Abc Africa

Abbas Kiarostami, 2001, 84m, English/Swahili/Persian

This is a film made at the invitation of the UN as an aid to spread awareness and generate relief for the teeming population of orphans in that country. These are the result of civil wars during the eighties and the massive toll taken by the HIV virus. Brave efforts are being made by an organisation called UWESO ( Ugandan Wommen's Efforts to Save Orphans), which is highlighted through the film.

However as might have expected from this gentle poet of the camera, and also from the title of the film, this is an introductory travelogue which gathers together the sights, sounds ahd culture of this unfamiliar country as it is at the present junction. The film is an anthropological study and we feel the pulse of this segment of humanity through their music and dance

The automobile loving director drives us around the country and as we proceed down the highways we have the glimpses of shanties sprawling amidst the mushrooming modern structures, and the untouched countryside. There is a particularly striking sequence of a tropical storm in the pitch of night as we see the lightning flashing in the indigo sky with a tree swaying violently in the foreground. This billion year old scene is symbolic of a continent more prone to the ravages of primitive nature.

The squalor, poverty and illiteracy is much in evidence and we see directionless children and youth ambling everywhere. Misery and hopelessness is the impression conveyed, even though the victim's themselves are hardly aware of their own plight.

The film closes on a note of euphemistic optimism as one little girl is fortunate enough to be adopted by a European couple. The airliner glides through endless billows of black clouds to a different destiny and a  Cinderella-like ending for at least for one child.

I Confess

Hitchcock, 1953, 95m

A priest is suspected of murder. He knows who is the true culprit but this knowledge has been conveyed to him as part of a priveleged communication, a confession made to him as a priest. Since this is not complicated enough to make a movie about, a love triangle is dug up from the past, and the priests former beloved is the sole witness who can contribute evidence in his favour. That's enough for the plot.

The film builds up moderate suspense which is ehough to keep you hooked if not glued, and beyond a point one is prepared to rough out through the two hours to know how things turn out, since who done it is clear from page one. Brand name Hitchcock provides furthur motivation.

The Master probably was constrained to churn out films with a certain frequency, and his oeuvre is a mixed bag of apples. Karl Malden as the detective gives us a rounded and pleasing portrayal, and this is one of the redeeming features of this lack lustre movie. But then one can get addicted to a director no less than to an author ( Wodehouse, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, John Grisham are all abusable substances ).

Brief Encounter (1945)

David Lean (1908-95), 1945, 82m, UK

An affair between a middle aged housewife Laura (Celia Johnson) and and a Dr Alec (Trevor Howard)  gets out of emotional control and the romance veers towards webs of lies that inevitably result from secrecy.

This is a Lean different from the one who gave us the magnificent spectacles in later years. But the poetry of the camera is very much evident, here in black and white splendor. The place of the clandestine meetings is a railway station and the implacable smoke spouting locomotives thundering past are the leitmotiv of the tale. The power of the film lies in the brief intensity of the affair, the transience of things.

It is very much a nocturnal movie (except the brief excursion to the idyllic countryside as they row down a stream) in both mood and setting. The poetry of the trains flying through the night pervades the film as a symbol of implacable destiny and the relentless nature of time. Laura at one point contemplates an Anna Karenina kind of resolution, but this is a movie saturated with sadness more than tragedy, and she does not in fact leap.

I think Lean is in essence a romantic idealist and the portraits of  Lawrence, Zhivago and Colonel Nicholson (in Bridge on the River Kwai) are not too different from the romantic pair of this film. The magic of the camera to create an epic visual poetry is already evident in this thirty seven year Lean.

This is hardly the "tear-jerker" some have called it. It is a film of youth and passion, about the frailty of our human vessel, and the nobility and fineness of which human beings are equally capable.

Death by Hanging

Oshima, 1968, 114m, Japan

This is a weird, macabre and disturbing film. R, a Korean-Japanese, has been convicted of two murders followed by rape and is about to be hung. The execution fails and his heart refuses to stop beating much after it is supposed to. The movie, starting as a rhetorical question about the morality of capital punishment, quickly slides into a bawdy farce full of gallows humor, often sickly and obscene. The participants in this highly scripted drama are the chaplain (since R is a catholic), the doctor, the public prosecutor, the guards and the officials who have to conduct the operation. The dialogs interlace humor with philosophy, social questions and recent history.

It is a loud, voluble film and the black and white photography within the suffocating confines of the execution chamber, supplemented by the unrestrained ribaldry lays bare the ugliness of the society which makes the situation an acceptable norm. The ritual and rigid formalities surrounding an execution serve to cloak it's very absurdity. The connecting chord of obscenity running through the film expresses the ugliness of killing, all the more if it has state sanction.

The mind of the condemned man is placed under the scanner and examined from all angles to determine the nature of his guilt. The act of killing is examined from a broad perspective. How is the death punishment different from an act of murder? The ring of officials narrate their own participation in multiple executions during the war. And finally R's sister who materializes out of somewhere tries to justify the crime by recalling the Japanese atrocities in Korea. All the while, R is lost in a fit of amnesia, out of which he emerges in gradual hilarious steps, but fails to remember that he is really R, or even if so, the same R that committed the murders.

This is a dark, brooding, outrageous and complex film and is a blend of many themes, centering around the act of killing in all it's generality. It concludes nothing but it's grim and morbid ribaldry leaves one with a sense of revulsion and disgust for the way our world is constituted.

Thanks to Nathanael Hood for introducing me to this unusual movie.

The Lady Vanishes 1938

Hitchcock, 95m

Hitchcock's comedic streak is at it's wittiest in this film. There is a build up of suspense as a lady literally vanishes into thin air and my guess is that Hitchcock must have created the mystery without having devised a solution and then wound it up as best as he could. It is a light and lively movie bubbling with life and mischief, including a pair of cricket crazy comedians and a whole pack of European (the traditional source of the commodity) villains . Most of the action takes place on a moving steam locomotive and that gives ample scope for a  variety of monkey tricks. The strength of the film lies in the freshness and of the script, the sparkling repartee and the youthful romance. It is a package of light entertainment, good enough to kill an idle hour and a half.

After all, Hitchcock was a mere thirty nine and the real wickedness and mastery of medium still a corner or two away. The film was immensely popular when it came out.
Criterion Essay