Category: Art & Cinema
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Avatar: A Review
By Usha Alexander
I look for the same strengths and value in science fiction as I do in any other kind of film. But I don’t care for macho, action-adventure films; I absolutely avoid them. Avatar is an action-adventure science fiction film. But it’s not macho. Which is not to say it doesn’t include some macho characters. I hope the difference is obvious.James Cameron has long been recognized as the rare writer-director whose blockbuster vision allows as much value and presence to his female characters as to his male characters. Whatever the general merits of his previous films, The Terminator, Rambo II: First Blood, The Abyss, and The Titanic, one thing they can’t reasonably be accused of is celebrating the masculine at the expense of the feminine. It’s not only that his strong, brave, intelligent, and resourceful lead characters, Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton, The Terminator 1984) and Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss 1989), are two among the spare handful of feminine hero(in)es one finds at all in science fiction films. It’s not just that his male characters are full enough to encompass the feminine, as when he shows us Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, Rambo II 1985) crying, even succumbing to the wilderness of his grief, driven by his heart as much as his head, or as when he casts the romantic hero of The Titanic (Leonardo DiCaprio, 1997) as a man who runs from a fight, preferring to sketch pictures, instead. Cameron not only doesn’t flinch from femininity or see it as weakness in opposition to masculinity, he seems hardly to notice the divide, and that’s what allows his characterizations to feel natural and authentic.
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Dance to Change the World
At TEDIndia, Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer, actor, and politician, tells a transformative story in dance—and argues that the arts may be the most powerful way to effect change, whether political, social or personal. Sarabhai played Draupadi in Peter Brook’s Mahabharata.
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The Truth About Burning Man
Jay Michaelson’s take on the famous event held each year in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada:
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The Dark Side of the Moon
Go see the movie Moon. I rarely watch, let alone recommend, science fiction, but this one felt close to the classics of the genre, such as 2001, Blade Runner, and Solaris. What do they have in common? They’re less about exploring outer space than the inner one, less about the gee-whiz-bang of science & technology than what it means to be human. Moon raises questions of identity, loneliness, corporate greed, and bioethics, with haunting landscapes and music to boot. No gratuitous explosions, crashes, chases, laser guns, femme fatales, or superheroes saving the day for planet earth. Instead, it offers a slow and deliberate unfolding of character through crisis—the crisis of self-discovery.
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Food, Inc.
If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert’s review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.
The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That’s true even if you’re eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They’re grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They’re fattened so fast they can’t stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.
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A Treasure Trove of Archival Footage from Around the World
I recently came across a YouTube channel, the Travel Film Archive, with over 300 short videos featuring archival footage from around the world, from the city streets of Trinidad, 1938, to the Ituri Forest in Africa, 1929; from the New York subway, 1905, to the Sahara Desert, 1953, or Sri Lanka, 1932. Much of the footage is silent, with only title frames to describe the location or action, but some is accompanied by documentary style voiceover. One James A. Fitzpatrick, something like the Rick Steves of his day, is a frequent narrator.The footage itself, along with the commentary, is a fascinating glimpse
into the past, a window on how people lived 60 or 90 years ago. We
see bits of fading or vanished cultural practices in their local context, from a time when they were still real: Native Americans
in
Idaho in full feathered regalia, participating in a drumming ceremony; Australian Aborigines painted in
white stripes, throwing boomerangs; Alpine Germans carving wood and staging the Passionsspiele; young Tahitian women dressed to pass as their French colonizers; life in a Sinhalese village, when coconut was king and people remained happily unfettered by excessive clothing.Though the commentary will strike the modern viewer as naive, amusing, or poorly informed about the world (perhaps even offensive), one can’t also help but be impressed by the boldness of those who endured the foreign climates and conditions, huge heavy cameras in tow, to learn something about other peoples and produce what’s clearly meant to be a mind-expanding educational experience for the millions back home, who would never in their lifetimes have opportunity for such adventure themselves. The power of such films to transport us and bring us the mysteries of the world today is damped by the ubiquity of images and information. But I imagine that in their day, these gems must have gone some way toward enriching the lives and minds of their viewers.
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Slumdog Millionaire: A Review
This weekend I gave in to the hype and saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire. I entered the movie theater prepared only with the lowest of expectations. And so I was only mildly disappointed. The film has obvious and broad appeal as the quintessential underdog story, and while the cinematography succeeded in capturing something true about the texture of urban India, and the child actors were fabulous, the movie on the whole was just downright silly. (I might warn of plot spoilers ahead, but the movie is so devoid of surprises that there’s no need.)There has been a certain amount of criticism from Indian audiences clamoring (predictably) that the film Slumdog Millionaire fails in the way of all popular Western media, depicting only India’s filth and poverty. But I don’t see this as it’s failing. After all, filth and poverty are undeniably part of the reality of India, and there’s nothing wrong with situating a story there, as Mira Nair creditably did in her breakout film Salaam Bombay! In fact, the lives of the destitute, as any who live in extreme conditions or on the frayed edges of bare survival, provide fertile fields for real drama and deep inquisitions into the human condition, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be reaped as such, in much the same way as we regularly do stories situated in Europe during WWII and the Holocaust or the Antebellum South.
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Sita Sings the Blues
Sita Sings the Blues is a Ramayana-inspired animated film told from the standpoint of Sita, who is depicted as an Indian Betty Boop. It is written, produced, designed, and animated by Nina Paley (I haven’t seen it yet but the concept is intriguing, as is the way Paley came to it).
Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose [American] husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”Category: Art & Cinema -
Pangea Day
This afternoon I spent four hours glued to my computer screen watching the live stream of the Pangea Day broadcast, a global film festival hosted simultaneously in Mumbai, London, Cairo, Kigali, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, showcasing short films from new talent all over the world. Interspersed with the short films were video montages of people speaking about universal human experiences—love, anger, sorrow—and short commentaries on human nature and human experience by scientists, activists, and others. The thrust of the event was to promote human understanding by simply presenting a broad sweep of stories that humanize the Other, that break down the categories of “enemy.” And as it meandered toward it’s final minutes, the focus drew increasingly toward the conflict between Israel and Palestine.It proved to be a most rewarding way to spend a Saturday. The films, especially, were frequently touching, thoughtful, and moving in surprising ways. I was drawn into the sense of a global experience of discovery that was unfolding at a million points simultaneously across the world, as millions watched and learned and cried together. And (it must be said) laughed together.
But the coup de gras was during the final moments when a Palestinian and an Israeli member from The Bereaved Families Forum stood up together and told their own stories of loss and forgiveness, and this was followed by excerpts from the documentary Combatants for Peace, by the young Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, previously known for her excellent documentary Control Room (2004).
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My Daughter, the Terrorist
I stumbled upon this documentary film from 2007 (haven’t seen it yet). It explores “what happens to a population that has experienced more than a generation of warfare,” and “how people become suicide bombers, a choice that seems completely incomprehensible to most of us”:
In Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, some rebel women end their lives as suicide bombers that have killed hundreds over the years. A Norwegian documentary film that follows two 24-year-olds training to do just this has enraged the Sri Lankan government, but raises important questions about the conduct of war and its consequences. The women are from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), often called the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group that has been fighting for an independent homeland for the Tamil ethnic minority since the 1970s. The demand has arisen, they say, in reaction to abuses and discrimination by the Sri Lankan government.
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Standard Operating Procedure
Spring is in the air but we know you well, discerning reader. You’re not into vacuous rejoicing. We applaud your instinct to hold the scents and scattering blossoms of spring as oh! so flippant. You yearn for the falling leaves of autumn and pine for the voluptuous bouts of sorrow and depression that define true thinkers. Well, there’s light at the end of your springtime tunnel! Standard Operating Procedure, a new film by Errol Morris on the horror of Abu Ghraib, has arrived to plunge you into the bluest of autumnal blues at a theater near you:
Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken
by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed
America’s image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the
notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic
abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant
behavior of a few “bad apples”? We set out to examine the context of
these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the
frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and
who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they
thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a
half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted
reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still
shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there. The
Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup. An
expose, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu
Ghraib; and a coverup because they convinced journalists and readers
they had seen everything, that there was no need to look further. In
recent news reports, we have learned about the destruction of the Abu
Zubaydah interrogation tapes. A coverup. It has been front page news.
But the coverup at Abu Ghraib involved thousands of prisoners and
hundreds of soldiers. We are still learning about the extent of it.
Many journalists have asked about “the smoking gun” of Abu Ghraib. It
is the wrong question. As Philip Gourevitch has commented, Abu Ghraib
is the smoking gun. The underlying question that we still have not
resolved, four years after the scandal: how could American values
become so compromised that Abu Ghraib—and the subsequent coverup—could
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Inspired Imagery
The last two times I put up some of my original paintings (Family Pictures) and some faithful copies (Second Hand Art). Today I have picked two paintings which are somewhere in between. These paintings are based on photographs I found in magazines. But they were painted from memory – I did not have the originals before me when I executed the paintings. As the originals were photographs and mine are paint and brush versions of the same and because I added and subtracted from the original compositions, the end products are not really copies. However, since I borrowed the basic idea, I hesitate to call them true originals.
(As usual, please click on the pictures for a larger image.)
One bleak February in Nebraska, I was struggling with a painting that was going nowhere. Both the weather and the creative mind block were cause for some frustratration. I wanted to put the work aside and start something fresh but couldn’t come up with a good idea. Then during a trip to the local library while browsing through an issue of National Geographic, I fell upon an article on Rajasthan, the colorful desert state in central India. Rajasthan is not far from Delhi and the photographs in the article made me painfully nostalgic for the hot, arid summers of northern India in the surrounding gloom of a midwestern winter. I could not check out the magazine. I made a quick sketch of the picture on a piece of paper and later transferred the image on canvas. What transpired was a very satisfying piece of art work that progressed with speed and enthusiasm. I finished the painting in high gloss varnish which lent it a luminous overtone. It is framed in antique gold frame and hangs in a room that gets the afternoon sun – resulting in an attractive glow. It always pleases me to look at this painting because I remember how happily I worked on it. -
Richa Arora – A Delhi Artist
It is always interesting when practitioners and students of science cross over to the world of literature and the arts. Is their artistic endeavor superior to more traditionally trained artists? I do not know. I can only speak for myself. The scientific perspective in art and literature invariably impresses me. The clear eyed precision scientist-artists bring to their craft confers a particularly satisfying uncluttered quality to their work.
On my recent visit to New Delhi, I visited one of the city’s well known art galleries. Among the gallery’s many works, I came across an exhibition of paintings by young Richa Arora. Her work is bold, interesting, clean and impressively confident. I had the pleasure of meeting Richa who was present at her show. She graciously gave me the permission to post some of her pictures on my blog. I hope the readers will enjoy her paintings as much as I did. And perhaps leave some comments for her.
Category: Art & Cinema -
Jack the Dripper
Does art lie entirely in the eye of the beholder, or should it have minimal standards? Who decides what is art and what is only a visually appealing painting, photograph, or sculpture? What makes a sketch end up on a museum wall and another behind a refrigerator magnet? Many years ago, during a visit to the SF MOMA, it struck me powerfully that the idea of art in the US had gone seriously amok — we have become, to quote Milosz, “indifferent to content, and react, not even to form, but to technique, to technical efficiency itself.” The world, I felt sure, will one day wake up and realize that much of abstract modern art — in particular the abstract expressionism of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Kandinsky, etc. — has been the greatest sham in the history of art. I stand with the British art critic Craig Brown who too is “astonished that decorative ‘wallpaper’, essentially brainless, could gain such a position in art history alongside Giotto, Titian, and Velazquez.”
I am certainly not for a frozen aristocracy of art. The world evolves, so too must art. New forms, mediums, techniques are not only inevitable but desirable. Yet, art to me is not about medium or technique. Art lies in the stories it tells, in the insight it reveals into the heart of the human material. Great art reflects the very depth of our being and experience. At the least, art is a mirror held up to us, to evoke a thirst, disquiet, longing, etc. — something we can try and articulate in words, however inadequate that might turn out to be. What we each see in that mirror varies of course and this is to be welcomed. Subjective appreciation flows out of our diverse experiences of life. Category: Art & Cinema -
Second Hand Art
In my introductory virtual exhibition I posted some original compositions. This post contains paintings which are copies of other artists’ works. As a student and amateur artist, I have made many copies over the years, true and inspired – of real objects, human beings, photographs and other artists’ works as my model. The exercise is akin to penmanship – for practice and to improve drawing skills and techniques. Occasionally, a copy turns out to be so satisfactory, that happily it becomes a work of art worth preserving . I display them in my home for my own enjoyment and am doing so now on the blog, for yours. These pictures are a testimony to my skills as an illustrator, much like a billboard artist – not my artistic flair. I have spoken with those in the know about the wisdom of putting them out for public consumption. They assure me that as long as I do not offer such art for sale or claim them as my own, I am not violating any ethical boundaries, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery .. etc.
When I started painting at Joan Furrow’s studio in Omaha in late 1992, I was for the first time, working seriously with oil paint. Joanie advised me to start off with a few copies of actual paintings to get a handle on the color, texture and proper brush strokes. All the paintings shown here are from assorted magazines that cluttered Joanie’s library. Unfortunately, I did not make a note of the artists’ names. So I cannot credit any one properly except to say that these are not my own compositions. I selected the pictures for different reasons but each appealed to me on the basis of subject matter, appropriate level of complexity and artistic quality. They are not reproductions in a technical sense because I did not measure out the originals in grids for exact proportions. I drew them from visual perception as closely as possible. But they are all good enough copies that if you saw the originals somewhere, you’d probably recognize them. The paintings are oil on canvas and they hang in my home. So enjoy some one else’s art vicariously – channeled through me.
Please click on pictures for larger image:
This was the first full painting I made at Joanie’s. I selected it for the depth of the perspective, colors and composition. The impressionistic style of drawing made it easier to avoid making glaring mistakes. I liked the criss-crossing of light and shadow on the dusty street. -
Kissing Without Consent or A Picture May Not Tell The Whole Story
Last week at the other blog, I reported the story of Glenn McDuffie, the Houston man who was recently identified as the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in the celebrated 1945 Life magazine photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt. The picture seen and recognized by millions, is an historical moment captured by a photographer’s lens, marking the end of World War II.
Upon being identified, McDuffie, who had served in the US Navy during WWII, described what the day was like when he went into Times Square with a couple of his buddies and later bussed the nurse in celebration.
On Aug. 14, 1945, he was in Times Square when the word came.
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Peter Brook’s Mahabharata
Earlier this year I saw Peter Brook’s Mahabharata for the third time in fifteen years. Each time my admiration for it has grown. Not only is the epic itself among the greatest stories ever told, Brook’s stage production is sublime too. I consider it one of the greatest dramatic productions of all time. Its notable lack of appeal to Indians, except to a sliver, may be because it is in English and stars mostly non-Indian actors (including, heaven forbid, some black Africans in major roles!), not to mention that it treats the epic simply as a great work of literature, without the cloying religiosity that has informed most Indian dramatizations (with predictable “box-office” success).Its international, multi-racial cast is fitting, driving home the point that the Mahabharata is both a universal story and the heritage of all humanity. Brook wrote the script with Jean Claude Carriere, an accomplished student of Buddhism, and it brings out some of the best philosophical and existential dilemmas of the epic. Costumes are tasteful, music score hauntingly beautiful, dialog taut and poetic. Battle scenes are creatively shown, like the Chakravyuh formation in war that traps Abhimanyu to his death.
One thing I noticed more this time—which you won’t find in popular Indian renditions—is Krishna’s ambivalent role in the story (he’s not “cute” either). Nor is he above cheating and murderous advice (for example, to kill Karna when he is down, to hit Duryodhana’s thigh, to sacrifice Bhima’s son). The conclusion is inescapable: the Creator too is flawed, much like His creation. In the end, with the catastrophic destruction of the war in which nearly everyone is killed, we wonder if Arjuna’s doubts were any less profound than Krishna’s “divine truths”. Was it all worth it? Should one aspire to act without attachment to the fruit of the action? A perfectly defensible interpretation is that Krishna brainwashes Arjuna into “understanding” his duty (or dharma), after which the great warrior exhibits no further doubts—hardly a commendable state. -
Family Pictures
Having conducted an energetic defense of science (and scientists) in a debate over scientific vs artistic creativity at Accidental Blogger, I decided to take an artistic respite at Shunya’s. Namit has given me permission to post virtual exhibitions of my paintings here [editorial note: Namit believes she has earned this right; it’s her blog too]. I will do so from time to time and share my meager body of work with readers.
Although I have loved drawing and painting since childhood, I have pursued this amateur but serious hobby in spurts of a few years at a time only about three or four times since my early teens. The last inspiration lasted between 1992-98. I haven’t picked up a brush in the past nine years. All the paintings are oil on canvas and painted in 1996-97. They are not fine art but done with much enthusiasm and loving care.
I have selected three paintings in this round which represent my impressions of some fond family memories. (Please click on thumbnails for a bigger image)
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Asian Art Museum, SF
The Asian Art Museum (AAM) in San Francisco is one of the largest of its kind in the West. Interestingly, over half of its 15,000 pieces come from a single donor — Avery Brundage (1887-1975), an engineer-businessman from Chicago, Olympic athlete, sports official, art collector, and a philanthropist, who ran a real estate company and also headed the International Olympic Commission from 1952-72. He successfully opposed the US boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, criticizing “radicals and communists” for the move. He was not only a racist and Nazi sympathizer, he even praised Hitler at a NY rally. But none of this kept him from accumulating some of the rarest and finest works of Asian art, with a special taste for Buddhist art (go figure!). For Indian art at least, the man seems to have gone for physical perfection. It’s not clear if he ever visited India, or had much insight into what he was collecting. These pieces probably bubbled up to the top of the art market in the West and he acquired them with a passion. Spanning three floors, the museum requires multiple visits to do justice to it. Here are ten selections from its South Asia gallery. Other galleries include The Persian World and West Asia, China, Southeast Asia, The Himalayas and the Tibetan Buddhist World, Korea, and Japan.
The Bodhisattva Maitreya, 100-300; Pakistan / ancient Gandhara
“Maitreya is believed to be a powerful spiritual being who, when the time is right, will be born on earth in human form and become the next Buddha. Though little actual jewelry has survived from this early period, the elaborate ornaments, collar, necklace, and bracelets shown here provide evidence of what such jewelry looked like. Notice on the necklace the long-bodied centaurs.”
Category: Art & Cinema -
Watching Movies – III
Here’s my short take on the movies I’ve seen in the last 6 weeks or so. A rating of 3 stars or more means that the movie was satisfying enough to me and worth seeing.
Life in the Undergrowth *****
Category: Art & Cinema
