Great Movies of World CINEMA not to be Missed !!

Persona (1966) - "Bergman at his most brilliant as he explores the symbiotic relationship that evolves between an actress suffering a breakdown in which she refuses to speak, and the nurse in charge as she recuperates in a country cottage. To comment is to betray the film's extraordinary complexity, but basically it returns to two favourite Bergman themes: the difficulty of true communication between human beings, and the essentially egocentric nature of art. Here the actress (named Vogler after the charlatan/artist in The Magician) dries up in the middle of a performance, thereafter refusing to exercise her art. We aren't told why, but from the context it's a fair guess that she withdraws from a feeling of inadequacy in face of the horrors of the modern world; and in her withdrawal, she watches with detached tolerance as humanity (the nurse chattering on about her troubled sex life) reveals its petty woes. Then comes the weird moment of communion in which the two women merge as one: charlatan or not, the artist can still be understood, and can therefore still understand. Not an easy film, but an infinitely rewarding one.


Blue - Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blue," the Polish director's French film,which is one of my favourite movies of all time is about Julie (Juliette Binoche), a grieving widow and mother whose husband, "one of the most important composers of our time," and young daughter are killed in the car accident she survives."Blue" is a lyrically studied, solemn, sometimes almost abstract consideration of Julie's attempt to liberate herself from her sorrowful love and to establish a new life. But love, which is a contradiction of liberty, cannot be easily fooled.


3. Wings of Desire - Wim Wender (1987) is a remarkable modern fairy tale about the nature of being alive. The angels witness the gamut of human emotions, and they experience the luxury of simple pleasures (even a cup of coffee and a cigarette) as ones who've never known them. From the angels' viewpoint, Berlin is seen in gorgeous black-and-white -- strikingly beautiful but unreal; when they join the humans, the image shifts to rough but natural-looking color, and the waltz-like grace of the angels' drift through the city changes to a harsher rhythm.


4 . Baran (2001) - Iranian director Majid Majidi's very touching love story between a Iranian boy and a destitute young Afghan girl, told in gestures and glances, skillfully binds together the broad social theme of refugees with Majidi's vision of the spiritual purity that is attainable through selfless love.


5. Citizen Kane - Orson Welles (1941)


6. The Solaris (1972) - Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris is a visually hypnotic, deeply affecting story of conscience, love, and reconciliation.Solaris deals with self-confrontation. In Solaris, a tenuous communication is established with the planet and, having faced up to his demons, the hero attains a degree of peace with himself.Solaris is an unsettling portrait of man's inequitable, often destructive interaction with his environment. Inherent in the tenets of the Solaris mission is a preconceived theoretical filter that accepts only those phenomena that can be logically explained or physically proven. Some scientists have hypothesized that the Solaris ocean is a thinking substance, a primordial brain, capable of realizing thought. However, lacking concrete evidence, Berton's deposition to the Solaristics board is met with skepticism and calls for the immediate termination of the program. A mission scientist, Dr. Messinger, eventually succeeds in dissuading the board from canceling the project by exposing their innate fears, which lead them to impose artificial barriers to conceal Truth, and proposing that the strange phenomenon, itself, is cause for further study, and not an excuse for an apprehensive retreat. In reality, it is not the failure of technology that impedes the attainment of Truth, but humanity's own inertia and myopic vision.


7) Dogville (2003) - Lars Von Trier -Dogville, an austere Brechtian critique of an unjust society, via a self-reflexive bit of wisdom.
Link of a critic of Dogville


8) Mar Adentros 2002 (Alejandro Amenabar) - The real-life story of Spaniard Ramon Sampedro, who fought a 30 year campaign in favor of euthanasia and his own right to die.(Spanish)


9) 12 Angry Men (1957) - is a courtroom drama. In purpose, it's a crash course in those passages of the Constitution that promise defendants a fair trial and the presumption of innocence. It has a kind of stark simplicity: Apart from a brief setup and a briefer epilogue, the entire film takes place within a small New York City jury room, on "the hottest day of the year," as 12 men debate the fate of a young defendant charged with murdering his father.


10) Akira Kurosawa Ikiru (Living/To Live) (1952) It tells the story of Mr Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a senior public servant who finds out he has terminal cancer and only a short time left to live. Mr Watanabe comes to the realisation that he has become trapped in his life, and seeks to give meaning to his last few months. What differentiates this film from thousands of Hollywood telemovies on the same subject is Kurosawa's non-linear use of time, and the utilisation of different character perspectives. The title of the film comes from the Japanese word for living.


11) Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966) - Robert Bresson - This Bresson creation, the donkey Balthazar, is one of the most intriguing and powerful in all cinema. Balthazar, whilst not the protagonist, is certainly the film's central character, and Bresson refuses to anthropomorphise him (except in a deep sense). The film's main structural idea is facile and effective - Balthazar gets passed from owner to owner, experiencing (and bearing witness to) all kinds of human love and hate.Balthazar is a parable of sin and suffering, but barely a religious one. The Biblical echoes in it in fact seem referential (not reverential), more of a cue been taken from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In that novel (which Bresson obviously plundered for Pickpocket and L'Argent), there is a harrowing scene where a workhorse is beaten and beaten till it crumples to the ground. It is hard not to be moved by the scene, and the same applies to Bresson's film. Like Dostoyevsky, Bresson is acutely realist, and only unconventionally spiritualist.


12) A Short Film About Killing (1988) - Krzysztof Kieslowski - This film is so potent that it is partially credited with the Polish government abolishing the death penalty.A Short Film About Killing shows the destruction brought on by a brutal murder committed by Jacek, a troubled young Polish punk. Jacek is disassociated from society. He meanders about Warsaw stewing in his emotional distress. Across town, cabdriver Waldemar Rekowski, a belligerent and horrible man, makes his way through his day. Finally, there is Piotr who, after winning his life's dream of becoming a barrister, must face the reality of being a part of the legal system. The three lives collide in a devastating story that will bring into question the meaning of violence, murder and capital punishment.

Khasak and Macondo: Magical Realism Foretold

I just read O V Vijayan's 'The Legend of Khasak' and one thing that struck me was his style of narration and story formation which seemed quite close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. According to me he is the Indian Marquez not belittling him. Both wrote their masterpieces at the same time but they hadn't heard of each others work.  Both 'The Legend of Khasak' and 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' has narrative styles which can be tagged as 'magical realism'. In the most simple interpretation 'magical realism' portrays a situation where paradoxes exist like rationality and fantasy. It consists of a world where we could find paradoxical co-existence of 'rational view of society' along with the acceptance of a 'supernatural or occult or mystical' as a normal mundane reality. Oxymoronic world is very much part of their existence. Marquez has put this quite brilliantly in his Nobel lecture, 

"A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude."

What place to know of magical realism better then  India where it oozes and pervades a large part of the folks.

 If we compare both the author's magnum opus than we can find that both the stories evolve and revolve around the imaginary town's created by them. In a sense in both the masterpieces the role of the protagonist is not played by the 'individual' but by a 'small fictional town'.The legend of Khasak has 'Khasak' and One Hundred Years of Solitude  has 'Macondo'. Town's where fantasy, supernatural or occult practices are part of their everyday existence. The story unravels within these towns. The story is strictly not woven around a central character  like say Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's 'The Portrait of a Artist as Young Man' rather we find  multitude of characters occupying the pages. Especially in Marquez the breadth of characters is huge with many generations living through a single novel. This sort of a  intertemporal narration provides a evolutionary view of the society than of individuals which is a commonality  found in most of the novels.We can say there is no 'existentialist angst' in the characters except in Ravi in the Legend of Khasak. But in a wider view existentialist pursuit exists in both the works. In  One Hundred Years of Solitude 'existentialist' crisis can be understood by the 'solitude' that embraces Macondo (Latin America in more broader way). The solitude  is not of a character but of  the whole town or say country or continent. The dysfunctional leaders, the wars, lawlessness and other misgivings has uprooted the existence of a 'proper state' leading to its solitude. Solitude is not somber like loneliness. But as  solitude is gained with maturity so Macondo also revels despite its misgivings.In legend of Khasak, Ravi has come to Khasak to experience solitude as part of soul searching 'existentialist' pursuit to unwind the moralistic guilt that he is carrying due to an incestuous affair. Here Khasak is meant to provide him the solitude to uplift his existence from the moralistic fall that he has undergone.As O Y Vijayan has also asserted  about the novel "It moves along, if you will, in a deeply emotional mode, in a constant search for cosmic mystery". 

This is just a first rough entry on these two great authors but  I would definitely try to show more shades of these giants of literature as I decipher them more.

Life as a Fascinating Novel

Life is like a fascinating novel with its ebbs and flows. Everybody is a protagonist surrounded by characters and situations to deal with. Is it a predestined script or not is a mystery. But this uncertainty in a way makes  life interesting to live.  If we observe closely every life portrays a drama pitched with tits-n bits of a thriller with occasional suspense. There are situations during our childhood that border on 'magical realism' with  the perception of the world bordering on fantasy whereas when some  of us enter the idealistic 'romanticized' youth  we are confronted with the 'realism' of life and in some cases where critical self evaluation occurs then questions related to ' existentialism' enraptures us.  An individual is like a character which in a sense is a creation child of society. Certain events and people lead the character to create a view of life that it aspires for. The character grows with the event that it faces. These life changing or progressive events are mostly melancholic in nature.There are also life changing happy events but mostly it seems that despair can be considered as the catalyst  which enriches the human being in totality. Happy events are something that everyone craves for but these sporadic melancholic events provides maturity to the character. These uncalled for events makes the character sometimes stop and ponder about the despairing pursuits and this mostly leads the character to venture into a new and  better terrain. These glitches small or big are wisdom lessons to be unraveled otherwise an event less single dream-state would finish the richness of life with it.

This novels (life's) main narrator is the mind. The main narrator is formed by humongous collection of sub narrators (thoughts). The mind in a sense is an eternal juggler and the human life in a way is sustained by the play of this eternal juggler. In other way we can say that life is like a jig saw puzzle where you may be placed at any part of the puzzle board but it is the mind that makes you to believe that you are down or up. From above (objective point of view) if you look to the board there is nothing like up or down. It is the way the mind views or places the board. reality is perceived. It is like this fascinating Zen story -

"There was once a stone cutter who was dissatisfied with himself and with his position in life.

One day he passed a wealthy merchant's house. Through the open gateway, he saw many fine possessions and important visitors. "How powerful that merchant must be!" thought the stone cutter. He became very envious and wished that he could be like the merchant.

To his great surprise, he suddenly became the merchant, enjoying more luxuries and power than he had ever imagined, but envied and detested by those less wealthy than himself. Soon a high official passed by, carried in a sedan chair, accompanied by attendants and escorted by soldiers beating gongs. Everyone, no matter how wealthy, had to bow low before the procession. "How powerful that official is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a high official!"

Then he became the high official, carried everywhere in his embroidered sedan chair, feared and hated by the people all around. It was a hot summer day, so the official felt very uncomfortable in the sticky sedan chair. He looked up at the sun. It shone proudly in the sky, unaffected by his presence. "How powerful the sun is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be the sun!"

Then he became the sun, shining fiercely down on everyone, scorching the fields, cursed by the farmers and laborers. But a huge black cloud moved between him and the earth, so that his light could no longer shine on everything below. "How powerful that storm cloud is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a cloud!"

Then he became the cloud, flooding the fields and villages, shouted at by everyone. But soon he found that he was being pushed away by some great force, and realized that it was the wind. "How powerful it is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be the wind!"

Then he became the wind, blowing tiles off the roofs of houses, uprooting trees, feared and hated by all below him. But after a while, he ran up against something that would not move, no matter how forcefully he blew against it - a huge, towering rock. "How powerful that rock is!" he thought. "I wish that I could be a rock!"

Then he became the rock, more powerful than anything else on earth. But as he stood there, he heard the sound of a hammer pounding a chisel into the hard surface, and felt himself being changed. "What could be more powerful than I, the rock?" he thought.

He looked down and saw far below him the figure of a stone cutter."

This illustrates in a sense that every character gets the best in life but it's his/her mind that makes him/her pathetic or a loser. Mind and hence the world thrives on this dualism. How the mind makes you like/love a particular process or person is a puzzle in itself? As argued earlier a character is impregnated with a  particular view(s) of life on the basis of the impressions created by certain persons and events. Say P likes K. K is not that physically attractive but has good nous. So this shows that P gives more weight to internal bearings to external ones. But this attraction may be like a thought that we regress so much that it becomes the most pleasant process in the world. But that unusual pleasantness without sound reason is just a thought regressed.

Sketching a bigger view of life affiliating it to a  novel we may come to the conclusion that it is the narrator (mind) who makes it a great or absurd novel.

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The Buddha, by the Mexican artist Octavio Ocampo.

Tao

You cannot take hold of it ,
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks;
When you speak, it is silent.

(Cheng Tao Ke)

Unbearable Lightness of Being

I was thinking about Kundera and trying to understand why I find him so interesting. In a way I was trying to dissect Milan Kundera.One  of the most interesting aspects about his writing is his art of dissecting his characters psychologically.  Another great aspect of his writing is usage of metaphors and taking a word and creating a world out of it. Like the word 'eternal recurrence' which he uses in his most beautiful novel, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'. In the starting couple of pages he dissects 'eternal recurance ' and then after doing this he merely transports most lucidly to the characters of the novel. The novel starts with these lines..

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"......."

and then after a while he writes ... 

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

The introduction of 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' is staggeringly beautiful due to its cogently philosophical narrative and also due to the  sublime metaphorical construction of one of the main characters 'Tereza'. In Kundera the characters are not born in a city but they are born out of a metaphor or a situation. In 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', Tereza is also born out of a metaphor, "she seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed" .Kundera knows the power of metaphors and hence the danger of it. "Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love".Through a metaphor he creates the underlying theme of the novel which is deciphered at various levels in the novel. 

Kundera is like Bach where the technique of counterpoint plays a very central role.Two diverse themes merged to create a work of art which resonates on a central core.His novels are like great fugues. In Kundera contrapuntal form dominates his novels where diverse characters would converge towards a central core. This paradoxical narrative structure is thoughtfully brought out in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' . The two main female characters are created on this paradox.  Sabina is the most fascinating character according to me in the novel. She portrays the 'lightness of being' , a being who is not burdened with any sense of morality or value judgement, which can be said as the most burdensome aspect in a human being. She in a sense is a pure amoral being. Contrasting to her is Tereza. She is loaded with the 'unbearable' burden of fidelity, morality and value judgement. She in a sense characterises the usual emotional human being. But as Kundera says " But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become". 

The process that binds  the characters in the novel  is the most contrapuntal word in real staggering proportions. The word symbolises sublime beauty, utter catastrophe, bliss, pure madness etc and is something without which life would be incomplete.This colossal word is 'love'. The main male protaganist in the novel has been struck by this ambiguous word. He is portrayed a real 'Don Juan' , a bard of coitus, a pragmatic man of the world for whom falling in love was like falling to die. But as Kundera counters for the notion of 'eternal recurrence' that you are born once and your life remains incomplete if you have not fallen in love. So it happens that for Tomas, Tereza becomes the sole person in his life who enters his poetic memory. Another sublime metaphor has been used by Kundera here,'poetic memory' which denotes impressions that touch the heart and stays there. Tomas is surgeon who know quite well to stitch normal wounds but this wound of love by Tereza is not healed completely and he leaves even his job for her and goes to the country side to live with her. 

The novel has lots of political metaphors also which I am not interested in but I think this is one work of art that should be consumed by all.