Exit Man-Child

I watched Phantom Thread a few days ago. In the theatre! The last film I watched in the theatre was probably Nil Batte Sannata, but this was Daniel Day-Lewis' last, so I had to watch it on a big screen, etc etc is why I put myself through all that going to a mall to watch a film entails.

(That was a complicated sentence. I will keep it simple for the rest of this post).

In this interview with middle school girls, Anderson says that he wanted to work with Day-Lewis again, and so over the course of a few months, the two of them sat together and figured out the story they wanted to tell.

So here's the thing: this story of a grown man surrounded by women propping him up in all things great and small is the role Daniel Day-Lewis wanted to be his last, before he retires forever from cinema.

That is even more disappointing than the film itself.

I'm not going over the plot. It involves clothes, Day-Lewis looking quite hot, the women he dresses not so, and a weird twist in the tale in the last ten minutes that was - how shall I put it? - very difficult to stomach.

You'd think that a film where most of the speaking roles belong to women, where in fact, there are more named women characters than men, would be a good thing. Nope. Not if, in all their actions, the needs of this great big man-child are the only important thing.

He needs silence at the breakfast table. Scrape butter too loudly, crunch toast, pour tea from an unacceptable height, tell him he's expected to attend a wedding, and the man's a nervous wreck, his day ruined and his inspiration in shreds. He asks a woman out and talks about his dead mother the entire time. Worse: he removes her make up at a restaurant because that's how he likes to see her. 

And so creepy the way his sister grooms this woman he brings home to be his muse (someone said on twitter, men having muses is nothing more than a way to conceal an erection beneath an education): how softly she should eat, how she must not introduce the slightest variation in his routine, etc etc.

I think this is supposed to signify the man's fragile genius. 

Poor Daniel Day-Lewis. If he needs to remove every male character from the script (bar one doctor whom his character tells to fuck off), if he needs to play a man who has to have women mother him and protect him and stand like mannequins around him, and be jealous but not so jealous that they impinge on his life in any meaningful way, all in order to garner a final Oscar nomination, then that's just pathetic.

If he wins, I think I will be capable of one more level of disappointment. (Personally, I think Timothee Chalamet should win in this category).

(I had more to say but now I'm just bored with how silly this film is. Now that this is out my system, I hope I will stop saying, "Another thing about Phantom Thread' to myself at odd moments during the day.)

Thinking is invisible: Hannah Arendt by Margarethe von Trotta

I saw Margarethe von Trotta's film Hannah Arendt a few days ago. I'd intended to blog about it as soon as but life got in the way and now I have my scribbles and the briefest impressions about the film. So this is not a review, just a bunch of thoughts.

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I last saw a von Trotta film more than 20 years ago at FTII. It left no impression on me. She was name a put along with Wenders, Fassbinder, Herzog and Sanders-Brahms and that's it. Now Helma Sanders-Brahms I remember. i remember being horrified and strangely moved by her Germany Pale Mother. 

But von Trotta's film I don't remember. So I watched Hannah Arendt with not too many preconceptions and even with some anticipation. I'd done no reading before - no New Yorker articles of the Eichmann trial, no quick read of Banality, nothing. 

If a bio pic is made at all, surely it must be made for people in my pristine state? I was a blank slate on which to impress whatever the filmmaker wanted to say about Arendt.

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The film was screened in an upstairs room at the Goethe Zentrum. It was 11.30 in the morning and nearly summer. The room was insufficiently darkened and the first scene was in low light. I know there was a torch swinging a half-circle as it was left on the ground after sounds of scuffle; and I assume, from what followed that it was Eichmann being captured by Mossad. 

Other low- lit scenes followed and I struggled to see what was happening. 

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The film follows a fairly straightforward narrative. Eichmann's capture, the news of it, Arendt's volunteering to cover the trial for the New Yorker, the visit to Jerusalem, the trial (with intercuts between images of the actual trial and reconstructions of the courtroom and the press room), Arendt's return, her (much-delayed) articles and the backlash. 

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I want to talk about bio pics and how, as a genre they are interesting for how little is possible within the framework. Or how little filmmakers achieve. There is a life and there are significant points in the narrative that are public knowledge. But those aren't interesting in themselves because they point to nothing new about the human being involved.

So bio pics devolve into a narrative about the minor events in the life of a person that contribute to their 'growth' as a character and the detail the ways in which small, throwaway events influence the larger events we're somewhat familiar with. 

In Hannah Arendt, for instance, an incidental  conversation in which Mary McCarthy corrects Arendt's use of English ('It's when the CHIPS are down. Not SHIPS.') pays off in the final scene in what is practically the closing line of the film, when Arendt gets it right and the audience (in the theatre; not in the film's lecture room where the scene takes place) laughs. 

No growth there, certainly, but an indication that the character is listening and learning. That she is behaving like characters should in good fiction - creating an arc for herself and her life. Getting from here to there in a neat progression of stimulus and response. Of what use is a bio pic in which the central character learns nothing and changes in no significant way?

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The main problem with the film - which I will confess to not responding to very well - is that it's a film about a thinker. And thinking is invisible. How does a director rise to the challenge of showing a person for whom all the drama and the movement is in the head?

Traditional montage, that we're so used to now we know what it's doing and how, finds visual representations that the character responds to. We know what they're thinking by how they respond. There's a lexicon of visual and aural codes that's been internalised from culture to culture in cinema's swiftly-moving century.

Chance conversations, and observations made in idle moments, the visible sharpening of the character's attention, the connections being made - this is how we know what's going on in the head.

In this film, von Trotta chooses the flashback; she chooses to have Arendt build her theories by remembering her interactions with Martin Heidegger. It's an interesting solution. For one thing, it's not clear what it is that she learns from remembering each of these interactions, so there are no clear lines drawn between the two things. The process of thought remains mysterious, which is as it should be. 

Also - less interestingly - it serves to point out Arendt's capacity for feeling at a time when she is, in her writing, being detached and refusing to be ruled by her passions - a thing that the Zionists in both Israel and New York are unable to understand.
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There were things about the film that felt very old. The intercut trial in black and white and colour (well, that could hardly be helped, I suppose); the sound design that had sirens, the sound of military boots and such-like to signify a transition into the past - other things I'm forgetting now. 

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It made me wonder why this film and why now. What about Arendt and the Eichmann trial is worth revisiting now? 

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Yeah - I don't really have any more to say about the film other than that I was disappointed in its predictability, in the way it hit plot points and tried hard to find narrative tropes that were primarily fictional. There was nothing interesting in it as a film. 

If I wanted to revisit the Eichmann trial, I think I would prefer to go read Arendt's articles in the New Yorker rather than watch a film about it. I have no doubt that I would find her own words more worthwhile than the 90 minutes that tried (and failed) to convince me that this was an important moment in 20th century history and philosophy.

Things in December

** UPDATE 29 December: Mail from the organisers of the Urur-Olcott Kuppam Margazhi Vizha saying the concerts today and tomorrow (29th and 30th) have been postponed due to inclement weather.

Concerts will now take place closer to Pongal. **

*** 

A bunch of things I've noticed and thought I'd share on the blog:

1. PARI: The Poeple's Archive of Rural India.

P. Sainath probably needs to introduction to anyone in S. Asia but the thing he's done most recently may be something that's flown under the radar if you look to newspapers and television to give you the news. He's started the People's Archive of Rural India, a website that is both an archive and a resource for much that is invisible to urban eyes. 

Here's what the introduction says:


There is surely much in rural India that should die. Much in rural India that is tyrannical, oppressive, regressive and brutal — and which needs to go. Untouchability, feudalism, bonded labour, extreme caste and gender oppression and exploitation, land grab and more. The tragedy, though, is that the nature of the transformation underway more often tends to bolster the regressive and the barbaric, while undermining the best and the diverse. That too, will be captured here. PARI is both a living journal and an archive. It will generate and host reporting on the countryside that is current and contemporary, while also creating a database of already published stories, reports, videos and audios from as many sources as we can. All PARI’s own content comes under the Creative Commons (http://www.ruralindiaonline.org/legal/copyright/) and the site is free to access. Also, anyone can contribute to PARI. Write for us, shoot for us, record for us — your material is welcome so long as it meets the standards of this site and falls within our mandate: the everyday lives of everyday people.

There's already quite a lot up on the site and I'm sure it will swell with more accounts as the months pass. 

I have no idea if anyone reading this blog has anything they could contribute but here's the word out.

(As a complete aside, looking at the Creative Commons License, it brought to mind the first time I was introduced to the concept of 'copyleft' if not the actual word. I was in Sainath's office with a friend, back when he was the editor of Blitz, and we were discussing something - not sure what; god knows, there was plenty to discuss, with the recent riots in Bombay and everything; though, of course, I can't say for sure that that was the subject of our argument since I can't see what we could possible disagree about on that head - and after a brief argument, Sainath gave us a pamphlet he'd written about the subject. 

He pointed us to the copyright page and said, "Look at it." 

"What should we look at," we asked. 

"The copyright."

We looked and we were baffled. It said, or Sainath said, as he read it aloud for our benefit: "copyright humanity". 

 (Or some similar, large category. I can't be absolutely sure that the word was 'humanity').

It was sufficiently odd for us to solemnly hold the book open at the copyrights page but of course there were more discussions after. 



2. The Sundarbans Oil Spill.

If you've been reading the newspapers etc (see above) you will have no idea that there has been a disastrous oil spill in the Sundarbans. 

It's not only an ecological disaster - for the river, the mangroves, the Irrawady dolphins - but also a sociological one. Those cleaning up are mostly children. 

The person to follow in this matter is Arati Kumar-Rao, whose twitter and instagram give one a more clear picture on the scale of this disaster.

There's also a crowdfunding drive to raise money for the clean-up that, hopefully, will be done in a safer manner.

3. The Urur-Olcott Kuppam Margazhi Vizha December 29th & 30th

Speaking of crowdfunding, a week or so ago, there was a fund-raising drive to clean up the beach (very, very outside the parameters of the Swachch Bharat thingy, I feel I should clarify) the Urur-Olcott Kuppam fishing village in Chennai.

T.M.Krishna, with whom I was recently in conversation at the Goa Lit Fest, is the organiser of both this drive and the two day festival of music and dance that will take place on the 29th and the 30th. The intention, clearly, is to take the cultural wealth of the December Season in Chennai beyond the confines of the sabhas and make it less elitist and inaccessible.

Details here.

Now, I know plenty of people who clear their decks in order to be in Chennai during the music season. Their days are just packed and if picking one's way through the concert schedule could seem like managing an intricate war game*, I was always outside of it, even though, until a couple of years ago, I seemed to be in Chennai every year at the end of December. 

I mean, I might have gone to a Poetry with Prakriti reading or two; hung out with friends and gone to a lunch or two at some famous sabha. But I didn't really do this season pass thing, not just because the whole process seemed so daunting (so much easier to sit in front of Jaya TV), but because I also felt rather left out of the whole very inner-circle-ness of the season.

If I'd been there this year, I still don't know if I'd have made the effort, but it seems much more likely. What I would have done is academic; if you're in Chennai, you could consider going.

4. Film Festivals

There are no links, but reading an account of being at IFFI (the main GoI one and not the Kerala one), and talking to Cat yesterday, who said the Chennai Film Festival had some pretty good films, I have been experiencing a sharp pang for days spent watching four films a day, to immerse myself in fare that is not the pap being dished out these days as thoughtful cinema.

Yes, I haven't seen PK, I am not going to and already it makes me want to barf. Another friend, an anthropologist, said there's a 7-10 minute section that's practically an anthropology 101 and she'd show it to her students if she had any. Me, I think she should just get them to read any of Ursula le Guin's Ekumen books.

Since this is almost entirely a report of the thoughts of others, to which I may or may not have responded irl, I should also mention that a theatre critic in Australia, whose writing I really respect, watched Ceylan's Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (yes, a couple of years late, but so what?) and soon after watched the Xmas Special Doctor Who and I really, I watched her do it on twitter and was unable to stop her - that's the nature of the medium, huh?

But this also I thought with another, different kind of pang, that people no longer mail to ask me recs of films to watch at whatever film festival is up in their part of the world. Because I am really, truly, no longer in touch with cinema.

And that, of course, is terrible. There is no good reason for why this has happened, but when I consider that cinema has been my thing since I was 15, it astonishes me that I allowed things to get to a point when I haven't watched one good film in a theatre, with proper projection and sound (as opposed to on my laptop in some shady format and a variety of subtitles in .srt) as cinema should be watched.

That's one resolution made for me right there, while I wasn't really looking.

One more post before the new year, people!

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*Though, wouldn't you know it, there's an app developed by TCS to sort this out for you.




 

Hanging by a thread

(It's not spider-silk but it's just as strong, so I don't despair.

Every time I announce a long silence on this blog, I break it almost immediately. This time, while not doing precisely that, I can't let the year go without looking back just once. At least just a little way.)

The year in reading has been amazing. I don't keep a reading diary - maybe I should - but off the top of my head, my stand-outs have been Rahul Soni's translation of Shrikant Verma's Magadh, reading and re-reading Sundara Ramaswamy, getting annoyed with Kalidasa in Iowa City, among other things.

But there's a book for every phase in one's life and while it was all Book of Disquiet five years ago and A Lover's Discourse two years ago, this is the year in which Daniil Kharms' Today I Wrote Nothing became my I Ching. What can I say? When I need divination, solace, when I need to bury something in someone else's words, I dive into this one.

Other things I've been reading recently: Miroslav Holub's Intensive Care which is basically some new poems and all his Selected rearranged in strange but informative ways. There are bits of paper sticking out, where I've marked lines and pages and the plan is to write about one book of poetry I've read at some regular interval as yet undecided upon.

When? Who knows. Some time soon, I hope.

Also Tomas Salamun's On the Track of Wild Game which, I don't know, is lik he was trying to be Bukowski, and was disappointing. I should put it away and return to it some other time.

Currently reading: Kazim Ali's translations of Sohrab Sepehri's poetry, The Oasis of Now.

On my Next Up list:

Tsering Wangmo's A Home in Tibet.
Naiyer Masud's Occult
Nirmal Verma's Days of Longing & The Red Tin Roof
Forugh Farrokhzad's Sin (in a less than satisfactory translation by Sholeh Wolpe, I already know this, but Farrokhzad has been the guardian angel of my recent writing, so it must be forgiven)
Kazim Ali's Skyward
M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!

This last is a book I have long wanted and when Kazim just gave me his copy of it, I almost swooned with gratitude. It deserves close and careful reading and extensive, maybe even running, commentary so I will definitely be writing about it, if not here then somewhere.

So that's the reading year, both gone by and coming up. It's not a blow by blow account - god! why would I do that to you guys? but it's some kind of highlight.

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I haven't watched and don't plan to watch The Desolation of Smaug. I feel the shorter and more entertaining gifs on tumblrs around the world are enough. And, Jennifer Lawrence notwithstanding, Hunger Games does nothing for me.

The Sherlock mini thingie yesterday! Did y'all see it? The hair, oh gawd! So terrible! I predict an awful season, but I will watch it anyway.

What will make me both happier and weepier, will be this evening's Doctor Who, in which Peter Capaldi says hello and Matt Smith says goodbye.

All this seems to indicate that I watch more TV than films and this is true. The last film I remember watching is Four Lions which is funny and sad and problematic and in which it is proved that Brit Pakistanis can outswear Malcolm Tucker.

Other films in recent times included the loooong, strange and strangely fun film Kin Dza Dza! There was the harrowing Act of Killing and the epic-but-went-by-in-no-time Jai Bhim Comrade. And oh yes! - there was Recollections of the Yellow House and Offside, which were easier because more familiar types of filmmaking, without asking too much of the viewer. I regret to say I didn't finish watching 12 Storeys, which I found unrelentingly bleak; but now I wish I hadn't skipped it.

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Music, I dunno. I said nasty things about whiny midwestern American singers who hide their faces behind their long beautiful hair and thus might have offended a friend. There was a lot of salsa music at the IWP, as well as lots of belly-dancing.

I mean, I listened to all the big releases and all - Kanye, Beyonce, Daft Punk (that was this year, wasn't it?) but the thing that really got me was a mixtape of tango that Kaash put up somewhere. It had 'Tango Apasionado' from Happy Together on it, so no more words necessary.

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I cannot talk about the people. They have been the most important.

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I am trepidatious about the new year. If I've had a good one - and I have - it must follow that the universe has a mega-balancing k.o punch in store for me, right? Right? Therefore I am nervous. I feel like I'm being set-up and I want to finish the year in hiding and/or hibernation so that I can fly under the radar and make myself small and invisible until it becomes necessary to show myself.

But that's just me. I hope the new year will be good to all of you.

See you on the other side.

The Act of Killing

Watched Joshua Oppemheimer's film The Act of Killing last night. I'd recently read something about it before leaving for Iowa; something about how many people who made the film were identified in the titles as only Anonymous. And this is true.

Image from here

I still feel, as I often do after documentaties that cut deep, unable to write coherently about the film. So associative thoughts, rather than proper review, follows:

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The film had to have been shot in a linear manner. There is a significant change in the main character(s) over the course of the film that is fundamentally Greek tragedy in its catharsis-seeking structure. There is unspeakable crime (what we'd call war crime, but which terminology one character refuses to acknowledge as applying to him. 'The winners write history,' he says. 'I am a winner. One day we will throw out the Geneva Convention and there will be a Jakarata Convention.'*

So war crimes. And when the filmmakers ask a few of those involved in the hunting down of and killing of communists back in the late 60's, two of the men, Anwar Congo among them, agree to re-enact some of the atrocities they committed. The go looking for actors: women, children. At first the people laugh, as does the audience. But this is massacre, rape, arson and garotting we're talking about. The laughter turns uncomfortable. We feel complicit.

Anwar and his friends are 'gangsters' which the film frequently glosses as meaning 'free men'. Their heroes are other filmic gangsters, heroes of the old Westerns, beacons of machismo. They watch films after selling tickets in black and then go and kill a few commies.

Anwar enacts the garottings. He dances, says he used to dance after. He watches himself in the scene that's just been filmed and remarks, 'I would never have worn white trousers to a killing. I look like I'm going to a picnic.'

As film buffs, Anwar and his friend declare that this film has to be entertaining, otherwise no one will watch. So there are these strange sequences that could have come straight out of a del Toro film or a Herzog. The girls in pink coming out of the mouth of a rusty fish by the seashore, the waterfall - they're pure Fitzcarraldo or Fata Morgana. I felt prescient thinking that, because I found later that Werner Herzog was indeed one of the producers of the film.

There were so many things that made me squirm, remember other films about genocide: Final Solution, Father, Son and Holy War. I thought of Resnais' Night and Fog and the impossibility - the undesirability, even - of re-enactment. I thought of the necessity of remembering while avoiding the pornography of consuming such horror.

But because the filmmakers (and here I credit more than the director, for reasons I will come to soon) chose both a classical approach while undercutting it with the bizarre, the film does not feel at any point like a gratuitous massaging of the conscience. There is remorse and horror at the end, and I briefly wondered if it was necessary. I think it was, it is. It is a genuine loss of self and recovery of conscience to which one possible reponse - I don't know what other there can be - is compassion.

As for the many, many anonymous people who participated in the making of this film - their courage is as remarkable as (I am afraid) it might be futile. The other paramilitary men, those who took part in the filming and then had doubts about how this will look and what it will say about them - they may not know the crew by name, but they know faces and they know how to find out about people and where they live and so on. I wonder what use their witholding of a name is and I wonder what they've had to do to remain under the radar.

Towards the end, after Congo puts himself int he position of the victim and is shattered by the experience, he asks to watch the scene in his home. 'I know what it feels like to be a victim,' he says. 'Did they feel what I felt?' Someone from behind the camera says, 'No. They knew they were being killed. You were just acting in a scene.'

These other filmmakers. The ones whose names stay boldly theirs in the end credits - they can leave. They can watch from elsewhere. They can appear at screenings in other countries. These anonymous people, though, must live where they always have. I wonder what that story is and how it will play out.

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*These sentences are not continuous in the film, though they happen in the same scene. They're also slight paraphrases.

Crowdsourcing a list

I could do with some help here, people. I'm putting together a list of must-see films that are not Bollywood/mainstream Hindi, Telugu, Tamil commercial film products and I realise I haven't seen anything interesting recently.

It would be great if I could crowdsource a list of films, year no real bar, but more recent would be better - because I have been slack about keeping up with recent good films.

Help? List in comments?

So BuSTiD

I'm sorry but one of the great things about having watched a lousy film is catching up with all the snark afterwards. It's palate-cleansing and I'm not sure why I'm apologising.

Yes, this is still about the Star Trek film.

On to the Exhibits:

1. We need FAQs, right? Of course we do; it's only...logical.

And why did Spock have to go with the bomb to set it off? Are you telling me in the 23^rd century that people don’t have a way to detonate bombs remotely? That’s stupid.

Well —

And why the fuck is the Enterprise just carrying around a cold fusion suitcase bomb anyways?

Look, you’re getting very upset, and this is just the first scene of the movie.

...

Why was Khan floating in space?

Actually, this Khan has the same origin as the original Khan; he’s a genetically engineered warrior, created for the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s. He ruled part of Asia befor —

Wait, what? The Eugenics Wars of the 1990s?

Yes. 

We didn’t have any Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, unless you count Dawson’s Creek.

Yeah, but Gene Roddenberry didn’t know that when he created Khan in 1967.

But we do, because it’s 2013.

But it’s canon! Don’t you like canon?

I like it when it doesn’t get stupid. And why the hell would Abrams and crew stick to Khan’s origin timeline, even though it makes zero sense, but also suddenly change him to a white dude? That’s cherry-picking the stupidest parts of canon and non-canon!

I don’t know. I think it’s nice that in this day and age, a white male can still be cast as an Indian played by a Mexican. White men really have come a long way!

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Ideally, this should be the point where we whiz past Exhibit 2 to Exhibit 3 (or, I should just shift Exhibit 3 and make it Exhibit 2, but I won't), but let me build suspense the JJ Abrams way, okay? It might get me a job in Hollywood some day. So...

2. In which Josh Horowitz asks the writer of STiD, Damon Lindelof, some questions and many mails are exchanged.

From: Josh Horowitz
To: Damon Lindelof
Sent: Sat, May 11, 2013 2:58 pm

Damon,

Here we go again. Thanks for subjecting yourself to my nerdy inquiries once again. {readcted because blahblah} Congratulations.

OK, down to the nitty gritty. I feel like I have to start with the biggest mystery/conversation that's surrounded the film from the get go. Why is Alice Eve in her underwear at one point? Oh and also, let's discuss your villain.

Yeah, I'm not waiting around for that re-run, but of course you guys have to go read.

*

Finally! Exhibit 3! The one you've I've been waiting for!

Via Aisha.

*

I think I may finally be done with this Star Trek.

Utpal Dutt's 'Ray, Renaissance Man?'

Over at The Big Indian Picture (which is, by the way, a must-read) is a magnificent rant by the actor Utpal Dutt, on many things Ray & GoI related. It is even more extraordinary when one realises that this speech was delivered at a Sahitya Akademi/Lalit Kala Akademi/Sangeet Natak Akademi seminar on Ray, shortly after Ray's death.

In contrast, I am thinking of the recent SA Young Writers' Festival, where the general tone was self-congratulatory and unjustifably optimistic.

Utpal Dutt, in his own words:

Already in Pather Panchali, Ray’s protagonists suffer not because gods have willed it so but because of poverty created by men. They are evicted from their home by a power that is stronger than gods— a social system that condones exploitation. And this revolt against a concept of gods who crush human beings reaches fruition in Devi, where a girl, a common housewife, is declared a goddess incarnate and is expected to heal and cure every sick villager, until the boy she loves more than her life is dying and is placed before her so that she can touch and heal him. She dare not play with this boy’s life and tries to flee, her sari torn and her mascara running all over her face. One has merely to compare this film with dozens churned out from the cinema-machine of this country, where a dying child, given up for dead by medical science, is placed before the image of a goddess—and, of course, there is a lengthy song glorifying the goddess—be it Santoshi Ma or some such forgotten local deity. Then the stone image is seen to smile, or to drop a flower on the boy’s corpse, and lo and behold, what the best doctors could not do, the piece of stone achieves in a second! The corpse opens its eyes, even sits up. This is followed either by another unending song of thanksgiving, or the boy’s parents weeping and rolling on the ground to show their gratitude. This kind of brazen, shameless superstition is peddled by film after film in this country every year. Are they any less dangerous than drugs? If drugs destroy the bodies of our young men, these films destroy their minds. A proper tribute to Ray would have been to make it impossible to make such filth and, instead, to make arrangements for Devi to be shown all over the country at cheaper rates. Devi is a revolutionary film in the Indian context. It challenges religion as it has been understood in the depths of the Indian countryside for hundreds of years. It is a direct attack on the black magic that is passed off as divinity in this country. Instead of the vulgarized Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Indian TV could have telecast Devi again and again; then perhaps today we would not have to discuss the outrages of the monkey brigade in Ayodhya.

I thought about Lucia and there she was

This happened a few days ago. I was driving along a surprisingly empty flyover and something about the streets made me think of Humberto Solas' 1968 film, Lucia. 

I was thinking of how young he was when he made it - only 25!* - and inevitably, of how useless I was** and idly wondered when I'd ever get to see these films again. I've never heard of a Cuban films retro in recent times, and I was making a list in my head of films I'd like to see again: Memories of Underdevelopment, Strawberries and Chocolate, The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin, The First Charge of the Machete.

But top of the frugal list I could reconstruct was Lucia, followed by Memories of Underdevelopment, and Juan Quin Quin (which was a lot of fun and subversive as heck).

Minutes later, and in an indication that the universe was arranging itself according to my fairly inexacting wishes, I found Lucia in the library. Brand new DVD, no one had borrowed it and it was all for me! me! only me!

So for all the moaning and deep blue posts of the last few days, I have to admit that I am tending towards the ecstatic.

That's all, folks.

(Will put up, at some point, my impressions of the film, which I'm watching after 18 years).

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*Wikipedia says he was 27. Oh well. 25 sounds more impressive, no?

**Though, if you consider that my life's ambition is to be deeply committed to doing nothing, no one can accuse me of failing at that.

RIP Chris Marker

Chris Marker. He was sui generis. RIP.

Sans Soleil. 1983.

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very least we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends. That the subject of this memory should be a photographer and a filmmaker does not mean that his memory is essentially more interesting than that of the next man (or the next woman), but only that he has left traces with which one can work, contours to draw up his maps.
Chris Marker, introductory notes to Immemory (2002)

 [the quotation via Vitro Nasu]

Shoulda watched Brave

The girl ahead of me at the theatre bought her own 3D glasses while we waited. After the film - after the web came at us and the extra scene came and went unremarked (Marvel has figured out at least, that no one stays until the absolute end of the credits and so they now insert the 'extra' after the main people have been credited and before the caterers and lawers get their share of the limelight), I thought of this girl. I thought what she did was the most amazing thing about watching The Amazing Spiderman.

Because I have never seen a film that needed 3D less. In fact, I am wondering if the film might even be improved if all of us didn't watch it at all. Like, in some forest somewhere, reels of films will fall and fall and be richer and more loamy for doing it unwatched.

Spidey is that film. It has absolutely nothing going for it (ok, it has Andy Garfield, who is middling-cute, but just about): lousy, witless dialogue, no chemistry between any two - pick any combo - characters, a laughable villain and a cop whose one line ("Do I look like the mayor of Tokyo?") was said as if it was meant to fall flat.

I amused myself by imagining that the newspaper cutting of Peter's parents' death had his mother's name as June Parker. That's how boring it was.

Tchah.

Shoulda watched Brave.

Dibakar Banerjee's Saturday moment

Haven't yet watched Shanghai and not sure I ever will, unless it turns up on TV and I accidentally land up on a channel that happens to be showing it. This is mostly because of a friend who sends out trenchant film criticism via (three or four) smses and his remarks on Shanghai were both funny and unrepeatable on a public forum.

Instead, let me point to a post and an interview with Banerjee.

The post (via Supriya):

Development projects, have a very political purpose, not only to hand over prime real estate land to private parties, but to remove every possible centre of dissent and political activity that is always incipient in the slums and working class neighbourhoods. The film, by portraying only the hypocrisies and the futilities of a middle and upper class characters, whose so-called good intentions and attempts for justice are constantly thwarted by ‘the system’, betray the one place where inspiration is found: the protest in the people’s movement, when the hungry go on hunger strike.
Thus, all of those who once stood before bulldozers, would not send anyone to go watch the film. A sentiment repeated by all of them – from Annabhau Sathe Nagar to Sion Koliwada.

‘They showed in the film, that the public is not agitating, that they’re only a few angry people who’re fighting for rights and dying,’ Says Santosh Thorat of Annabhau Sathe Nagar, who has been fighting for the right to a home, and against Slum Rehabilitation scams, since his home was demolished in 2005, ‘And this film is about how the state deals with the few of them, so you better keep your mouth shut.’

‘People who don’t have any knowledge of what’s happening in the street and in the morchas, in the andolans, especially the youth, whose homes have never been demolished, they’d be very badly influenced by this film.’ Said Jameela Begum of Anna Bhau Sathe Nagar. Four young boys from Sion Koliwada who experienced demolitions and violence, would add how a young woman leader from their slum is in jail for protesting against demolition, but their awareness was born by the realities of what they face. The lack of the realities of what they faced in the past week – one boy who was beaten up by the police after trying to protect his father from the police, simply replied, ‘the film was boring.’

And from the interview in the DNA:

Another criticism was that the daily trials and vulnerabilities of the working class and casual labourers weren’t really represented.

Anant Jogue’s character, who mows down Dr Ahemadi, is representing the working class. So is his wife, and the character of Bhaggu (played by Pitobash). I didn’t see the need to have more than one or two characters to represent that strata of society. The film, in the end, has been made for intellectual pleasure; it’s a story. It’s not to push the agenda of any particular set of people, but to ask some pertinent questions instead.

Oh nice. So Banerjee "didn’t see the need to have more than one or two characters to represent that strata of society" but of the few who do represent one of that strata of society one of them happens to have killed what appears to be 'the good guy'.

Plus, this idea that intellectual pleasure cannot exist in stories about people who are not the middle class is so incredibly hilarious. But the get-out clause that is the It's just a story plea doesn't cut much ice, I'm afraid. Especially not from someone who wants to provide intellectual pleasure.

And Banerjee seems to think that by making this a "story of middle-class people, caught up in an alien slum environment, and struggling to come to terms with various things" [from early in the interview], he isn't pushing any agendas.

How sweet.

What he said

Jonathan McCalmont on this year's Cannes shortlist and eventual award (which went to Haneke's Amour and though of course I'm happy about that...):

Clearly, this shit is intolerable.

Aside from the obvious moral arguments about inclusivity and discrimination, there is also an important aesthetic argument to be made about the importance of unfamiliarity to the art house cinematic experience. Indeed, chief among the many pleasures of art house film is its ability to introduce us to whole new ways of seeing the world. For example, when Apichatpong Weerasethakul won in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, he was not only being rewarded for his cinematography and storytelling but also for his great skill at articulating what it must be like to see the world through his eyes, the eyes of a forty year-old gay man from Thailand. Similarly, when Cristian Mungiu won the Plame d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days he was not only being rewarded for the skill with which he explored the issue of abortion, but also for his capacity to speak for an entire generation of Romanians who grew up under the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Central to the appeal of art house cinema is its peerless ability to show us the world from an entirely different perspective. Indeed, it is telling that the success of both Weerasthakul and Mungiu lead directly to explosions of critical interest in films from their respective countries.  Art house cinema is all about new perspectives and art house cinema audiences are forever crying out for new ways of seeing the world.

By choosing only established male directors for competition, 2012 Cannes festival organisers ensured that their Palme d’Or would introduce no new conceptual blood into the cinematic bloodstream.

By choosing a shortlist dominated by elderly men, Cannes festival organisers denied art house cinema audiences the chance to discover something genuinely new.

I've long felt that Cannes has become less interesting as the years go by and vaguely remember mentioning this phenomenon of Old White Men dominating the competition section. So basically, what Jonathan said.

Haneke's Love

Somehow, I thought I was over suffering and the slow decline into death. Really. Thought that was all so 2009, the obssessive examination of all things decaying and dying.

Turns out old obssessions can still take. And when it's Haneke, it must be watched.

And it has Trintignant! And Emannuelle Riva! (And, incidentally, Isabelle Huppert).

Haneke cast French screen icon Jean-Louis Trintignant, 81, and Emmanuelle Riva, 85, in the story of George and Anne, a couple of retired music teachers, whose rich and adoring relationship is cruelly tested when she suffers a stroke.
Set in the hushed rooms of the couple's parquet-floored Parisian flat, the film charts Anne's physical and mental decline, and the increasingly unbearable strain it puts on George, who pledges to care for her at home until the end.
Utterly believable in the role, Riva told a press conference after the screening that she threw herself heart and soul into the part, sleeping in her dressing room at the studio where it was shot to remain immersed in her character.

[...]

"Once you reach a certain age, you necessarily have to face the suffering of the people you love," he told the press conference. "It's part of nature." "It raises the issue of how to manage the suffering of the people you love." Wheelchair-bound, half-paralysed, the intelligent, vivacious Anne early on tells her husband she does not wish to live such an impaired life. But carry on they do, as far as George can take her.

Now doesn't that sound just like something I'd like to watch?

Preserving the born-digital: "The future for digital storage is constant migration."

Since I'm not really done with the previous post, but think this deserves a dedicated one to itself, the article I linked to, on the question of preserving films that were 'born-digital':

The preservation of born-digital films is going to be the greatest challenge ever to face archivists.

Margaret Bodde, Executive Director of the Film Foundation

The new magical software has sometimes led to over-restoration. Grain has too often been polished out, creating a plastic sheen. Still, today no archivist can avoid using the new toolkit. The sadder story involves not restoration but conservation and preservation. A civilian might think: That’s simple. Just save film on film and digital on digital. But things are more complicated than that.

Let’s start with a movie like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was shot with digital capture. After production and post-production, it was made available to theatres as both a Digital Cinema Package (that batch of files on a hard drive) and some 35mm prints. But there are several digital versions of the movie.

The Digital Source Master: This is the original sound and image “content” captured in specific formats, either tape-based or file-based, and those may come in many flavors. The Girl was shot with the Red One camera on the company’s proprietary format R3D. That material, along with sound recording, was converted to other files in postproduction. Any major film nowadays is likely to use many digital video and audio formats. This entire set of materials forms the Digital Source Master for a film and these assets are usually stored in the studio’s vaults. Along with them are, usually, film-based copies of the final product, often as separation masters.

The Digital Cinema Distribution Master, in standards specified by the Digital Cinema Initiatives. This is the finished film unencrypted and uncompressed, providing “content” at 2K and/or 4K resolution. Roughly speaking, this is the digital counterpart of a 35mm film negative.

The DCP, compressed and encrypted for theatrical playback. It is, again in some respects, the digital counterpart of an analog film print.

Eventually, The Girl will show up on the optical disc formats DVD and Blu-ray, not to mention streaming video, cable transmission, and web-based platforms. (Actually, it’s probably already available for Darknet download.)

Many studio films are housed in nonprofit archives too, and until recently those movies have been deposited and stored as analogue copies. But what will those institutions now keep? There are only three minimally acceptable formats: the uncompressed and unencrypted DCDM, the DCP, and a 35mm print. Suppose your film archive is lucky enough to receive both a DCP and a 35mm print of The Girl.

First, how do you access the DCP files? A DCP is typically encrypted to block piracy. When The Girl played theatres digitally, each exhibitor was provided an alphanumeric password that would open the files for loading into the theatre’s server. By the time you the archivist get the files, that key may have expired or been lost. Without the key, the DCP is useless.

Then there’s the matter of storage. The 35 print of The Girl can simply be passively conserved, following the motto, “Store and ignore.” But all digital material, no matter how minor, requires proactive preservation. The future for digital storage is constant migration.

Archivists estimate the life of any digital platform to be less than ten years, sometimes less than five. All hard drives fail sooner or later, and they need to be run periodically to lubricate themselves. Tape degradation can be quite quick; one expert found that 40 % of tapes from digital intermediate houses had missing frames or corrupted data. Most of the tapes were only nine months old.

Moreover, hardware and software are constantly changing. One archivist estimates that over one hundred video playback systems have come and gone over the last sixty years. Archives currently recognize over two dozen video formats and over a dozen audio ones.

Periodically, then, the DCP files of The Girl will have to be checked for corruption and transferred to another tape or hard drive and eventually to another digital format. Such maintenance takes time; shifting a terabyte of data from one system to another may need at least three or four hours. Ideally, you’d want several copies for backup, and you’d want to store them in different locations.

There are hundreds of other films like The Girl awaiting processing at major archives. About 600-900 features are produced in the US each year. Currently the world is producing about 5500 films per year. At some point, they will all originate in digital capture.

Besides access and storage there’s the matter of cost. Storing 4K digital masters costs about 11 times as much as storing a film master. You can store the digital master for about $12,000 per year, while the film master averages about $1,100.

How do the overall costs of digitizing mount up? Look at the situation in Europe. The EU countries produce about 1100 features and 1400 shorts per year. An EU archival commission, the Digital Agenda for European Film Heritage, estimates that to conserve one year’s output would require 5.8 PB (petabytes) of storage. In 2015, the costs of archiving that year’s output (without restoration) are projected to be between 1.5 million and 3 million euros. Beyond initial conservation, long-term preservation of that year’s output would consume, though migration and backing up, about 1900 PB and cost about 290 million euros.

The access problem is soluble. Your archive could be given an unencrypted DCP of The Girl and then create its own key to prevent copying. Or the DCP could be assigned a generic key, perhaps for a specified time period, that will open the files in a secure milieu. They could then be migrated to an format under archive control. On the matter of software, archivists are working on establishing standard preservation file formats and codecs. To deal with the other problems, you’d have to press for increased budgets and personnel to cover the new duties that digital archiving creates. But the costs, including training personnel on ever-changing platforms, are of tidal-wave proportions.

So there you are: first there's the ease of technology and then - as any editor will tell you - the sheer migraine it induces.

**

Not entirely related, but this: "Once you’ve found a way to conserve-preserve The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, what if you want to show it tomorrow? Or ten years from now? Or fifty?"

I feel they could have chosen another film as an example, because this just....makes me giggle.

The Archivist of the Ephemeral

The British Library here had a panel discussion and inauguration of an exhibition that's travelling across the country, about South Asians in Britain. Someone from the audience asked the panelists why they did their research only at the V&A, the National Archives of India and all the usual places. Why were they not looking for the more rare manuscripts, archives and material that was surely available in other places, the man wanted to know.

I was thinking of this when I read this article about the digital preservation of film (via The Valve), and about the fire that destroyed so much of the Film Archives at Pune. The whole enterprise of archiving anything seemed impossible, brave and quixotic.

Imagine you are on the threshold of your career and, with the thoughts of material success and respectability dinned into you, you still choose a life that is not just hard to justify as signifying 'success' in the usual way, but is actively futile and Sisyphian.

You become an archivist. You might as well have chosen to be a mortician.

**
There were children who had been invited to be placeholders yesterday. I don't know who was fooled by the tactic; certainly not the panelists, who took it with fairly good grace. (This is not meant to insult the intelligence of the children; they were clearly brought there with no preparation about the nature of the exhibition, or given a context for the discussion. I doubt they gave a hoot about Krishna Menon's Pelican Series of non-fiction, the first Asian woman to study law at Cambridge or the intricacies of a pre-Independence Indian being an  MP in the UK.)

It occurs to me that anyone interested in the archival is already a specialist with a specialist's peculiar interest in what is being resurrected.Who but someone interested in silent comedy is going to care that a 'not yet found' Harold Lloyd short was buried under the permafrost somewhere in Canada and has now been restored? Perhaps the only way to answer that question is by not putting the actual found film to the test, but to make, say, The Artist.

It's hard enough for a new generation to pay its respects to the one gone by via what is already available and accessible. I say this with a tinge of bitterness, because I'm finding it unexpectedly hard to get the kid to read Wodehouse. Wodehouse! This kind of behaviour is calculated to make me shake my head more in sorrow than in anger and moan about the present (de)generation....but I digress.

It's hard enough to get what someone older goes on about; how hard it is going to be to make anyone care about what is deeply past, unless they already care about it.

And therefore how doubly, triply admirable that so many people dedicate their lives to a monumentally impossible task: keeping the past alive in its primary forms.

**

In Praise Of Limestone

by W. H. Auden

 

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. 'Come!' cried the granite wastes,
"How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels,
"On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad."

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

Two on Dyer's Zona

Geoff Dyer interviewed in Guernica.

ASH Smyth: So, a whole book about a single Russian movie. How did that happen? You make it sound like you were sitting watching Stalker one afternoon, for the twenty-fifth time or whatever, and then just found yourself in the middle of a paragraph of notes and realized that this was what you were writing, right now.

Geoff Dyer: Um, well, the exact story, which you might decide is too boring to tell, is that I went to hear this [Werner] Herzog talk at the BFI, and then picked up the program and saw they were showing Stalker, with a debate about Stalker, and then I was immediately thinking “Shit, I’d like to be on that panel!” And then I started thinking of ways in which I could surreptitiously get myself invited on, and then I thought “Oh, I’ll write something for the Guardian,” and arranged to do that. And no sooner had I done that—the guy said “800 words?” and I thought I’d just do that quickly—than I kept ringing him back asking for more and more words, but of course he can’t just say “Yeah, we’ll devote the whole of this issue to you!” and so it very quickly became a source of frustration. By then, I was really up and running. So I went with it, though I wasn’t thinking, at this early stage, that there’d be a whole book’s worth. I really didn’t know how much there would be to say. All I was aware of was that the saying was enjoyable.

ASH Smyth: So how did it happen, literally? Did you sit through it another n-million times? You say that you’d wanted to write it in 142 chapters, one for each take…

Geoff Dyer: Yeah, that was a little thing that sort of blossomed and then faded. I was working through it pretty much in order, but then there came a point when I did have the film going on a computer, just to make sure it was a reasonably accurate record of things. I felt it was important that I didn’t have things in there that were wildly wrong. Though I could see the attraction of that, given that part of the nature of the Zone is that you’re not sure what’s there. “Did that bird really disappear?!” I allowed myself a certain amount of leeway, but it’s pretty reliable.

And Jonathan McCalmont (who you should be reading whether he's talking Tarkovsky and Dyer or not):

Every time Zona reaches a particularly juicy point in Stalker, Dyer wrenches us out of the film and into a digression drawing on film theory, the history of film, the life of Tarkovsky or the life of Geoff Dyer. Sometimes, these digressions will go on for a number of pages before returning to the film itself and sometimes these digressions will be unpacked in a series of footnotes that can also go on for a number of pages before returning us either to the original digression or to the substance of the film itself. As a result of this somewhat unorthodox structure, reading Zona is an exercise in juggling book marks and flipping back and forth between different points in the book in order to a) follow Dyer’s unravelling lines and thought and b) remember how these vast digressions relate back to the substance of the film. Initially, I took all of this page-flipping to be nothing more than a product of the same authorial insensitivity that prompts academics to produce works that have all of their footnotes at the end of the text despite there frequently being hundreds of the fuckers. However, around the time I had two fingers jammed between pages of Zona and Dyer was encouraging me to flip forward thirty or forty pages, the penny finally dropped: Dyer is intentionally wrenching us out of the flow of the text. Far from being a bug, Zona’s tendency to spiral away from a train of thought or the text of the film is actually a feature, a deliberate aesthetic choice.

So that's another one on my wishlist, if anyone's listening. (How can one not read a man who goes to listen to Herzog and finds himself writing a book when thinking up excuses to appear on a panel to discuss a film? Also: "I’d seen that film The Return by…whatever the guy’s name is, but I hadn’t really thought about it much." *snort*.)

Advance notice: War Horse

Yes, okay, so I'm going to watch War Horse on Sunday. The kid is the excuse, but I promise to retain an open mind - by which I mean, I anticipate that I will dislike the film immensely (despite its few compensations) and will duly report my experiences.

I realise, with horror, that I haven't written about any films since May or June last year*. Not even just to be nasty.

So in anticipation, and as preliminary preparation, I thought I'd remind you guys what it used to be like here when I talked cinema: Slumdog, Dasvidaniya, about the Asian Awards and so on.

Thank god for people like Banno, I tell you. (Here, for instance, just for your reading pleasure, is Banno on Ghajini. )

I'm in danger of forgetting I ever used to have anything to do with cinema.

So, I promise to bring despatches back from the front. Stay tuned.

__

*Announcements, naturally, don't count.

Screening of Partners in Crime

Paromita Vohra's new feature-length documentary, Partners in Crime will be screened at the Prasad's Preview Theatre and at the Department of Communications, University of Hyderabad. Details:

SCREENING 1
Date: 11th February, Saturday
Time: 3.30pm tea, screening 4pm
Venue: Prasad Preview Theatre, Rd No 2, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad

SCREENING 2
Date: 15th February, Wednesday
Time: 3:45 pm
Venue: Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad, Gachibowli, Hyderabad-500046

About the film:

Is piracy organized crime or class struggle? Are alternative artists who want to hold rights over their art and go it alone in the market, visionaries or nutcases? Is the fine line between plagiarism and inspiration a cop-out or a whole other way of looking at the fluid nature of authorship? Who owns a song – the person who made it or the person who paid for it? When more than three fourths of those with an internet connection download all sorts of material for free, are they living out a brand new cultural freedom – or are they criminals?
Metal heads who market their own music, folklorists who turn tribal aphorisms into short stories, music archivists who hoard and share everything they can get their hands on, anti-piracy fanatics who think piracy funds terrorism, a smooth talking DVD street salesman who outlines the efficiency of the illegal market, media moguls, lobbyists, “monetizers, downloaders, uploaders, the biggest hit song of 2010 and the small time nautanki singer whose song it was inspired by – these places and people throng the world’s bazaar in which the film is set. Partners in Crime takes you througha story about art, crime, love and money to check if the times, they may be a-changing after all.

For some reason, can't embed the Youtube clip, so here it is.

A question for my filmmaker friends

Question: Why are DVDs sliced off into chapters rather than into reels?

No, seriously. Why?