Dhapso

Cinema beyond entertainment

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:00:00 -0400

So I wrote a review recently for this movie called Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and most people did not like it because I slammed the damn film. Particularly because they were entertained by this movie and most comments were to this effect “dude, you don’t seem to like movies at all.” If they were aware of the word, some would have called me a cynic. Then somebody said that this movie brings together a whole lot of things, how the film was entertaining, that it was not just about the plot and that every film can’t be an art film. My critique was too much of a critique for this film by their standards.

So here’s a bit of defence on why it’s important that we critique our cinema and that we do it well, even if it entertains us because at the end of the day you’re paying for it and it had better be worth your money and time.

Cinema is an experience, a part of that experience has to leave you entertained, but one wishes that this entertainment does not come at the cost of making you feel like a dud. The other part of that experience goes beyond entertainment, it has an effect on you and if it’s really good it can move you. Most people think cinematic experience and entertainment are not possible in one package — hence the notion that all arty farty films are boring.

So here’s why a lot of Bollywood and Hollywood cinema is not worth it. Far too often it’s the same plot, rehashed with the same old dialogues, which have always worked, and a bit of brilliant aesthetics thrown in. It’s good entertainment policy. Good cinematic vision? I doubt that. Clearly the director does not value the intelligence of his/her audience too much because they know they can get away with same story line by just adding brilliant aesthetics since the commercial success of the film is hardly affected.

Aesthetics define cinema, of course they do. But the hard thing for directors to achieve is to create a cinematic sequence where aesthetics are not merely another tool to hid flaws in the storyline, the characters, the narratives, etc. They can’t be the sole technique around which your film revolves- it must go beyond that. Beautiful aesthetics are derived very often from the director’s cultural capital. And because a large portion of his/her audience may not possess the same amount of cultural capital they are likely to be wooed easily by the director’s beautiful sequences. Then the act of directions becomes about making a good business investment— not to deny the importance of commercial success- and good filmmaking gets lost.

Japanese and Korean films are an excellent example of good filmmaking, where everything, from aesthetics to characters to a plot blend all so beautifully that you’re left stunned. Clearly their directors know what good aesthetics mean but their entire cinematic experience is not just dependent on that. One such film that comes to my mind is Old Boy, which has so many plus points to it— an original plot mind you around the age old story of revenge — that it leaves you with an actual experience that is beyond entertainment. The experience of love, of incest, of relationships, of beauty; Old Boy just brings all of that together.

Even Tarantino whose films seem to be about blood and more blood, is not your simple film-maker. His character line is often quite complex to understand. Look at what he does in Inglourious Basterds— the guy kills Hitler in the end of his film. He brings alive an idea has perhaps always haunted the world is — What if they had got Hitler? A pretty simple idea, it would be seem right? Or perhaps it’s a little more complex than that? That’s for you to answer.

When I go watch a movie I want a little bit more than entertainment. I really wish to know the purpose of the film. Is there an idea that the director was trying to challenge, to portray? If I find that the end of the film I’m not even asking that question, then it’s an ordinary film for me. The problem is never with its emphasis on commercial success. The problem lies with the director discarding cinematic vision completely as to ensure that the former is not affected. For me, this is not cinema.

Perhaps it is the curse of our age, where we are so used to the idea of seeing moving images all around us, all the time, online to theatres to television, etc., that we are happy with what we get. Perhaps the people who really experienced cinema were the ones who lived in the early 20th century. Cinema was their revolution. For us, it’s just an exercise in entertainment.

All the love in the world. Bah. So much for Happy Valentines

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:27:05 -0500

All the love in the world. Bah. So much for Happy Valentines

All dedicated to you

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:53:36 -0500

Dear all,

This is a five part story. Start with the part 1. Please do leave comments. Thanks a lot. I know it’s a long story but it took a lot of effort.

Thanks for reading

Shruti

All dedicated to you Part 5

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:52:00 -0500

Part 5

When she checked her mail, she found the Salsa video. She wanted to call him and she did. She wanted to hear his voice. When he picked up there was silence. Only one question remained before them, the one, they dared not ask. Why had he not done anything if he knew all of it?

He could never answer that question. They would put the phone down as they always did without saying a word because there was nothing more to talk about. They would both then go and watch their solitary public performance, still wondering whether it was truly they who were present in that video and not someone else.

All dedicated to you Part 3

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:51:00 -0500

Part 3

Every time someone sent him a video link, of one that was going viral he would get agitated. When his friends showed him “Numa Numa man,” he had gotten into a terrible rage. He had broken the desktop screen. His oldest friends understood and left him alone.

He had then gone to his cupboard and started rummaging for his old tapes. There he was with hundreds of tapes, each one with the same thing; her dancing Kathak. He kept going through all of them, getting drunk on her visual images. At the end of it, she was dancing in his head and “numa, numa, man” was a distant memory. It was only then that he remembered the salsa video. He found it, but he had no courage to look at it. He mailed it to her, not knowing why he did it in the first place.

She hated the idea of people watching a video of her dancing, even more than she had hated the idea of people watching her live, as she had danced on the stage. She had her reasons for doing this. Teenage years are a time for making terrible mistakes and all three of the made colossal ones.

When they were young she was insanely proud of him and also scared; her fear was that he would leave; often it left her covered in sweat, even though he would be sleeping right next to her. They were too young when they started sleeping together; he kept telling himself that what he was doing was to protect her but he knew that it was all lies.

And she grew ever scared that he would find someone better and smarter than her. Sometimes she thought he would choose her, the other her, her friend and eventually he would. It was horrible the way she found out. He put it up on Facebook for everyone to see, a picture of the two of them kissing. She screamed and screamed and he did not know why.

He could not understand what was wrong with that picture. Meanwhile, she would delete her account one day as though it would undo the picture, then next day go back, reactivate her account and see the image again, thus reliving the whole thing. She hated what she did to herself during the course of those months. He wonders if that was how her anorexia began.

He was never happy about her being thin but she never liked to talk about it. He’ll always be convinced it’s his fault that she became anorexic, when in fact it has nothing to do with him or anorexia.

This Facebook thing was just the start of what would become a virtual storm. Her friend put up that video of the two of them making out, a video in which she was naked. He had promised that he had deleted the video but there it was in every one’s account on Gmail and on Facebook on her profile. It was for those people to delete the video, not for her or him.

All because she called her friend a slut, a traitor; that was the only provocation she gave her. Everyone in her school saw the video; everyone at his college saw it. It went fucking viral. The girls at her school teased her so badly; they said she was a fat, attention seeking slut, that it was unbelievable that he had even dated her because he had a great body while she was a flabby bitch.

Maybe that’s how her bulimia started, no, it’s not anorexia. She grew in love with the feeling that throwing up gave her. It was the only real control she had that time. Bulimia was the new form of protest. She would eat and then watch the nutrients flow right out of her body, exactly as they had gone in. The taste of bile was constant in her mouth. Her friend said she deserved it.

Kathak was gone, never again would she dance publicly; that one video, the one that men would Google search for when bored of regular pornography, the one that still got a hundred hits over a day on some obscure porn site, would be the last public performance she would give .

All dedicated to you Part 4

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:51:00 -0500

Part 4

Her friend was now gone, so were parts of her body. They managed to cure her friend out of her; they had managed to tell her that her friend did not exist. It was she, who had put up the video that it was her Facebook profile and had in fact always been hers. The other one was a fake profile, like so many other fake profiles that existed on the internet. A fake profile of an imagined real person had caused all that damage but somewhere that girl had really existed, for brief moments.

But then again there was no one to blame for the video, not even the one who was real. True the girl, in the other profile pictures looked like a slutty version of herself but it was always her, without her even knowing that it was her.

The girls had always been one. The boy had known it, he had always known and that was why he would always be convinced that her anorexia was his fault. The friend and the girl had gotten their revenge; he could never bear to see her dancing again. It would remind him that there had only been one woman dancing in that video. He had chosen to see the truth in video and not in real life when she and ‘her friend’ had been around.

Her nightmares had walked right past him, he had taken pictures of her nightmares; he had slept with them and kissed them and done nothing. It was all lies; he could never protect himself from her.

All dedicated to you Part 2

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:50:00 -0500

Part 2

Jealous teens that they were, each would grow to be more and more precocious than the other. The boy was already in college and hailed a genius by his professors. She felt ashamed of herself sometimes, afraid that she was not his match.

But there was something that she excelled at, she could dance. More importantly, it was she who had taught him to dance, not her friend, and she took great pride in this fact. He loved to watch her dance, he loved it because it was the only time he thought she was her true self. She was the most beautiful, solitary person when she danced.

She would practice hard at Kathak. Her head had been filled with prophecies of genius and beauty, by a fanatic teacher, a man much respected before he finally went insane. The boy would always remember the panic had felt he heard that her dance master was now in asylum. Nothing filled him with more terror, than insanity that was recognized and sought to be corrected.

Of course none of her teacher’s prophecies about her came true; she was a brilliant dancer and would always remain one, but there were other more important tragedies waiting to unfold.

She would recount how she and the boy had learned salsa. It was her break from Kathak. Kathak was a solitary passion; salsa was the passion that came alive with the boy. As they would dance their bodies would come together, it was the only dance that made her feel so tingly, and then he would smile and sometimes burst into laughter for no reason. He would remain a terrible dancer forever. Despite that he loved to try and make her swirl completely; she encouraged him to keep trying, even though she would be the one who would fall thanks to his clumsy steps.

The heels would hurt her feet and leave them sore, her knees would be swollen and stiff after salsa and he wondered why she went through such pain at all.

She would always remember his first camera, not the SLR, the video camera. The SLR had been with him for donkey years. He had shot so many pictures of her, never once letting her pose; strangely he made her look good in all the pictures he took; even though she thought she looked fat in every picture, despite the fact that she was unnaturally thin. He never wanted to click pictures of her friend, but sometimes he did take them.

She was the one who looked more sensuous in the pictures, something that always left him feeling ashamed.

He would record on his video camera her as she practiced Kathak; she hated watching the tapes. It reminded her of the fact that her friend was missing in her dance. Her friend sorely disliked Kathak. She hated being made to watch and secretly swore revenge on the boy every time he made her watch the videos of her friend dancing. It reminded her of the fact her friend did this without her, that she had no role to play in the Kathak.

He kept that recording of her on stage, dancing Kathak like she used to; Kathak was her life and he would sometimes secretly wish that everything would be gone from her life; her friend, his own self. The only thing that should remain would be moments of her dancing. Perhaps that was why he shot so many videos of her dancing Kathak. Of the salsa he grudgingly made one video.

Long after their teenage romance was over, he once threatened to put it up on YouTube, the video of her dancing Kathak on stage, her first and last public performance. Years had passed and now they would only fight on Gmail; they wouldn’t talk on Skype ever, for fear of hearing each other’s voices. It was not his fault that she would alternate between complete erasure and complete romanticization of their past.

Sometimes she would tell herself it was the best thing ever, at other times she could not bear to think about it. She wondered how they even dated; he had hated contradictions and she was full of them.

She would get angry whenever he asked her why she left dancing. She once said it was because of him. Even she knew it was an unfair thing to say.

It was one of those fights where he was pushing her for the truth; he said that she was afraid of letting the world see how she really was, that she liked to escape into self created fantasies and nightmares. Her friend was the cause of the trouble according to him.

He had wanted to put up the video because he was convinced that everyone would love it and that it would probably get her to dance again. He just wanted to get her to dance again. She told she never wanted to see that video or any other video of herself again. She reminded him that one video was enough for her life. He had nothing more to say.

All dedicated to you Part 1

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 08:49:00 -0500

When the three of them were growing up, the two girls had trouble liking the boy; he represented all forms of weirdness. He was precocious, knew some eight languages by the time he was barely ten and would not let them eat Maggie. This language obsession was something the girls never got. They kept wondering what good it would do for him to learn so many languages. He kept saying it was because he planned to read each philosopher in the language they had originally written their works in. They wondered what was wrong with the translations. Then there was the whole anti Maggie campaign.

In fact, it was not just restricted to Maggie. They once went out on a camping trip all three of them and a bear ran off with their food. The girl, the one who he would grow to love, had screamed and screamed. The boy had stared at the bear, the bear had stared back. The boy and the bear were getting annoyed by her screams. An eight year old girl screaming at the top of her lungs was distressing to the bear; he kept wondering what the fuss was all about, he just wanted food. The boy was thinking the same thing.

Anyway they were left without food. So the boy went into deep into the jungle, leaving them behind at the campsite. She was wondering why he had to go into the forest at all. They could just go back to the McDonald’s on the highway and get food. His forest obsession was another thing that perplexed her. She wanted to go with him as well, but she knew she would scream because of the spiders in the forest.

The other girl would have gone with him; she was not afraid of spiders but she knew if that if she into the forest alone with the boy, her friend would get jealous. He came back with wild berries and that was all the dinner they had. She was so angry. She wanted to scream and kick him. The other one ate the berries quietly. She liked to take advantage of their fights. Sometimes he wondered why he was in the situation in the first place.

After the trip the girls were mad at him. Eight year old girls can’t survive on just berries when a McDonald’s is close by. Hunger was a mental thing for them, exacerbated by the knowledge that they could have been gorging on burgers instead of chewing wild black berries.

They decided to teach him a lesson once they went back. The girls started learning Spanish. It was the one language that the boy had real difficulty with. They would giggle incessantly as they watched him struggling with the syntax of the Spanish language. They would ask him teasingly, how he planned to read the Spanish philosophers. Sometimes she took pity on him, when he would make that sulky face that he reserved only for her.

Her friend never saw that face.

She would then switch to French, though she could barely speak it; he would smile again for he felt important as he could now go back to correcting her. The other one was not so kind; something that disturbed him. She would continue to try and put him down. He wished she would get her friend to stop but she never could.

He could not understand that it was futile, that what he waited for would never happen. She would never be able to control her friend all by herself.

By the time they were teens, she and the boy fell in love. It was a stupid thing and they would go on to regret it terribly, everyday more so. The boy’s academic genius had convinced him that he could solve their special problem. He told him that one day her friend would be away from their lives, that all of his philosophical genius would help her overcome their trouble. The master of languages, the boy who read Derrida and Marx and apparently even understood all of it, was confused by a girl and her friend.

He was already in college while the two of them had yet to begin high school. Well of course, there’s the fact that she was younger to him by a good 2 years but still the girls were never up to his level. The other one was his equal in some respects; when it came to Physics she did beat him often.

At times she wondered whether he let her friend beat him simply to make her feel better about herself. She hated her friend when it came to him; everywhere else her friend was most precious to her. She would not do without her friend.

From the webcomic Ape not monkey.

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 03:49:02 -0500

From the webcomic Ape not monkey. :

Hehe.

Music for the Soul

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 20:27:15 -0500

Dear xxx,

When I first visited you something was playing in the background. Some sort of classical. I don’t really know which composer but as I later found out it was Chopin. He’s supposed to be a master of sorts; I can’t claim to know much about classical western or even Indian music but I just know that he’s good.

I don’t suppose I can express music over this digital medium. It would be futile. I think of Jaron Lanier who talks about MIDI as a form of musical interface is restricted only to the keyboard; he writes “MIDI squeezes musical expression through a limiting model of actions of keys on a musical keyboard,”; he talks about how MIDI restricts the musical note and that before it happened the definition of a note was a transcendental, bottomless idea. I’m just thinking of his words and the experiences I’ve had with music today.

I’m writing this letter to you as a post on this blog to try and paint a picture of the musical experience I had today, when I heard a rendition of an Indian classical piece. Forgive me, for the picture may seem blurred, incoherent, much like a Picasso painting to someone who has no clue of cubism and what it stands for; say someone like me. It’s an impossible task to illuminate such an experience because the digital medium can’t possibly allow me to relive it for you.

I can post about it on my blog, true. I can use endless, meaningless phrases like beautiful rendition, sublime experience, mystical revelations; I can go on trying to explain the meaning of what I heard today to you, to those few who shall read this, but I suppose in reality I can’t share that experience with you. To truly share that experience would entail something much larger; perhaps I would have to be one with music to explain to you what it truly felt like; I’m not sure what it would be.

I know what you’ll say, “You’re being vague,” or worse still, “You could have just recorded the person as he sang and sent me the clip via email.” Of course I can do all of that; email travels at the speed of light and instant sharing is, I suppose, easy. But I still don’t think I could have truly shared the experience with you.

Yes, I know I called you instantly to discuss the experience with you, even though we are not supposed to be talking. I told you about it over the phone and you couldn’t hear; we were connected by a bad signal. I guess that did not leave much scope for any sharing. Perhaps I should elucidate to you what I mean by sharing and why it’s so important to us, as we are or were.

We, who’ve not experienced real touch for so long, share only via the technological. It is but an incomplete sharing, far more incomplete than when we were together. I don’t share with you; I share you, with a phone, an email, a facebook page, a skype call. We share but bits of each other, no touch, no face, and some distorted memories; ourselves as we knew each other are lost; the digital medium cannot and won’t let us access them. We’ve build up images of each other in our heads and then face disappointment because we don’t live up to those images; we know each other’s flaws but we wish to find the perfection because technology has granted us the mode of being in constant touch.

But as you rightly pointed out, we hardly touch when not separated by technology. It has not brought us together but driven us apart. “Hello”, is what we say to each other for that is how each conversation much begin, must it not, thanks to us being on the phone with each other; not with a kiss as it should for lovers long separated.

Thus, I suppose it would be pointless for me to try and relive the musical experience for you. I promised you at the onset of this letter/blog post, that I would do that but I cannot deliver that promise. However I can relive something for you that will perhaps remind us of the touch we long for, because we both experienced it a long time ago when technology did not separate and connect us simultaneously.

To our first shared experience of the Delhi rains on the motorcycle, to our very first minor accident, to the thrill of the fast, sleeting rain, that had fallen on our faces as you had driven the bike at high speed on an empty road near the Delhi University Ridge road. I’m hoping to take you to the wind and rain piercing our skin as we had both experienced it, when both our windcheater and supposedly waterproof jackets had failed against the rains. Perhaps you will go there as I did recently. Perhaps, the digital medium would not have erased that the touch of that memory. Perhaps your memory and mine will be our collected shared memory and not something that we remember because of this blog post.

Love,

yyy

P.S: To the others who read it, I’m not really sharing anything with all of you for the memories belong to us; maybe not even us. It is but a ghost of ourselves that I’m sharing in this post.

Thanks to Chandru, who’s suited to take Photography 101,...

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:37:20 -0500

Thanks to Chandru, who’s suited to take Photography 101, here at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Taught how to click this by a friend who’s no longer...

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:31:03 -0500

Taught how to click this by a friend who’s no longer here.

Photos by a man.

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 14:27:54 -0500

Photos by a man.

Just a clarification

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:14:44 -0500

Hi,

The last 5 posts are comments by the following people.

Arindam, Avani, Abhimanyu, Ishani and my reply to Ishani’s comment. I just installed the option for comments from Disqus thanks to my genius friend Cheenu. You can now comment at the bottom of each post. Tumblr does not allow that to happen on its own. I had to install the right code.

Also a big thanks to all who visited the site. I felt a little overwhelmed.

Shruti

failure to see virtual connection.

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:11:05 -0500

I fail to see how the vertual world of technology per say has anything to do with the present story. the fragmentation of the relationship talked about is not influenced in any way by the means of communication adopted.

I absolutely loved the story!

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:11:00 -0500

I absolutely loved the story!

Subtle thoughts

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:10:56 -0500

As Kundera said “, The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”….similarly your story also subtled treatment of the story made me remember the protagonists of the novel…..

Reply to Ishani

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:13:00 -0500

I’d never really thought of the story in terms of just a long distance relationship that is sustained via the internet. I also wanted to reflect on the general fragility of relationships and how perhaps the digital medium is not helping. It perhaps makes the cost of maintaining our sanity and relationships much higher because we keep telling ourselves that there is something out there more permanent.

A vicious loop.

Interesting story.. What I found particularly interesting is the manner in which they are...

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:02:48 -0500

Interesting story.. What I found particularly interesting is the manner in which they are negotiating their relationship through the virtual world. In a sense, their relationship changes when they are together, it becomes a thing that is absolute, consuming; but when they are away and have to connect with Skype, they become fragmented lovers trying the grab snatches of each other’s lives. Although they know that as fragmented virtual lovers they may not be able to survive, they pull through for those all consuming moments when they are together. It becomes a complex balancing act and a very costly too.

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:55:38 -0500

There is no such thing I suppose because one tends to distort memory. For instance when I look at baby pictures of myself then I keep trying to remember that incident and I partially convince myself that, I do remember it as it happened.

Also don’t want to strain the brain too much. I’d feel dizzy if I thought too much about my first memory.