G.K.Chesterton on Charles Dickens

"Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted. . . . Hence there was this vital point in his popularism, that there was no condescension in it......
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The belief that the rabble will only read rubbish can be read between the lines of all our contemporary writers, even of those writers whose rubbish the rabble reads. . . . The only difference lies between those writers who will consent to talk down to the people, and those writers who will not consent to talk down to the people. But Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like deity and poured out his riches and his blood. This is what makes the immortal bond between him and the masses of men. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonized to produce it. They were not only enjoying one of the best writers, they were enjoying the best he could do. . . . His power, then, lay in the fact that he expressed with an energy and brilliancy quite uncommon the things close to the common mind. But with mere phrase, the common mind, we collide with a current error. Commonness and the common mind are now generally spoken of as meaning in some manner inferiority and the inferior mind; the mind of the mere mob. But the common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes; or else it would not be common. . . . In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens"

from G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
chesterton.org

Cache

*Michael Haneke*117m*French*2005*

1. At 48.38 Majid makes a reference to George’s nose, implying some injury to the nose, possibly inflicted by Majid. Could the coughing boy around the “smoking gun” have been George? Soon after he says “you are a lot bigger, should not be hard to kick me. George further says as a child Majid was bigger and stronger, so he had no choice.

2. Even if Wajid is not the source of the tapes, after seeing the drawing, he would know whether Walid is the culprit. In any case, once he knows what has been going on, he is in the best position to reason things out.
3. Pierrot, even if he already knows Walid and the childhood incidents, could not have done it solo.
4. We rule out Majid, because he looks and acts innocent, and it would be directorial folly to implicate him. Pierrot does hate his parents enough to disappear and cause them great anguish, so he may readily agree to be an accomplice to Walid. Walid of course has a powerful motivation to seek vengeance for his father’s fate. (When Walid finally confronts George, he just wants to see him, as if to enjoy the fruits of his psychological torture.) If Majid is to be ruled out the possibilities are (a) Walid alone (b) Walid plus Pierrot. They would need to be very perceptive, almost superhuman, to understand the traumatic memories buried inside a thick skinned guy like Georges or to scheme out such a devious procedure or anticipate it’s likely effects. Anne’s verdict about Majid’s innocence must be taken as final (“he couldn’t have staged it”). Walid’s denial of connection with the tapes in his final encounter with Georges is convincing.
5. The only conclusion I can draw from the final meeting of the two boys is that the whole story has entered the psyche of Pierrot and that is the real revenge.
6. The tapes? Must be Haneke. One thing which I believe is that our deeds are indelibly printed on our minds, at whatever depth of consciousness. You can escape from the legal system, but the real punishment is the psychological degeneration. This is an absolute law. It is said that when we die our entire life plays out like a video cassette. This is what karma actually means. In terms of psychological damage one can never escape the effects of one’s deeds. One easily recognizes grown-up Georges in the prevaricating boy that he was. I don’t think this is what Haneke is conveying.
7.In that sense the video tapes are the Recording Angel or the imprints of karma, or the workings of conscience, which are inescapable, absolute, and strict.

8.Could be to remind us about the Parisien Tien Mien, the massacre of Algerians, about which I for one have heard for the first time. The aslant approach penetrates deeper into the mind. Examples: Munyurangabo, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Nuit et Bruillard.The historical tragedy is a repressed memory like the "interlude" in Georges' childhood.

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Spider 2002

*David Cronenberg*93m*

At 98 minutes it's a gripping enough movie with more than a quorum of gore. As an insight into mental illness with or without traumatic origins, I don't think it rises much above A Beautiful Mind.Perhaps it is authentic in the sense of portraying a mind trapped into revolving eternally around a single obsession. Unusual is that he finally sees through himself. It is too bleak for a movie and not bleak enough to correspond to the realities.

As Roger Ebert says, there is no growth, no transcendance. But maybe the concluding insight into his own failing is a growth, even a remarkable one, given the bleak prognosis in such cases.
Roger Ebert's review

A Passage to India 1985

*David Lean ( 1908-91)*168m*Peggy Ashcroft*Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee, Alec Guiness, Roshan Seth, Sayeed Jaffrey*

The film is based on E.M. Forster's novel, which I have not read. It is set in India in the 1920s. I have been for decades a fan of David Lean. Lawrence of Arabia, which I saw in the sixties, was the seminal movie in my life, in which I saw for the first time what a film can be. The Bridge on the River Kwai comes a close second, addicted to war movies as I was . The present movie is not vintage Lean, with the vast vision and perspective . But it is certainly an unputdownable entertainer and  paints colonialism in general with  broad if not so deft strokes. However, the picture of India painted in the period referred to is silly and derogatory, which is attributable more to Lean than to Forster. To think he had an Indian wife for eighteen years.

"Only connect" says Forster in Howard's End. Looking at this film, the degree of disconnection that existed in India between the whites and the Indians is amazing. It is as though the English had positioned themselves as the superiormost in the caste system. "It is well accepted that the coloured races are physically attracted to the white but not vice-versa", argues the counsel in a trial for attempt to rape. In fact, the disconnect must have been more like a chasm, meticulously cultivated, and the means by which a miniscule of disciplened, wealthy and armed  foreigners managed to extend a lucrative occupation for so long. It is but a step short of apartheid, or apartheid cleverly disguised. It is also true that the colonial mentality has not died out because the wealthy classes have replaced the colonial masters and the poor and backward continue in their separate world.

However this is not quite the true India of 1928. Lean seems to see India as populated by mindless mobs , guided by irrational impulses and beliefs lurching like a river in spate. Even the educated and rebellious are shown to be rabidly emotional. In reality this was the period of  Gandhi, when he was awakening and organising the discontent by unconventional , revolutionary strategies . He was teaching the meaning of dignity and courage. The spiritual tidal wave that had appeared is nowhere visible in the movie. Indians are shown to be almost subhuman and deserving of contempt. After all, Lean was born in 1908, and for all his cinematic genius, is of the mind of adventurers and empire builders like Clive, Churchill and Aguirre. He seems to have been but a shallow humanist.

The picture is one sided. Some of the characters are quite improbable. Never have I seen anyone like Professor Godbole. Nor is the speech anything like the way Indians speak (even English). The intonation is false, even for Victor Banerjee, who is Indian, as Aziz. Lean may be a master of the panoramic and the vastness of a historical perspective, but seems limited in characterisation. Certainly he has no feel for India. His vision remains Kipling-esque. It is the India of snake charmers, just  thinly separated from the rope trick.

There is some scope for his panoramic cinematography.  There are trains, as there were in Zhivago, Kwai and Lawrence. The Indian Railways are surely the crowning  glory among the good things the British left behind. Trains  pierce through the vast plains or the lush green hills. Crowded railway stations, where the select mingle with commoners and dogs, and the military bands blare a welcome. Luxurious , lurching dining cars, where the white man preens. Every white man seems to have been like a king, merely by virtue of skin colour. The sublime and battered erotic sculptures in the forest, which send the young post Victorian heroine into a dizzy spell. There are some magnificent closing shots of the Himalayas, worthy of the maker of Lawrence of Arabia.

Attenboroughs Gandhi is a far more texturally accurate account of the period under narration. Satyajit Ray's Chess Players remains unmatched for it's understanding of the British period. Through the finely etched and inspired portraits of General Outram and Nawab Wajid Ali, he captures the essence like a two-sided mirror.

Finally, I seem to have outgrown Lean as my idol of younger years. But a movie well worth the penny.

Roger Ebert's review

Firaaq 2008--"in camera"

*Nandita Das ( director )* Gujarati, English, Hindi*101m*Deepti Naval, Tisca Chopra, Naseerudin Shah, Raghuvir Raghav, Paresh Rawal*

Perhaps the best film about the holocaust is Alan Resnais' Nuit et Bruillard ( Night and Fog ), in which the tragic events are examined in a very indirect manner as reflections, and we see no brutality on screen. Similarly, the same director frames the nuclear holocaust in a melodrama Hiroshima mon Amour, and the actual tragedy ( transcending the power of imagination ) comes to our consciousness at a degree of separation, through a corner of the eye as it were, that makes it all the more unforgettable. The maybe one minute sequence of charred two legged creatures as they lurch towards the river is a permanent image in my mind. More recently Munyurangabo, from the Korean American director Lee Isaac Chung relates the Rwandan genocide in a retrospective story about two teenagers, which leaves a more powerful impression than the older bloodsoaked Hotel Rwanda, which covered the same ground.

The post Godhra events have deeply scarred the subcontinental psyche, and one may be grateful to the maker of Firaaq from sparing us the gruesome details which we can more easily imagine, rather than have them rubbed in once again. Instead, she skillfully focuses her camera on the society of Ahmedabad a month after the pogrom, and examines the volcano through it's aftermath. Interweaving several strands of narrative into a  rivetting movie experience, one is left with a graphic and authentic picture of the ghastliness of what must have been. The strength of the movie is the authentic under current of humanism.

Arti (Deepti Naval) is married to the brutish Paresh Rawal, trying to save his younger brother from prosecution on charges of involvement in a gang rape during the carnage. Arti herself is unable to forget her failure to rescue a woman fleeing from the marauding mob. Anuradha Desai (Tisca Chopra)  is married to a well-to-do Muslim businessman, contemplating a shift to Delhi. Muneera ( Shahana Goswami ) is a Muslim lady whose house was burnt down. Comically, a group of Muslim friends fight for the ownership of a pistol and a single over-sized bullet, which occidentally goes off, provoking a police chase sequence. Khan Sahib, a somewhat demented music teacher, lives in isolation, with his faithful attendant Karim ( Raghubir Yadav ) till he begins to understand that the world which was his has ceased to exist. And there is an orphan child Mohsin ( Mohammad Samad ) who has seen it all, the killings and burnings, but too small to undestand it--perhaps he thinks that is what life is. The film ends on a faint note of optimism as Mohsin is returned to the refugee camp.

The film is alive, cinematographically. The suburban landscape with our ubiquitous three-wheelers, the narrow lanes flanked by avenues of multistoreyed, old, ornate and ramshackle dwellings give true three dimensionality to this stage of erstwhile carnage. The cocktail of languages and endless variety of dialects is our very own and familiar tower of babel.  Nowhere does it strike a false note. Form is seamlessly blended with content, faulting towards restraint rather than excess.

A remarkable debut which succeeds splendidly in what it sets out to achieve. This places Nandita Das squarely as an emergent force in cinema.
Review: Gaurav Malani