Category: Art & Cinema
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The Namesake
Mira Nair’s movie packs in far more universal appeal than Jhumpa Lahiri’s book. Rather than the movie’s fidelity to the book, my main basis of comparison was: on the whole, does it tell a deeper, richer story? I thought yes; it improved on a mostly drab and plodding book, altering it in positive ways. For instance: the movie reduced the book’s all-pervading, melancholy sense of loss and exile of the middle-class Indian economic migrant (which I couldn’t relate to and found rather annoying); it had richer vignettes of India as seen through visiting NRI/ABCD eyes; its manner of revealing the significance of “Gogol” was more effective; near the end, it made the middle-aged Ashima come into her own as a woman/singer; and so on.
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Watching Movies – II
Here is my short take on the movies I’ve seen in the last month or so. A rating of 3 stars or more means that the movie was satisfying enough to me and worth seeing.
City of God *****
Category: Art & Cinema -
Watching Movies – I
In the last eight weeks, I’ve seen over a dozen films. For the gazillion diehard fans of Shunya’s Notes, I thought I’d share their names and rate them on a 5-star scale. I don’t watch a movie unless I’m reasonably sure it won’t insult my intelligence, so most turn out to be satisfying enough and worth seeing (at least 3 stars). Call me a snob but I stand with Shyam Benegal in calling mainstream Bollywood / Hollywood cinema “a form of retarded art” and I’ve largely avoided it for years (except the odd film I see for social or anthropological reasons, and that rare exception to the rule).
The Motorcycle Diaries *****
Category: Art & Cinema -
Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka
In Aug 2005, I visited a remarkable site in Madhya Pradesh, India: the prehistoric rock shelters and paintings at Bhimbetka, discovered in 1957-58 by Dr. Vishnu S. Wakankar. Of the nearly 750 rock shelters, 500 or so are adorned with paintings; about 15 are open to the public, though few come due to their relative remoteness and lack of public transportation. The site, 45 km from Bhopal, is at the foothills of the Vindhya mountains and is surrounded by forests of teak and sal that had grown lush green in the monsoon season.Bhimbetka remained a center of human activity from the lower Paleolithic times—the oldest paintings are believed to be 12,000 years old (a disputed estimate); the more recent ones date from the first millennium BCE. One can plainly see that the same surface was often used by different peoples at different times.
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On Photography: Truth, Lies, and Photos
(This is a follow-on to part one of my notes on photography)
Many urban middleclass Indians I know are peeved by what they see as a staple of photography on India: squalor, poverty, lepers, fakirs, the deformed. Their India is not like that, and they harbor a knee-jerk hostility to such images. There are so many more suitable subjects of photography, they say, this isn’t the full story (what is?). One cousin was more articulate: the West, he said, has employed such a lens for decades to perpetuate negative stereotypes of India. It is an act of power. The white man came, and still comes, with little love in his heart. His jaundiced eye only sees the exotic and the grimy, making India seem primitive and medieval. -
On Photography: Which Thousand Words?
If a picture says a thousand words, which thousand words does it say to whom? If we all wrote down what we hear, no two accounts would be the same. A picture of an antelope can tickle a palate, provoke wonder in the Lord’s creation, convey a medical factoid, illustrate the photographer’s technique, bore a teenager, etc. A picture of a destitute woman with child may provoke sympathy, wonder, or contempt (if she is seen as lazy, irresponsible with pregnancy, parasitic on society, etc.). The more “abstract” a photo, the wider its range of interpretations. So the question is: can a photographer convey a controlled moral message at all?On the art of photography, we’ll do well to recall Wittgenstein: “What can be shown, cannot be said.” What a picture conveys, he suggests, cannot be fixed by words. Words are a subjective proxy for a picture, a separate creation with a life of its own.
In matters of appreciation, photography may well be closer to music. As forms of art, both are more abstract than, say, novels and films, which at least have words and ideas to latch on to. But novels and films are already notoriously subjective. The best writers know how hard it is to control interpretation. “The stories we write,” says JM Coetzee, “sometimes begin to write themselves, after which their truth or falsehood is out of our hands and declarations of authorial intent carry no weight. Furthermore, once a book is launched into the world it becomes the property of its readers, who, given half a chance, will twist its meaning in accord with their own preconceptions and desires.”*
