Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cinema. Show all posts

Thursday, August 04, 2016

A collection of moments/quotes from Sans Soleil


Recently saw an indulgent movie, indulgent for the navel-gazers like me.
Sans Soleil, 1983, by Chris Marker [wiki, imdb]
[did you know there are Emus in Haldwani]

A solution to change the present, through the medium of iconography
if the images of the present don't changechange the images of the past

Expressing the falsities and inadequacies of the image
portable and compact form of an inaccessible reality

How love can't be imagined without illusions

If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it

To dissent and to fail, is not failure
All they won in their understanding of the world could've been only won only through struggle.

How the mind can adapt (its knowledge) towards any mode of action
... they studied capitalism so thoroughly to fight itthat now they provide it with its best executives

A movement is not without personal goals
... the movement had its posturers and careerists - of matrydom
On the students who fought and massacared in the name of (their) revolution
they "trembled with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world"
[original, by Che Guevara] "If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine."
Leading towards a life, vs leading a life

They are life, to be eaten on the spot, like fresh donuts.Its a very simple secret. the old try to hide it, and not all the young know it.

On a dance-cult, that does public performances as a means of cleansing or understanding
For the Takenoko, 20 is the age of retirement.They want people to look at them but don't seem to notice that they do.

---
Personal development through a movement or revolution, as learnt from the Guinea-Bissau coup

We'll see that beneath this ceremony of promotions,seemingly perpetuating the brotherhood of the struggle,there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,
and that Nino's tears expressed not an ex-warrior's emotionbut the wounded pride of a heroslighted at not being raised high enough above the rest.Beneath each of these faces lies a memory,and where there was to be one collective memory,there are a thousand memories of men who parade their personal woundsin the great wound of history.

---

On finally understanding Mussorgsky's compositions

Its meaning has been lost, but for the first time, he glimpsed the presence of that thinghe didn't understand,which had to do with unhappiness and memory,which he must grasp at all cost,and toward which, slowly, heavily, he began to walk.
---

The entire text.
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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

cinema = behavioral observation

Movies are all about behavioral observation. Gestures and vocalizations in response to environmental pressures, seeking to exercise autonomy through adaptive strategies. We humans have a narcissistic tendency to gloat in, and associate reward to having gained a new understanding behind, those gestures and vocalizations, in different environments. Observation is FUN. Cinema is a proof of that - we swarm to observe other creatures (preferably of our species) expressing themselves through gestures and vocalizations. Films grow old on us, or certain films seem outdated, because we have already observed same/similar humans producing the same response to the same/similar environmental pressures. There are some films which have a veneer of "new", by having people appear and talk different in visually different environments. The formula is out there.

Humans will keep watching humans doing the above, empathizing with them, and grow awareness, opinions, weltanschauung, which induces a "feeling good" feel-tone. When something leaves us in splits or tears or screams, the motto seems "Come in for therapy, come out therapized", and that the movie has served its purpose to induce a strong response - in the real world, a chance to cry, laugh or scream in abandon comes seldom, and we seek upon the combined efforts of the film crew to push us to that.

We watch humans because they can give closure to the expression of a thought. For this same reason, we don't watch animals much, because closures in expression and environmental interaction under influence are impossible to gauge. However, we do know that animals, alike humans, respond to environmental pressures  (or stress factors), and have their personal favorite stress factors. Animals try to put it out there, but we don't get it completely, unless we feel amused, and would like to continue in our observation, in building a framework beyond the human situations. Instead of cinema, sometimes I wish to watch animals channels like Discovery or Animal Planet because of the possibilities it offers on a thought plane, because of incomplete expressions (and not because death is a reminder that things end but nature exists).
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Sunday, May 22, 2016

Movie trail 2016 Apr-May


In the recent span of a month, here are some movies accomplished, and my score:

Order by watch (chronology)

[2015] Meru: 9/10
Meru is a mountaineering movie. The project was dope. It is personal and intense, the best way a mountaineer's life has been represented so far. Anker, Chin, and Ozturk are fantastic climbers and human beings.

[1989] Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro:7/10
This is another old gem (much like Ruby, but not Sapphire or Diamond). The content is powerful, and well expressed. They took the eyes into a ghetto, and showed the overlapping issues that play, and how people accidentally fall into the buckets of good and bad by the way they react to it by their capacity of human understanding.

[2016] Aligarh: 7/10
The direction and cinematography of this movie had me impressed. The university scenes are well portrayed, including the demeanor of professors. Though it was confusing about the very issue it tried addressing - ie that of gay rights.

[2015] Charlie Kay Chakkar Mein: 5/10
Before I could watch this, I gave it out to a friend, who reported back with a raving review. I didn't feel the same - the movie reeks of bad acting, the script is unconvincing, the scenes look staged much like a tele soap.

[1986] Hannah and her Sisters: 8/10
Intelligent content can trump over rich content anyday. Multimillion dollar movies of today still don't manage to captivate the audience as well as this one - with simple camera angles in domestic settings - does. Michael Keaton's character is hilarious. All characters are relatable, in some way. All individuals are given a space to mature on the screen, which is what makes the movie feel larger than life, though immersive in none but the banalities of life.


Order by release (Date/Yr)
[1986] Hannah and her Sisters
[1989] Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro
[2015] Meru
[2015] Charlie Kay Chakkar Mein
[2016] Aligarh
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Tuesday, February 02, 2016

Realism of The Revenant (2015)


"If we ended up in greenscreen with coffee and everybody having a good time, everybody will be happy, but most likely the film would be a piece of shit."

I wondered throughout if it was all done for real, but yes it was. The Revenant, a 2015 movie, nominated for 12 oscars, is a beefy deal to get over with. Glad to have screened it tonite when Yogi was over. "Starkly beautiful and uncompromising", as one review calls it; ditto.

I did know it would be about the outback, and especially focused on survival, unaware of the background that it is based on the trapper expeditions in the harsh American north. Also didn't know the man behind it - Inarritu - all of whose movies I have enjoyed and found a lot of awareness encapsulated. Babel also had a similar theme of unfolding drama among people of diverse ethnicities and languages. But whereas in Babel the camera swept back and forth between interconnected dramas unfolding in the Moroccan deserts to the Japanese clubs to the Mexican and American border, here the camera is set solely on the American outback, and all "different" peoples - Arikara, Pawnee, Siouxee, French, English - converge here to create an epic drama.

After watching this movie, I admire the skills of the trapper and the survivor even more. Just a week back was I introduced to Nessmuk, a legendary American wilderness survivalist, pulling me back into the feverish thought; and today came The Revenant. Long wilderness reveries to follow in the near future.
Stories started to swirl off the set of the film in the summer. Crew spoke of enduring a “living hell”, of being forced to work in -25C temperatures, of travelling for hours to remote locations in Canada and Argentina to film for a mere 90 minutes, the result of Iñárritu’s decision to shoot only in natural light. 
Leonardo DiCaprio went through hell to play indestructible fur trapper Hugh Glass in The Revenant
PS: 2016 Oscars had some predictable outcomes
- Best Director for Alejandro Inarritu - two consecutive Oscar wins is a feat not seen in the last 65 years, and one which establishes the dominance of the Three Amigos (the Mexican trio of Inarritu, Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuaron)
- Best Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio - and his first Oscar!
- Best Cinematography for Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki. He is now the first cinematographer in history to win three consecutive Oscars, following gongs for Birdman (2015) and Gravity (2014)
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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

In the meantime


As a consumer, here is some interesting bits about the world I've consumed in the itinerant new year holidays:


Rubrics and hubris of all sorts, sorry.


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Friday, March 13, 2015

Day Updates and Cinema: 1994 visited in 2015

t'was an active day today. i was busy in cinema and code - code is the boring part.
it started with a rerun of pulp fiction (1994), right after a first viewing. Its interesting moviemaking; memorable characters, quotes, music, storyline. This is the kinda dark humor and bloodletting that I've grown up identifying as 'the cool' (an organic process), and it felt good to catch up with my passion for cinema after a long time. I had Pulp Fiction on pause for the longest while since getting hands on a bootlegged copy.

On the other end of the day, which is now, it closed with another rerun - Forrest Gump (1994). [just noticed the coincidence that both the movies were 1994. special year.]  I have seen FG more times than I could recollect. It is a warm dreamy movie punctuated by 3 emotions - longing, loneliness and parting. Thing about good movies is that they are dense - every viewing gives something different to think about, or a different understanding, or a different set of  'moments', or a better understanding of some character. Dynamics do change when one has company, and the type of company, too. Today it was about Jenny. She gave up too often, she got into wrong company too often; "Run Forrest Run" seems wisest thing she said, leaving him a kid to stop at.

Watching Forrest Gump (today) and Pulp Fiction  (yesterday), it was annoying to find how their elements have permeated mainstream cinema, and "inspired" filmmakers.

The Wall saw no progress today.
PS: We're making a climbing wall, in my own (well, Kru's) backyard.
We were supposed to fetch a ladder and finish the holds today, but alas our ladder acquisition didn't go smooth. Starting our practice on the wall, we had enamored audience-cum-neighbors watching, who promised to arrange one for us - SOLVED! Tomorrow shall see big progress and tall claims. Backyard climbing might turn into my biggest indulgence once it's done - few rotations on the wall are enough to realize that.
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Sunday, August 12, 2012

Here's (not) to Chiwda

I shouldn't have laid my hands on the packet of LaxmiNarayan Yaancha Best Chiwda and sat musing over the processing that goes into making the oh-so-tasty overfried coconut strips (much to rival bacon strips). That distracts me from blogging, and hence demands more short-term retention from my memory, so later when I can sit down - like now - I could vomit recall out more.

To really nail the blame, we should go back to hunger stimulants (or their corresponding inhibitors), and wish that our body would never demand so much of energy, which means it'll have to be a system of selfless organs demanding energy in the form of oxygen in the form of blood for mere survival and never more, living on the edge, making us prone to any failure at any wrong moment - this makes asceticism look like an inward process of convincing the organs to live inside a really narrow probability cone -- On these musings, suddenly I'm left in awe of the poor who have traveled through a much narrower probability cone than we have; at the end of the day, when survival is all that counts, these people rival any of us. It is also the civilization to commend that allows an environment for such a wide range of cones to exist - you would think there is some upper or lower threshold, but no, be as rich (as you can be) or as poor (as you are left), you will find yourself living, with your cone spectrum a non-determinant of your longevity.

Okay, finally some update. I'm kinda ticked off that my long-term retention is weak - can't recall anything of what my track of personal journey 7 years back. But I'm happy to find that cDc is still alive so I can revisit my past (not amounting to inducing nostalgia). The above observation is doubly-valid, if we recall that I haven't even retained much of the programmer's manual in this passage of years, and have tiredly walked down from the pedestal of a geek to a wannabe. But "that begs the question" (to remind myself of the debate culture at school, where a lot of similar verbiage was thrown about): If I really will forget everything I think or say 7 years from now, how crazy does that make me about the future? Maybe one day I have progeny, and then 7 yrs later I can't even remember for sure if I did, so I make another one? Maybe I graduate thrice?

I've been feeling lazy. Lazy means mostly keeping indoors, but physical inaction doesn't necessarily mean a mental equivalent - the mind can still be rife (on reef). The Big Lebowski last evening has been a historic landmark in movie watching. Right now I'm culturally re-shocking myself and enjoying it all the more on a re-viewing of Lost in Translation; the portrayal of Scarlett is almost tangible, and now I like her all the more.

Checked out the weather:



Delhi isn't too good. It shows a rainless cloud, but in real, right now, its sunny outside. Such weather is only encouragement to foolish things - like consuming items of leavened wheat flour, or pretending to find refuge in humans. Blech... I can trust that it'll be pouring buckets in Ntl, so is that where i should be heading to?
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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

मेरे हाथ तेरी ताकत


A poster I designed today. My fictional directional debut, "Mere Haath Teri Taqat"!

Cover art credits: myself. It was one of those moments of genius as I was working with the scanner.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Ride, Sweat, and Amelia

Sleepy, but still I can brief the day - here on my blog, as I'm presently under a crisis of having run out of pages in my notebook, and not being able to locate the same one that I'm so anal about.
The evening started very late. The advantage of my early return from the office was squandered when I set out fixing the newly-installed broadband in household, trying to reconfigure and restart the modem a million times, to ultimately infer that dear K hadn't even confirmed if our line was activated or not. Annoyed and fatigued, I dosed off just like that.
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Wednesday, July 04, 2012

Where is the friend I seek / Var är den vän (Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället) / Johan Olof Wallin

Where is the friend I seek at break of day?
When night falls I still have not found Him.
My burning heat shows me His traces
I see His traces whenever flowers bloom
His love is mingled with every air.
His voice calls in the summer wind.

This short translation from the english subtitles to Smultronstället a.k.a. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) fluttered many hearts (and some like me, who paused the movie midway to blog about it). The poem is a beautiful thought. But replaying the lunch scene over and over, I couldn't help but wonder why the dialog (which is in Swedish) takes so long for each individual line - they just seem to be saying too much for so few words. So I decided to find out more about the poem and its origins.


The poem, Var är den vän som överallt jag söker (by Johan Olof Wallin, a Swedish archbishop and poet) is an old swedish poem, originally written as a hymn in a Swedish book of Psalms published in 1819.

The poem is 8 stanzas in total. In the movie, Bergman uses only the first two, and breaks on the third one. Here are the stanzas spoken between the three characters:

Var är den vän som överallt jag söker?
När dagen gryr, min längtan blott sig öker;
När dagen flyr, jag än ej honom finner,
Fast hjärtat brinner.
Jag ser hans spår, varhelst en kraft sig röjer,
En blomma doftar och ett ax sig böjer.
Uti den suck jag drar, den luft jag andas,
Hans kärlek blandas.
Jag hör hans röst, där sommarvinden susar,...

Here's something for improvisation on the subtitles (hat tip to this guy):
"Where is the friend I seek everywhere?
Dawn is the time of loneliness and care,
In every sign and breath of air,
I find His love is there."

Happy cinema!
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