet keeps postponing the great film because he must ‘first make a little money’ and therefore must compromise just this little, just the once.”

— Satyajit Ray

The Nose Poems 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Salik Shah) — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:06:00 +0000

"It took me more than six months to come up with a poem about her nose . . . yeah, a silly nose can move you so much . . ."

— 3:08 AM Mar 25th

Some of my dear colleagues at Mindworks happily took part in this exciting poetry exercise recently. Perhaps this was the first time that there was any poetic interest in our nose.

My Nose

My nose knows
Where the kitchen lies,
Of bread loaves
And apple pies.

My nose knows
Your heady scents,
Of orange blossom
And vanilla spice.

My nose twitches
In anticipation,
Of silky sheets
And musky nights.

My nose knows
What the touch can’t feel,
What fails the ears,
Beats the eyes.

My nose knows
The passion beneath,
Those innocent looks
And cherry smiles.

— Angelene

Breathe Easy

Two holes, a bone and a show of skin
Some hair to trap the dirt within

To blow, to dig, to wrinkle and make
For Inuits of the Arctic a novel handshake

To catch a cold, to makes a mess
It runs and pokes into others’ business

We all have one but some stand out
The Jewish, the Greek, and Roman no doubt

That besides it makes us look pretty
Unless we talk of Shilpa Shetty

It’s a lesson that we shouldn’t fuss
About our breathing apparatus

— Sridhar

A poem about Nose

“The edge that looks like a beacon on
the horizon,
a dew drop dangling on the leaf . . .
one of the many beautiful jewels of a woman.”

— Adesh

Your Nose

All of them will have your nose
and they will be just as beautiful as you are
I will watch you rub your noses
like we did when i'd pinch
love and smile mischievously
and then bite and let it burn like tulip

They will tell you
your little duckie has your duckie nose

A nose of a dove
that will find us everywhere
nose that will wake me up
that will tease me
and make me cry when we're old
When they leave us alone
that will find us
when our eyes cannot see
nose that wouldn't let me sleep
at nights and not even let me leave

They will tell them
All of you got your noses from them
And I'll tell them —
'Don't blame me,'
and I'll proudly tell your name.

— Salik

The Nose Dare

You can close your eyes
If you want.
I'll still be there.
Just where I was.

I won't disappear.
Because I live here!

You walk with me
Up in the clouds, sometimes.
Where I do not wish to be.

And you let me down
When you walk
As if
You would bury your head in the ground.

You have taken me for many a ride
On foggy, wintry mornings.

You still do that to me
In the ruthless summer sun.

I freeze. I burn.

Yet I never complain.

Through stormy winds or rain ...
In pleasure and pain,
Here shall I remain.

You are free
To close your eyes.

— K Jayalakshmi