THOUGHTS OF XANADU

as i had imagined

2011-06-13T17:39:00.003+01:00

your face distracted me exactly as i had imagined,
the same languor of your lips,
the beautiful fragility of your fingers,
that mascara
which only looks good on your eyes,
a certain heat on your cheeks
that some would consider sexiness,
and the blissfully, carelessly undone hair,
that shaded all and revealed all,
exactly as I had imagined,
before we met
in crazed times, those times of craze,
even being in your shadow that aroused jealousy,
exactly as I had imagined,
blue smoke like never before,
the blue smoke that rose from your
lips into the depth less depths of being,
like the first blue smoke, the true blue
of being, like the first blue after the first fire,
exactly as I had imagined,
the vacuousness confused for sultriness,
the certain heat in your cheeks,
the magnitude of your gaze,
but mostly your colour, that mascara,
the shade beside your shade,
the fragility of your fingers,
as the blue rose from
your lips,
the smouldering cigarette in your hand,
exactly as i had imagined,
in the crazed hour of departing,
when even one look is too many and one too less,
as one leaves and departs for ever,
shattering one's heart,
in the clear crystal of that blue
smoke,
that colour on your eyes,
that heat on your cheeks,
the magnitude of your seeing,
exactly as I had imagined,
the blue smoke rising from your cigarette,
as one departs,
in the crazed heat of that crazed hour,
hostage for ever
to the handsome velvet of your skin.

untitled

2011-05-27T00:01:00.000+01:00

Winter Light

2011-05-26T12:45:00.000+01:00

Bergman's Winter Light functions as a drama, both as a story and as a piece of cinema. The camera is central to this 'movie', for while the dimensions of the story are important, I personally feel that the camera work in this drama functions as a mirror that reveals and withdraws from the characters the important aspects of their experiences, which is the director's main attempt. It is customary Bergman territory, a northern land, a few people, bareness and coldness of the landscape. However, central to it is the camera, that not only focuses on the main characters but does so in an unhesitant and unflinching gaze, which to the viewer's dismay, hides more than revealing. There are a few scenes, especially Ingrid Thulin's monologue, where in one single shot, the camera looks at her and she looks at us, in a scene that is enormous in its intensity, for the scene would not have the same concentrated intensity had the camera been otherwise. The drama, since it focuses on what is deemed as God's silence, God's silence towards the world, it is in the space where that silence exists that the camera acts via and on the characters.

It is not possible for this drama to seize us without the claustrophobic quality of how the camera works, for it follows the faces of the main dramatis personae, as if following the faces into the minds of these people, for the minds of the people is where the doubts are, where the silence that affects them lingers, where it festers. If the pastor of this small church, which opens the first act, has doubts regarding God's existence, and if his worshippers too suffer with the same woes, then all is lost. In essence, here the worshipper leading the flocks are all blind, surrounded as they are by this curtain of doubt. If God does not speak to an individual, personally, or if God's silence is perceived as a condition wherein one cannot function metaphysically, then this malaise is not new but an old one, the oldest one. Where worship functions is in the form of a supplication, in the form of a physical supplication, for without a physical supplication, even in the most cerebral religions, God remains distant.

It is also true that in this drama, Bergman shows the emptiness of mere rituals and critiques the rituals that dominate or by force dictate the development of a certain kind of spirituality. And by giving a rawness to the emotions of his characters, by giving them a past that is troubling and unhelpful, a certain atmosphere of doubt is created. The fisherman who doubts shoots himself, the pastor's lover who doubts bends down in the end with doubts, the pastor without faith leads the church service in the end. And Christ too had doubts we are reminded, on the cross he felt forsaken, what are we to make of that, a worshiper asks? In the end nothing is resolved, the unbelieving belief goes on, must go on. Perhaps knowing to have to live in God's silence is a gift, the ultimate test of a believer.

The austerity of the landscape, the winter setting, the closeness of the camera are signals achievements of this drama. The gaze is on the actors, as if by penetrating into their eyes, not only will their doubts come out, but also their confessions, their solitary silences, their hesitations and perhaps some resolution.

that indeterminate hour

2011-03-23T21:44:00.000Z

A group of stragglers and bums had gathered outside the ramparts of an old fort in ruins. Beyond, one could see the lights of the city, but here, at an indeterminate hour, between dusk and night, several other people joined this group, and lit a fire. He sat near the fire, on the soil of this land, from where Arabic calligraphy was still visible on the broken and fallen columns of this old fort; he was thinking of what the verses might mean, in that chaste Arabic, he thought at that delicate hour between dusk and night. He felt close to the patron saint of stragglers and those who light illegal fires near derelict forts, in this land of many patron saints. The night was on the cusp of dusk, at a very dangerous hour he heard this crowd whisper. And then all of a sudden, she walked across the dusty field and sat next to him, her long brown hair hiding a part of her face, and the sky dazzled with crimson rays, and far on the horizon small clouds fled away from each other, and the hour that was already indeterminate became heavy with melancholy. And he wasn't sure whose heart beats he could hear then, his or hers.

From the group huddled around the fire, a woman rose and began singing a song, as she sang to the rhythm of a flute and a drum, and she sang of a book of separations, and how her lover never came, and she sang of long hair and how her lover never wrote to her, and though the song rose from her lips it passed through his heart, he felt. The singer's hair was black and long, and she sang of long hair and separations, and she lamented that her lover never wrote to her and never came to her, so how was she to spend her nights, she asked. She sang that her eyes were always wet and that she seldom slept, and evenings brought her pain and her bed was lonely and that her lover never wrote and never came to her. The singer with long black hair sang and danced as if possessed, and the sky was black and now past that indeterminate hour, and a dark melancholy hung in the air, as she sang , who will tell her lover that she waits for him and who will transcribe her tale on paper, she asked, as the fire raged in the middle of this strange group of people, as the singer finished her song and she sat down next to the fire, to some applause and some cheers.

The night had passed that indeterminate hour of delicate mystery and he felt as if all the fresh dew that had fallen on the earth near the singer's feet had stopped in his eyes. He looked at the girl with long brown hair sitting next to him, and her eyes were like clear flames in a desert, the singer's song had passed through her heart too, he thought. She was writing with her nails on the earth near her, on soil fresh with dew she wrote and crossed, she wrote and crossed, and he wasn't sure whose heart beats he could hear then, his or hers. This hour was full of surmise, he thought, as such hours always are, and this disparate group of stragglers felt a common destiny at that hour, hour heavy with melancholy and fresh dew. He looked at the girl sitting next to her, and the hour of reckoning seemed bright as a flame, her long brown hair seemed like his destiny, and her finger tips were soiled now and the singer's song had passed through his heart and her heart too. Who was to transcribe his tale on paper, he thought, and who would record her indifference he thought, and her eyes were bright like flames and the hour was filled with surmise and she never came to him and never wrote and the nights were long he thought and who would tell her that he was waiting for her and he seldom slept and the dew was still fresh and the singer had finished her song and the singer's song had passed through his heart and he he wasn't sure whose heart beats he could hear then, his or hers.

Susana

2011-03-20T19:08:00.001Z

Luis Bunuel's Susana is generally regarded as one of his lesser movies though I would go on to say here that he only made great movies. However, it is true that Susana is not so well known, though it has all the trademarks of the great director and perhaps raises more questions than one might think otherwise. Susana was made during the master's Mexican phase and is shot in black and White. It has some surreal tricks but on the whole it has a more straight forward narrative than one would expect in a Bunuel movie. Susana is a movie wherein Bunuel subverts the Gothic genre but also makes the movie as a kind of a morality tale. However, even on a not so close viewing, it is obvious that the director is not content in just narrating a tale but in laughing at a few widely held "male" conventions, and also certain aspects of Mexican and Catholic constructs.

Susana is shown being restrained and then thrown into a cell in a reformatory wherein this young woman soon realizes that for company she has rats and scorpions. It seems clear that Susana had escaped and has been apprehended. She is being punished. Susana, terrified, prays to God and cries his help and soon flies out of a iron window in the wall, after a cross shaped light throws a reflection on the floor. Outside, it is a virtual deluge and soon she takes refuge at a hacienda, wherein a kindly looking family give her bed and food and kindness. Susana is however not welcome to the elderly maid who sees in the rain and in Susana's appearance a bad omen, a devilish act.

Susana is blonde and beautiful and it is soon clear that she is about to create havoc in this household as all the three men, the master, his young son and ranch hand all fall for her. Susana's goes in a well planned manner to seduce all three, creating friction in the household. However, the ranch hand gets to know that she is an escapee from the nearby reformatory and blackmails her into loving her. Susana uses one against the other and eventually her identity gets revealed and she is dragged, virtually back to the reformatory. We never really get to know why she had in the first place been incarcerated there and what her crimes are though it does seem that she might somehow be mentally unbalanced.

Bunuels' concerns are not mundane however. In this story gets woven the male machismo that seems to be the male prerogative and how all of Susana's actions are attributed to the devil, she herself being devil incarnate. The spectre of a temptress somehow excludes the possibility of a male allowing himself in being seduced, for the male character somehow cannot innately resist temptation. Bunuel, I think, plays on the Adam and Eve story of Adam's gullibility, absolving him of all blame can be quite tempting. In this case, Bunuel clearly also brings in certain elements of Mexican Catholic narratives to show the viewer how background political and social realities allow the exploitation of women and how strong willed female characters, which usually Bunuel shows, are seen as a sign of unrest and rebellion against the established order of men, church and piety.

Susana has some key note Bunuel trademarks of leg shots though in this case, Susana uses her bosom to unveil these hypocrisies. As regards narration, the surreal trademark shots are less in evidence though the drama hinges within a household and almost reads like a detective tale. Susana is essential viewing for Bunuel devotees.

And the rest is rust and stardust

2011-03-18T20:37:00.001Z

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Sketches

2011-03-17T19:39:00.003Z

4.

he saw the most beautiful flowers laid out on the wet green grass, flowers in their most riotous colour, splattered with colour, as if all the colours of this world had taken refuge in them. he saw the flowers but could not name them. he wanted to touch them, smell their scent and drown in their profuse colour and when he was about to touch them, he was wrenched away by a force that he could not see and all that he heard was cries and sounds that surrounded him, sounds and noises that came from some invisible place. and it was then that he realized that all would be lost soon, as he felt an invisible force making him climb a rope that he saw hanging from the most benevolent sky, as his hands bruised against the rope that was drawing him higher and higher, whisking him away from the colours he had seen, illegal and illicit as he thought, till he could think no more.

Sketches

2011-03-12T00:05:00.002Z

3.

you did not read the pages that fluttered away, pages with words or something like that, you relied on conjecture and hearsay, you thought that language and spoken words were enough, you did not understand the difficulty of loving in two languages, did you? you thought that at sunset the sky looks the most beautiful, the sun wears colours that have ripened and saturated finally and given to the sky what it loses at dawn, you ignored the blue of noon, the fierce heat of certain southern afternoons, when appleyards are sleepy and farmhands and their young lovers have kissed and wept, you ignored all that, didn't you? you heard the music and you knew all the songs but you still thought that music was elsewhere, else why would you forget the tunes you heard outside cheap public houses when insomniacs drift out and the moon slips in? you thought that unheard melodies were the sweetest, else why would you drift away like certain clouds do from certain other clouds, leaving gaps and spaces that are bigger than the sky at times, you ignored certain forlorn spaces, even though they had music, didn't you? you said that nights are laments and days are dirges and that poetry is water for the soul and that bull fighting is the most melancholic invention ever and you bled when the fighters bled, didn't you? you said that you felt cold in arthouse cinemas and art galleries were a load of rubbish and that real art was on the streets and after midnight along the seafront on cold northern nights along tacky hotels when a lone towel swings in its loneliness on the clothes-rail, you remember? you said walking with one hand in the other was your idea of resistance and rebellion and that philosophy was cheap and even poetry was tacky compared to the loneliness of a lost cat, you shouted and whistled and your white teeth shone and you said this is the world and this is the life and this moment alone is real, didn't you? you said only poor students on drugs with cheap clothes live the high life, they mix music with saliva and their kisses are the best, the most satisfying and the most fulfilling, they touch the core inside or something like that, you remember? you said one should stand with the back naked against a window wet with rain and then make love after midnight with all the burning and the yearning and the with all the anger and the rage one feels, didn't you? you said poetry is in the skin and that the waters of true poetry rise with the moons and the dunes of the skin, you laughed that brandy laugh and everything finished, the days and the nights and the skin and the moons and the aches and everything, you remember? but you didn't write and record what you thought and felt, even though the pages and sheets were always there, bare and empty, as they are now, bare and empty, as they flutter now aimlessly, tired and wasted, you didn't, you didn't.

Le Ceremonie

2011-03-11T10:58:00.001Z

In Chabrol's Le Ceremonie, class consciousness pervades not only the unconscious but all visible relations. Henceforth, from the first frame, the viewers objectivity is constantly under pressure. Class distinctions pervade and invade us everywhere and possibly everyone is a victim of somebody else. That there is something amiss in all this is not a new wonder. When the domestic servant played by Bonnaire and her mentor played with menace by Huppert engage in a private war against their oppressors, hell will break loose. We must not however be trapped into thinking where our loyalties must lie. Chabrol achieves mastery in depicting the states of people's mind and warped personalities that are distinct from their class sensibilities. It is true that Sophie's employers are complacently smug but it is also true that occasionally they are kind. They are rich is a fact but that they are also alive is another fact; in deciding what is not right or passing judgement, the duo of Sophie and her mentor are acting for themselves, not on behalf of some members of their class.

Chabrol gives us a lot of clues about their flawed and dangerous personalities. In essence, the duo are lonely in their respective ways but their solidarity for each other has pathological consequences. They don't really know each other but assume so, their friendship or bonhomie is born out of darkness and need. This kinship or solidarity runs along class divides but I think, it also cements along a line that brings their fractured pasts together, and allows events to develop. I do not believe that Sophie is pushed towards the Huppert woman, who is already many steps ahead. Sophie has already crossed many frontiers in her mind. The employing rich family remain true to their own sensibilities and taste ; contrast Don Giovanni with rude mannerisms and what they see on their TV. That the ending is sinister and dark is not because there is a class war but because Sophie's person is going towards that denouement anyway.

The cultivation of style is seen by the two women as directly linked to money; whether aesthetic sensibilities are inborn or arise from cultural and educational capital is indeed the most important point here. Sophie's war is born out of a warped understanding of such things. Her vindictive nature sublimates in violence. However, the employing family and their arrogance is a reflection of their "entitlement status", and it exists amongst all classes and those who write poetry or even visit art galleries. However, this entitlement does not predispose or should not allow them to be victims of violence, for this entitlement is all that some people know. Nice clothes, beautiful houses and charming taste is ultimately all part of a social privilege that some have and either inherit or acquire from a background capital.Those who don't have it are not neccessarily those who cannot acquire it.

In Le Ceremonie, the actors playing the rich family are brilliant in their respective ways but Huppert brings malignant menace and considerable nuance to her role. Bonnaire plays the role out of her skin. Her performance is easily the best. This is such a great movie that one viewing alone leads to myriad reflections. And its aesthetic is so chilling and so Chabrolesque that one frame on, and we know mayhem is afoot.

Intentions of Murder

2011-03-08T21:34:00.002Z

Sadako, the plump young and portly lower class suburban wife has certain certainties in her life that she expects but beyond these, there isn't much. Hell breaks loose when a stranger breaks into her house while she is alone. Initially, it seems that he is looking for money which he steals but Sadako resists him when she wakes. He tries to flee and threatens her with death, he has a knife. He then savagely attacks Sadako and ties her on the floor. However, seeing her naked thighs unleashes him and he rapes her. Later, Sadako decides to kill herself and while thinking these thoughts feels hungry and nibbles on left overs. An attempt to throw herself on the rail track behind her house is half hearted.

In Sadako, the quintessential unprivileged woman decides to stay quiet. Sadako is the common law wife of a quiet librarian, who has a mistress too. He is seen sporting Eros and Civilization in his library. Later at home, he treats Sadako as a kept woman. The train track is just behind the house, it is an important motif in this movie. Sadako's son is not registered as her son, need we know any further?

In Intentions of Murder, Imamura shows both how the kept woman or a woman can be continuously subdued and subjugated. That she is raped and develops some feelings for her tormentor is quite beside the point. The state of mind which induces a person to develop sympathies for one's subjugator is indeed a complex and interesting psychological state. However, in Sadako's case, her feelings are not born of some vague romantic longing, for how often does a woman fall in love with someone who rapes her? Her escape with her rapist to Tokyo must be seen as her fight against the many betrayals that she has suffered at every step of her life, witnessed by the numerous flashbacks and reveries we see her falling into. We can make a case of Sadako as a victim of not only her circumstances but as a psychological sufferer, and her escape and trysts with the pathetic man who has raped her is her flight not to Tokyo but to those inner regions of the mind that we know nothing about, especially hers. That she leaves her hopeless life but also her son behind is a proof of how sordid her life is, better escape with this aggressor, this obvious evil man than live with her husband whose systematic violence towards her is a given part of her life. At one point in the movie, even her son calls Sadako a fatso!

Towards the end of this movie, which ends on a positive note, Sadako has gained freedom from her rapist, her husband's mistress is dead whilst spying on her ( her mission to prove to him that Sadako is unfaithful, to him who has a mistress) she has filed a case to gain legal status as a mother, and her husband, convinced that Sadako did go to Tokyo with a man, agrees in a meek manner for the status quo to remain. But the status quo has changed. Sadako has from her trauma gained a strength, and is convinced of her inner charms even if outwardly she looks unattractive. But that is neither here nor there.

Intentions of Murder is easily one of the best movies I have ever seen. Imamura is relentlessly nihilistic in corroding every perceptible value that lower bourgeoisie life uses to cover its slime and grime. It is a movie that attacks rather than shows; it is not a brave movie but a movie that subjugates the viewer in its pincer hold. The train journeys to and from Tokyo are magnificient in depicting the ennui and desperation of Sadako's life. Nothing fills you with more dread than not knowing what Sadako might do, what her rapist might not. If Sadako enjoys her rape and later shows how lusty she could be, it reflects the grime of her life, the not so genteel veil that she wears during the day. Her husband usually forces himself on her and that must not be ever considered as a paean to male victory and aggression. The flashbacks are an imporatnt part of this movie's clear and not so clear symbolism.Imamura fills more menace into this movie than you will feel in a hundred others. I am a slave to this movie, now and perhaps forever.

Summer

2011-03-07T17:57:00.000Z

There’s a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses it’s miserable and it comes on at night. In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner “isn’t well.” And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is “having a hard time,” “in strange lands,” “without much chance of writing epic poetry,” “without much chance of anything.” The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism. Bathrooms, dreams, long hair flying out the window to the sea. The sickness is a wake. (The author appears shirtless, in black glasses, posing with a dog and a backpack in the summer somewhere.) “The summer somewhere,” sentences lacking in tranquillity, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the lens of a still camera. The writer is a dirty man, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat, hauling barrels of garbage. He’s also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel . . . “The wind whips grains of sand” . . . “Without much chance” . . . The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer’s jacket is also black.

Roberto Bolano, from Antwerp

Sketches

2011-03-04T12:45:00.005Z

1.

He loved her but he also loved the haze that surrounded her. Naturally, he was quick to accept the distance between them, anything otherwise would be foolish. However, his philosophy was based on discourse than action, and he was content to spy at her from a distance, knowing that his rivulets were changing into rapids into torrents, if only her eyes could see. But for once, he threw his caution away and decided to lay out a Persian night for her, Omar Khayyam, silken rug, moonlight and nargile. His head buzzed. The nearest tall building seemed like a piece of art. He would tell her that love begins with an obsession and ends in longing. He would tell her that he has chaste desire for her, mixed with promise and memory. He would tell her that her haze drives him crazy. He would refrain from undoing her long brown hair, he would keep his heart at arm's length from himself. He planned to lie on the silken rug near her feet, tasting moonlight mixed with soft pain. He would not touch any rusty wires.

2.

She stood with her back against the wall, her naked toes drawing circles on his rug. He imagined he heard music as her anklets drowned the traffic outside. True philosophy must leave discourse and end in action, she said. Her fingertips came together as she said that, the air around them singed and burned. Her lip stick dazzled. She told him that love begins with longing and should end in an obsession. Her moonlight pricked. She undid her long brown hair and tied it in knots. She was seldom effusive, and she was not effusive then. Her fingers spoke. Unspoken words were falling like marbles on a polished wooden floor, darting everywhere at random. She looked at length at him and then turned away. His ache restored. Life needs the perspective of distance, she smiled. Her white feet were driving him crazy. Her haze took charge. Desire, what brute she thought. He could hear her hear his beating heart.

She didn't Come

2011-03-03T18:26:00.000Z

She didn’t come. I said: And she won’t…so
let me rearrange the evening with what suits my failure
and her absence:
I put out the flame of her candles,
I turned on the electric lights,
drank her wine then broke the glass
and switched the music: from the swift violins
to Persian songs.
I said: She won’t come. So I loosened my elegant
necktie (to relax more) and put on
my blue pajama. I could walk barefoot
if I want. And sit cross-legged, sagging
on her sofa, to forget her
and forget all the things of absence.
Then I put back in the drawers what I had prepared
for our party. I opened the windows and pulled back the curtains.
I stood in front of the night, my body holding no secret
other than what I waited for and lost…
and I mocked my obsession with purifying the air for her
(I had sprayed rose and lemon water).
She won’t come…I will move the orchid
from the right to the left to punish her forgetfulness…
I will cover up the mirror with a coat, I don’t want to see
her radiant image…and add to my regret.
I said: Forget what you have chosen for her
of ancient love lines, she doesn’t even deserve
a plagiarized poem…
Then I forgot her, ate my quick meal standing,
and read a chapter in a school book
about our distant planets,
and wrote, to overlook her harm, a poem,
this poem.

Mahmoud Darwish, Tr. Fady Joudah

The Unbearable Sensuality of Chabrol's Cinema

2011-03-02T15:14:00.000Z

Claude Chabrol's cinema is rightly regarded as the cinema of ambiguity, to which I add that his cinema is also the cinema of style. And his muse, Stephane Audran, who was also his wife, starred in a few of his movies, called the Helene Cycle, is the goddess of style. Chabrol demands, and this is clear after you watch one of his movies, that one pays close attention to what we see, for a lot goes on in a Chabrol movie. Seemingly about serial murders as in Le Boucher or about a wife's infidelity, what Chabrol does is to peel away the surface and reveal the hypocrisies underneath. In a sense, unveiling bourgeois hypocrisy using the detective genre is achieved with mastery and class by the great film maker. Personally, I have always felt that great literature and great movies can achieve great results using the detective method and crime to allow the development and perhaps realisation of bigger themes.

As I mentioned earlier, we must watch his movies with intense attention, which is sometimes not possible. The bigger picture is in small details and it is possible that such details can be discerned on multiple viewings only. As soon as a Chabrol movie begins, we are immediately surrounded and assaulted in all of our senses by the most sensual of images and by a soundtrack that not only causes us to see but feel the atmosphere. Chabrol cinema, I am compelled to say, is the cinema of senses, a sexy cinema. The most mundane detail and the most trivial event is filmed with great aesthetic charm, conveying the feeling sometimes that style is more important than substance. Any unpleasant thing to be done must be got over with quickly, it seems. Consider the murder in Le Biches, where Frederique is stabbed by Why. It is done in a charming manner, as if Frederique is willing to be murdered, as if excessive force and excess of blood would revolt the sensibilities of the murdered and the murderer.

Sometimes watching his movies becomes unbearable. To a great extent, this must relate to the relation his characters have with their surroundings and the surroundings to the viewer. There is a mathematical precision to the images, so that every single move has not just been carefully rehearsed but that each move has a philosophy behind it. The unbearable sensuality is actually quite intellectual. By that I mean that the imagery has a purpose and is not just random. What is described as a thriller in relation to his movies or as suspense is a very intellectual one indeed. By suspense, if the actor doesn't know and we know is not the same as if both don't know. And anyway, the concerns of his thrill are far more ramified than any wife sleeping behind her husband's back.

I want to specifically, at this stage of my Chabrol acquaintanceship, mention the Helene Cycle. Played by Stephane Audren with Helene as her character's name in a few of these movies, she not only symbolises this extremely unbearable sensuality, she takes it a few steps further so that this charm that she radiates, this erotic and sensuous mystery that she creates, takes her and situates her in a place where she becomes remote and simultaneously extremely mystifying. The Helene cycle cannot be imagined without Audran. Her looks apart, she comes across as very accomplished and intelligent as an actor who is able to project the persona of her character on to her and vice versa. In Le Boucher, when the head mistress walks with Popaul to her school, cigarette dangling from her lips, in a wonderful one take six minute shot, she appears as if she is walking on a Paris street or on a catwalk. She is able to endow the most mundane character with the most electrifying charm.

I was very impressed with Le Femme Infidele, for what is a husband supposed to do when his wife is having an affair? Ordinarily, all sorts of usual things happen but here, the bourgeois crust is left untouched as the husband confronts his wife's lover at his home and then accidentally kills him. Such things are however not whispered at home and life must inevitably move on till other conclusions are reached. In Le Boucher, when an ex-army man starts killing women in a quaint village, the teacher to whom he has started an attachment with, and who refuses that, after suspecting this man refuses to tell the police about her suspicions till the end, which is dramatic.

In Les Biches, there is a menage a trois, and a very subtle reconfiguration of relationships. There is the emphasis on class distinctions and hypocrisy and how people can be used in relationships but there is also the seething geometry of imagery to which I will return again. Stylistically, Le Biches is beuatiful. The opening shot, when against the backdrop of the Seine, Audran steps into our sights, haughty and beautiful, chillingly so and later on at St Tropez, with Why and her chorus of jokers, which acts as a commentary on the action within it. I must admit that of the four Helene movies, I didn't like it the most, for sometimes the actions and movements seemed very artificial and jilted. It is possible to see this trait as a projection of the relational dialogue within the movie but on the whole, it did seeming jar at times. Why becomes Frederique after she has loved her and as both love the same person.

La Rupture follows the travails of a mother's battle to keep possession of her son against the dirty and slimy tricks of her father-in-law who employs an equally detestable character to defame her so that the court can decide against the child's custody. Audran plays a mother in torment but does it really well. Our sympathies are with her and the man hired to defame her is very slimy indeed. In the end, he gets what he deserves but the end is very psychedelic indeed. An image of a balloon peddler is chillingly unforgettable. This movie has a chorus too in the form of tarot playing ladies in the boarding house where Audran resides and their role assumes some significance in the end.

Coming back to the point of unbearability. I think while watching these movies, what strikes is the distance Audran has from the surroundings. She is mesmerizingly seductive in her own way and aloof in that seductive charm, as if what is going on around her has nothing to do with her, as if everything is a game. She is a study in detachment. It is this alienation, this estrangement from the surroundings that make the movies unbearable, for want of a better description. The rising tension rises from her, for she is never histrionic, never over-dramatic. This enhances the drama, the sinister drama of the movies more. In a way, Audran is more credible than a Hitchcockian character for the latter is usually in some kind of an inner existential or melancholic crisis. Audran's crises are far more subtle, based on instinctual relationships with others, her surroundings, and her own crazily mystifying beauty, which is a mix of seduction and intellectual beauty. The Helene Cycle is a great contribution to cinema by Chabrol, whose reputation is now more art house than it was during his life time.

the infrarealist manifesto

2011-02-19T13:05:00.000Z

— Galaxies of love are appearing in the palms of our hands

— Poets, let down your hair (if you have any)
— Burn your nonsense and start loving until you come up with priceless poems
— We don’t want kinetic paintings but enormous kinetic sunsets
— Horses running 500 kilometers an hour
— Squirrels of fire hopping through trees of fire
— A bet to see who blinks first, between the nerve and the sleeping pill.

— The death of the swan, the swan song, the last song of the black swan, IS NOT in the Bolshoi but in the intolerable pain and beauty of the streets.
— A rainbow that starts in a grindhouse theater and ends in a factory on strike.
— May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. May it never kiss us.
— We dreamed of utopia and woke up screaming.
— A poor lonely cowboy that comes back home, what a wonder

Selections from Roberto Bolano's The Infrarealist Manifesto, Tr. Tim Pilcher

The Last Interview

2011-02-07T16:51:00.004Z

Maristain: Have you burned your skin with a cigarette?

Bolano: Never voluntarily.

M: Have you ever carved the name of your beloved in the trunk of a tree?

B: I have committed greater abuses, but let's draw the veil at that.

M: Have you seen the most beautiful woman in the world?

B: Yes, sometime around 1984 when I worked at a store. The store was empty and in came a Hindu woman. She looked like a princess and well could have been one. She bought some hanging costume jewelry from me. I was at the point of fainting. She had copper skin, long red hair, and the rest of her was perfect. A timeless beauty. When I had to charge her, I felt embarrassed. As if saying she understood and not to worry, she smiled at me. Then she disappeared and I have never again seen anyone like her. Sometimes I get the impression that she was the goddess Kali, the patron saint of thieves and goldsmiths, except that Kali was also the goddess of murderers, and this Hindu woman was not only the most beautiful woman on earth, but she also seemed to be a good person.....very sweet and considerate.

M: What is your favourite soccer team?

B: None right now. The ones who fall to second tier, then third consecutively, then regional until they've disappeared. The phantom teams.

M: Which historical character would you have liked to resemble?

B: Sherlock Holmes. Captain Nemo. Julian Sorel, our father. Prince Myshkin, our uncle.

M: Did you fall in love with older neighbours when you were young?

B: Of course.

from Roberto Bolano The Last Interview, Interviewed by Monica Maristain

That Summer

2011-02-04T11:03:00.005Z

1.

Her feet were blotched red, as if covered with blisters, standing on the blazing tiles of a hot courtyard, in July, under a blazing sun, her barefeet had survived the ardour of her passion, as she had stood barefoot, calling him from the courtyard of their immigrant passion. He had seen his hands covered with the after scent of crushed roses, all perfume was his. The steel of agitated hooves and the clamour of other lives could not drown the lucky star of his lucky heart. Love begins with claiming the lovers' feet first, he told her, as he looked at the sky's azure and her brown hair. Thoughts like currents passed from one to the other as they felt as one, without need for caress or touch.

2.

She looked at him through the shutters in her window, across the courtyard where he was pretending to sleep, through the shutters she pretended she had shut tight, at him across the courtyard, the concrete tiles of the courtyard baking in the hot sun, a July sun after a June of bliss, all their prayers having been answered, some by his unsure Gods, some by her mother of God, and now this. She licked her dry lips again and again, he only saw the eyes, he never saw the lips, murder at noon. A fly buzzed near his ears tirelessly which he tried to catch in his hand, when he realised that she had seen him, through the shutters. She smiled as she shut the shutters loudly, he leant back in careless bliss. The scent of violets and regrets swam through the courtyard.

3.

Her flaming lemon top burnt in the hot July sun, yet her forehead was clean, without a drop of sweat, as they looked at the glittering concrete of the car park, three steps away from closure and oblivion. He looked away from the faraway look her eyes would surely seize soon, both waiting for some incident or accident, praying to the moody godheads of sudden destruction. A rhythm and blue number, equally detested by both, played on a nearby radio, as some stray memory of her from earlier times, which he had then resolved to forget completely, struck him like a stone dropping in a silent well. The sun kept blazing though he felt suddenly so cold.

Applause

2011-02-03T11:35:00.000Z

She said she loved busy days. I looked at the sky. “Busy days”, as well as clouds and cats that slipped away between the bushes. Those flowers that I left in the field are my proof of love for you. Later I came back with a net to look for butterflies. The girl said: “disaster”, “horses”, “rockets” and patted me on the back. Her back spoke. Like crickets squealing in the afternoons of lonely villas. I closed my eyes, breaks squealed and the police quickly got out of their cars. “Don’t stop looking out the window.” Without speaking two of them reached the door and said “police”, the rest I could hardly hear. I closed my eyes, the boys died on the beach. Bodies full of holes. There’s something obscene in all of this, said the nurse when no one was listening. “Busy days, I looked at the sky, cats”, surely I won’t return to the open air, not with flowers, not with a net, nor with a damned book to pass the afternoon. The mouth opened but the author couldn’t hear anything. He thought in silence and later thought “it doesn’t exist”, “horses”, “a waning moon in August”. Cast in black. Someone applauded from the void. I suppose this is happiness.

Roberto Bolano, Tr. Tim Pilcher

Innocent Sorcerers

2011-02-02T14:24:00.001Z

There is one scene in Andrzej Wajda'a Innocent Sorcerers that is the movie in itself. It has everything that a cinema struck can ask for: beauty, words, imagery, poetry, timelessness, sadness, energy, pathos and high drama. It runs well near fifty minutes and takes place in the shabby apartment of a young doctor with peroxidized hair in post-war Warsaw in the early hours of one night. The young man called Basil has decided to help a friend 'tame' a charming young woman they have seen in a music bar and due to some confusion ends up with her. She, who later introduces herself as Pelagia, surprises him by accepting his invitation to his place. What follows is a marvellous scene of such intense wryness, humour, tragedy, drama and cynicism that it encapsultaes everything that can be commented in a politico-social sense about any society in transition.

Pelagia begins by teasing the man and both agree that they should proceed to engage in a sentimental plan with each other according to certain written rules, which he writes down and sticks with a knife to the wall. The rules of engagement aim at introduction, intelligent conversation, followed by a kiss, by perhaps a physical union but within degrees of freedom. If Basil thinks he is clever, Pelagia is cleverer as each aim to out do the other. In conversations that skirt on various issues, from the frailty of human knowledge to human ignorance, the two engage in verbal sparring. Basil then invites her to a game of playing with a match box and scoring on what end it falls on; they bet on taking their clothes off, one thing after the other, at each wrong call. Initially, Pelagia starts to win but later Basil wins more. During these attempts, the conversation is sparkling and flirtatious, tender and tendentious, awkward and soulful, romantic, beautiful and occasionally tense. Each is testing the other and yet each is cynical and unsure not to admit something really tender.

Later as Basil makes her scrambled eggs and later still when Basil is called out by his friends for a few minutes, on returning he finds his flat empty. Basil rushes out looking around the city for her but cannot find her at all. On returning he finds her in his flat and he appears much relieved though he does not show it. Pelagia leaves after a while but after shutting the door, stops and returns to Basil again.

I thought the long scene is a mood scene, a scene that proves time and again the revivifying nature of cinema, its poetic element, its drama. The conversation between the two is beautiful poetry and at the same time, it represents a particular mood, not only for Basil but Pelagia too. I am not sure whether Pelagia is her real name; in the climate of the country that it shows, cynicism reigns supreme. In only that sense is it political, for the city scenes show the city in ruins and yet there is a gay hedonism at work here. A certain gayness pervades the spirit of the times in which these young men and women move or work. This is evident also in the almost lazy way that Basil keeps rejecting the advances of good looking females earlier in the movie. However, in a war sapped place, perhaps there is no place for tenderness or perhaps tenderness is replaced by a boxing match, as takes place in Basil's flat.

The movie has a wonderful background jazz score, which in a sense compliments the gayness of spirit of these young men who certainly seem to have no morals. Yet, in the scene between Basil and Pelagia, and in all cinema I will list this scene very high, the talk is of love and morals. A certain tenderness is missing, a certain cynicism has set in, war has taken away something after all. Both are lonely, though to his loneliness she remarks that she is ambitious. And when he finds that she has left him, he runs frantically in a mix of dazed pain and confused regret. He may after all have found the one he was looking for, she too may have found the one she wanted inspite of her ambitions. Such sentimental plans must be tried occasionally.

I’ll give you an abyss, she said

2011-01-30T12:14:00.000Z

I’ll give you an abyss, she said,
but so subtly you will only notice it
after many years have passed
and you’re far from Mexico and from me.
You will discover it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
though not much.

Roberto Bolano

Lisa

2011-01-28T12:55:00.003Z

When Lisa told me she had made love
with another, in the eternal telephone booth of life
in the market in Tepeyac, I thought the world
ended. A tall thin man with
long hair and a long cock, didn’t wait even
one night to penetrate her to the core.
It’s nothing serious, she said, but it
is the best way of getting you out of my life.
Parmenides Garcia Saldana had long hair and could
have been Lisa’s lover, but some
years later I saw he’d died in a mental hospital
or committed suicide. Lisa didn’t want
to lie any longer with losers. Sometimes I dream
of her and see her happy and cold in Mexico
designed by Lovecraft: We listen to music
(Canned Heat, one of Parmenides Garcia Saldana’s
favorite groups) and then we make
love three times. The first time he comes inside of me.
The second time inside my mouth, the third, hardly a thread
of water, a short fishing line, between my breasts. And all
of that in two hours, Lisa said. The two worst
hours of my life, I said from the other end of the line.

Roberto Bolano, Transl. Mariela Griffor and B. H. Boston

The Green Ray

2011-01-26T19:03:00.001Z

Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert situates Delphine's desire for 'understanding' in relation with her own standing in a bourgeois world where 'vacations' set the tone for knowing a person and her situation. Since loneliness can be fought by holidays in exotic locales or even at cheaper places, Delphine must not however let the world hem her in. Instead each abortive attempt at a holiday must bring her back to the starting point of such desire. What starts as a desire to negate her isolation ends up in increasing her isolation and making it more worse. Any attempts at conversation with strangers is an attempt to try; however, the outside world seeks answers that are already decided but Delphine has her own views which are outside the legitimate. The deciding tone of her outer life is set by the interactions she has with people who see the world in a narrative sequence considered normal. Delphine strives to explain to others how she sees the world and has to explain it making those explanations credible. All explanations must be bourgeois to bourgeoisie people.

Delphine struggles to articulate herself because some things have no point in being explained about. In essence, she is in isolation and lonely, but extremely sensitive to herself. This sensitivity is generally confused with stubbornness, consider the vegetarianism dialogue in the movie where she has to defend her right to be a vegetarian even if there is a hint of being teased. In this sense, not having a lover is a disability that she chooses to live with but her search is for someone credible, someone who is not simply interested in just sleeping with her. This search, like Haydee's search in The Collector, is something which the casual observer, who is hurried, has either no desire nor inclination to follow more deeply. Delphine knows the loneliness of finding herself in after what casual sleeping with people can lead to, she wants to be granted recognition as a person who is capable of being loved as well as capable of loving.

The Green Ray is a scathing indictment of a bourgeois world that usually considers difference as 'not fitting in'. As usual in Rohmer world, the action details the happenings over a month's vacation period. The chats and conversations are carried out in 'real time'. One particular chat with two strangers and the Swedish 'free' spirit is absolutely brilliant in depicting a particular kind of holiday small talk. In those few minutes, Rohmer shows the flaws of an entire generation. Maybe the green ray that Delphine sees towards the end will bring her good luck and love, for she has her quirky superstitions.

The movie is charming, the sets are around the world of cheap holidays and show cheap bargain hotel rooms, and the transition of the holidayer from a city to a beach with credibility and without artifice. The beach scenes are extremely realistic, my favourite is the exchange between the two young strangers, both men, Delphine and a Swedish girl "who knows" English. The ennui of holidays and the state of mind that prompts such desires is shown in savage nakedness.
Love is a word much misunderstood, Delphine in her youthful enthusiasm confuses it with many other things. However, sensitive that she is, she does not confuse love with 'filling the gap', she is smarter than that. Her occasional lack of humour is not her being tedious but sensitive in trying to fathom certain things. Delphine is strong-willed like other Rohmer women, she will walk alone all day if it comes to that.

a new music

2011-01-20T18:29:00.001Z

A strange music had taken hold of him of late, as if all his usual din had given way to a new desire, an illegal desire, a lust for something desirable but out of bounds, a stirring, a need for confessing, a need to be heard, to dwell on what he thought he had heard against what he thought he must hear. Walking along the usual landmarks on his usual roads, he felt as if there was a need to touch what he had formerly shunned, as if listening to what this new music meant giving in to an illegal whim, a strange but certain music inside his mind had awakened the ghosts of former lives. Had he thought what this winter spring was going to give when this cold winter had previously not whispered anything suitable for him to feel at home with? How could one convey the life sensations, the most intimate workings of one's mind when he was not even intimate with his own? It had never been a question of estrangement from himself but a question of not knowing what he was still susceptible to, for of late, this susceptibility was that of old, like when rain falls on hard earth after a dry spell, and the smell that the earth exudes is like an intoxicant, a summary judgement on love and desire. While walking thus on familiar streets that one walks on without thinking, he thought of this new music, this new feeling, like the stirring of primeval desires or the sudden acknowledgement of a dream that one has dreamed, or an intimation of a crazy desire, the thrill of desire, the smell of that desire, the thrill of that craziness.

Each step he took was as unknown to him as the beating of his heart for while one can perceive a heart beat, one cannot actually see it beat, and hence all such steps were as unknown to him as the perception of this new music or this new feeling. And yet each thought and each step towards the unknowing of his own mind had been fraught with uncertainties, but the uncertainties were more charming than any concrete reality in his life. Walking like this, and thinking about such vague things like feelings and desire, he wanted each step to take him further away from his imminent destination, for he wanted to walk endlessly, and smell not only the trembling of his heart but also the mystery that he was to himself, and that his feelings were to him. At no point did he feel that he could understand the suffusion of his new emotions or the underlying nature of his own reactions to them; at no point however was he concerned about explaining himself to himself. For the first time after many moons had he realised the craving for new desires or felt the stirrings of pain as like under a young moon, like the blue black sky at night which one suddenly notices after many cloudy skies, and after which one wants to die. As he kept on walking, he realized that even his most stolid reserve had given in to the most effusive of feelings, he suddenly remembered the worst and the craziest songs, and almost felt an urge to hum some words out loud. It was in the clear crystal of those moments that he felt he had lapsed beyond mere confession and that this new music was the sweetest medicine, the most beautiful of heartaches and the richest numbness yet. And such were his thoughts as he neared the world of his destination, which even that world could not stop.

Come

2011-01-14T16:25:00.001Z

come like a dream
on tiptoes
suddenly
come like a sudden shower on a summer afternoon
come at dusk when the sun has to set
come as some faraway bells sound sadly sometimes
outside my window
like the roar of a train at dawn come
like the wind at night
suddenly
come with the incessant tread of hooves
like the violence of violets
come without smile or promises
come with your long hair undone
suddenly
with bare feet with one anklet only
surprise yourself
come once

as the wind beats

2011-01-12T15:01:00.000Z

Tonight the wind beats relentlessly against the roofs
and on the streets plastic bottles and paper fly aimlessly
as some insomniacs make their way to a bar,
trying in vain to light a cigarette in such wind.
There is no promise or fruit in such pursuit
and the night will turn out to be bare and lonely,
but can it stop those who dislike the loneliness of the midnight hour?
Some of them will want to listen to duets in incomprehensible tongues,
while others will only want to drum their fingers on the bar tables
dispersing in vain the melancholy in their fingers
and some will test the water of promises made.
Altogether it is a bloody business
and bloodier than murder.
The night is silent other than the wind
and winds are seldom silent.
Some walk slowly shielding their cigarettes in their palms
as their shadows flee like frightened ghosts
on the pavements lit by the odd street lamp.
Later, one of them will finally sit at the bar
but still look expectantly at the door,
though convinced that the person with long brown hair will not come.

Chloe in the Afternoon

2011-01-11T22:09:00.000Z

Chloe, of Rohmer's Love in the Afternoon, is the most frank and openly speaking woman of the six moral tales. Sitting in an office will kill me she says to her lover Frederic, it is so bourgeois. Chloe wants to have what she wants to have, on her terms, in her way. Any other way would mean demeaning the whole thing. It is possible that Rohmer paints a bohemian picture of Chloe, a kind of free-spirited image of Chloe but even if that is true, she still attracts not because she shocks but because she speaks the truth to Frederic. If truth is shocking then so be it. Love or Chloe in the Afternoon is the last of the six moral tales that I have watched recently and I must admit that as a cinematic experience, it has not only been rewarding but a sexy tease too.

Frederic is visited by Chloe suddenly one afternoon in his office. Frederic is married and his wife is expecting their second child. Chloe is not an old flame but the ex-girl friend of an old friend. Chloe has returned from overseas. Chloe is looking for a job. You are not my friend says Chloe to Frederic but I like you. They start meeting each other regularly in the afternoons when Frederic, a lawyer, is free. Frederic is the quintessential narrator of Rohmer's, he likes reading novels when he goes to and from Paris to suburbia. Frederic is in a stable marriage but nonetheless he is looking for something. He imagines and daydreams once that he is wearing a magic amulet that can weaken the will power of beautiful women he sees walking around on busy Paris streets every day. They are all extensions of my wife, he thinks.

Chloe and Frederic start meeting every day nearly, going shopping or having coffee. Frederic likes talking to Chloe and Chloe is quite amused by this all. Once she disappears unannounced for a week which annoys Frederic. Later Frederic helps find her a job. Frederic insists he only loves his wife but prefers to be in Chlo's company. Frederic thinks to indulge in polygamy is barbaric but adds that he will obey the rules of society. Chloe thinks that polygamy is all right if women are also allowed the same freedom. Chloe flirts with him and he flirts with her. They kiss sometimes but he always insists that he belongs to his wife. However, later, in her tiny flat, she steps out of the shower and she asks him to dry her. He does and starts undressing himself, while she waits naked for him on her single bed but he suddenly remembers his family while taking his clothes off, an old image comes into his mind and he departs very quickly. He goes home to his wife.

Chloe wants a child with Frederic but Frederic thinks that is crazy to which she responds hence:

"It is enough to know I love you and tell you so. You know, I have a vivid imagination. I can imagine it is you when I am making love to some one else." 'You are crazy' "Crazy is pretending you love some one you live with."

Frederic dreams of falling in love with other women. At one point he asks Chloe: Can one be in love with two women at once? ( I remembered it is the same question that a dear friend asked me a long time ago) Chloe tests him initially but it is hard to say whether she loves him. She is clearly very free spirited and has bold ideas but is she really that free? Chloe sees beyond the well trodden path, she wants a meaning entirely within herself, to herself. She will not perhaps find any stability within the bounds of marriage but then as a character she is a template of a certain free spirit, perhaps of the times. She wants to become a mother, outside the marital axis. Chloe is unconventional in comparison to the conventionality of other thoughts, in comparison to how others think.

Frederic is carried away by passion but it is also fair to say that he likes being in the company of Chloe, for after all, she is good company. The question is: Can a man and woman be friends outside a sexual binding? The scene that shakes him is the scene that reminds him of his family life. That convulsion is the same as other convulsions that Rohmer males make. That they shake themselves from the point or the brim of passion and return to more 'moral' choices is a Rohmerian imperative. In that sense, Rohmer is a conservative moralist but if one is a moralist, surely one is not always conservative? The idea of ethics and faithfulness must enter into consideration in any relationship, however trivial. That such choices are made by his males does in no way make them radical departures from the other male types that were portrayed by Rohmer's contemporaries.

Perhaps the magnitude of thinking of an artist, if worth judging at all, must be done after a few decades of his work. In that sense, Rohmer's world assumes more importance now in the present European climate. However, these works must not be seen as just outside the political framework but as part of a wholesome commentary on moral and ethical considerations. In a way, the choices that are made individually have a combined effect as well. However, it is also important to realize and understand how a particular thought is approached. And which steps in a thinking process are neglected. From that point of view, these tales are very important.

The Case of Professor Moriarity

2011-01-09T20:19:00.002Z

It is perhaps time that certain facts be put straight in front of those members of the public who have followed the accounts written by Dr Watson about his long association with Sherlock Holmes, some facts that may cause certain new tremors in the public mind, as certain events did when Sherlock Holmes made a return, albeit in a manner that Dr Watson presented to the public after Holmes made his sensational return. The aim of this revelation here is not to cause any controversy but to alert the public to those issues that have vexed certain discerning minds now as they did then. I refer to the important matter concerning the events that Dr Watson described in The Final Problem and in The Adventure of the Empty House. However, I also want in particular to clear certain other issues related to those matters almost taken for granted by the reading public as also by Dr Watson himself, especially pertaining to the affair of Professor Moriarity, who I will show, never existed.

In the preface to The Sign of Four, the great writer P.G Wodehouse presented a hypothesis that it was Sherlock Holmes himself who was Professor Moriarity and that the latter was invented by Holmes to cover certain "crimes" committed, using Watson's memoirs as an alibi. Wodehouse demonstrated that Holmes was never in need of money, never demanded fees from clients, mighty or small, and never even remotely spoke about fees, though the only notable exception was when he actually demanded five thousand pounds from the Duke of Holdernesse Hall in The Priory School affair.

If Holmes never demanded fees for services rendered, pray, how come he afforded the life style he had? This needs further investigation, which I will attempt here. It goes without saying that the rooms at Baker Street did not come cheap, and even though Watson contributed half of the rent, it was certainly done in discreet ways unknown to Watson. Secondly, Holmes always sported clean and fashionable clothes, he would often dine at good restaurants, and was well disposed to regular dining out and attending concerts. Holmes would never travel second class and as far as I remember, always paid for travel and lodgings for both himself and the good doctor, staying at the best hotels. Holmes would only rarely ask for expenses to be repaired to him and yet, what was his source of income? The good doctor never seems to reflect but then he was quite discreet and loyal to Holmes.

I think it was not a matter of chance that Holmes met Watson before the affair of A Study in Scarlet. My hypothesis, after having gone over all the facts is this: Holmes was able to ascertain through his brother Mycroft Holmes the names of all the returning reliable people from the Afghan campaign and knowing Mycroft's considerable position in the Government ( Holmes calls Mycroft the British Goverment at one point ) Holmes was able to "find" Watson, knowing his poor health, quiet disposition and unsullied character. Since certain influential quarters in the Government were getting hot on the tracks of Holmes, who was an important member of the European underworld mafia, he wanted to settle down, invent a new alibi, and instead of committing crimes, at Mycroft's suggestion, solve them.

Using his good offices and his money, finding rooms at Baker Street was easy. The rooms at Baker Street were far more dearer than Watson ever knew, and Holmes paid the rent himself, with Watson paying the half but token amount. The furnishings were done tastefully by Holmes and paid for by him but Watson always thought the lodgings were pre-furnished. Holmes had a considerable amount of money acquired through nefarious activities like extortion, blackmailing and other illegal activities which he relocated to his Swiss accounts, dissolved his connections with the underworld, albeit superficially and severed temporarily his contact with Mycroft, and settled to a life of cocaine and boredom with his good friend Watson. It is quite factual that Holmes never truly envisaged the fame he would get by the accounts that Watson published, making him almost a household name across Britain and also famous in three continents.

During their time together, from around 1880 to 1888, Holmes solved many cases, including the strange Problem of the Sholto's, from which Dr Watson got a wife. It was around this time that Watson moved out of Baker Street as any family man would, and set up his lodgings and medical practice in Kensington. He continued to remain in contact with Holmes, though it was not regular. During Watson's married years, the cases that were solved where chronicled under the general rubric of The Adventures and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes respectively.

After the good doctor settled to the routine of his practice and married life, Holmes started to renew his contact with the underworld fraternity that he had apparently shunned. Scotland Yard, which had always had doubts about Holmes, had by now closed the Holmes file, not only under the pressure of the Government but also to stop looking silly in front of the public, in whose eyes Holmes was the best policeman ever. Besides, Mycroft had been urging Holmes to reconsider his position as certain elements within the underworld were unhappy with Holmes' good reputation and were considering coming out clean. Not only were there political issues involved here but if left unresolved, it could possibly drag Europe into war. With all these considerations, a strange series of events were witnessed by Dr Watson, which the reader will understand now if I am allowed, considering that I don't want to test the readers patience more.

It is clear to all that Dr Watson was at home one night, busy in the affairs of conjugal life when Holmes literally burst upon him and asked for the blinds to be lowered. His demeanour as Watson noted was unlike his usual calm self and when Watson asks him what he was afraid of, Holmes replied "air guns". Later, Holmes mentions the name of Professor Moriarity to Watson for the first time and details the criminal exploits of Moriarity , calling him the Napoleon of crime. He then persuades Watson to accompany him to Riechenbach Falls in Switzerland, where he was to have a final discussion with Moriarity. As we know, Watson neglected his marital duties quite frequently, to our gain, and instantly agreed. The events that followed at the falls are too well known for me to recount here in detail. Suffice it for the purpose that I require here that a note was left for Watson, a struggle between Holmes and Moriarity was arranged, traces that lead to both of them having fallen into their watery deaths, a confirmation from the Swiss police who were too obliging to do so, and Watson returning back to his lodgings, disconsolate and in despair.

Watson was later told that financial and other affairs had already been taken care of by brother Mycroft. Watson then published a long and slightly sentimental account of Holmes and Moriarity, the underworld considered it as a good solution, Scotland Yard as the ideal, the money laundered previously was distributed between foreign and domestic crime syndicates, the possibility of war was averted and Holmes got rid of Moriarity, who never existed, and himself, in one masterly stroke. The plan was hatched by Mycroft at the Diogenes Club and certain quarters in the Government approved. Watson continued to miss Holmes and the public found succour in the case accounts that he had published.

It is indeed my point that in 1894, three years after his death, Holmes, who had never indeed died but lived under an assumed identity in Sussex, was told by certain quarters in the British Government to return, at the time of the death of Ronald Adair, which was described by Dr Watson in The Empty House. It had indeed been a plan for Holmes to make a return by now, and what better opportunity than when "all London was interested in and the fashionable world dismayed by the death of the Honorable Ronald Adair under tragic and inexplicable circumstances". In his "meeting" with Watson again, Holmes was not only able to get the most solid public alibi, he was able to get Watson's account to the public, which was basically his. We must remember that the man incriminated in the Adair affair was none other than Colonel Sebestian Moran, whom Holmes described as the second most dangerous man in London. Not only was the Adair affair staged, in my opinion, it allowed Holmes to hand over Moran to Scotland Yard as Moran had started making uncomfortable noises in certain quarters. That his subsequent silence later on was rewarded and that it was never mentioned by Dr Watson goes to demonstrate my case further.

Holmes and Watson returned back to Baker Street, the rooms almost as they used to be, everybody was happy, including Mrs Hudson, and the good doctor resolved to carry on though the first Mrs Watson had died, we learnt subsequently. Watson's practice was bought very quickly by somebody who Holmes found and who later turned out to be a relative of Holmes's and the two settled down once again to batchelor-hood and solving crimes.
Instead of testing the resolve of my patient readers any further, I would like to emphasise the vast deception that Watson and the public were subjected to, and the elaborate plans hatched by Mycroft and Holmes to fool the public and other discerning agencies. Watson's practice was bought by none other than one of Holmes's cronies, and the money that had been laundered to Swiss banks was legally relocated to Britain, one of the missions of the Reichenbach Falls adventure.

How is it possible, dear reader, that Holmes was able to retire to the Sussex Downs with bees and a house keeper when he never had a regular income? How is it possible for him to pay the rent for the Baker Street rooms when, he could actually have bought those rooms for all the rent he paid proving that he never actually wanted to buy the property? How is it possible, we may ask, for Holmes to always travel first class? Why did Holmes always ride a hansom from Oxford Street and walk to Oxford Street from Baker Street when even a person with the most cursory knowledge of London will reveal that that is strange and bizarre! Why should one walk from Baker to Oxford Street and then take a train when Baker Street has its own station? Where indeed was Mycroft before The Greek Interpreter's affair? Why did Holmes not mention him to Watson before that? And indeed, what can be more surprising than the fact that Watson never saw Moriarity!

The above questions point to only one conclusion and that is that Sherlock Holmes orchestrated the police and the public through the memoirs that Watson published and hence used Watson to not only keep his reputation intact, but also enhance it. Holmes was the mastermind behind the London underground mafia and had operations in three continents. He used Mycroft to get intelligence about Scotland Yard tailing him. We know that his mind was first rate and analytical and certain circumstances which had pushed him to use his brain for criminal activities later pushed him to use it for the public good. He often used to rant against inactivity and boredom and on one occasion clearly marked by Watson, he speaks lightly about being a criminal. That he kept his financial affairs away from Watson and that Holmes was never openly suspected is a tribute to his genius as a mastermind and as a great actor, both talents he used to dodge the police and criminals with. I must remind the reader that Colonel Moran used to work with Holmes in the mafia and the Adair affair was staged to essentially neutralise Moran. It is also my contention that Colonel Moran knew about the non-existence of Moriarity and was planning to use it as a lever to gain amnesty from the Government.

I have based my deductions on data and facts, and have not committed the capital mistake of theorising before one has data and have not twisted facts to suit theories. I also hope that the reader will appreciate the intentions behind this piece, which is to restore the reputation of Dr Watson, which has come under vicious and unseemly attacks recently after sensational publications have started to besmirch the clean character of the good doctor, which pointed wrongly that he knew about the Moriarity issue. It is not my intention to belittle the contributions of Sherlock Holmes towards developing the detective profession into an art, for none can deny that he was indeed an artist. However the innocence and gullibilty of Dr Watson in this regard must not be questioned. I hope that Dr Watson's innocence in the whole saga needs no further defense.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

2011-01-08T15:37:00.000Z

Since Cassavetes is generally regarded as outside the American mainstream, his gangster movie Chinese Bookie does really stand outside the Hollywood gangster flick . After a while, all Hollywood gangsterism becomes repulsive because these movies and the characters they show are so self immersed, as if their world is besides them. Translating that into cinematic reality makes these criminals very odd as their personalities are melo-dramatized, and all kinds of psychological baggage's are given. To that extent, Cassavetes's Vitelli too is a typical Hollywood crook who entertains, for not only does he run a striptease, his main performer there, Mr Sophistication is a talking philosophising entertainer while Vitelli himself, subdued and broken, in his monologue towards the end, talks about creating a persona, a deception that consists of watching oneself perform.

Vitelli, performed with charming finesse and restraint by Gazzara, aims to make himself comfortable with himself. He too performs what eventually Cassavetes mocks, that artificial unreality which consumes lives lived in achieving little when the means to do so have left a person. In the end his person is ambiguous and so too his fate, and perhaps that is the masterstroke of this movie. Altogether, Cassavetes achieves with method and poetry what Hollywood would not have. There is the clear influence of genre crooks and criminals, parking lots, shadows and jazz. But in narrating this story, there are realistic elements that lend credibility to the imagery, which though persistently American, has the touch of a film maker whose voice is clearly distinct, American but un-American too.

when we met once

2011-01-07T11:07:00.003Z

We met by the water line
it was summer, you remember it was warm
a surreal morning, we were surrounded by the noise
of tables and chairs and spoons and cups
and what the hell I thought, reserve isn't everything.
You sat and you had the glint and stone in your eyes
and then the sun fell on your long brown hair
and restored to stone what the rose hides.
You didn't speak and I didn't say a thing
and the coffee got cold and I forgot to light my cigarette.
How are you I asked tamely as you turned to look
at an urchin making a pass at a girl,
just loving isn't enough you said,
one must live and die together, I think now
I should have died then.
You kept playing with a spoon and put it on the table
as our eyes met but what could I say?
That hour fled like a thief into the night
I remember I forgot all I had to say.
The sun shone on the water as we decided to
leave, my feet were heavy as we walked
and I remembered my unlit cigarette.

While Waiting

2011-01-05T18:38:00.002Z

While waiting, I become obsessed with observing
the many possibilities: maybe she forgot her small
suitcase on the train, and my address got lost
and her mobile phone got lost, so she lost her appetite
and said: No share of the light drizzle for him/
Or maybe she got busy with an urgent matter or a journey
to the south to visit the sun, and called
but didn't find me in the morning, because
I had gone to buy some gardenia for our evening
and two bottles of wine/
Or maybe she was in dispute with her ex-husband
over matters of memory, and she swore not to see
another man who might threaten her with making memories/
Or maybe she crashed into a taxi on the way
to see me, which extinguished some planets in her galaxy.
And she is still being treated with tranquilizers and sleep/
Or maybe she looked in the mirror before going out
of herself, felt two large pears
making waves on her silk, then sighed and hesitated:
Does anyone else other than myself deserve my womanhood/
Or maybe she ran, by coincidence, into an old
love she hadn't healed from, and joined him for dinner/
Or maybe she died,
because death loves suddenly, like me,
and death, like me, doesn't love waiting

Mahmoud Darwish, Translated by Fady Joudah

The Pornographers: Introduction to Anthropology

2011-01-04T18:15:00.002Z

Ogata's boat has found it's way from the backwaters of Osaka to the seas, Ogata is inside his boat, looking and marvelling at the perfect woman he has crafted, stitching each hair separately on her, each painful step a further step towards realizing his perfect woman, with whom he can sleep at will and look without fear. This is an image that persists after The Pornographers comes to an end but: before this we have been through a maelstrom of other emotions too, and Ogata whilst occasionally philosophising , didn't struck me as a poetic type. In Ogata, Imamura has created a character who alternately hovers between the caring and the unscrupulous, between the lecher and the artist that he eventually becomes. Imamura calls his movie an "introduction to anthropology" and the world he shows is messy but not one bit artificial. It is messy because it's roots are deep inside the soil of furtive and restless minds. Even to Ogata's sidekicks, the human imagination is something one can only be afraid of.

Ogata is essentially a bum, he is a man who makes 8mm pornographic movies and sells them to clients of all sorts. Ogata is also a pimp and distributor of cheap literature and as a tenant supports his landlady and her son and young daughter with whom he is clearly obsessed. The duality of his nature is a tightrope that we must walk on, Ogata is without any scruples entirely and hence full of surprises. His landlady Haru sleeps with him at will and she keeps a Carp behind her bed in a tank, the carp is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Every time she does something bad, she says, the carp jumps, which is practically throughout the movie. In Haru, Imamura shows the social dynamic of a kept woman, it is usually the man who keeps the woman, he pays for her bum son and her daughter's studies.

The social realities which force such power changes are very obvious. Ogata and his cohorts are caught between the mafia and the law and hence his procrastination is quite complete throughout. It is not the lack of a reaction to such realities but a lack of self reflection that Imamura shows throughout his movies and here. Ogata has one eye on Haru and another on her daughter Keiko, he wants a child with Haru and marriage to Keiko, Ogata sees the inversion of all rules within a social reality that is seemingly out of bounds from the bigger niceties of life. Ogata philosophizes when he relaxes with his other colleagues, there Ogata desrcibes the realities of his situation carefully, he is also very aware of the human condition too.

Haru is later a victim of her own denials, screaming inside a cage, a woman hysterical and paranoid while Keiko is a willing victim of her own anger, systematically killing herself. Ogata throws the carp into a river after Haru dies, and retreats into his boat to perfect his perfect woman. Ogata has realized the 'pathos of being a man', as he sees it.

The Pornographers is a movie that fascinated me and like all of Imamura's movies, the social milieu that he has sketched is something that while seemingly reflective of a Japanese "underbelly", symbolises at least for me the invisible tentacles of our own minds. I am not willing to see the movie only as a critique of political and social realities or of a particular society nor do I think of it as a shocking indictment that shows incest and the indignities of lust; I think of these characters as inhabiting those terrains of the mind that are let loose when economic and cultural realities and the people who control and sanction them have lost the moral force to speak. Within the arc of such desires and the darkness of such minds arises the craving to create a perfect woman, an object, a commodity, a fetishism that absolves, apparently, the moral agent of any blame whatsoever.

Imamura Shohei's "Messy Cinema"

2011-01-01T14:13:00.002Z

"I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure... I ask myself what differentiates humans from other animals. What is a human being? I look for the answer by continuing to make films." Imamura

One of the dangers after watching a few of Shohei Imamura's movies is that one can lose the taste for all other kinds of cinema altogether, and let oneself be seduced by a cinema that has reached fruition and is complete. While Imamura described his cinema as messy, it would be fair to describe it as dangerous. By messy, Imamura might have meant subversive and sarcastic or he might have meant that his movies would not follow genre conventions or the rules of Japanese aesthetics or that he would make movies about messy characters. I would say that his cinema is complete and within one movie, he shows us all the emotions that a person is capable of, including disgust, greed, lust, affection and tenderness. I will aim here to briefly discuss some aspects of his movie called Vengeance is Mine while also observing some general features.

Vengeance is Mine is based on true events that lead to the arrest of a serial murderer and is played by the marvellous Ken Ogata. Ogata plays a disturbed and disturbing factory worker called Iwao who kills two of his colleagues in cold blood and in a gruesome, pitiless manner. There is seemingly no obvious motive for his crimes. But in classic Imamura fashion, we see his previous criminal history as a confidence trickster, a con man and a swindler and earlier still as a disaffected and rebellious young man, witness to his father's humiliation by the armed forces. Iwao is from a catholic background and the reference points to Catholicism loom large throughout the movie. Later, he lodges at an inn of low repute and befriends the lady owner of the inn. He begins a stormy but almost predictable affair with her.

The story is told in numerous flashbacks and shows how his wife and father were also erotically drawn to each other. In many ways, the general baggage of Catholicism sweeps over the movie almost completely. However, it in no way explains the senseless murders that Iwao commits. There seems to be an unpredictable edge to his behaviour, for he is extremely explosive though he is capable of occasional kindness.

I will be loath to accept any psychological explanation for Iwao's behaviour other than a deeply unsettling fascination with murder. It is more acceptable to consider the almost repulsive murders and absolutely unremorseless behaviour as just that, basically senseless. In an inversion of the title, 'vengeance is mine' would mean vengeance after life provided there is one such. However, it would be futile to consider that Imamura is telling us a tale about a serial killer. As Imamura said himself, he wants to make films that show a connection between the lower part of the body and the lower strata of society. From such a perspective, the most striking aspect is a rough rawness to his movies, depicting a world of the lower classes that is crassly and almost resolutely sexual. The numerous sex scenes that pervade his movies seem to have absolutely to do nothing with sex, for in almost all cases, there is violence associated with these acts and women are beaten into having sex. Or generally speaking, I should say that sex cannot exist other than a kind of violence that people do to each other, and this has nothing to do with class or this movie.

In the world that Iwao moves in and the people he befriends, violence is inbred within their lives as is any lack of sensitivity or decorum. It is as if decorum is the forte entirely of the middle classes. Iwao sleeps with Haru whose husband sleeps with prostitutes; Iwao's wife has incestuous moments with her father-in-law and thus the cycle seems endemic. In Imamura world, the hypocrisies and sufferings of certain weak people is a given fact, any resistance is considered as heretical. However, in what is clearly a swipe at bourgeoisie morality, the violence that is rampant is shown pitilessly. It will be total ignorance to see this without the ramifications of what the aftermath of the second war has meant for Japanese life. Imamura's cinema thus depicts a reality that is so estranged from what Ozu shows us about Japan. Ozu's 'family movies' are not unreal to say the least; it is his studied restraint that is so different from Imamura's.

"The Japanese did not change as a result of the Pacific War—they haven’t changed in thousands of years!", said Imamura in an interview. The Japanese life that we see so often in the classic cinema of Ozu or sometimes in Mizoguchi depicts a consciousness that actually is different from the one portrayed here for here it is so unaesthetic to say the last. Imamura strikes me as anti-intellectual in his approach to films and the way his characters don't look for rationalizations to define their world. Just getting on with life is entirely what the game is all about instead of ruminating on half empty streets against beautiful backdrops with melancholic beauties pondering their way carefully through snow or rain. Consider Sadako, the portly, plump woman who makes her way home after seeing her tormentor die in a train tunnel in Intentions of Murder, the movie that is seldom calm.

In my facile way, I consider that all art must not only show political realities, at home or on the street, it should not flinch in going all the way in showing the skin under the clothes, here be it a beautiful kimono. By baring monster desires for her father-in-law, monster so long as society considers it so, Kazuko, in a scene of unbearable erotic fever, brings out all the pent up emotions of the human psyche in that hot spring where vapour and night have clothed both naked bodies. In that sense, Iwao is a true revolutionary, for his killing and his questions are truly anarchic and hence senseless. How can one justify a logical killing from an illogical killing, for after all, a murder is just that? In using the lower classes to show his vast understanding of human nature, Imamura has brought out all the anxieties of the thinking classes of not only his but the entire generations of people who have fought against outside oppression in the entire world.

A 'kept' woman like Haru or a 'common' law wife like Sadako are just waiting for another oppressor to seduce and kill them; Iwao is the simmering symptom of unknown illnesses. The beautiful flower arrangements or the mono no aware must not seduce the viewer into lulling herself or himself into thinking that there is no discontent here; the world of prostitutes and pimps and murderers is existing alongside the world of those who structure that world. That Haru asks for no explanations from Iwao and that none are forthcoming from him adds to the intrigue and the drama. Haru professes a desire to have his child and eventually he kills her like he has done before, with no apparent motive at all. Ultimately, everything is senseless, including his crimes.

your dream tramples through the woods

2010-12-31T12:18:00.004Z

In the shape of a boar
your dream tramples through the woods on

on the edges of evening.

Glittering white
like the ice from which it erupted
are its razors.

It rakes up a bitter nut
from under the leaves
that its shadows tore from the trees,
a nut
black as the heart that your foot kicked along
when you walked here yourself.

It gores the nut
and fills the thicket with grunting fate,
then strikes off down towards the coast,
there where the sea
holds its darkest of feasts
on the crags:

perhaps
a fruit like its own
will delight the festive eye
that has wept such stones.

P. Celan, translated by J. Neugroschel

Why does Oharu faint?

2010-12-29T11:53:00.000Z

Oharu faints thrice in The life of Oharu, and on all occasions, wakes up feeling kinder and more forgiving. In an influential essay on this movie by Robert Cohen called "Why Does Oharu Faint? Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu and Patriarchal Discourse", Cohen says that Oharu's spiritual transcendence is gained after "she abandons her gender identity and sexuality", and in a sense, her victory is only pyrrhic. However, personally, I find that it goes against the standard narrative that Mizoguchi employs throughout the movie, but on the whole, I agree with what Cohen says. I think what Cohen says about abandoning her identity and sexuality is far more interesting and appealing than any spiritual excuse that could account for how Oharu has become a saintly character and her fainting spell at the beginning and in the end is more a physical and psychological surrendur to the awful life that she has lead till then.

Oharu has the kind of life that is brutal in systematically making a nonentity out of her; from a courtesan to being loved, from a woman abused to a degree of safety as a wedded woman and then eventual fall from position and grace when she is sold as a prostitute, Oharu goes through the umpteenth time what is basically a rotten life for her. There is resistance from Oharu but in that world, it can only be token. As a concubine to give the Lord Matsudaira his heir and later as a prostitute, Oharu fulfils a certain destiny that women have had to bear in all ages and in all cultures. Oharu walks a languid walk in the beginning of this movie and sitting in a temple, she visualizes her former true lover. Oharu can only fall into reverie, for only by re-living can she actualize a world that is permanently lost.

The rest of Oharu's life is a progressive narration of one injustice after another, but only through her reveries and flashbacks can Oharu gain a certain spiritual meaning. I however, do not subscribe to any notion of spiritual largess gained through physical or emotional suffering. Oharu's sufferings are neither mild nor subtle; Oharu carries on in spite of all the sufferings that she must suffer. That Oharu's experiences can be described through expressions like transcendence makes a mockery out of all her experiences.

All of Oharu's sufferings can be seen against a background of social, cultural and political realities of her times and in essence they can also be used as justifications of her sufferings. Oharu is a mother and yet not considered so, she wanted to marry for love and saw her lover beheaded and the only place that can salvage whatever is left untouched inside her is a Buddhist temple. It is in the symbolic realm of a religious sanctuary that all Oharu has lost comes back to her. All other places, be it a street or her parent's house, be it a monastery or a field have only reduced her to a person to be used or mocked at.

Oharu's fainting spells must be seen as an unknown impulse within her to resolve the conflicts that she cannot resolve practically. When she meets her lover, she faints as she is frightened of his advances and in that fainting spell, there is an element of hysteria, I think. In purely psychological terms, this behaviour, whilst hysterical, is still unknown to the actor and can have diverse causes from which it arises.

Taking again from Cohen, a de-sexualization and loss of gender will ultimately allow Oharu to devictimize herself and come to terms with her state. By mixing a certain eclectic mysticism with her subjectivity, Oharu can gain that recognition that has eluded her all her life.
From a purely Foucauldian perspective, Oharu has become what Oharu has subjectivized within herself, for her to be Oharu, she must have the life of Oharu. Or, for Oharu to gain a certain transcendence, a certain experience must precede it. That religious imagery is used to give her a semblance of person- hood is a significant step towards her restoration as a person, for without any exaggeration, any nostalgia for those past times is purely a delusional pastime, for essence, person-hood did not exist during Oharu's times.

Since Mizoguchi is considered as a feminist, and since his treatment of such themes is regarded as sympathetic, it is only with a certain brutality that he can show how earnest we must become to prevent such misery to unfold to another Oharu. However, in so-called modern times, women in wars and in times of so-called peace have been used as objects; in relative peaceful times women have been used as objects within the war zones of domestic lives. Hence, from a perspective that essentially combines peaceful doctrines with Buddhist meditation overtures, Oharu can gain through a rejection of her personal memories and later through a complete disavowal of her gender and sexuality a peaceful 'transcendence' that she could not find in her earlier life, when she was a woman.

Jean-Pierre Melville's Melancholic Killer

2010-12-27T00:01:00.003Z

Sometimes style alone matters and from that perspective, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai is the king of style. Melville creates a gangster who while outwardly only wearing one hat carries many philosophies inside or may be nothing. A tribute to and inspiration from gangster noir, and a source of inspiration to movies since then, Le Samourai is stylish and slick, and is able to create persona and mystery though that may not be what the samurai himself wants. In keeping with mystery and style, Melville's minimalism is bleak, grey-white and sparse, from the first frame where blue smoke and a bull-finch in a cage making it's relentless melancholy noise to later and in places elsewhere, Le Samourai walks in the style and manner of an artist trained to be devoted to his unique art alone. In that sense, Delon's Jef Costello with his American name is one whose philosophy flourishes in the moments where his eye and white gloved hand aim to kill, for killing is high art.

In essence, sometimes what draws audiences to flicks like The Godfather is not murder but a certain style that gangsters have, and in all truth, Melville's assassin has credibility because he seldom talks and we don't know him much when the movie ends. Add to American inspired gangster flick the seeming outer kernel of a Japanese samurai and as the credits roll, Melville announces the code and way of the Bushido, which is the director's fiction. All such narratives about gangsters must ultimately be fictional and emotive and also romantic but here, Melville creates a unique melancholy assassin, whose spartan room but stylish clothes reveal a melancholic silence. He is trained to kill in many ways and in one scene, a woman notices him as he sits in a stolen car, noticing the stealthy glance, but returning it with looks that kill. The credibility of this movie lies entirely in de-romanticising the killer and in keeping melodrama away from him, and his credibility is kept in place because of our distance from him or rather his studied distance from us. His extreme aesthetic silence and his fantastic good looks are props that help in this almost bleak existential melancholy, for the contract killer too has a philosophy, which he will carry out, regardless of anything.

Le Samourai is a wonderfully stylish movie and Alain Delon plays an assassin whose silence and single-mindedness betray nothing except that bleak melancholy of his very bleak room. There is little of the true samurai about him in the way of a true philosophy and in that sense the title can be misleading. However, in dealing with his last contract he shows that he is indeed a samurai, for he does a seppuke. The soundtrack is magnificent and mouth wateringly sexy. Melville had adopted his favourite American writer's name. Delon gives the role that aura which few could have done.

Le Samourai

2010-12-26T00:25:00.000Z

Le Collectionneuse

2010-12-23T10:59:00.000Z

I somehow prefer the French title to the English Collector but any way, Le collectionneuse is another of the Contes Moraux of Rohmer's. I must admit that watching these movies has been a privilege and in many ways, I have remembered my own hypocrisy and self deception. I wish Rohmer had made many more moral tales. This movie intrigued me as much as it attracted me for here, the male characters are far more smug than in the other tales. The main character Adrien is on holiday at a friend's house in a 17th century villa in St Tropez. Sharing it with him is another friend called Daniel. Adrien is a middle man in the art collection business, he wants to set up his own gallery. Adrien is handsome and has a girl friend who refuses his invitation to go with him. Daniel is a painter and the two get along very well. We have all the ingredients of a Rohmer tale here, summer vacations, picturesque surroundings and the protagonists tendency to philosophize.

Adrien, as narrator, makes it very clear that he prefers inactivity to work and that his life is his work. He finds a perfect foil in Daniel in that the two don't even think of disturbing each other. Daniel seems to be the thinking type while Adrien is the thinking as well as the talking type. Daniel considers thinking as work too but Adrien prefers to read so that he doesn't think. Daniel however considers even reading to be work. Into this lazy world arises a disturbance in the firm of the attractive Haydee, a young woman who is also a friend of the villa owners. Haydee arouses Adrien's curiosity more than Daniel's, but for both of them, she seems a challenge. Haydee challenges them indirectly in that she seems to be with a new boy every day, who either pick her or drop off at the villa. The two men actually call her a slut, for it is clear that she challenges them sexually. Adrien wants Daniel to sleep with her but Daniel will have none of it. Adrien thinks that Haydee is going down the ladder as he sees her with a new boy every night though Haydee sees it as part of her search for something.

Adrien wants Daniel to sleep with Haydee and one day it does happen. Adrien then thinks that it happened because he had tested her and that they both did it because they wanted to test him. Everything that happens must involve Adrien even if remotely. Adrien later sets up Haydee with Sam, the art collector. Daniel dumps Haydee which Adrien observes with satisfaction and then approaches her to give her support which she rejects. Adrien wants in the end to sleep with Haydee which Haydee would not mind but Adrien believes that it is Haydee who wants that. Later, on their way to the villa, after Haydee has accidentally broken Sam's costly vase, they run into her friends who invite her to another town. Adrien waits in his car but because he is blocking traffic, he has to make way for another irate driver. In that incidence, he leaves Haydee behind. He thinks he has left her behind but he uses that as a factor of his will.

Of all the male characters in the moral tales, Adrien is not only the most handsome but the most smug. He attacks bourgeois life but he is a bourgeois himself. He knows he is good looking and thinks he can have the girl he wants and not who wants him. He is interested in making money but pretends he is interested in doing nothing. He prefers the company of others but believes he likes his own company. He uses others to test his own limits believing it is fair to do so. He is articulate and intelligent and has a beautiful smile. Some of his witticisms are brilliant like : "What I don't want is to think my own way. I want to be led". He is well read but pretends he is not. He has an anthropologist's approach towards people; he tells Haydee that he would not stroke a woman's legs if her nose was ugly. He knows he is a dandy but he is the philosophising dandy. His self absorbed attitude is attractive though he is extremely selfish too. He attributes to willpower what should be attributed to chance. On the whole, he is willing to surrender to Haydee in the end but he does not know that he had already done so.

Daniel is the most withdrawn of the three. He prefers solitude and self awareness. He is not as articulate on a daily basis as Adrien but he is articulate spasmodically. He tends to speak when he wants to under a certain pressure. At one point he says : "People who are always thinking don't exist." Daniel is not willing to be an in Haydee's collection but eventually he ends up being just that. He shocks people merely for the value of shocking them. He is interesting in so far as he let's himself be. He is funny at times. He knows the games Adrien is playing but he couldn't care less. He prefers to be 'on a high' with himself. In the end, he is as self deceptive as Adrien. And as disappointing.

Haydee is not as articulate as other women of the moral tales. When she is introduced, she is walking along the sea shore, clad in a bikini. She lets her looks do the talking. She is pretty but not beautiful. Her smile is worth a million dollars though. She tends to reply insults with silence. She is seemingly dumb but she never let's you know what she is thinking about. She is impulsive and has no loyalties to any one apparently. She is disturbed underneath the promiscuity and she disturbs others randomly. She is quiet and well mannered but capricious and mysterious. Overall, she is not as wordly wise as the other two. She is an observer and soaks much and gives little. She is not the usual Rohmer talking woman.

Le Collectionneuse is a wonderful movie in many ways. It catches the sexy bohemian attitude of the main characters in an unforced unassuming manner. The way the villa is transformed by the attitudes of the three people and the sometimes visible tension between them is caught with subtle effect. The morning and siesta scenes are beautifully filmed and the conversations on the veranda or on the beach have the feel of 'real time' chats. One particular scene when Haydee and her 'boyfriend' have breakfast with Adrien and Daniel has impossible comic elements and charming wit and repartee. Here Adrien, on being asked what he does for work replies that he is an eye specialist, with such dead pan sincerity that the other two burst into laughter later, when Adrien tells Haydee's friend, who is wearing Polaroid sunglasses that polarization is already extrapolation. He advises him to wear Daniel magenta glasses which he, Adrien has prescribed. Basically Adrien and Daniel play the goat. One scene between Adrien and the art collector Sam, with Haydee observing them in silence turns vicious after Sam labels Adrien as a school child on vacation.

Waiting to unite with one woman while falling for the second one till you meet the first one is as much as basically happens here as in other morality tales but to sum it up like that is the way of a novice. Much more happens during the absence of the 'loved' one and the presence of the 'temptress'. I do not know if Rohmer has any sympathy for the male type though his female type emerges better.The performances by the three actors are convincing with only Patrick Bachau being a professional. I have read that Rohmer has been described as a conservative moralist because of his conclusions but that will be the aim of another post to consider. The camera work of Nestor Almendros in all of the morality tales is as important as the directorial role. The casual ordinariness of the images adds to the verbal grandeur of the dialogues.The colour schemes in this movie are refreshingly subtle, like water colour paintings done by an artist on drugs. Overall, Le Collectionneuse is a sexy movie that I will see again, and after that, again.

Things I didn't know I loved

2010-12-21T16:29:00.001Z

I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

from Nazim Hikmet's "Things I didn't know I Loved"

let us say those words again

2010-12-20T14:58:00.001Z

let us say those words again
some words that may touch us again
words that may make a poem
or a song
words that may dissolve into the iris of your eyes
and stay warm there
some words that remind us of days and nights gone by
words that may lead to other words may be new words
some words that may touch us again
words that may make a poem
or a song
words that fly from the tips of your fingers
and live on your lips
some words that may lead to new stories new threads
of new songs on lips on finger tips
let us say those words again
some words that have a name and a date
words that may touch us again
words that we could mount on our lips and keep
warm in our eyes
let us say those words again

Ugetsu

2010-12-19T13:42:00.001Z

Ugetsu or Tales Of The Pale And Silvery Moon After The Rain is generally regarded as a ghost story and as a chronicle of war and the subsequent sufferings faced especially by women, but in the lines below, I will aim to describe it primarily as a love story. In three separate scenes, I will try to describe the intense and incomparable love between the main characters. This is not a plot description by any means.

The Lake Biwa Scene

It is no exaggeration to say that this scene has no rival in cinema. What we see first is a boat floating dreamily on a lake, towards us, and a lake shrouded in mist, the mist shrouded in wan and silvery moon light. A woman stands at the rear end, oaring this boat, and singing a song that arises seemingly from the depths of this lake. We see the boat glide on this most dreamy of lakes, as we recognise the men and woman huddled on it, as if tranced, held in the sway of the mist and moon light, tied to this boat by this most unearthly song, reminding them, if they can hear it, of the transience of all things. The boat and the lake may not exist at all, it seems we are in a trance, the remote viewer. Now, we see the boat from the rear end as it floats dreamily and as another boat emerges, as if out of the depths of this lake, out of this swooning mist, this moon light covered sensual mist.

Later, at dawn, when Miyagi looks at her husband in the departing boat, from the edges of this now real lake, Oh, Miyagi, you wanted to go with him, the desperation on her face, the camera cutting back and forth from the boat to Miyagi and back, that is the first intense depiction of love in this movie. The moon is in love with the lake, the mist with the lake, the boat with the water, and mortal men and women must do what they must do.

Lady Wasaka Dances

Lady Wasaka and Genjuro are in love. Genjuro holds a cup of Sake in his hands as Wasaka rises and, her face painted white, she drifts in front of him, she slides and writhes, she sings a song for her lover. This is no ordinary love for in her hands, haven't his pots attained perfection? "Your pots are saddened by my touch", she says, yes, this is no ordinary love, as Lady Wasaka dances and sings a song, the sound of which comes from another world. It sounds other worldly because this emotion is not of this world, she has suffered to attain Genjuro, now he is her's, as she dances a mournful dance, as she sings, "The finest silk, Of choicest hue, May change and fade away, As would my life, Beloved one, If thou shoulds't prove untrue." Love must necessarily seek suffering, sacrifice leads ultimately to the final gates of love opening like Wasaka's arms, as she holds her beloved.

Wasaka's eyes and her white face, her silken finery and her burning passion are not able to hide her fear that Genjuro, her only lover will one day leave her and that she will be all alone, with these pots and cups. Genjuro too loves her with the world weary love of men who are doomed to love immortal love, men whose eyes have seen eyes, whose faces have seen faces but this too is new for Genjuro, this awakening of the senses, this tragic numbing of the soul, this hypnotic movement of the limbs, Sake and mirth, Wasaka and love. This love is however immortal but Genjuro does not know that.

Genjuro returns

Miyagi waits in their tired hut for Genjuro. Love will pardon all, even greed. Have this stew, you are cold and tired, Miyagi says. Gone is her agitation and in its place is languid melancholy, had not their previous meeting raced against an hour glass, but this is new and you have returned home now, Miyagi knows. She looks at her lover with the known certainty of certainties, she alone knows that she must go, leave soon, perhaps forever, lover look at me, I will be gone soon, but she does not say that aloud. She has waited so long for him and he has travelled so long for her. Later, asleep, he dreams a dreamless sleep, safe sleep in the safety of being near the person who matters, and she has left him but so it seems. I will always be with you, Miyagi says and we hear. Genjuro hears that too. Near his pots and pans and outside his hut, he has erected a shrine for her.

My Night at Maud's

2010-12-17T14:48:00.002Z

"There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain".

Rohmer's My night at Maud's is the third of his 'Contes Moraux' and as for as the talking style philosophizing goes, this is the best of the three I have seen so far. Jean-Louis is an engineer who has returned from overseas and is shown attending mass, a few days before Christmas. There, he spots a young blonde woman and on his way back, tells us that she will be his wife in the future. A chance encounter later sees Jean-Louis reunited with an old friend Vidal and the two soon start talking about chance and probability. Vidal reveals he is a Marxist while Jean-Louis confirms he is a Catholic. The two start discussing chance and Pascal's wager. Later still, Vidal invites Jean-Louis for dinner at his friend's Maud's place. Maud is divorcing and as Vidal declares, it will stop the two of them sleeping together out of boredom. Jean-Louis accepts.

Maud is a charming and exquisitely sensual, exquisitely attractive woman, who is disarmingly frank and brutally challenging to some of Jean-Louis's opinions, as the night moves on. Jean-Louis confirms that he follows a strict catholic moral code and that he would want his future wife to be a catholic and blonde, though the latter could be compromised. However, he also does admit that he has occasionally not been able to follow catholic morality. He lies about not knowing who the supposed blonde is he though he has only seen her. He declares that re-reading Pascal has done nothing for him for he finds Pascal's wager as not in the catholic spirit. When Maud asks him if he has morally compromised himself, he admits that he has but only when he has been single and not in a relationship. Soon they discover a snow storm has hit the town. Vidal decides to leave, leaving Jean-Louis behind, who accepts Maud's invitation to spend the night at her house, in her spare bed room.

Maud invites Jean-Louis to sleep next to him, atop the covers of her couch bed, which he rejects initially, settling on a sofa chair. But soon afterwards he gets up and settles next to Maud atop the covers. Previously Maud has declared that she sleeps naked during the night and true to her word, she does. Jean-Louis, however, stands by his moral code and doesn't give in to any temptation. Later in the morning, he feels a stirring of desire for Maud and on her responding, he stops himself. After that, he tries again but is rejected by Maud as she declares that "she likes men who know what they want." Jean-Louis later departs and becomes a good friend of Maud's and the two meet again. Their discussions continue to focus on their futures, especially if the two could be suitable for each other.Maud also tells Jean-Louis how her own marriage ended because of her husband's affair with a young blonde. Jean-Louis meets his blonde girl again by chance and declares his affection for her, asking her "do i have a chance to get to know you?" She is unhappy because of her own terminated love affair but seems quite receptive to Jean-Louis.

It is interesting to note that Jean-Louis is clearly attracted to Maud who also likes him. However, he accepts to spend the night with Maud while Maud only invites him to; he could have rejected that. Jean-Louis also adheres to his rigid moral stands but does cave in completely when he lies next to Maud. It is she who on rebuffing him, sends him to his usual catholic norms. Maud is not playing with him but testing him when Maud invites Jean-Louis to sleep next to him, which he rejects initially but accepts soon afterwards. Jean-Louis, in my opinion, could have left with Vidal and not stayed with Maud. After all, if the roads were treacherous for Jean-Louis, they were so for Vidal too. Jean-Louis actually believes in his standards, in his catholic values but does not think that he can be happy with Maud. However, on another meeting with her, he declares that only she can make him happy and that he feels happy only in her presence.

Maud is unhappy with her present situation but is not attracted to Jean-Louis' religious convictions. She openly tells him that he cannot convert her. While openly saying that she would be happy to marry him, she also thinks that it could possibly overwhelm Jean-Louis, who reminds her of a boy-scout figure.

It is interesting to see that once again, the main protagonist is either self- assured or self- absorbed. By putting temptation in his way, Rohmer is actually continuing a narrative of temptation being put in the way of someone who could be potentially tempted. In a sense, the temptress seems to be blamed more for tempting than the tempted. I am not sure if it is the product of a certain religious sensibility that has set the tone for such narratives down the ages or whether the female sex is sen as natural tempter. In that sense, the temptation or moral dilemma facing Jean-Louis is more concrete, in that he is lying next to Maud who is naked and perhaps willing; contrast this with Claire's Knee where the temptation is still inside the mind at a more nascent stage. From that point, I think the morality discussions are more subtle and psychological in Claire's Knee than here. Hence I preferred Claire's Knee to Maud, metaphorically speaking, though I would like to be in Maud's company.

There is perhaps a standard depiction of a femme fatale here in Maud in contrast to the blonde woman Jean-Louis finds in the church. It is difficult in a Pascalian sense for Jean-Louis to marry Maud because she is Maud; Maud is not ethereal and a believer as the blonde is. Maud is wise and wordly and fast, while the blonde is vulnerable looking and appears innocent. Maud is treated in a standard moral attitude and in that sense, I could only sense a male morality towards her. I do not know if all male morality is also a standard religious morality after all. When Jean-Louis discovers that his blonde wife is the same woman with whom Maud's husband had an affair, he declares to his wife that they are square, for the day he met her, he was with Maud. He does not tell his wife that he did not sleep with Maud but creates a situation where he actually lies to his wife, who responds that they should never talk about things past now.

Personally I found Jean-Louis as a hypocritical male agent, who has an idealized notion of womanhood and marriage, seeing things through a Catholic prism but actually doing the opposite. His wife must be Catholic and blonde, but he does not mind sleeping next to Maud, who has dark hair. While Maud is intelligent and understands Pascal more than Jean-Louis perhaps, Jean-Louis wants to settle with his blonde wife who appears that she may not understand Pascal. The last scene of the movie has Jean-Louis and his wife meet Maud on a beach by chance. Maud and Jean-Louis stop to have a chat, and Maud seems unsurprised that the blonde woman is his wife. He makes a reference to the evening they had spent together five years ago but Maud reminds him of the fact that it was a night.

Maud has remarried she tells him, but the marriage is not working out as she says that she has no luck with men. Maud then leaves as she walks away with Jean-Louis striding towards his wife and child. That is such a melancholic and bitter moment, it is actually a source of discomfiture for a sensitive person. Maud had liked Jean-Louis but he is not morally strong enough to be with her, I think she is intelligent enough to realize that. Jean-Louis had also liked Maud but he is shackled by his resolves; by not sleeping with Maud, he has won a wife but lost much more.

Regarding the setting, by now, we know that talk and philosophizing is the tone of Rohmer territory. This is black and white and winter, hence no summer grass or sunshine or placid lakes. The snow and the frost on the roads is captured beautifully. The camera focuses for minutes together on the speaking face, gathering all the inflections and nuances.. Francoise Fabian as Maud is lush with a burning sensuality. She is however able to transform into playful innocence ( as if sensuality is not innocent, too much Rohmer talk) in a moment's passing. Jean-Louis Trintignant draws the viewer in and he reveals himself very slowly. I was not however attracted to his persona as I was to Jerome in Claire's Knee. That speaks volumes about his performance which is brilliant. This movie has become one of my favourites and is nothing less than a masterpiece.

It is interesting to note that Pascal was born in Clermont, where the movie was shot.

Claire's Knee

2010-12-16T20:01:00.004Z

"There are things you hear and things you see, and the rest is supposition.”

As I stated in a previous post on Rohmer's movie style, talking and chatting are the essence of his 'thought' evocation, for essentially, Rohmer's world is where thinking begins and actions stop. Actions may still exist but they stem from thoughts, after thinking. In Claire's knee, as in his other movies, the main characters are away from their usual habitat and for various reasons on vacation. This time,, it is near the Swiss border on a picturesque lake. Jerome runs into possibly an old flame called Aurora, who is lodged with a family, as she is trying to finish a novel. Jerome is a career diplomat and has come there to sell his villa. So far, so good. Jerome is the kind of character that I immediately warmed to, for vague reasons really, not because he is fully bearded but perhaps because he seemed to have a lot of time on his hands, and appeared relaxed. Jerome informs Aurora, whom he has last seen in Bucharest that he is getting married to a woman called Lucinde.

Aurora introduces Jerome to a young girl called Laura, who is the daughter of her landlady. Later, Aurora, herself not unattractive, informs Jerome that Laura may be in love with him. Jerome finds that amusing but at Aurora's insistence, decides to play a game so that Aurora can use what happens as material for her novel. He laughingly assumes the role of a guinea pig for her, as he claims. Laura clearly seems enamoured of Jerome and it is clear that she is looking for father figure, as she herself declares. On a hiking trip alone with Jerome, Jerome kisses her but Laura stops him, saying that she wants more than friendship. Later, Jerome claims he will not play the guinea pig for Aurora. Soon after, Claire, Laura's half- sister arrives and to his own dismay, Jerome falls for her. Claire is young like Laura and whilst picking pears on a ladder, Jerome seems to get attracted by her knee. Soon afterwards, Jerome declares to Aurora that usually possession leads to desire for him but in this case, desire is asking for possession.
Initially Jerome, in his numerous chats with Aurora and Laura declares that he has found in his fiancee Lucinde, the woman with whom he is never bored. While he might still be attracted to other women, it is only with Lucinde that he feels fulfilled. But in his first meeting with Aurora, he declares "Why would I tie myself to one woman if I were interested in others?”, though later on he is clear that Lucinde is really made for him. During a chat with Laura, he shows her Lucinde's photo and admits that she is not his type physically but immediately says that “Though I don’t really have a type. Looks don’t matter to me. It’s the character alone that counts". However later, he declares his passion for Claire, who is long legged and pretty. He admits that Claire is not his type. In Laura he finds a girl who challenges his opinions, especially about character and in Aurora, he finds a kindly ear.

In his desire for Claire's knee, he makes it clear that were she to throw herself at his feet, he would disregard her but that only in possessing her knee would he feel that he had liberated himself from exploring this desire. Much earlier Jerome declares that life is too short to notice adolescent yearnings but he does notice Laura's yearnings acutely. Jerome tells Aurora that any woman can be approached through either a caress on the neck or arm or a kiss on the cheek but in Claire's case, it is her knee. When he does finally get his opportunity, he fondles and strokes her knee and Claire lets him do it. It is an intriguing scene, not only for the two of them but for the viewer too, and one wonders where Jerome will stop or how Claire will react.

Claire's knee is a magnificent movie and in this vacation spot, the main characters meet, have tea, walk, are on a boat, inside a house, indoors and outdoors, talking and walking, chatting and getting angry at each other, compromising and philosophizing. In essence, one or two Rohmer characters in all his movies are the philosophizing type. They are not philosophers but the talking type, those who talk about things when they are actually talking about themselves, who give examples of things when they are actually speaking from their own experiences. That they contradict themselves from time to time is evident but more importantly, they seem to at least outwardly arrive at some outer conclusion.

Jerome is a brilliant example of the talking type. Sitting or standing, dressed casually and hatted, Jerome is the quintessence of the moralizing type. He never ceases to give an opinion or reflect from his past experiences. He always or usually has something to say or advise. He advises Laura to study in Paris or Lyon and advises Claire to keep away from loutish boys. He knows he is always away from making a mistake but admits that it is possible to do so. He never seems to be in a rush or hurry. He is generally polite and very lazy in his demeanour. Jerome is also a bit of a hypocrite and seems to justify his own lapses. He never admits that he is completely wrong and always justifies his weakness or some behaviour with a theory. His explanation of his desire for Claire's knee is nothing short of a psychological formulation but actually quite misleading.

The other characters are brilliantly portrayed by all the actors including Laura, who is simply scintillating. She is the Rohmer woman par excellence, very wise and maturing with experience, while Aurora is already worldly and wise. The locales are as in other Rohmer movies, sun and shade and naturalness are important ingredients. The moody analysis of desire and its undercurrents are discussed against a background of summer grass and pear trees and motor boat cruises on placid lakes. I think Claire's Knee is such a subtle and important movie that I must see it many times before I can actually appreciate the intense psychological implications that are more hidden than visible.

Pauline at the Beach

2010-12-15T14:36:00.005Z

''Love burns. I want to burn with love."

Eric Rohmer is generally regarded as one of the important names of the French new wave of the sixties. His style makes him quite unique and it has been likened to a novelistic approach towards film making. Rohmer himself declared that he was more interested in thoughts than actions. This is evident right from the beginning of Pauline at the Beach where Pauline, entrusted to her older mature cousin Marion, soon after lodging at their summer seaside bungalow start talking about 'love'. The characters soon start setting the agenda for discussion, for a chat, much like as it happens in ordinary day to day situations. In this as in other Rohmer movies, it is thoughts that instigate words as shown but also the ability to create a space wherein words and thoughts can be shared. In other words, much of Rohmer territory is on the beaches as in here or about people on holidays or on vacations, where they get a chance to talk.

Another feature of his movies is the essentially naturalistic setting. By that one would infer the ordinariness of the scenes shown. The shots are much of those we see naturally in ordinary situations, on the beach, on the streets, inside a house and so on. There is in essence an ordinary routine appearance to what we see which enhances the background tone of talking that seems to be the primary aim. The shots of people casually walking on the streets and stopping and chatting at a normal place is wonderfully shown in Rohmer's movies. The ordinary chatting scenes do not make the movie more realistic immediately but actually enhance the sense of talking. I can see myself as having been part of endless discussions with various people on topics as diverse as faith and life and love and so on. What strikes one in this movie however is the 'return' to a previous established routine, after episodes or episodes have unraveled. In that sense, the opening and closing of the gates at the beginning and the end of this movie signify that very clearly.

Pauline at the Beach is one of Rohmer's six moral tales movies, and the themes are not connected.

Pauline is young, in fact very young and Marion is older and she thinks she has a better understanding about matters that relate to love. As she declares, she wants to burn in love, with love. She is looking for an instinctual extinction in passion and also believes that that will ultimately lead her to finding the right person. She rejects the advances of an old flame Pierre but succumbs quickly to Henri a stranger that Pierre introduces her to. Marion encourages Pierre to think about Pauline who is already enamoured of a boy of her age. Henri likes every woman he sets his eyes on, he has no fixed abode, he is a traveller and never locks his house for there is nothing to steal from. Pierre wants something permanent with Marion who wants a recognition of her spirit in Henri who desires both Pauline and Marion physically.

Pauline's instincts ultimately are more superior to Marion's and as summer moves on, Pauline becomes more mature. In fact, she never gossips about anyone in their absence in contrast to the the older more mature people around her. Everyone is in an enclosed circle of sorts and in this combination of circles and triangles, feelings and emotions grow and subside. What they think of as love is as passing as the summer, and as summer passes so does their love. Pauline wants to know a person before she falls in love though she does admit that she had developed something for a stranger she had seen just once, in passing, without them talking to each other. Pauline is not subject to waves of burning but waves of restrained emotion and as her maturity grows, she seems more aware of what others believe about and don't.

What Pierre does not understand is why Marion does not love him but Henri even though Henri is not good for her? Pierre believes that Marion is blind not to see how good a person he is and yet Pierre strangely continues to love Marion even though she rejects him for Henri. Pierre does not think Marion's behaviour is logical and yet Pierre himself does not behave logically. In essence, Pierre thinks that in love, one should make logical choices but he is not making a logical choice himself after having seen Marion's illogical behaviour.

Henri seems a fairly remote and diabolical man as he would not mind sleeping with anyone and yet his theories about love seem better than Pierre's. He rejects Marion's burning in love hypothesis and says that an initial spark must be the spring board for future passion. He rejects Marion as being the symbol of perfection and finds her perfection oppressive. He rejects Marion because she falls too easily for him and as he puts it, “she gave me no time to desire her.”

Throughout the movie, we see all the characters doing the opposite of what they say and sometimes saying things for effect. It is difficult for instance to say someone doesn't mean a thing when they utter things about love or life and so on. It does not mean however that we are lying. Perhaps it means that that is what we believe at that given instant or that one can say things under the oppressive beauty of some one or under the beautiful spell of someone just seen. I have great sympathy for nearly everyone shown in this movie and am much in love with Rohmer's unique vision of being unobtrusive and at a distance from his characters. There is almost a casual approach towards film making that seems to be the case here and yet in essence there is a rawness and an intensity that lies at the heart of things.

Pauline at the Beach seems like a very unassuming movie. However, to assume that would be a mistake. It is a relentless deconstruction of many things, observed with humanity and humour.

The Lovers

2010-12-14T13:49:00.003Z

I find tales of bourgeoisie women in their mid lives facing boredom in their marriages boring to say the least. They happen usually to be trapped in their 'loveless' marriages and chance encounters with strangers or husband's friends lead to occasional emotional and often sexual release. Then they suddenly realize that it either sinful to do so or against prevailing norms and values and this behaviour is sometimes generously described as a revolt against masculine repression or some other fanciful psychological devices are used to explain such misdemeanour. It is fair enough at times to accept that maybe their lives are boring or loveless but often most lives are. But where Louis Malle's The Lovers struck me as more interesting though less realistic is the actual revolt of this attractive woman in a loveless marriage who defies 'logical' behaviour and proceeds to leave her child, husband, clothes, jewellery and all that such life amounts to behind and actually flee with her 'lover' in his car from her house to something which she does not know what.

On the road with her love, chance having brought them together, she has misgivings and sheds a few tears but she defies all her initial doubts and leaves. She has spent, initially unplanned but later with resolute intensity, a night with her new lover and seems to have discovered 'love' and meaning. Now, I am all for love at first sight, even second sight, but to actually flee after the first night seemed very brave to me. But perhaps that is what she was craving for, this sense of danger that first sight attraction brings, this sense of adventure that 'instinctual' love brings, ennui and 'repression' having thwarted all emotions perhaps. On the surface she doesn't seem repressed, she enjoys material comforts, is fashionably dressed, enjoys the style of polo playing upper middle-class, sports the latest hair style in Paris and has friends who enjoy the same rush. I thought her husband seemed stern but sensible, he understood the bourgeois demands that his wife was putting on herself and yet something eludes us, something perhaps that Malle hides.

Unless the story is a parable, the crises that we see must not however make me cynical to say that the wife has no right to feel bored; even bourgeoisie wives have intellectual and emotional needs! But what I liked most about the movie is the end, for the wife and her new lover actually do flee for something which I do not know. Will this adventure end and will she miss the trappings of her usual comfort? What about the young daughter she has left behind?
Jeanne Moreau plays the wife and is ravishingly attractive and almost ethereal in her beauty. Her grace, her charms and her erotic attractions have something of the watery about in this movie and in spite of her adultery, she appears a picture of 'innocence'. The camera work is subtle, with alternate focus on shade and light and the house scenes are very effective in showing the interior locales of such an existence.

This movie is clearly an aesthetic success and an important sample of the French new wave.

Ashes and Diamonds

2010-12-13T15:16:00.000Z

I fell in love with Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds while watching it and am still under its spell. I had not seen any Wajda movie before. It is the kind of movie that fills the viewer with awe at a film maker's craft, a kind of movie that stays with the viewer. Even though the movie portrays what has been shown in numerous ways in numerous movies, namely the dilemma of idealism against the realities of life, the harsh choices that a harsh life inevitably presents people with, yet it does so in a manner so artistic and so restrained that it leaves one sad and breathless, enlightened and yet wary, filled with the after echoes of false dawns. It leaves one with ashes and no diamonds.

The movie begins with breathtaking speed and surprise. Maciek and Andrezj are lying on the grass on a seemingly benign day in an um-named Polish town and we find that they are lying in wait, waiting to assassinate a communist party official immediately after the second war has ended. The scene ends with frantic violence, with Maciek gunning down one fleeing man in front of a chapel, the man's back covered with flames. Later on, in the main hotel in town, they discover that they have gunned down the wrong people by mistake and that the surviving official is at the same hotel for the night. Maciek, younger than Andrzej and idealistic, is naturally miserable at what has happened. However, the two men who are right wing soldiers are ordered to aim at their target again. The action that follows details a 24 hour period at the hotel, during which Maciek falls in love with a beautiful barmaid, Krystyna at the hotel bar. Maciek seems torn between what he truly wants and what he desires or what he thinks he idealizes.

There is a scene between Maciek and Andrzej near the bar where Maciek is trying to capture the bar girl's attention. In a scene that I personally find ravishing and unforgettable, a scene that I must have watched endlessly, he sets a few vodka glasses on fire. The symbolism of lost youth and waning idealism may be there but for me, it is such a beautiful scene, so romantically enacted that it takes the breath away. Krystyna senses that Maciek cannot commit to her and later on during the night, they visit an old chapel outside the hotel. The innocent men that Maciek has killed earlier lie there but outside is a statue of Christ hanging upside down. Afterwards, Maciek departs from Krystyna and goes in search of Szczuka, the communist party official. He guns him down near the hotel and Ssczuka falls in his arms. Maciek however decides not to join Andrzej on their way back to Warsaw but runs into a patrol of Polish army soldiers who run after him and gun him down on a rubbish dump.

Maciek is played by Zbiegniew Cybulski and I have learnt that he died tragically in a train accident. His performance is one of the great highlights of this movie. In essence, his performance is unforgettable. Cybulski was compared to James Dean once and in his leather jacket and tinted glasses, he looks menacingly debonair. He is restless and charming, torn between the ideology that makes him a killer and the trappings of a young man who desires love and life. He is afraid to admit to Andrzej that he may have fallen in love with Krystyna. In essence, in those few hours in the bar and in his room and outside, his agitated romanticism and his sullen attitude balance his freshness and his innocent manner. He is the prince amongst killers, he is a romantic anarchist, he is lover and assassin, revolutionary and doomed.

Wajda's cinematic techniques, as I am beginning to familiarize myself with, are considered baroque and beautiful. The scenes are shot in a naturalistic manner, and there is much emphasis on light and shade. The bar scenes are magnificent and the burning vodka one I have mentioned earlier. Krystyna is restrainedly beautiful, Maciek is quietly confident that she will accept his invitation to join him in his room. She knows she has no future with him but in her own way is hopeful and spends a night with him. He dies in a rubbish dump, the symbolism here is evident, Wajda shows the inherent stakes that pit one force against another in the name of country and ideology and patriotism, which to Maciek or any other sane observer in any age must strike as hollow and futile in comparison with the idealism of youth, which he burns and the gift of life which he has snatched from others. Outside the chapel with Krystyna, krystyna unearths for Maciek the feelings that he is not supposed to have or the love that he must not voice. Later on and since then, everything is ashes.

Below, the burning vodka scene that I found in Polish. I have fallen in love with it.

Tristana

2010-12-11T13:39:00.000Z

Tristana is a wonderful movie, in that the imagery and surreality of Bunuel's world gushes forth in each image. Tristana is another 'woman' movie in which Bunuel portrays a young woman's fall into poverty, sexual and emotional exploitation, her rebellion, revenge and eventual rehabilitation after many travails and losses. Shot in Spain and in the environs of a walled and picturesque setting, the movie tells the tale of how young Tristana is exploited by her elderly guardian, at first as a protector and then for his sexual needs. The guardian has lapsed into relative poverty and is forced to sell his antique possessions but clings to his old world ways with tremendous determination. He is clearly not a parvenu nor a really lecherous person but is steeped in the world, a world that uses women as part of a sanctioned order

When Tristana goes out into the world and falls in love with Horacio, a young painter, her benefactor cannot accept that. Tristana flees with her lover but eventually returns as she is unwell, with a dangerous infection in her leg, which is eventually amputated. However, for this she must stay with her benefactor, Don Lope, who confesses his real love for her, which Tristana refuses to accept. They get married eventually but she snubs him, and later, at night, when he wants to consummate the wedlock, she refuses and reminds him of his age. Later still, Don Lope is unwell and asks Tristana to fetch a doctor which she pretends to do. In the meanwhile, Don Lope dies.

Tristana is a subdued movie as for as colours are concerned but is shot in the usual 'unreal' Bunuel manner. Played by Catherine Deneuve, Tristana is sadly beautiful and beautifully sad and her expressions, her mannerisms and her body language convey the anguish of exploited women down the ages. Fernando Rey, one of my favourite actors, plays Don Lope with his customary nonchalance and regal ease and later with a certain degree of solemn acceptance of his deeds. Don Lope is quite an interesting character who reveals that all his life he has refused to work for money and denounces any merit in such a thing for why should he work so that others get rich? In his demeanour, his manners and his behaviour, there is no sign of debauchery but that in reality is the sign of such a gentleman, who carries on his activities without sensitivity or insight.

The household of Don Lope has interesting characters too, and his housekeeper's very young son, who is uninterested in any kind of meaningful activity, is clearly bewitched by Tristana. In a scene where Tristana asserts her freedom, she bares her bosom to this young chap, in an act that she sees as her reassertion of those rights that had not been available to her before. The calm manner in which male hypocrisy sanctions her subdued existence, and the way the two men, one out of love and the other out of his own selfish ends continue to set the tone of her life is shown in sharp relief against a backdrop of the hieracrhical nature of such dominant modes of intercourse. Towards the end, Tristana is determined when she refuses to save her 'husband', who, now rich again after having inherited his estate, passes it on to her. Tristana is now rich and one hopes will find some solace with Horacio, though that is not shown.

Bunuel shows a lot of his characteristic fetishistic shots, especially the leg shots and the prosthesis for Tristana's leg, which in one shot is adorned, lying on her bed with her inner garments. Then there are the dream sequences, which are so unnervingly extravagant with imagination. Deneuve plays her role with ease and grace, the aloof beauty, the melancholic young woman but the main performance is still Fernando Rey's, Bunuel's lead actor in all his later movies, who in spite of not exciting the viewer's sympathies, carries on with a melancholic gesture of accepting not only his material fall but also his emotional fall from grace. Rey was a consummate actor, a great actor and one never gets the feeling that he actually acts but as of someone who has naturally inherited that role. Tristana the movie shows Bunuel attacking the bourgeoisie values and concepts that he brilliantly attacked all his life and in showing with beauty and skill, the unending crime of accepting hypocrisy, be it social or religious.

a splash of blood

2010-12-10T21:27:00.000Z

the unexpected

2010-12-09T17:00:00.000Z

the night was wondrous but not wonderful, for amazement and surprise are elements of discovery, and the unexpected discovery is a haunting piece of music; were it for that night to have worn different colours, colours that one expects certain moods to wear, then surprise would have been replaced by gesture and pose. But this was night on tips and toes, this was fur coat and scarf, it was bright lips and brown, it was frost and fog. Had one known, one could have quoted favourite lines from favourite writers, come prepared with steel and silk, music and book, mask and wit. Had one known, one would have invented name and face, learned beforehand to walk with grace on ice and snow, sought advise from friend and seer; had one known, one could have learned not to fail one self, to look calm when the heart was all agitation.

But the unexpected happened. You came with the force of attacking marauders, with the impatient force of merciless armies, with the unexpected disquieting force of unavoidable power. Your finger tips tore the night air to shreds, your bright lips burnt the frost with a blazing flame, the havoc your presence created was unknown to you, you were one calm presence amongst fluttering hearts. Your words made ripples that still linger with me, your smile was seldom effusive but when you spoke, your words fell on the frost like clear diamonds. When you left, the space behind you ached with the lushness of invincible surmise. You took with you our disjointed words and our stunned surprise.

When my Lover will come

2010-12-06T18:45:00.004Z

When my lover will come and I will hear her feet,
I will tear that hour from the fabric of unreliable time
and hang the musk of that hour like a flag
and stitch it to the bloodied walls of my memory.

When my lover will come and I will hear her feet,
I will slave my heart beats to the drowsy sound of her anklets
as she will step on my spreading desire,
drowning that hour with the spreading mist of her scent.

When my lover will come and I will hear her feet,
I will read out all the words that I know to her,
and throw away all the blank papers I own as
she will write her name on each moment of that captive time.

When my lover will come and I will hear her feet,
I will hide all the awkward din of my awkward heart
as I will touch each strand of her long brown hair
and tie her hair and myself in knots.

That Obscure Object of Desire

2010-12-03T18:52:00.001Z

All Bunuel movies are seductive, at least I find them so. Towards the end of his career, Bunuel only made beautiful movies. Not only are they charming and seductively so, but if a particular shot is frozen, they appear before the eyes as wonderful tapestries, as sensual images that are surreal, lush with colour. Even in typical bourgeoisie activities like having dinner, the images are extremely winning. That Obscure Object of Desire, a movie that one can watch endlessly, is certainly experimental for the object of desire is played by two actors, and the same character portrayed by two actors is certainly quite novel. When Mathieu meets Conchita by chance, a woman who lives with her mother and is actually poor, he develops an obsession for her, and in actual matter wants to sleep with her. All his advances, while not entirely unwelcome are rebuffed by her. He befriends her, buys her gifts, even goes to her apartment and loans money to her mother and sends a marriage proposal. She, very cleverly never actually declares any hatred for him but always keeps him hanging, so to say. This leads to him intimidating her and blackmailing her but she always promises consummation tomorrow which actually never comes. Against this is a background activity by a terrorist group that act in violent activities which though unconnected to this couple play a hilariously delicate part in the end.

She makes him buy a villa for her and then refuses him entry to her house and then engages in sexual activity with another friend under his very nose so to say. Mathieu narrates his story to his fellow travellers in the train from Seville to Paris and with his usual dead pan countenance, effectuates a response from them which borders in believing him. In all of his escapades where Mathieu tries to humiliate Conchita, he expects a natural response from his audience to say that all along, it was him who was being humiliated. In response to a fellow traveller after unloading a bucket of water on Conchita, Mathieu tells them that it is definitely better than actually killing her. Though his determination and her resistance seem endless, the drama ends with both walking together, she is some state of resistance and then an explosion. We are not really sure what happens to them.

Bunuel's later movies ( they have the best film titles also of all times) have small episodes connected in a loose and yet enchanting manner and yet they never seem disjointed. The movie opens with Mathieu throwing a bucket of water on Conchita. He is on the train to Paris and his fellow travellers include a woman, her daughter, an elderly gentleman and a psychologist,who is a dwarf. The milieu is cosy and tailor-made for a tale. All his actions, some of them smug and abhorrent are hilarious. Contrast this with the The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where a group of bourgeoisie men and women never actually manage to sit and have dinner for the very precise moment is interrupted by one event after another. In one incident, one of the couples whilst waiting for their guests, decide to make love in their garden for fear of being loud and in another they are interrupted by an army contingent who decide to hold army exercises. The couples are typically upper middle class and quite frivolous in what ever they do. Each scene works on it's own as a vignette, and a quirky episode is followed by a surreal dream followed by reality followed by some bizarre event or another.

In both movies, Bunuel attempts to show the hypocrisy of middle class values and manners and customs. In That Obscure Object of Desire, Conchita is actually treated like an object that Mathieu desires to sleep with and ignore her desires; it is almost that he is buying her, for his advances have nothing solemn about them. In The Discreet Charm, after each episode ends in a fiasco, the bourgeoisie group are shown walking on a highway as if without aim.

Common to both movies is Fernando Rey, who was once described as the last of the continentals. I would hate to imagine any one else play those roles. He has an air of disinterested smugness about him, as if being good and being bad are both boring things to do. His acting does not seem as acting like all for he seems naturally inclined towards such a performance. He is a natural charmer and portraying an upper class gent seems to be his born right. Angela Molina is certainly svelte and charming, almost seductively sexy while Carole Bouquet is disinterestedly casual about her own charms. The interiors, the decor, and the outdoors are magnificently beautiful. One can sometimes describe them as melancholic but on the whole, all of Bunuel's images are sexily lush, as if the beauty in itself is delicately surreal.

What one doesn't mind at times is the apparent simplicity of the stories but if you actually think, all these episodic vignettes have an underlying psychological claim for complexity. In both movies, Bunuel is wonderfully subversive and hard hitting for there are so many episodes wherein he actually leaves no institution without attacking it. Be it the Church or social
customs or bourgeoisie values and mores like marriage, Bunuel actually gnaws at the very essence of the hypocrisy that covers their outer shells. The dream sequences are actually dangerous territories for there, Bunuel charts waters that few have attempted to do before or after him. The claims for a psychological approach may not be entirely unfounded. If one considers the situations where Mathieu finds himself in with Conchita, the very idea seems surreal.

Bunuel actually pursues his usual search for exploring towards a particular end; here the object of exploration is desire. The imagery around which this is built is seemingly disarming because it seems frivolous at times but in actual manner is quite sinister. While Conchita seems to like Mathieu, she will not allow him to use her; he must win her affection. To do that, he must begin to like her and then love her, which is certainly difficult for Mathieu. It is difficult because the thinking that forms the background of his stable state is based on a patronising attitude towards such things - be it class distinctions, affection or women. And since Mathieu desires Conchita, and Conchita is certainly desirable, Bunuel plays with the psychological states of his characters and with those of his viewers. After all, if one thinks of desire, then where does it stop? Perhaps desire for a wrong thing is a wrong desire, but in one's inner mind so to say, these wrong desires are constantly pushed under the cover of lawful desires.

I must mention again with what I began.....that whatever we see or witness in a Bunuel movie is seductively beautiful. Hence, even in images that we might normally find repelling, in other places, in Bunuel world, they become erotic. Conchita played by Molina is very erotic, even a hand gesture from her can set ships launching. When both Mathieu and Conchita seemingly go up in flames, the scene appears beautiful, as if two people have not died but momentarily taken refuge in sexy flames. It is possible to be a slave to Bunuel's images ones entire life, to see from the prism of those images the ugliness of our own and surrounding images. That his imagery is described as surreal is a testimony to the beauty that he created. That he also dictates a political and moral end to his images is the highest degree of success for any artist.

The Unasked Question

2010-12-01T16:44:00.001Z

After you came out of your disputatious mood and settled down to a certain degree of repose, leaning your back against the window, quite unconsciously, more out of habit than anything else, you let loose your long brown hair and it fell on your shoulders, some strands shading your face, you started to roll some strands on your fingers, as your gaze settled on a spot on the floor and a calmness settled in your entire pose. After a while, as if by degrees but unhurriedly, you smiled, as if some thought or thoughts had lead to that smile, as if remembering something had lead to an inner knot being unraveled, and you smiled again, and your smile, that was my tremor.

You continued to linger in your reverie and I did not want to disturb you and then as if finally some indecision had been finally resolved, you looked at me and your face was so beautiful. But somehow, as if by magic, your earlier uncertainty had been replaced by a mellow sort of look in your eyes, as if you were repenting at not having made some resolve earlier and were thinking of doing something with the force of the autumnal winds that we could hear behind shut windows. And then quite suddenly, you declared that walking on cold rainy autumn nights is very romantic, and that only romantic people can indulge in such pursuits, you added, and that one must walk without aim on such nights, past all kinds of shops and business establishments, on all named and unnamed roads, familiar and unfamiliar streets, under lights and in shade, and that this way one gets to see what is under the skin of people.

Your hair was still on your shoulders and down your back too but now, you suddenly gathered it in your hands, more by habit than by any resolve I thought, and then gathered all the other unruly strands too, and cupped your hands and made a ball of your hair on the back of your head, like a resting snake. We must learn to walk at night in these crisp autumn nights you said, having gotten up by now, and you turned and opened the window that opens on the street, bringing in the noise of the city and the smell of falling rain. Walking at night is not the same as walking during the day, you said as you turned to look at me again, your fingers wet by the wet window sill, and it is also important to know who to walk with, you declared, getting ready to leave. I nodded in agreement but all that time I had been thinking of that earlier smile, that moment that had lead to that smile, and yet in spite of all my will, I could not ask you what had made you smile, that one question hung on my lips then.

In that frame of mind, I had thought that you were thinking of something or someone, and that an earlier uncertainty had resolved in favour of that thing or person, and that you had decided to become benevolent and giving; that some pattern on the floor had resolved it for you, that the talk of walking was merely an interruption you had invented to straighten your thoughts, that talking of autumn and winds and walking on cold autumn streets had lead you to resolve something that had been troubling you, that weather and its vagaries were never the sort of thing that you had allowed to affect yourself with, that my silence and my diffidence in themselves were the tools you could use to chisel at the hazy ends of your thoughts, that my silence and the rain were merely friends that helped you and gave you a helping hand. And in spite of all that and in spite of everything, that one unasked question hung on my lips then as it does now, the unasked question.

Giants and Toys

2010-11-29T18:08:00.001Z

In Yasuzo Masumura's Giants and Toys, the central female character is actually not quite so central. Her predicament is that she belongs to a working class environment, her father is actually in the shadow of her mother who is in the shadow of her daughter who is in the shadow of anonymous poverty. Chance brings her in contact with an ambitious businessman, whose fledgling company sales bring him about to think of an audacious idea to defeat his nearest rivals: use an ordinary Tokyo girl's face for an advert in selling their company's goods. The idea is not to use a model but to use an ordinary looking girl, so that the buying public can identify with her. The buying public are brainless he thinks, they are morons he believes, they go with the diktat of the market. Since consumerism is God, and consumers from various sections of society are devourers of goods, sticking them up with such a girl to identify will help improve sales. The sales improve, the girl is transformed from anonymity to a haute-bourgeois, but the plan does not work to script. Something must be done again.

The transformation of a simple Tokyo girl's entire outlook is as central here as is the mindless consumerism being critiqued for at no point are the company bosses even prepared to show any sympathy for this girl whose love interest in a young man working for the company is genuine and yet who does not realize that his interest is merely to cajole her into accepting this modelling scene. His ambition is to impress his boss; he is clearly interested in another woman who is working for his rival company. In this madcap scenario, everything is morally impaled; the man and his girl and the girl and her boss and the boss and his boss are all interested in using our young naive model into thinking that their main interest is to help her. What she fails to realize is that she is herself becoming what they don't want her to be: strong minded and independent, some one who can make her own decisions. So, when the moment of truth comes, she refuses to accept appearing in their new ad campaign, even after using her love interest, for by now, she has fallen in love with a young man from another company who has now become her manager.

The end is extremely farcical. The boss collapses and coughs up blood because he cannot cope with the strain and his morally upright young understudy, initially defiant of his morally compromised stance, actually puts on a space suit as an ad gimmick as he walks stone faced through a busy Tokyo street, almost like an ordinary street peddler, showing off his company wares, egged on by his old girl friend to actually smile. Our model has faded into anonymity, she is in the hands of her manager, who has already started her exploitation and will continue to exploit her. Giants and Toys is a satire and very well made. The colour scheme is surreal, almost lush with colours. The acting is good but it doesn't demand greatness. The crime stories that I wrote in connection with Fassbinder's work is at full play here. The savagery of modern consumerism, the complete disregard for any human or moral value is shown in all its naked brutality. The mindless competition and its fallout in exploiting young people and public alike is depicted in its shameless hypocrisy, exemplified very well by the official photographer who has no regard for employers of any kind nor for the models used.

The use of women as no more than mere objects is supplanted by the crudeness of the whole system that thrives on such images. The distinction that Masumura would like to drive between a traditional and so -called modern society is very clear here. Every one wants to make a fast buck , as they say. Eventually the poor model too becomes lethal and abjectly inept in choosing her boy friend who is also a savage parasite. Everything has turned upside down. This is a bad bad world and Masumura, even in a frivolous manner is extremely dangerous as he shows the total breakdown of any values. Every one is in the dark. And nothing has changed since this world began. And nothing will. This movie is quite forward of its times and stylistically terrific.

the rain fell slow, down on all the roofs of uncertainty

2010-11-28T17:36:00.000Z

I miss you

2010-11-26T21:02:00.000Z

This song could perhaps end all songs.

Bela Tarr: some thoughts

2010-11-25T13:24:00.000Z

for Roxana, who is a mind reader

Perhaps an Eastern European or specifically a Hungarian Post-apocalypse will look exactly as Bela Tarr shows us in his movies. Deserted villages and towns, empty vacant roads, tired and muddy during the day and then forbidding and forlorn at night. The street lights don't light anything except a sinister emptiness, a forbidding solitude. Or may be the apocalypse has struck and left the remaining few survivors, who seem guilt ridden and as empty and vacant as the streets. The houses they inhabit are dark and cold, one can feel the damp rise and the outer mist and fog somehow exudes inside not just the bricks and wood but the nerves and bones of the remaining few. The only places that show signs of life are the public houses, where a hedonistic and rampant kind of drinking goes on. It is a kind of senselessness of the body or bodies, wherein the people alive or seemingly so are living without any visible remnants of outwardly volition.

The bawdy and almost senseless drinking exudes nothing except a paralysis of mind and senses, a numbing of the very souls of these numb people. Since there is no one on the streets, there are a few in these public houses. There are some performers too. This is so in the long dance sequence in Satantango. That dance sequence typifies this emotional and moral malaise. A different kind of routine follows in Werkmeister Harmonies. Here, the drunks perform, and such is the physical affliction, they do so inspite of themselves. The collaboration of Tarr and krasznahorkai should not be overlooked. As in Harmonies and later on in Satantango, the novelist Krasznohorkai achieves a depiction of an inner restlessness that is embodied in the behaviour of the bodies concerned: In his War & War and in The Melancholy of Resistance, it is existential concerns that are the main theme of his novels. It is as if everything is broken and cannot be fixed. Seen from the Post- Soviet perspective, it is as though the long communist or dictatorial regimes have left the populace devoid of what they might have possessed. Krasznohorkai has exploited that anguish in his novels without giving them the music that one wants to hear again and again. Or in other words, any comparison with Kafka is fallacious for Kafka's world is essentially religious.

Existential despair can perhaps arise out of a crisis of thought or else after a collapse of previously held cognitions. It cannot suddenly substitute for all other ills. If communist states deprived their citizens of certain essential freedoms, it is because ideas about citizenship were not allowed to thrive. However, for any kind of alternate ideologies to flourish, which also allow certain people to become spiritual, a certain space for discourse is essential. It is perhaps that space that can be exploited in various art forms. Personally, I find depiction of existential crises in fiction or in cinema quite boring. This alienation business seems thoroughly middle class. Get on with life seems a better option rather than depict neurotic females like Antonioni did. This alienation bogey has now been overplayed long enough. It implies a very cunning hypocrisy as I see it. The place where Tarr succeeds is actually in depicting the alienation of the entire landscape from man completely. His places are always cold. The weather in Werkmeister is a character too as in Satantango. Such a device is perhaps used as a personifying element. The frozen nature of the night, the lack of electricity, the scarcity of drinking water, here and in other locations are thus used to reflect a kind of spiritual tristresse. It thus seems, after observing this world, that, existential despair is an occupation of the middle classes. The working classes can only act as a back drop on this essentially middle class business of angst.

Compare this to the bleak landscapes of Antonioni which are stylish, almost like paintings and his women, who are quite good looking and depressed. The stylish city scapes reflect a growing post war distaste of modern amenities. No cause for the sadness of Antonioni's women is obvious. It seems as if the very material advances that have made their lives easy are depressing them. In La avventura, as soon as one main character disappears, her friend, the central female character, never flinches whilst being kissed by friends fiancé. That depression induced by technological advances can be balanced by promiscuous sexual acts seems acceptable to Antonioni's neurotic creations. In Tarr however, it is as if the entire community of people have surrendered after witnessing an event of enormous magnitude. Here, bawdy sexuality is the norm rather than an exception.

It is entirely possible that Tarr shows us a moral fibre that totalitarian rule has produced or that energy sapping state of the soul that only allows a certain movement of the limbs and permits nothing other than hedonism. However, to situate Tarr only in a totalitarian space or Hungarian space will be an injustice to his work. In essence, his movies depict a state of men and women in slumber, in lassitude. That such states of mind can exist is his concern. He is also concerned with the lack of any positive or life affirming stance on the part of these souls or that they lack souls entirely? Tarr thus depicts, if symbolically the state of men and women who have taken a back seat and are thus virtually waiting for a messiah. In Satantango, this clearly seemed to me to be the case and in the first moment of Harmonies, the main character is defintely giving a demonstration. Too much is written nowadays about the effect of politics and social policies on modern conditions of our lives but unless the change comes from within, there can be no fruit in waiting for some one to come and effect a change.

Tarr is a supreme artist. His work demonstrates the effect of moral ineptitude. The bawdiness and the ugliness he shows is not something he relishes but something that he finds revolting to say the least. However, he is also a realist and in his portrayals, he shows very artistically the damaged fabric of our times. Inevitably, this will lead to existential interpretations of his work, especially because of his collaborations with Krasznohorkai. One would like to see these movies outside of a specific landscape and linger and think that essentially all human experiences are similar.

the loneliness of the long distance runner

2010-11-24T18:27:00.001Z

In its current manifestation, British cinema, with only very rare exceptions, has become prey to the kind of thing that is labeled as political correctness. This sort of enforced attitude does not allow the creation of any genuine piece of criticism nor does it allow those conditions to thrive that allow vigorous critiques of state or cultural trends. Once a particular attitude is considered more useful, from a point of view of non-confrontation, then whether it is literature or cinema, genuine works of art will never arise. This is in contrast to times in Britain, in the early and late sixties, where at least in cinema, certain movies were made that allowed the expression of certain points of view, be it those of people who were marginalized because of class or other less conspicuous distinctions. Since art without any political tones is merely a pose, it is only in true works of art that political manifestations can become evident.One of these movies is based on a play by Alan Sillitoe and is called The loneliness of the long distance runner.

The movie was very popular I understand in the sixties and surrounds the times at a reformatory of 'an angry young man', Colin, who gets sent there following theft at a bakery. At the Borstal, the man in charge realizes that the young man has potential as an athlete and assigns him the task of winning a long distance cross country run against the local public school boys. Hence, the confrontation is quite obvious, the outcast against the establishment boys and the movie makes no bones about it. Colin whilst practising his runs, lapses into reveries and thus previous events are told in a flashback. From a poor background with a dead father and a working class mother with other siblings, c lapses into petty crime and theft. His attitude is typical of a young man who sees no future in a society where the workers, like his dad used to be, have no future of actually realizing their true potential. The rebellion against established mores and against enforced class distinctions is very obvious to the troubled young man.

"You play ball with us and we will play ball with you" is the first warning shot that the Borstal boys hear. Colin past allegiances , to his family and friends, his girl friend filter through his mind and yet, in a very menacing but vague manner, his acts of petty crime are tokens of resistance against a system that perpetuates class distinctions. This is shown strikingly in a scene when he and a friend lower the volume of a newly acquired television and mimic and laugh at the posh accent on the television. When Colin finally participates in the race, he leaves his nearest 'posh' opponent a mile behind but decides not to cross the finishing line. He chooses to wait as a spectator and even makes way as his opponent wins the race, much to the stunned dismay of the Borstal school authorities, who are in a way, wounded and bemused. Colin's act of defiance seems to him a signal manner not only to react against the establishment inside and outside the reformatory, but also to show an alliance with his fellow detainees, who fear that he may have turned to the 'other side'.

The performance of Tom Courtenay as Colin is a master class in restraint and quiet menace. The bleak country side shown, the English town of the sixties, in the Midlands, the working class set up of his family and the general aura that surrounds the characters is extremely authentic. This movie does what a thousand other books and movies will usually fail to achieve. The established order that Colin fights against may have changed as the country has changed in the last few decades but the interior structures of power are still virtually untouched. The movie ends with Colin shunned by the Borstal authorities but he is at least content in reverting to what he sees as his real self, which is an affirmation of his acts of resistance against authority but inevitably, his lapse into loneliness, which such acts can and usually lead to. At one point Colin rages and says: "Do you know what I'd do if I had the whip hand? I'd get all the coppers, governors, posh whores, penpushers, army officers and members of parliament and I'd stick them up against this wall and let them have it 'cause that's what they'd like to do to blokes like us."

The loneliness of Colin is not merely a romantic one but extremely real, situated as it is in his 'times' but also outside that of a pure 'time' or place. In that space, in the realization of that resistance, his loneliness is worth the price he pays.

all stories are crime stories

2010-11-23T20:32:00.001Z

All stories are crime stories, so said Fassbinder once. In his world, or as he saw it, Fassbinder envisages people using emotions not just blackmailing weapons but sometimes as cunning ploys to extort. This extortion is either then used for a material advantage or for emotional gain. The person who gets used isn't always usable but is in a state where he or she is at a disadvantage. Fundamentally, Fassbinder sees these situations as crimes that people commit against each other. We can also see everyday situations precisely as situations where we actually take advantage of people who are in one way or another either dependent on us financially or emotionally or as subservient to our inner desires, whims or fancies. I do not see Fassbinder's claims as extravagant, in that he dramatizes situations to an extent and we see a melodrama and the criminal use, if one is permitted to say, of that melodrama.

Even in non-women films, Fassbinder acutely asks the same relentless question. In his 'women' films like is Petra Von Kant or Lili Marleen, the women are shown to use their emotionality to a certain end. Once a character is perceived as weak, then the other person will go out and eventually destroy him or her. Change this to a more broader social situation, say the role of guest workers in Germany and the same ethos is shown at work. In essence, once a person is pushed against the wall, and there is no way that this person is given any space to maneuver, that in itself constitutes a crime.

In Fox and his Friends, where Fassbinder himself played the leading role, money is clearly a weapon that is used as a fulcrum in an emotional relation. If Fox had no money, which he does acquire after winning a lottery, he would not have gained entry into the upper-bourgeois world he finds himself in. He does not choose the change of class but falls in love with a charming man. However, the charming man uses Fox emotionally and takes him only as an object of love in bed but does not ever forget to remind him of his class differences. Once Fox has been deprived of all his lottery money, he no longer is of any use to said people. His whole emotionality is thus shown as amounting to nothing other than something that can be taken advantage of. If Fox had not fallen in love, he could have charted a different course for himself. However, once he has fallen in love, his emotion is treated farcically by his lover, who has no use for a working class fair ground talking fox.

Fassbinder does not just hint at an emotional difference between the so-called lovers but also, once Fox is destroyed, the lover' dad hints that "in principle, it is the only way of dealing with them". Hence, class differences are also shown as a tool for exploitation but also as a tool necessary for doing so. Love thus serves only as fodder for continuing exploitation, be it Fox or others. Hence, an emotion which we seemingly accept as benign and important actually ends up as distancing us from those who either pretend to or we think we need to love or protect. Love thus ends as a weapon that alienates us from the loved one and becomes an object of mere brandishment. It is thus sharp as a knife and gets waved considerably in our face. It is mostly sharper than a knife and the word is subsequently quite misused.

Fassbinder's treatment is to show its vicarious use, not its total uselessness. In general terms, he was a very romantic man and only a person blind to colour and sentiment would refuse to see how he created movies that are artistic and very politically conscious. In all his important concerns, this usage of people occupies a prominent place and the viewer should never choose to ignore its importance. If a person is strong, then should the person not fall into any kind of emotional state? Is strength hence an ability to ward off all emotions and stay away from all sources that may lead to such anxieties? Fox betrays himself to the extent that he does not think he is being manipulated. Fox does not betray himself because he falls in love.

Love and Anarchy

2010-11-22T15:59:00.003Z

Lina Wertmuller's movie is a lush poem, a desperate poem, a crazy poem. The first scene, the first opening is the beginning of anarchy, then violence, a wide expanse followed by the burst of love and a boy's question: Mama, what is an anarchist?" The anarchist in question, takes refuge in a whorehouse, itself the abode of a revolutionary sympathiser. The house itself, a magnificent picture of art and image, a virulent cacophony of sounds and thighs and breasts and voices. Sin and holiness, flesh and the unholy, our anarchist unsure and feeble, frightened and tremulous and woe upon woe, in the throes of love now.

An image of lushness and riches, loud and colourful. The violent unhappiness of men who fall in love with prostitutes, an anarchist in love with a prostitute. "Let us make love without staring at each other", he gets advised and later on, as the day dawns, he is not woken up after a night of love making and the intended assassination target, Mussolini, leaves unharmed. The arrest follows and so does his death. The lover is bereft and besides herself and the world looks.

This is the first Wertmuller movie that I have seen and its energy, its humour and its frantic lushness is a sight to behold. The acting, particularly by Giancarlo Giannini and Melato as his aide is simply wonderful. The whole cast has a manic edge to them and the springboard for activity is shown in all its vibrancy. Their is humour here and it is not without its comic edge but it clearly shows how a common man can be used in any political setup by any political party an then abandoned. It does not help if the protagonist, if he can be called that, falls in love. love is itself an anarchic activity and two anarchies are two too many. A wonderful movie.

true love is without conditions

2010-11-19T20:48:00.004Z

true love is without conditions you always said,
night or day, before dawn or at dusk,
the lover's wrist or the lover's waist
must be equal music.
we must kill ourselves before this word is lipped,
we must whip ourselves before love is lived,
we must be ready to die at this altar you always said,
love is not for everyone.
love tears us rips us rends bare our nerves you said,
the knocks it gives the heartbeats heartaches are sweet
you always said. it is murder it is an injustice,
love is night it is darkness it is day.
the traces it leaves its marks are dark you always said,
they are inside look no more,
the moth that kills itself the flame its madness
is love, look no more.
and the emptiness at night restless hope you always said,
is love. the long list of complaints, the long nights
the long days every injustice pales before its
merciless hooves, you said.

Yasuzo Masumura

2010-11-18T19:41:00.001Z

It has been noted in influential film circles that the cinema of Yasuzo Masumura is the cinema of fanatics. It can imply that one can become a Masumura fanatic or that one can only watch his movies fanatically or that it is of fanatics.. Of the Japanese film masters of iconic status, Masumura should not linger far behind. Fame, that fickle thing relies on many factors. But I am sure Masumura would not mind that. The corpus of his work is luminous. It is my intention to write down a few misplaced thoughts about his work in general and about two movies in particular.

It can be said that Masumura's cinema is a cinema of subversion. By that I do not mean that his movies touch on the usual social alienation theme or social wars that have blotted all post-war and post-colonial societies in general. By that I think I mean the methods of cinematic portrayal, the very acts of catching on screen, with the lasting thuds of big hammers, the essence of characterization, characters that remain with us after art house cinema doors are shut at night or those that remain with us to torture us. I may say without any ounce of exaggerated prolixity that the character of the nurse Nishi, played by Wakao Ayako, the sublimely beautiful, the stunningly beautiful Ayako, in Red Angel, has begun to affect me since these last few days. I mean, I am affected by her discomfiture, I am tortured that she is much tortured.

We claim sometimes that we like imagery in cinema, for instance the Tarkovskian image or the despotic imagery of Herzog but surely, it doesn't mean anything without a story? Masumura says: "Some believe more in the image, others believe in the story. Personally I believe in the story. Because images aren’t absolute, one can’t express everything with them." The stretching of a story, for after all a story is a story, it is in the uncomfortable distance of that stretching that Masumura starts in discomforting the viewer. Personally I like imagery much, but would prefer Pasolini to Tarkovsky any day. There are stories behind the images aren't there? Nature is always malignant. Rain falls and makes us wet, nearly always, except certain rains that never fall.

Red Angel

is set against the back drop of the Sino-Japanese war. Nishi, played by Wakao, is a young nurse who is raped by soldiers one night, and later she leaves for a field hospital where she falls in love with Okabe, a doctor, who is disillusioned with war in general. He saves many lives and yet also cripples many by life saving amputations. On returning to her base, Nishi decides in favour of giving sexual comfort to a double amputee, for that soldier no longer feels like a man. Nishi takes him out, invites him for a steam bath and tells him that he can do anything to her. Next morning, the soldier leaps to his death. Back with Okabe, Nishi declares her love for him and he discloses his morphine addiction. She wants him to make her into a woman and he declares that he is no longer a man. Cholera breaks out and the two withdraw into Okabe's room. Nishi ties him up refusing to inject him with morphine and later, man again, the two must burn together. Out on the front together, the Japanese camp is attacked by the enemy, the Japanese are routed with Nishi as the only remaining survivor. She finds Okabe in the rubble and falls on his chest.

I am not concerned with any indictment of war in Red Angel. Frankly, these things are boring. This world is past any sense of justice. What must concern us now is only how individuals can behave during wars and in periods of inactive bloodshed. Consider the war crimes in Iraq, consider the photographic portrayal of imagery from Iraq, then consider individual responsibility again. The world that Masumura chooses to show us is a sado-masochistic world at times. Once Nishi is raped and she decides to get on with things, after she discloses it to her head nurse who reminds her about a war, everything is upside down. Later, her assent to sexually serve a soldier who cannot touch his manhood, and Okabe's refusal to consider amputees as men, shows the almost militarist regimes in their minds. The scenes in Okabe's chambers are wonderfully claustrophobic, the imagery is essentialist, dark and despairing. Pour me a drink Nishi, pour me more, says Okabe.

One of the lasting images of this movie is the erotic grandeur of Wakao Ayako, as steam pours forth from the bath that she has invited the amputee soldier in. This is grand cinema at its grandest best. You feel her pain but more than that, you feel the soldier's pain too. There is a painful whip in Masumura'a hands, as he whips the viewer. All militarist societies have people that carry whips, and all societies are essentially totalitarian. This is erotic solitude and Wakao seethes and burns. The steam rises, do anything you want says Nishi, everything is thus lost. And later, with Okabe, a genuine bond develops but one wonders how genuine it is. Outside the shells fall and inside Nishi, one sacrifice after another.

Masumura's Ayako Wakao is a strong character and in general, his women are very strong. However, even though his women have a streak of individualism, a streak to reach to some end, they are basically exploited women. Women are no more than commodities he shows. War or peace, Masumura shows how everything gets inverted in the name of ideology. Even an ordinary oppositive view can be subverted by different conditions that are chosen by people over one another. Masumura says:"I don't try to portray women. It's just that women are the more human. Men only live for women, all their lives they carry their burden the way a horse pulls his carriage, and then they die of a heart attack. Only by focusing on women can we express humanity. I don't choose women so I can talk about women. I'm not a specialist of women's issues like Mizoguchi is."

Nishi and Okabe withdraw into the dark enclosed solitude of his chamber, surrounded by gunfire and falling shells. Next to morphine and Okabe's impotency, seethes the raging torrent of Nishi's beauty. The interior, so sparse and so war like in its essentialism, whimpers as the two rage against each other and in a way, against the war itself. I should have met you in Tokyo in earlier times, pines Okabe, I love you. Love or passion, in the hermetic solitude of Okabe's chamber, Masumura triumphs in depicting the sadistic tortures of hell and the impotent loneliness of people.

distant like dreams

2010-11-16T20:21:00.004Z

Deep and dense,
like a deep dense forest in one of my forgotten dreams,
your voice calls me in a language that
I do not know.
I struggle to understand what you mean as
our lips and our fingers and our eyes meet.
Fever is sweet.
I try to recall that moment of love
but I remember nothing now.
Love never lingers for long, nor passion.
I often think how your voice used to sound, your stress on certain words,
but everything is vague.
I remember your colours often but everything is slippery like life itself.
What forgiveness now if I cannot remember clearly how your
eyes would colour at the threat of my touch?

Virgin Spring

2010-11-15T17:17:00.004Z

Bergman's Virgin Spring is based on a medieval legend and has spawned a few successful movies itself. Whilst the story essentially details the struggle between good and evil, the master stroke lies in actually hemming in the viewer and obscuring his or her judgment. Objectively looking at what we see is essentially hard here. The movie makes you fill with rage, you want to do something yourself. Is there a clear distinction between pure good and pure evil and do such things exist? Can one be completely good or completely evil? Such are the thoughts it forces on us, such is the essence.

A remote forest setting, a household filled with ascetic Christian folk, a very Christian household. Tore, played by the magnificent Max Von Sydow lives with his wife and daughter Karin. Karin is very young and is shown as the very picture of radiant innocence. In fact, she is innocence itself, and the other occupant is her step-sister who is pregnant out of wedlock, bitter and shamed, she is an outcast within the house but not to Tore and Karin. Karin must go to the nearby church and offer candles and must leave on horseback. She decides to takes ingri with her. The landscape, wild but pure and yet a shot of a crow, hark back to myth and legend and a forboding of things to come? Ingeri worships the Norse deity Odin and whilst preparing food for the day, sandwiches a big frog into a loaf of bread, unaware to Karin. Ingeri is bitter, we can understand, alreday the lines are drawn between Karin and her, Karin the beautiful, the radiant and innocent and ingri the sullied, the sullen.

On their way, a one -eyed man, perhaps a Norse priest and Ingeri wants her to put a spell on three traveling men. Ingri wants a kind of revenge it seems and escapes whilst Karin has left on her own. Soon Karin is stopped by three herdsmen, one of them a very young boy, and in her naive innocence, allows herself to be coaxed in sharing her lunch with them. their designs are evil, why cannot she see that? The viewer squirms, karin is still smiling. and then they brutally rape her and kill her, watched by Karin, a small rock in her hand, crying and suffering and yet paralyzed into inaction. The herdsmen leave Karin, after stripping her of her beautiful dress and take refuge in her own home, where after supplication and dinner, they settle for the night. One of them, in the early hours of the morn, offers to sell Karin's dress to the mother. The mother? A scene of brutal simplicity and then Tore, informed and tortured, decides to take revenge. He kills all three and then suffers more. Later when he discovers Karin's body and lifts her head, a spring gushes out. He vows to build a church there, to redeem them all.

What interests me most after watching this drama is not the story per se but the ingredients besides it. Bergman succeeds in altering the objective perspective. You end up as a partisan. Karin has been sullied and revenge must be swift. But are we right in talking about revenge? Should there be a thing called revenge? What does it achieve? Is it possible to be at peace with one self without and with revenge? There is no doubt about Karin's innocence but is she all pure as opposed to Ingri who too is innocent but impure? What is purity and then what is virginity? Who sets the dominant tone for such matters? And yet a normal emotion of rage and fury will follow such an atrocity. Herein, Bergman shows us this household of pious Christian folk, the wife burning herself with candles, such is her penance. And then, she wants revenge too, as does Tore.

Doesn't he tear down a birch and lash himself with it and ask Ingri to get him a butcher's knife? The most interesting aspects again are the usual Bergman characters, landscape being one. The ominous nature of his settings in general and in this drama in particular add to the sinister events being played. To say that nature alone is pure and indifferent is an extreme view too. In the hands of nature, we are but flies, as flies to wanton boys. The lack of dialogue when Tore kills the men and boy adds to the heightened severity of those scenes. It is as id all primeval urges had gushed and stopped there. The suffering of Tore and his wife is all too evident and the lack of words dulls our objectivity.

I do not personally know how one can behave in such circumstances or how one should. The rule of law is a modern invention, a familiar construct. Justice is as evanescent as those Nordic clouds and as slippery as the tomes of law. Morality or Christian values or any other values cannot actually dissipate the violent anguish of Tore or his wife nor bring back the innocence of Karin or her youth. I do not wish to know what her innocence is and whether she is pure and I cannot say how purely evil those herdsmen were. I cannot safely say that the Norse deity Odin has no powers. All I can suffer with and see is Tore as he tears down the birch, as he lashes himself with its branches, as he cries and suffers and as Karin struts on her horse. All I can think of is Ingeri in her silent suffering. There seme to be no answers.

35 shots of rum

2010-11-12T20:11:00.000Z

A poem speaks to us with words and the words convey images and feelings. The moving image is a poem already. In the clip below, from 35 Rhum, Denis achieves a lot without words. What we see is a poem in the eyes and the poetry of the body. Dance opens chains and ties a few more. The ethno-urban tone of the setting is clear. The movie is an adaptation of Ozu's Late Spring. What you see below is a poem. Words are quite un-necessary subsequently.

Hour of the Wolf

2010-11-11T20:31:00.001Z

The Bergman world exists here in all it's hermetic essence, an island, a couple and wind swept shores. Johan, an artist, a painter, has vanished, his wife looks at the camera and speaks to us, after we hear the noises of film making, the directors voice too. Johan has vanished but Alma will continue to stay on the island, why has Johan vanished, she does not understand. Told from her perspective and his dagbok, Hour of the Wolf traces Johan's descent into paranoia and madness. He sees figures and hears people talk to him and follow him. It is a descent into a psychotic world, which his wife begins to share with him at times. Often he is chased by people, talks to them. Are these visitations real? And then a visit from a man who supposedly owns the island and an invitation for dinner at his castle. The Gothic ingredients are thus complete. But not before that a visit from a past lover, Veronica Vogler. She will be at the castle too, he is told.

The castle dinner hosted by the rich family is a great favourite of mine. With the camera panning in arc like swishes, Johan drinks and suffers, Alma sees him drink and suffer, and later, he defends the creed of the true artist. Back home, Johan tries to kill Alma and Alma flees. Johan is at the castle again where he tries making love to Veronica's corpse, who wakes up and breaks into hysterical laughter. Johan is then attacked by the castle occupants, and in true horror style, nibbled at. Alma later on faces the camera and wonders if she could have done more. Johan runs away from the castle, and vanishes on the way. Alma helps construct the events leading to Johan' disintegration.

The movie, I have read has autobiographical tones. Bergman and Liv Ullman who stars as Alma were in a long relationship. The relation was tense and Bergman had his moments of alienation from his partner. The movie restores some of his artistic concerns on to the screen. How faithful can an artist be to others whilst being faithful to his creed? The person living close to another person starts taking on the characteristics of the loved one, is a constant refrain in this movie. Alma asks that question many times. What should be sacrificed for the artist and what is the nature of this sacrifice? We wonder as Alma does. Alma starts seeing a 216 year old woman who later on says she is in her seventies. Does Alma completely begin to identify with her husbands' inner life? She starts reading his diary and to what extent does she allow herself to be swayed on to his beliefs? I s that a voluntary act and how voluntary is it? Does Alma have much choice?IT is clear that some events from Johans' past haunt and trouble him. He sees himself in a homoerotic situation with a young boy whom he dashes against the rocks too. All seems elusive.

One of the most erotic and abiding images in this movie personally for me is when Johan, sitting on his own trying to paint feels a presence. From the left side of the screen we see a figure approach. Then we see legs, a feminine figure and as she gets closer, we see feet, as they approach and she sits down near Johan, and then bares her breast to him. It is Veronica Vogler, played by the hauntingly beautiful Ingrid Thulin. There are some beautiful scenes on this windswept island and the castle scenes are enacted with a lot of Hollywood panache and perhaps a parody of the genre. Max Von Sydow plays the tormented artist. I saw him recently in a Di Caprio movie and thought he still is magnificent. Ullman plays the wife and tormented soul par excellence as usual. She bares lets you on to her though there are moments of understanding. Her seductive charms seemed to be lost on Johan who was lost in a different world.

Hour of the Wolf is a movie that has the usual Bergman characteristics and characters. It may also be very close to him personally as his expression of his own troubles as an artist. It is beautifully filmed and demands more than passing attention.

Mamma Roma

2010-11-10T13:04:00.005Z

Mamma Roma opens with an image or rather with a painting or the subversion of a painting. Christ's last supper and here Mamma Roma herself, loud and ebullient, inviting pigs to her ex- pimp's wedding feast. Pasolini begins with aggression and a distance from the first scene, and from a distance, the shot of a long wide table. Mamma Roma punning and singing, and we are suddenly privy to her world, this ex-prostitute, who wants to take her son Ettore to the outskirts of Rome, to bring him up as an untainted young man, away from the taint of her ex-profession. Near Rome, the recurrent theme, the ruins, the empty fields, the collections of garbage and rubbish, cathedral domes, long serene and clear shot of a clear sky and Mamma Roma, nameless, Mamma Roma to every one, to her son too, unknowing of her mother's profession of the past. The new scene finds Ettore hanging with bums as his mother opens a stall and sells vegetables now. Her ambition is to graduate to the petit -bourgeois, she attends the church, her eyes are on the daughters of respectable bourgeoisie families, she does what mothers do.

Watching Mamma Roma is nothing short of a drug, an addiction. The two shots of Mamma Roma walking towards us, long sequences, in the dark, the night, delivering two monologues, one crisp and bitingly sarcastic, the other mellow and melancholic, behind her the lights of Rome, nothing visible except darkness and as she walks, she looks at the camera, directly at us, joined by other citizens of the night, who walk and who she leaves behind, the sinuous walk, the serpentine ease, the following gaze, Mamma Roma dares to shock. In the second of these shots, Mamma Roma says that she has an awful ache in her stomach, like I ate my heart out. Ettore has become what she didn't want him to, a common thief, a bum. She tries to lure him away from Bruna, a girl he gives gifts to, who has slept with all Rome. Ettore driving with his mother on his new bike, with his mother clasping his waist tight, I remember this image too, the defiance of her eyes, her language.

Pasolini's A violent life, that I read last year, has similar characters, bums and thieves and prostitutes and pimps, the hangers on, the ruins outside Rome, the fights, the scrapes the dispossession, the marginalized. Mamma Roma wants a piece of that respectability, for her son, for herself. However, Carmine, her ex-pimp returns, he threatens, she must walk the streets again, the highway as Mamma Roma describes it, otherwise he will disclose it to Ettore. The long second monologue shot follows this piece of blackmail, a battered sad Mamma Roma this time, very morose, very bitter. Then Ettore gets caught stealing a radio, gets locked and tortured in a police cell, strapped, almost crucified. Here Pasolini subverts the crucifixion image, the shot is a horizontal one, Ettore cries for mercy, Mamma he cries, save me. Later Mamma Roma, eating bread dipped in milk, looking at the threatening suburban landscape outside, cries for her son, he was innocent she claims, why him?

Ettore's body language is very striking. He sleep -walks through the movie, he seems lazy, very disinterested, not caring at all. There is a lethargy in his body, a lack of motivation in his movements, it translates in how he moves, how he walks. Later he has a bright fever, he is almost besides himself, and later still, he seems restored to himself but suffering as he is strapped now, tortured, bruised, he dies. With Ettore too, Mamma Roma tangos, as she teaches him to, echoes of an Oedipal type, clasping to his waist later on, we are never told who his father is, how he was raised, as she claims Ettore, he must get out of this useless way of his, learn a trade, after all she would get on the cross for her.

Anna Magnani's performance in this movie can be described as a tour de force, a mesmerizing performance, a piece of acting that confirms the power of cinema, a powerhouse character that she fills with the oddities of her laugh, the black messy hair, the humour, the loud voice, her songs, her sorrow her ambition, her desires her contradictions. Magnani's performance in Mamma Roma is one of the most powerful in all cinema and can only be described with adjectival prolixity. The mind numbs when she walks, little black bags under her eyes, Mamma Roma of the suburbs, of the streets, of dark nights and calm mornings, of the vegetable stall, of figs and artichokes and cunning little schemes, the donna of the streets, the mother, the balancing trapeze artist.

It is all to easy to say this is a movie of social protest. What sets this movie apart from such movies is Pasolini's superior art, for in one blow, he delivers everything. It is perhaps fair to say that he is a Marxist and Catholic in one given moment, a skeptic and mystic combined. His images are those that he revers and subverts. Pasolini combines herein his manifold genius of a philosopher and politician, the writer and camera aesthete and above all, Pasolini the poet, Pasolini the dangerous poet. Mamma Roma looks outside from the window of Ettore's prison cell, restrained by the fruit sellers and other bums, as she tries to throw herself out of the window. The last shot, the most dangerous, the most powerful, the most subversive, Rome at a distance, the emptiness between the two, the dome of a cathedral, the indifferent haze of the day, the loneliness of Mamma Roma, the futility of her ambitions.

Nights of Cabiria

2010-11-09T18:16:00.004Z

Cabiria has been a prostitute for as long as she remembers. Once she remembers, she had long black hair, it fell to her shoulders, she would go out with her madre, life was different then, she was young. Who can she trust now? She was nearly drowned by her pimp and her money was stolen not long ago, this is her life, exploited by all, pimp or no pimp. It takes a hypnotist to unravel her life, her desires, talk about her madre, her long black hair falling to her shoulders. And now this man, this new man, what does he want? He appears well meaning, brown skinned with black hair, she is afraid but what the hell, Cabiria must try again. As Cabiria walks alone, in the end, desolate and heart broken, robbed off all her money, the new lover just another fraud, another disappointment, she looks at the camera, image of broken hopes and dreams, and some steel too. The smile says it all. The last scene is worth millions.

Fellini's Nights of Cabiria is pre-fantasy Fellini, extremely brutal in his treatment of the themes that were his concern around that time of his film making. The script was co-authored by Pasolini and has some extremely memorable lines, some very memorable scenes. I like Cabiria in the rain, I like Cabiria walking and running, with Chaplin like energy. I adore the last scene. I can watch it endlessly. The last scene is a poem. The performance by Giulietta Masina is phenomenal. She owns the character. She reminds me of Anna Mignani from Mamma Roma, in the certitude of her performance. She exemplifies that performance, that character. She is filled with solitude, she is a solitary person. Her smile hides her solitude, her loneliness. She has always been betrayed, she must live in Rome or thereabouts. Not for her is a family life, a country home, a husband, children. No, Cabiria must live to fulfill that destiny, the fierce solitude of that life.

Nights of Cabiria is a great movie and some scenes are poems in themselves. Truly a memorable film, Nights of Cabiria is relentlessly melancholic, a very sad movie about a desperately unhappy person.

oh fairouz!

2010-11-05T20:12:00.000Z

Tokyo Monogatari

2010-11-04T18:01:00.000Z

At first everything seems all right. An elderly couple visit their grown up children in Tokyo and nothing appears to be amiss. Then Ozu Yasujiro shows us what looks like a wound. With a knife, he starts scraping the edges of this seemingly benign looking wound and then, relentlessly, he plunges this knife into this festering festering wound. The elderly couple are welcome at their son's house but he has no time for them. Neither does her daughter. They visit one child first and then the other and the only person who takes time out for them is their dead son's widow. The couple are soon booked to visit a spa, which proves a lonely and trying time for them. They return to find their daughter as unwelcoming and as busy as before. The children are considerate but too busy. In the end the couple return home and the ailing mother dies. The children come late but leave soon afterwards as their busy lives command them. And so life moves on.

The most striking things are not that the children are busy but that the couple are resigned to see their hopes dashed. In this resignation is a mix of hope and longing, mixed as both are from events in a distant past, when their children where young, when their children were theirs. Ozu is never benign in his portrayal of this theme. Far from it, when the elderly couple cannot sleep at the spa because of all the revelry going on there, both husband and wife lie fanning themselves, looking resolutely at the ceiling, the husband in his patient fury, the wife in her impotent resignation. He gets up in defiance of something and the next mesmirizing scene, both facing a silent sea is an indelible image in all cinema. It has not just rage written all over it but conveys the futility of all life, all relationships, all hopes and all expectations. the elderly man, played by Chieko Higashiyama is a portrait of stolid acceptance of the couple's circumstances. Children and parents drift apart he reminds his young unmarried daughter, he knows no other way to describe it.

Ozu's use of ellipsis is most marked in his narrative structure, for the journey to Tokyo or from Tokyo to the cheap spa town are never shown. The low shots, famously called the tatami shots are extremely uncomfortable to the viewer, for not only do they convey stillness, they also convey a total lack of resolution. There are no panning shots or at least I didn't notice many. The poetry of everything conveyed is evident but the most important bits are left unsaid, the silent gesture, the unsaid word, the unwhispered hope, matched in technique by the lighting, the shots, the movement-less camera. The last scene to me, in which a boat lies loose on the sea and what we can describe as the roar of a train seemed to me nothing less than angry hissing. " Life is a disappointment", says the old man.

It is usual in film circles to debate which is the greatest movie ever. Tokyo Story as it is also known as, has consistently been voted in the list of all the top ten movies ever made. I find that personally pointless. I remember having read recently that watching Japanese cinema can be dangerous. I find that an apt description in many ways. I always remember Fassbinder when I watch Ozu, though the styles are so different. Fassbinder once wrote that all stories are crime stories. The children here are self-absorbed, they are not cruel, at least not on the surface. I find that the crimes in the family set-up are committed everywhere and by everyone, what Fassbinder describes as the fascism of relationships. The dangerousness of this cinema, its so-called menace is a reflection of our own moral compromise. This must also seen against the break up of the family structure and the transition from agrarian to so-called Western ways of life. The elements of post-war Japan figure in a very noticeable way in Ozu's movies.

Ozu has no intention of removing the knife he has driven in the wound, either in this movie or elsewhere. It is upto the viewer to either acknowledge that wound or to live with that knife.

Late Autumn

2010-11-03T13:31:00.003Z

Ozu Yasujiro's Late Autumn continues the central theme of traditional values and family life which is a characteristic feature of Ozu's oeuvre. Made just before An Autumn Afternoon, it would be silly to use cliched formulas to describe this film, however, sometimes one resorts to over used cliches and one has no choice. In my very considered opinion, this movie is an intense masterpiece. It begins and ends with a colour schematic which represents Ozu's subdued depiction of plot and characterization. The interior is green-grey and aquamarine, it is autumn, again the tones are dulled, the signal trees, leafy autumn, the aftermath of mourning, the colour of melancholy, the so-called minimalist interiors, the economy of expression, the discipline of emotion, the subdued pain.

I think this is one Ozu movie which, on second viewing recently, I found with pervading sadness even in its lighter moments, and lighter moments it has. Akiko and her young daughter are shown together with her dead husband's friends at a funeral ceremony. The friend's recollect the times whn they knew Akiko as a salesperson at a chemists when they were all young, and how they all pretended to be ill to go and see her. All their efforts are unrequited and now, years later, they plan, at first frivolously and later with some seriousness Ayako's and even Akiko's marriages. Akiko, the mother, stays unknowing of all these plans and behaves in a dignified manner when Ayako wrongly assumes that her mother is planning to get married too. The bond between the friends and their Friend's widow is affectionate and strong and nowhere does it lapse into silly sentimentality or any profuse excess of emotions. Akiko finally decides to continue to live as a widow, in this autumn of her relational life even though she is quite young. Yuriko, Ayako's friend, leads a spirited defense of Ayako's position after her daughter blames her mother but it all ends in restoring what seems to be an appropriate end.

Ozu's treatment of this theme shows the women as very independent and strong willed and the backdrop of the traditional versus the modern is cleraly an important part of his concerns. The performances are heart warming, especially Setsuki Hara's as Akiko, who was central to many Ozu movies. I particularly enjoyed Okada Mariko's Yuriko as a very charming portrayal of this very effervescent young woman, who takes on the three well meaning and scheming men. The scene when they all have sushi at her mother's restaurant is brilliant in its complex simplicity. Well, that is Ozu, extremely complex, seemingly, disarmingly telling us tales about family and values and life and love and yet, like Early Spring, which this movie is so close to, surrounding the sensitive viewer, even in his or her casual voyeurism, with a life that most strikingly shows the sadness, the ennui, the melancholy of cycles which life is composed of, which we live. All of Ozu's trademark technicalities are in evidence here, including the ellipses, the elides in the story. I thought, the movie is a magnificent example of sensitivity towards one self and others. The sets and the street scenes are lavish in their economy, their delicacy. Late Autumn is a movie that grows on you, that needs multiple viewings.

Late Foucault

2010-11-02T19:08:00.001Z

In an excellent appraisal of Foucault's lecture series at the College de France , Michael Hardt writes about the later books in this series, some of which are yet to appear in English. The two books in question, The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth are the subject of Hardts' review in the NLR. Since the middle of this year, I have been reading the lecture series and have so far read most of Psychiatric Power, Society must be defended, Security, Territory, Population and am currently reading The Government of Self and Others.

Contrary to his early style which many including myself find inaccessible, Foucault's style towards the later phase of his life is perhaps simpler and easier to understand. Foucault draws upon inexhaustible sources of erudition and much of what we read among contemporary philosophers is influenced by Foucault. Foucault elaborates upon his concept of Biopolitics, further written about and commented upon by Agamben later on. The style of these lectures is brilliant, direct and though not interspersed with questions, it takes account perhaps of those questions which the great philosopher might have anticipated. Foucault speaks like the master and his inexhaustible knowledge seemingly has all the answers.

In The Government of Self and Others, Foucault elaborates on the doctrine of Parresia or truth-telling and helps us differentiate it from mere performative utterances. Parresia must come at a price, he reminds us, sometimes one has to pay with one's life. From Plato confronting Dionysius with Parresia to modern technologies of the self, this brilliant book seems to be as prescient as any of his other works. The brilliance in reading Foucault consists of his drawing examples from ancient and medieval times and showing how relevant they are to current times. We may, with our own ways, reflect and draw upon the world around us in the light of what Foucault wrote and make it easier for ourselves to understand or make some sense of what we think is happening to us or the world as such.

Brise marine

2010-11-01T00:05:00.002Z

The flesh is sad......and I've read every book.
O to escape.......to get away. Birds look
as though they are drunk for unknown spray and skies.
No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,
nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea.....
not my lamp's desolate luminosity
nor the blank paper guarded by it's white
nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!
I'm off! You steamer with your swaying helm,
raise anchor for some more exotic realm!
Ennui, crushed down by cruel hopes, still relies
on handkerchief's definitive goodbyes!
Is this the kind of squall- inviting mast
the storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast
away......no mast, no islets flourishing?......
Still, my soul, listen to the sailors sing!

Mallarme, Translated by E.H & A.M Blackmore

Literature + Illness = Illness

2010-10-31T12:53:00.000Z

Roberto Bolano's The Insufferable Gaucho has a memorable essay called Literature + Illness = Illness, written whilst he was waiting for a liver transplant at a specialist hospital in Barcelona. The essay is dedicated to his hepatologist. The essay is essentially a contemplation on mortality, including the writer's own mortality. Thinking about such things in a huge elevator with his Japanese doctor, Bolano thinks of what goes through the minds of people who know are going to die, like himself. What do hey think of before dying? He then writes about the association between illness and things like height, with Dionysus, with Literature and poetry. Where does reading get us, he asks. Reading is like having sex says Bolano. Ultimately it is a finite activity in an infinite sea of books, in an infinite possibility of sex. Essentially he thinks that reading one book is equal to reading all, where does it lead us?

Bolano beautifully paraphrases Mallarme' Brise Marine and Baudelaire's The Traveller. The Mallarme' poem translation that Bolano has chosen is my own personal favourite. The flesh is sad and I have read every book, wrote Mallarme. Taking this further, Bolano says that reading and sex have gotten this reader nowhere. The real essence is in travel. Travelling can be the only saving grace against the ills of the modern world, traveling as a prescription for our neuroses. Not the traveling prescription of modern times but of yore, traveling for months together, for years. Bolano remembers traveling in his fathers truck in a landscape in Chile that he describes as post-nuclear and then in Mexico and later on in Spain, where he lies ill as he writes this essay.
Towards the end of this essay, Bolano is reflectively thinking about Kafka, Kafka having said that " nothing could come between me and my writing". Thinking about this, Bolano thinks that " travel, sex and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of self, and yet, they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be - a book, an expression, a misplaced object........in order Rodin anything at all, a method perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the new, which has been there all along".

The concerns of this essay have plagued me since long. But read one must, even if ultimately it is a solitary pursuit unlike sex generally and travel though the latter is an exception. Bolano's concerns are expressed through the prism of reflections of a nearly dead man, a dying man, a terminally ill man and hence this essay reflects that mood. The style is unlike that of his novels which are faster and pacier , unlike this essay which has mellifluous music and the sadness of ennui, the ennui that the Mallarme poem spoke of, the oases of fear that Baudelaire wrote of, the malaise of modern life, the romance of reading, the hope to find something new.

Reading leads us nowhere eventually and gives us no answers. I have read one book means that I have read all the books. The flesh is sad, why did Mallarme write that asks Bolano. It at least may lead us to an abyss eventually even if that abyss too is unrevealing.

The Sound of the Mountain

2010-10-29T19:56:00.001+01:00

I feel that if I had to read only one novel for a whole year and never hope of it ending, then I would choose The Sound of the Mountain by Kawabata Yasunari. I would just relish seeing Shingo busy in his routine, coming back home and chat to his daughter-in-law kikuko and think of his lingering love for his wife' dead sister. What better than see his growing affection for Kikuko, with whom his bond is unwritten and unsaid, Kikuko of the sad eyes and clear forehead, Kikuko of the bright Kimono and tight Obi, Kikuko of the graceful shoulders and melancholy eyes, the sad Kikuko, the unloved Kikuko, whose husband Shuichi prefers a geisha. Fusako, Shingo' daughter is estranged from her husband, she brings unrest to her parents house, she is unhappy, she too is sad, there is melancholy that drifts in and out of the Shingo household. At night, Shingo, now in his sixties, fears the ravages of memory, hears the sound of death, fears death, hears the sound of the mountain, hears too his own longing, the failed love for his dead sister-in-law, he sees her in dreams. Shingo's memory is failing, he thinks about the lives of his loved ones and at times blames himself for Shuichi' failings.

At night, Shingo feels the stirrings of desire for Kikuko, sees her and doesn't in dreams, sees the breasts of a faceless woman, feels and feels it, the Kikuko of the bright Kimono, of the tight Obi, cutting and trimming dwarf plants, cutting the yatsude at the bottom of the cherry trees, looking at Shingo with affection and who knows what, Kikuko the neglected wife, of faint early summer stirrings and nocturnal desires. The common occurrences in the Shingo household, the new electric razor that Kikuko has given Shingo, the new Kimonos she has bought for her sister-in-law, the newspaper stories that Shingo' wife likes to read, the morning sunflowers, the lingering gaze of Shingo as it falls on Kikuko's shoulders, on her tight Obi, on her melancholy eyes, her beautiful forehead, the downy hair on the nape of her neck.

Shingo's moral crisis forces him to have a meeting with Shuichi's geisha. Around the same time, Kikuko secretly has an abortion, refusing to have Shuichi' child whilst Shuichi' geisha , also pregnant from Shuichi decides to have the child. Shingo pays her money after she has separated from Shuichi, and the geisha Kino withdraws away. Kikuko returns home, Shuichi starts spending more time with her, though he does declare to Shingo that she is a free agent, on hearing which Kikuko cries, adamant that she won't leave, especially Shingo. Life resumes again, Fusako's husband has survived a suicide attempt, there is talk of Fusako opening a stall with Kikuko offering to help, there is a plan for a family holiday, the seasons have passed a full circle, we have seen the sunflowers and the cherry trees, the maples too, and heard the hissing of the mountain.

This is Kawabata territory, fierce in its ambiguity, in its passing and unpassing hours, its passing and unpassing time, its recreation of a lost romance in changing minds, its hints, its provocations, its subtle and not so subtle suggestions, the romanticism, the loneliness, the eroticism of everything he creates, the mood, the atmosphere, the longing the desire, the stirrings of memory. The tale ends in ambiguous melancholy, the relations between the characters are shaded by restraint and sadness. Shingo is not emotionally close to his wife, he finds in Kikuko the daughter he doesn't find in Fusako and yet he has a soft almost erotic affection for Kikuko though it is never described with distaste. The almost disdainful attitude which Shuichi has for his wife I find something difficult to accept but then I am not privy to the cultural elements of geisha life and the moral implications it might have for Japanese sensibilities. All geisha's are not mistresses and as Shingo lies in the arms of a geisha once, he finds a calmness in that embrance if not just plain physical arousal.

I do not know if the novel could have been written from multiple perspectives for while on the one hand Kikuko's sadness is described with both direct and indirect ways, yet her attitude towards Shuichi is not described at all because it is never discussed. In other ways, with geisha's in the background, all these women floating in and out are persistent acts to which any sensible woman should act against and yet, there are no signs of revolt. Kikuko does rebel, by having an abortion and yet settles in again but does she come back for Shingo instead? Does Kikuko know or feel that her downy hair on her neck appeals to her father-in-law, does she know that the shrug of her shoulders, her bright Kimono, her tight Obi arouses in Shingo memories of his previous love and current erotic desire?

Much and I feel everything is left in shade and doubt. The mood of this novel is mysterious, it is almost scary in its contemplation of moral crises, though it is softer in its eventual ending compared to Soseki's novels. I will linger outside the Shingo household veranda as Shingo will look at the distant mountain, thinking of death and Kikuko and I will linger to wait as Kikuko comes out to water the cherry trees, dressed in her bright Kimono, her tight Obi, Kikuko of the beautiful shoulders, the sad eyes with the downy hair on the nape of her neck.

the loose gazing of our eyes which is endless

2010-10-28T13:48:00.003+01:00

What follows below is a daydream, a rendering of 'the loose gazing of our eyes which is endless' from Apollinaire' The Mirabeau Bridge.

this is all a dream, we never met really, it is a fable, our touches had the fate of distance destined from the beginning, we lingered in the arc of our shadows, our shadows stretched from one to the other, under the shadow of the world, beneath the shadow of ourselves, under the hesitant union of our shadows we lingered a while didn't we, we sat together often, under the shade of crimson autumn leaves, looking often at the lines of our hands, looking for some meaning in the shadows that shaded us, shadows that stretched from me to you, and from you to me. we gazed loosely at each other, often lingering in the shadow of those gazes, we thought that this time would outlast the bitterness of lonely hours, hours that crept so often between us, hours of solitude and meeting, at the edge of those gazes, within the arc of those hours, at the periphery of your scent.

your scent your smell, the iris of your eyes, lie I would if I didn't think that I saw in them my destiny, in the discreet shadow of your arms the destiny of my mouth, in the shadow of your arms the meaning of my shadow, between those gazes the unruffled warnings of my desire, the stirrings of my touch, the unsaid ruffling of your lips, the movement of your lips, the smell of your lips, the scent of your days, the meaning of your nights, my eyes never met your eyes I admit, your eyes never sought my eyes in open unrestraint, yet didn't our gazes linger endlessly on those moments between us that were shadowless, didn't I seek the water of your mouth didn't I seek the heaviness of my touch on you though I didn't tell you so?

my eyes will forever seek the fresh iris of your eyes, after you open your blinking eyes, after you have swept away with your wet fingers the loose strands of your hair that keep getting in the way of our gaze, after you open your eyes unhesitantly to my fresh questions to my fresh eyes, I will not let the old images that fall on your eyes come in the way of the new gaze, come near sit near me, it is autumn again, the streets of my memory are littered with your memory, come unhesitant come again come and seek in my eyes the loose gazing of our eyes which is endless even if it is only a dream.

The Mirabeau Bridge

2010-10-27T19:34:00.006+01:00

Under the Mirabeau Bridge the Seine
Flows and our love
Must I be reminded again
How joy came always after pain

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

Hands within hands we stand face to face
while underneath
The bridge of our arms passes
The loose wave of our gazing which is endless

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

Love slips away like this water flowing
love slips away
How slow life is in its going
And hope is so violent a thing

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

The days pass the weeks pass and are gone
Neither time that is gone
Nor love ever returns again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

Night comes the hour is rung
The days go I remain

Translated by W.S. Merwin, G. Apollinaire

on certain evenings

2010-10-25T18:40:00.003+01:00

certain evenings bring fierce pain
just after sunset, and a little before total darkness
comes a strange feeling. often in the past
I thought it was a longing for familiar habits
or pure sentiment or just missing those that I truly miss.
but this nameless ceaseless emptiness is more
than mere longing or nostalgia. sometimes it comes as soon as
I hear a sad song played in a language that I do not
know. sometimes the way the traffic lights change
and reflect and burn in a restaurant window, you know that feeling?
the beautiful girl dining inside sitting opposite
a man oblivious of her beauty, the missed heartbeat of that moment,
you know what i am talking about?
the way the high street feral cat hides his anguish behind anger,
on the main street, that gives me endless pain too.
sometimes there is no reason in all this you see, you have gone
your way, and soon everything will be forgotten, you and me
and the cat and the beautiful girl. even smoking cigarettes
does not help, even one after the other. the calm of burning candles
does not kill the anguish of real or imagined pain.

Akutagawa's Robbers

2010-10-25T00:07:00.000+01:00

If reading fiction meant that some kind of illumination is expected, then that would be reading for the wrong reasons. If one reads sometimes to lessen one's misery, that too is an odd reason. Since I don't know the primary reason behind reading, may I say that if one wants to be enchanted and discomforted at the same time, if one wants to be hypnotized and saddened in one instance, then one must not look further away but pick up your Akutagawa. In Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Japanese Literature gives us many reasons to carry on reading. Reading Akutagawa is drinking of a chalice that while poisoned is also rich in that liquid which the gods might like too.

In a Grove, also made famous by the movie is the oft quoted text of Akutagawa's. His Kappa is not far behind. What however I find derisory is the way publishers bracket certain writers to sell books. For instance, the book of Akutagawa's that I am reading these days is called an The Beautiful and the Grotesque', for his fiction is usually seen as belonging to that particular kind of fantastic fiction genre. It is a certain attempt at orientalizing aspects of non-western fiction and here in is no exception. Even though the Kappa might seem outrageous and perhaps fantastic, to include all the stories under the title I just mentioned seems bizarre. The first story in this collection is called The Robbers and in no way is it grotesque. There is beauty in it, of a most melancholic kind, and beauty in the writing. That this first story is fierce in it's treatment of what it wants to say is a testimony to the greatness of the writer.

There is no way that I can possibly describe the melancholy of The Robbers. The depiction of mood, the evocation of scene, the dramatization of the elements, there is almost a mis-en-scene quality to the writing. The action that takes place in Kyoto, the concrete descriptions of the streets, the almost mesmerizingly haunting and almost provocative constructs of the visual elements of this story are just mind numbing. The description of the plague that is affecting Kyoto around the time the events are described is caught hauntingly in the passage below:

"The breathless sky, hung with humid summer heat, spread over the houses; it was a certain noon in July. At the crossroads where the man had paused there was a willow.....the leaves on its sparse branches so long and slender that one might think it suffered from the plague prevailing at that time; it cast its meager shadow over the ground; and at this place there was no wind to stir the leaves withering in the sun. And, on the highway scorched by the sunlight, where presumably because of the intense heat there had for some time been no passer-by, there wound in long sweeps the trail of an ox carriage that had passed some time before.......Everywhere fiery dust bathed the crossroads........there was not one drop of moisture........" And again........"Restless swallows flashing their white bellies, from time to time skimmed the sand of the street; over the shingled and cypress-bark roofs the crowding dry clouds of fused gold, silver, copper and iron showed no sign of movement. The houses built on either side were so hushed and still behind the wooden shutters and bulrush blinds that it might have been doubted that throughout the whole city any were still alive".

This collection comes with a very enthusiastic introduction titled 'A Sprig of Wild Orange' and shows the enthusiasm of the translator, who is clearly an Akutagawa lover. The book has wonderful stories, depictions of situations, but more than anything else, the evocation of mood and atmosphere.

my lack of depth

2010-10-24T13:30:00.003+01:00

Perhaps my most noteworthy characteristic is lack of depth. Whatever I say or do, the whole of me is contained in what I do or say, and I have nothing in reserve upon which to fall back in the event of my having to retreat. I am, in fact a man all vanguard, without any main body or rearguard. From this characteristic comes my proneness to enthusiasm. I get excited over any trifle......what I mean is that it is an enthusiasm that almost always lacks the support of the intimate, effective strength without which any kind of enthusiasm dwindles into mere foolish desire and rhetoric. And I am, in fact, inclined to rhetoric......that is, to the substitution of words for deeds. My rhetoric is of the sentimental kind; I want for instance, to be in love and often deceive myself into thinking that I am in love, when all that I have done is to talk about it.....with great feeling, no doubt, but simply to talk about it. At such moments, tears come easily, I stammer......But beneath these outward signs of fervour I often conceal a bitter, a positively mean, kind of subtlety which makes me deceitful and does not represent any real strength, being merely the expression of my egoism. I am what can still be called a dilettante.

from Conjugal Love, Alberto Moravia

The Skating Rink: Bolano

2010-10-24T12:42:00.002+01:00

One of the striking features of Roberto Bolano's novels is the matter of style. It is essential, at least from my personal point, that I find that hard to ignore. In the Anglo phone world, with exceptions, style in literature has largely remained subservient to narration, or at least to a comprehension of narration, though there are abundant subversive examples that don't follow that norm. The fact that Bolano is a Latin American novelist must not be pointed as a point of difference alone. At another level, his novels, and I have read all that are available in English, do not just compel us to read because we are in search for a story but they prompt us to read them because of the immense matter of style.

As I have written here on numerous occasions about Bolano, I cannot find his novels any step away from a story that I can remember but largely closer to a stylistic insistence upon elegance. In other words, I would find it hard to read anything in this subversion of genres had it not been embellished by a pace and narrative style that is musical, very exhortatively dangerous, beautiful, seductive and hypnotically engaging. I find that in essence, the central concerns of his fiction are unchanging and yet each novel is a style away from another. It is interesting to note that this novel, The Skating Rink, was his first, and yet we are reading him from the last unto the first, following the massive successes of TSD and 2666.

The Bolano world is uniquely compelling. In this novel too, the characters have the same literary pretensions as elsewhere. One is an illegal migrant, a night watchman at a camping ground, a poet who could be Bolano himself , another a successful business man and the third a corrupt small time bureaucrat of the local socialist party in the town of Z, near Barcelona. The narrative unfolds in alternating monologues from these three, and involves the beautiful Nuria Marti, a figure skater who has been dropped from the Spanish national side. The middle-aged business man is clearly in love with her, and sensing her disappointment, decides to build a private skating rink for her, diverting state money and utilising government officials and resources. His main pleasure lies in watching her skate in this rink, hesitant as he is to declare his "love" for her. Nuria plays the game nicely, and is close to Moran, writer turned businessman, with whom she is having an affair. The whole thing reaches a crescendo in the end when an old woman, who has already been abused by the social welfare system, senses the idea behind the rink and decides to blackmail Nuria's lover. A dead body is discovered in the rink, the woman is murdered by another rookie writer, the night watchman decides to leave for Mexico, Nuria leaves for Barcelona and does nude photo shoots for a popular magazine, her lover, imprisoned but later released, tries to find Nuria but fails to do so.

We are seldom close to Nuria as a character though the Bolano types are in evidence here. I do not think that this novel reads like a detective story, though it functions like one. The doomed types are here, the poet, the rookie, the murderer, the fat politician who writes a report on the prison system whilst in prison and wins a prize and the dangerously reckless attitude that pervades these characters. They are always in the midst or fringes of poetry. One can call them as anarchic, in that the anarchy is of a romantic kind. This novel is at a disadvantage in being the kind that we can only read after his major works. The seeds of TSD and 2666 are already contained here, as the latter novels like Amulet had seeds seen in TSD. I do not think it useful to compare this novel with the more famous ones. Personally, I did not find the characters engaging in the beginning though towards the end, my sympathies are with them. Nuria lapses into nudity, Rosquelles into prison, Gaspar flees to Mexico amd Moran I don't remember.

Style is a matter of preference, also of aesthetics. There is always, I maintain, a longing behind these characters. They reflect the unending greed of the modern world, the pain of exile and migrations, the ennui of failure, the plaintive cry of doomed poetry. We may not always find these poets as ones we can say we know intimately, but it is fair to say that we are in their midst. It is in the recognition of this painful tenderness that the chief charm of this fiction lies. And also its truth.

Fire Dance

2010-10-23T15:55:00.001+01:00

when it rains these days

2010-10-22T00:06:00.001+01:00

around this time of the year, when it rains, it brings with it the intensity of all the pain preserved in forgetting memories or at least in attempting to forget, and the wetness of the rain is matched by the remorselessness with which it falls. one thinks of times past, and one wishes that the past could return only if it gives us the whiff of those hours that then were seemingly as uncultured as times present. one no longer thinks of this falling rain with compassion or attaches to present hours any redeeming myth for that is the right of all previous nights. i think of poetry now only as a kind of nostalgia. poetry is only nostalgia, a remembrance. without memory there is no poetry and without poetry memory is as remorseless as this falling rain.

in other hours at other places on other nights, in summer outside cafe's along seafronts in cheap coastal towns, at dawn but usually at dusk, when it rains and it rains a soft mellifluous rain, a melancholic rain, a soft rain, a rain of memories, a dark dismal rain, unrepentant rain, that too is cause for poetry, it is of poetry, it causes poetry, in the glow of certain lamps, in the trailing light of certain footsteps, after the echoing fall of certain footsteps, in the gap between the echo and the step is also poetry, a heart rending abysmal poem.

our sorrows are no longer those that bring with them lasting memory of lasting aches but are born out of the cinder of instinctual pain, ready to delight the nostalgic taste of fabricated lovers. one thinks of a growing pressure in a beating heart, this rain that falls, that face that stood outside the bright arc of those lonely lights, the shimmering haze of blowing shadows, that plea for understanding, the immense speed of passing time, the known hollowness of tender emotions. and the rain that keeps falling, the rain that brings poetry.

autumn dusks

2010-10-21T13:54:00.003+01:00

Two blocks from our high street stands the casbah bar cafe,
where loiterers and some say illegal migrants puff at nargile in these cold autumn days.
Others, blinded by dusk and melancholy and other afflictions,
stand and smoke smuggled Russian cigarettes.
Some laze around on worn out chairs outside the cafe,
drinking coffee and listening to early Cohen.
At dusk all are equal so we think,
The resident poet, the illegal migrant or the affable conservative voter.
And yet each dusk is different and brings different pain.
We havent seen the well read girl
with long brown hair for weeks,
days are getting short and it will be winter soon.
I remember last winter,
when we met last and when you left.

Twilight in Barcelona

2010-10-18T19:50:00.003+01:00

What can be said about the drowning Barcelona twilights.
Remember
The Rusinol painting Erik Satie en el seu estudi?
The magnetic Barcelona twilights are like that, like Satie's
eyes and
Long hair, like Satie's hands and like Rusinol's affection.
Twilights inhabited by supreme silhouettes, magnificence
Of the sun and the sea over these hanging or subterranean
abodes
Built for love. City of Sara Gilbert and Lola Paniagua,
City of Slipstreams and completely gratuitous secrets.
City of genuflections and cords.

Roberto Bolano, from The Romantic Dogs

Faith

2010-10-17T21:31:00.003+01:00

At midnight, when the moonlight spilled into the river reeds, and the willows, the waters, and the breeze were communing in whispers, the body of We Sheng was gently borne from beneath the bridge towards the sea. But Wei Sheng's spirit, in the lonely moonlight from heaven, would probably have reflected longing thoughts; and stealing away from the corpse, Wei Sheng's departing spirit, just like the smell of weeds and water rising from the spineless river, Rose towards the faintly glimmering sky.

Thousands of years thence, this spirit, having traversed in it's time countless transmigrations, has surely again been entrusted to life in human forms. This spirit is the spirit that dwells in me; and I - born in these modern times- cannot do work of any worth. Day and night, at random, I live a life that is apt to be desultory and dreamy, awaiting the coming of something inconceivable; and like the Wei Sheng beneath the bridge at dusk, I seem to live awaiting always a beloved who never comes......

From The Faith of Wei Sheng, Akutagawa Ryonosuke

In a year with 13 moons

2010-10-16T16:02:00.001+01:00

Snow Country

2010-10-16T13:50:00.001+01:00

"The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop".

This being the beginning of Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country, I read the above lines quite a few times, the magic of these lines was quite overwhelming. This was snow country, everything was cold, the sensualist called Shimamura had arrived by train, we were hemmed in by mountains, romance would follow, followed by love, tragedy, death I thought. This was my sort of country, I thought. However, after reading the novel, a strange kind of emptiness seized me, as if I had just missed that train myself. I tried my best to be a party inside the desolate coldness of this country and yet this romance eluded me. Kawabata's celebrated novel, which the translator claims to be his masterpiece, has I am sure the excellent qualities that has made it famous and yet, surprisingly, it evoked in me neither mood nor misery. Shimamura and Komako's romance seemed quite watery to me. And of course, Shimamura is a sensualist, and Komako is the one who is in love and yet I could not bring myself in any sort of proximity to the characters.

The first part of the novel seemed to drag heavily for me, the second part had some qualities of mood. The descriptions of landscape in relation to the characters and the descriptions of the characters in relation to the landscape are beautifully done, as if the two are commingled in some kind of way. Yet, the understated subtleness still eluded me. Towards the end, I was blaming the translation or the translator, and yet I am sure the translator has done a fine job. There is something about Snow Country that I did not seem to let me affect. I cannot say that it is Kawabata's style for there are elements of it that appealed to me. The beginning was extremely Haiku style, each line a poem in itself. I did not warm to Shimamura and even Komako, who in spite of her tragic destiny seemed remote to me. It was Yoko, in life and on the last page, who realized a certain dramatic and tragic sensibility for me.

The problems of approaching Snow Country are mutliple. I am not that familiar with Japanese aesthetics, nor the foundational aspects of Zen Buddhist traditions, which form perhaps the core of Kawabata country. In essence, this kind of style evokes a dissonance from the unacquainted reader. Whether it be tea-ceremony or flower arrangements, the melancholy of autumn or maple leaves in a train of silence, it is the ability to get inside that aesthetic scenario and then, regardless of outcome, look at the world from that perspective. Therefore, were I aware to be aware of such an approach and am I ultimately responsible from the detachment of this prose? If Shimamura carries something of Kawabata, then I stand apart from that country and yet, in Yoko, there is someone I can understand. Shimamura is a fine man, I don't doubt it, he has a wife in Tokyo, a geisha in Snow country, likes Yoko too, that too I must accommodate but I don't warm to Shimamura.

In the first movement on the train, Shimamura does not look at Yoko but on her reflection in the train window, thus keeping himself at a distance from that face and arousing in himself an aesthetic distance. If the attempt is to resolve some kind of a spiritual crisis and pass on a certain Zen stage through his requited and unrequited passions, then, as I said earlier, a reader like me must visit many things before visiting snow country. It is my resolve to read Snow Country again, to draw from it the mystery and magic that the first three lines promised and the rest decided to conceal. The fault is however, entirely mine.

when you opened your palm

2010-10-15T19:31:00.002+01:00

you opened your palm and the years fell away
like sand from your palm the hours fell down like sand
when you opened your palm time stopped something happened
like sand drifting away like the years fell away
and you didn't speak and I didn't say a word in all that silence
the hush of that silence you know it was strange it was so silent as you opened your palm
and the years fell away like sand from your palm
in all that silence all that time you didn't say a word and I didn't speak
in all that silence the hush of that silence your pale palm I saw your pale hands
as you opened your palm and the years fell away like sand in that silence
the loudness of that silence and you didn't speak and I didn't say a word
and the hours fell down and we each turned away towards our different ways
and how long were those moments as we walked away towards our different ways
and how loud everything else seemed how loud was that silence
as we turned towards different ways as you opened your palm as I turned away
as the years fell away like sand from your palm how everything drifted
like sand like those hours how everything fell away and how silent everything was
and how loud that silence

La Notte

2010-10-15T18:58:00.002+01:00

Contempt

2010-10-14T17:58:00.004+01:00

For some strange reason, I kept off reading Contempt and have realized what a mistake I made. I do not want to outline a plot of this novel here, for that is easily done anyway. what strikes me most about this novel is the mood, the evocation of mood, the sense of doom, the breathless energy of that mood, the unending melancholy of the prose, the pace of narration, the sense of elegiac destiny of the characters, the almost detective pace in the end. Moravia is well known to belong to the group of writers who gave us the essay- novel, like Musil for instance. I perceive that Moravia or reading him is out of fashion, particularly in America these days. Some of his books sadly are out of print as I discovered recently, like The Lie for instance. I acquired a dusty copy of Conjugal Love recently, which in its introduction calls Moravia a master of relating the war of the sexes!

Contempt is not just the dissection of love between a married couple but a narration of states of mind. what the narrator wants to know is ' why doesn't my wife love me any more?'. the question of there being any validity in his belief or any substance in his belief while being the focus of his narration, there is also a sub plot namely in that Moravia introduces the story of Ulysses, and a neat little interpretation of whether Ulysses didn't return to Penelope for so long because she detested him, he knew that, he kept away because she had contempt for him? contempt, that is what the narrators wife tells him she has for him. we go through his attempts to try to ascertain what he might have done to attract this contempt, and he is convinced that while he might have made a few mistakes, he hasn't actually done much to earn her contempt.

While Moravia is generally regarded as an existentialist writer, what strikes me most is his psychological characterization, his eye for depiction of mental states, the ceaseless digging at situations. In essence, this is a plot-less novel and more of a situational essay-novel. His attempt to portray a marriage is secondary, the chief concern is portrayal of character. 'You are not a man', the narrator's wife tells him. He finds that hard not to bear but to understand. After all, what should a man be like, a question that puzzles me much. Within Contempt the novel is woven a systematic deconstruction of those states of mind that we don't admit we actually entertain, even if occasionally.

Godard's movie, is extremely faithful to the novel. The movie has some stunning panoramic vistas that just is a pleasure for the senses including a very melancholic soundtrack. Does the movie read like a suspense thriller: no, does the novel: yes. The movie is as good as the novel, though I think the novel is better. Reading Moravia is like getting into a pincer, two pages and you know this is getting really uncomfortable fast. You want to read more to get out of your misery, you want to read more and more and finish the damn thing in one sitting. I have no more praise than that.

in the stillness now

2010-10-13T21:47:00.001+01:00

In his moments of extreme stillness now, and unchanging silence, and this destiny for solitude, he thought of days when he knew her, remembering times when he had spoken to her so many times, he thought, though he had never actually talked to her. His natural effusiveness in her presence, he remembered now, was clouded by an air of forced stillness and this lack of clarity into her thoughts gave her an advantage over him he thought, which to his surprise he had preferred then. He had taken her beauty for granted and had assured himself of her beauty so unquestioningly; he however was not sure of what she thought of the world or herself or him. Any resolve on his part to break this silence between them only increased the hush of forced silence between them, leading it to become more still, till this silence between them became a source of comfort to him in her presence, for this silence allowed him in whatever way he allowed it to, to make or a seal an invisible pact between them, he remembered now. In essence his reticence to express himself before her was matched equally by her equal resolve to hide behind her silence. Sometimes it seemed to him that perhaps these thoughts were only imagined by him in a state of heightened susceptibility, and that there was no reason now to think of her any differently from all the others, for actually what he recognized as a weakness in others occasionally he failed to recognize in himself and thus he did see into the possibility of him actually having fallen into anything resembling any proximity to her. This self examination now occasionally lead him into uncomfortable introspection, for to him admitting any idea of falling into love was an admission into defeat, even now. However, how could it be love if he had never even spoken to her and when they had never been at any sort of proximity? The romantic notion of love distilled into him from an early age, that almost keatsian insistence on unrequited passion had never moved him to any ecstatic vision of himself and yet in her presence, he let his heart beat ever so fast almost as if not doing so was an admission of guilt, a trespass against her inviolable beauty.

Had he not felt morose when autumn days without her had seemed bereft of any meaning and hadn't he on so many occasions felt intensely melancholic at the mention of her name, for any other person acknowledging knowing her was a proof to him of his own distance from her. However, thinking of those days now, he reminded himself that he had felt content on many occasions of at least knowing her, for not to know her seemed to him to be the admission of the first guilt if not the first sin. On azure days and on cold autumn afternoons, had her eyes not seemed to have called him? Had she not appeared to have wanted to talk to him and was he not convinced that the melancholy touch of her fingers was destined for him alone? Had he not written countless poems for her, scores of which he had discarded? Had he not imagined the silk of her hair , the inescapable water of her mouth, the rising tide of her moons? Had he not felt excruciatingly tortured when he could not remember at times the exact shape of her mouth? How many countless times had he imagined the two of them together, walking the streets that he had wanted them to walk together? Had he not visited these thoughts on infinite occasions and had he not felt the most melancholic pain in his heart whenever he tried to remember the exact end of all their meetings, after having failed to remember each? These thoughts gave him no comfort now for she had left all times including the silence between them far behind when she had left.

what use are words

2010-10-11T16:43:00.003+01:00

what use are my words now
when you called I did not turn
I let the world lead me into colours
that I always detest

what use are my words
I hate how they fall on your ears
how hollow they sound
as I live my life as if it is somebody else's

what use are my words whether I write them or
speak into the hollow of your eyes you will never
trust me to turn if you call again
and I no longer believe what I say to myself

what use are my words now
to whom do I say out loud that I do not
trust what I said to the flaming sky when
you called and I did not turn

what use are my words
the words that I inscribe are shallow as they leave
my fingers sad as they leave my lips
I shudder at my words I should have turned

Na dis rien

2010-10-10T20:03:00.000+01:00

Contempt

2010-10-09T21:34:00.001+01:00

Last Kiss

2010-10-08T21:29:00.004+01:00

The taste of your last kiss is like rust in my mouth
as I survey all the time that has passed since
then. Your heavy eyebrows weigh on my heart now as
I spend all my time thinking about you in metaphors.

I lost equilibrium after you left and I coveted the musk
of your last touch. Each day after that is like a chain
around my neck.
Nothing has mellowed.

Some hours bring back the luxury of your skin as
I count all the times we swam in each other. Some moments
stand out like jagged peaks of pain and yet
everything smells of rust.

dreams of summer

2010-10-06T18:44:00.000+01:00

Lying Poets

2010-10-02T17:59:00.004+01:00

Adorno once famously said that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz. In a letter, Celan lamented on neo-Nazism in Germany after the war and wrote: "some of them even write poems. These men, they write poems! What all don't they write, the liars."
Reading this, very naively I think of all that these sensitive souls had to endure in a supposedly fascism purged society and yet face anti-semitism daily, in all it's obvious and less obvious forms.

Today, one thinks about the cultural racism that Muslims face in Euro-America, almost on a daily basis, in all it's obvious and less obvious forms and yet the perpetrators as Celan would have noted, are liars, they write poems. It seems inevitable that almost all nations and people have their blind spots which are quite noticeable to the those on the outside. In the aftermath of the foundation of the Zionist state of Israel and it's subsequent atrocities against the Palestinians and it's Arab neighbours, including atrocities of a political, human and military nature, these atrocities are almost lost on all Jewish writers, academics and Philosophers except a handful, so much so that the Palestinian catastrophe, properly called nakba, is lost on what Celan should have perhaps noticed as well. We must say that all those who don't recognise these criminal acts against the Palestinians are liars and they write poetry!

In it's present manifestation, the racism and the anti-Islamic stance adopted by those write the narratives of Euro-America are liable to be declared as liars too, and as Celan wrote, only true hands write true poems. It is to be seen that the blatant rejection of the Palestinian nakba can be seen as something that was ignored by all Jewish writers with exception and something which Celan like sufferers could not even point out. Nowadays in Europe on the whole, the politics of the day that revels in banning articles of clothing like the burqa are engaging in a kind of feminist politics that uses this feminist diatribe and perpetuates and reinforces this Muslim-phobic and cultural racism that raises wall after wall against immigrant Muslims on Euro-America and is pushing, day after day, these immigrants into a state, where after the next fifty years perhaps, the new holocausts could begin all over again.

While outwardly these immigrant populations seemingly have certain modicums of freedom and access to instruments of equality which languish in stolid disrepair in their original countries, yet, alas yet, there are clearly as Celan said:
Whichever stone you lift-/ you lay bare/ those who need the protection of stones.

Winter

2010-09-20T21:03:00.004+01:00

It's falling Mother, snows in the Ukraine:
The saviour's crown a thousand grains of grief
Here all my tears reach out to you in vain
One proud mute glance is all of my relief....

We're dying now: why won't you sleep, you huts?
Even this wind slinks round in frightened rags.
Are these the ones, freezing in slag-choked ruts-
whose arms are candlesticks, whose hearts are flags?

I stayed the same in darkness forlorn:
Will days heal softly, will they cut too sharp?
Among my stars are drifting now the torn
Strings of a strident and discordant harp....

On it at times a Rose-filled hour is tuned.
Expiring:once.Just once,again....
What would come, Mother:wakening or wound-
if I too sank in snows of the Ukraine?

Paul Celan, 1938

this bitter earth

2010-09-19T15:10:00.000+01:00

another evening in tangier

2010-09-18T14:45:00.003+01:00

all night he waited for arrival, for the sudden beats of arriving
and felt nothing but the crushing weight of expectation
as his brave plans melted into a dawn unexpectedly clear.
and now with solemn steps he makes his way to the eastern beach,
away from urchins and tourists and lies barebacked on the sand
in the shade of an alcove, waiting to see those big waves later.

she did not give her promise though he waited long enough,
he thought as he lay on the sand all day long.

it is evening again he sits again in cafe paris smoking Kif
as other places beckon, the call of demanding days in uncertain times.
reflection does not bring him any more wisdom
than does looking at the sea or the sky.
she will never know his innermost heart and
he will soon forget her face any way.

his mood has changed from restless agitation to resigned sadness
as he discovers other colours that had lay hidden till then.
the sea and the sky no longer seem intent on meeting
in the old city life is making old noises as
big berber men walk alongside bare feet urchins smoking kif,
and riffian women hide their hennaed palms.
but now he only looks and moves on.

An American Tea Party

2010-09-16T18:06:00.005+01:00

Politics in the USA at present? Politics or in the place of politics a space filled by hatred, an ungainly form of market hatred, a capitalist fed ignorance of the "other", a creation of the other, a perpetuation of the notion of the other, of the enemy, an insistence, a loud insistence on difference, and the negation of that loudness, a suffocation of real debate, a thorough insistence on a univocal vision of the now, of the past and the future, the restoration of all previously mellowed prejudices, a resurfacing of a new climate of the fear of the other, for the fear of the fear of the other, a departure from debate, an American insistence on gesture dictated occupation of the political space, a soap-opera type attitude towards realities and of realities, a "Friends" type of structuring of reality, of the structuring of the other, through the now and present, towards the future.

The Tea Party at present, in modern America, the negation of the multicultural model, the affirmation of hidden prejudices, the "greatest" country in the world as is declared every day, the climate of fear, for Muslims in the USA, the new realities of America, the other, the Muslim. The Palinisation of politics, the reduction of Islam to news, as a sound bite, the negation of Islam as a religion, the negation of space for the other, the open declaration of a war against the new pariah, the new Jew as not the old Jew but the old Jew as the Muslim, the Muslim as the enemy, the open lance thrown at the new enemy, the Euro-Americanization of this hatred,this attitude. Europe follows this prescription, this Tea Party redemption, this Anglo-Saxon angst, angst because there was never a real angst, an angst of the angst, fear because the idols of fear are still prescribing the attitude towards the other, the new Jew.

When Europe will open it's gas chambers again, we know now who will be there.