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Image Courtesy: Three Lights by Daily Dose of Imagery.
The blog is sleeping still, and dreaming. Below: excerpts from some posts (links provided) I wrote on Cinema.
The Bride wore Yellow » To begin with, not a post written by me; but a collection of a couple of reviews of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, vols. I & II, written by a dear friend. This was published in June, 2007.
Look at my eyes girl, you will see your mother’s son »
One of those rare (very long) academic writings the likes of which I hate to publish in this blog, this one was about Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar. I remember promising that I will write a follow-up post on Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar, I didn’t keep the promise…
A Blank Little Post »
Like a blank little screen… Not exactly on cinema, somehow provoked by…
Something which communicates, something which cinema can, theoretically, never use/record: the touch. The way the touch conveys. Ultimately that was the ur-language, the language before language was. And social language, the voice, the written words, the words typed in, the glance and the look, all try to displace, replace, substitute that vehicle to mean: the touch. Not because touch has become impossible, but because touch has lost its magic. Therefore sick chats, sicker phone-sex, nauseating scraps and mails … all try to convey a kink which the touch is supposed not to be able of triggering; no, if words or ogles are meant to be a means to the end of the touches, one finds that the touch is ultimately as cold as frozen maggoty meat. But once upon a time touch was a language. Can you remember how the shivers in the water-envelop told you that mom is happy with you inside her? Or dad’s first nervous trembling grasp? And all those things which we never tried to remember because we never thought that we will lose them. And now, each desperate kiss is to be recorded, the hand grasping the hand is firmer so that one does not forget and one day we cannot recall a touch, differentiate her from her, isn’t it as nightmarish as forgetting the face whose name we can recall (the other way round is always more irritating but less disturbing)?. But how many unique touches assigned to unique people do we remember?
The way they touched: in memorium Ingmar Bergman and Ciao…Antonioni! Cinema passes away »
…And then, tributes to two great filmmakers dying on consecutive July-days…
But touching your skins, the skins of your face, were we able to mean, able to express? So cliched it was, the places to touch, each time the same and you expected none to change the game; as boys, as men…your landscapes were just those few tourist-spots, which in photos were displayed, which the prints described and brochures prescribed: a moonlit land were limited to those erogenous zones where neons glowed, where high billboards…
…Yesterday it was Ingmar Bergman, today Michelangelo Antonioni. Old men fading away in rain, sat in the parkbench like bookends. And I can see a lonely man in Grenoble, stubbles and a stick, sitting in the park, paused his weary flipping through the pages of his book named Histoire du Cinema and staring blank. Time is up, JLG! The chessboard is withdrawn, the mimes have ended their tennis-play. No more stories to tell, no more women to look at, no more ideas to give birth to, no more battles to win… No more life in your Europe to wonder at through your lenses…
L’Avventura: an Erotica »
This is a favorite piece of mine. It’s based on a great Antonioni film and is one of those rare work of complete fiction in this blog and at those collage of images I can stare for minutes! It had a setting, rather an important historical one: the way my metropolis is expanding and invading the rural hinterlands. It is an erotica, but it had political subtexts and it ended like this
When I am watching your face being flushed with desire, peeping into those skins which I was so eager to see, touching you there where I always yearned to touch…I know I am grappling the surfaces, the cloths of your soul and can never enter those dungeons of yours where feelings are cajoling thoughts…I was being overwhelmed with sentiments and tears that these will end faster ’cause we are kids afraid under the open sky which is a metropolis looming large over the countryside, that we might not have our time again, that touching you there always bears the shadow of lifting away my body from yours, that bodies meet to part again. But you are there girl, under the clouds and the sky…living to the lees few moments of your day when your body is your mind! Immeasurable floods of thoughts swarming your mind’s sky…
The Boy inside me »
This was…very, very personal; but still based on another famous Nouvelle Vague film. Now I smile when I read it…
Believe me, you always accused me of pampering him, but I am tired of him! I abhor him, his obstinate silence of not growing up, his arrogance of not coping up, his systematic evaporation of all cuteness which would have redeemed him, the hints of pimples in his cheeks renders him unsuitable of any affection. I watch him, he looks hungry. But when he watches me contemplating him, he gathers up a poise, a dumbness, a gait, a glance which provokes a slap hard to restrain. An wriggling unease in my torso thrusts me towards finding out an excuse to do it: slap him right and left after offering a choice of any one. But okay, I turn away my eyes because a slap must never search out a miscreant, the other way round is preferable.
A Day in the Life »
I liked this one too! A post you are supposed to read along with the Beatles song provided. It was haunted with a teardrop following a kiss-in-the-screen…
I was troubled when someone again brought the issue of bullets and holes and body-and-hole counts. Someone said that my blog is the most blatant instance of narcissism: I have merely used politics months ago to draw attention to my self-centered writings. I hate discussing my blog in my office. As the sun climbed down the sky I was worried that my phone might ring and I am not in a position to speak. You might phone me and ask me if I am enjoying the separation. She might phone me and ask why am I not letting her love me since I did let you throughout these years and you didn’t deserve it and she deserves it. “Why are you not allowing me/did you not allow me to take care of you?” both of you might ask and believe me, though I try to hide it from my colleagues, my students and all those beautiful eyes, I feel like screaming into most insecure tears under the sky that I don’t know, I never had the answers, I never will answer even if I come across the truth of that question. It only hurts that both of you are crying bitter in this hazy afternoon and Sylvia Bataille turned her tear-drenched face towards me last night.
About Pierrotting »
Another aborted beginning. Don’t read it if you hate rambling long thoughts-aloud to strange references… I thought of writing a novel on a favorite French Nouvelle Vague character. I never wrote it, but here were some ambitious sketches… There is also another index to few more posts here (featuring an affectionate farewell to yours truly by that man whom I miss - Paul Knopfler - who called me “Pierrot”). Darn Paul! Things are really making me nostalgic about months a year ago!
I gather meanings, I collect words. Sitting by the water when I am trying to light a cigarrette in the breeze, this madman visits me in this place. I pay him a coin, he offers me a word. These days he offers me one even if I lack changes. I know it is a word which I have dropped few hours ago in another street and never knew that I have lost it. Tossing the word, I discover that a new meaning is there on the flip-side of it. Or, it is not exactly a new meaning always; I never knew it had a meaning afterall, or I have actually lost my dictionary, or I have forgot that words have meanings at all. I know words have their use-values, or their exchange-values. I use them each day to squeeze out their utilities or to buy things in exchange, but only when this madman gives them back to me I understand that they also have “meanings”.
