Notre Musique 2004

* Jean Luc Godard, 76 minutes, French*

A meditation on life, centred around the reality of violence. Hell is war. Purgatory is where we are, with all our questions of the meaning of it all. The Egyptian poet as himself recites his poetry ( below ) and  Godard as himself talks about reality and illusion. And guess what, there is a heaven!

A hard to figure but easy to enjoy visual-tonal-verbal-intellectual essay on the plight of humanity. The elegant fusion of words, images and music makes for a delectable repast. Let's once and for all get over the stone age myth that a movie is a story. Stories are  tedious. A film is an instrument of transformation.

From the film

Mahmoud Darwich, the poet

.... those who write

their own story

inherit the earth of those words.

There is no more room left for Homer.

You try to be the Trojan's poet.

Euripides was Greek.

Troy never told its story.

Does a people or a country

that has great poets

have the right to defeat

a people that doesn´t have poets?

Can a people be strong

without writing poetry?

If they defeat us in poetry we are done for....

Godard as Godard

Heisenberg and Bohr were waIking through Denmark´s countryside.They pass by the castIe of EIsinore.The German savant says, ´That castle has nothing extraordinary about it". The Danish physicist repIies,"Yes, but if you say, ´Hamlet ´s castIe´, then it becomes extraordinary."

EIsinore: the real. Hamlet: the imaginary.

Imaginary: certainty. Real: uncertainty.

The principIe of moviemaking: to take the light...and shine it upon our night

Olga, the Russian Jewish emigre woman:

Two things give me pause...one very small, another very big.

But the small one is aIso big.

What ´s the small one?

Suffering.

Suffering?

Could it be so important? Is it be possible to kill without suffering?

And the second reason, the big one?

The other world.

Punishment, you mean?

That doesn´t matter.

The other world,simply the other world.

You think there is anyone who doesn´t think about the other world?

Everyone can onIy judge for themselves.

Freedom will only be total when living or dying is indifferent

Everything boils down to the individual human being. Everyone shares culpability.

Olga blows herself up and sure enough, this other world, paradiso, where she finds herself  sharing an apple, is all greenery and streams, guarded by US marines. Honestly, even without the marines, Godard at his advanced age, has a rather bleak vision of the world to be. He could at least have equipped heaven with internet, movies, and books. How long can you look at greenery or subsist on apples?

Paths of Glory 1957: the rites of murder

Stanley Kubrick ( 1928-99 ); Kirk Douglas, 85 minutes.


* Kirk Douglas as a Colonel in the French army is asked to lead an impossible attack on an enemy position which will certainly cost the lives of 90% of his men. The attack is a failure and leads to a court martial in which three men are indicted for cowardice....*


"With this film Stanley Kubrick joins the ranks of great directors, never to depart"......Ebert.

A must see anti-war war movie. ..."anti-authoritarian ignorance." ( Stanley Kubrick ) A black and white epic of war, among the best, if not the best.

Brilliant, grim, funny. A pace quickening, spell binding battle-field and court-martial drama. A reconstruction of trench warfare during WW1 in dazzling B/W. Monochrome seems particularly appropriate for WW1. In fact monochrome is correct for any war.

Kubrick seems to be playing on many themes which will reappear in Strangelove, Lolita and Space Odyssey. He surveys the war of the trenches in  visual splendour. The trenches have evolved into well organised human habitations since the war has been long, and daily dying a way of life. In this twilit world of sandbags and dust, gunfire is as routine and continuous as chirruping of birds. He examines the workings of the military hierarchy with un-subtle satire. Human life has little meaning, even that of your own side.  A general orders machine gun fire to be opened on his own soldiers.

 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave....Thomas Gray

The blood of the mighty is precious. The scales of justice are tilted. Stealing a loaf of bread is equally reprehensible whether done by a beggar or a lord.

The military rituals. The ceremonies of the court martial,  the execution-ground and of the officer's mess. How evolved, how full of codes and niceties is war, how un-wholesome from within. Imagine the ritual of the execution, with all it's pomp and ceremony, like a mass at a cathedral, through the eyes of the condemned men.

The finale. A captured German girl tearfully sings to the French troops. As the song progresses, their obscene gesture turn to tears and we have the extraordinary spectacle of a whole audience of battle hardened soldiers in tears. Friend and foe are comrades as they mourn the scourge of war. The machinery of the state is the common enemy, or is it? To be officer or men is a quirk of chance. Kirk Douglas says he is ashamed to be a human being. What Kubrick is indicting in this melancholy film is the fact of being human. Mankind is a sickly beast.

Roger Ebert's review

Breathless ( 1961 ): "a boy who thinks about death"

Director: Jean- Luc Godard; French, 84 minutes.

"After all, I'm a louse. After all, I must. I MUST."

Is it the same man we saw as a teenager facing the great sea at the end of 400 blows? He has learnt to survive. He has not given in to defeat--he has accepted life on her own terms and he steers the boat from day to day, with no guarantee for the morrow. But he is alive for he has not committed the sin of accepting defeat. He is both hunter and hunted and the law is of the jungle. Feeling has died and he does not leave the cigarette even as he lurches to his downfall. That last obstinate puff. He is unconquered or is it just a young director's expression of pity? But he says he is tired and will not run. It was headed for this. He was always lurching inside. Even asking for this.

The girl is only calculating losses and gains. She weighs him on a scale. If we need to ask whether we love or not then we don't. In any case she is not the one who committed the murder nor has she been the hunted one ever before, so why should she now? But she has counting on his running away, not staying back to be killed.

"You're a louse."
"What's a louse?"....and moves on.

Come to think, there was tragedy in the contortion of his face from the start, that wide compressed arc of the lips.

Pyaasa ( thirsty one ) 1959

Director: Guru Dutt;  Hindi, 141 minutes

Yeh ujle darichon mein payal ki chan chan

Thaki haari sanson pe table ki dhan dhan

Yeh berooh kamron mein khansi ki than than...

These lines by Sahir Ludhianvi, one of the authentic poetic voices of renascent India, best expresses the mood. This film owes as much to lyricist Sahir as to the director hero.

It is a landmark in Hindi film. Rated among the top 100 films in a survey by Time, afficianados of Bollywood swear by it and one exposes oneself to indignation and contempt, if one were to raise doubts. It is a film that has become an institution.

One must select the right yardstick. Guru Dutt is not Ray. Lacking the aesthetic sensiblities of Ray he is the common man's  elitism. For that matter Ray is little known outside his home state. But Guru Dutt made a film that has touched a chord in many generations, as it did mine again today. Like Sahir Ludhianvi and many others of that generation, Guru Dutt must have seen the answer to the sufferings of people, which were primarily economic in origin, in the example of the perceived Soviet miracle.

The plot. Vijay ( Guru Dutt ) is a lovesick young poet who is entangled with two women, his ex college mate Meena (Mala Sinha ) and a good hearted call girl Gulabo ( Waheeda Rehman ) . Meena eventually marries a publisher. We see him struggle for recognition, get cheated by relatives, lose his mother...

If you want to pick potholes in the plot, there is no dearth. The movie is primitive in it's construction. It is full of  melodrama and self glorification. But it has the power of a vision struggling to find expression. It is authentic. Everything else should be forgiven.

It is perhaps the director playing himself in Vijay--an alienated young poet, unwilling to adjust in imperfect society, compassionately observing the sufferings and injustices he finds around him. It is a spillover from the fervour and zeal of the independance struggle, now seeking new enemies in the social distortions. It is the revolutionary temperament in-embryo.

One of the powers of the film is  the lean and lanky Johnny Walker, the yet unbeaten arch-comedian of Hindi cinema, enacting the tel maalish wala or oil-massage man. His body seems to be made of plastic and his limbs revolve around the rest of him like a catherine wheel. He puts every nerve and fibre into his acting . He is not one of your dead-pan comedians. His face has a million muscles and they are all moving. He is an expressive whorl of motion gathering power from an inner spring.  When he speaks he pulls all his vocal chords to convey the love and good nature and desire to make people happy which is his centre as it was Chaplin's. And there is a profound sadness which echoes Guru Dutt's own, accounting for the rapport they had in real life too. ( He was Dutt's discovery.)

In fact all the characters--Tun Tun the comedienne, Rehman as the villainous publisher, and a host of others--enact within the safety zone of their much loved stereotypes, repeating themselves while remaining fresh, again like the Tramp. Mehmood, who was later to forge his own brand of comedy, is seen here as a villainous brother-in-law.

The film pantheon in those days was very much a small closed circle and actors tended to play variations on familiar themes. They were usually playing themselves. The audience would start tittering as soon as Johnny Walker appeared and gave any reason to provoke that reaction. That is what they wanted and had payed for and what the imperative of economics of the industry, the money and risks involved, dictated. Guru Dutt himself falls in this category. Along with Dilip Kumar he is the eternal love sick boy just as Dev Anand is the happy go lucky modern type. They all had their oft imitated or parodied trademark mannerisms.

Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959

Director: Alan Resnais; language:French; duration: 91 minutes

Ultimately, a film review is about whether you liked something or not, and, if you did, what it was that you liked. If  I don't like a film I would probably not end up seeing the whole of it, and even if I did, it is best forgotten rather than writing about it. This one is definitely worth seeing.

It makes an indirect, muted yet clear and heart felt statement on a matter which remains of the highest concern. No less alarming than nuclear weapons is the fact that somewhere down the lane, the human heart has been submerged.The style is subjective, reaching it's fullness in the yet to come Last Year in Marienbad.

This is about an affair between a Japanese architect and a French nurse and another between the same woman and a German officer in he past.The current affair takes place in Hiroshima. The structure is non chronological and the narration jumps from past to present--the two day ongoing romance,  memories of the atom bomb, and the trauma laden older affair in the beautiful French countryside .

The original intention of the film maker was to make a film about the aftermath of the bomb, but finding it too big a topic to deal head-on, he has approached it obliquely through the lens of a foreigner's eye, tinged with her individual unusual war experience. She has a fixation about Hiroshima which is responsible for her taking an assignment in Japan and her affair with the Japanese man. Who is the enemy and who is a friend?

What the director succeeds in doing is to give an authentic glimps of a nuclear holocaust--a cameo, as it were--framed by a  relatively humdrum romance in the setting of the reconstructed city, with it's atom bomb museum and the prominent Atom-bomb dome.

The same director has done a parallel short ( 30 minutes or so ) film-essay on the Holocaust titled Nuit et Brouillard or Night and Fog. His movies treat time as the mind sees it. The mind seems to perceive the three entities of past, present and future as one and cinema gives an opportunity to portray the invisible workings of the mind on a flat screen, visibly.  The present film is in that a pre-cursor of Marienbad. To quote from the linked essay by Kent Jones:

Anatole Dauman, one of the film’s producers, told Resnais, “I’ve seen all this before, in Citizen Kane, a film which breaks chronology and reverses the flow of time.” To which Resnais replied, “Yes, but in my film time is shattered.” 

The critic Pauline Kael is said to have remarked that the film collapses into soap opera. However, by entwining these three threads each telling a story of it's own kind situated at the vertices of  triangular time, Alan Resnais succeeds in his intention of touching our heart about the unspeakability of war.

We glimpse the nuclear inferno fleetingly as though through a crack in a wall, or like a dark landscape momentarily illuminated by a flash of lightening, but that glimpse is etched on the mind, as on a camera film. His mildness of tone and understated approach in no way trivialises the past.

And that is what I liked.

Essay by Kent Jones