tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78097567006046477672024-03-05T09:31:54.122+05:30Meandering MindReflections on cinema, people, places and loveUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-60208546443081316772023-03-11T19:27:00.003+05:302023-03-17T16:48:36.104+05:30Publication of AÑORANZAS / YEARNINGS: Cuban Women’s Poetry in Exile <p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">If you would like to support the publication of this book, kindly support our crowdfuding effort on the indiegogo platform: </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;">https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/book-publication-a-bilingual-anthology-of-poetry#/</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Here are the details of the forthcoming publication:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">AÑORANZAS
/ YEARNINGS: Cuban Women’s Poetry in Exile (1990-2021)</span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;">Selection,
translations, notes and introduction by Indranil Chakravarty<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> If you prefer to listen to a video: </o:p></span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px;"><i>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v6E_qQllOg</i></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwGN-Q3mqEq_EqguEL83Wx4tmM-uFKa4cBmIRORTSsObdi7mym0f3azfxIdtzBBOonAvuMvOTcfbeTGt-4J9qtUfwD2ZEYvMVYRoMRk6RehbUJ8CG55KnfmOWZ2m_r_NM38Nps4oRB7hcJnV0utz-v-yibe5AgPy8eFTbBYnH81R1b5fBM_dlW8LcB" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="530" data-original-width="289" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgwGN-Q3mqEq_EqguEL83Wx4tmM-uFKa4cBmIRORTSsObdi7mym0f3azfxIdtzBBOonAvuMvOTcfbeTGt-4J9qtUfwD2ZEYvMVYRoMRk6RehbUJ8CG55KnfmOWZ2m_r_NM38Nps4oRB7hcJnV0utz-v-yibe5AgPy8eFTbBYnH81R1b5fBM_dlW8LcB" width="131" /></a></i></div><i><br /></i><p></p>
<p>I am an Indian writer and a professor of cinema who studied at the International Film School (EICTV) in Havana in the late 1980s. Over the past two years, I have been working on a book project that is purely a labour of love. It is a poetry anthology of Cuban women in exile over the past thirty years. It started as a small tribute to a few creative Cuban women whose lives I have followed over three decades but then the canvas expanded to include many other poets whom I did not know personally. It has taken me a lot of time and effort to select 105 poems by 23 poets in this collection. I have done the English translation of all the poems alongside notes and comments. However, the publication of this anthology has proved very difficult but now we have an Indian publisher with international distribution who is willing to publish provided we raise the funds to cover the basic cost of production. Hence this crowdfunding effort. </p><p>All anthologies of Cuban poetry till date have been edited by Cubans. This anthology is a departure. It is edited and translated by a writer who is both an insider and an outsider, thus bringing a fresh perspective, perhaps a simultaneous critical distance and emotional connection for readers beyond the ambit of Cuba and Latin America. Its two time-markers are 1990 (the beginning of its ‘Periodo Especial’ that triggered large-scale migration) and 2021 (a moment of unprecedented large-scale uprisings on July 11). The poets in this collection left their home in the intervening years and even while they developed their professional careers abroad, continued to write poetry in their private moments by way of healing themselves, unable to return to their homeland.</p><p>While socialism has fallen apart everywhere else in the world, an authoritarian, repressive regime continues to rule in Cuba. Nothing is more revealing than intimate poetry to express the pain and anguish of thwarted lives and smothered creativity. All the poets in this collection grew up under that rule but left the country to find a more dignified life in exile.</p><p>Over the past 30 years, I have experienced from close quarters, the pain, the agony and alienation of many of these excellent poets, who have struggled to 'reboot' their lives in another country while still yearning for their homeland. Today, almost all of Cuba’s bright, sensitive, and cultivated women and men live outside the country and the poignancy of their yearning speaks to us about what it means to lose one’s homeland.</p><p>This collection seeks coherence by focussing on women and using specific time-markers that have framed a generation. I have also tried to find a connecting theme – yearning – in a broad existential sense. We hope you will support us to make this publication possible. This is a celebration of poetry and freedom in the most trying of circumstances. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The 23 poets in this collection are:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="es-CU" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Maria Cristina Fernandez/ Legna Rodríguez Iglesias/
Dermis Perez Leon/ Lizette Espinosa/ Zoe Valdes/ Eilyn Perez Amores / Gelsys
Garcia/ Damaris Calderon/ Ena
Columbie/ Yosie Crespo/ Ana Maria Pedroso / Alessandra Molina / Eilyn Lombard Cabrera /
Sonia Diaz Corrales / Maria Elena Hernandez Caballero / Maria Elena Peña de
Prada/ Milena Rodriguez Gutierrez/ Odette Alonso Yodu / Lleny Diaz Valdivia /
Kelly Martinez-Grandal/ Elizabeth Mirabal / Gleyvis Coro Montanet / Eva Maria
Vergara.</span><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-25703533114699688622017-08-15T05:48:00.000+05:302017-08-15T05:48:32.404+05:30Revisiting Fellini's "Amarcord" (1973)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8e8XG6YZuUKVGVh4FmleMIzcwpB6O34sPDNyjkpTjcoDeedjnLffcfER32YQcH4XUk79DZo8pnFhUArQwlBOoPBfS5HqimQ6e9GIWOuvjimNvy2znEQ2gbEtZsfRuQ1JmNLcYYmmGC5M/s1600/amarcord.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="593" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8e8XG6YZuUKVGVh4FmleMIzcwpB6O34sPDNyjkpTjcoDeedjnLffcfER32YQcH4XUk79DZo8pnFhUArQwlBOoPBfS5HqimQ6e9GIWOuvjimNvy2znEQ2gbEtZsfRuQ1JmNLcYYmmGC5M/s320/amarcord.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Federico Fellini’s <i>Amarcord</i> (1973)<a href="file:///C:/Users/Indranil/Desktop/CHAPTERS/CHAPTER%202%20-%20Biopic%20History%20and%20Evidence.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-NZ; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-NZ;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> offers unique historical insight well before its time. Made in an
autobiographical mode - the title literally means “I remember” - the film
recounts the memories of growing up in the small Italian sea-town of Rimini in
the backdrop of 1930s Fascist Italy. Following an episodic narrative structure (like most films of Fellini), the
film teems with colourful characters, most of them being ordinary people, each
with a story of its own to tell but the film is significantly without any
single protagonist. While the characters live out their love, desire and
fantasies in Rimini, one character stands out – a lawyer posing as the official
historian of the municipality. Others are casually dressed but he is always
impeccably, formally dressed and always addresses the camera (unlike others),
eager to narrate the history of the small town by locating it in the <i>grand</i> tradition of the Roman Empire: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">…The origins of this town
are lost in the mists of time. In the Municipal Museum, there are stone
implements…that date back to prehistoric times. I myself have found some
graffiti of the Great Age on the walls of caves in Count Lovignano’s estate. Be
that as it may, the first certain date is 268 BC, when this became a Roman
colony… [Someone farts offscreen.] …The divine poets Dante, Pascoli and
D’Annunzio and many others have sung praises to this land while numerous of its
citizens have contributed greatly to the arts, science, religion and politics.
[Someone farts again.] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Not only is there a popular
irreverence (expressed through scatological humour) towards the pompousness and
absurdity of ‘official history’, the myriad lives affirm their existence, as it
were, all of whom are part of that inclusive, utopian space of <i>Fellini’s Rimini</i>, far from the ramparts
of Roman History. Fellini is here,
unselfconsciously and intuitively, doing postmodern history, displacing and
subverting grander versions of History through sarcasm and irony and opening up
the floodgates to innumerable micro-histories: his-story, her-story, histories.
This is also the agenda at the heart of postcolonial historical practice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When Rimini is enveloped by snow, the
town historian in <i>Amarcord</i>, still
under the spell of “monumental history”,
rises to tell the ‘story’ again in grandiose terms: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This will go down as the
Year of the Big Snow. Since the Ice Age, it never snowed so heavily in our
town. It snowed in 1541, then in 1694... <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">By now, we know, the ‘historian’ is
talking ‘baloney’. It is interesting that the only two characters in the film
who talk directly to the camera are the town-idiot and the historian. The boys
have to stop the historian by throwing snowballs at him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-22091416212556215482017-08-01T10:24:00.001+05:302017-08-01T10:29:18.887+05:30Short Course on Philosophy in Film<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqlzxGG3G2qN3U1HHkgEurDtbI_4LKQCgCGnbJ6v7y1CgH56I-asj75UCovEuP2K9eeDMkzS34dZJJYuQWhgpDMVaBTcytX4U644PdYH0cYSDgo8dadhmSDdCFpCir-JRNdUN1sYSvYrA/s1600/Philosophy+in+Film+Flyer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1131" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqlzxGG3G2qN3U1HHkgEurDtbI_4LKQCgCGnbJ6v7y1CgH56I-asj75UCovEuP2K9eeDMkzS34dZJJYuQWhgpDMVaBTcytX4U644PdYH0cYSDgo8dadhmSDdCFpCir-JRNdUN1sYSvYrA/s640/Philosophy+in+Film+Flyer.jpg" width="451" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-21981817511567733482015-07-28T21:19:00.000+05:302015-07-28T21:19:52.091+05:30Understanding Cinema: A Film Appreciation Course for Contemporary Living<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHTLAm34yxXcNC1M5Q92hmRHlTdN3ut0EnI3forH_P_grS7lmxNVqgaPgxLAMbUmj36MUX00FuQGMTS9jsReWClTwVxIUNceORJKyqof36e_cVw5vXQrBzrOhJqTYDFknP6lk-xGJ6Txw/s1600/UC+Emailer+Box.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHTLAm34yxXcNC1M5Q92hmRHlTdN3ut0EnI3forH_P_grS7lmxNVqgaPgxLAMbUmj36MUX00FuQGMTS9jsReWClTwVxIUNceORJKyqof36e_cVw5vXQrBzrOhJqTYDFknP6lk-xGJ6Txw/s320/UC+Emailer+Box.jpg" width="232" /></a></div>
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<b>COURSE OVERVIEW:</b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Though certain kinds of cinemas have greater visibility than others, there is a vast diversity in the films made around the world. The general character of </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Hollywood cinema, ‘Bollywood’ and its relationship with ‘Indian Cinema’, and concepts such as ‘independent’, ‘parallel’, ‘regional’ and ‘world’ cinemas would be understood as stepping-stones for celebrating cinema in relation to the cultures and contexts from which they emerge. The course will deepen one’s understanding of cinema and provide a richconceptual base that would enable the assimilation of all kinds of cinemas into one’s own life. </span></div>
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<b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY</span></b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;"> was Professor of Film Appreciation & Screenplaywriting at Whistling Woods & Film & TV Institute of India. He graduated in Film Direction from <i>International School of Film & TV</i><i> </i>in Havana. He has lectured at several universities in India and abroad. His book, <i>The New Latin American Cinema</i> is a reference text at several universities as also his latest publication which is a book in Spanish, <i>Rediscovering Tagore</i>. He has been on the jury of film festivals in Brazil, Mexico, Cuba and Spain and is currently the Director of the recently launched 2-year PG programme, ‘Film & New Media Production’, at Wilson College’s Mackichan Hall campus. Indranil has directed film projects for European Union and UNESCO and is currently developing the audiovisual curriculum for American high school students. He was also corporate trainer for UTV's World Movies channel. </span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Dates: </span></b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Aug 7, Friday, 5.30pm – 8.30pm: <i>The</i> <i>Cinematic Form</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Aug 8, Saturday, 11.00am – 4.30pm: <i>Time & Space in Cinema</i></span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Aug 9, Friday, 11.00am – 4.30pm: <i>Methods of Film Analysis</i></span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Course Fees:</span></b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Rs.3500/- (incl taxes)</span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">For Whom:</span></b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Meant for anyone who is interested in understanding cinema deeply in order to enrich his/her life, irrespective of one's core discipline. And of course, it is meant for film & media students and industry professionals. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;" /><div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">
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<b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Please register by 4<sup>th</sup> August at:</span></b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Somaiya Centre for Lifelong Learning,</span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">2<sup>nd</sup> Floor, Above Kitab Khana,</span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai - 400001</span><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; color: black; font-family: Arial;">PLEASE REFER TO THE POSTER AND KINDLY FORWARD IT TO ANYONE YOU THINK WOULD BE INTERESTED. </span></b><span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; font-family: Arial;"><span style="color: black;">For admission please write to us at </span><span style="color: blue;"><a href="mailto:learn@somaiya.com" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">learn@somaiya.com</a></span><span style="color: black;"> or call 61702270</span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-69547974864417210192015-07-28T21:15:00.000+05:302015-07-28T21:15:24.427+05:30<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For course details, contact and application form, please refer to the Wilson College (Mumbai) website link:<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-25782263780175105012015-07-28T21:04:00.001+05:302015-07-28T21:04:30.698+05:30Lecture on "Magic Realism in Latin American Literature" <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXnUz6GLQUaIe-4QPx-8nIzxeZftSvym5YElyZG-pa4JSfqZQFcyBMzC68f-1i-f1PRgdulacURqL2GX5JDiQLiqX4Mesz03nPMcdBbKVh0hZepmdHjyE0O2aogd09eyCyz0aPyyqslFs/s1600/MR+Emailer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXnUz6GLQUaIe-4QPx-8nIzxeZftSvym5YElyZG-pa4JSfqZQFcyBMzC68f-1i-f1PRgdulacURqL2GX5JDiQLiqX4Mesz03nPMcdBbKVh0hZepmdHjyE0O2aogd09eyCyz0aPyyqslFs/s320/MR+Emailer.jpg" width="232" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Lecture
summary: </span></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Fiction
lovers and literary critics around the world have been captivated by the
haunting power of magic realist literature that has come out of Latin America
since 1960s. While it has made publishing history by catapulting
literature-in-translation into the bestseller lists, it has also made us
question the artificial distinctions between high literature and popular
culture. Spanish-language writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende,
Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar & Jorge Luís Borges have become key
reference points of contemporary world literature. This lecture will try to
understand the distinctive features of magic realism where the</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: Batang;"> fiesta of poetic metaphors, lyrical allegory and
symbols are not a carnival of subjectivity but a rational analysis of a reality
deformed by European culture and suffocated by American imperialism.</span><b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-16853551941046631192015-04-02T16:03:00.003+05:302015-04-02T16:03:38.785+05:30Hinduism versus Hindutva <span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">With article 66A struck down, one can now reinvoke this brilliant, insightful and potentially explosive essay by Ashis Nandy titled "Hinduism versus Hindutva", written way back in 1991:</span><a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Socissues/hindutva.html" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: helvetica, arial, 'lucida grande', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Socissues/hindutva.html</a> . It was extraordinarily perceptive for its time considering it was written before the Ayodhya riots and is as relevant now as it was 24 years later.<br />
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<b><span>Hinduism Versus Hindutva</span></b><br /><b><span>The Inevitability Of A Confrontation</span></b></div>
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<span>Taken from:<br />Times of India, February 18, 1991.</span></div>
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<span>By ASHIS NANDY</span></div>
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REBELLION against the secularist dogmas have broken out in many forms and in many places in the world. Some components of the environmental movement have mounted a savage attack on the secular worldview, the Christian church has helped to bring down the secular communist regimes in East Europe; religious leaders have played a significant role in the battle against autocracies in South Africa, Iran, Philippines, and in many. South American polities, and the growing concern with the survival of' cultures and dialogue of faiths has made religion as a pathway to the rediscovery of practical ethics in politics.</div>
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Sinking Secularism</div>
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The decline of secularism in India has been accompanied by less admirable results. The language of secularism here has been taken over by hard-eyed, thin-lipped practitioners of ethnic politics convinced that it will give them respectability and access to state power. However, the decline has also opened up one serious possibility. Hinduism and Hindutva now stand face to face, not yet ready to confront each other, but aware that the confrontation will have to come some day. It is my belief that it will be a struggle unto death.</div>
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Speaking pessimistically, Hindutva will be the end of Hinduism. Hinduism is the faith by which a majority of Indians still live. Hindutva is the ideology of a part of the upper-caste, lower-middle class Indians, though it has now spread to large parts of the urban middle classes. The ideology is an attack on Hinduism and an attempt to protect the flanks of a minority consciousness which the democratic process is threatening to corner.</div>
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The minority consciousness that Hindutva protects survives on anger. It is the anger of Indians who have uprooted themselves from their traditions, seduced by the promises offered by the modernization of indict, and who now feel abandoned. The process of seduction has included not only the promise of a good life but also the promise of a special political role for those having modern education and modern professional skills. With the demise of imperialism, modernization in India--particularly that subcategory of it which goes by the name of development--has failed to keep the promises.</div>
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Hindutva on this plane is the ideology of a section of the lower-middle class, living with the burning ambition of breaking into the upper echelons of modern India and yet fearful that they may be pushed into the ranks of the urban proletariat by the upper classes, not on ground substance, but of "style". For the believers in Hindutva , the pseudo - secularists represent those who have the style and now doing the pushing; the Muslims represent the fear of being proletarianised. Hence, the hostility to both. On this plane, the sources of Hindutva are no different from that of Islamic fundamentalism.</div>
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Hindutva, if it wins, might make Nepal the world's largest Hindu country. Hinduism will then survive not as a way of life or the faith of a majority of Indians. It will survive in pockets, cut off from the majority who will claim to live by it. It will also perhaps survive in odd places, outside Hinduism. Perhaps directly in Bali and some sections of the Sikhs and the Jains in India; less directly in aspects of Thai and Sri Lankan Buddhism, in the pre-imperial forms of Christianity in South India and, to the utter chagrin of many, in many strands of South Asian Islam.</div>
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That death of Hinduism in India will be celebrated by all votaries of Hindutva. For they have always been embarrassed and felt humiliated by Hinduism as it is. Hinduism, I repeat, is a faith and a way of life. Hindutva is an ideology for those whose Hinduism has worn off. Hindutva is built on the tenets of re-formed Hinduism of the nineteenth century. Reformed according to the reading of those who saw Hinduism as inferior to the Semitic creeds, in turn seen as well-bounded, monolithic, well-organized, masculine, and capable of sustaining the ideology of an imperial state.</div>
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Last Kick</div>
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Hindutva at this plane is Western imperialism's last frenzied kick at Hinduism. It is an ideology meant for the super-market of global mass culture where all religions are available in their consumable forms, neatly packaged for the buyers.</div>
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Speaking optimistically Hindutva has its geographical limits. It cannot spread easily beyond the boundaries of urban, semi-westernized India. It cannot penetrate southern India where Hinduism is more resilient, where it is more difficult to project on to the Muslim the feared and unacceptable parts of one's own self. Hindutva cannot survive for long even in rural north India where Hinduism is more self-confident and the citizens have not been fully brainwashed by the media to speak only the language of the state. Nor can it survive where the Hindus are willing to be themselves--proudly "backward" superstitious sanatanis rooted firmly in their <i>svadharma</i> and <i>svabhava</i>.</div>
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That is why the RSS considers its first task to be moral and physical "improvement" of the Hindus. It does not much like the so-called fallen, compromised Hindus presently available in the back-waters of Mother India. It loves only the Hindus who have been dead for at least one thousand years. If the RSS has its way, it will make every peasant in India wear khaki shorts. For its ideal Indian is the brown- skinned version of the colonial police sergeant, reading the Gita instead of the Bible.</div>
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That is why the late Nathuram Godse did not kill the modernist and "pseudo- secular" Jawaharlal Nehru but the 'arch-reactionary', 'anti-national' sanatani -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. After the murder, Nehru could only say that the killer was insane. The modernist Prime Minister found it too painful to confront the truth that Godse was sane, that he knew who was the real enemy of Hindutva.</div>
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To those who live in Hinduism Hindutva is one of those pathologies which periodically afflict a faith or a way of life, Hinduism has, over the centuries, handled many such pathologies; it still retains the capacity to handle one more. After all, has not the Hinduism coped for more than a century with the modern civilization, which Gandhi, used to call satanic? Hinduism, the argument goes, will eat up Hindutva once a sizable section of the semimodernized Hindus gives up as a lost cause the pathetic search for a psychological defense against the encroaching forces of the market the national security state, and the urban-industrial vision and, instead, confront the reality of these forces directly.</div>
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Whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, the choice is clear if you happen to live in India. It does not lie in a glib secularism hoping to supplant ancient faiths. It lies in alliance with formations that have risen in rebellion against the social forces and the ideologies of dominance that have spawned</div>
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Hindutva in the first place.</div>
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Many of these formations cut across cultures, faiths and state boundaries. The struggle for cultural survival has begun not only in India, but all over the world. In every case, it has also faced a sizable opinion within the community that the struggle must be given up, that pragmatism demands that the culture must adjust to the modern world by giving up its essence to become a part of global mass culture. However, cultures are turning out to be less obedient and docile than many social engineers thought.</div>
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Natural Death</div>
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Perhaps Hindutva too will die a natural death. But, then, many things that die in the colder climes in the course of a single winter survive in the tropics for years. May be the death of Hindutva will not be as natural as that of some other ideologies. Maybe, post-Gandhian Hinduism will have to take advantage of the democratic process to help Hindutva to die a slightly unnatural death. Perhaps that euthanasia will be called politics.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-81114703766965673042014-03-28T11:00:00.000+05:302014-03-29T01:03:26.421+05:30An open letter to the cast of ‘Khel,’ on their art of casting aside<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="color: red;"><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif;"><span style="font-size: 19px;"><b>I am uploading here a guest comment as a blog-post as it concerns a person - Prof. Shyama Prasad Ganguly - who is my close friend and co-author and also because </b></span></span><b style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 19px;">it relates to questions of integrity in artistic production. </b><b style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 19px;"> - Indranil</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dear lead pair: you made my eyes leak. </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A prominent English
daily on March 3, 2014, carried a photo of that riveting Bengali play <i>Khaila</i>, scripted by the outstanding playwright
Sisir Kumar Das, directed by the brilliant director Shamu Ganguly. The photo, taken at one of the
several stagings of </span><span style="color: purple; font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><a href="http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-fridayreview/those-lonely-sunset-days/article789829.ece"><i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Khaila</span></i></a>
</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">in New Delhi years
ago (produced by Bikalpa), repackages it here as <span style="color: #741b47;">‘</span></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><a href="http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/family-matters/article5743199.ece"><span style="color: #741b47; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a scene from Khel</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #741b47;">,</span>’ where ‘Khel’ is ‘A Play in Hindi….By
Averee Chaurey and team, New Delhi.’ The problem with this is two-fold. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a) That it is untrue.
(The image is a scene from the Bengali <i><span style="color: purple;">Khaila</span></i>,
and not the Hindi <i>Khel, </i>since <i>Khel </i>was yet to be staged at the time of
this article). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">b) That it is
unethical. (To omit altogether the name and the role of the Director of the
original play, of which this is but a translation). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That this team
manages to expound on their abundant influences and inspirations that culminate
in <i><span style="color: blue;">Khel</span>, </i>without a mention of the
Director </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">who's labor and artistry shaped the
very characters that the Hindi version would be re-delivering – is
jaw-dropping. It </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">is
jaw-dropping for reasons and concerns of ethics, honesty and integrity that
will be self-evident to most artists. It is tear-inducing, however, for reasons
that cannot even be described. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For days and weeks
and months, and months together, the Director of the original <i>Khaila </i>reflected on the script in order
to sculpt the characters of the elderly couple that are now playing <i>Khel </i>(game, if you like)<i>. </i>The profoundly stirring script by
Sisir Kumar Das met the immense work and thought invested by Shamu Ganguly in
mounting the play that moved audiences. You will know best the painstaking emotional
and physical mentoring that was involved in shaping the characters that you
play in the Hindi <i>Khel</i>. Better than
anyone else, you will know that this was accomplished over years, and over the
course of some sixteen productions across India. Is it all a blur? Like looking
through those hyperbolic, cloudy glasses that your character was made to wear in
<i>Khaila </i>(an exemplary directorial
touch in and of itself, where the old, lonely, desperate, neglected, mother deceives
herself into believing that the glasses would correct her failing sight and
pathetic life, knowing the whole time that it corrected nothing)? What is it
that leads you to make such a colossal omission in </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><a href="http://habitatworld.com/events/show_event.php?id=154&o=3&c=1&m=03&a=03&y=2014&w=1"><span style="color: purple; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">presenting</span></a></span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and announcing <i>Khel</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Let us, for a moment,
gloss over the most obvious purpose with which such omissions are usually made.
Let’s pick another, more generous one; one that doesn’t entirely fracture my conviction
in people and the human relationships that they are out to build through art. Could
it be, perhaps, an over-identification with the theme of the play itself - the
deplorable reality of parents, mentors, best cut off and forgotten? There
couldn’t be a better way of doing poetic justice to the very plot of the play. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As I read about all
the publicity of <i>Khel </i>– ‘a play by
Averee Chaurey’ (a truth that only the imagination may grasp) - I cannot help
but wonder what a visionary Sisir Kumar Das was, to nail down so precisely through
his script this </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ever-shrinking space for human
sentiments such as dignity, grace and gratefulness. Off-stage, you show it
best. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ritika</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-8160810525854003062014-03-23T21:10:00.000+05:302015-04-02T16:06:40.244+05:30'Kick Like a Girl' : Panel Discussion<img alt="cid:image003.jpg@01CF4390.D1AC37F0" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=cea7c5f69b&view=att&th=144da0bc2b33bf53&attid=0.1&disp=emb&zw&atsh=1" />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-25467880111172675932012-11-21T23:20:00.001+05:302015-04-02T16:04:17.632+05:306 day Film Appreciation workshop<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG86Ijgk_e7ZSJXJutEF-bomz-SWJ_kYip_yU7Whk6jnwsiXsSYvA1cjKidyAL31Qu7woo29ifgML6xp1eB1thisux6TTWArnbkjE5yJGo0rAs7rIeIsmJT1Qn3b2g8Kux0XcW3Q_F2BU/s1600/FA+Workshop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG86Ijgk_e7ZSJXJutEF-bomz-SWJ_kYip_yU7Whk6jnwsiXsSYvA1cjKidyAL31Qu7woo29ifgML6xp1eB1thisux6TTWArnbkjE5yJGo0rAs7rIeIsmJT1Qn3b2g8Kux0XcW3Q_F2BU/s640/FA+Workshop.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-82047491692897547452012-07-19T23:56:00.000+05:302015-04-02T16:08:42.398+05:30NEXT: Global Shorts Festival<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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'Next' is the generic name for a series of festivals that deal with youth film-making and gives us a good idea about next-generation film-making. Most of the films tend to come from well-known film schools around the world. The first edition is called 'Next: Global Shorts' (Mumbai, July, 2012) and will be followed by 'Next-Ibero-American Shorts' (Delhi, 2012) and 'Next: Indian Shorts' (across several cities of Europe and Latin America). The partners of every event keep changing though the curators remain the same. </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://festivalnext.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Get all the information here</a></span></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzrxIkfL8LFaKkWXCZFT_kz2Elbx3-xdZeML3FDXbM63lIdZLVOzZax8wYzDlKrXIYYV-HV81DCnIIWGiBeB-f5Mjzpj2ifNbzEH46nQgwMfmndI_jsaNxUPA_62W7OPrXH0E-lswI37g/s1600/next+poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzrxIkfL8LFaKkWXCZFT_kz2Elbx3-xdZeML3FDXbM63lIdZLVOzZax8wYzDlKrXIYYV-HV81DCnIIWGiBeB-f5Mjzpj2ifNbzEH46nQgwMfmndI_jsaNxUPA_62W7OPrXH0E-lswI37g/s320/next+poster.jpg" height="320" width="226" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-62202322879272852482012-04-11T01:39:00.000+05:302012-04-11T01:43:28.870+05:30'Rediscovering Tagore'My book in Spanish, 'Redescubriendo a Tagore' (Amaranta, 2011) [Rediscovering Tagore] is now available online and ready to be delivered by courier to any place in the world. I am thankful to Uread.com for offering the reader such a generous discount:<br />
<a href="http://www.uread.com/book/Redescubriendo%20a%20Tagore/9788192184319">http://www.uread.com/book/Redescubriendo%20a%20Tagore/9788192184319</a>
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Book release in Barcelona:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxeihi89mcNnLznbWLJ1zxe6-ovKcZbJs1NDr-Kk9mQJ167m1Sy_0lGaqazhJGN6hDXyn4PEz1ii-PqWxxO0ss-GfkfW2qrJqM8OTlQolJQGzbD4lpinK1h-GcZ9HqjzuBimHZEf0l8rU/s1600/barcelona+n+valladolid+018.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxeihi89mcNnLznbWLJ1zxe6-ovKcZbJs1NDr-Kk9mQJ167m1Sy_0lGaqazhJGN6hDXyn4PEz1ii-PqWxxO0ss-GfkfW2qrJqM8OTlQolJQGzbD4lpinK1h-GcZ9HqjzuBimHZEf0l8rU/s320/barcelona+n+valladolid+018.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Book release at the Goa International Literary Festival, Dec 2011:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9uCnabugM315rhczPvtJ7NW_6xthlTkcgjInHvYbc_-F9nqRLrgxWm4cC2dU_BREwh2I6D9ULmtxy5G-3RXOZwrWgG6jSKB8xYQKVXzkg3V5ox1rBN0kT2-UKDCdUB2r86XsEcAfHPmg/s1600/goa+dec+2011+065.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9uCnabugM315rhczPvtJ7NW_6xthlTkcgjInHvYbc_-F9nqRLrgxWm4cC2dU_BREwh2I6D9ULmtxy5G-3RXOZwrWgG6jSKB8xYQKVXzkg3V5ox1rBN0kT2-UKDCdUB2r86XsEcAfHPmg/s320/goa+dec+2011+065.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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Reviews of the book can be found online at Nuevo Herald (Miami-based).<br />
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elnuevoherald.com%2F2012%2F01%2F22%2F1107038_redescubriendo-a-tagore-un-puente.html%23storylink%3Daddthis&h=LAQE7vLCdAQHSOQNXIDfaemoHDr8xb53TAh6coE8moXVyfg">http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.elnuevoherald.com%2F2012%2F01%2F22%2F1107038_redescubriendo-a-tagore-un-puente.html%23storylink%3Daddthis&h=LAQE7vLCdAQHSOQNXIDfaemoHDr8xb53TAh6coE8moXVyfg</a><br />
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To see photos of the 'Tagore in Spain' event:<br />
<a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tagore-en-Espa%C3%B1a/285648154795210?sk=photos">http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tagore-en-Espa%C3%B1a/285648154795210?sk=photos</a>
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<br />
Review of our Tagore event in Costa Rica:<br />
<a href="http://www.nacion.com/2011-10-09/Ancora/NotasSecundarias/Ancora2933816.aspx">http://www.nacion.com/2011-10-09/Ancora/NotasSecundarias/Ancora2933816.aspx</a>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-31096631940377808202012-02-29T02:19:00.000+05:302015-04-02T16:15:39.548+05:30The Future of Film & Media Education in India<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">In response to <a href="http://www.mid-day.com/opinion/2012/feb/120212-Opinion-Film-City-Blues.htm" target="_blank">Paromita Vohra's write-up on Subhash Ghai and Whistling Wood</a>s in Mid-Day: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">Vohra’s logic is so sloppy that to deal with it comprehensively, one would need more space than what this forum allows. Though I have been a professor at WW since its inception, I am not its spokesperson by any means and I resolutely maintain my critical distance with it. However, certain things need to be pointed out. The state of film education in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;"> is a serious matter that needs to be addressed with the right degree of seriousness and certainly not with flippant social analysis which trivializes the entire issue with mere claptrap. </span><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">Vohra might get some cheap thrills out of ridiculing the “international” aspect of WWI but I bear witness to what the Dean of </span><st1:stockticker><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">UCL</span></st1:stockticker><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">A (one of the world’s leading film schools) had once said: “We do not have anything like this in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">US</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">”. Having seen all major film schools in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;"> from the inside (and several major film schools abroad), I have not come across any institution where curriculum issues and teaching methodologies are discussed and debated in detail for months on end and constantly updated by some of the best minds in the Indian film industry. Student responses are constantly assessed and courses are redesigned in almost every semester. Personally, I have never witnessed such positive energy, seriousness of purpose and academic rigour anywhere else, far less in our state-run film schools which are in a pathetic state of decay. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">At a time when the Indian state acknowledges its own failure in creating worthwhile institutions and is emulating successful ideas developed and implemented at WW (entrusting it to develop, for example, the CBSE curriculum), it is a fundamentally regressive mode of thinking that creates false oppositions of “state vs. private” (or legit subsidy vs. lusty profit) as if it was a good guy vs. bad guy encounter of a “Bollywood” thriller. At a time when India is on the verge of ushering in private universities to play a lead role in defining India’s intellectual future, individuals like Vohra need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the state’s role in enabling the creation of such institutions, which may often have to include generous land grants/subsidies without which it is impossible to make such educational ventures possible, specially in a city like Bombay. In any case, the whole hoopla around the legitimacy of the land grant is based on a false premise. WW does not even own the land. It is convenient to ignore such small details. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">There are several things in WW that one would be critical about but the fact remains that rarely in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;"> has one seen such an efficient set-up where everything seems to work with clockwork precision. What I personally consider extraordinary about Subhash Ghai’s achievement is not necessarily the films he has made but the fact that he has made WW grow beyond himself and if one looks closely, one would find that ALL the teachers who are moulding the “next-generation” filmmakers of the mainstream industry actually belong to the opposite camp of “parallel cinema”, thus imbibing students with a sensibility that can perhaps change the face of our cinema. In this regard, Ghai’s extraordinary dedication and sincerity takes on the dimension of some kind of “public service”. Add to this the fabulous infrastructure and the beautiful architecture! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">Far from being a rhetoric, the ‘international’ dimension in WWI is real in that there are several members of faculty, staff and students who are from abroad and the curriculum is not at all narrowly ‘Bollywood’. The overwhelming number of films that I personally show and analyse in my Film Appreciation classes are a far cry from what goes by the name of Bollywood. We have even shown extremely “mediocre” Indian documentaries and put them up for debate. Vora should be thankful for that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">The prohibitive fees is definitely the major talking point, always. However, the student profile seems to be changing gradually. They are not rich-kids always; many of them have inner-town middle-class backgrounds, empowered by loans at a time when Indian middle classes have consciously realized that education is their best investment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">It is fundamentally dishonest to ask WW to show results in terms of “stars” that it has churned out. It is common knowledge that hardly anyone makes an impact in the film industry in less than 15 years and WW’s first batch graduated only 4 years ago. A proper assessment can only be made at least a decade later but to dismiss all the significant achievements already accomplished, is to trivialize the debate about film/media education and the creative role of the private sector. Every film institute in the world, overtly or covertly, has a certain ideological stance (and agenda) with regard to mainstream industry. It is obvious that a film school located in the heart of the world’s biggest film industry would be resolutely industry-oriented like many film schools in US. It does not serve any purpose to resort to simplistic, prejudiced stereotypes that refuse to see the cultural battles that are being fought on daily basis by people who have chosen to be inside the bastion of commercial filmmaking with the hope of making it a bit more sensitive to the world around us. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang; font-size: 10pt;">Finally, I would leave Vohra with the thought to honestly ponder over whether she would go to a state-run subsidised hospital or go to any extent to avail the services of an efficiently-run but expensive private hospital, in case she is confronted with a severe cardiac arrest. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-62645490912920235212011-04-20T01:07:00.000+05:302015-04-02T16:07:32.783+05:30Teaching Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos)<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">I recently<b> </b>did a lecture series with a group of MA-M.Phil-Ph.D students of English Literature at a university in Mumbai (Bombay) where Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' has recently been introduced as part of contemporary World Literature. Since I was told that students know nothing about Latin America, I had to start from basics. So I did the first session as an introduction to Latin American literature and the second lecture dealt more directly with the novel. I thought I might as well share this with others who might be interested. </span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="background-color: white; font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lecture I: An Invitation to Latin American Literature</span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"><<… The eccentricity of </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Latin America</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> can be defined as a European eccentricity: I mean, it is <i>another</i> way of being Western. A non-European way. Both inside and outside the European tradition, the Latin American can see the West as a totality and not with the fatally provincial vision of the Italian or the German or the French or the English… >> Octavio Paz, <i>Vuelta</i>, no. 117, 1986<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg74OnKeZryClaZcg7PAugFgTMw90JcHt7qXwGoLtisux425UWg7eEAQNrW_v4gVweqfTGk-XYqmuCgQAZOK8nNlwuuTbG9yCFrOGrlUaYEGifepmCU89ZQtYMZIS21qi90T6pd9I08t2s/s1600/Cannibals+eating%252C+engraving+from+1602+Historia+Americae+%2528History+of+America%2529%252C+by+Theodore+de+Bry%252C+1528-98+Flemish+printmaker%252C+published+in+Frankfurt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg74OnKeZryClaZcg7PAugFgTMw90JcHt7qXwGoLtisux425UWg7eEAQNrW_v4gVweqfTGk-XYqmuCgQAZOK8nNlwuuTbG9yCFrOGrlUaYEGifepmCU89ZQtYMZIS21qi90T6pd9I08t2s/s320/Cannibals+eating%252C+engraving+from+1602+Historia+Americae+%2528History+of+America%2529%252C+by+Theodore+de+Bry%252C+1528-98+Flemish+printmaker%252C+published+in+Frankfurt.jpg" height="252" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><st1:place><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">New World</span></b></st1:place><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> and the Old:</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> Engravings of Great Voyages (<i>Historia Americae</i>) inspired by </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Columbus</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">’ extravagant accounts of the “exotic” lands bear testimony to European ideas about the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">New World</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> (see image at the end). “Discovery” vs invention (</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> was never discovered, it was invented by European imagination). These images enfolded them within the mythological vision of a </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> still emerging from the Middle Ages. The fantastical images of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> -- “where men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> -- found unscrupulous acceptance in </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> over a long period spanning several centuries. The explorers and later the ‘conquistadores’ used the exhilarating fantasies of the chivalry <b>romances</b> to express the marvels of the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">New World</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> in the attempt to come to terms with the diversity and difference of America.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Three mechanical inventions had changed “the whole face and state of things” (as per Francis Bacon)-- <b>printing, gunpowder and the magnet</b> -- which permitted literature, conquest and navigation and let the Renaissance spirit flourish. Indeed it can be said that the discovery of the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">New World</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> released the Renaissance imagination itself.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">The </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">New World</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> had been, since the Renaissance, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes and unusual experiences. For </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> (and later on, Anglo-Saxon America) “Latin” </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> represented one of its deepest and recurring images of the Other. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">The term "<b>Latin"</b> </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> was coined by the French in their imperialist zeal during the 19<sup>th</sup> century. They opposed Latin to Anglo America to claim for political gain a historical and linguistic kinship with the regions recently freed from Spanish domination. The name has stuck although clearly many of the cultures in the region have no connection with the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Roman Empire</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Columbus</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">’ diaries: “discovery” <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> in 1492 initiated a long chain of unfortunate, violent events. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Columbus</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">’ genocide in </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Latin America</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">. Indian population came down in 40 years (since </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Columbus</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">’ arrival) from 3 million to 60,000 (2% of population). The Chroniclers (mostly clergymen who were witnesses). <span class="apple-style-span">Most Spanish officials argued that that the indigenous people’s work in the silver mines was the contribution they had to pay in exchange for the ‘gift’ of being evangelised (converted to Christianity). [</span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Readings</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> from </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Columbus</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">’ diaries attached, with highlighted sections.]</span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l2 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Encounter of races; Carpentier considered the “discovery” to be the most important watershed in history; Neruda’s ‘Canto General’: ..’antes de la peluca, habian los rios. </span><span style="font-family: Batang; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Los rios arteriales.’ (Before the wig, there were the rivers. The arterial rivers.)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Fiction writers like Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez plunder the colonial record for stories, characters and situations. Ref: <i>Autumn of the Patriarch</i>, p34. Octavio Paz has written a massive literary biography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17<sup>th</sup> century Mexican poet-nun. Also explore the pre-Columbian roots of </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Latin America</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Colonial rule thus represented a definitive cultural rupture. Alienating the New World Man from pre-Columbian Man. Latin America eventually became the site of a creative <b>cultural symbiosis</b>, immensely rich with the possibilities of cross-fertilization. Most thinkers from the nineteenth century down to our own time have located the cultural specificity of </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Latin America</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> to the incongruous amalgam of the continent. (diary, pp 11, 12, 15)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Crisis of identity and the search for forms of authenticity become abiding concerns; masks and labyrinths are recurring metaphors; private search for meaning and authentic personal language conflated with a larger continental quest for identity. Neruda’s invocation of <i>The Heights of Macchu Picchu</i> or Cesar Vallejo’s lamentation in<i> Trilce</i> (“...between my where and my when / this crippled coming of age of man” )<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">[iii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> are moments when personal anguish moves to a broader vision of a suffering humanity.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Art, society and history have become profoundly interlinked. Individual artist’s private search for meaning epitomizes the society’s search for a new, amorphous self-definition. Every work of art has consequently implied a certain social ideal even if it chooses to represent a deliberately alternative reality.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Ban on reading and publishing of the novel during the Inquisition; reading became a sinful adventure; novels like DQ reached the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">New World</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> concealed in the false bottoms of wine barrels; Chronicles got fictionalised because the novel was prohibited. “Revenge of the novel” led to “novelisation of the whole of life” – a world reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Mario Vargas Llosa) Ever since then, the European tradition of the realist novel never took hold in LA. The novel remained a misfit. First novel: The Itching Parrot (1816, </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Mexico</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">). <o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Civilisation vs Barbarism: The turbulent excitement of political life in nineteenth century </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Latin America</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> stood in sharp contrast to the dullness of much of its literature. Major debate revolved around notions of civilization (represented by </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">) and barbarism (savagery as represented by the chaos of traditional society). <o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Independence</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> from colonial rule and the birth of new republics ushered into a new era: no more shadowboxing between European fashion and LA reality<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Uruguyan José Enrique <b>Rodó </b>hoped that “the noble and winged part of the spirit” would eventually rule over gross sensuality (<i>Ariel,</i> 1900), others like the Cuban José<b> Martí</b> declared in a celebrated essay called <i>Nuestra America</i> (“Our America”, 1886) that the<b> “barbarians” had an authenticity and spontaneity which would finally be more valuable to the continent than the borrowed fineries of the “civilized” European.</b> <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">While the <b>traditionalists</b> endorsed a reworking of the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain suitably adapted to the new republics in their post-colonial era, the <b>liberals</b> turned to the values of the French Enlightenment with its primacy of reason and equality before the law.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Archetypal landscape: <i>pampas</i> (the Prairies) as a place of barbarism but also the crucible of national identity. The <i>gaucho</i> (inhabitant of the <i>pampas</i>) became the primary agent of this landscape. In several countries with strong indigenous traditions, the liberal <b>Creoles</b> laid the foundation of a neo-classical <b>“americanismo”</b> disclaiming the heritage of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Spain</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> by evoking an ideal vision of the Indian past. <b>(indigineous novel). </b> Thus in every country, there emerged an archetypal, authentic son-of-the-soil and by transforming that figure into an ambivalent national symbol, artists and intellectuals temporarily crystallized the problem of national identity.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">“Cold </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"> of the North” vs “the warm America of Spanish origin”; Mexican revolution & the flowering of lit after indep (mask metaphor): p 144 of King</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Oswald Spengler’s <i>The</i> <i>Decline of The West </i>(1918) was received with great fanfare because it suggested to them that Latin Americans may soon leave behind their sense of inferiority to </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title="">[iv]</a></span></span></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""></a></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;">1920s mark the emergence of the modern novel. “Creative cannibalism” in Brazil; 20s-30s: Guatemalan <b>Miguel Angel <u>Asturias</u></b> drew on pre-Columbian traditions in order to explore myths and realities of the people, <b>Argentinian</b> Jorge Luis <u>Borges</u> asserted a self-confident cosmopolitanism and emphasised form and coherence in writing, Cuban <b>Alejo <u>Carpentier</u></b> defined and explored the ‘magical realism’ of LA. 1950s- the <b>‘boom’.</b></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;"><b></b></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Literature of the ‘boom’ (“Latin Freakshow”): a </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">US</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> marketing term implying vigorous promotion; describes the increased consumption of cultural production in the 1960s. A readership emerges, the author becomes a brand name, a mark of quality; writers become superstars: Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende, Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, etc. Cuban revolution of 1959 remains a key point of reference: battlelines were drawn with regard to those in favour of it and those against it.</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;">Use of the baroque and Faulkner’s influence in Latin America: p139, 140 (Carlos Fuentes interview): ‘the great novelist of defeat in a country premised on success, success, success, all the way, a country that never learnt anything from defeat’</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l3 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Batang;">GGM: The collision between a largely matriarchal oral tradition and an aristocratic, patriarchal written tradition is one of the fascinating aspects. Most of his novels are written from a point in time when everything has already happened. Read the famous first paragraph of <i>100 years of Solitude</i> (note its complex tense– a Faulknerian ‘present’-ation of time - and a sentence from <i>Autumn of the Patriarch</i>). This type of narrative structure relates to the central issue of memory, personal and social, written and oral. The contagion of amnesia, in 100 years, arose from the local Indians, an oral community, whereas the cure is brought by Melquiades, the writing man.</span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Definitions: MAGIC REALISM<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">It’s a <b>mode</b>, not a genre. The <b>unreal happens as a part of reality</b>, quite logically. It possesses often an <b>allegorical quality</b> as well as a sense of time and space contrary to normal perceptions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Magical realism is a term used to capture the living contradictions of societies in the active process of underdevelopment and neocolonialism although it originated in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Weimar</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Germany</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> where it referred to the mystery in the mundane. Alejo Carpentier used the term as "our <b>marvellous American reality</b>" in the '50s. <b>"The fiesta of metaphors, of allegory, of symbols is not a carnival of subjectivity; it is the attempt at a rational analysis of a deformed reality, deformed by European culture and suffocated by American imperialism," </b>said the brilliant Brazilian filmmaker, Glauber Rocha.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Courier New";">o<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Magical realism <b><u>differs from pure fantasy</u></b> primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society. According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the <b>fusion of the real and the fantastic,</b> or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Surrealism and Magic realism: Frederic Jameson called MR “poetic transformation of the object world but a world in which the objects are also <i>narrated</i>”. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> <u>Surrealism:</u> Surrealism: </span><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang;">A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. + An artistic movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Presence of the historical and the political below the surface of the narrative.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Magic realism writers express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement. It marks a view from the fringes of European cultures and an interest in syncretism produced by colonialism. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Garamond;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> ‘Ariel’ is an allusion to Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ where the master Prospero has two slaves: Ariel (winged part of the spirit) and Caliban who is base. Caliban is an anagram of Canibal, canib, carib, </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB">Caribbean</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB">. Tempest alludes to the ‘discovery’ of the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB">Americas</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB">. Shakespeare created in the figure of Caliban, the other face of the nascent bourgeois world: “…I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/ One thing or other, when thou dids’t not, savage, / Known thine own meaning, but would babble like / a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known.” The attitude of the rebellious slave Caliban is thus: “ …You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid thee / For learning me your language.” (Act 1, Sc 2)</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;">[i]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Batang;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Batang;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: Batang;">“. . . travel’s history:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"> Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"> Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"> . . . And of the Cannibals that each other eat, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"> The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"> Do grow beneath their shoulders.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"> (Act I, sc. iii, W. Shakespeare,<i> Othello</i>, 1605)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_ednref2" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;">[ii]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: Batang;"> Amerigo Vespucci’s reports (the Italian navigator from whom the continent got its name) encouraged Sir Thomas More to invent a vision of an ideal society in his <i>Utopia</i> (1515). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/prince/My%20Documents/LECTURES/Carpentier%20Lecture/SNDT%20Carpentier%20Part%20I.doc#_ednref3" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">[iii]</span></span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="ES" style="font-family: Batang;"> “. . . entre mi donde y mi cuando <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="ES" style="font-family: Batang;"> esta mayoria inválida de hombre.”<i> </i> </span><i><span style="font-family: Batang;">Trilce</span></i><span style="font-family: Batang;">, 1922 (Translation mine)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: x-small;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Batang;">[iv]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span><span style="font-family: Batang;"> “Spengler’s explanation of history in terms of cycles of cultural growth and degeneration enabled Carpentier to overcome his pessimism about the historical prospects for Latin America: if the loss of spirituality to which rationalist humanism appeared to lead was not an ineluctable destiny, then to approve the vitality of primitive cultures as the nativist writers had done, was not necessarily reactionary; for these local cultures could now be seen not as vestiges of the past but as the seeds of a new, specifically American culture in the making.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: Batang;"> Edwin Williamson, ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity’ in John King. (ed.), <i>Modern Latin American Fiction : A Survey </i>, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Batang;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style="font-family: Batang;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> : Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 83.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Batang;"><o:p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lecture II: Textual Analysis of Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos, 1953)</span></b></o:p></span></div>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Carpentier’s voodoo experience; his protagonist is the Haitian shaman, Mackandal who has extraordinary seductive powers over his audience. Thus, he becomes the creator of identity for the black slaves. This is symptomatic of the new mood of nationalism that emerged in the 1920s. Such powerful storytellers employing techniques and material rooted in long standing popular traditions, could not fail to appeal to cultivated writers seeking to connect more fully to American realities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Cultural nationalism thus combined with modernist experimentalism to create an autochthonous culture where tradition could be reconciled with modernity.</b> Thus it became an occasion to reassess LA’s relation with </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> and it meant coming to terms with the modern culture of the Enlightenment. MR= Surrealist desire for psychic wholeness (rationalism of the Enlightenment had alienated Europeans from the life of the instinct, desire and imagination) + Haitian experience in 1943 (magic & religion, the repositories of authenticity and wholeness, were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom) + reading of Spengler (explanation of history as cycles of cultural growth and degeneration helped him dispel his pessimism about LA’s future; also rise of Fascism). <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Disenchantment with surrealism (literary trick): “redeem the mind from the dead hand of rationality by unblocking once more the sources of the marvellous, the experience of which presupposes a faith.” …The marvellous in literature entailed a belief in the supernatural: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">those who do not believe in saints cannot heal themselves by the miracles of saints.”</b><span style="color: blue;"> Carpentier thus took the novel out of the drawing rooms of </span></span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> and thrust it in the deep wilderness of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">, where it might recuperate the mythological powers of the epic and romance, those narrative forebears it had once destroyed through irony and burlesque in </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: blue; font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">. – source of the exuberance of modern LA fiction. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">By celebrating the supernatural and the miraculous, magical realism inevitably generated antinomies between faith and reason, imagination and intellect, nature and culture.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">THE LOST STEPS: AC’s “<b>American cycle</b>” of novels (Kingdom of this world – ‘49, The Lost Steps - 53, Explosion in a Cathedral –‘62); written in Venezuela during the dictatorship in Cuba; looked at his own life in Paris between the Wars; in 1947 travelled to the wild interior of the Gran Sabana. Realised the cultural significance of the <b>“</b></span><st1:place><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Forest</span></b></st1:place><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">”;</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> next year travelled through the upper </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Orinoco</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> river<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Background of AC</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: 1904-1980; studied architecture and music; family background in music; early childhood in a Cuban ranch, father was a cellist/architect, grandma worked with Cesar Frank; formation on European novels – Balzac, Zola, Flaubert; spoke Spanish with French accent; moved to Paris to become journalist (music critic) where he wrote elevated accounts of European salon and concert scene; popularised High Art in LA, sponsored first Picasso exhibition in LA, wrote librettos for classical composers; became a major radio personality playing classical music (1939-45); wrote “Music in Cuba” (1946) his first non-fiction masterpiece; prepared the ground for his novels; went to jail in Cuba and then moved to Paris; returned after 1959 Cuban Revolution, after which till his death, he was Cuban ambassador in Paris; personal journey symptomatic of the Latin American intellectual of the 1920s and 30s. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">The novel is a <b>repudiation of Europe </b>and the <b>pretences of surrealism</b>; Felt the need to free himself “from the grip of surrealism”; he felt that Europeans whored after a surrealism that they never understood as the Enlightenment had taken the magic out of their lives (with its emphasis on rationality) and yet this sensibility was fully formed among Afro-Cuban shamans. <b>He hated himself for measuring LA with European yardstick</b>; rise of Fascism made him lose the traditional LA respect for European civilization.Magic and religion – the repositories of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>authenticity and wholeness - <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Title is an <b>allusion</b> to Andre Breton’s ‘Les Pas Perdus’ (the lost steps/ not lost)<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">PLACE</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> of the novel: Indeterminate, deliberately; Pan-Americanism<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">NARRATOR</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> of the novel: anonymous; relationship with Carpentier; narrator fails not tragically but inevitably; living by the <b>metronome</b>; <b>doppelganger</b>?; search for <b>authenticity</b> (travels to the roots of all life). Native vs authentic; <b>novel of self-condemnation</b>; AC avoids the narrator’s fate; King p91: Is AC lamenting the fate of the composer, or subtly mocking his folly in seeking refuge from history? No doubt, as the allusion to Don Quijote would suggest, he remained ambivalent, torn between heart and head. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Use of capital letters: </span></b><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Forest</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">, Time, Theatre, The Valley Where Time Stands Still, etc. Allegory?<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">USE OF LANGUAGE</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: operatic, overblown, possibility of irony lurks behind every phrase; sonorous, complex prose style, ornately gilded like an altarpiece.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">MYTHS</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b>Book of Genesis</b> & Fall (origins of the God’s chosen people, first book of the Hebrew Bible;<b> Sisyphus</b> (king condemned to roll the stone for eternity only to see it roll back the mountain), <b>Odyssey</b> (episodic quest structure), <b>Don Quijote</b>, <b>Prometheus</b> Unbound (217) – steals fire from Zeus and gives it to mortals and is then his liver is eaten every day by an eagle only to grow back the next day; <b>Genevieve of Brabant</b> 218 (</span><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Batang;">the chaste wife falsely accused and repudiated</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">), <b>Deuteronomy</b>: </span><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Batang;">Traditionally seen as recording the words of God given to</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Batang;"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span lang="EN-GB" style="color: black; font-family: Batang;">Moses; fifth book of the Hebrew Bible.</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"><o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">THEMES</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: All stages of civilization can be witnessed in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> in the present (possible to evade time) Read Paz’s passage in ‘Labyrinth of Solitude’, p11-12; p80: ‘the question of our origins is the central secret of our anxiety and anguish’. + p194 of Paz: we cannot dwell in the past but become contemporaries of all mankind. We have to live in our own epochs. He is a man seeking to recover that faith upon which the <b>sense of the marvellous </b>depends. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">If the Artist is bound to History, </span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">what is the place of the imagination in the unfolding of time? Once a magical consciousness came into contact with a rationalist one, the magic was condemned sooner or later to evaporate. But if the magical elements in the “marvellous real” were unsustainable, was it possible to salvage the sense of the spiritual and the transcendental?<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><st1:place><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">FOREST</span></b></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: Symbolism: ‘great theatre of the forest’; journey through space becomes journey through Time; celebrate Nature but rejects European hankering after ‘the natural man’. Positions men in nature against the mediocrity of pallid existentialists. In </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Europe</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> this </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Forest</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> can no longer be experienced – sanitised and erased several centuries ago. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">RUTH</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: decadence <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>5; wife to leading lady 8<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">MOUCHE</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: contempt for shallow bohemianism (wild about primitive art); for them it is neither creative nor liberating but crude and reactionary. Mouche projectsthe writer’s own ANGER against his own self, his aesthetic detachment during the pre-war years. Lost Steps: AC’s own way of <b>purging his own past</b>. <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><st1:city><st1:place><b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">ROSARIO</span></b></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: Don Quijote reference; is this his Dulcinea of the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">New World</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">? </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Rosario</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> completes the opening sentence of DQ. She is the soul of Nature, the essence of womanhood, </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Rosario</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> doesn’t pose any challenge to his male authority; she is lost.<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in left 261.0pt; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Read King: p 90<o:p></o:p></span></li>
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<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Readings from the novel:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Ruth’s decadence: 5, 7<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Sterility: 6<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Allusions 12, 33, 59, 80<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Freedom: 16 (irony)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Backstory 21<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Surrealism 24-25… 29<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Wild about primitive arts 32<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Seeing LA with European lenses 43<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Living in different ages 51<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Mouche 70<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Three Wise Men of </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> 71<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Discovery 77<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Description of mountain journey 78<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Rosario</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">’s appearance 81<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Bookburning 90<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Father 95<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">9<sup>th</sup> symphony boring 97<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Bodily love 99<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Recalling the chroniclers accounts 110-111<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Authenticity and validity of primitivism 123<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Butterfly rain: 133 + amphibious men 144<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Rediscovery of the power of Christian myth: 135<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Description of the dark power of the </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Forest</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: 138, 149<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Example of Allegory: 141<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">El Dorado</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">: 142 – 143<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Rosario</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";"> beats Mouche: 147, 149 (revenge of the authentic)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">“We are the conquistadores” 158, 176, 177<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Nature’s mimetism: 165<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 261.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Rosario</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">’s mystery: 173<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 261.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Refinement of the savage: 173<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 261.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Time travel: 178-179, 186, 187<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Woman: 180<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Sun entering the body: 197 – 198<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Sisyphus: 198<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Decision to stay + Ruth’s stage show: 244<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Disenchantment with city life: 252<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Batang; mso-bidi-font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode";">Against surrealism: 254<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-9180718077978492952011-01-02T23:27:00.001+05:302015-04-02T16:05:52.785+05:30Listamania Contd: 20 Best Books on Indian cinema<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 45.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b><u><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">20 Best Books on Indian Cinema:</span></u></b><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (in random order)<b><u><o:p></o:p></u></b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Indian Film</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by Erik Barnouw & S. Krishnaswamy (OUP, 1980)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947-1987</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by S. Chakravarty (OUP, 1993)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Painted Face: Studies in </span></i><st1:country-region><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">India</span></i></st1:place></st1:country-region><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">’s Popular Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by Chidananda Dasgupta (Roli, 1991)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> with Javed Akhtar by Nusreen Munni Kabir (OUP, 1999) (Also the companion volume, <i>Talking Songs</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Indian Popular Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">, ed. </span><st1:place><st1:city><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Pradip Krishen</span></st1:city><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">, </span><st1:country-region><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">India</span></st1:country-region></st1:place><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> International Centre Quarterly (IIC, 1980) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">by Ashish Nandy (OUP, 1998)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">by Ashish Rajyadhyaksha and Paul Willeman (OUP/British Film Institute, 1999)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">8.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Report of the Enquiry Committee of S.K. Patil </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(New Delhi, 1951)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">9.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Ideology of the Hindi Film </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">by Madhava Prasad (Rupa, 1998)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">10.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Cinema of Satyajit Ray </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">by Chidananda Dasgupta (NBT, 1994)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">11.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Cinematic Image Nation: Indian Popular Films as Social History, 1947-2000 </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by Jyotika Virdi (</span><st1:place><st1:placename><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Rutgers</span></span></st1:placename><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></span><st1:placetype><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">University</span></span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> Press, 2003)</span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">12.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></span><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition</span></em><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by Bhaskar Sarkar (Duke University Press, 2009)</span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">13.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Our Films, Their Films </span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">by Satyajit Ray (Orient Longman, 1976)</span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></em></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">14.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Making Meaning in Indian Cinema </span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">by </span></em><st1:place><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;">Ravi</span></em></st1:place><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;"> Vasudevan (OUP, 2000)</span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></em></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">15.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience </span></em><em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal;"> ed. Preben Kaarsholm (Seagull, 2004)</span></em><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">16.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by Ranjani Mazumdar (Permanent Black, 2007)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">17.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Apu and After: Revisiting Ray’s Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> ed. Moinak Biswas<i> </i>(Seagull, 2006)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">18.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Politics of India’s Conventional Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> by<i> </i>Fareed Kazmi (Sage, 1999)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">19.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Bollywood: A History </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">by Mihir Bose (Roli, 2006)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">20.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Bioscope Man </span></i></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">(a novel) by Indrajit Hazra (Penguin, 2008)</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-52897601294049182142011-01-02T23:21:00.001+05:302015-04-02T16:16:16.298+05:30Listamania: 30 Great Film Books<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">In the year 2000, <i>Sight & Sound</i> magazine asked 51 leading critics and writers which are the most inspirational <b>five </b>books about film ever written. The choices threw more light on the writers who made the selections rather than on the content or quality of the books they mentioned. It only intrigued me enough to come up with my own list, though not restricted to a list of five. These may not be the 'greatest' books on cinema (if any such judgement was possible) but they are the ones closest to my heart.</span></div>
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<b><u><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">30 Best books on Cinema </span></u></b><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(not in order of excellence)<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Signs & Meaning in the Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Peter Wollen (Secker & Warburg, 1969)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Hitchcock </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">by Francoise Truffaut (Paladin, 1967)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of the Film </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> Cavell (Viking, 1971)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">What is Cinema? Volumes I & II</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Andre Bazin (University of California Press, 1967, 1971)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Notes on the Cinematographer</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Robert Bresson (Editions Gallimard, 1975)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Currents in Japanese Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Tadao Sato (Kodansha International, 1982)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Film as a Subversive Art</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Amos Vogel (Random House, 1974)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">8.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Sculpting in Time</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Andrei Tarkovsky (Bodley Head, 1986)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">9.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">The Cinema Book</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Pam Cook (BFI, 1985)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">10.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">by Robert Phillip Kolker (OUP, 1983)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">11.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Film Form</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Sergei Eisenstein (Harcourt Brace, 1949)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">12.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Film Sense</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Sergei Eisenstein (Faber & Faber, 1943)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">13.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">A History of the Cinema: From its Origins to 1970 </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">by Eric Rhode (Allen Lane, 1976)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">14.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Bergman on Bergman</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Stig Bjorkman, et al (Touchstone, 1973)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">15.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Godard on Godard</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. by Tom Milne (De Capo Press, 1986)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">16.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">To the Distant Observer: Form & Meaning in Japanese Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Noel Burch (University of California Press, 1979)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">17.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Ozu</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Donald Richie (University of California Press, 1974)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">18.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">The Japanese Film: Art & Industry</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Donald Richie & Joseph L Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1982)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">19.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Movies & Methods, Volume I and II</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Bill Nichols (University of California Press, 1976 ; reprinted by Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">20.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Film Theory & Criticism</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (OUP, 1985)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">21.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></i><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">ed. Stuart Kaminsky<i> </i>(OUP, 1975)<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">22.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Peter Bondanella (OUP, 1978)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">23.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Concepts in Film Theory</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Dudley Andrew (OUP, 1984)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">24.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">My Autobiography</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Charles Chaplin (Penguin, 1964)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">25.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Jump-Cut: </span></i><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Hollywood</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">, Politics and Counter-Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Peter Steven (Between the Lines, 1985)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">26.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism & Beyond</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne & Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (Routledge, 1992)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">27.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Brazilian Cinema</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> ed. Randal Johnson & Robert Stam (Columbia University Press, 1995)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">28.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: small;"><i>Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America </i>by John King<i> (Verso, 2000)</i></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">29.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">The Films of Akira Kurosawa</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by Donald Richie (University of California Press, 1998)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">30.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> by David Desser (Indiana University Press, 1988)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-39710103080833376082011-01-02T23:00:00.001+05:302011-01-02T23:00:31.794+05:3050 Indian films to see before you die!<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">While lists on World Cinema and American Cinema and European Cinema abound, I wonder why there are no lists of Indian Cinema. Here is one to begin with. This is in <b>chronological order</b> and includes films made till 1995. I am still working on a list post 1995. </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Neecha Nagar</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1946) by Chetan Anand<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Dharti Ke Lal</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1946) by K.A. Abbas<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Dr. Kotnis ki amar Kahani</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1946) by V. Shantaram<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Kalpana</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1948) by Uday Shankar<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Do Bigha Zameen</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1953) by Bimal Roy<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Pather Panchali</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1955) by Satyajit Ray<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Jaagte Raho</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1957) by Shambhu Mitra <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">8.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Aparajito</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1957) by Satyajit Ray<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">9.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Mother India</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1957) by Mehboob Khan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">10.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Kaagaz ka Phool </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1959) by Guru Dutt<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">11.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Mughal e Azam</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1960) by K. Asif<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">12.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Charulata (1964) </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">by Satyajit Ray<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">13.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1968) by Satyajit Ray<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">14.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Bhuvan Shome</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1969) by Mrinal Sen<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">15.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Uski Roti</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1969) by Mani Kaul<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">16.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Samskara </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1970) by Pattabhi Rama Reddy<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">17.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Pakeezah</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1971) by Kamal Amrohi<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">18.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Ankur</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1973) by Shyam Benegal<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">19.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Sholay </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1975) by Ramesh Sippy<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">20.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Ghasiram Kotwal</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1976) by Saeed Akhtar Mirza etc (YUKT Coop)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">21.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Ekdin Pratidin</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1976) by Mrinal Sen <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">22.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Aakaler Sandhaney</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1980) by Mrinal Sen<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">23.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Chakra</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1980) by Ravindra Dharmaraj<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">24.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Bhavni Bhavai</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1980) by Ketan Mehta<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">25.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><st1:street><st1:address><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">36 Chowringhee Lane</span></i></st1:address></st1:street><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1981) by Aparna Sen<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">26.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Elipathhayam</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1981) by Adoor Gopalakrishnan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">27.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Ardha Satya</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1983) by Govind Nihalani<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">28.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Jaane Do Bhi Yaaron </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1983) by Kundan Shah<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">29.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Maya Miriga </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1983) by Nirada Mahapatra<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">30.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Damul </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1984) by Prakash Jha<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">31.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Mukhamukham </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1984) by Adoor Gopalakrishnan <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">32.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Paar </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1984) by Gautam Ghosh<i> </i><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">33.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Chidambaram </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1985) by G. Aravindan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">34.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Bombay</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">, Our City </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1985) by Anand Patwardhan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">35.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Mirch Masala </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1985) by Ketan Mehta<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">36.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">New Delhi</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> Times </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1985) by Ramesh Sharma<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">37.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Klanta Aparanha</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1985) by Manmohan Mahapatra<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">38.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Tabarane Kathe </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1986) by Girish Kasaravalli<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">39.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Genesis </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1986) by Mrinal Sen<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">40.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Anantaram</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1987) by Adoor Gopalakrishnan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">41.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Nayakan </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1987) by Mani Ratnam<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">42.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Tamas </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1987) by Govind Nihalani (5 hour TV series)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">43.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Piravi </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1988) by Shaji Karun<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">44.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Roja</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1992) by Mani Ratnam<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">45.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Bandit Queen </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1994) by Shekhar Kapur<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">46.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Hkhgoroloi Bohu Dur</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"> (1994) by Jahnu Barua<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">47.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Kadhalan </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1994) by S. Shankar<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">48.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Unishe April </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1995) by Rituparno Ghosh<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">49.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayengey </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1995) by Aditya Chopra<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .75in; text-align: justify; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">50.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">Kathapurusham </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(1995) by Adoor Gopalakrishnan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .25in; text-align: justify;"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-18297106921397630712011-01-02T22:42:00.003+05:302011-04-13T23:49:21.058+05:30Next 70 Films to See Before You Die<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Who doesn't like lists? Personally I love making them up for myself. Following my earlier post titled <a href="http://inchakra.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html">'50 Films to See Before You Die</a>', I was surprised how many people started using it as a guide to initiate themselves to the world of cinema. I insist that 50 films is very inadequate to claim any kind of film literacy. One has to see at least 200 of them. So in continuation of that, here is my follow-up list of the next 70 great films. I refuse to rank them and so prefer to present them in A-Z order. This list still leaves a large number of outstanding films. You can rest assured that even after seeing these films, you will have scratched only on the surface of international cinema. This list is only indicative, an invitation to explore world cinemas.</span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';">(A-Z order)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS';"><br />
</span></div><ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0in;" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">2001: A Space Odyssey</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1968) by </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> Kubrick<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">21 Grams</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2003) by Alejandro González Innaritú<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Amarcod</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1973) by Federico Fellini<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span lang="ES" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Amores Perros</span></i><span lang="ES" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2000) by Alejandro González Innaritú<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Ashes and Diamonds</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1958) by Andrzej Wajda <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Battleship Potemkin</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Behind the Sun</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2001) by Walter Salles<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Birth of a Nation</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1915) by David Wark Griffith<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Bitter Moon</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1992) by Roman Ploanski<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Bonnie and </span></i><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Clyde</span></i></st1:place><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1967) by Arthur Penn <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Breathless</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1960) by Jean Luc Godard<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Casablanca</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1942) by Michael Curtiz<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Central Station</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1998) by Walter Salles<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Children of </span></i><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Paradise</span></i></st1:place><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1945) by Marcel Carne<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Children of Men</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2006) by Alfonso Cuarón<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Chinatown</span></i></st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(1974) by Roman Polanski<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Closely Watched Trains</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1967) by Jiri Menzel<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Diary of a Country Priest</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1951) by Robert Bresson <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Do the right thing</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1989) by Spike Lee<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Don’t Die without telling me where you are going</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1995) by Eliseo Subiela<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Double Indemnity</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1944) by Billy Wilder<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Duck Soup</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1933) by Marx Brothers<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Easy Rider</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1969) by Dennis Hopper<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Eyes Wide Shut (1999) </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">by </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Stanley</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> Kubrick<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Faces</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1968) by John Cassavasetes<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Fanny and Alexander </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(by 1982) by Ingmar Bergman<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Talk to Her</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2002) by Pedro Almodóvar<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Constant Gardener</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2005) by Fernando Meirelles<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Gospel According to St. Matthew</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1964) by Pier Paolo Pasolini<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Graduate</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1967) by Mike Nichols<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Greed</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1924) by Eric von Stroheim<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">High Noon</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1952) by Fred Zinnemann<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">In Praise of Love</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2001) by Jean Luc Godard<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">In the Realm of the Senses</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1976) by Nagisa Oshima<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Intervista</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1987) by Federico Fellini <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Jalsaghar</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1958) by Satyajit Ray<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Kalpana </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(1948) by Uday Shankar <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Landscape in the Mist</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1988) by Theo Angelopolous<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Lucia</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1968) by Humberto Solás<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">M</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1931) by Fritz Lang<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1941) by John Huston<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Man with a Movie Camera</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1929) by Dziga Vertov <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Manhattan</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(1979) by Woody Allen<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1974) by Werner Herzog<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Marriage of Maria Braun</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1978) by Rainer Fassbinder<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Last Tango in </span></i><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Paris</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(1972) by Bernardo Bertolucci<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Los Olvidados</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1950) by Luis Buñuel<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Nine Lives</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2005) by Rodrigo García<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Passion of Joan of Arc</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1928) by Carl Dreyer<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Pather Panchali</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1955) by Satyajit Ray<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Psycho</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Pulp Fiction </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(1994) by Quentin Tarantino<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Raging Bull</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1980) by Martin Scorsese<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Rear Window</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1954) by Alfred Hitchcock<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Rebel without a case</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1955) by Nicholas Ray<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Rules of the Game</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1939) by Jean Renoir<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Scarface</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1932) by Howard Hawks<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Seven Samurai</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1954) by Akira Kurosawa<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Shortcuts</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1993)<i> </i>by Robert Altman<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Singin’ in the rain</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1952) by Donen & Kelly<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Sunset Boulevard</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1950) by Billy Wilder<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Tango</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1998) by Carlos Saura<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Third Man</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1949) by Carol Reed<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Three Times</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (2005) by Hou Hsiao Hsien<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><st1:city><st1:place><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Tokyo</span></i></st1:place></st1:city><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> Story</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1953) by Yasujiro Ozu<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Touch of Evil</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1958) by Orson Welles <o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Two or Three Things I know About Her</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1967) by Jean Luc Godard<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">Ugetsu Momogatari</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1953) by Kenji Mizoguchi<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">The Wizard of Oz </span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">(1939) by Victor Fleming<o:p></o:p></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .5in;"><i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;">W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'; font-size: 10pt;"> (1971) by Dusan Makavejev<o:p></o:p></span></li>
</ol><br />
<ol start="1" style="margin-top: 0in;" type="1"></ol>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-18238228194337671962010-07-29T14:07:00.000+05:302010-07-29T14:07:51.989+05:30Udaan Grounded<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><i><br />
</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">The </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">Cannes</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"> selection may well be the best thing that can be said about </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">Udaan</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"> because nowhere in the world is it more difficult to defy the mainstream than in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">India</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">. The canted credits of the pre-release publicity promised an unorthodoxy of style and content that the film unfortunately does not live up to. It only reinforces some of the jaded stereotypes of Indian popular cinema that the film intends to oppose by infusing some degree of lived personal experience into it.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">In the first place, the visual quality of the image leaves a lot to be desired. It may have had something to do with the digital projection at the theatre I saw the film (Movietime) but the colours seemed washed out and the image was grainy like a 16 to 35mm blown-up print; it even pixellated at certain points. I am not sure whether this was an intentional effect of de-glamourising the image to make it look ‘real’ but certainly there is a desire to adopt a </span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_641531734">Dogme 9</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95">5</a></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">-style of filmmaking. I doubt whether the low-light scenes can survive a DVD transfer. More than a ‘cool’, ‘indie’ look, visually it felt like a 1980s Hindi film, in more senses than one.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">The greatest problem with the film is the simplistic, one-dimensional villainous father in the film and the film’s use of cheap melodramatic tactics. The father-son relationship trauma has been the staple of several Indian films and so there is no inherent novelty in that. This is particularly disappointing because we have associated Anurag Kashyap with a kind of filmmaking where even the most villainous characters are understood on a human level and when the world is seen through their eyes, as in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">Black Friday</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"> where the most heinous acts look somewhat justified, leaving the viewer in a state of moral ambivalence. This approach to filmmaking looked at the same facts from so many points of view that it altogether undermined the notion of a unique stable perspective from which ‘the real truth’ can be known. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">Udaan</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"> is devoid of any such understanding. That rich empathic attitude gives way to a simplistic, easy categorisation of good and evil in the most pathetic tradition of Indian popular cinema. Possibly the scriptwriters didn’t want to provide any backstory information but it leaves so many things vague that one feels the scriptwriters have conveniently brushed all the relevant aspects of the story under the carpet. For example, the man had two previous wives; the question remains where are they, what happened to them? Both of them could not have died. Did he kill them? If the second wife was still alive, why did she not care about the kids? We do not even see the boys talking about their mothers. This is a world devoid of women but also devoid of any kind of tenderness or affection. The only flush of understanding that comes from the uncle is soon defeated by the crassness of ruthless masculinity. The only women who find a few frames of attention are either hookers in theatres or the third wife who looks the same or the aunt who is cold and distant. This has now become a huge problem with all of Anurag’s scripts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">It is this simplistic vision of life that trivializes an authentic pain by melodramatising it, by creating false oppositions of good vs bad, man vs woman, small town vs big city, child vs adult. The use of a cute but hapless child with markings of beatings on his back (who nevertheless tries to keep it a secret) is not something I would expect from a writer of Anurag’s calibre. It is the cheapest trick in Indian ads and films to instantly pull at people’s heart-strings. </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">Bombay</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"> is seen as </span></span><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">Paradise</span></span></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">, a place of liberation, where teenagers start business outfits like restaurants and become instantly successful. Please, give me a break! <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">The film that obviously served as an inspiration and reference point for the film – Truffaut’s </span><i><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/400_blows"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">400 Blows</span></a></u></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;"> (1959) – had also depicted a ‘wild child’ trapped in an oppressive social institution like a boarding school but did not have to rely on such melodramatic trappings. The film is alluded to several times in the film through the use of the liberational ‘running away’ or the final freeze frame but the fact that the boy has co-liberated his kid brother is a bit too much, that too in search of ‘Bombay’ (not the symbolic sea as in </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">400 Blows</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">) suggests that his sense of freedom is another delusion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #45818e;">The ‘real look’ of the film cannot disguise the falsity of the world that Motwane/Kashyap seek to represent. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-18982341215957560792010-07-28T15:26:00.000+05:302010-07-28T15:26:09.399+05:30Cannes Musings<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Over the past three decades, Indian cinema’s track record at the Cannes Film Festival has been particularly miserable, if not a matter of national disgrace commensurate with our performance in the Olympics. It is not that it is any better at the other A-level festivals (Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Toronto) but despite the deep-rooted eurocentric bias, Cannes certainly has an ability to discern quality films from any part of the world irrespective of the scale of film production in that country. Granted that the Cannes Festival is fiercely competitive, a country with a production of 900 films a year should fair better than </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Sri Lanka</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> or a country like </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Brazil</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> with 40 films a year which manages to get an average of two films selected every year.</span> <br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">How do we explain the misery of Indian cinema? We rub our noses so much in the dirt trying to keep our films ‘popular’ and ‘commercial’ that we hardly ever manage to make them any more memorable than yesterday’s newspaper. American cinema has the same intentions but it still manages to produce a few films every year that transcend their time. Since 90% of our popular films fail even at the box-office, they cannot actually be called either popular or commercial. Another lame excuse is that our film language is so unique (songs, dance, melodrama etc) that no one else in the world is capable of appreciating us! Why should we lionize Cannes or Venice as the true upholders of quality cinema? Why should we judge ourselves based on others’ criteria? Belligerence apart, it is a classic alibi that is tantamount to justifying our 132</span><sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">nd</span></sup><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> position on FIFA world rankings on the ground that we could get entry into the World Cup only if the whole world played soccer according to our rules, whatever that may be. As a nation we are so deeply ensconced in our mediocrity that we have either refused to look at the larger picture of our position in the world (contrary to our aspirations to be part of the global village) or constantly need justifications based on jingoistic claims to uniqueness. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">In that sense, Vikramaditya Motwane and Anurag Kashyap may have redeemed some degree of our cinematic self-respect though the selection of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Udaan </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Cannes</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> was in the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Un Certain Regard</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> category and not in the prestigious competitive section. The last Indian film to get into competition was Murali Nair’s </span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Pattiyude Divasam</span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">(A Dog's Day) in 2001 and the last film in </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Un Certain Regard</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> was also Murali Nair’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Arimpara</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> (2003). The last Indian film to get an award at Cannes competition was also a Murali Nair film, </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Marana Singhasanam</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> (Throne of Death, 1999). Since Nair is based in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">UK</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> and also financed from there, these cannot be considered ‘Indian’ achievements not unlike Chandrasekhar’s Nobel Prize but this is just the other face of globalization. Where does all this leave us? Twenty five years of solitude!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">The 2010 Cannes edition, however, had two more Indian films in its selection. They take us back to 1983 (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Mrinal Sen’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Kandahar</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> - The Ruins) in the ‘Cannes Classics’ section and to 1973 (</span><span class="apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Ritwik Ghatak’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Titash Ekti Nadir Naam</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> – A River called Titash) </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">in the ‘World Cinema Foundation’ section. It is an irony that we still have to live off Ray, Sen, Ghatak and Gopalakrishnan for many more years to come. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">The really sad part of the story is that the best of Indian cinema rarely gets seen in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">India</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">. Let us first learn to respect our own selves before we can demand respect from others. World cinema can never be a substitute for our own cinema because it is from there that our filmmakers have to draw sustenance. As Gandhi said, ‘I want to open up all the doors and windows of my house so that the wind from all directions can blow into it on the condition</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">that I am not </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">uprooted</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">NFDC has done a great disservice to our nation by making some of the most adventurous and landmark films in our history and then allowing them to rot in the cans without getting distribution. These films are not yet available even on DVD so that they may enter into our contemporary debates or shown in film classes. They have forced those films to be forgotten and thereby failed to make them contribute to the consolidation of a more substantial film culture. Even Satyajit Ray’s films are rarely seen in our country beyond Bengal and the only watchable DVD copies of Ray or Ghatak that exist come to us from UK or USA. We have had to wait for Martin Scorsese to restore Uday Shankar’s </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">Kalpana </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">(1948), the most extraordinary film made in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">India</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> before</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> Pather Panchali</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> (1955)!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">In other words, we reap what we sow. No country in the world is so disconnected with its own cinematic past and at the same time burdened by the baggage of film memory. I could not agree more with Anurag Kashyap whom I heard recently saying that more than innovative screenwriters, what we need in our country are creative producers. ‘Creative’ in this case means producers who are driven not solely by the dream of profit but </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">also</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> informed by film culture with a strong desire to push the </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;">bandwith</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #674ea7;"> of Indian popular cinema, making films with passion and conviction that any story can sell which has a ring of truth in it. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-79596656988772961512010-07-20T02:36:00.001+05:302010-07-20T02:38:49.385+05:30The Emotional Algebra of Anais Nin<span style="font-weight:bold;"><span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span><br />One of the privileges of the teaching life is the paid vacation. The torrential rains in Bombay add great value to life only if you do not have to go out into the ‘mean streets’.<br /><br />Among other things, today I was browsing through some of Anais Nin’s writings and as always, I am endlessly fascinated with her, perhaps more as a bewitching woman than a writer. Her biographer gives her the epithet of being “a major minor writer”. I am not so worried about her position in literature but some of her insights into life cut like knife. I would like to share some of these.<br /><br />Anais Nin became well-known particularly after Philip Kaufman’s film Henry and June, on her simultaneous bisexual affair with Henry Miller and his wife June Miller. Those who have seen the film have been captivated by the film’s erotic power (one of the most hauntingly sensuous films ever made) often without any awareness of her writing. Philip Kaufman did a workshop at my film school with this film when I was a student and so I have a special kind of relationship with the film.<br /><br />To mention Anais Nin as the finest writer of female erotica is to trivialize her work. Besides, I have a problem with the word ‘female’ as applied to her work. For a quick overview, Anais Nin (1903-1977) was a French writer born of Cuban parents both of whom were classical musicians. Her great-grandfather ran away from Paris to Havana at the time of the French Revolution and she, in her lifetime, ran away from Paris to NYC during WWII. In the prime of her youth, not only was her libido the most active, she was also the toast of the entire Parisian art world. Nin was the lover of many leading literary/art figures including Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, James Agee and Lawrence Durrell, Otto Rank (psychoanalyst, Freud’s famous student), Gonzalo More (a firebrand Peruvian communist revolutionary) among others (C.G. Jung?). [The beautiful, expert ‘Madame’ in Buñuel’s Belle de jour is called Madame Anaís as an allusion to Nin.] Henry Miller took entire pages out of her diaries and incorporated them en toto into his novel Tropic of Capricorn. She let him do it out of sheer love. As she wrote somewhere: “…(I am) capable of every audacity in life but vulnerable in love.”<br /><br />Her nine novels are actually pale shadows of an outrageously reckless and bizarre life (except Winter of Artifice, 1939, and the lesbian novel The Voice, which are my personal favourites). Her legacy to literature was her 69(hmm!)-volume diaries which explore every goose bump and furrow of one woman’s sexual consciousness. She spoke of her diaries as her shadow, her double. “I will only marry my double”, she wrote in one of her autobiographical novels.<br /><br />And yet, as I mentioned earlier, I have some issues with the notion of ‘female’ erotica à la Nin. One French philosopher recently said that the male gaze was deeply planted within her notion of the ‘female’. Consider this, her most titillating triumphant declaration:<br /><br />“… My recipe for perfect happiness – mix well the sperm of four men in one day … I walk joyously away, debtless, independent, uncaptured…”<br /><br />Elsewhere in her Diaries, she writes:<br /><br />“…I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding."<br /><br />Even as you try to pass judgment on her moral ambivalence, she would reply with this:<br /><br />“… We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences and very painful ones sometimes - the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do. …”<br /><br /><br />Since this is far from being an academic blogpost, I just wanted to make a few casual comments on re-reading Anais Nin but I want to leave the reader here with some flashes of her insights into life. I adore the passion with which she lived her life and the beautiful poetry inherent in them. They really sound like “quotable quotes” one could memorise and use on the right occasion or inscribe it inside a card for a friend who is lost in life’s dark alleys (like most of us):<br /><br />o Living never tires one out as much as the effort not to live. And if one lived deeply, one also rested deeply. …People living deeply have no fear of death.<br />o I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.<br />o Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.<br />o Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish it's source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.<br />o We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.<br />o We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.<br />o We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.<br />o There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.<br />o I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.<br />o Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.<br />o I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.<br />o Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she is bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child rearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment man rests inside of her.<br />o Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.<br />o Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.<br />o Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.<br />o If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.<br />o There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.<br />o The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.<br />o The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.<br />o Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-7811749798554911832010-07-18T19:55:00.001+05:302011-01-07T01:50:19.919+05:30‘What cinema can be’<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><b><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/" style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Roger Ebert</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11pt;"> is possibly the most influential film critic who surfaces on top of every film-related search ahead of IMDB or wikipedia. He is a </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">truly</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11pt;"> sensitive person whose comments I look up after watching any film that I like. And so I was pleasantly surprised to see his insightful comments on Satyajit Ray, whom he considers on par with Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel. In fact, Ray used to say that </span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47; font-size: 15px;">despite the vast cultural differences, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47; font-size: 15px;">his more perceptive critics were in the West. Film commentators and scholars like Penelope Houston, Eric Rhode, Jay Leyda and Robin Wood have helped to canonise Ray as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time (and his position seems to be improving with time). Here are some of Roger Ebert’s brief but superlative, moving comments about Ray:</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle"><li class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">"The </span></span></span></span><st1:place><st1:placename><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Big</span></span></span></span></st1:placename><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> </span></span></span></span><st1:placetype><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">City</span></span></span></span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">,"(Mahanagar) which has crept quietly into </span></span></span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Chicago</span></span></span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">, is one of the most rewarding screen experiences of our time. … The remarkable thing that Ray accomplishes is to make us really deeply care about the fortunes of this simple family. …</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">That is why I have so much trouble approaching Ray's films as "foreign." They are not foreign. They are about Indians, and I am not an Indian but Ray's characters have more in common with me than I do the comic-strip characters of Hollywood.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">… </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Ray's people have genuine emotions and ambitions, like the people next door and the people in </span></span></span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Peoria</span></span></span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> and the people in </span></span></span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Kansas City</span></span></span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">. There is not a person reading this review who would not identify immediately and deeply with the characters in "The Big City"</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">… </span></span> <span class="apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">By contrast, </span></span></span></span><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Hollywood</span></span></span></span></st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> films with exploding cigarette lighters and gasping starlets and idiot plots are the real "foreign" films. They have nothing at all in common with us, and</span></span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/classifieds?category=search1&SearchType=1&q=Satyajit%20Ray&Class=%25&FromDate=19150101&ToDate=20101231"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Satyajit Ray</span></span></span></a></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">of </span></span></span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">India</span></span></span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> understands us better than</span></span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Jerry Lewis.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></li>
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</div><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle"><li class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room" (Jalsaghar) (1958) has one of the most evocative opening scenes ever filmed. … Ray</span></span></span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">(1921-1992) was an unusually tall man, handsome as a movie star, the grandson of a landlord such as the protagonist’s ancestors. …. Perhaps as a reaction to the hundreds of overwrought Indian musical melodramas churned out annually, Ray made an austere character study--also with music. His hero deserves the comparison with King Lear, because like Lear he arouses our sympathy even while indulging his vanity and stubbornly doing all of the wrong things. Like Lear, he thinks himself a man more sinned against than sinning. Like Lear, he is wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></li>
</ul><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle"><li class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The great, sad, gentle sweep of "The Apu Trilogy" remains in the mind of the moviegoer as a promise of what film can be. Standing above fashion, it creates a world so convincing that it becomes, for a time, another life we might have lived. … Never before had one man had such a decisive impact on the films of his culture…. The relationship between Apu and his mother observes truths that must exist in all cultures: how the parent makes sacrifices for years, only to see the child turn aside and move thoughtlessly away into adulthood…. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">The way the film records his stay, his departure and his return says whatever can be said about lonely parents and heedless children…. It is like a prayer, affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray. </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></b></span></li>
</ul><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle"><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">Ghare Baire (The Home and the World)… </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">is a contemplative movie -- quiet, slow, a series of conversations punctuated by sudden bursts of activity….. Together, they form a small group of ideas and emotions, growing and shifting, mirroring in their secluded chambers the violent changes in </span></span></span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">India</span></span></span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></li>
</ul><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="circle"><li class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">While commenting on Luis Buñuel’s <i>Tristana</i>, he concludes: … </span></span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #741b47;">A few great directors have the ability to draw us into their dream world, into their personalities and obsessions and fascinate us with them for a short time. This is the highest level of escapism the movies can provide for us -- just as our elementary identification with a hero or a heroine was the lowest. As children, we went to Saturday matinees and for an afternoon we were cowboys and Indians. As adults, there are more intellectual routes to escapism. A powerful director like Buñuel (or Bergman, Fellini or Satyajit Ray) can open up his mind to us, the way an actress can open up her eyes. It is an experience worth having.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></li>
</ul><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-39978095833195160532010-07-18T03:13:00.000+05:302010-07-18T03:44:08.048+05:30Do classics have an expiry date?<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Of late I have been wondering whether all the films we used to call ‘classics’ or ‘masterpieces’ are ‘forever’, as they were supposed to be!<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Do some have earlier expiry dates than others?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">My job as a professor of cinema has thrown up certain questions that I am still trying to answer. While teaching at a glitzy film school in Mumbai’s <st1:place><st1:placename>Film</st1:placename> <st1:placetype>City</st1:placetype></st1:place>, I have found a strange and challenging phenomenon - most students of filmmaking cannot really <i>connect</i> to many of the standard classics of world cinema. I had rarely encountered this problem to this extent but now that my livelihood depends on this, I intensely speculate on a daily basis whether a certain film, notwithstanding its status as a ‘classic’ would <i>work</i> with <i>my</i> students. May be this is specific to the place where I teach, which is a predominantly up-market institute that happens to attract students who are Bollywood-obsessed <i>and</i> have enough money to pay the high fees. We are aware to what extent in <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region>, economic status determines – to a large extent - one’s cultural orientation, exposure and degree of rootless-ness. This, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>however, only partly explains the conundrum.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">There are also other easy but valid answers: most students are frivolous, they are more enamored with glamour than with cinema per se, some of them are too immature, etc. And yet these also do not satisfy me though all of them carry a grain of truth. Even while teaching a group of ultra-serious IIT students, I have sometimes not found the desired emotional impact.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Is it my personal failure that I cannot excite students about these films? Is it the failure of these ‘classics’ that they have failed to transcend across time and space unlike earlier? After all, <i>La Dolce Vita</i> as a film hasn’t changed inherently. It has only become more accessible in its DVD avatar but its reception may have changed.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Then, is this the impact of Time? Has the world around us changed so much that ideas and emotions that excited us earlier do not move us any more? Has cinema (film language) changed so much that some of the great films do not ‘talk’ to us any more with the same degree of intimacy and instead look ‘slow’ and pretentious?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I guess there must a be a bit of truth in each one these possibilities. I do not intend to say at all that none of the classics work; in fact, several of them still work even with the uninitiated but even my response to certain films is not so enthusiastic any more and several films just fail to impact. The important aspect of this phenomenon is that this does not seem to happen with the traditional arts <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>such as literature, painting or music. Only in the case of cinema, the classics seem to run the risk of being ephemeral.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">I was delighted to find that Umberto Eco raised exactly the same question in one of his extraordinary essays titled ‘The Multiplication of the Media’ in his riveting collection of essays titled ‘Travels in Hyperreality’ (Picador, 1987). It happened to him when he was looking forward to a TV viewing of Kubrick’s <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> after several years but was hugely disappointed by the experience.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">… That film which had stunned us only a few years ago with its extraordinary technical and figurative invention, its metaphysical breadth, now seemed to repeat wearily things we had seen a thousand times before…. The final images are kitsch, a lot of pseudo-philosophical vagueness in which anyone can put the allegory he wants…</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(p 145)</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">He goes on to provide a sophisticated and elaborate explanation for this disenchantment for which neither Kubrick nor the viewer can be blamed:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">… every new invention sets off a chain reaction of inventions, produces a sort of common language. They have no memory because, when the chain of imitations has been produced, no one can remember who started it, and the head of the clan is confused with the latest great grandson. …The spaceships of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Star Wars</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, shamelessly descended from Kubrick’s, are more complex and plausible than their ancestor, and now the ancestor seems to be their imitator….(p146)</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">In other words, if <i>Citizen Kane</i> makes little impact on the audience of today, it may not be so because Orson Welles seems a less dazzling genius in hindsight but simply because all the technical and narrative innovations of the film have been cannibalised to such an extent that the film is reduced to a matter of historical curiosity. If this is a phenomenon unique to cinema, it is because it is a supremely technological form and therefore technology plays a crucial role in its accelerated growth and reception. Imagine watching <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i>Sin City</i> ten years from now! We will not even understand why we were at all<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>impressed with the film once upon a time. If Normal Mclaren’s <i>Horizontal/ Parallel Lines</i> do not work at all now, blame Windows MediaPlayer’s randomized visualiser for that which is actually far more sophisticated than what Mclaren could ever do.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Films whose reputation depend on technical or narrative virtuosity are more likely to get jaded earlier but this does not guarantee that films that depend more on the depth of its content are likely to have a longer shelf life. This is where our social atmosphere influences our tastes. When I see a Alain Resnais film with my students, I really wish that the editing was faster though I do not feel the same when I see the same film alone. I saw <i>My Night at Maud’s</i> a few months back and found it impossibly pretentious and boring. I am not sure whether it is so because these films are actually ‘boring’ or ‘slow’ but simply because now there is far lesser appreciation and tolerance for films that aspire to be discursive rather than narrative. So this is the extent to which the world around us changes us, imperceptibly. The supremacy of <st1:place>Hollywood</st1:place> storytelling has no one right now to challenge its aesthetic claim to universality.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">May be a more interesting question would be to ask why certain films from the distant past and B&W still ‘work’ with the uninitiated. There are many such examples: <i>Sunset Boulevard, Twelve Angry Men, Taxidriver, High Noon </i>(all American examples) or<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Uday Shankar’s <i>Kalpana</i> or Shombhu Mitra/Raj Kapoor’s <i>Jaagte Raho</i>. Consider an ultra-avant garde<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>film like <i>Last Year at Marienbad</i>. It was rated as the greatest film of all time ahead of <i>Citizen Kane</i> by the <i>Sight & Sound</i> board of film critics through the 1960s, 70s and 80s and then suddenly thereafter it disappeared from all lists into utter oblivion. Or consider Makavejev’s <i>WR: Mysteries of the Organism</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I have rarely heard any film student or even scholar talking about these films in recent years. Something seems to have happened by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s – a kind of shift in popular consciousness and our collective aesthetic judgment.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Even as I try to disentangle this mystery about so-called ‘classics’ and need to get ready with the films for my class,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I choose the ones which are popular among students for all the wrong reasons and then use them to deepen an understanding of cinema. As usual, life also brings surprises: our good old <i>Man with a Movie Camera </i>(1929) works with every batch because our students who are mostly hooked on hardcore computer games think it is a cool MTV-style music video, never mind it was invented in the context of a communist revolution.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">And yes, sex is no longer a safe bet. ‘Classics’ that came with liberal doses of sex had viewers glued to the screens, if not for anything else. <i>Last Tango in Paris, Salo</i> or <i>Sweet Movie</i> doesn’t work as it did earlier. Only after the screenings did <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I realize that most of<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>the students possibly have several GBs of hardcore porn on their laptops, far more potent in their evocative power than the stories with their narrative pretensions. Sex in European art cinema which was the uncredited staple diet of <st1:country-region><st1:place>India</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s film society movement is now ineffective. So, my films in the next few weeks are going to be <i>City of </i><st1:city><st1:place><i>God</i></st1:place></st1:city><i>, Clockwork </i><st1:city><st1:place><i>Orange</i></st1:place></st1:city><i>, Amores Perros, </i><st1:city><st1:place><i>Havana</i></st1:place></st1:city><i> Blues…</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">What do I care if they are declared ‘classics’ from some pulpit or not! They ‘work’ better with my students than the most sublime of Bergman’s films. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-4054182724545846642010-07-14T11:34:00.000+05:302010-07-14T11:44:35.294+05:30Film Appreciation Course at NCPA, Bombay<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Here are the outlines of the lectures that I shall deliver at NCPA through the month of August. In case you are interested in attending them, please register directly with NCPA by writing to <span class="gd">Kavita Ogale</span> </span><span class="go"><a href="mailto:kogale@ncpamumbai.com">kogale@ncpamumbai.com</a>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt">1<sup>st</sup> Session: 7<sup>th</sup> Aug, Sat,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> – <b>The Landscape of Cinema</b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><b></b></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Though certain kinds of cinemas have greater visibility than others, there is a vast diversity in the films made around the world. The general character of </span></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Hollywood cinema, ‘Bollywood’ and its relationship with ‘Indian Cinema’ and concepts such as ‘independent’, ‘parallel’, ‘regional’ and ‘world’ cinemas would be understood as stepping-stones for celebrating cinema in relation to the cultures and contexts from which they emerge.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2<sup>nd</sup> Session: 8<sup>th</sup> Aug, Sun,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> – <span class="apple-style-span"><b><span style="color:black">Visual Storytelling: Time and Space in Cinema</span></b></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt; color:black"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">What is it in cinema that makes it unique from other forms? <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Is it a language with a<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>certain grammar which we learn innately?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Perhaps the better films are those that<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>use this grammar more effectively by telling their stories visually rather than through words. If cinema fragments time and space and then brings them together, how does it manage to give us a coherent vision of an imaginary world seen through the window of the film screen?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">3<sup>rd</sup><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Session: 14<sup>th</sup> Aug, Sat,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size: 10.0pt"> –<b> Evolution of Film Language and the Early Comedies</b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt"><b></b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">From its embryonic form in the closing years of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, we trace the emergence of cinema through the early 20<sup>th</sup> century until it grows into a dominant cultural form, both as art and industry. Some of the great filmmakers of the early years were comedians, many of whom have now been sadly forgotten. Films that we once saw as just hilarious are now perceived as works of great artists who explored and expanded the expressive power of cinema.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">4<sup>th</sup><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Session: 15<sup>th</sup><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Aug, Sat,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> – <span class="apple-style-span"><b><span style="color:black">Understanding Story Structure in Films</span></b></span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt">What makes some stories more compelling than others?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What dramatic devices do films often use to give ‘structure’ to a human experience that transforms character?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There seem to be some general principles that work for films across cultures and these conventional notions of structure are referred as ‘classical’. However, wherever there are rules, there are exceptions. Is there any specifically ‘Indian’ way of telling stories? How does the Indian popular cinema draw upon the storytelling traditions in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size:10.0pt">?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">5<sup>th</sup><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Session: 21<sup>st</sup> Aug, Sun,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size: 10.0pt"> – <b>American Cinema: </b></span><st1:city><st1:place><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Hollywood</span></b></st1:place></st1:city><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> and the ‘indie’ film</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt"></span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Though film language was creatively explored in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">France</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size:10.0pt">, it was in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">USA</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> that the cinema developed into a huge industry as early as 1919. While a few big corporations monopolised filmmaking and developed their own signature styles and dominated the world, the studio system gradually declined and took a different form. In resistance to the studio-system, there developed in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">America</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> an off-Hollywood independent cinema tradition that subverts the mainstream and yet, it is from this alternative cinema that </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Hollywood</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> continues to draw its fresh blood.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">6<sup>th</sup><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Session: 22<sup>nd</sup> Aug, Sat,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size: 10.0pt"> – <b>Major European Film Movements</b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">While in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">USA</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size:10.0pt">, cinema was primarily seen as an industry and films as consumer commodities, in </span><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Europe</span></st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> it has often been perceived as an art form and an expression of culture and history. Thus films often grew out of vibrant social, political and artistic movements that explored new avenues and deepened cinema’s engagement with the world. These pioneering movements had tremendous impact not only on </span><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">Hollywood</span></st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> cinema but on cinemas around the world, including </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt">India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-size:10.0pt">.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">7<sup>th</sup> Session: 23<sup>rd</sup> Aug, Sun,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> – <span class="apple-style-span"><b><span style="color:black">Mise-en-scène</span></b></span><b> and<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Film Styles</b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-size:10.0pt; color:black">Mise-en-scène</span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">refers to the articulation of cinematic space and defines the style of individual filmmakers. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It involves almost everything that goes into the making of a shot: composition, movement of camera and characters, lighting, set design and sound design.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span> Some films drive the story forward with every element in the frame contributing to that end while others invite viewers to pause and reflect on the compositional spaces of the narrative.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt">8<sup>th</sup><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Session: 30<sup>th</sup> September, Sat, </span><st1:time minute="0" hour="14"><span style="font-size:10.0pt">2pm to 6pm</span></st1:time><span style="font-size:10.0pt"> – <b>Concepts of genre and auteur</b><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">The idea of genre has<b> </b>defined </span><st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Hollywood</span></st1:place><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> film production to a large extent where films are targeted at specific audiences who have certain expectations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Indian popular cinema, however, addresses its audience differently though it is increasingly embracing the concept. While the supremacy of genre obliges filmmakers to work within certain conventions, master filmmakers (auteurs) manage to transcend them and leave their signatures in terms of style and content on every film they make. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; "><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 16px; "><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY</span></b></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">is Professor of Film Appreciation at Whistling Woods International in Mumbai’s </span></span><st1:place><st1:placename><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Film</span></span></st1:placename><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span><st1:placetype><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">City</span></span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">. He graduated in Film Direction from </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">International School of Film & TV</span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">(EICTV)</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">in </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Havana</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> (</span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Cuba</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">) where he studied under the Nobel Laureate, Gabriel García Márquez. He was screenplay consultant for the</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">European Union Cross-Cultural Programme</span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">. He has taught screenplay-writing and Film Appreciation at several universities and institutes in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">India</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> and abroad. His book on Latin American cinema is now a reference text at several universities. He has also published a study of the Indian film industry and several essays in English, Spanish and Bengali. He was Manager of the Osians’ Film Archive and Convenor of the</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">First All-India Screenwriters’ Conference</span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">held at FTII, Pune and has been on the jury of film festivals in </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Brazil</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">, </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Mexico</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">, </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Cuba</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> and </span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Spain</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">. He is also the director of a foundation called ILACI (Indo-Latin American Cultural Initiative) which has exclusive collaborative arrangements with UNESCO and IberMedia and is currently producing a documentary series. </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black"> </span></span></span></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7809756700604647767.post-13810977642495468292010-07-14T01:48:00.001+05:302011-06-23T11:23:33.534+05:30Bibliomania<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbRApwTtyG-SnLlZuerq4RXDk9QtP3Zw908_Zfb0GwbHEEa7WE5TjRVK_ezD9UxkhDvGVre-JCc70n3OQB6d_mgoylN97pwqZsrWjhuOsVMKxVKMH9uZ3K4Uahujc-KxCmBEoR1kfkc90/s1600/Book+cartoon.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493488542580754418" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbRApwTtyG-SnLlZuerq4RXDk9QtP3Zw908_Zfb0GwbHEEa7WE5TjRVK_ezD9UxkhDvGVre-JCc70n3OQB6d_mgoylN97pwqZsrWjhuOsVMKxVKMH9uZ3K4Uahujc-KxCmBEoR1kfkc90/s320/Book+cartoon.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 228px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">The online bookshop <a href="http://www.flipkart.com/">www.flipkart.com</a> (our own version of amazon.com), has had several casualties like me. Whoever I have introduced to this marvel has thanked me profusely but the spouses complain that I have created a serious financial imbalance in their private lives. The efficiency of flipkart is so impressive and the discounts so attractive that as soon as a book reaches me, I find myself ordering a new one from my endlessly long ‘Wishlist’. This means I end up buying one book every other day as I happen to receive one new book with the same frequency. My book-buying rate happens to be three times higher than my reading rate which possibly makes me more of a book-hoarder than a book-reader. If I had not picked up this habit, I would have more money in the bank but I would not be richer. </div><div class="MsoNormal">‘Are you a lawyer?’ ‘Do you sell books?’ </div><div class="MsoNormal">‘So… you mean to say you have read all these books?’</div><div class="MsoNormal">While the first question is unique to <st1:city><st1:place>Bombay</st1:place></st1:city> where very few homes have book-collections unlike more cultured cities, the latter question is one that I encounter very often. Only someone who doesn’t share the passion of the bibliophile would dare to ask such a question because books are much more than just books. They exude a strange kind of positive energy that spreads a kind of tranquility that can impact any one. Kids refusing to go to bed fall quickly asleep in a room full of books and it can also provide a great backdrop for the drama of love and seduction. Live in a room surrounded by great books and realise how the wisdom of the ages seep into your body through the thin air. You do not even have to read them! </div><div class="MsoNormal">When we are collecting great books, we are collecting some kind of eternal happiness – a sort of guarantee in a life completely devoid of any other certainties. A person can surround him/herself with 6,000 books (and about a 1000 DVDs as in my case) and thenceforward have at least one place in the world where s/he can be happy! Borges once said that he always imagined that <st1:place>Paradise</st1:place> would be a kind of library – a labyrinthine one at that.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Anatole Broyard articulates it better than me: ‘The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.’ In other words, one has a specific personal relationship with each book in one’s collection. A private library is also a working tool and has got to do with a primitive sense of possession. I cannot find my peace-of-mind unless I wrap up the book in plastic, write out my name in the title page along with the date and place of its procurement and then read it with a red pen in my hand and a bookmark. That is also why I find it impossible to read a borrowed book and when I lend one of my own to someone, I feel like an anxious parent who waits at the balcony for a teenager child to come back home from a late night party.</div><div class="MsoNormal">So many hard emotions are experienced over the loss or procurement of books! Nazis burnt them in spectacular bonfires just as much as the Inquisition did five centuries earlier. And I too have lost half a dozen close friendships over books that were not returned and I certainly miss those books far more than the human beings. Gustave Flaubert wrote <i>Bibliomania</i> in 1836 when he was just 14 years old, his first published work. It is a slightly fictionalized version of a true story of Don Vicente, a Spanish monk who was literally willing to kill to possess a book he wanted for his collection. It still stands as a classic example of bibliomania taken to its extreme.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Our relationship with the electronic document is vastly different in its affective value though I find myself reading far more material online these days - particularly the ubiquitous wikipedia -than the physical book. With the increasing proliferation of the Kindle and the Sony Reader and the Google Library Project that promises to make available online every printed book in the history of humanity, I am quite convinced that we are the last generation of human beings on earth collecting books that may promote deforestation but reinforce our emotional bond with the world of ideas in all its physicality. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0