Into the Wild…{wip}

“The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life, not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure itself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head..”

The film is amazing a personal journey that will touch one deeply. This reflection of the protagonist by the sea-side made me cry….

It’s review can be read at Rakesh’s …will insert my reviews later! 

Oscars reveal America’s heart of darkness, writes Praveen Dass

 

Amidst focused bursts of work and work related travel, scheduling times for *Only Non-work related activities like internalising equally well analysed and Very readable articles which are more salacious (or) sagacious in their approach, is great a way to get self rejuvenated. During my stay in Chandigarh, previous week, I did come across such kind rendered by Praveen Dass. The intense expression, which the writer managed to sustain throughout the article, gripped me with such a force that I decided to display it to a much wider audience.

{Reproducing Praveen Dass’s review on TOI, New Delhi / Chandigarh}

Commenting on the 2008 Academy Awards, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano observed that the years’ top two Oscar nominated films were “Sinister, filled with violence, and above all, without hope”. Both Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old men” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There will be Blood” may indeed be guilty on all counts. But they do stand out instead as “Artful expositions on the darkness that lurks in our hearts”. And, they also seem to suggest that this darkness now gnaws at America’s very soul, which is why, to moralist dismay, the pair will ensure as classics. This is mostly on account of two singular characters who define both films. Like evil twins newly arrives, they come yoked together by some bleak Manichean world view, where a stifling gloom keeps blotting out the flickering light.

Daniel Plainview of “There will be Blood” is one – an imposing early American oilman, with some oily blackness seeping well into his soul. This is made amply clear by Blood’s first 15 minutes. Wordless, except for guttural grunts of men working and an almost caustic musical score, the film clearly puts upfront and centre Plainview’s single-minded prospector’s quest for riches from below. Its long narrative then grinds us past the character’s successes by way of his ruthless scheming; even jettisoning bonds of family, where and when found inconvenient. And, in depicting another major strand of 20^th century America – religious zealotry, in the form of Eli, an ambitious Christian preacher who develops a complex relationship to deliver an oblique message for the new millennium.

Ultimately, like some overstretched alligator jaw, the film’s narrative finally snaps shut. Plainview – who’s now a 1920’s oil magnate – bullies, humiliates and arrives at closure in his relationship with a bankrupt Eli. Plainview does all that with a brutish glee, obliquely insisting that he is the devil – Eli’s putative “third revelation” the faithful were warned about – come now to finally claim his savage toll. Part character study, part canny allegory, this flawed epic is the film maker’s cue to us that American industry’s rapacious beginnings prefigure its current ills. It is, after all, a movie titled “There will be Blood” about a quest for oil in desert sands.

And in Daniel Plainview the film-maker has conjured a terrifying portent : Marx’s spectre of unbridled capitalism come to celluloid life – of fearsome glare and fiercer appetite.

“No Country for Old men” is a more measured but starker film about two men in 1980s’ Texas tangling with another force of nature. This would be the taciturn Anton Chigurh, a creature of purer distilled menace. His bizarre malevolence is made amply clear, in the film’s first 10 mins. The film’s plot revolves around Chigurh’s pursuit of a cache of stolen drug money spirited away by a lucky war veteran, and their pursuit, in turn, by an increasingly despondent small-town sheriff.

Always a step behind Chigurh and his prey, the elderly sheriff is a man who slowly comprehends that his time as lawman is up. Ranged against something as malefic and soulless as Chigurh, he’s unsure when hunter and hunted trade places in a random universe shot with chance. One segment, in particular, conclusively spears all hope: the shaken sheriff hauntingly contrasts his plight in a changing land with a fond, near elegiac dream of being protected by a father in his youth. The Coens, long feted as notoriously impish artists, have crafted their starkest, darkest, bleakest film, devoid even of the whimsy that lightened its own predecessor in their oeuvre, the masterly Fargo. Chigurh and Plainview represent something more sinister than simple archetypes of evil. By cleaving to some amoral code, both set themselves up as remorselessly methodical and far more than your average scenery chewing sociopath. Where Chigurh sticks to his morbid fascination with chance and death, tossing coins and making hapless victims decide their own fates, Plainview clings to some warped notion of success and satisfaction. This is truly mythic evil. Chigurh is malignant Beelzebub – a death demon unsparing of even crows – to Plainview’s inveigling Mephistopheles, deceiver of poor Californian landowners. Like No Country’s title, both figures recall Yeats. They’re his “rough beasts”; frighteningly unstoppable and slowly slouching off to be reborn in some distant time.

Indeed, quite a bit of recent Hollywood has been reflective of this murky mood. A perfect year of foreboding would have seen the other three Best Picture Oscar slots going to Zodiac, a film of an obsessive quest to fund a serial killer; Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, an even darker heist movie; and Eastern Promises, another austere study of the evil that men do, especially if they’re creepy Russian mafia types.

But No Country and Blood are a cut above in the epic sweepstakes. Darkness and Starkness are cloak and hat they don with thinly disguised relish, completely enshrouding, as the Vatican bemoans, a “moral conscience”, Oscar adulation for them is a blazing neon sign that the land of hope and glory is now missing quite a bit of both.

“We should boycott women who don’t cry”, Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, Nana dances

 

{the link :youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlBS3PmPfaI}

Godard’s Vivre sa vie {My life to live},  is an unsentimental sketch of twelve distinct episodes, which unfolds the life of a young Parisian Nana (Anna Karina), who works in a record shop, but aspires to be an actress. She, indiscernibly, drifts into prostitution (when it turns dark the streetwalkers’ endless beat begins) to meet her expenses, initially, which, soon, becomes her mainstream occupation, due to her association with harsh-cold-business like- pimp, Raoul. Each episode, like a turning point in her life/a revelation to her, is given certain depth by reflecting the ever growing disengagement of her inner self with the decision she took, a sense of helplessness to break away from it and just to stay in accepting the absurdity of situation {existentialism!}, a realization of gradually being distanced from her dream/ideal slot,  and the essence of each is captured in a title with key variables like the characters, the situation, the location, the decision taken, the action etc, say

“A Café. Nana wants to leave Paul. The Pinball Table” {episode - 1}

“The Record shop - Two thousand francs - Nana lives her life” {episode - 2}

“The Concierge -Paul - The Passion of Joan of Arc - A Journalist” {episode -3}

“The Police. Nana is questioned” {episode - 4}  

“The boulevards. The first man. The room” {episode - 5} 

“Meeting Yvette, A Café in the suburbs, Raoul, Gunshots on the street” {episode- 6}

“The Letter - Raoul again - Champs Elysees” {episode - 7}

“Afternoons - Money - Sinks - Pleasure - Hotels” {episode - 8}

“Young Man – Luigi – Nana wonders if she’s happy’  {episode - 9}

“The Streets - A guy - Happiness is no fun” {episode - 10}

“Place Du Chatelet - A Stranger - Nana the unwitting philosopher” {episode -11}

“Again the Young man - The Oval portrait - Raoul trades Nana” {episode-12} 

…..…, takes the viewer through Nana’s firm decision to walk out of  an existing relationship to realize her big dream, a sense of resignation and cynicism about her as she finds herself trapped further in the depressing depths of her newly chosen life {prostitution}- with no escape, where she is treated as one more “body transaction”  displayed in the streets, an object / a body to be enjoyed or manipulated. It, no longer, is a life, but a kind of existence controlled by some external factors. 

“You only have to take interest in things. After all, things are what they are. A message is a message. Plates are plates. Men are men. And life is life’.

She pursues her new existence of bodily transactions – leading men to hotel rooms, money-talk, undressing, getting naked, smiling for them, etc without the required level of inquisitiveness and energy, physically detached, disinterested, frozen stance when she is held close… “The prostitute must always be at the client’s disposal. She must accept anyone who pays”. And during one of such encounters, she faces rejection as a seasoned prostitute. Her joy of finding a young love is rendered short-lived, as she finds herself sold to a group of men by her pimp. Her life comes to a shocking end when she is caught in a shootout over money. A tale of a woman who tries to escape from a life with constraints, who wants to assert self in this world, but fails to escape from the influence of men in her life.   

I, particularly, liked this dance scene where she begins to dance to the upbeat music, teasing the young man, performing across the room smiling excitedly, expecting the world around to admire her as a “Special Woman” - a woman to be loved, to be admired, to be cared for and whose dreams have to be given the right kind of support, and who should never ever BE EXPLOITED. However, her performance does not evoke much response from the men around, who throw a few glances at her when she passes by.

 “In order to live in a society in Paris today, on no matter what level, one is forced to prostitute oneself in one way or another—or to put it another way, to live under conditions resembling those of prostitution ….in a modern society, prostitution is the norm.”  Jean-Luc Godard –(Le Nouvel Observateur 1966)

“It seems to me that in Paris today, we are all living more or less in a state of prostitution. The increase in prostitution, literally speaking, is partial proof of this statement because it calls into question the body, but one  can prostitute oneself just as equally with the mind, the spirit. I think it is a collective phenomenon, and perhaps one which is not altogether new. But what is new is that people find it normal.” –  Jean-Luc Godard

{link:Wiki says, rather than glamorizing prostitution (as in, for example, Pretty Woman), Godard analyses it from a sociological perspective. In fact, one of the film’s original sources is a study of contemporary prostitution…}

{Link: Sensesofcinema:To Appreciate Silence

For eighty-five minutes I sit in silence. I sit in a theatre with a projector behind me and screen in front. A beam of light bounces from one to the other and right before my eyes the life of Nana, played by Anna Karina, materialises. When I emerge from the theatre I have to remind myself that I am not in Paris in the 1960s, that the world does not exist in black and white and nor is it accompanied by a melancholic soundtrack.

I grab a festival flyer and return to my car. I drive home in silence as the last remnants of the film linger in my mind. I can vaguely hear the music from the closing credits. As that music fades I listen to the silence and recall Nana’s words in translation:

– Why must one always talk? Often one shouldn’t talk but live in silence. The more one talks the less words mean.

The camera, in this film, captures Anna Karina and her sensitive face so delicately, like a gentle lover, consciously making an effort not to be intrusive, but to follow carefully and tenderly, those moments of realisation, fun/excitement, subtle frames of her subtle coquettish charm, and fleeting spaces of sadness/gracefully rendered grief. …her face spontaneously, elegantly, captured what she felt at a specific moment, as a quick response to the acts of external world, while on the other hand, maintaining not so easy to capture “her own personal disenchantment towards the world outside……Godard, the director, was her lover and later her husband. 

“An Unfinished Cinema”-Abbas Kiarostami

  {Link:Abbas Kiarostami is the most influential and controversial post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker and one of the most highly celebrated directors in the international film community of the last decade. (1) During the period of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, at a time when Iranians had such a negative image in the West, his cinema introduced a humane and artistic face….}

Reproducing the Text written by Abbas Kiarostami, a refreshingly brilliant filmmaker who never tried to belittle the intelligence of True-Cinema lovers. Text written for the Centenary of Cinema.

“Originally, I thought that the lights went out in a movie theatre so that we could see the images on the screen better. Then I looked a little closer at the audience settling comfortably into the seats and saw that there was much more important reason: the darkness allowed the members of the audience to isolate themselves from others and to be alone. They were both with others and distant from them. When we reveal a film’s world to the members of an audience, they each learn their own world through the wealth of their own experience. As a filmmaker, I rely on this creative intervention for, otherwise, the film and the audience will die together. Faultless stories that work perfectly have one major defect : they work too well with to allow the audience to intervene.     

It is a fact that films without a story are not very popular with audiences, yet a story also requires gaps, empty spaces like in a crossword puzzle, voids that it is up to the audience to fill in. Or, like a private detective in a thriller to discover. I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films.  It belongs to the members of audience and corresponds to their own world. 

The world of each work, of each film recounts a new truth. In the darkened theatre, we give everyone the chance to dream and to express his dream freely. If art succeeds in changing things and proposing new ideas, it can only do so via the free creativity of the people we are addressing – each individual member of the audience. Between the fabricated and ideal world of the artist and that of the person he addresses, there is a solid and permanent bond. Art allows the individual to create his truth according to his own wishes and criteria; it also allows him to reject other imposed truths. Art gives each artist and his audience the opportunity to have a more precise view of the truth concealed behind the pain and passion that ordinary people experience everyday.  A filmmaker’s commitment to attempting to change daily life can only reach fruition through the complicity of the audience. The latter is active only if the film creates a world full of contradictions and conflicts that the audience members are able to perceive. The formula is simple : there is a world that we consider real but not completely just. This world is not the fruit of our minds and it does not suit us all that well but, through cinematic techniques, we create a world that is one hundred times more real and just than the one around us. This does not mean that our world gives a false image of justice but, on the contrary, it better highlights the contrasts that exist between our ideal world and the real world. In this world, we speak of hope, sorrow and passion. 

The cinema is a window into our dreams and through which it is easier to recognize ourselves. Thanks to the knowledge and passion thus acquired, we transform life to the benefit of our dreams. The cinema seat is of greater assistance than the analyst’s couch. Sitting in a cinema seat we are left to our own devices and this is perhaps the only place where we so bound to and yet so distant from each other : that is the miracle of cinema. In cinema’s next century, respect of the audience as an intelligent and constructive element is inevitable. To attain this, one must perhaps move away from the concept of the audience as the absolute master. The director must also be the audience of his own film. For hundred years, cinema has belonged to the filmmaker. Let us hope that now the time has come for us to implicate the audience in its second century.”

  “The Wind Will Carry Us”,

One amongst the masterpieces crafted by him, which allows us enough space to Reconstruct the film through our point of view towards life. I must say, it is one of those few films, which leave us feeling so refreshed, so optimistic about the Present. The Future may promise finer things in life, but stay with this moment. 

I say, “Let yourself be directed up and down the narrow path through the golden wheat fields, drooping and swaying beneath the weight of their ripe, golden harvest…..it is the real country, picturesque, profoundly characteristic and feel the most intimate experience of your life”. “A stunningly lyrical and eloquent exploration” says, The New York Times. Winner of Best film - Venice Film Festival, this is about a filmmaker from Tehran who travels to a remote, serene looking mountain village. He has secret plans to record a local ritual ceremony surrounding an old dying woman (behind the blue window of a tiny house). A young boy, Farzad becomes his guide, who ultimately becomes his source of information - the informant on the old woman’s journey towards death - she did not take the soup tonight, She did not speak to anyone etc… Convincing the locals that they are archaeologists looking for some buried treasure, the filmmaker attempts to befriend the villagers with mixed results. As the rustling wind, golden light and deep shadows of the village cast an alluring spell, the deathwatch drags on much to the irritation of his crew and the old woman stubbornly clings to life, differences within the family (the boy belongs to) settles down, leaving the protagonist well deservedly transformed…..he realizes that he has no right to intrude upon a family’s privacy and its rituals,especially, when it is under an emotional hit, due to a grievous event - death !

 “Taste of Cherry”, 

Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, is an emotionally complex, subtly disturbing meditation on life and death. It reflects the helplessness of humans who are burdened with Life, who are trying to break away from the inexplicable canvas of varied problems in life, loneliness- could be one of them, who constantly search for some kind of wordily, gestures-led comfort from other humans. Middle-aged Mr Badii drives through the hilly outskirts of Tehran - searching for someone to rescue or bury him.

{link:Taste of Cherry(1997), a mythic tale told in the simplest terms but containing a complicated concept of suicide possibly alien to both eastern and western cultures. A desperate man bent on committing suicide attempts to enlist the help of someone to make sure he is buried, dead and not alive. Can he find a compassionate man to do him such an unusual favour in exchange for a large monetary reward? A simple idea, almost an Aesopian tale, but one that branches off into complex dimensions and sub-themes relating to the human condition, the legitimacy of the act of suicide, and many other meanings.“

 

The movie,”Where is the friend’s Home?”, Rakesh says, is a beautiful meditation of general humanitarianism coupled with care and compassion and at the same time undaunted by meaning-less opinions and un-understanding adults. The movie ends on a note of triumph but not as expected by the kid.

………

………

{Our expert : Alok Celebration of Short films}

Godard’s Masculin féminin

I discovered this charmingly youthful world of the French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud, a familiar face as the sullen romantic Antoine Doniel in {link: Truffaut’s filmepisodes}, amidst those fragments of conversations I enjoy with Barb, a film connoisseur. And I, at times, walk down the street to stare at the refreshed list of critically acclaimed works, class-acts by thought-leaders as displayed on the glass windows at Alok , just to feel the thrill in the air of having stumbled upon one more new found. 

 

 

{link :Masculin féminin},

is a film about the things that young people say and do …I could still recall this simple scene at the cafe when Jean-Pierre Leaud (Paul) repeats the act or a harmless prank pulled off by his friend on the lady at the other table a moment ago, i.e. walked over to her to touch her breasts, with no introduction, but on the pretext of borrowing a sugar cube from her. It’s completely a different world as enjoyed by younger people, a world that has no clear-cut objectives, but is characterized by repeat acts of certain situations that promise “maximization of sheer a delight”, until  the novelty of the experience loses its flavor. 

 

In Godard’s words, “it is a film between one reflection and another. There are times when you do not necessarily need a baby, but it so happens you have one anyway. It’s there, it exists. it would perhaps be better if it had come along at some other time, but when it’s there, you dress it in whatever’s at hand..”   

This film captures, very beautifully, the tussle between “the spirit of freedom and spontaneity as brought in by youthful energy” and “the ever-increasing need to participate in certain political developments, ideologies around the world”, through conversations exchanged between youngsters hanging around in Parisian cafes. It, also, depicts the sense of discomfort within the younger generation caught stranded between the “no-longer-workable” moral values of their previous generation & their country, the winds of change flowing across from a much freer-world called America (the America influence!), their willingness to consume global youth culture, and the ever-growing need to rearrange themselves in a more modern set-up to appreciate one’s sexual needs. While being at this, it does manage to grasp hold of a youngster’s realization of a much-murkier adult’s life and its varied intricacies [look at the scene when Paul {Leaud} and his girl friend Madeleine {Chantal Goya} move across various coffee tables in a cafe, within a few moments, feeling so uncomfortable as they are hit by bits and pieces of conversations between adults], and heartbreaking solitude {”everyone is unable to live alone”} caught on the run, amidst one’s chaotic social life.

 

Adrian Martin, a noted film critic says “Godard’s  Masculin feminin comes from its double focus: the sense that Godard is watching his characters from a great distance and judging them is counterpointed by a secret empathy, a fleeting tenderness”. The Masculine feminine divide strikes at the viewer relentlessly – boys talk politics, paint slogans, witness arguments, try to see the girls getting undressed from the running trains, secretly desire to settle down in life with a job and a girl. While girls play with their hair, paint their lips, follow the latest fashions, and enjoy a freshly acquired individualistic streak – courtesy the wave of pop culture consumption. A closer view of a completely different world, the French youth lives in – their habits, choices, struggles within personal relationships, in Cafes: ordinary bistros with a jukebox in the corner, benches, a bar and streets, which runs in sharp contrast with a rather fluid milieu or philosophy portrayed as graffiti on the walls. 

Adrian Martin {a film critic for the Melbourne Age; the author of Raul Ruiz: Magnificent Obsessions} writes, “the film represented France’s nouvelle vague of the 1960s, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It featured icons like Jean-Pierre Leaud, Brigitte Bardot {fleetingly}, and spoke of love, sex, politics and work. It captured every teenager’s dream of hanging out and fooling around in Parisian Cafes. He further says, Godard presented Masculin feminine as an act of reportage, an almost ethnographic account of the social climate. Godard’s key reference points were two films that helped build a bridge from old-fashioned, supposedly objective documentary to the more subjective and experimental form of the cinematic essay : Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, and Chris Marker’s Le Joli mai. This film contains so much rich and amusing detail about fashions, fads, pop music, and international political events in the newspapers (especially Vietnam)” . The film retained its documentary aspect; the majority of the dialogues in it are constructed, almost surreally, as interviews, question-and-answer sessions delivered in machine-gun shot-countershot valleys. “There were no written dialogues; they were real interviews with the actors. I did the interviewing myself….and later mixed up these

 

interviews in the editing….the most notorious scene- the interview with “Miss 19”, where

Godard drops the dialogue pretext altogether, instead gives Paul (Leaud) a job as a sociological investigator, and in a long and painful sequence shot, grills the poor girl on every pressing real world subject she knows next to nothing about. He further says, “Taking Masculin feminin as primarily a chronicle of the 60s, however, obscures the film’s achievement, both as a work of art and as a personal testament. Aesthetically, Masculin feminin can easily seem like one of Godard’s more casual efforts : a collection of fragments, notes, improvisations. Looked at closely, it coheres into a tight pattern that is surprisingly classical and balanced. Although Godard plays fast and loose with the on-screen numbering of the “fifteen precise facts” of the story, the film nonetheless scrupulously alternates extended “tableau” scenes with transitional flurries (street views accompanied by multiple voice-overs), and the intimate personal story (the private) with explosive intrusions of violence (the public). He experiments with different ways of rendering the verbal exchanges between his characters – demonstrating that truth can never be simply filmed in a singular transparent way, while trying, all the same, to reach and express that truth through a mosaic or collage structure.”

 

In a year with 13 Moons by Fassbinder …

  {link: Continuation of my previous post on this dramatic tale : the aftermath of a Personal Catastrophe}….as reviewed by Robert Kolker, the author of A Cinema of Loneliness : Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman.  He captured the essence of this film in a phrase “Controlled Hysteria”, which is both astoundingly a beautiful and brutally a disturbing definition of art.   

There are three directors of the New German Cinema that are best known outside their country : Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Of the three, Fassbinder was certainly the most prolific, probably the most profound, definitely the most political, arguably the most inventive of the group. He used film as an exploratory tool, pushing it to its limits, often pushing his audience to their limits by making films so unrelenting that viewers are asked not to sit back and allow the film to pour over them, but to became actively engaged in its visual and narrative energy.

“In a Year with 13 Moons”, a relatively late film, it is Fassbinder at the peak of his powers combining the melodramatic exaggeration that he picked up from the German born American director, Douglas Sirk, and the political and aesthetic ideas of the German playwright, Bertolt Brecht. Sirk offered Fassbinder a way of creating films of Controlled Hysteria, with great peaks of emotional outburst. Brecht provided the restraint and the politics. Brecht was an anti-melodramatist, who believed that melodrama, when it absorbed the viewer, making him or her believe they were watching a version of the real world, was misleading and a way to create intellectual passivity. He wanted his viewers not to identify with what they saw, but to observe, to understand the mechanics of the dramaturgy and its political underpinnings. He wished his work to create an “alienation effect” that put the audience at a distance and made them think as much, or more, than feel. To all of this Fassbinder adds a touch of surrealism and theater of the absurd.

What a mix! Melodrama and Anti-melodrama; Emotion and Intellect; the Self and the World; Engagement and Distance; the collision of the Profound and the Bizarge ; Cinematic art that confronts history and Politics with subjective experience and makes its audience a part of the meaning-making project. Such is “In a Year with 13 Moons”. This is the most personal of Fassbinder’s films.  

The film emerges from a terrible event, the suicide of Fassbinder’s lover. The immediate result might have been a film of enormous despair. But Fassbinder’s determination to regard his subject distantly, persistently, and with rim humor, to diminish emotional intensity by denying spectator identification with the characters, and to politicize the personal, makes it bearable – more than bearable; endlessly intriguing and deeply satisfying. It is a mark of Fassbinder’s talent that given the personal nature of its origin and creation, the finished work is not a merely subjective lament, and it does not indulge in the mystification sometimes associated with “subjective cinema”. The pain suffered by the filmmaker and expressed in the film is situated objectively, and although the film studies the breakdown and death of a pathetic individual, that process occurs in a way that parallels a larger breakdown in social relations. Like all of Fassbinder’s films, it becomes an analysis of capitalism and the distortion of relationships created on every level.

Elvira (nee Erwin) who is a transsexual is the central character (played evocatively played by Volker Spengler, a frequent actor in Fassbinder’s films),  a figure of such innocence that her/his grotesqueness emerges not from what she has allowed to be done to his body but from the matter-of-factness with which she accepts it and allows it to destroy her. Erwin was married and worked for Anton Saitz, a small racketeer in the meat-packing business and who also runs a whorehouse along totalitarian lines. When Erwin expressed his love, Anton told him it was too bad he was not a woman. Erwin went off to Casablanca and returned as Elvira only to realize that Anton took advantage of his weakness and put him out of his body. If the relationship between Anton and Elvira parallels that of Master and Slave, on another level it parallels that of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis : a fraudulent sophisticate and childlike fool – user and abused. Every sequence that Elvira inhabits, confirms her status as passive follower and willing victim, echoes the mutilation and disintegration of herself. The viewer often seeks out the contents of each space, which is mostly dark, only enhanced by available light, discerns it, locates it, and then deals with the emotional terror” it contains, which reflects Elvira’s psyche. Early in the film, after her lover leaves her and she is knocked down by a car, and looked after by Zora, a whore who literally picks her up form the gutter, she visits the slaughter house in which she once worked and where she first knew Anton, “It’s life itself: the steaming blood, and death”, she says in a kind of “fascistic reflection that indicates the state of her confusion and damage”. The slaughterhouse scene is Fassbinder’s metaphor for Fascism.  In the scene, as in so many films, emotional and physical degradation are linked with Germany’s terrible past and the obsession with physicality is given a brutal literalness. Elvira is a construction of everyone she knows – man, woman, husband, father, worker, provider, passive lover, abused lover, chattel, willing surrenderer of identity, of sexuality and of personality. The slaughterhouse becomes an image of the brutalities that made her a metaphor for the fascism of the spirit, many versions of spiritual murder and dismemberment follow, unrelentingly.

This disturbed and disturbing film asks us, above all,  to understand the ‘depths of victimhood”. Elvira is the victim of fascism past and present. For Fassbinder, the past is always present, though perhaps he is recalling Marx’s comment that history does repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. This is a film unlike any you have seen, will move, disturb, and, in a way only a great work of the imagination can, allow you to see clearly, even through its darkness.  

Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Fassbinder)…of course,WIP

.”….This is the first time I have ever spoken to so many people at once and I am not as good a speaker as the others, but I can explain, I think, why I joined this party at my age. I must confess, it’s not because of politics, which I know too little about…but because of the people, I have found among you. And these people told me that we must not accept everything as God-given, that it’s not all fate. I believe them, and that’s why I am here. I have come to realize there is a reason for everything for all the terrible things that happen in the world. I was married to my husband for 40 years, that’s a long time, but much too short as well. Because, what did I do all those years? I did what was expected of me, what is expected of every woman. I had children, kept house and so on. And Hermann did, what was expected of him. He went to work, he went to war, and that was the way of things. But is that life? I ask myself now? Is that really life? or did we just live in the way others wanted us to live? Was that really our life? I don’t know. Down in the valley, all you see is the mountain. But up on the mountain, you can see many valleys and mountains. Forty years is a long time for two people to be together. I thought I knew him and I thought there was no need to talk. We knew everything there was to know. But that’s not true, not true at all. We have no idea, how my husband must have suffered to have done what he did!  And I knew nothing about it. Is that life? Other people’s problems, that’s what he talked about. But we never really learned how to live together, or we were not able to get through to each other. How desperate he must have been, not knowing which way to turn! He had nobody like you to talk to who might have told him what was right. Things would have been different then. And he would not have been used after his death to fill those magazines with lies. My husband is no murderer. And he is not crazy either. He is a man who hit back because he was beaten all his life. Beaten and trampled on…If it’s true what I’ve heard here that 1 % of the population owns 80% of all wealth, the he tried in his own way to fight this injustice. The way he did it was wrong, but I want to make amends for that. I, Emma Kusters, will join you in your struggle for justice today.  …”             

Little head is busy with her work and a wonderful romantic twist of affairs …but she does not mind lean back onto Alok (our expert) to grab hold of his opinion on this masterpiece….

Update: Barb , a movie connoisseur who introduced me to Truffaut , recommends French movies unflinchingly, while I declare my loyalty to my dear Fassbinder!

 He dragged a recent survey done by Guardian Unlimited at my counter :  

{Link:In March, folks at Guardian Unlimited asked viewers to let them know what the best ever non-English films were. They’ve totted up the thousands of votes people cast to present their definitive top 40. But what did Guardian’s film writers think of peoples’ choices? Here’s the chart, and their verdicts…..}

Featured are the masters François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Elem Klimov, Marcel Carné and Haneke.  

Am still working like a glamorous slave…..would be reviewing “The Return” as well! In the meantime, a big Hi goes to Alok, Ant, Vidya, ./w and a few others who regularly visit this space of mine…

Vodka Lemon by Iraqi-Kurdish Hiner Saleem

 {this new post heralds the launch of ÓBUMBLE-BEE series on my blog}

I view this movie as a series of “Postcards from desolate and snow-covered village in Armenia”, portraying a heart-warming tale of human optimism amidst lonely and frozen  mountainous landscape. And the poignant note, which this tragicomedy tale opens with, introduces you to various facets of the admirable survival instinct of  the village - the gentle conversations at the graveside, surprisingly not laden with sadness, but more like daily updates, the town market where one’s possessions are sold, the journeys and the shared grief lonely hearts indulge in a green bus, the cigarette smoke swirling within the circle of chairs occupied by elderly gentlemen ruminating the likelihood of receiving a huge parcel presumably bearing money from their sons who  emigrated to foreign lands, the photographs that came from Paris - a momentary escape from their meager existence, the empty chairs, the empty hands with no work, the heartfelt love songs sung by the bus driver ….a gentle portryal of human hardship laced with whimisical fantasy and subtle humorous grief. The bleak poverty stares deep into one’s eyes and chills one to the bone, but crushes under the unflinching beat of optimism…..what I truly liked about my brush with this movie is the excerpts of Interview given by the director - Hiner Saleem….

Hiner Saleem says : I like to quote what my grandfather used to say on the Kurdish misfortunes - “Our past is sad, our present is catastrophic, but fortunately we have no future”

In the case of the Kurds, or the Jews, or the Armenians, or of other people who have known misfortunes, if they do not have a little bit of humor, if they do not manage to put things in perspective, they can not survive. According to a famous 17th-century orientalist, “the Kurds are both the saddest and the most joyous people”. Even in truly difficult and tragic moments, there is always a little thing that makes us burst out laughing. {link: I like to view tragedy as a period, a stage that is going to pass}. I do not like playing victims.

The film is a tender fable about misery, a baring down to white in the vein of “la vie en rose”. He says, I have always longed to film Kurdistan, the mountains, the trees, the pomegranates, my mother, the Kurds! then I tapped into the ruins of post-Sovietism……      

Despite everything, Armenians remain incredibly optimistic. Hiner furthers on, all Armenians are magicians because I do not understand how they manage to live (maybe they do not understand either!}.

The Kurdish anecdote he shared with us created ripples of goosebumps all over me. “One day my friend’s friend has been forced to sell his color TV, but he did not want to leave his children without TV, so he had sold the large, beautiful color TV and bought a small black-and-white one. At some point, his 5-year old daughter asked him - daddy, why does Catherine no longer have red lips? they have become all black”. Hiner adds, ”this absurdity and optimism, this misery and love, this life that veers between tragedy and comedy, these red lips become all black - these are all the reasons that pushed me to shoot Vodka Lemon in these Kurdish villages of Armenia”

When he was asked, “Two images echo one another : in the beginning, the image of the old musician who arrives on a bed, and at the end, the piano that makes a false getaway, if we can put it that way. Was this done on purpose?”…he says,we are in a barren country, yet despite everything there is hope: people do not sell their piano, they do not sell their dignity. In the last scene with the piano, it is especially love, that matters, the love that begins to grow between Hamo and Nina (the leading protagonists), this amazing power to resist the odds together and to find solutions..”

I am enthralled by the last scene - with practically all of their possessions sold, bare walls and bare corners around their homes, as a last resort, they sit huddled in warm clothing, against the frigid layers of silence, on the piano bench waiting for someone to buy the instrument.  When a prospect approaches them “Is it for sale? or you bought it”, they both without a word, go rolling down the snowy road with the piano….

{link : The Cemetery - a key element in the movie} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACwkJOBbjwU

Hiner says Kurds have a particular relationship with the dead. The dead are not really dead.They are no longer visible to men but they are omnipresent in everyday life. People go to the cemetery with vodka and food. Family, friends…everyone sits down by the graveside. Then they drink to the health of the deceased and talk to him. The cemetery is not a place of sadness at all. When he greeted a few young people at the graveside, “what are you doing here?”. They answered him, “we smoke.we chat.where else should we go? there is no cafe. this is our buddy, who is dead. There is a chair. we sit here and keep him company”……

In a year with 13 Moons by Fassbinder (WIP)

…I am still under the depressing influence of this movie. It is painfully sad and a difficult movie to watch. How would you feel when you watch a “sad poem” moving gently across the window? tell me how would you feel? you tremble, you quiver with some unknown pain, tears march down your cheeks silently, but to some beat in the corner. You are not ashamed of your tears, as they are emerging from those newer depths of your heart. They are like those brooks that murmur behind your backyard…..I fought valiantly with the sense of urgency that gripped me (a love struck woman!) to put down a note on this “sad poem”. But, I posted a message on the board, today morning, said in a tone of rectitude that I would fail while attempting my hand at this….therefore, I sought a help!

“I like to reconstruct  the conversations I used to have when I was 20 or so, and talked to people, to customers.And I thought, it must be possible to solve the problems. If I were, say, Adenauer, I could go to Moscow, and talk to them and the prisoners would be released. I have quite a different yearning now. It was so hard to conform, to situations I was forced into, or forced myself into. It makes no difference. Maybe I would like to…I do not know. Maybe I would like to go back Anton or to Irene. The yearning for Anton is something you hide from or something I hide from. With Christoph it was different.  I tried to give him what I did not get from Anton. And, I thought, I may, I could give it to Christoph. But it did not work out.  Giving him so much that he’d have some to give back to me. That may sound calculating, but it is not.  May be it’s, what one calls Love. I dont know. Irene and I, a kind of escape. Our relationship wasn’t entirely clear. It was an urge to get away from the situation we were in. That was the main thing. That’s how we came together. And the bonding agent…If you make soup too thin, you use some flour to thicken it. Marie-Ann was a kind of catalyst, too. I dont really know, what it is,…love. I always needed it, but I rejected the word. Marie-Ann, well of course, plays a role, but may be not so much for me as for Irene. ..Anton had his meat business and all kinds of strange deals. I don’t want to talk much about that. Everyone says Anton’s a swine. An idealistic swine. I don’t know what to say. But it didn’t affect me because I had to cope with this feeling earlier. Later, it didn’t interest me anymore. Earlier, I reacted differently too. I put up with a lot of things on account of Anton. It seemed natural to me that Anton was the stronger one, I the weaker. And he knew it. Naturally, he should have taken my side. Irene did. So why could not he? I do not know why you are asking me these questions. He did not write. I waited for him everyday but he didn’t come. The swine. He could have written. But no swine ever learned to write. What could he have written? he had to do his sums. That caused me a lot of suffering. Maybe it was right, what I did. I don’t know. I cant say. I am not sure. On the one hand, I was sure that it had to happen and that I wanted to die. On the other hand, I didn’t know what life held in store for me. Life is and held some kind of hope. And then again, things like comfort or maybe yearning.  Maybe I was curious to experience what those words really meant. And if I had really wanted to die. I don’t know. It probably came from the subconscious. Would I have written down my correct address? I can’t explain why I did it now. If I had really wanted to die maybe I would not have written it down. After the event, it’s so hard to talk about these things. When I wrote down Irene’s address, I was not thinking if anything at all. I just felt I had to fill out that registration form. Handsome stranger, the time will come one day when all my dreams become reality…. ..”

my fingers are at work….

….“I sat there aimlessly
watching the grass swaying softly
in the courtyard of my mind.
Is this how emptiness measured?
A few grinning moments sprung by,
a few grievous moments trudged on…..if silence hugs me will I become silence to you?

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the rebel, the non-confirmist - I

 A Cinema of Vicious Circles by Thomas Elsaesser  

{Jyo : I, as an amateur viewer of critically acclaimed movies & a recent entrant to this intellectual forum ,have certainly something to feel excited about….{link:discovering FASSBINDER on my own and following his work like a passion driven child with a sense of wonderment}. This “Fassbinder girl” (as my colleagues call me, as the shop boy recognises me), for a change, did surprise Alok, Barb, Rajiv & others…Reproduced over here is an excerpt done on this legendary director, which I found on the jacket cover of }

“What I would like is to make Hollywood movies, that is, movies as wonderful and universal, but at the same time not as hypocritical, as Hollywood..”

Since his death in 1982, Fassbinder’s stature as an international auteur has steadily grown, not least because of an increasing appreciation of his later films. Especially, his so-called “BRD trilogy” (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, Veronika Voss), Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his engagement with the legacy of Nazism have been reappraised, and the sexual politics of films like “Fox and his friends”,”In a year of 13 moons” and    “Querelle” are still controversial. Not every director of the New German Cinema saw as clearly as Fassbinder the irony of being a “kept filmmaker- kept in order to be critical”. When Fassbinder was asked to account for his success, at the time when “Why does Herr R.Run Amok?” was released, he replied :’The established culture business needs outsiders like me”. His “Cinema of Vicious circles” depict the dynamics of power and complicity, of impossible choices,of honest bad faith and unenviable alternatives play across the social field, from film-making to love-making,from deals with international producers to deal with Munich drug pushers. He seems to have been energised by these vicious circles,since he relished and cultivated them throughout his career. If in the early films they underpin his plots without necessarily becoming the explicit theme, the later films make them their outer, political horizon until, in “The Third Generation”, collusion between authority and rebellion furnishes the film’s very subject matter, as terrorists are paid by the state in order to justify its law-and-order policies. His films all have at their center the hard core of a contradiction, an unsentimental, detachedly lucid point where the plot lines cross to motivate a moral or emotional impasse, sensed by the characters  and recognised by the viewer.

“The American method of making (films) left the audience with emotions and nothing else”, he explained. “I want to give the spectator the emotions along with the possibility of reflecting on and analyzing what he is feeling”.

In the early films, “reflecting on” the feelings of the characters often took the form of avoiding even the suspicion of emotion.  “Love is colder than death”, displays such emotional detachment and understatement that a contemporary reviewer complained, “the film comes out of an almost unimaginable fear that an emotion might occur which the director would not wish to answer for“. The desires binding people to each other in these films are those common to popular culture : love and money. But these twin strands of action and feeling are braided together and twisted into a shape that makes their inextricability axiomatic, and therefore not so much a moral stance as a formal  structure.

If we look at the plots of Fassbinder’s first 5 films, it becomes apparent that they describe a similar configuration, which could be schematized as : A wants X, but needs B to get it. B wants y, which can only be had with the help of A. The structure could be one of perfect symmetry or even exchange. B gives x to A who makes sure B gets y. But the situation is complicated by two factors : firstly, there is usually also C and D, whose function is to block access to x or y or both: but even where there is neither C nor D to impede the exchange, x and y are incommensurate, not of the same order of being, in precisely the way that love and money are incommensurate. To put it differently: both A and B undervalue the other wants and overvalue what they want from other.