The Last Director

I just read an insightful tribute to Dennis Hopper in Sight & Sound magazine written by Brad Stevens and am wallowing in the discovery of one of his directorial films that I want to watch eagerly now, and a singer whose music feels really good this Friday night.

Song: Only when it rains by John Buck Wilkin
Album: In search of Food Clothing Shelter and Sex (LP-1970, USA)
Film: The Last Movie (1971)
Director: Dennis Hopper

It's a wonderful song. Ecoutez!

Link to Only when it rains



As always my biggest grouse is accessibility! Where can I find The Last Movie? (no result on my trusted download site). Where can I find the music of John Wilkin? The internet is throwing nothing on him (not even wikipedia). This just makes my quest for obscurity stronger! I did find the LP cover below.....



only when it rains does it rain
only when it stops, it is no more
all of them princes
all of them gone
all of them lovers
in search of their own
and you can look to the mountains
and look to the seas
but don't come calling
cause you won't find me
hmmmm hmmm hmmmmmmmm

For more on the film to understand why the song has been shot the way it has, here's the Sight & Sound link.
I have over the years started believing in breaking narratives down...only with anarchy does something new emerge. Can't wait to watch this one.

Riding Easy

As someone who is a fan of Jack Kerouac, and a fan of all the crazy souls who love and live to be on the road, Easy Rider (1969) is a film that is affecting. Today, on the day of Dennis Hopper's death, I decided to sit and watch the film, his debut as a director. Hopper won for Best debut at Cannes in that year for the film.



Prepare for a real trip (drugs included) with Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson across America from L.A to New Orleans, through mountains, down rivers, meeting freedom-loving hippies trying to live off the land to the other extreme of conservative white Americans who could hate you for growing your hair.

What is freedom? What is it today - to be free...?

"I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em."

I'm amazed to read online, that Hopper made a film that was almost 5 hours long, and it was edited for over a year and brought to its current size. I enjoyed the way the acid trip sequence was edited, to be able to translate the experience of a trip onto film, is usually a work of art.

The music is great! Good ol' Steppenwolf, The Byrds, Hendrix and whole lot of others I must listen to. It's the music that really adds to its cult status. The opening credits cut to Born to be Wild...I don't think anyone can re-create that magic of Fonda and Hopper on their bikes riding out onto the great U.S Highway...looking for their America. Like a true nature's child, we were born to be wild, we have climbed so high, no never gonna die....

No, you are never gonna die.

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

- Andrei Tarkovsky

Bibi, Begum aur Patni

Well, I've had a mammoth film viweing day of three classic hindi films depicting the social life of Indians in three different periods.

1. Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962)

2. Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977)

3. Katha (1983)

Although Sahib Bibi and Shatranj were set in a time older than their year of release, I found certain similarities and observations on the role of men and women in Indian society in all three of them.

Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam: Meena Kumari's character is of a woman who is married to a rich landlord of Calcutta (pre-independence) who is given to heavy drinking and womanising at the kotha. But she is not like the other women in the house who quietly ignore these antics of their husbands and as according to her sister-in-law even support it as a 'manly' activity. She wants to spend time with her husband, or what else does she have to do the entire day! Her Husband is like a God, and she must serve him at all times, so much that she will drink liquor and sing for him (blasphemy in those days). I really liked her performance, it was powerful and conveyed the dichotomy of her situation very well. The song, "na jao sayian" is haunting with her drunk presence and Alvi's camera movements. But why does she have a deep devotion for her husband who clearly does not care for her? Was it a survival technique for women in those days who could not be economically or socially liberated? Or was it in some sense a powerful effort on her part to claim her husband back to where he belonged?

But there is only a slight retribution for her at the end, as her husband lies bedridden and she drunk....an ironic role reversal.

Waheedas's character on the other hand is of a woman who is also taking charge of her life, even though it is within archaic child marriage rules.

Shatranj ke Khiladi: Shabana Azmi is Sanjeev Kumar's wife who has clearly lost interest in her to his chess board. Here too, Azmi's character tries to connive Kumar's character into spending time with her. She is desperate and even sexually deprived. But the man here is not interested in being physical. On the other hand, Jaffrey's wife (a robust Fareeda Jalal) is cheating on him with his nephew and clearly expressing her sexuality. I found these to be brilliant characterisations.

Katha: Deepti Naval's character is easily attracted to the "bad-boy" Farooque Sheikh. While on the other hand Naseeruddin is never able to express his love for her till the last moment nor does Deepti's character guage his emotions. But what struck me was when Farooque's character asks her if she is 'modern and liberated'. As soon as she admits she is (hesitatingly), he finds it easy to canoodle and get her into bed. But even after facing humiliation from him, Naseer's character accepts her in the end as who she is.

All in all......I'm trying to place how women are portrayed in Indian Cinema through the ages. Why is a woman portrayed to be begging for a man's affection? And yet, they are infinitely free and powerful. It says something about our patriachal society, which has been, and still is going strong, if not directly but subtly.

I'm just a little person

What is it about Charlie Kaufman, that throws you into the delight of complication?
What a feeling. I'll call this the Kaufman emotion - one that I feel after watching anything written by him, or as right now in the film Synechdoche, New York ---his first directorial venture.

Oh Charlie, you speak to my soul...in the same convoluted manner that we all speak to our own souls and those of others around us. Because this is your story....and also ours. Exactly how Cayden in Synechdoche says, "There are millions of people in the world. And none of those people are as an extra, they're all leads in their own stories."

In this film, he has so successfully given some words, characters and visuals to the ever difficult questions of life and death. Questions we ask ourselves at so many points of life. When the character of Cayden (fashioned after Kaufman himself?) is not sure of what he is trying to achieve through the concept of his next play, his actress (played by Michelle Williams) says, "It's good that you don't know...when you know that you don't know, it is the first step to knowing."

The beautifully and immaculately constructed screenplay, is nothing but the circle of life that gives birth to its real, fictional and on-stage characters, lives and dies like a being and a world unto its own.

"The end is written into the beginning".....a line uttered by Cayden's love-interest........says it all for me. For it is isn't it in any written, spoken story just like life? A story that goes on and on, and never sees an end till death. Yet, it still goes on.
And as always, Kaufman blows you away with that one long monologue from one of his characters:

"As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time."

Some of the songs have been written by Kaufman himself......and my favourite goes, "Somewhere maybe someday maybe somewhere far away............."

I cannot express myself anymore. Excuse me, as Cayden says, "It's Complicated."

Idiot-ing the Box

"You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, trenches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot."

Those are the words of the character James Reston Jr from Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon...and one of the many moments in this engrossing film, that made me really feel the interlacing of politics, media and power.

When I saw All the President's Men, it spoke to me not just a story of a momentous turning in the history of American politics, but it made me feel the power of print journalism. Frost/Nixon however, reveals the inherent dichotomy of television journalism for me. An anchor who is more of a performer, backed by serious researchers buying his way into an interview of a lifetime.....botching it, due to the nature of his subject, trying to save it....and only succeeding because of the nature of his subject.

It's a challenge to simplify complex issues in television journalism. And a bigger challenge not to oversimplify complexity, and remove it altogether. Love it or hate it - the tele won't go even if Werner Herzog says....."Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossing hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials."

Pune. FTII. May-June, 2007.

These are some crude pics I took from my cell in the FTII campus during the one-month Film Appreciation Course in 2007. I find the campus and its inhabitants - a floating island.

FALLING OFF THE MAP

What do you think of if you reach a place, beyond which there is nowhere to go? You would have reached the end of the world. Literally and figuratively Werner Herzog travels to such a place in his documentary Encounters at the end of the World.

Herzog lands in Antartica, and spends time with the people living there from physicists, zoologists and lorry drivers to travellers and lost souls. A young fella in an ice-cream vendors attire, squeezes out a vanilla cone while he is credited below as being a "Filmmaker, Computer Expert". These are your professional dreamers at the end of the world.

"Where else do you find guys with Phds doing the dishes, or linguists on the one place on earth where there is no native language."

You find them in a Herzog Film.

Herzog talks to a zoologist, an expert in Penguins about certain mysteries regarding the mammal. The zoologist has spent his whole life studying the life of Penguins, so much so that he has little to talk about to humans. And it is so evident while Herzog makes conversation with him. It makes you laugh, and yet it filled me with a strange kind of sympathetic joy. Herzog's question: "Can Penguins be driven by insanity?" The answer comes in the form of some amazing footage of a lone Penguin adventurer.

There's a deep sea diver who is certain about the end of the human race and loves to show doomsday B-movies to his colleagues.

And the jellyfish are hauntingly psychedelic.

What captures my feelings for this film, is when a female scientist studying seals says, "I can't describe the sounds of the seals below me, below the frozen sea we are on. I don't know, It's Pink Floyd."

Antartica can very well be a space station. It could even be the Moon.

I'm off the Map.

BOHEMIAN EXPRESS

"I love the way this country smells. I'll never forget it. It's kind of spicy."

I'm swinging listening to the soundtrack of The Darjeeling Limited. Such an eclectic mix of The Kinks, Satyajit Ray's themes, Merchant Ivory themes, the sweet Les Champs Elysees, two classical symphonies and a hindi number by Asha Bhonsle and Kishore Kumar called 'Typerwriter tip tip tip'! It goes, "Typerwriter tip tip tip tip tip tip tip karta hai, zindagi ki har kahaani likhta hai".

Oh I am so blissful. What a film. What a gem. So random, so beautiful! I love these lyrics from The Kinks number.....

This time tomorrow where will we be

On a spaceship somewhere sailing across an empty sea

This time tomorrow what will we know

Well we still be here watching an in-flight movie show

Ill leave the sun behind me and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by

Seven miles below ma I can see the world and it aint so big at all

This time tomorrow what will we see

Field full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets

I dont where Im going, I dont want to see

I feel the world below me looking up at me

Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by

And Im in perpetual motion and the world below doesnt matter much to me

This time tomorrow where will we be

On a spaceship somewhere sailing across any empty sea

This time tomorrow, this time tomorrow

Trains can be so symbolic....they are so metaphorical. Be it in Ray's Pather Panchali----a steam engine oozing black smoke cutting across the fields of the Bengali landscape. Jamal and Salim stand aloft a train as they cross the vast stretches of the Indian landscape in Slumdog Millionaire. And Francis, Peter and Jack carry their life's baggage while junking savoury snacks and cough syrups in a luxury train with hot female attendants in Darjeeling Ltd.

I am crazy about the last shot of the film when the end credits roll-----you see a train window, and a long winding train chugs and ambles on the tracks to Shankar Jaikishen's melody; and you can imagine the sound of the tracks----jhik jhik jhik jhik------beat with the theme like gentle drums.

Makes me want to go on a train ride across the length and breadth of this country, savouring tea and lots of sweet lime!

Let's go get a drink and smoke a cigarette.