Blaise Pascal

Roberto Rossellini, 1972, 128m

This ocher tinted biopic captures life in medieval France at an unhurried pace. We are familiarized with the life of the philosopher scientist, concluding with its melancholy end at an early age.

The Man with a Movie Camera

Dziga Vertov, 1929, 66m, USSR

At 66 minutes and a new addition to the Sight and Sound 2012 Top Ten once in a decade list, I felt impelled to view this film, and it was by no means a disappointment. There is nothing of the stiltedness once associates with films of this period and it might have been made last year. Apart from the nostalgia of freezing a lost time, it is an exuberant portrayal of the perpetual motion that is our extraordinary mundane existence. One senses the hope and vitality of nascent Sovietism of this post Lenin early Stalin time. Whirling gears and spindles, men and women intent on their industrial tasks, crowds forming and dispersing in cityscapes that might have been in the US,--gigantically spacious as both countries are or were--horse carriages competing with tramcars, this is a visual breathtaking treat from end to end. The jazzy musical score matches the visuals in expressing the overflowing joy of ordinary things.
Click HERE for the whole film.

Socrates

117m, 1971, Rossellini, TV (It)
The drama of Socrates' trial, condemnation and death is movingly presented in this stark film. The sets are rudimentary, there is just the hint of a musical score and the script is extracted mainly from Apology and Crito. The great director, who turned to biopics in the latter part of his life, is successful in breathing life into this ancient philosophers' life and ideas. We see this gentle man of seventy, unperturbed by his imminent demise, refusing to avail the opportunity of escape devised by his friends. The portrayal of his wife, less of a philosopher but almost as courageous, grappling with the destiny of being married to Socrates, is particularly sensitive and poignant. The film maintains a cool detachment as it portrays the somber and uplifting events that concluded Socrates' life. His philosophy has the depth to address the ultimate issue of death. Socrates is a courageous man whose actions match his ideas. Rossellini has a feeling for the sublime.
"I do not want to make beautiful films, I want to make useful films." - Roberto Rossellini

Pikoo's Diary

26m, 1980, Ray, Aparna Sen, Victor Banerjee
This is an extraordinary, unforgettable film, all the more for its brevity. And not just for the boldness of its theme, for Indian cinema of 1980, (adultery, that too brazen, under the eyes of an alert child), but the poetic power. In the last few minutes, time comes to a fullstop, and the child's universe is transformed by elemental occurrences. Everything coincides: clouds gather, the woman falls, death creeps in, a game of cards, sleep, a lotus trembles on its stalk. Sexuality. death, sickness, aging, nature, time. Awesome Life.
Part 1          Part 2         Part 3

The Snake Pit

1948, 98m, Olivia de Havilland

A highly romanticized and sanitized depiction of mental illness, which does little justice to the depth of inner desolation it entails and the trail of destruction which it leaves. Virginia, the glamorous victim, suffers from an unspecified illness involving confusion and amnesia which lands her in an institution, where her fate is sandwiched between a callous and at times brutal establishment, and a handsome psychoanalyst. She is subjected to the painful treatments current at that period (electric shocks and hydropathy) but psychoanalysis has the day as her past traumas are pealed and all ends happily ever after, as she returns to the ministrations of a doting husband. The environment and conditions inside the hospital are more comical than horrifying, and conform more to the popular image than to any reality. As an early depiction of the subject, it is a very rudimentary and inadequate treatment which sugar coats the grim reality. Manifest behavior is the tip of the iceberg. The sea of experiential reality is invisible. Probably straight narration is an inadequate idiom. I am tempted to quote:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.