I Wrote, about Cinema

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Image Courtesy: Three Lights by Daily Dose of Imagery.

The blog is sleeping still, and dreaming. Below: excerpts from some posts (links provided) I wrote on Cinema.

The Bride wore Yellow » To begin with, not a post written by me; but a collection of a couple of reviews of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, vols. I & II, written by a dear friend. This was published in June, 2007.

Look at my eyes girl, you will see your mother’s son »
One of those rare (very long) academic writings the likes of which I hate to publish in this blog, this one was about Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar. I remember promising that I will write a follow-up post on Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar, I didn’t keep the promise…

A Blank Little Post »
Like a blank little screen… Not exactly on cinema, somehow provoked by…

• Something which communicates, something which cinema can, theoretically, never use/record: the touch. The way the touch conveys. Ultimately that was the ur-language, the language before language was. And social language, the voice, the written words, the words typed in, the glance and the look, all try to displace, replace, substitute that vehicle to mean: the touch. Not because touch has become impossible, but because touch has lost its magic. Therefore sick chats, sicker phone-sex, nauseating scraps and mails … all try to convey a kink which the touch is supposed not to be able of triggering; no, if words or ogles are meant to be a means to the end of the touches, one finds that the touch is ultimately as cold as frozen maggoty meat. But once upon a time touch was a language. Can you remember how the shivers in the water-envelop told you that mom is happy with you inside her? Or dad’s first nervous trembling grasp? And all those things which we never tried to remember because we never thought that we will lose them. And now, each desperate kiss is to be recorded, the hand grasping the hand is firmer so that one does not forget and one day we cannot recall a touch, differentiate her from her, isn’t it as nightmarish as forgetting the face whose name we can recall (the other way round is always more irritating but less disturbing)?. But how many unique touches assigned to unique people do we remember?

The way they touched: in memorium Ingmar Bergman and Ciao…Antonioni! Cinema passes away »
…And then, tributes to two great filmmakers dying on consecutive July-days…

• But touching your skins, the skins of your face, were we able to mean, able to express? So cliched it was, the places to touch, each time the same and you expected none to change the game; as boys, as men…your landscapes were just those few tourist-spots, which in photos were displayed, which the prints described and brochures prescribed: a moonlit land were limited to those erogenous zones where neons glowed, where high billboards…
• …Yesterday it was Ingmar Bergman, today Michelangelo Antonioni. Old men fading away in rain, sat in the parkbench like bookends. And I can see a lonely man in Grenoble, stubbles and a stick, sitting in the park, paused his weary flipping through the pages of his book named Histoire du Cinema and staring blank. Time is up, JLG! The chessboard is withdrawn, the mimes have ended their tennis-play. No more stories to tell, no more women to look at, no more ideas to give birth to, no more battles to win… No more life in your Europe to wonder at through your lenses…

L’Avventura: an Erotica »
This is a favorite piece of mine. It’s based on a great Antonioni film and is one of those rare work of complete fiction in this blog and at those collage of images I can stare for minutes! It had a setting, rather an important historical one: the way my metropolis is expanding and invading the rural hinterlands. It is an erotica, but it had political subtexts and it ended like this

• When I am watching your face being flushed with desire, peeping into those skins which I was so eager to see, touching you there where I always yearned to touch…I know I am grappling the surfaces, the cloths of your soul and can never enter those dungeons of yours where feelings are cajoling thoughts…I was being overwhelmed with sentiments and tears that these will end faster ’cause we are kids afraid under the open sky which is a metropolis looming large over the countryside, that we might not have our time again, that touching you there always bears the shadow of lifting away my body from yours, that bodies meet to part again. But you are there girl, under the clouds and the sky…living to the lees few moments of your day when your body is your mind! Immeasurable floods of thoughts swarming your mind’s sky…

The Boy inside me »
This was…very, very personal; but still based on another famous Nouvelle Vague film. Now I smile when I read it…

• Believe me, you always accused me of pampering him, but I am tired of him! I abhor him, his obstinate silence of not growing up, his arrogance of not coping up, his systematic evaporation of all cuteness which would have redeemed him, the hints of pimples in his cheeks renders him unsuitable of any affection. I watch him, he looks hungry. But when he watches me contemplating him, he gathers up a poise, a dumbness, a gait, a glance which provokes a slap hard to restrain. An wriggling unease in my torso thrusts me towards finding out an excuse to do it: slap him right and left after offering a choice of any one. But okay, I turn away my eyes because a slap must never search out a miscreant, the other way round is preferable.

A Day in the Life »
I liked this one too! A post you are supposed to read along with the Beatles song provided. It was haunted with a teardrop following a kiss-in-the-screen…

• I was troubled when someone again brought the issue of bullets and holes and body-and-hole counts. Someone said that my blog is the most blatant instance of narcissism: I have merely used politics months ago to draw attention to my self-centered writings. I hate discussing my blog in my office. As the sun climbed down the sky I was worried that my phone might ring and I am not in a position to speak. You might phone me and ask me if I am enjoying the separation. She might phone me and ask why am I not letting her love me since I did let you throughout these years and you didn’t deserve it and she deserves it. “Why are you not allowing me/did you not allow me to take care of you?” both of you might ask and believe me, though I try to hide it from my colleagues, my students and all those beautiful eyes, I feel like screaming into most insecure tears under the sky that I don’t know, I never had the answers, I never will answer even if I come across the truth of that question. It only hurts that both of you are crying bitter in this hazy afternoon and Sylvia Bataille turned her tear-drenched face towards me last night.

About Pierrotting »
Another aborted beginning. Don’t read it if you hate rambling long thoughts-aloud to strange references… I thought of writing a novel on a favorite French Nouvelle Vague character. I never wrote it, but here were some ambitious sketches… There is also another index to few more posts here (featuring an affectionate farewell to yours truly by that man whom I miss – Paul Knopfler – who called me “Pierrot”). Darn Paul! Things are really making me nostalgic about months a year ago!

• I gather meanings, I collect words. Sitting by the water when I am trying to light a cigarrette in the breeze, this madman visits me in this place. I pay him a coin, he offers me a word. These days he offers me one even if I lack changes. I know it is a word which I have dropped few hours ago in another street and never knew that I have lost it. Tossing the word, I discover that a new meaning is there on the flip-side of it. Or, it is not exactly a new meaning always; I never knew it had a meaning afterall, or I have actually lost my dictionary, or I have forgot that words have meanings at all. I know words have their use-values, or their exchange-values. I use them each day to squeeze out their utilities or to buy things in exchange, but only when this madman gives them back to me I understand that they also have “meanings”.

I Wrote, about Writing

Image courtesy: Concrete Leaf by Daily Dose of Imagery

This blog is sleeping; and dreams like words and images arise out of its unconscious, the archive of hidden and buried posts. Here are snippets of what I wrote about writing, chronologically presented unlike dreams:

The Erotics of Writing »

• And then I read them again, and I feel dizzy, as if in a post-coital bliss, and I start recalling what happened moments ago, when I was assailed by your words, and I cannot recall, my faculty of recording moments was suspended then, I was in throes of pleasure which is gone like the flashes and bangs of thunder but fading sounds still rumble. This recalling is the process of understanding your writings. We males try to understand, you women feel and experience, and when you are writing you resist those masculine processes of total comprehension, appropriation, prose-ification of meaning. Your words in flux, meanings melting, the enigma of non-linear train of thoughts baffle all masculine habit of meaning-making. So I stop understanding you, cannot recall that narrative of making love … and I realise that I cannot understand you ever, I don’t wish to. You are there lying by me like a satisfied woman who has tasted her man and I can feel the “set of secret languages delightfully taking a shape” within me, I will write now, or later. Only regrets that I never can catch that shape. May I maintain that poetry is feminine, I am convinced about that (and not all women writing achieve that being woman, not all men approve of that idea) and I should thank you girls.

Writing, Post-coital »

• The writing becomes autonomous, almost. Uncontrollable, “a result of undecided love”, graving/craving for fruit, to whom you need to forfeit yourself when it is hungry, and when it is hungry, only love can keep it alive. Yeah, mystic, paranormal, a web that entangles yourself, the writer. But whose actually is the ‘claustrophobic state of affair’, the baby feeling cocooned, or mommy feeling stuffed in with a throbbing life? This is not known to me, either or both. Thinking also of the state of reader, me when I read you; I do feel stuffed with unnameable things which is, ironically, language with few extra bags and baggages (unnameable, ’cause babies inside do not have names until we name them on the paper).

An Erotica on Writing »

• That is writing to me. Writing you. Speaking you. Looking at your face divine. Breaking into thankful tears after orgasmic release. The mystic sublime of an atheist, non-believer like me. Making love through words. And you lie there, replete with my words all over your body, words readable by no-one but me, in a language universal but private, words which might mean nothing, but the act of fingering your body with alphabets, mouthing your body with phrases, stroking your body with brushes of tongues touching sounds, writing you into existence when you already exist, making you the woman. Bearing you and giving birth to you while you are there somewhere. And when the writing ceases starting to miss you, you fly away, escape somewhere, the pain that I cannot hold you eternally like that, the remorse of finishing it off, but the inevitability of reaching the end of a frantic narrative beyond my control. I write you to the world, speak you to myself, love you to you only.

About ‘Love-Language’: another view from this side »

• So that’s the point: a language corrupted, how do we redeem language of love from the clutches of proprietary power, patriarchy and gender. Gender? Can love-language be relieved of gender? Isn’t it a sheer impossibility? Not exactly, in my language, we have the immense treasure of love-songs written by Rabindranath Tagore, who exploited well the absence of gender-markers in the verbs or pronouns of Bengali language and created a bliss of androgeneity, or, in other words, sheer absence of gender. Love-language can be relieved of gender, not only in its use of registers, but also in the ideological unconscious (or ideological superego?) underneath the manifest language. But how … dunno … have a hunch that poetic love-language must express the body instead of gender; am not talking of erotica or pornography, am talking about a body beyond masculinity or femininity. What am I talking about? Probably about a language which isn’t there …

The Artist’s Underword »

• But what can you do then? Well, I have my ways. Artists can be blunt, should be misleading, dishonest, capricious, not in his works, but in his statements…Artists are clever people, armed with cunning, they know how to survive, they know how to dupe and bribe the powerful, because they know that only they are capable of making hidden statements which will be understood/deciphered in posteriority. And artists should never, ever elucidate themselves, because a reader/viewer must work out the meaning investing at least a few fraction of cerebral labour that the artist spends; as specialised readers, we artists know that the pleasure of experiencing an artwork lies exactly in the pursuit of this elusive structures of design and meaning…

The Readers’ Underwords »

• Should someone write about his own work? If one does, does it render the ‘original’ artwork redundant, ‘cause its lacking something? Or should they be considered as rejoinders/afterthoughts/footnotes to the ‘original’ and be considered as a continuation? In my previous post I talked about certain artists’ mischievousness. I still stand by it. Eccentric, you might label me…but I think that artists toil and slog, and they slog hard; they cannot make their works easily consumable (unless they are really paid a helluva lot of dough!). I am not being an old-fashioned modernist, I am accusing the common receivers’ habit of shorter attention span, instant gratification and shallow comprehensibility that the culture industry coupled with consumerism brews. And which medium can be more exemplary of that than the one I am currently dabbling in and you are engaging with than blogging?

Writing me in, writing me out »

• I define art as all-encompassing, writing, painting, photography…the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Let me take painting or poetry as a model. What is poetry? As a teacher who hates to be esoteric I try to place things initially in very simple terms to my students. To them I have defined poetry as an exercise which wrests away words from the socially accepted, constrained lexical ‘meaning’. Thus each word gains connotation in a certain context, within a certain syntax of language and emotions…that’s poetry to me. That’s art to me. When I look at Van Gogh’s later paintings, I don’t look at sunflowers or churches or crows or wheatfields. I watch the yellows, I watch the hasty and bold brushstrokes…because brushstrokes in late Van Gogh appear as brushstrokes…a static medium is suddenly evoking swirling motions. As a student of cinema I know that the introduction of motion within staticity also introduces something else: time. So when I watch those yellows and brushstrokes I know I am watching the nervous desperation of an unloved man who knows he is on the brink of either total madness or a suicide…he doesn’t have much time left at his disposal…

Still writing me in, writing art thou? »

• A blog, unlike a book, is temporal, with a past, present and future. I am thinking about my blog and the past few weeks when I was not being able to post anything due to my exhaustions and depressions. The home page was showing a post which was dated days back…the intervals were painfully gaping open my inactivity, my writer’s block…in more precise terms (now this is too personal) my ongoing inability to express. Thinking of Paul’s blog which has sadly halted in a particular day; each day the post at the top speaks out the piling up days of silence. As I was trying to “breathe tomorrow in” during my days of troubled articulation, fingers poised over the keyboard but unable to strike, I knew I was trying to “exhale today away”. And in a blog like this, I am only what I eat!

Self-portrait in Gratitude »

• How dangerously can I probe into myself? I know the zones at the edge of which I might just falter and halt. I started writing last year after experiencing a major crisis in my life, which is very apparent in this blog but it is an event which I don’t wish to discuss much, because it does not involve my life only. When I started writing, this mining and unearthing of the self was, of course, a project but I never wished to confess. I knew vaguely that it was a reconstruction of the self through mourning something. Thus, when I am reconstructing anew, it is not exactly detrimental to my psyche if I dissect my earlier self because it is something I have abandoned. If redefining self is what I will be doing, then I can lighten my shoulders of many burdens too, many assumed and imposed identities. That’s what I am doing.

Adorning the surface of a loss »

• It is like the potters, the makers of vases and vessels. They shape the surface of a space that holds nothing. That this shape will be used later to hold water, or grain or a plant is a different proposition altogether. The potter has nothing to do with it. They delimit the contours of a space of nothingness, it is like an act of mourning, giving surface to a shape holding something which is lost and lost irretrievably…It is possible; to write the private, but I don’t attempt it. It is neither possible for me to write about the enormity and complexity of real pains, real loves, real longings and losses, nor will it be fair doing so…because of other lives involved. In those enormity of emotions, we are selfish, utter egoists and thus blinded from the truth. Though I know of certain processes of relatively freeing my discourse from my ego, I am sometimes ruthlessly posited against myself when I write or speak but I really don’t matter. Truth can be best understood from fictions, even our own truth, from shapes of things which we have lost or sometimes is worth losing because you know it will return with its enormity.

My Own Private Euphoria: an incomplete post »

• My choice of expressing myself in what is our father-tongue rather was a conscious one. Because I never intend to publish these in hard-copies, never intend to be known as a poet in the public, I wanted a space where even Indian-English novels have failed to reach…at ground-zero, a place where local Bangla rock-bands have reached (and failed to reap results), a level where pure expression is possible because culture has still not reached there with its codifications and history of the normative. The magic of words have never failed, but culture has failed miserably. I needed a space, during a moment of crisis in my life, to start from a scratch, to pour myself into words and imminently forgetting it, to give birth to a self and see it flicker and die within moments, to gather all achievements and feel it all as ‘virtual’ the next morning. Blogging, thankfully, has no history or canons; no tradition as yardsticks, no landmarks to imitate or fight with. At least sitting by my keyboard I can start with my emotions and arrive elsewhere…