Culturazzi

Creative, Distinctive, and Stimulating: Paul Kline photography

Culturazzi — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:30:52 +0000

Paul Kline is an outstanding photographer from Washington DC, USA who has been in the photography profession for the past six years. Paul pursued a BS from Cornell University in Engineering and took up photography seriously when he went on to study at New York Institute of Photography.

“I enjoy photographing people the most. My approach to advertising photography is the same as documentary photography, in my advertising photography work I hire actors/models and place them in a realistic situation. I then stand back and document them. Working with people adds a dimension of uncertainty to photography. It’s great to watch people and catch a moment of emotion,” the remarkable photographer tells us.

Paul’s creative and stimulating photos have been displayed in several exhibitions and have been recognized with several awards including the International Color Awards – Photo Journalist of the Year Nominee 2009; PX3 Competition - Prix de la Photographie HM Paris 2008; Olympus & PDN’s VisionAge Contest, HM April 2008; and Popular Photography Magazine Photographer of the Year – Finalist, July 2006.

A collection of Paul’s terrific photographs can be seen below.

Paul’s current photography pack: Canon 5d Mark II. Lenses used frequently : 70-200mm L, 24-70 mmL, 100mm macro, 16-35mmL.

Note: (c) 2010 Paul Kline. The images are the sole property of the photographer, and should not be used for any purposes without the prior consent of the photographer.

More of Paul’s photography can be found on his website.

Shutter Island - Martin Scorsese

Daniel Montgomery — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:03:29 +0000

Shutter Island was shuffled from an intended fall 2009 release date to February 2010, which changed the its profile from Oscar-season prestige picture to a late-winter thriller with low expectations (a studio delaying a film is often a sign of a lack of confidence), but it has proven to be a sound business decision; though the film has met with generally positive reviews (62 on Metacritic, 67% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes), it nevertheless might have been regarded as a disappointment from Martin Scorsese and struggled to get traction during the crowded awards blitz. Now, the film is well on its way to a domestic gross of $100 million.

The irony of all this business of release schedules and box office receipts is that Shutter Island happens to be a great film, but will probably be remembered more as Scorsese’s genre piece than as a worthy addition to the director’s canon. A fair trade, I suppose. People are seeing it. A lot of them. That’s what matters.

But if it’s remembered as a mere potboiler, that truly would be a disservice. Emphasized in the advertising are spooks and scares and gotcha moments; it’s not a misleading characterization, per se, but it is a drastic oversimplification. The film has a richness of style, theme, and character that wouldn’t translate in ads — at least, not in the ads for a movie you’re trying to sell to a mass audience. Start to prattle on about metaphor, morality, and the nature of violence and you’ve lost them.

The film begins on a ferry carrying US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) to Shutter Island off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. The island is home to Ashecliff Hospital, a facility for the criminally insane, where patient Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) has disappeared without a trace.

Scorsese draws us into his vivid world immediately. We’re treated to a foreboding wide shot of the island followed by a closer, deep-focus image as the ferry approaches the dock. As Teddy and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) enter the hospital’s gates, the suspense is punched up by music that sounds like an action climax when we’ve barely begun the introduction, but that’s the only stylistic flaw I can think of.

The film is just about perfect as an evocation of atmosphere and suspense. Scorsese demonstrates impeccable technique, a triumph of style furthering substance. The cinematography by Robert Richardson uses high contrast in interior scenes, shining bright, glaring lights on his characters amidst dark settings that are full of great detail; the production designer is Dante Ferretti, in whose last film, Sweeney Todd, he also made a fully enveloping world to reflect a lead character’s deteriorating psyche. Visually, the film is madness made manifest, an illusory world of broken minds and unspeakable acts.

Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing evokes memories, first in tantalizing flashes of images yet to be understood, then in longer, exquisitely paced stretches where the bits and pieces begin to assemble themselves into mysterious dreams and hallucinations. Scorsese’s use of sound further enhances the effect; he knows precisely when to punctuate a scene with music or silence, and consider his use of striking matches as Teddy makes his way through a dangerous cell block — the aural snap and the bursts of light made me grip my chair a little tighter.

If Shutter Island were merely a mood piece, it would be good enough to recommend, but Laeta Kalogridis’s screenplay, based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, contains trenchant philosophical and psychological insights. The action is set not long after World War II; Teddy was a soldier who helped liberate Jews from the Dachau concentration camp. This is not simply backstory. What Teddy witnessed has changed him, and by extension changed us all. The island represents a primal reaction to the Holocaust, a schism of our fundamental understanding of the world. It overturned our beliefs of what mankind is capable of and left us floundering in a world of violence we cannot reconcile.

On Shutter Island, we find a mother capable of drowning her own children, a man who viciously murdered and disfigured his victim out of feelings of sexual inadequacy, and doctors who… what are they up to exactly? Are they performing grisly experiments? Creating sleeper agents? Are our institutions committing the same crimes committed by the Nazis? Paranoia overcomes us: How can any of us be innocent if any of us can be so terribly guilty?

The hospital warden, played in a brief but memorable performance by Ted Levine, is casually cynical. He believes violence is our nature, that when stripped of social order — law, religion, consequence — we would surely kill each other. Teddy vehemently disagrees, but he can’t be so sure anymore. The film closes on a line of dialogue I won’t reveal, but it’s a perfect summation of the film’s central conflict — not between Teddy and the hospital, but between our better selves and the demons we find within us.

Watch a trailer for the film here:

Mystic River - Dennis Lehane

Shubhajit Lahiri — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:11:53 +0000

“If you really want to know when innocence dies, just look these people in the eye”
- New York Times Book Review

Oftentimes the power of a book gets determined by the role played not just by its protagonists, but also by the place it is based on. Going by that dictum, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, which has at its forefront three devastatingly real characters as its principal protagonists, and where Boston, the author’s hometown and the city where the story is set, has become the proverbial fifth character, is a rousing success. That it is also an extremely engaging murder mystery tale, apart from being a top rate character study, only adds to its status as one of the most rewarding pieces of contemporary American fiction.

Published in 2001, the book, which won the prestigious Dilys Award in 2002, starts off with a flashback of sorts on one not-so-fine day in the year 1975 in the working class East Buckingham region of Boston. The blue collar nature of its residents forms a vital aspect of what the effects of the day ends up having on three kids growing up in that community. Sean Devine lives in the comparatively ‘upper class’ section of the Boston locality known as Point, while Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle reside in the seedier part of the neighbourhood known as the Flats. The three are playmates and hang out together. Yet, from the very outset, the class distinction at their residences defines their strangely impersonal friendships. Sean is smart and has a college-educated future ahead of him; Jimmy is brash, fearless and has trouble written all over him; Dave, who is raised by his single mother, is a boy of low-confidence who just tags along with his two companions trying to win them over with a charm that he does not have.

And then, all of a sudden, an ominous car smelling of apples stops in front of them with a Big Wolf and a Greasy Wolf in it posing as police officers. The former judges Dave as the easiest picking of the three, and intimidates him into hopping into the car. Dave gets into the car, and their lives change irrevocably forever. Though Dave manages to escape from the wolves four days later to the surprise and happiness of the community, their friendship of convenience gets broken right down the middle because somewhere deep down they all get to realise that this is not just one memory that they will have to carry for the rest of their lives, but that this episode will in more ways than one literally as well as figuratively shape their futures as to who they will be and what they will make out of their lives.

Flash-forward to present-day Boston, twenty-five years after that fateful day, and another not-so-fine day beckons the lives of the three, now grown-ups but still essentially boys in their own ways. Sean, not unexpectedly, has made the best out of life. He is a homicide detective employed with the Massachusetts State Police department, and is known for his ability to close cases with tremendous speed and regularity. But his professional success is counterbalanced with his broken personal life. His wife, the only woman he has and is capable of being in love, has left him, and consequently he took to alcohol and an increasingly destructive lifestyle, which he is on the path of recovering from, albeit with futility written all over his endeavour. Jimmy, true to his love for trouble and dare as a kid, never completed school, became a crook by his early teens and a notorious gang-leader by his late teens. He ended up serving time in a penitentiary, which contrary to what usually happens, reformed him, and he is now a family man with a loving wife and three doting kids – two from his present wife, and one, Katie, from his first wife who died when he was in prison. He thus leads a good life, running an honest shop, but with the potential for crime and violence very much running through his veins, searching for a reason to explode at the first given opportunity. Dave, as was pronounced ‘damaged goods’ by a person of the neighbourhood amid celebrations the day he returned home twenty-five years earlier, is a seemingly normal guy but with deep scars and unhealed wounds in him. He has a homely wife and a fine kid; however he is a severely lonely, irreversibly destroyed man, and harbours secrets and masked dualities that have the ability to shatter him and his family. And when the three were living their own respective definitions of life, trying to bury their personal sins and memories in their own personal ways, a ravaging tragedy occurs in the form of the young and beautiful Katie’s gruesome murder. And that sets the three off, as a violent repercussion of the event, on a collision course from which none will return unscathed, i.e. if they at all manage to return alive from the chain of events set in motion in the first place.

Thus, quite evidently, Mystic River is not a light read by any stretch of imagination. It is a modern-day variation of a Shakespearean tragedy – a tale of lost innocence, broken friendships, ill-fated loves, bleak memories, trampled dreams, dark secrets, misplaced loyalties, self-destructive deeds and brutal retributions. Plot has taken a secondary roll as pages after pages have been devoted to bring out the three exceedingly complex, deeply flawed, intensely fallible and yet profoundly believable men in all their nuances, shades and layers. The characters, to reiterate a point made earlier in this review, have been delineated as such frighteningly real people that they will remain with the readers for a long time. And, in keeping with the characters, Boston has been painted in rich strokes as a city of ‘Sad Eyed Sinatras’ – a city that is as alive, as unique and as three-dimensional as Raymond Chandler’s cold and lovelorn 30’s Los Angeles, and Samaresh Majumdar’s turbulent yet poignant 70’s Calcutta, in The Big Sleep and Kaalbela (The Odd Hours), respectively – two unforgettable books, masterpieces rather, that I have happened to have briefly spoken about at this site.

Yet, despite the gut-wrenching tale, it also happens to be a terrific page-turner and a compelling read. This immensely moody, haunting and emotionally draining book is evidence enough that Lehane has a natural and an uncanny ability to grip his readers through the creation of dense imagery, fine suspense build-up and stupendous character development. The novel has a fractured narrative that swings frequently from the present to the past – a crucial element that Lehance has made use of in defining the numerous alter-egos of his characters as well as in his successful attempt to go far beyond the generic confines of the police procedural and murder mystery plot. Nevertheless, the author has ensured that the non-linear unfolding of the events through heavy usage of flashbacks or the detailed expositions of what transpires in the nooks and corners of his characters’ minds, never act as sources of deterrence in the pacing and accessibility for the not-so-literary-minded readers. Thus what we have here is a breezy-fast, powerhouse book that does not just knock the readers down with its complex character study and crushing denouement, but in its own way, also manage to lift them up by providing the kind of satisfaction one gets after reading books that keep playing in one’s mind for a long after the final page has been read.

As an aside, Dennis Lehane’s books seem to be tailor-made for good cinematic adaptations, though if this book were to be taken as an indication, it should not have been logically so. Mystic River was made into the much acclaimed and Oscar winning movie of the same name by Clint Eastwood. His Gone Baby Gone, at the hands of actor-turned-filmmaker Ben Addleck turned out to be a surprisingly engaging movie. And his Shutter Island, adapted by the legendary Martin Scorsese very recently, has opened to a lot of appreciation from the critics and viewers alike.

“Mystic River is a deeply felt, beautifully composed novel by a gifted young writer… who is helping to set the standards by which 21st-century crime fiction will ultimately be judged.”
- Barnes & Noble Review

French Film Screening by Culturazzi - 7th March 2010

Culturazzi — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:10:42 +0000

On the special occasion of Culturazzi’s second birthday, we are proud to announce Culturazzi’s first event offline in the form of a feature film screening. The event, set for 7th March 2010 in Bangalore, will see the official offline launch of Culturazzi as an initiative for the first time, and will be followed by the screening of French feature film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (French: Le scaphandre et le papillon) is a 2007 French/American biopic/drama film based on the memoir of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The film depicts Bauby’s life after suffering a massive stroke at the age of 42, which left him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome.

The film was directed by Julian Schnabel, written by Ronald Harwood, and stars Mathieu Amalric as Bauby. It won awards at the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Globes and the BAFTA Awards, as well as four Academy Award nominations.

Details for the event are as follows:

Venue: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Race Course Road, Bangalore
Date: 7th March 2010
Time: 5:00 pm onwards

Entry is free by invite. Call 91 9742050949 to block invite passes.

A Single Man - Tom Ford

Daniel Montgomery — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:13:50 +0000

“Even the music makes me want to kill myself,” said a man a few rows down from me during the closing credits. I laughed; sometimes someone just says it all.

But being depressing is only one of the problems with A Single Man, helmed by fashion designer-turned-director Tom Ford. Watching it, you can see that Ford has an impressive eye, but maybe not for movies. He opens with a shot of Colin Firth drifting naked in the ocean, in a state of limbo that well prepares us for what follows; from the very beginning the film is trapped in a state of dreary suspension, a frosty lacquer of style without substance.

No, maybe not. There may be substance in this story, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis and containing dialogue passages about fear, loneliness, and regret, but whatever meaning there is struggles to breathe under Ford’s lugubrious direction. Especially in the first half his film is overwhelmed by slow motion, extreme close-ups, clothes, tableaus, and an oppressive, narcotic score that has the effect described above. The photography is self-consciously de-saturated to reflect the somber mood, and then brightens when we’re shown memories of happier times, or a moment flush with attraction in the present; the effect is simplistic, and too readily apparent to be effective; when the color is vibrant we know it’s code for happy, and when it drains we know we’re being told to feel sad.

Ford designs compositions, not scenes. They’re painstaking detailed — the camera slowly panning up on a girl in a blue dress, a high-contrast black-and-white scene of two lovers on a rock cliff, the eyes and lips of students in a lecture hall — but for all their heightened elegance they’re flat and superficial. He’s aiming for existential angst, but his film looks and sounds like a Calvin Klein fragrance commercial.

Firth plays college English professor George Falconer — a moment to consider the instant mystique of a name like Professor Falconer, who sounds like he should be a bookish fighter pilot or adventuring ornithologist — who we learn at the outset has lost Jim (Matthew Goode), his lover of sixteen years, to a deadly car accident. Perhaps you will be as surprised as I was to learn the duration of their romance; both actors look the same age in all of their flashbacks, even the scene of their very first meeting, and Goode, only thirty-two, doesn’t look old enough to have begun an adult relationship sixteen years ago. This may seem like nit-picking, but without a consistent sense of the passage of time, their steady, committed relationship plays more like a whirlwind affair.

The film takes place over one day of George’s life. A revolver is introduced in the early scenes, and it becomes clear that this is the day he intends to kill himself. As he makes his preparations (teaches his last class, empties his safe deposit box), he happens upon men who look like they walked out of … well, a Tom Ford fashion shoot. One is his student Kenny, played by Nicholas Hoult, who has come a long way since playing the awkward child from 2002’s About a Boy. Now 20, Hoult has grown into a young man of lean build, angular face, and androgynous beauty, which Ford favors with loving camerawork. George then meets Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), a Spanish hustler dressed like James Dean. They share a tender scene that isn’t convincing, because Kortajarena is so meticulously styled, dressed, and posed that he never seems like a person. He’s a still photo from an Armani spread.

George’s best friend is Charley (Julianne Moore), a fellow British expat who has romantic history with George and still harbors feelings. She is a divorcee and the mother of a grown child who has left the nest. They bond over their shared alienation, but Charley doesn’t develop into a complete character much more than Kenny or Carlos. They get together to drink and commiserate. There are odd moments of frivolous laughter and dancing. They air grievances. They’re full of ennui and oh so chic, but there’s nothing especially compelling about their relationship; we’ve seen this sort of gay-man-straight-woman co-dependency before.

All the while the Cuban Missile Crisis sits in the background, barely an afterthought to the screenplay written by Ford and David Scearce, from a novel by Christopher Isherwood. During a class discussion of Brave New World, George describes cultural fears real and imagined, but he can’t be bothered to listen as a colleague discusses possible nuclear war; he’s distracted by the glistening bodies of tennis players. Such is the film.

Watch a trailer for the film here:

Hounds of Love - Kate Bush

Pranav Dhingra — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:17:29 +0000

We have discussed Kate Bush’s work on Culturazzi before, and here we are again - talking about the eccentric virtuoso from the UK. Kate Bush is an artist for all times, with her mad-hat antics, her spectacular music, her masterful use of language and metaphors. Hounds of Love started it all. Hounds of Love finds Bush at the peak of her powers, where she has stayed arguably since that time, if you discount the whole story (pun intended).

Kate Bush’s brand of music might not appeal to everyone at the first listen. She is, to put it mildly, a quirky and eccentric singer and performer. Her videos throw you off-balance with their multi-cultural motifs and her singing does not follow any particular style. But deep beneath all the dramatic layers, you find an artist who simply loves performing, and uses music as the finest medium of expression.

The album is split into two sides. Side A is Hounds of Love, often described as containing “accessible pop songs” that are easy to like, with their thumping beats, and trademark Bush vocal acrobatics. Indeed that’s true, the four big singles of this side are grand, heartbreaking, inspiring, and soul stirring. Each song is special in its own way: The Big Sky is like a song sung by an eager wide-eyed child creating a world of his/her own, out of humdrum clouds, and the simple things life offers. The music is thumping folk full of life.

‘That cloud, that cloud - looks like Ireland,/ C’mon and blow it a kiss now./ But quick ‘coz it’s changing in the Big Sky/ It’s changing in the Big Sky now.’

One of my personal favorites and a song that impresses with its intimacy is Cloudbusting. With military drumrolls, Kate Bush recalls the imprisonment of psychologist Wilhelm Reich through the eyes of his son, Peter. Reich is the inventor of the cloudbuster, and although the song is narrative-driven, the emotion Kate puts into the song makes it a song that any kid, however old, can relate to, remembering the good times with his or her parents. The driving drumbeat throughout the song, the chanting chorus, the cello — all energise and bring vitality to the song.

Cloudbusting is a song about memories shared between children and parents, the helplessness of the masses in front of authority and how time forces us to bury our childhood. “You’re like my yo-you/ that glows in the dark/ what made it special/ made it dangerous/ so I bury it/ and forget. One of the more well-known songs of this side is Running Up the Hill - covered over the years by a plethora of artists (the Placebo cover is brilliant too!). Bush explains the context of the song well: “I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can’t understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think we’d both be very surprised! And I think it would lead to a greater understanding. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either… you know, I thought a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, ‘well, no, why not a deal with God!’ You know, because in a way it’s so much more powerful - the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you.”

Once you are done with the rambunctious and energetic of Side A, move on to Side B - a veritable masterpiece, poetry admixed skilfully with music. Side B is called The Ninth Wave after Tennyson’s poem: ‘Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,/ Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep/ And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged/ Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.’

The songs on this side provide a lyrical narrative to the dreams and hallucinations of a woman lost at sea, presumably keeping alive holding on to a plank, waiting to be rescued. In interviews, Bush has talked about how each song is about the feelings and emotions that the woman goes through, holding for dear life, as wave after wave lashes her, and in the desolate cold of the ocean, her life slowly runs past in front of her eyes.

The side starts with Dream of Sheep — where Kate’s voice echoes across a dark lonely ocean, voices floating over radio waves intermingle with voices lost inside the drowning woman’s head. The woman is struggling between weary tiredness drifting her slowly to sleep, and a desire to think about “friendly voices talking about stupid things” which will keep her from sleeping. The last minute is stunning in its heartbreaking intimacy, dreaming of a home, of sleep, and yet knowing icy death awaits you if you let sleep win.

The next song - Under Ice is about the woman slowly losing consciousness and sinking, into the deep water. Here, the woman starts dreaming of her childhood, skating over ice and carving little lines on the ice. The lyrics are then self-explanatory:

There’s something moving under/ Under the ice/ Moving under ice – through water/ Trying to get out of the cold water. “It’s me”.

What follows is another tour de force from Bush, Waking the Witch - voices telling the drowning women, to get up, wake up, see the little light. It’s this call to action which explains to the listener, that the woman will struggle, thrash her hands about, and rise from the water. The second half of the song, a swashbuckling romp filled with sonic trickery and chanting hypnotic choruses re-energise the listener, and presumably the woman lost at sea. The song concludes with the sound of a helicopter and a voice shouting out - “Get out of the water”.

Jig of Life is exactly what the title implies - a romp through the grand spectacle that is life. Shouting to the woman, to make that final push, to survive against the raging seas, and let herself “live”. The pipes, the whistles, the bagpipes, all splashes of the water, relentlessly pushing the woman to win.

Can’t you see where memories are kept bright?/ Tripping on the water like a laughing girl./ Time in her eyes is spawning past life,/ One with the ocean and the woman unfurled.

The ordeal of the woman takes a turn for the worse, as she fights for dear life, in Hello Earth. It is a song for Earth, for our symbiotic relationship with Mother Earth, our sheer powerlessness in front of nature’s fury and grandeur. The woman remembers the experience of the storm taking her under water, as if watching from above the earth the storm form over America, and taking her ship down into the water.

All you sailors
(Get out of the waves, get out of the water)
All life-savers
(Get out of the waves, get out of the water)
All you cruisers
(Get out of the waves, get out of the water)
All you fishermen
Head for home
Go to sleep little earth,
I was there at the birth,
Out of the cloud burst the head of the Tempest,
Murderer, Murderer, of calm,
Why did I go?
Why did I go?
Go to sleep little earth.

The heroine is now emotionally and physically exhausted, remonstrating herself for leaving on that ship, wanting to sleep, and imploring little Earth, to be calm, and sleep with her. Towards the end of the song, Kate whispers in German - “Deep. Deep. Somewhere in the darkness, there is light.” This is admittedly, the lowest point in the entire album - desolate, lonely, leaving even the listener exhausted, now one with the character lost at sea.

The Ninth Wave concludes with the simple beauty of The Morning Fog, as the woman is rescued and gets a second life, reborn as a new person - gaining a new appreciation for the simple beauty of life. After all the darkness of the night, she sees light.

“I am falling
And I’d love to hold you now,
I’ll kiss the ground
I’ll tell my mother
I’ll tell my father
I’ll tell my loved one
I’ll tell my brothers
How much I love them. “

It’s these simple and heartwarming lines that define Bush’s spirit for me. And hence concludes Kate Bush’s epic masterpiece. At once weaving poetry skillfully with music, and creating art that elemental and child-like in its innocence and beauty, where each note and each line proves how life-affirming and beautiful Bush as an artist truly is. This is my pick for one of the best music album of the last century.

Listen to a track from the album here:

Darling - John Schlesinger

Stephanie Lundahl — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 04:00:41 +0000

John Schlesinger’s Darling is the pure embodiment of swinging London in the 60s. In certain respects it plays like a time capsule, capturing and locked in a particular moment in time. In other ways it transcends its period, creating something that remains compelling and engaging, a film that seems at times to step out of itself and comment on the actions of the plot from the perspective of years or decades later. It’s a rare achievement.

There’s something very prescient about the way that Darling begins, with a poster of Diana Scott (Julie Christie) being pasted up over top of a charitable ad. 40 years later, this preoccupation with celebrity over matters of substance seems completely natural. Popular culture today is defined by an easily gained, highly disposable form of fame that is often void of any real meaning but nevertheless given more attention than the complex problems facing the world. There was a celebrity culture by 1965, of course, but it hadn’t completely saturated the media yet. Darling draws attention to this inevitable shift and by opening with these shots of the poster being pasted up, it establishes the ironic tone that will be carried through to the conclusion. Diana has problems but they aren’t real problems in comparison to the actual tragedies taking place around the world, and her difficulties will be entirely of her own making. Darling is highlighting that not only is her narrative false, but that viewing her as a tragic figure, as a victim, is false as well.

Her story begins, more or less, with her first meeting with Robert (Dirk Bogard), a television personality with whom she forms a friendship. Both are married but that doesn’t stop them from entering into an affair and, eventually, leaving their spouses in order to move in together. Their relationship is happy, at first, despite the jealousy she feels whenever he spends time with his children and estranged wife. Her jealousy, however, is really just a cover for the restlessness and boredom she feels. Her relationship with Robert was supposed to be exciting, a break from the domesticity and monotony of her marriage. Instead this new relationship just repeats the patterns established in the first and it comes to a similar end.

While still living with Robert, Diana gets involved with Miles (Lawrence Harvey), through whom she gains access to a glamorous and fast living crowd. Miles paves the way for Diana becoming the face of an advertising campaign and has no issue accepting her sexual favours, but he ultimately refuses to be pinned down by her. At every turn he makes it clear that she’s little more than a diversion to him and more often than not he abandons her at parties to go off with other women. Separated from Robert and more miserable than ever, she escapes to Italy to film a commercial where she finds herself pursued by an Italian prince (Jose Luis de Villalonga) whom she eventually marries. The marriage, like everything else in her life, fails to make her happy. It is as false and empty and she herself has become a figurehead, a symbolic wife purchased to make the picture of the family complete. Unfulfilled, she attempts to run away once again to something and someone else and discovers that she’s burned too many bridges and is all out of options.

As Diana, Christie renders a performance free of vanity. Physically Diana may always look perfect – she is, after all, all about image – but Christie and Schlesinger let us see beneath the veneer to the less than beautiful person that she actually is. She’s calculating and manipulative, a person incapable of giving love and incapable of being loved – she just can’t help but destroy whatever it is that she has at any given moment, certain that she’s missing out on something better. She has to keep moving because desire is all that there is to her personality; she’s all about wanting and is psychologically unable to cope with having. Christie captures this restlessness and even manages at times to make the audience feel for her, which should be impossible given how thoroughly she’s reaping what she’s sown. Christie brings that necessary element of humanity to Diana but manages to do so without sacrificing or softening the ugly edges of the character.

The film itself casts an ironic eye on Diana, the people she surrounds herself with, and the world that she wants to gain access to. There’s an emptiness to the carefully crafted debauchery of Miles’ world and a glitzy hollowness to the life of wealth and privilege she marries into that undercuts their alleged glamour. The film stands far outside the events it depicts, it sees Diana for what she is and it sees her desires for what they truly are. In its quiet way, Darling is actually quite brutal because it makes certain that no one leaves unscathed. This hardness has preserved the film, allowing it to remain compelling and interesting when other films its age now seem old fashioned and irrelevant.

Bikash Bhattacharjee: The Artist of the Artless (Part 3)

Sourav Roy — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:31:57 +0000

Holding a prism to the twilight sky

As united as the art critics were in lambasting Bikash Bhattacharjee’s work in his early days, in his later years they were as divided in interpreting his work. Because, it’s a common ailment of the common art critic not to rest in peace till he has categorized an artist and put him in a pigeonhole, neatly labeled and cross-referenced. And Bikash Bhattacharjee was not particularly willing to get inside a box.

Did the eyes “…ancient and dry.”* with ” something troglodytic about them.”* in his paintings point to expressionism? Did the dystopia on his canvas strewn with eyeless heads signal surrealism? Didn’t the Doll, showing up at the most unexpected of places in his Doll Series clearly say magic realism? Could the exaggerated highlights and the metallic overtones be anything but photo-realism? Do the breathtaking detail of textures and almost cinematic quality of light and shadows suggest a whole new-genre altogether, hyper realism? Or is it just plain old realism? His inspirations, as diverse as Abanindranath Tagore, Hemendranath Majumdar, Edgar Degas or Andrew Wyeth, didn’t make the job of art critics any easier either.

The answer to all the above questions are simultaneously yes and no. There are no silent screams, no painful distortions, no absolute helplessness on his canvas - a hallmark of expressionism. As far as surrealism goes, let’s quote the artist himself: “I could not avoid getting influenced by surrealistic elements, especially in the memorable creations of famous filmmakers. I am an incurable optimist and surrealism and optimism are poles apart.” Magic realistic art gently pushes the boundary of realism and depicts situations that are improbable but not impossible. Though some of Bikash Bhattacharjee’s art can be classified as vaguely magic realist, his whole oeuvre can hardly be called so. And last but not the least, the words photo-realism, hyper-realism and realism are mere wordplay rather than a valid style, genre or movement.

Instead of looking at his art through tinted glasses of existing genres, we should look at it with a wider gaze. The core from which his art originated was his superlative draughtsmanship and absolute command over almost all Media. And these impressive tools were guided by his deep care and concern for the city of Calcutta, uninfluenced by any subscription to avant-garde or overseas influences. His oneness with common man’s feelings drew him to leftist ideology but his simple and traditional upbringing stopped his paintings from becoming political pamphlets. He painted only what he knew - the sunless bylanes of North Calcutta, the artless man in the street, the turbulent times and the everyday mundane. That is why one needs no degree in art appreciation to understand the housewife with Durga’s third eye, the eyeless socialite or the anemic lady next to a dilapidated marble nude. If we really have to look for a theme in his art - it is people and how much he cared for them.

His care for all things human didn’t end on his canvas. Being a true friend, philosopher, and guide to his students at the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata and standing by them not only in matters artistic but also emotional and economical, being a champion for city-related causes - by roaming in the streets for donation or painting portraits in record time, being abundant with praise even for rivals or deserving juniors, buying paintings from young artists - the stories of Bikash-da’s generosity are as abundant as his paintings.

Once when he broke his leg, the young doctor in attendance injected anesthetic in his hand by mistake. While everybody else presented drew a collective sharp breath, Bikash Bhattacharjee broke into peals of laughter at the comedy of it all. This small incident brings in sharp focus the essence of his life and art. Life is hard, unjust and full of heartbreaks. But if you look closely enough, you will never run short of reasons to live with hope in your heart. This is in short, is the essence of being human.

The night comes early

But destiny had the last laugh when the right side of his body was paralyzed by a cerebral attack in 2000 and brought a premature ending to his artistic career. The last triptych, ironically named Bisarjan (Immersion of the idol of Goddess Durga) remained unfinished. Though his admirers insisted for him to start painting with his left hand, incurable optimist that he was, he kept expecting his right hand to revive. After five years of wheelchair-bound life, on December 18, 2006 he breathed his last. Even with more awards, more masterpieces and more appreciation than anybody ever wished for, he left art connoisseurs wanting for more. He also left behind a heartbroken family, mourning colleagues, students who would become masters soon, and last but not the least a thriving small industry dedicated to forging his paintings, that continues bearing witness to his popularity.

Back to Part 1 of the article

Back to Part 2 of the article

Man on Wire - James Marsh

Sourav Roy — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:05:27 +0000

On September 11 1999, when the first reports of the attack on the World Trade Centre started pouring in, it seemed too unreal to be true. After the dust settled, the media started rifling through the bookshelves of contemporary extreme fiction to find parallels. It turned out, none of their nightmarish plotlines could come close to the devastating current affairs.

It was not the first time fact trumped fiction at World Trade Centre. On August 7 1974, a Frenchman named Philippe Petit, conquered the twin towers. He didn’t do it with with screaming jet planes but with breathtaking beauty and amazing grace. A one-of-a-kind ‘funambule’ or high wire artist, Petit ambled back and forth for forty five minutes on a metal cable strung between those two towers, four hundred and fifty metres above the ground.

Man on Wire (2008) directed by James Marsh is a film documenting this feat of fantasy, all of which is incredibly factual. And just like the feat, the film, constructed like a first-rate thriller, keeps you in the nail biting will-he-won’t-he mode till the very last moment.

It all started on a rather dull day in 1968, when Philippe Petit, seventeen years old, was sitting in a dentist’s office and flipping through a magazine. He stumbled upon an article about the plans to construct the two tallest skyscrapers of the world side by side at New York City. There was a hazy artist’s impression of the towers, quite poorly printed, that accompanied the article. He drew a line joining the two towers, visualized himself walking on it, tore the page in the guise of a fake sneeze, pocketed it, walked out of the dentist’s office and as they say, never looked back.

Even at that age, performing on a high wire was a consuming passion and after that day, the passion found its Mt. Everest. In the opening sequences of the film, a split screen shows the tower in its various stages of ascent and Philippe’s childhood, adolescence, youth in a slide show of photographs - side by side. As if he had commissioned the tower in order to conquer them.

Everything he did from then on, became just warm-up or a build-up before the grand finale. The relentless practice and his first feat of illegal high wire walking between the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in June 1971 was followed by an encore on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in June 1973. The Twin Towers were also keeping pace and were nearly ready to be scaled. Philippe Petit decided it was about time he got ready to be on top of the world.

The way he went about the preparations was marked by the burning passion of a possessed man and the ice-cold precision of a scientist. The first location recce brought him to the conclusion he could have reached five years ago. It was simply impossible. The structure was four hundred and fifty metres high (the highest man-made structure in the world at that time). The wind was strong enough to blow a person away like a dry leaf. Rigging and guy lining the high wire would take hours and so would the hauling up of nearly one tonne of equipments up hundred and ten stories. And all of it had be done behind the back of the strict security. The best possible scenario could be an arrest. The worst possible could be the death of a dear friend followed by being imprisoned with assistance in a manslaughter for the rest of the team. Philippe carefully weighed the pros and cons and said, “It’s impossible that’s for sure. So let’s start working.”

Co-dreamers of this impossible dream were a ragtag bunch of old faithfuls and strangers found by serendipity - his lover, Annie Allix, two American goofballs who couldn’t speak a word of French, Jean-Louis Blondeau – childhood friend , Barry Greenhouse, the crucial inside man and many others. ‘Le Coop’ or ‘The Coup’ began.

It will not be right to get into the details of how a potent mixture of espionage, disguise, research, practice, identity theft, and bow helped them inch closer to summit. And it will be extremely callous on the reviewer’s part to reveal how romantic discord, panic attacks, nasty surprises and false starts almost sent the coup hurtling down hundred and ten stories. There should be no explanation either about how a naked dance by Philippe Petit on top of the North Tower under a starlit sky on August 6 1974, brought it all back from the brink. Because then you would be denied taking the incredible journey yourself, every turn of which you must experience in full.

On the foggy morning of August 7, 1974 Lower Manhattan woke up to a dangerous, foolhardy, glorious dot between the two towers of World Trade centre, dancing, pirouetting and occasionally walking. Like every policeman before who had arrested him for his acts of unprecedented physical poetry, the NYPD sergeant too waited reverentially for him to finish first. “I was watching something somebody would never again watch in his whole life.” He said. Philippe Petit was eventually arrested and found guilty. The charges were disturbing the peace, trespassing and disorderly conduct. “If you do a small show for kids, all charges will be dropped.” He was said, which he did, and not only did he walk away scot-free but also as an overnight international celebrity. The ending was not so happy for the rest of his comrades, one of whom was expelled from the United States.

The title of the film quotes the police report that led to Philippe Petit’s arrest. What dry judicial prose utterly fails to describe, the hybrid of actual and re-staged footage in the film achieves brilliantly. It’s no mean feat and knowing that in advance, Monsieur Petit refused to grant the director film rights unless he was allowed to take an active part in every aspect of the film. The new footage is so seamlessly blended into the old that after some time you give up guessing which young Petit is real and which one is an re-enactment by a lookalike actor. In certain key scenes, where the doer Petit steps back and the dreamer Petit comes forward, he is played by exuberantly young Paul McGill - a masterstroke of the director.

While your eyes and heart devour the rapidly unfolding film, your brain can’t but think what kind of a person would want to do a thing like this and more importantly, why? His present avatar - passionate, elfin and with all the disarming charm of an artist, a showboat and a conman combined, seems to give a vague answer. Since his childhood, he was a single-minded little climber and nobody could stop him. As he grew up the passion for putting up a beautiful show joined a street criminal’s sense of serious mischief. A lifelong fan of cops-and-robbers movies, he was egged on equally by the beauty and the lawlessness of his goals. More importantly, he had the rare gift of making others see the dream through his eyes, or as said by one of his accomplishes, “He was selling the concept so hard, as if he was selling a timeshare or something.” But at the end of the day, a work of art is its own explanation. Or we can just drop the analysis and listen to Jean-Louis Blondeau’s wise words, “The important thing is, we did it.”

9/11 is not even mentioned once in the film, and for a good reason. Marsh explained that Philippe Petit’s act was “incredibly beautiful” and that it “would be unfair and wrong to infect his story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the Towers being destroyed.” If the real world couldn’t preserve the timelessness of the feat, he surely could, in the reel world.

Besides winning an Oscar, a Sundance audience award for best documentary, another 26 awards & 7 nominations, Man on Wire wins something else every time it’s screened. It wins back our faith in the oft-repeated words, “If you want something, nothing is impossible.” You better not dare to believe otherwise.

Watch a trailer for the documentary here:

Ed Wood – Tim Burton

Leonora Pinto — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:13:33 +0000

What if you had a passion for doing something you were terrible at? Would you make it your life’s work regardless, or would you shove The Dream down under a pile of Get Real? Most people would do the latter. “When I grow up I want to…” says everybody, but hardly anybody actually grows up to do what they completed that sentence with; most people don’t join the circus, become an astronaut or make movies. Most people don’t have what it takes to live those candy-colored dreams, recognise that and find a “real job” instead.

Edward D Wood, Jr. was not most people.

And neither is Tim Burton most filmmakers. Most filmmakers, after all, make movies about heroes, super-villains, big achievers or champions. Burton – ever the champion of the outsider – chose to make a film about someone who never really succeeded at anything except doing what he always dreamt of doing. Wood wasn’t even one of those ‘ahead-of-his-time’ masterminds whose genius is only recognised posthumously. B-grade? This maverick journeyman’s films probably rank 24 letters further down the alphabet, and have earned him the ignoble title of Worst Director of All Time.

Yet, this is not a farce or a send up. In anybody else’s hands, the story of this nutty writer, director, actor and producer (sometimes he was all these at the same time) could easily have gone there. But Tim Burton’s hands shape it into a charming tale of a passionate, undiluted and unabashed love for the movies.

Edward D Wood, Jr. grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the movies soon captured his heart, never to release it. Often choosing the cinema over school, little Ed Wood would rummage around the trash cans at the end of the day looking for discarded stills from the day’s films to add to his growing collection. Fascinated by the strange and weird, his favorites were films based on horror and the occult. These would become the focus of the movies he dared to dream up and make.

Intriguing though his early years were – carnival freak being amongst his jobs as a youngster – Burton chooses to concentrate on what could arguably be called Ed Wood’s golden years. Ed Wood, the movie, takes us through Ed Wood, the filmmaker’s, years from struggling scriptwriter to his piece de resistance – Plan 9 from OuterSpace. Less biopic, and more strange love story.

Ed Wood’s taste of relative success began when he rediscovered yesteryear superstar Bela ‘Dracula’ Lugosi. Together, this odd couple of never-was and has-been managed to convince studios and investors that they had something special. Lugosi’s career was reignited, and Wood’s career sparked into motion, with Glen or Glenda – a film that was supposed to be I Changed My Sex – the true story of transsexual Christine Jorgensen. When Jorgensen refused to cooperate, Wood, undaunted, wrote Glen or Glenda, a screenplay about transvestism that was based on his own love for dressing in women’s clothing. It was a very personal film, and included lengthy medical expert testimony to stress that a man who cross dresses is not homosexual, neither is he “off” in any way. He is perfectly normal and completely heterosexual, but just happens to feel more comfortable dressed as a woman. Wood’s love of cross-dressing is rumoured to have stemmed from his mother dressing him in girl’s clothes as a kid, since she wanted a baby girl. Indeed, for Wood, it seemed to be nothing more than a stress-buster, the equivalent of a maternal hug, and he often resorted to his favorite outfit of angora sweater, skirt and heels when he was feeling frazzled and tense.

Wood went on to churn out movie after movie on shoestring budgets, in a matter of days, with motley-crew casts that included his production assistants, a pro wrestler, a television psychic, a chiropractor and a mechanical octopus monster, that had to be manually controlled by an ailing Bela Lugosi after its machinery had conked off. With a charming – if completely misplaced – confidence, he rarely shot more than one take, declaring even scenes with glaring acting faux pas and obvious blunders perfect to print. He would save money by filling chunks of his movies with stock footage; he had the particular skill (if that is the word to be used) of managing to fit any random footage into any story. His movies turned out as ludicrous as their names sounded – Bride of the Monster, Night of the Ghouls, The Night the Banshee Cried and other questionable gems. But Wood carried on regardless of rotten reviews, empty theatres, the lack of investors and the loss of his ambitious girlfriend who wanted to be rich or famous or both, and knew he could never make her either. Making movies was all he knew how to do, and all he really wanted to do.

One of the most endearing – and funniest – scenes of the film is when Ed Wood happens upon his idol Orson Welles. You would think the Z-grade filmmaker and the genius would have nothing in common, that the latter would snub the former. You would be wrong. Welles and Wood connect and bond over a shared artistic frustration with the system, and identify with each other’s struggle to bring their respective, uncompromised visions to the screen. Tim Burton himself could easily have been the third man in that conversation. Big studios are rarely comfortable letting filmmakers like him swim as far outside the mainstream as they would like. That scene does more than establish Burton’s empathy with Wood, however; it establishes Wood’s credibility as a true artist – he may not have been a very good artist, but he was a legitimate one.

Tim Burton injects the movie with an infectious enthusiasm that skips off the screen, and pulls on your smile muscles, rendering them utterly unable – indeed, unwilling – to resist. Like Wood himself, Burton picked black & white as his cinematography palette, and yet he manages to splash the film’s canvas with the kitschy colorfulness of a child daring not only to paint outside the lines, but also to color the grass purple and the sky green. The movie seems to drag its feet in places, and leap about with no discipline in others, but that is more likely than not intentional – it all fits the haphazard mad method of its subject. The always-superb Johnny Depp plays right along – his starring turn as Wood has an over-the-top delight to it that seems to channel an eleven year-old boy who has seen his first pair of breasts. Ed Wood is, yet again, evidence that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are a match made in some weird, enchanted place that I would very much like to visit someday.

But Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are hardly the only people to be enjoyed in Ed Wood. Sarah Jessica Parker as Wood’s fiancée Dolores Fuller, and Bill Murray as campy queen Bunny Breckinridge are delightful in their brief appearances. Worth particular mention, though, is Martin Landau. We first meet Landau’s Bela Lugosi in a scene where he’s picking out his own coffin, testing out his options the way people usually test out mattresses – by lying in it. It’s the start of an instant classic performance that in a lesser actor’s hands could easily have crossed over the line into grumpy-old-man caricature. But Landau plays Lugosi with equal parts of pathos and deadpan humor in an outstanding turn more than deserving of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar he picked up for the role. If Ed Wood’s love for the movies is the soul of this film, the relationship between Wood and Lugosi – part friendship, part co-dependence – is its heart.

Ed Wood cocks a snook at the notion that dreamers must be celebrated and revered only if they actually make something of themselves. It dares, instead, to commemorate an impractical dreamer. In doing so, it has made the real life Ed Wood something of a cult favourite, with the kind of movie fan who loves the movies for their ability to tickle not your mind, but your sense of mindless fun. And it does so by refusing to be mindless itself.