There were no fences where I spent my childhood. There were hedges, of sajivani and cactus, of bamboo and stone, but it was understood that a child could make a path for himself through any barrier, so long as he didn't harm the crop. To the north Marshyangdi drew a natural boundary, to the east and the west the valley strangled itself. To the south the mountain rose. There were half a dozen pine trees in that deciduous forest; their brushlike needles stood out in contrast discernible from the window of my home. The feilds blend into the forest. Jackals stole chicken and children picked gooseberries and blackberries the coldest cranny of the mountain. There was no center of the village, nor any limit. Sitting under a tree, it was possible to start a story about a spring hidden behind a hillock: there was no need to tie a story tmporally.
Once letters clumped into meaningful words, and words strung together and very tastefully ended in a period to suggest one whole idea, once epics came to life, once science-fiction became transparent, once the magic of Bruce Lee fighting in Hong Kong without the benefit of subtitles became a favored escape, once the village teemed and spilled over with people of all colors and transformed into a babble of migrant laborers and their newborns, once the tree once at the edge of a child's story became a stop on the way to further flung glades, once the world folded out, unfurled, at once the three dimensions became a more legible flatness, and the flatness of the unfathomed bunched up into an even more complex challenge. The bird that is poised to fly is not the same in flight.
I did, really, I did chase the rainbow once. I reached a place a mile past Marshyangdi on the Gorkha side before clouds covered the sun and there was no more rainbow. That chase took me places I wouldn't have hunted for on my own otherwise.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Empty Vessel
I was privileged to be born near books, with a priest in the family who awoke at four in the morning and recited Chandi stotra and and other hymns as he tended to his daily ablutions. I was also privileged to have as many women in my family. After a hard day's work in the village, the women gathered around a lamp or two for their only luxury--recounting their hardships and happy endings, gossiping, anticipating and dissecting and building in the air and taking the air out of other enterprises. I listened, often until I fell asleep in a corner, and i must have continued to listen in my sleep as well, because many things come to me which I am sure I never experienced.
Another way in which I was fortunate was the ethnic and cultural diversity in the village, and the social fabric of which my families were a member, one which stretched over the mountains to villages a couple of days walk away. There were certain forbidden territories--the temple of the Old Goddess where the Magars sacrificed their swines, the spring near Mulpaani where the children were forbidden to drink, the washed roots at the mouth of Mulpaani where the source's serpents lived, a bend in Khare Khola where stillborns were buried--and there were specific spirits or decapitated skeletons or wandering witches who roamed their own territories. The landscape was a narrative in its own, made possible only through hundreds or thousands of years of habitation, where it was possible to see in the shadows of a tree a woman who hanged herself there sixty years ago, or a rocking rock on the edge of a precipice from where a laborer fell to his death.
The landscape existed, thusly, as a layered narrative composed of stones and trees or fields and paths shaped by specific events in the village's history that jumped up afresh to the eye, each time transformed by the gown of dusk or the clamor of birds, flapped by vultures alighting and jostling in a litter of carcasses, and as a cast of real, dead spooks and kin, drawn from various generations, colored by very different stories told by the same person, details picking on their own scabs or wearing borrowed jewels from myths and epics similarly heard in the haze of half-sleep. One was outside, the other flowered inside.
As a child, I populated my head with as varied a cast as it was possible for a child's mind. I also had many friends in the cracks on the wall or in the shapes made by leaves against light. I named them, these creation of chance that had acquired permanence, and i spent hours talking to them. Amazingly, invariably, they talked back. As soon as a mind reaches the stage where it can sustain a conversation, it wants more of it, because it recognizes that each of such conversation is a perfect conversation. The most agreeable opponent is within the mind.
[more to follow]
Another way in which I was fortunate was the ethnic and cultural diversity in the village, and the social fabric of which my families were a member, one which stretched over the mountains to villages a couple of days walk away. There were certain forbidden territories--the temple of the Old Goddess where the Magars sacrificed their swines, the spring near Mulpaani where the children were forbidden to drink, the washed roots at the mouth of Mulpaani where the source's serpents lived, a bend in Khare Khola where stillborns were buried--and there were specific spirits or decapitated skeletons or wandering witches who roamed their own territories. The landscape was a narrative in its own, made possible only through hundreds or thousands of years of habitation, where it was possible to see in the shadows of a tree a woman who hanged herself there sixty years ago, or a rocking rock on the edge of a precipice from where a laborer fell to his death.
The landscape existed, thusly, as a layered narrative composed of stones and trees or fields and paths shaped by specific events in the village's history that jumped up afresh to the eye, each time transformed by the gown of dusk or the clamor of birds, flapped by vultures alighting and jostling in a litter of carcasses, and as a cast of real, dead spooks and kin, drawn from various generations, colored by very different stories told by the same person, details picking on their own scabs or wearing borrowed jewels from myths and epics similarly heard in the haze of half-sleep. One was outside, the other flowered inside.
As a child, I populated my head with as varied a cast as it was possible for a child's mind. I also had many friends in the cracks on the wall or in the shapes made by leaves against light. I named them, these creation of chance that had acquired permanence, and i spent hours talking to them. Amazingly, invariably, they talked back. As soon as a mind reaches the stage where it can sustain a conversation, it wants more of it, because it recognizes that each of such conversation is a perfect conversation. The most agreeable opponent is within the mind.
[more to follow]
Friday, April 20, 2007
Origin of Stories
To really understand what centrality cinema has come to possess for me, I have to look as far back as it is possible: If this mode of narrative seems most natural and necessary to me, I must peel away the mysteries that house other familiar forms of story-telling.
Immediately, stories beget a nature that is public or private, root or fruit, impressed or sold.
Any exercise to dissect the following will be arduous. A man doesn't sit down to write about the foundational, formative experiences of his life and achieve that in a few sentences. A daft writer can perhaps accomplish that about his wife or a new, minor character in an unfinished story. But the journal he keeps is necessarily fat and cluttered, irreducible.
Narratives weaved around the stones and bits of colored glass and rags and twigs and cut-outs from newspapers, which formed the cast of the stories told by three-year-olds, were the first public form of narratives I experienced.
There are always a small number of stories that children are told by other children--perhaps a few years older, at most--that incorporate themes older than humanity: fear of the unknown, biological functions, sensory rewards. The story I remember is about an old couple who are visited by a bullying bear, who ends up eating their turd and is scared away when the old woman lets go an alarmingly loud fart. This story no doubt still circulates among Nepali children giggling in the dark.
Swasthani Brata Katha, a book recited an impressive seven times in a matter of a month, established the necessary understanding of karma, basic Hindu scheme of honor, piety and heavenly reward. But, it was also a story where a seven year old girl is married off to an eighty-year old leper. It is also a story where a god with the ability to destroy Creation carries the decomposing corpse of his beloved in a mad expression of high melodrama surpassing adolescent tantrums. It is filled with equally gleeful descriptions of beautiful women and horrible demons; the eyes of a temptress stirs the heart just as much as the description of a flesh-eating rakshasha's blood-plastered face.
Such recitations are also the first experience of the cruelty inherent in a lyrical medium, where sound and images cascade without chance, a complex dance, and the reader's gentle recitation deceptively simplifies the horrors within the narrative.
[More to follow]
Immediately, stories beget a nature that is public or private, root or fruit, impressed or sold.
Any exercise to dissect the following will be arduous. A man doesn't sit down to write about the foundational, formative experiences of his life and achieve that in a few sentences. A daft writer can perhaps accomplish that about his wife or a new, minor character in an unfinished story. But the journal he keeps is necessarily fat and cluttered, irreducible.
Narratives weaved around the stones and bits of colored glass and rags and twigs and cut-outs from newspapers, which formed the cast of the stories told by three-year-olds, were the first public form of narratives I experienced.
There are always a small number of stories that children are told by other children--perhaps a few years older, at most--that incorporate themes older than humanity: fear of the unknown, biological functions, sensory rewards. The story I remember is about an old couple who are visited by a bullying bear, who ends up eating their turd and is scared away when the old woman lets go an alarmingly loud fart. This story no doubt still circulates among Nepali children giggling in the dark.
Swasthani Brata Katha, a book recited an impressive seven times in a matter of a month, established the necessary understanding of karma, basic Hindu scheme of honor, piety and heavenly reward. But, it was also a story where a seven year old girl is married off to an eighty-year old leper. It is also a story where a god with the ability to destroy Creation carries the decomposing corpse of his beloved in a mad expression of high melodrama surpassing adolescent tantrums. It is filled with equally gleeful descriptions of beautiful women and horrible demons; the eyes of a temptress stirs the heart just as much as the description of a flesh-eating rakshasha's blood-plastered face.
Such recitations are also the first experience of the cruelty inherent in a lyrical medium, where sound and images cascade without chance, a complex dance, and the reader's gentle recitation deceptively simplifies the horrors within the narrative.
[More to follow]
Thursday, April 19, 2007
New Town
Movies since last post:
Adaptation
The Italian
Grindhouse
I have lost access to movies, unless I go to the theatre, which costs money and time. I have started working at an Indian restaurant, which means inconvenient hours and very bad pay. I am still hungover from yesterday [I suppose Sushrut and I celebrated Nepali New Year 2064, after all], and I don't have the focus and energy required to do any creative thinking. Still, a blessing to be in a library: Santa Rosa Junior College's library isn't as well equipped as the Mountain View Public Library; The students aren't as courteous to other patrons of the library either. On the flip side, computer access is plenty and without restriction.
More than a post about movies, this is meant as a return to the blog, from which I have stayed away for 18 days.
Adaptation
The Italian
Grindhouse
I have lost access to movies, unless I go to the theatre, which costs money and time. I have started working at an Indian restaurant, which means inconvenient hours and very bad pay. I am still hungover from yesterday [I suppose Sushrut and I celebrated Nepali New Year 2064, after all], and I don't have the focus and energy required to do any creative thinking. Still, a blessing to be in a library: Santa Rosa Junior College's library isn't as well equipped as the Mountain View Public Library; The students aren't as courteous to other patrons of the library either. On the flip side, computer access is plenty and without restriction.
More than a post about movies, this is meant as a return to the blog, from which I have stayed away for 18 days.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Friday, March 30
Movies since last post:
Viridiana
The Wind Will Carry Us
The Producers
The Silence
Samurai II
Tokyo Monogatari
The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy is a hillarious movie about the movies--a behind-the-scenes of Samurai movie production. It is, like all good comedy, full of the threat to turn into a grave drama. The Producers [Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder] doesn't need an introduction. Samurai II, as is obvious, is the sequal to Samurai I, with Mifune playing the lead. It is second in an epic trilogy.
The Wind Will Carry Us is by Abbas Kiarostami, and The Silence is by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, two of Iran's most distinctive filmmakers, indeed, two of the most distinctive filmmakers alive. It is possible to say after watching any Makhmalbaf movie that I had never seen anything like this before. Each movie deserves a posting of its own.
As does Ozu's Tokyo Story.
As does Bunuel's Viridiana.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time right now. Also, I will not be able to watch another movie of this sort--venerated, collected--for a while now, because I am not sure how I will have access to anything cinema at all. I am still looking for employment, a search that is taking me northwards across the bay. All depends upon when I will be able to secure either a netflix account, or a membership at a public library.
In the mean time, I hope this blog serves as a list of movies to watch, for reviews it hasn't hosted any yet, and therefore has no claim to any merit on its own.
Viridiana
The Wind Will Carry Us
The Producers
The Silence
Samurai II
Tokyo Monogatari
The Fall Guy
The Fall Guy is a hillarious movie about the movies--a behind-the-scenes of Samurai movie production. It is, like all good comedy, full of the threat to turn into a grave drama. The Producers [Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder] doesn't need an introduction. Samurai II, as is obvious, is the sequal to Samurai I, with Mifune playing the lead. It is second in an epic trilogy.
The Wind Will Carry Us is by Abbas Kiarostami, and The Silence is by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, two of Iran's most distinctive filmmakers, indeed, two of the most distinctive filmmakers alive. It is possible to say after watching any Makhmalbaf movie that I had never seen anything like this before. Each movie deserves a posting of its own.
As does Ozu's Tokyo Story.
As does Bunuel's Viridiana.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time right now. Also, I will not be able to watch another movie of this sort--venerated, collected--for a while now, because I am not sure how I will have access to anything cinema at all. I am still looking for employment, a search that is taking me northwards across the bay. All depends upon when I will be able to secure either a netflix account, or a membership at a public library.
In the mean time, I hope this blog serves as a list of movies to watch, for reviews it hasn't hosted any yet, and therefore has no claim to any merit on its own.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tuesday, March 27
By the end of this month, I will have to leave Mountain View. I still don't have a job, and I will definitely have no access to a collection of movies as good as here, or a way of watching them. There'll be a hiatus from the blog, but not for too long.
Movies since last post:
The Funeral
8 1/2
The Funeral is a charming Japanese comedy. As anyone familiar with the langauge of criticism knows, the word "charming" is a patronizing word. Well, there was a plenty to be impressed by in that movie, yet, at the end, it was hard to think that anything from it will stay. It did have one of the most fresh opening sequences. The man who recommended it to me at the library had given a short, rapid snort of a laugh when he said "all the best people of Japan worked in it," and I took it home, thinking, surely, it must be good, if "all the best people of Japan worked in it." I didn't know any of the actors, and I was certainly not disappointed by the movie, but it wasn't
of the calibre or character os a movie that satisfies.
In the tradition of the best dark comedies, it begins with a voice over--crisp, amused, melancholy, almost like a Raymond Carver sentence. It then becomes a bit silly, as if drunk on too much sake. There is a shot of the dead man's daughter running to the phone at the end of a movie set: she runs over all the debris of a shoot, her attendants picking the hem of her kimono. She manages superbly to step over cables and tracks and all the innards of benind-the-camera, but trips on her kimono at last, everybody tumbling to the floor in one big heap. We know what news awaits at the other end of the phone. This--tripping over the traditional, and not knowing exactly how to react to the sudden demise of a close relative--is the movie. It has everything in it: arresting eroticism, drunk men bawling about the dead man, children misbehaving as the head prient prays. And it is a comedy, yes, it is an uplifting story at the end.
I have less than two minutes to write about 8 1/2. Only this for now: Fellini is among the very, very few directors, whose images, if you were to isolate even just a single frame, would immediately convey the mood and meaning of the entire sequence.
More later.
Movies since last post:
The Funeral
8 1/2
The Funeral is a charming Japanese comedy. As anyone familiar with the langauge of criticism knows, the word "charming" is a patronizing word. Well, there was a plenty to be impressed by in that movie, yet, at the end, it was hard to think that anything from it will stay. It did have one of the most fresh opening sequences. The man who recommended it to me at the library had given a short, rapid snort of a laugh when he said "all the best people of Japan worked in it," and I took it home, thinking, surely, it must be good, if "all the best people of Japan worked in it." I didn't know any of the actors, and I was certainly not disappointed by the movie, but it wasn't
of the calibre or character os a movie that satisfies.
In the tradition of the best dark comedies, it begins with a voice over--crisp, amused, melancholy, almost like a Raymond Carver sentence. It then becomes a bit silly, as if drunk on too much sake. There is a shot of the dead man's daughter running to the phone at the end of a movie set: she runs over all the debris of a shoot, her attendants picking the hem of her kimono. She manages superbly to step over cables and tracks and all the innards of benind-the-camera, but trips on her kimono at last, everybody tumbling to the floor in one big heap. We know what news awaits at the other end of the phone. This--tripping over the traditional, and not knowing exactly how to react to the sudden demise of a close relative--is the movie. It has everything in it: arresting eroticism, drunk men bawling about the dead man, children misbehaving as the head prient prays. And it is a comedy, yes, it is an uplifting story at the end.
I have less than two minutes to write about 8 1/2. Only this for now: Fellini is among the very, very few directors, whose images, if you were to isolate even just a single frame, would immediately convey the mood and meaning of the entire sequence.
More later.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Monday, 26th March
Movies since last post:
Zatoichi Meets One-Armed Swordsman [Zatoichi: Destroy the Chinese Sword!]
Mrs. Doubtfire
I enjoy samurai movies. I realized yesterday that my first samurai movie had been Rashomon, which doesn't even qualify as one. It has all the wrong elements: 23 strokes exchanged? Tajomaru is hardly a samurai, adn the woodcutter's tale undoes everything samurai that is present in the story. I am familiar with Akutagawa's short story In the Grove, which forms the basis for what has come to be known as Rashomonesque: I suppose, the West, as the dominant cultural paradigm, gets to coin words that are actually inaccurate and misleading if one looks at the origin of it. Akutagawa's Rashomon is no less a moral challange to the mind than In the Grove, but the French certainly wouldn't have taken to "In-the-grove-ness" as well as they did to Rashomonesque. The word almost seems destined. In the process, Akutagawa is lost entirely, and the world gets Seven Samurai as the greatest Samurai/Western story ever told.
To me, for very long, Toshiro Mifune exemplified the typical movie samurai. Now, after watching Zatoichi, I prefer Shintaro Katsu's Yakuza swordsman. He is subtle, funny, elegant and capable of shifting from humble to brutish in a breath: Mifune is stuck forever in the Mifune shell. Perhaps Kurosawa never could let go of the investment the West had made in his movies with Mifune's gruff ronin, so casted Mifune in a diverse portfolio of roles, but in each of which Mifune, without fail, replicated something basic about himself. Katsu doesn't have the advantage of a mind like Kurosawa at his side, but without Kurosawa, Mifune hardly ever compares to the versatility that Katsu shows within a role that would easily be seen as confining. He is a clown, a poet, a swordsman, a tender lover and a paragon of virtue as the blind masseur. Mifune, on the other hand, even when playing a contemporary Japanese man, is the same gruff, growling brute incapable of much else than screaming "Baka!"
The opening sequence of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo typifies the Zatoichi character: a man reduced to an animal, yet quick to poesy and murder alike. "Yet again, I have blood on my hands," he murmers, crouched in a rain-filled paddy, before he lures his assailants to his quick play of sleek blade.
I had seen Mrs. Doubtfire a long time ago, in the Assembly Hall in Budhanilkantha, a rather bad video print which was, nonetheless, very funny. Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, which now seems to be in very bad taste itself, is one movie that made me laugh the most: I have only laughed nearly as much since while watching Borat. What struck me most while watching Mrs. Doubtfire was not so much the movie, but the city in which it had been shot: San Francisco. It is significant to see familiar spaces in a story that is otherwise fantastical. That wall between the real and the unreal gets a shove, shakes a bit. Hollywood, as people across the globe think of it, and as homeless people in Hollywood see it, is not the same entity. The mind is forced to consume it as if it were a bony fish; cautiously feed on the fantasy, and separate the pointed intrusion of reality from it.
I have checked out 8 1/2 today. Bunuel's Viridiana and quite a few other movies also wait.
Zatoichi Meets One-Armed Swordsman [Zatoichi: Destroy the Chinese Sword!]
Mrs. Doubtfire
I enjoy samurai movies. I realized yesterday that my first samurai movie had been Rashomon, which doesn't even qualify as one. It has all the wrong elements: 23 strokes exchanged? Tajomaru is hardly a samurai, adn the woodcutter's tale undoes everything samurai that is present in the story. I am familiar with Akutagawa's short story In the Grove, which forms the basis for what has come to be known as Rashomonesque: I suppose, the West, as the dominant cultural paradigm, gets to coin words that are actually inaccurate and misleading if one looks at the origin of it. Akutagawa's Rashomon is no less a moral challange to the mind than In the Grove, but the French certainly wouldn't have taken to "In-the-grove-ness" as well as they did to Rashomonesque. The word almost seems destined. In the process, Akutagawa is lost entirely, and the world gets Seven Samurai as the greatest Samurai/Western story ever told.
To me, for very long, Toshiro Mifune exemplified the typical movie samurai. Now, after watching Zatoichi, I prefer Shintaro Katsu's Yakuza swordsman. He is subtle, funny, elegant and capable of shifting from humble to brutish in a breath: Mifune is stuck forever in the Mifune shell. Perhaps Kurosawa never could let go of the investment the West had made in his movies with Mifune's gruff ronin, so casted Mifune in a diverse portfolio of roles, but in each of which Mifune, without fail, replicated something basic about himself. Katsu doesn't have the advantage of a mind like Kurosawa at his side, but without Kurosawa, Mifune hardly ever compares to the versatility that Katsu shows within a role that would easily be seen as confining. He is a clown, a poet, a swordsman, a tender lover and a paragon of virtue as the blind masseur. Mifune, on the other hand, even when playing a contemporary Japanese man, is the same gruff, growling brute incapable of much else than screaming "Baka!"
The opening sequence of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo typifies the Zatoichi character: a man reduced to an animal, yet quick to poesy and murder alike. "Yet again, I have blood on my hands," he murmers, crouched in a rain-filled paddy, before he lures his assailants to his quick play of sleek blade.
I had seen Mrs. Doubtfire a long time ago, in the Assembly Hall in Budhanilkantha, a rather bad video print which was, nonetheless, very funny. Peter Jackson's Bad Taste, which now seems to be in very bad taste itself, is one movie that made me laugh the most: I have only laughed nearly as much since while watching Borat. What struck me most while watching Mrs. Doubtfire was not so much the movie, but the city in which it had been shot: San Francisco. It is significant to see familiar spaces in a story that is otherwise fantastical. That wall between the real and the unreal gets a shove, shakes a bit. Hollywood, as people across the globe think of it, and as homeless people in Hollywood see it, is not the same entity. The mind is forced to consume it as if it were a bony fish; cautiously feed on the fantasy, and separate the pointed intrusion of reality from it.
I have checked out 8 1/2 today. Bunuel's Viridiana and quite a few other movies also wait.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 25
Movie since last post:
Monsieur Verdoux
I have only been able to see movie in the past 24 hours, and it feels odd, given how prolific it has been lately. It was a Charlie Chaplin talkie--I think only the second of those I have ever seen, the other being Great Dictator--and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Chaplin's work manages to do everything that other "unpretentious" directors--some say a group with as few as three or four, including Bresson, Bunuel and Ozu--manage by being as far removed as they can be from a typical Chaplin movie.
What is a typical Chaplin? Physical "low-brow" comedy touched off with a satirical wit worthy of an engaging social commentator? If so, then Monsieur Verdoux is just that. You can see the Chaplin of "City Lights," albeit a much better dressed tramp, and you can also hear the same sentiments as in the barber's speech in Great Dictator, when Verdoux compares himself, a convicted mass-murderer, to the great nations on earth, who are each an equal mass-murderer. It is funny in that old, sentimental, articulate Hollywood way, sparked by Welles and charmed by Chaplin.
This seems a good time to revisit L'Argent. I can't recall if I have seen another movie by Bresson. It is very likely that I have, but my memory isn't the best, and although I can remember characters or sequences when I don't need to be thinking about them, I can't remember them when I need to. Calvino writes that the act of searching for a particular memory must necessarily change it a little, because the land that searches for a grain of memory now isn't the same that placed it there a long time ago. I can't remember exactly what I was thinking about a particular instance in a movie now that I need particulars, now that the articulation of any idea depends upon finding specifics that can be meaningfully arrayed.
So, here's what I think of L'Argent now: like most cinema worth thinking about, L'Argent seems cleaved into two distinct halves: that before Yvon's prison stint, and that after. How does a man think of himself in this world, where he is but one among countless many, and where there is no telling whose actions will have the most devastating effect upon his life? Yvon pays the penalty for two crimes he never commits: actually passing on forged currency, and actually assisting armed robbers. Yet, he gets arrested in both instances. In both instances he blames circumstances, and so do I, as the audience, by sympathizing with his plight, by finding it cruel that Justice insists upon keeping all eyes closed.
Yet, the same man who tries to kill himself during his solitary confinement [punishment for something that, in another age, would have been required of a man], leaves the prison determined to kill. He kills for sport then, almost, and he kills a woman who suffers, on her own and to protect him, for nothing more than a little bit of money. He is a very different person that the one that we learned to sympathize with.
I suppose, with works of art that take time to finish, the artist meets a kernel of truth somewhere in the process, halfway through the journey, perhaps, which then requires him to deviate from what he had thought to be the original intent of his work, his veritable destination, so to speak. In Monsieur Verdoux, a charming widow-killer, suddenly becomes gray and haggard, and announces how his disabled wife and young child are dead now. "But they are much better off where they are," he says with a cold sigh, and we immediately know that he isn't without any guilt. In L'Argent, Yvon tells the woman who gives him shelter that he killed the hotelier for some money, but felt no remorse for it. He talks about the blood and the pleasure in it. And we know that he is without any guilt.
The man directly responsible for Yvon's misery, a man who tells the judge that he takes pleasure in robbing the rich and giving to the poor, and that he was "hoping to be acquitted and continue doing it," stands for us: those who think of themselves as, even if only marginally, gifted capable of taking advantage where there is opportunity, and continuing behind the smug bravado of someone who never falls. This is also the Yvon who cannot take being called a forgerer, and pushes the righteous waiter. Then there is the Yvon of the second half: in all honesty, a fantasy within ourselves. Behind each tranquil face is the fantasy of having the guts to go out and enjoy a bloodsport, to be able to harm those who harm us, and even more so those tho have never had anything to do with us.
Bresson's present-day heirs are perhaps the Iranian movies: so simple that they are hard to understand, lyrical in their restrain, baroque in their terseness, an eye turned manyfolds inwards that they leave the audience weary of being watched. Calvino writes about certain cinema being the anti-camera: as if the screen is actually capturing the essence of the audience, as if reality exists within the cone of light between the projector and the screen. I suppose, in that case, the audience exists for cinema to be possible: as if beauty is a vast conspiracy of the mind to ensure its perpetuation, and cinema, as the primal form of images and sound in motion, has conspired the thinking audience into being.
Or, perhaps not.
Monsieur Verdoux
I have only been able to see movie in the past 24 hours, and it feels odd, given how prolific it has been lately. It was a Charlie Chaplin talkie--I think only the second of those I have ever seen, the other being Great Dictator--and it was thoroughly enjoyable. Chaplin's work manages to do everything that other "unpretentious" directors--some say a group with as few as three or four, including Bresson, Bunuel and Ozu--manage by being as far removed as they can be from a typical Chaplin movie.
What is a typical Chaplin? Physical "low-brow" comedy touched off with a satirical wit worthy of an engaging social commentator? If so, then Monsieur Verdoux is just that. You can see the Chaplin of "City Lights," albeit a much better dressed tramp, and you can also hear the same sentiments as in the barber's speech in Great Dictator, when Verdoux compares himself, a convicted mass-murderer, to the great nations on earth, who are each an equal mass-murderer. It is funny in that old, sentimental, articulate Hollywood way, sparked by Welles and charmed by Chaplin.
This seems a good time to revisit L'Argent. I can't recall if I have seen another movie by Bresson. It is very likely that I have, but my memory isn't the best, and although I can remember characters or sequences when I don't need to be thinking about them, I can't remember them when I need to. Calvino writes that the act of searching for a particular memory must necessarily change it a little, because the land that searches for a grain of memory now isn't the same that placed it there a long time ago. I can't remember exactly what I was thinking about a particular instance in a movie now that I need particulars, now that the articulation of any idea depends upon finding specifics that can be meaningfully arrayed.
So, here's what I think of L'Argent now: like most cinema worth thinking about, L'Argent seems cleaved into two distinct halves: that before Yvon's prison stint, and that after. How does a man think of himself in this world, where he is but one among countless many, and where there is no telling whose actions will have the most devastating effect upon his life? Yvon pays the penalty for two crimes he never commits: actually passing on forged currency, and actually assisting armed robbers. Yet, he gets arrested in both instances. In both instances he blames circumstances, and so do I, as the audience, by sympathizing with his plight, by finding it cruel that Justice insists upon keeping all eyes closed.
Yet, the same man who tries to kill himself during his solitary confinement [punishment for something that, in another age, would have been required of a man], leaves the prison determined to kill. He kills for sport then, almost, and he kills a woman who suffers, on her own and to protect him, for nothing more than a little bit of money. He is a very different person that the one that we learned to sympathize with.
I suppose, with works of art that take time to finish, the artist meets a kernel of truth somewhere in the process, halfway through the journey, perhaps, which then requires him to deviate from what he had thought to be the original intent of his work, his veritable destination, so to speak. In Monsieur Verdoux, a charming widow-killer, suddenly becomes gray and haggard, and announces how his disabled wife and young child are dead now. "But they are much better off where they are," he says with a cold sigh, and we immediately know that he isn't without any guilt. In L'Argent, Yvon tells the woman who gives him shelter that he killed the hotelier for some money, but felt no remorse for it. He talks about the blood and the pleasure in it. And we know that he is without any guilt.
The man directly responsible for Yvon's misery, a man who tells the judge that he takes pleasure in robbing the rich and giving to the poor, and that he was "hoping to be acquitted and continue doing it," stands for us: those who think of themselves as, even if only marginally, gifted capable of taking advantage where there is opportunity, and continuing behind the smug bravado of someone who never falls. This is also the Yvon who cannot take being called a forgerer, and pushes the righteous waiter. Then there is the Yvon of the second half: in all honesty, a fantasy within ourselves. Behind each tranquil face is the fantasy of having the guts to go out and enjoy a bloodsport, to be able to harm those who harm us, and even more so those tho have never had anything to do with us.
Bresson's present-day heirs are perhaps the Iranian movies: so simple that they are hard to understand, lyrical in their restrain, baroque in their terseness, an eye turned manyfolds inwards that they leave the audience weary of being watched. Calvino writes about certain cinema being the anti-camera: as if the screen is actually capturing the essence of the audience, as if reality exists within the cone of light between the projector and the screen. I suppose, in that case, the audience exists for cinema to be possible: as if beauty is a vast conspiracy of the mind to ensure its perpetuation, and cinema, as the primal form of images and sound in motion, has conspired the thinking audience into being.
Or, perhaps not.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Saturday, more Bunuel, March 24
Movies since last post:
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
101 Nights
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo
The Mirror
For some reason, watching Bunuel after an Iranian movie is very disappointing. I know that Bunuel movie was a good watch; I was amazed and I could feel the wheels turn in my head while I watched the movie: both a good and a bad sign. Good, because it was clearly a movie that would last beyond the viewing [say, unlike Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, all swordplay and Mifune's growl, but nothing lingering in the mind], but bad because it was annoying to have my thoughts interrupt the viewing.
Later Bunuel seems very much occupied with terrorism--albeit of a kind very different from what is identified today as terrorism--and I am not sure if I like his take on it. Camus, Calvino and Bunuel share very similar experiences of violence, but Bunuel seems to have done least justice to his own experience of it, and to the gravity that is in the core of terrorism itself.
The reason I was disappointed with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has less to do with that movie itself--although the twists towards the end became tiring and predictable, and lost its charm soon enough--but with the wit and beauty of the Iranian movie I watched just before it; The Mirror by Jafar Panahi.
I am a big fan of movies from tehran. I think the best movies made in the last decade have come from Iran. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence is at any given moment, in any frame, more lyrical and insightful about the cinema of cinema that Bunuel's cast walking along a country road, looped endlessly in farcical ends that come undone when one of the cast wakes up from a horrid dream, as if it is the same for us when we shake the newspaper in resignation and throw it on the floor to shake from us the news of a new blast in Baghdad.
But, even better than Makhmalbaf's was Panahi's "Don't look into the camera, Mina Khanum." Dialogues in Iranian movies are a curious mix of the real and the fantastic: each word, each act seems poised as not to blaspheme through idolatry. When a little girl throws off her fake plaster cast and refuses to act anymore, the movie looks right through the mirror and laughs at us. The story about a little girl being lost "in the hustle-bustle of Tehran" then actually becomes about Mina being lost in Tehran, and we find ourselves in the bus where she travelled, where music intervened as if my cinematic magic, where each of our responses was recorded before cinema came undone, and we wince everytime the same thought is encountered across the divide of the unreal.
Again, I am running out of time. Coherence is a luxury.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
101 Nights
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo
The Mirror
For some reason, watching Bunuel after an Iranian movie is very disappointing. I know that Bunuel movie was a good watch; I was amazed and I could feel the wheels turn in my head while I watched the movie: both a good and a bad sign. Good, because it was clearly a movie that would last beyond the viewing [say, unlike Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, all swordplay and Mifune's growl, but nothing lingering in the mind], but bad because it was annoying to have my thoughts interrupt the viewing.
Later Bunuel seems very much occupied with terrorism--albeit of a kind very different from what is identified today as terrorism--and I am not sure if I like his take on it. Camus, Calvino and Bunuel share very similar experiences of violence, but Bunuel seems to have done least justice to his own experience of it, and to the gravity that is in the core of terrorism itself.
The reason I was disappointed with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has less to do with that movie itself--although the twists towards the end became tiring and predictable, and lost its charm soon enough--but with the wit and beauty of the Iranian movie I watched just before it; The Mirror by Jafar Panahi.
I am a big fan of movies from tehran. I think the best movies made in the last decade have come from Iran. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence is at any given moment, in any frame, more lyrical and insightful about the cinema of cinema that Bunuel's cast walking along a country road, looped endlessly in farcical ends that come undone when one of the cast wakes up from a horrid dream, as if it is the same for us when we shake the newspaper in resignation and throw it on the floor to shake from us the news of a new blast in Baghdad.
But, even better than Makhmalbaf's was Panahi's "Don't look into the camera, Mina Khanum." Dialogues in Iranian movies are a curious mix of the real and the fantastic: each word, each act seems poised as not to blaspheme through idolatry. When a little girl throws off her fake plaster cast and refuses to act anymore, the movie looks right through the mirror and laughs at us. The story about a little girl being lost "in the hustle-bustle of Tehran" then actually becomes about Mina being lost in Tehran, and we find ourselves in the bus where she travelled, where music intervened as if my cinematic magic, where each of our responses was recorded before cinema came undone, and we wince everytime the same thought is encountered across the divide of the unreal.
Again, I am running out of time. Coherence is a luxury.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Friday, March 23rd
I am in for a long weekend of movies, movies and more movies. Bunuel and Bergman, but also another Samurai movie: Zatoichi meets Yojimbo. Samurai Banners is missing from the previous list.
Movies since last post:
Umberto D.
L'Argent
De Sica's Bicycle Thief is by far the best of cinema. This is not to suggest that there aren't others as good. But, there are so many elements in that particular movie that can be found recurring in the works of others, like Kurosawa, Ray and Ozu, that the movie becomes like the wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus.
Umberto D., by De Sica's own account, was his return to the form after forays like Miracle in Milan. It is a simple enough story--isn't that the most common comment about great works or narration?--but so basic that it jolts any person. It is the story of an old man and his dog. There comes a time when the old man finds the last shred of his dignity lost to the cruelty of post-war Italy. He worked for thirty years at the ministry to public affairs, he tells the passersby, who coldly look at him and walk away: how can a man, old as he is and fallen on such bad times as he is, rely solely upon the insignificance of his position in the state's schema to gather sympathy from others equally destitute, when the government he served has been that of the Fascists under Mussolini?
There are three principal characters in the movie: a maid who is unsure who is the father of the life in her womb, the dog Filke, and Umberto D. The possible father of the unborn child are on of the two: one from the north, and other from the south. And, because the recurrence of war is uncertain, an old man tries to kill himself along with the dog he loves so much.
De Sica must have been a great director: as did Fellini, De Sica used non-actors to play the best characters he has given to cinema. But, I think the principal difference between the methods of Fellini and his is in that for Fellini the non-actors are just that: props to his fancy; whereas De Sica makes them act: the maid presses a coffee grinder against her belly as she wonders who the father might be, and grinds the beans while tears flow down her face.
I watched L'Argent and thought about 300 instead. What is the language of cinema, and how are images written? Bresson's method seems too simple, but it is not, and the method in 300 is ostentatious, showey, but achieves not even a fraction of what Bresson does with two simple cuts. When Yvon grabs the waiter's shirt after being accused of spreading counterfeit money, the violence in that simple act of grabbing a man and thrusting anger into him is far larger than the machochistic growlings and bloody limb-tearing in 300.
L'Argent deserves a much longer posting; as do many of the movies in the list from yesterday. My time is running out.
Movies since last post:
Umberto D.
L'Argent
De Sica's Bicycle Thief is by far the best of cinema. This is not to suggest that there aren't others as good. But, there are so many elements in that particular movie that can be found recurring in the works of others, like Kurosawa, Ray and Ozu, that the movie becomes like the wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus.
Umberto D., by De Sica's own account, was his return to the form after forays like Miracle in Milan. It is a simple enough story--isn't that the most common comment about great works or narration?--but so basic that it jolts any person. It is the story of an old man and his dog. There comes a time when the old man finds the last shred of his dignity lost to the cruelty of post-war Italy. He worked for thirty years at the ministry to public affairs, he tells the passersby, who coldly look at him and walk away: how can a man, old as he is and fallen on such bad times as he is, rely solely upon the insignificance of his position in the state's schema to gather sympathy from others equally destitute, when the government he served has been that of the Fascists under Mussolini?
There are three principal characters in the movie: a maid who is unsure who is the father of the life in her womb, the dog Filke, and Umberto D. The possible father of the unborn child are on of the two: one from the north, and other from the south. And, because the recurrence of war is uncertain, an old man tries to kill himself along with the dog he loves so much.
De Sica must have been a great director: as did Fellini, De Sica used non-actors to play the best characters he has given to cinema. But, I think the principal difference between the methods of Fellini and his is in that for Fellini the non-actors are just that: props to his fancy; whereas De Sica makes them act: the maid presses a coffee grinder against her belly as she wonders who the father might be, and grinds the beans while tears flow down her face.
I watched L'Argent and thought about 300 instead. What is the language of cinema, and how are images written? Bresson's method seems too simple, but it is not, and the method in 300 is ostentatious, showey, but achieves not even a fraction of what Bresson does with two simple cuts. When Yvon grabs the waiter's shirt after being accused of spreading counterfeit money, the violence in that simple act of grabbing a man and thrusting anger into him is far larger than the machochistic growlings and bloody limb-tearing in 300.
L'Argent deserves a much longer posting; as do many of the movies in the list from yesterday. My time is running out.
Friday, March 23, 2007
I have been trying to get started on this blog for a few days now. I don't have any access to the web other than Mountain View Public Library, so it is difficult to update as often as I would prefer.
Here's a list of movies I have seen over the past few days:
I Vittelioni
Spring Flowers
The Taste of Cherries
Le Samurai
Samurai Rebellion
Zatoichi 4: The Fugitive
Incidents at Blood Pass
1941
The Cuckoo
That Obscure Object of Desire
Each was a good movie to watch. Perhaps only the four Samurai movies were sensational. 1941 was mindless, but at times poignant. Of the remaining, perhaps The Cuckoo would be the last pick. Surprisingly, I would then place I Vittelioni and That Obscure Object of Desire on the same rung. Then The Taste of Cherries, and rightly, most venerable in this pantheon, Ozu's Spring Flowers.
It seems counterintuitive, even unproductive, to start a blog about appreciating movies with a posting that puts different works in a hierarchy. My intentions is not to write about movies and declare on better than the other. But, reality is that there are limited number of minutes in a day, adn if you have to watch one or the other, you'd rather choose the one that will best reward the temporal investment in it.
I intend to write about each of the movies listed above: although, at the moment, I can see myself easily forgoing any commentary on Speilberg's 1941. It is possible to write a 300 word essay on that movie, but not necessary. It is hilarious, and what a mad mad world, and can you spot the references, and that'd about it. Watch it if making her laugh also makes her fall into your arms. But, any of the other movies above listed can be enjoyed--I would even say each is better enjoyed--in solitude.
Here's a list of movies I have seen over the past few days:
I Vittelioni
Spring Flowers
The Taste of Cherries
Le Samurai
Samurai Rebellion
Zatoichi 4: The Fugitive
Incidents at Blood Pass
1941
The Cuckoo
That Obscure Object of Desire
Each was a good movie to watch. Perhaps only the four Samurai movies were sensational. 1941 was mindless, but at times poignant. Of the remaining, perhaps The Cuckoo would be the last pick. Surprisingly, I would then place I Vittelioni and That Obscure Object of Desire on the same rung. Then The Taste of Cherries, and rightly, most venerable in this pantheon, Ozu's Spring Flowers.
It seems counterintuitive, even unproductive, to start a blog about appreciating movies with a posting that puts different works in a hierarchy. My intentions is not to write about movies and declare on better than the other. But, reality is that there are limited number of minutes in a day, adn if you have to watch one or the other, you'd rather choose the one that will best reward the temporal investment in it.
I intend to write about each of the movies listed above: although, at the moment, I can see myself easily forgoing any commentary on Speilberg's 1941. It is possible to write a 300 word essay on that movie, but not necessary. It is hilarious, and what a mad mad world, and can you spot the references, and that'd about it. Watch it if making her laugh also makes her fall into your arms. But, any of the other movies above listed can be enjoyed--I would even say each is better enjoyed--in solitude.
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