I finally saw Volver, the new Almadovar film, I loved it for the same reasons I love Almadovar’s films- the design, the melodrama, the female centered universe of the narrative. The man actually seems to like women. Volver, in particular ensconces it’s audience in the warm embrace of mother-daughter relationships, to the extent of bringing a mother back from the dead in order to right the wrong done to her daughter.

It makes an interesting comparison to Meghe Dhaka Tara, a similarly melodramatic film and cinematically over the top (in a different way than Almadovar), with a female character, Nita, in it’s center. However the relationships in Ghatak’s film are those of predation and annihilation. There is one particular scene that comes to mind. In this scene, Nita is with her suitor, and her mother, is looking at them unobserved. There is an anxiety and ruthlessness in that look which chills you to the bone, I have never forgotten it. Of course, the comparison of these two films goes only so far, given that the partition of India haunt’s Ghatak’s film, while I don’t really know that something similar informs Almadovar’s film.

I have been on the National Archives web page for the last couple of days, researching films and photos. While looking around, I found this photo:

“Rickshaws are almost as common in India as they are in China. Some of the…troops are on their way to see `Tarzan’s New York Adventure’—in India…”

African American soldiers going to see a Tarzan film in Calcutta. What can you say about that? It was interesting to find this in conjunction with the rumbles about the new Clint Eastwood film about the battle for Iwo Jima, where the absence of Black soldiers has been noticed by those who took part in it, like Sgt. McPhatter:

…almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter…..”Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face,” said Mr McPhatter. “This is the last straw. I feel like I’ve been denied, I’ve been insulted, I’ve been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism.”

And here is a tidbit about the newsreel footage from that time, from auhor Melton McLaurin:

“One of the marines I interviewed said that the people who were filming newsreel footage on Iwo Jima deliberately turned their cameras away when black folks came by….

Filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo died at 86 in Rome on Thursday. Pontecorvo was the director of the amazing, Battle of Algiers, which is about a chapter in the Algerian war of independence from France. This film has a diverse audience (NYT):

“The Battle of Algiers” won the Golden Lion for best film at the 1966 Venice International Film Festival. (Mr. Pontecorvo directed the festival for four years, starting in 1992.) But its legend grew as it was used as a kind of training film by both urban guerrillas and the authorities trying to suppress them. The Black Panthers studied the film in the 1960’s, and in 2003, months after the war against Iraqi insurgents began, the Pentagon screened the film for military and civilian war planners.

Its been interesting looking at what is out there regarding this film. The American Conservative opines:

In Algeria, torture worked. What the film doesn’t show is that in France, though, the public started to lose the stomach for the “necessary consequences.” Alarmed that the politicians might throw away their fallen comrades’ sacrifices, the paratroopers threatened to drop on Paris in May 1958 unless Gen. Charles de Gaulle became France’s strong man.

Once in power, however, that great patriot resolved to cut and run. He had to weather two coup attempts and countless assassination plots, but, minus the Algerian tumor, long-suffering France emerged peaceful, prosperous, and democratic.

Sounds familiar! doesn’t it? Here is a link to Democracy Now’s take on the film and it’s implication for the current war and the role of torture. There is more extensive discussion of the Algerian Revolution and the film at the Monthly Review.

Most of the articles I read, are made uneasy by the fact that Pontecarvo was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and even if they like the film they have a queasy feeling about it. I think the film is a lot more complex and as such its difficult to co-opt it with complete ease by anyone who wants to draw easy lessons for our current dilemmas.

After meaning to see it for a year, we finally got a chance to see Good Night, and Good Luck. It was really good– very absorbing and dramatic. And interestingly more like a play than a movie, despite its artful use of archival footage, and good cinematography, which did not treat the scene like a filmed play, but was very much part of the drama in its movement and framing, in short, very cinematic. I suppose the impression of it being a play comes from the action being confined to two or three indoor locations- a TV studio, control room, offices, and a couple’s bedroom, and also the spareness of the narrative, which does not venture into Murrow’s personal life to “explain” his “motivations” and all those pop psychology things most films feel compelled to incorporate. Straithern’s Murrow was quite enigmatic and opaque. Anything personal was given over to the supporting cast, through whom the film showed us the toll McCarthyism, and the general atmosphere of paranoia and distrust took on people’s personal lives and careers.

According to an article in Slate, Murrow’s role in bringing down McCarthy was just one of the strands of the larger story. There were other courageous people who paved the way for Murrow, who came rather late into the game. Whatever the historical lapses of the film, the fact remains that the Red Scare and McCarthyism destroyed many lives and careers, and was a shameful period in American history, which most people seem to have forgotten about.

The film is perhaps more a commentary on our times than an attempt to be a history lesson, which it manages to do rather effectively.

My friend Yousuf Saeed, a filmmaker from Delhi has been in the States since mid-September showing films made by him and others, including Girish Karnad, on the syncretic culture of India. Yousuf’s latest film is a beautiful exploration of the classical music in Pakistan (quite an antidote from the usual horror stories about madrassas etc.) Boston University has a nice article about him and his films, the following is an excerpt from that article. If you are in a position to see these films, hope you will take the opportunity to do so.

In front of a small but attentive crowd last night in Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences, Indian documentary filmmaker Yousuf Saeed presented two documentaries detailing cultural diversity, prompting a discussion among those in attendance.

Beginning at BU and working his way across the country — to as far as Chicago and Austin — the award-winning director said he plans to expose American students to the diverse cultures of Southeast Asia.

Saeed said he believes now is as good a time as ever to spread his message.

“As the world becomes smaller, not everything has to be uniform,” he said. “The diversity of cultures has to be respected and appreciated.”

In the first of a two-part series, Saeed showed two documentaries, his own — Train to Heaven — and Indian actor and director Girish Karnard’s Niche in the Lamp. While Niche, about Islamic Sufism, was filmed in a familiar documentary style, Train took the form of a short musical.

Train to Heaven draws together a harmonious montage of images. Train, primarily drawing a Hindu audience, features Sunni and Shiite imagery together in a rhythmic array of colorful posters.

“[It] portrays the diversity of culture . . . even religions are not monolithic,” Saeed said. “[In India], every few kilometers, you can find a different language.”

By presenting his films across the United States, Saeed “would like to introduce the fact that there are more than just Bollywood films in India.”

While Bollywood is the more mainstream and melodramatic Indian medium, Doordarsham, India’s national television station, features educationally and historically insightful documentaries.

Saeed came to the United States and BU on a grant from the Humanities Foundation and with help from modern foreign languages chairman and professor Chris Maurer.

You can read the rest of the article in the BU paper. Here is a schedule of the screenings.

Oct. 03, 2006: 1:30 pm to 4 pm
Wellesley College
Also at the Music department, Wellesley College the same evening:
Khayal Darpan – A Mirror of Imagination (105 mins) A film about classical music in Pakistan

Oct. 06, 2006:
University of Texas, Austin (Center for Middle Eastern Studies)
1. Films on Syncretic Festivals of North India
2. Khayal Darpan: a film about classical music in Pakistan

Oct. 11, 2006, 12:30 pm
Columbia University, Southern Asian Institute (SAI) at NY
Theme: Multifaith Festivals of South Asia 
Film 1: Basant (13 mins) about the sufi festival of spring held at Delhi every year. 
Film 2: Muharram (12 mins) rituals of Muharram at Amroha (north India)
Film 3: Lahore Basant (23 mins): Directed by Samina Aslam

October 16, 2006: 5 pm
Chicago University (South Asian Studies)
Theme: Plural Symbolism in the Literature, Images and Rituals of South Asia
1. Sukhan: a film about Amir Khusrau, a 13th century poet (30 minutes)
2. Basant: a film about a Sufi festival of spring (12 mins)
3. The Train to Heaven

Now that the Borat movie, in set to be released, and the imdb board is trading briskly in insults, it occurred to me that there was something interesting about the fact that Sacha Cohen, the comedian with the persona of a Kazakh TV journalist, is Jewish.

First, I was reminded of Lev Nussimbaum (See mine and Amardeeps post), an Azerbaijani Jewish man who passed himself off as Essad Bey in pre-war Germany. And second, I was reminded of a conversation Kerim and I had in London. In essence our friend, a British Jew said that despite being upper-middle class and very well educated there was only so much hope of advancement, his Jewishness would ultimately hit a glass ceiling, Disraeli and Rothschild notwithstanding.

If Jews have been Europe’s first “other,” or if Shylock came before the battle of Plassey (1757), it stands to reason that an “resident Oriental” like Borat/Cohen would “self-Orientalize” and take on a Kazakh persona, much like Lev Nussimbaum, who found a career in Oriental drag. So what Borat/Cohen is doing is not very new in a sense.

I don’t know how I feel about his show though, at times I find it quite offensive, and at other times its very funny. One of the interesting things about his performance is how he takes on Englishness, and I mean Englishness, not Britishness. In one of the clips I saw, he goes to a boat race, and proceeds to examine the mascot of one of the teams which is a Hippopotamus, and sits next to a gentleman in a pin striped suit and learns about the appropriate rituals and responses demanded by the situation, much like a Colonial anthropologist, or Diane Sawyer! Also interesting is the moments of anti-Semitism and racism Borat exhibits or gets his guests to display.

I guess what I am suggesting is that Borat the Kazakh is about being Jewish in modern UK, and examining being Anglo. And if I were a Kazakh, I think I might be annoyed at being used as an instrument so that Anglos can understand themselves better. Nobody wants to be a mere mirror.

(Also see Siddartha’s post on Sepia Mutiny)

The movie based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake is set to release in November, meanwhile the trailer can be seen on the Apple website.

Its often disappointing to see films based on books, however Lahiri’s careful and precise style might translate well into film. So much of her prose seems to be about the accumulation of small physical acts by her characters, the concrete stuff of an actor’s craft, that it might make the film version of the story compatible with the novel. However, I am wondering how the film will handle the passage of time in the story, which covers a lifetime. It looked clunky from the trailer, but the film might prove to be otherwise.

The Catholic Secular Forum in India has sent the call out for a fast-unto-death to protest the the movie, The Da Vinci Code. The group sees the protest as:

“It’s a more Christian way of doing things rather than pulling down things and tearing them up,” he ( the general secretary) said.

I suppose its laudable that they would espouse such a Gandhian gesture, as opposed to what the Shiv Sena has been prone to do. However, from what I understand the Da Vinci code doesn’t pretend to be gospel, its a work of fiction. I wonder where all their hurt feelings were when The Passion of the Christ came out, which was the gospel according to Mel and anti-semitic to boot, and uncomfortably prurient in its depictions of a body in pain.

In any case, protesting a film seems like a senseless exercise.

While the past three months have brought nothing but chaos and stress, I’ve managed to regain some sanity with an infusion of books and films. And with this first post in weeks, I suppose things are getting to normal. So briefly here are a list of films:

The Insider: Spike Lee’s latest. Its good, competent, and delivers what it promises–a good bank robbery film. The opening song is A.R. Rehman’s Chaiya, Chaiya, which was a good match for the film, though the lyrics have nothing to do with the movie but never mind. There is also a Sikh character which was another surprise, and he wasn’t a cab-driver either (no disrespect to cabbies), though there was cab joke in one of his scenes, so the film did acknowledge that particular stereotype. Anyway, I wasn’t demanding my money back after the show.

Hard Candy: Which is about a pedophile and his fourteen year old supposed victim. Typical indiewood fare. Supposedly character driven, but saturated in the flatulent emissions of its own importance. Full of cute little quips in the dialogue, with characters so uni-dimensional it makes you scream. What makes it even worse is that the characters are given the blandest, shallowest motivations you can imagine. How do these movies get made?

Friends With Money: This one is a character study of a group of friends, I couldn’t care less about. They are all neurotic and more or less unhappy, which should have been interesting, but isn’t. Tepid and bland. Plus its hard to put the fact out of your mind that Jennifer Aniston is a “Friend.” To be fair, there are moments when the film gets to an interesting place, but doesn’t pursue it further.

The Notorious Bettie Page: By far the most interesting film I saw recently. Thankfully Mary Harron doesn’t even go near psychology in that annoying way that seems to be obligatory for everyone who has come out of an MFA film program. I just wish the film had been on a bigger scale. In the Q and A session at the screening, Mary Harron said how she was really interested in the fifties, but from the film it looked that she had to scale down her ambitions. A pity.

The Sentinel: I can’t even be bothered to say why this one sucked.

Thank You For Smoking: This one was enjoyable, even though the filmmakers felt compelled to make the main character likable by giving him a son he cared about. Where, oh where do you have to go to get some good, honest to goodness satire these days?

We are leaving in a few minutes for India. Posting will be even more sporadic than it has been. Hopefully, I’ll be able to blog about how the production is going.