http://www.caravanmagazine.in/

The Caravan Magazine
A Journal of Politics and Culture

In 1940, when the entire Indian subcontinent was rising in the independence struggle against the British rule, the late Mr. Vishva Nath, the founder of "Delhi Press", launched The Caravan. With its nuanced political and literary journalism, The Caravan became, in many ways, the cradle of development for English magazine journalism in India. It inspired and engaged more than three generations of political, academic and social thinkers in India, and carved a special space for itself as the magazine for intellectuals and activists.

In 1988, The Caravan was renamed as Alive, a magazine that continues to be published today. Over the years, "Delhi Press" has become the largest magazine publishing house in the country. Today we publish 31 magazines in nine languages, including popular titles like Woman's Era, Grihshobha, Sarita, Saras Salil and Champak.

The Caravan is still fondly remembered in the senior intellectual circles of the country. The magazine has now been re-launched with the same journalistic spirit of our first publication, and as a magazine dedicated to narrative journalism.

Goodbye to Ballimaran
By NABINA DAS

I’ve heard about riled up days that despised names of verses
they preferred riding set-jaw jeeps over the back of old town Dilli
earlier than the rooster, stopping for certain numbered doors

Possibly, those sweaty days turned swear words into Molotovs
charred down bamboo screens after summer’s whimsical rain
left a few blackened posts under roofs where couplets had lived

Possibly I imagined my footsteps would precede yours there
even now, waiting, a pastured horse munching tender rhymes
your leftover half-ghazals, their florid maktas, for this was love

Didn’t Ghalib live here? My rickshaw man pedaled and smiled:
He bought his quarter peg here every evening, walked from there!
No wonder, I imagined your beard hair on the banister, wind-tangled

If you still exhaled behind that cindered verandah I would not know
holding broken bangles, pieces of a departed love, post intermission —
Alvida, you must’ve said in a sad refrain, adding in English, “So long.”

Opposites

http://maryannemoll.blogspot.com/

Sensibilities 

An attempt to make sense of things in a random universe, one Friday at a time.
Through a magnifying glass, brightly.

  
Name: Maryanne Moll
Location: Philippines

Opposites

You to me are a battle of flavors,
like orange and chocolate,
like cucumber and tofu.
When you kiss me my tongue burns
with the quarrel of purple and yellow,
like the fried ice cream you gave me,
a reticent betrayal of depth by light.

Old key, new key 

 

This key, printed with yellow flowers and green leaves on a blue background, used to belong to the man in my life. It is a key to the downstairs entrance to my apartment. I took it away from him before I left Baguio last week.

This floral key does not work anymore, because my landlady had the lock changed recently, the same day a neighbor in the building reported that she had been held up at knife-point, and her bag, which contained her keys, had been taken. (My neighbor is fine now, although, I assume, cellphone-less and credit card-less for the moment.)

Of course my man now has a copy of the new key, although I wasn’t able to find a floral design for him before I went to visit him in Baguio. What he has now is an ultra-light alloy colored a strange orange-y gold, with a matte finish. I chose the most conspicuous-looking key template I could find, so he can quickly distinguish it from all the other shiny steel Yale keys that he has, keys to his numerous places of habitat – his quarters at the brigade, his office drawers, his house keys in Baguio and in La Trinidad, Benguet, his locker keys in school.

My own copy of the old key, on the other hand, has always been the ordinary silver Yale key that was given to me by the caretaker when I first signed the apartment’s lease contract. When the caretaker gave me the new key he asked for the old one back, and I noticed how worn the old key looked, with the patina already showing in the corners, and with the formerly sharp edges now smoothed out after over three years of use. How many times has that key locked and unlocked the downstairs entrance? Since my days are so irregular – some days I just stay in, some days I don’t go home, some days I’m in and out of the building – it’s hard to tell. On the average, I would say that the combined locking and unlocking of the downstairs entrance would most probably amount to more than 7,000 times a year, which totals to over 21,000 times from day one of my stay until now. That’s a lot of use for a key!

 

The floral key, on the other hand, had not yet been used as much. After all, my man came into my life only this summer. And regardless of the fact that the floral key had also been held by a different man from further back into the past, the floral key had always been just a duplicate, a side key, a cute reassurance that someone will come into my life and hold that key in his hands whenever he wants to be with me.

Furthermore, since the floral key is a signifier of the kind of simple and limited reality that I have in my relationship, it thus does not deal with the nitty-gritties of my apartment that would require its holder to go in and out of the building several times a day, like taking out the trash, or dropping off the laundry, or letting the cleaners in and out once a month, or running to the store to shop for supplies or groceries, or to go to the landlady’s office to pay the rent and other bills. The purpose of the floral key is to simply look conspicuously feminine within the secret folds of a male wallet, a reminder of my purpose in its holder’s life: the light, sunny, prettifying fixture. Which is what should be, I think. Like me, the floral key is an occasional thing, a part of reality but not the entire reality, but is a critical element to hold in a man's hands when the need arises. It might not always see the light, might not even be kept in a proper keychain, but it is always there when needed, a promise of unconditional companionship and acceptance.

Lest I portray my man to be negligent, let me say that his holding of the key proves his power and reliability. A key inherently carries reponsibilities with it, and duties that have to be rendered to the occupants of the space that the key secures. In this sense, all keys are the same. My silver Yale key requires me to pay the rent and take out the trash; his floral key requires him to treat me with tenderness. But the sameness ends here, and where the sameness ends, the beautiful, chaotic, mad, turbulent, healing, reassuring, strengthening, challenging, inconvenient, and uplifting difference begins.

The floral key is just one of two keys that lead to my sanctuary; the holder of the floral key still has to knock on my door, to which he doesn't have the key. But still, the hand that used to hold the floral key – which now, temporarily, holds a strange orange-y gold key with a matte finish while I have yet to find another floral key template for him – is no insignificant hand. He opens the first entrance, I open the last one. After these two equally important unlockings, together we lock the door behind us to create our own microcosm in which there is no more need for keys.

http://www.midnighteye.com/

Midnight Eye - The latest and best in Japanese cinema -
interviews, features, film reviews, book reviews, calendar of events and more... -

Norwegian Wood

The story of how Haruki Murakami's much-loved novel "Norwegian Wood" made it to the screen is almost a movie in itself. Vietnamese-French director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo) first approached producer Shinji Ogawa four years ago and expressed his desire to direct the film. Ogawa sent a letter to Murakami, who was initially wary but gradually warmed to the idea. Over the course of four years Tran wrote the screenplay in French and had it translated into English (it was this English version that he used in communicating with Murakami). It was then translated into Japanese, and Tran proceeded to direct a film in a language he doesn't speak. At a press conference he argued that this was actually an advantage, because "when you can't understand the words you can tell immediately if a scene is bad, and when you see that it's good you want to make it even better."

Fans of Tran will immediately recognize the film as his: "Norwegian Wood" is a story told in textures and colors. The smooth flesh of young men and young women, the brightly geometrical patterns of 1960s fashion, sun gleaming through colored glass windows and filtered through cigarette smoke. There are very few wide shots in the film, creating an intimate atmosphere of warm interiors-cabins in the woods, cramped dorm rooms, funky Tokyo apartments, record shops, stylish bars. "Norwegian Wood" seduces immediately on visuals alone.

The story concerns three college student friends in 1960s Japan. Naoko (Kikuchi) and Kizuki (Kora) have grown up together and have been a couple since they were in junior high school. Kizuki's best friend Watanabe (Matsuyama) accompanies them everywhere. When Kizuki suddenly commits suicide, the already fragile Naoko begins to fall apart. Having been secretly in love with Naoko for years, Watanabe clings to her even as it becomes clear that she cannot function in the real world, retreating to a sanatorium / commune deep in the mountains. When a free-spirited girl named Midori (Mizuhara, in a remarkable debut) comes into Watanabe's life, he is forced to choose between his attachment to a fading Naoko and a life lived in the present.

Murakami's story and Tran's film both evoke a very specific place and moment - Tokyo in the 1960s, a time of passionate student protests and a period of transition, when the embrace of free love and a lifestyle unburdened by rules actually seemed possible to many college students (who would, for the most part, ultimately graduate to join major corporations and abandon their ideals). The film's characters seem to stand at the cusp of a better and brighter future, but the pain of the past continually comes back to haunt them. This juxtaposition of a world of bright colors, casual sex, and endless possibilities with a world of unexplained death and loss is a poignant love letter to youth and rebellion.

The performances are all top-notch. As Midori, Kiko Mizuhara manages to convey an amazing amount of information with only a slow, toothless smile-the character often comes across as grating in the novel, but in the film she seems to light up every scene she's in. Kikuchi conveys Naoko's fragility without making her merely an object of pity. The love scenes between various characters are raw and real, with sex standing in (often painfully) for the emotional connections they were never able to forge. When so many young Japanese actors in dramatic films frequently resort to emoting and fake crying, or are forced into love scenes that seem impossibly contrived, it's refreshing to see a group of performances that feel natural and effortless.

Some have commented that the film is far too serious - Murakami's novel had a lot of funny dialogue, much of which has been removed. Murakami purists may also take issue with the more superficial treatment of some of the story's relationships. Ultimately, though, the changes are for the better. Murakami novels are known for characters that spend an inordinate amount of time talking about themselves, but the film manages to convey their thoughts more effectively with silence and strong acting.

At its most basic level, Murakami's novel is pure melodrama. Translator Jay Rubin comments that those who had first read the author's "cool, fragmented, American-flavored narratives on mysterious sheep and disappearing elephants" were disappointed to discover that "Norwegian Wood" was "just a love story." Indeed, in a less capable director and screenwriter's hands the result could have been just another over-the-top story of young love and loss. But Tran Anh Hung takes the material and elevates it to something sublime, turning a much-loved but fairly conventional story into a work of art.

http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/

Nostalghia.com - An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site

Tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky, featuring photographs, diaries, and quotes

 

 

It is a well-known fact that "The Tarkovsky Diaries" (Martyrolog) differ significantly between various language editions. His diaries are voluminous indeed and his family has been — understandably enough — reluctant to release it all. Nevertheless, with the passing of time, more and more has become available, and subsequent editions have contained increasing levels of detail. The "Calcutta Edition" is generally considered the best English edition of Martyrolog, but the "French Edition" has for a long time been the most complete in terms of content. 

 

The excerpts are taken from the Polish version of Martyrolog, until recently the most complete edition. Sponsored by the Polish Academy of Sciences, and edited by Dr. Seweryn Kusmierczyk of the Dept. of Polish Literature, Warsaw University, this 1998 publication contains detail heretofore inaccessible to the Tarkovsky scholar. During a visit to Tarkovsky's family in Italy several years ago, Dr. Kusmierczyk was given access to many documents that had belonged to the late Tarkovsky. The resulting Polish-language publications, of which the Diaries (Dzienniki) is one, shed much new light on Tarkovsky's creative process, how he worked with others, and what his opinions were on other directors, actors, movies, etc. 

Mirror, mirror
The cinematic universe of Andrei Tarkovsky

---

MIRROR: the eye is encouraged to go deeper into the multi-layered images, which give the impression that the detail they contain is inexhaustible. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD: watching this film is like sharing in a dream being dreamed by the material world itself.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, it’s said that the mysterious Zone that the protagonists explore is in a constant state of change. Tarkovsky’s cinematic universe is in the same condition. Film, for him, is a way of imprinting change. He is concerned with processes: fire, water flowing, the sun rising behind a farmhouse (in an incredible shot in Nostalghia), microcosms that are decaying but not dead (since matter is constantly being stirred by breezes or by the impulses that cause water to flow, and since out of the decay, life will come).

That Tarkovsky’s films themselves constitute an organic whole is apparent, and this will be confirmed by the MFA’s retrospective of all seven and one half of them. (The half is the medium-length The Steamroller and the Violin, the director’s 1960 diploma film) It’s pointless to warn viewers about the alleged slowness of these works, or about their refusal to make any concessions whatever to the supposed requirement that a movie should entertain. Tarkovsky’s films are foremost among films that make their own way of dwelling within time a primary preoccupation; they demand a level of attention far beyond that needed for the task of being entertained by commercial cinema, and they repay this attention with their complexity, precision, and depth.
 
Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Tarkovsky’s first feature, provides an access to things and sounds that seems unmediated: watching the film is like sharing in a dream being dreamed by the material world itself. Some of the plainest, most concrete images in the film — shots of animals, for instance — occur in dream sequences, whereas the sequence in which history enters the film most forcefully — the sequence of the war’s end — is filmed as if it were a dream.

In Tarkovsky’s later works, dream and reality fuse. Both Solaris (1972) and Nostalghia (1983) end with objective hallucinations in which the heroes’ memories find concrete realization. The whole of Mirror (1974) is an extended act of remembering, the building of a personal myth with several levels (each Tarkovsky film is like a house or a landscape that’s familiar but different each time you visit it), in which remembered experiences, recounted incidents, dreams, poems (those of the filmmaker’s father, Arseniy Tarkovsky), and historical events reflect one another.

Mirror is the farthest Tarkovsky went in dissolving narrative. The war film Ivan, like the medieval panorama Andrei Rublev (1966), is structured in extended episodes that tell a linear story obliquely (since the episodes are at varying distances from the main story). In Solaris, key narrative events are elided; the movement of the film is keyed to changes in consciousness, perception, and atmosphere. Stalker (1979), with its simple journey structure, is a largely " linear " film, but one in which whatever belongs to narrative is beside the point. Here and in Nostalghia, storytelling is submerged in a wealth of detail, the data of consciousness: movements, waiting, recollections.

All Tarkovsky’s films are nostalgic: they view the world as in danger of being lost, and they see it from the point of view of someone striving to hold onto it. The heightened awareness of aural and visual detail in his work needs to be seen in relation to this emotional imperative. The melancholy opening of Solaris is characteristic: the hero wanders alone by the lake near his father’s house, taking leave of Earth, perhaps for the last time, before his trip to the planet Solaris. The optimism of the film lies in the affirmation that Earth can always be, and is always being, created by the human spirit: the struggle to remain human (or, in the case of the simulacrum Harey, to become human) gives value to existence under the most hostile conditions.

In Stalker, Tarkovsky returns to the theme of Solaris, this time abandoning the science-fiction trappings in which he seems to have been only mildly interested and that he regarded as a distraction from the essence of the story. He delegates to the dialogue the full responsibility of conveying the science-fiction premise; he leaves the decor (which he designed himself) free to represent a world that’s scarcely a stylization of late-1970s Soviet reality (the film was shot on location in the Estonian capital of Tallinn and in the Mosfilm studio in Moscow). The world of Stalker is fully real and present, and though the time of the narrative is shifted, we know, into the future (since no such disaster as that which has created " the Zone " has yet happened), the shift required to believe in the film’s world is a lateral rather than a forward one, since the disaster has already happened in potential and needs no particular actualizations to become real (not that these are lacking: Nagasaki 1945, Hiroshima 1945, Chornobyl 1986 — this last seven years after the release of Stalker, and eight months before Tarkovsky’s death).

The imaginative sidestep of Stalker is the same move made in Tarkovsky’s other films, which are about life lived alongside history, its effort and endurance, the creating and reviving of purely personal meanings, the formation and disintegration of families and small communities. The re-creation of medieval life in the vast fresco of Andrei Rublev is a great achievement, the more so since it’s linked so thoroughly to a personal adventure that is also the journey of the human spirit: only through the hero’s experience of earthly suffering, fear, and hope can his art have meaning. Even more moving is Tarkovsky’s rendering of 20th-century history in Mirror, with its affirmation of memory as a vital principle and its sense of the machinery of history at work beyond the sphere of the film’s characters, who try to avoid getting squashed by it (a point made in the tremendous sequence in the printing shop, which evokes the daily experience of the Stalin era).

 

The central problem of Stalker is the central problem of all Tarkovsky’s films, but stated explicitly for the first time: the possibility of a single person’s taking responsibility for all humanity. Stalker postpones a decision on this question. In his next two films (which were also his last two), Tarkovsky answers it in the affirmative. In Nostalghia, the passage of a man carrying a lit candle across a drained pool is supposed to save and give meaning to the world. In The Sacrifice (1986), nuclear war is miraculously avoided by one man’s private decision, before God, to give up everything he has and fall silent.

The Sacrifice is a a highly personal work that must occupy a key place among Tarkovsky’s films for anyone interested in them as spiritual autobiography, but it seems to me almost suffocating in its perfection and troubling both in its endorsement of the paternalism of the hero’s sacrifice and in its portrayal of women as hysterical or childlike (a tendency already obvious in Rublev, Solaris, and Nostalghia). Yet it has two of Tarkovsky’s greatest shots: the magnificent long take at the beginning of the film, and the long take of the burning house near the end.
Such shots are representative of the filmmaker’s insistence on extending the image in all directions: up (as at the beginning of Ivan’s Childhood and the end of The Sacrifice), sideways, down. Camera movements gradually unfold spaces, revealing unexpected distances (Andrei Rublev). In Mirror, the main movement is inward, toward the past, and it’s complemented by a movement back and out (emphasized by the winds that repeatedly come out of the landscape, toward the camera); in Nostalghia and, especially, The Sacrifice, sweeping lateral tracking shots emphasize the horizontality of spaces that resemble stages, suggesting a need to dramatize inner states.

Tarkovsky’s camera is intent on testing the reality of the people and the things it photographs, a reality that for him is confirmed by imperfections, dirt, signs of age and decay (in Solaris, all the characters have scars; the universe of Stalker is one of gorgeous wreckage, decomposition, flooded interiors). Mirror and Stalker are films of astonishing density: the eye is encouraged to go deeper into the multi-layered images, which give the impression that the detail they contain is inexhaustible.

The Lawless

Elusive Lucidity

http://elusivelucidity.blogspot.com/

The Lawless

If you have not read Andy Rector's beautiful, compelling reflections from a few years back on Joseph Losey's The Lawless, you should do so.  (This work is available to stream on Netflix now, at least in the US.  It's not very long, and it is very good.)  Losey's film is in many ways similar to the roughly contemporaneous Ace in the Hole (also set out West, in the sticks), but while it is less ambitious than Wilder's excellent film, The Lawless seems deeper and more cohesively critical in some ways.  I will springboard from Andy's comments into some of my own notes.

-The rigorous framing of the police who are only rhetorically good; they let real brutality and distortion happen always.

A representational strategy the film employs: most of its cops are presumably "decent folk," and The Lawless depicts them early on as being a number of reasonable individuals with a bad apple or two in the bunch.  Intriguingly, this representation mirrors the function of the police themselves in the social body depicted, i.e., superficially benign (and indeed perhaps benign almost to a man), but systematically complicit with the mob lawlessness which seeks to enact revenge upon Paul (Lalo Rios) - an imperfect kid caught in a bind.  The effect of this is a beautiful, subtle perversion of the general model, which valorizes individualism and thus individualized action, causation, culpability, etc.  The Lawless grants as much but contextualizes it - "just doing my job."

-The cut from Lalo Rios taking a shower outdoors to the white privileged kid taking a shower in a comfortable bathroom.

We see the latter character first in silhouette, I believe.  Paul though is silhouetted later in the film, at the police station, after they've taken his fingerprints at a desk - and in the same shot, courtesy of shadows on the wall, we see his mug shot being taken.

-The father of the privileged kid as well-meaning only insofar as his wallet goes (shoring up the system in the process)

Though I do think the film positions his behavior as sincere - perhaps he's a so-called "liberal communist" avant la lettre?  The shoring up of the system is not laid at the feet of his supposed character fault, but rather at the incongruity of his liberalism toward a good cause when it fails to link up with the proper destructive/reconstructive mechanisms against the system.  Again and again, The Lawless outlines individualism's dead ends - despite all manner of faith & good works ...

-The long (dare I day Straubian) pan across the quarry where Rios is being hunting for something he didn't do - beginning on the back of the farmers head and going in the opposite direction from the idealistic newspaper man trying to find Rios before the police do - a dialectic shot if there ever was one.

I am constantly impressed again with the flexibility and strength of classical Hollywood cinema - the malleability of its codes and the way that these codes could be applied to ends highly antithetical to what is generally presumed to be Hollywood's product.  (This presumption may be correct in everything except its range across the films themselves.)

-The newspaper man's gestus. Ciment says he's a positivist Capra hero who realizes he is wrong. His stopping to admire the smell of burning leaves in October (representing nostalgia for small town America) in contrast with marred human relations all around him.

And again, I would stress here that the film does not dwell on the individualist wrongness of this "positivist Capra hero" (an apt description).  Burning leaves in October - an uncontroversial existence? - these aren't illicit desires in themselves.  It is the use of these desires in a context which renders them as a screen against more pressing, ultimately damaging concerns which The Lawless criticizes.

-The very Brechtian gesture of the match that the newspaper man lights for the callous and sensational newspaper woman's cigarette as she dictates lies to her paper, saying that Rios had no "remorse" in his eyes, all she could see was "cruelty". This gesture of the newspaper-man's is in contradiction to his moral position in the scene prior. The lighting of the match is an action showing that the newspaper man has not put into action his consciousness of complicity (which the film is so good at laying bare,media/career wise) and it's like the opposite of the fish-wrapping scene in NOT RECONCILED (Straub) where Schrella REFUSES to dine with a still-fascist democrat by having his lunch wrapped up and leaving.

Yes, this is a brilliant scene - in part for how low-key it is, demonstrating something about Larry's "character psychology" but also of political consciousness in general, the way it is so quickly effaced or repurposed into uselessness in the face of social niceties.  Though we do live in an age when manners seem to matter far too little, their convenience as an occasional shield to political (i.e., politicized) interpersonal confrontation is still to prevalent a function.

-Gail Russell's strong moral/political-bearing character. Such a character is not unconventional to Hollywood films of the time but hers stands out in performance and absolute clarity of the political lines she demarcates. Russell's actual personal/professional life during the shooting of LAWLESS is even more devastating, and constitutes a story worth looking into

She's amazing in the film.  Her character does fall into a certain line of anglicized Hollywood tradition - a romantic interest; pale eyes - but she's still a superb character, and her existence is notable for the perhaps shocking (shocking!) presumption that there were women who were politically active, knowledgeable, committed, etc.  (Not simply "won over" because their boyfriends blazed a trail.)

Know that THE LAWLESS is a film directed by a man who studied Fritz Lang and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Know that an argument could be made for it as a Marxist film, made within Hollywood, and after the HUAC purges no less (courage). That its screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (sometimes credited as Geoffrey Homes) was "greylisted" and yet fought for his blacklisted comrades. Somehow Losey went on to make several more politically advanced films within Hollywood, THE PROWLER and a remake of M among them. And know that you must track it down...

... and tracking it down, thanks to Netflix, is very easy.  Just as it was possible - not easy, but possible - make films like The Lawless in classical Hollywood, the system allows for the regurgitation of yesterday's politically critical products.  (The Lawless is less an A-list film than V for Vendetta or Children of Men, but its politics are far better.)

With THE LAWLESS's politics as a film intact, through his account we can already see some irreversible degradations that went on in industrial Hollywood. If THE LAWLESS is a product of a group of people who represent something that has been lost in the US today (Losey, springing from the same lively and progressive artistic/cultural atmosphere as Orson Welles that once existed in Winconsin early in the 20th century; and Daniel Mainwaring, springing from an honest journalistic tradition, now almost completely gone, where it remains it is ghettoized), and who in all sincerity tried to expose the rottenness of certain aspects of America, we mustn't forget that THE LAWLESS was still a product.

My Life in Movies

http://lunar-circuitry.net/wordpress/

My Life in Movies is a collection of thoughts and impressions by A.R. While ostensibly a film blog, I also cover art and literature when the mood strikes me. There is no specific subject or theme to this blog, though there are recurring obsessions, such as film noir, psychological horror, and cinema as contemplation. Film, for me, is just another art form, one that is ideal for conveying rich internal realities. My Life in Movies is driven by personal impressions and recurrent obsessions, not qualitative “reviews” as such (though entries can be used as such, if you like). There are many movie blogs out there, but this one is mine.

About the Author
I am an artist, illustrator, writer, and sometimes-designer residing in a little bungalow in Kansas City, MO with a boyfriend, dog, and cat. Lunar-Circuitry houses my online portfolio of art, illustration, fiction, and poetry.

Recurrent Obsessions

Cinema: film noir, silent films, German Expressionism, Golden Hollywood, New Wave Cinema, psychological horror, intelligent science/speculative fiction, cinema as contemplation, art films, foreign films (primarily French, German, Eastern European, and Japanese), stop motion animation, black and white films, color and composition as symbol.

Art: the sublime; the grotesque; representational, figural, and narrative art; creation of surreal or fantastic space and environments in photography; photography as drawing based medium; Surrealism, magic realism, fantastical realism, and variants; visionary, outsider, and folk art; German and Austrian Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism; Symbolism and Aesthicism (”art for art’s sake”); Northern Renaissance and Baroque Art.

Literature: the grotesque, magical, fantastic, or weird; speculative fiction (SF); early Modernism; French symbolism; Southern Gothic fiction (anything vaguely Gothic); psychological horror; lyrical prose.

Further: Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Camille Paglia, psychology, sociology, anthropology, gnosticism, mysticism, Buddhism, comparative religious study.

Girish Shambu's Blog on Cinema

http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/

A quick note: Blogger is forcing me to migrate to a new setup. It will likely happen within the next week or two. If the website experiences any convulsions or seizures, you'll know why! I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it all goes well.

* * *
 

Teaching a film class for the first time has meant that I've been watching the assigned films with an extra-fine toothcomb. Before the semester started, I thought I knew these films intimately. But I've been constantly surprised by new and previously unsuspected wrinkles and folds in, for example, Marnie, Safe, or The Gleaners and I.

I've resurrected the practice of maintaining a film journal, and have been keeping notes on all the films I see, not just the ones for class. Particularly, I've been recording "small, striking moments" - those that arrest you (without always signaling their full import right away) but fly out of your head in a few weeks if you don't consciously capture them in writing. I'm defining these moments broadly: they may have to do with performance, or gesture, or movement, or camerawork, or editing, or any number of things. These moments have also proved valuable in class, providing new and unexpected 'angles of entry' in order to talk or write about a film.

~ Ultra Violet ~ Indian Feminists Unplugged

http://ultraviolet.in/

 

About UV
 

Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists.
 

It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information (not necessarily in the order). It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country – or around the world – are saying.

Ultra Violet does not represent any school, wave, organization, institution or categorization. We do not belong in a box. We do not huddle together in a tank. We do not fly in formation like a flock of geese. We are all free people, approaching feminism from different locations, backgrounds and personalities. The opinions and views expressed here are those of individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of other contributors.

Image: Portrait by Nathan Altman of Anna Akhmatova

Ultra Violet features a community of young feminists blogging on the various issues, challenges, and triumphs that affect women in India today. It is an initiative by Hengasara Hakkina Sangha, a women’s rights organization in Bangalore, India, which works in the areas of gender, law and rights. Women experience their lives from multiple locations and there are many different feminisms. Ultra Violet provides a place to explore and understand the ways in which young women in India are challenging, negotiating and transforming unequal power structures. It is also a space to celebrate women’s histories, wisdom, creativity, laughter and love for life.

About the Name
Violet is the colour of feminism. We wanted to be very clear that this is a feminist blog and not ‘just another space for women’. Feminism is a much misunderstood and maligned word. Over the years, its true meaning — the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of sexual equality — has been distorted and defiled by many. This blog is both a reclaiming of the term and a clarification of what it means to us, today.
Ultra Violet, if one takes the slangy definition of ‘ultra’, means extremely violet. But ultraviolet also refers to what is situated beyond the visible spectrum. This blog is also an attempt to explore such regions of shadowed knowledge and understanding.

Comments Policy

You’re welcome to leave long, thoughtful comments. You’re welcome to leave multiple comments. Please do not, however, leave lengthy articles or self-promotional stuff in the comments space. UV is meant to be a safe space for feminists and women who want to know more about feminism. While divergent viewpoints are welcome, please keep the tone respectful. Personal attacks, offensive language and hate speech are not welcome. Misogynist, casteist, communal, homophobic, transphobic and anti-feminist articles or comments will be summarily rejected or deleted. The above when couched in clever language or sophistry will still be rejected or deleted.

Ownership and Copyright

All posts at Ultra Violet belong to the individual authors / contributors. They own all rights to these posts and are free to publish them wherever else they wish to. If you want to use an article that has been posted here, you will need to contact the author for permission. You can write to editor[at]ultraviolet.in and I’ll be happy to help you with the contact details.

Under The Glass

By Anita Sivakumaran

The doctor pointed down at the photos
Under the glass of her tabletop.
The trapped lives pushed up
through the honey light glaze,
tapped me on the shoulder.
Husband, two sons: pride and joy.

Their tapping was a nail knocking on my numb head.
The doctor, her deep red sari and bindi
Proclaiming fertility, preserving matrimony,
Was talking me out of an abortion,
Was presenting to me, in words and pictures,
A future I could have. Her life could be mine.

Earlier, she had insisted on showing me a screen:
The primordial murk out of which all life sprang.
‘Look, the dot,’ she pointed. ‘There,’ she flourished,
As if at her own creation.
A god showing off. A stick holding Brahma.
A swirl of black and white is all I saw.
And all were dots, swirling,
Between my ears, and in my throat.

‘The dot is the baby. The dot is the baby,’ she kept saying.
But I drew a blank for baby.
A blank in which I settled, and thought
About small, needful things:
An exam that loomed,
toast and contact lens, and laundry, and pens.

The doctor, staring defeat in the eye, wouldn’t meet mine.
And I asked for the small, needful thing.
I asked for those little everyday sips of poison
That make a poison woman.
Clasping her palms, she said to the wall,
‘Abstinence is the best contraception until marriage.
After marriage, one can plan, give intervals.’
‘Intervals?’ I said.
‘Between babies,’ she said.
I could hear the sob catch her throat.

Then she handed me to another, less fastidious, lady doctor,
Who wrote me a prescription without comment.

About the Author

Anita Sivakumaran grew up in Madras and now lives in London. She has published short stories in Riptide Journal Volumes 4 and 6 (forthcoming) and is writing a collection of poems about the urban woman’s experiences in India.

Haircut
By Sumana Roy

He always snips off ends. My tranquil ends,
fins deep asleep. Hair is frond. Hair is leech.
Hair is auction. Hair is lintel. Hair is traffic,
sigh, umbrella butt. Gaya, Kashi, Vrindavan.
Coconut-flesh scalps, a manifesto. “Boy’s cut.”

He always snips off ends. Antennae
of lust, tendrils of moist defeat. Hair is vial.
Lady Godiva. Hair is oyster, hiding nudity. Scissors
– suspicion’s toolkit. Sita, Vedavati. Sharpness
a male moral – “Haircut’s our last ahimsa art”.

He always snips off ends. Kesh is a congested
city. 1984, shears, rape of the lock. Hair is pilot.
Haircut is amputation, tattoos on memory. Indira.
Taslima. Bun’s a burqa, beni a beauty of bridges. Bob,
Bang, Blunt. Hair burns, without waste, like a vowel.

He always snips off ends. Hair is shame’s prosody.
Hair is sex – a woman’s mistake. Hair is hotel. Chemo,
autumn, venetian blinds. Hair loss is Sibyl’s prophecy.
Hair is habit. Hair is rosary. Hair is vomit. Hair fall is debt.
Comb turns into procrastination. Haircut to humility.

About the Author
Sumana Roy’s first novel, "Love in the Chicken’s Neck", was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. She’s working on a collection of stories about clothes, tentatively titled SML. She’d like to work harder on growing her hair.

http://pratilipi.in/

Pratilipi is (for the time being) a completely non-commercial magazine running on the editors’ investments and on the works of like-minded contributors.

It is an ‘online’ magazine for two reasons:

1. An online magazine can be more ‘open’ in terms of eccentricities of form etc. The writers and the editors can really work and interact with a text; it can be edited and re-edited at any time; its form can change by the minute (although we do not intend to do that).

2. A printed, bound magazine needs the sort of resources that we do not (as yet) have nor do we (as yet) know the ways that lead to such resources.

Pratilipi is (wants to be) a bilingual / multilingual, multiscript magazine that provides a space for conversation / debate between diverse sorts of writing and writers.

Pratilipi forbids itself nothing – except taking on a representational role on the web or catering to such expectations – and, hopefully, never will.

THE DISTANCE OF A TEMPLE BELL

By Sharanya Manivannan

 

How easy to imagine that this is all
that lies between us –
the dirt road and
the distance of a temple bell.
I am sitting on the tiled porch and
waiting to see you stroll up the path at
twilight, your fingers full of flowers
little globe amaranths, the marigolds
in your palms like small crushed sunsets
watching you pause to run your slippered foot
over a spray of mimosa, cross the street
amidst the rumble of cows passing by
the low gate, a laugh in your eyes I can see
from all the way here –
        how I love you,
in the simple indigenous way in which
things emerge from this arable daily.
I rise and strike a match. The night has fallen
and with it has come the coda of cicadas. If ever you
want to find your way here, know that in every
window of this house, a lantern burns all night.
And there is a woman wrapped in a shawl
waiting for you at its door, listening to the
roosting owls in the big pepper-vined tree
aching with the thought of when life
was more than the sum of its mirages,
and the memory of rain in an open courtyard,
the tendril of basil at its heart.

DOORWAY

By Sharanya Manivannan

 

There is no denouement for a hunger
not guided by any map I can draw for you.

Would it be enough to ask if you would
meet me there – in the shade of the
tamarind tree, or on that bench beleaguered
by the confetti of bougainvillea petals?
There are other places too – by the tank
of the forgotten temple, come to me, find me
by the light of the new moon,
or I can wait, if you like, in the upstairs room
you left unlit, by the rusted swing, on the
eastern shadow of our secret tree.
O meet me at the intersection between
my longing and your leaving, I’m there most
every other night. Meet me beside the river
that wore away its name, by the gilt-edged
boundary of my dream of bleached peacocks.
In your world, the atlases must be precise,
geometric wonders. My coordinates were
never recorded.
Still, there is a sweet afternoon,
somewhere, when we sat on a porch
and spoke as though we were not
merely pilgrims, waiting, at a
moment of accidental confluence.
And time was a circular,
sinous thing, nothing ever lost,
nothing ever left ajar.
The orchestra of the wind and the leaves
and the scent of augured rain.
The echo of the swing of a door:
opening and shutting,
opening and shutting.

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