living on the outside

I've tried a few times over the years to try and post more polished work here on the blog. I don't think it has happened even once. Last night I was talking to Amma about wanting to blog of my experience of the Sydney Film Festival (which I'll write about subsequently) and she told me to try and write in a simpler, more accessible form. While I told her I'd try, I also knew that it was unlikely that it'd happen. Primarily, it is because of a problem I have with redrafts. Many of the writing tips I've read stress the importance of editing and redrafting. I understand its importance, I just can't get myself to do it. Probably because I'm too lazy but I'm reluctant to admit that's a big factor here. It seems to be about two different things:

1. Almost none of what I express here is original or beautiful or important or any of the like. I don't mean it with false humility or embarrassment. I feel it in my bones, it is evident to me. The blog is, and has been, a place for me to regularly keep posting on the thoughts and experiences I've had. It is a journal. But then why not just write in a personal diary? I've wrestled with this question quite a bit and have tried writing 'first drafts' in a notebook or a Google Doc to later edit and put up here. That never happens because the piece doesn't seem worthy enough on a second look. Also, if I seem to go off on flights of fancy here, what I write in my notebooks goes beyond the stratosphere. They're just words following words that, more often than not, create a swirl of incoherence. While I, more or less, write the blog for myself, I'm aware that this is a public forum and I must try and be a little more thoughtful. It is the possibility of an audience, of another individual going through this that keeps me conscious enough to try and make sense. By way of analogy, if the notebook is my bedroom, where anything goes and there's no audience, writing here is like sitting in a friend's house after dinner and making conversation. It is not a big social setting for me to feel the expanse of my ignorance and futility acutely but a place I'm comfortable in that also demands a certain social decorum. Then why not make it more accessible like Amma says? That brings it to my second point.

2. Part of it is arrogance, a (misplaced) sense of individuality; A desire to leave behind my most 'authentic' being as if anyone cared. Part of it is the fear of requiring to say something more useful if I expect an audience to pay attention; This way I can say, defensively, that these are idiosyncratic ramblings and I didn't ask for a readership. Part of it is the incredibly stupid desire to preserve anything that comes out of my head because of its 'uniqueness'. Part of it are the mottos from half-remembered writing manifestos I used to read years ago- that Form is Content, that it is a writer's duty to expand the realm of what's possible and acceptable etc. Ultimately though, this blog is my first version of my history. And in that sense, it is an attempt to capture as closely as possible what's going on inside me when I'm writing it. I both care and not care about a readership. I care because I don't want to be trapped in my solipsism, become a madman who's intelligible only to himself. I sometimes do feel happy when I get appreciation for something I've written (including from a surprised future me). And I don't care because I don't think I know enough to address a public, have enough 'content' in me to 'communicate effectively' to others, I don't want to see myself as a sellout especially with how I write. I don't care too much about an audience because I live in a Post-Modern world where the notion of the self has grown so large that people are only thinking of their stories no matter who's they are reading. And in such a world, the notion of writing for an audience disintegrates. Occassionally, I convince myself that what I'm doing here is like a Platonic Dialogue, an act of thinking in public. If anything of value can be gleaned off all this, it is not at the level of the post but at the level of the entire blog. I've tried to explore where a thought comes from and what shapes it takes before leaving my orbit.

I've long dreamt of being a writer and filmmaker. It's my greatest fantasy. Over the years, I've learned that I don't have the talent nor the perseverance to achieve it. Which is fine. Truth be told I was enamoured more by the glamour and celebrity of those identities than the craft and the art themselves. I can't seem to redraft and tinker and improve because I'm no writer. I'm a blogger and that is the process I enjoy, that I think about regularly, that I am happy about. My talent, whatever little I may possess, is not a writerly intelligence but articulation. I'd like to believe I have the ability to think fairly comfortably in words and be able to transcribe them unadulterated. It is the art of conversation, especially with the self, that comes naturally to me. And I'm more than happy to cherish that gift and explore the possibilities it offers. 

The blog like is a little space in a corner in Lamakaan where I'm having a conversation with myself. And if a few people who're going past want to stop and listen in for a few minutes, I'm happy with that. If not, then atleast it gives me a chance to perform in a public space outside of the confines of my own head, almost like an improv actor on stage, and for those minutes and hours, I'm a happy man. I'm content with that arrangement. 

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I seem to have a thing for seminars and festivals. They give me immense joy. Specifically if they're offline, in the real world. I feel like a kid in numaish. Traversing that physical environment among groups of people, the excitement at the prospect of learning and experiencing something new, and a sense of community (albeit briefly) make me feel extremely alive and invigorated. I'll try to write brief notes on the 9 films I saw, in chronological order, as part of SFF 2021.

1. Memoria - There is a long scene in the first third of the film which I think is filmmaking of the highest order. The Tilda Swinton character is talking with a sound engineer, trying to get him to recreate the deep, booming sound she's been hearing. Weerasethakul handles it with such assured steadiness that I was drawn in so completely into the act of listening to a series of sounds, noticing subtle variations and trying to match it with the original sound. It is an incredible scene. 

I really enjoyed the film despite dozing off for a couple of minutes during its extremely slow third act. It brought a certain calmness to my mind and pushed me to observe and collaborate with the happenings on the screen. Equally importantly, I think it also helped me learn how to watch 'art' cinema. I'd always assumed that when you're deeply involved in a film, you forget the passage of time. Memoria forced me to pass consciously through the thick, viscous texture of time, almost like passing through a wall of jelly. And I felt refreshed at the end of it. There is only one way I can rationalise the enjoyment of Slow Cinema: To live in the modern world is to compulsively seek entertainment and distraction. It is hard to be truly, deeply, relaxingly bored because your smartphone keeps interrupting it. The antidote to intrusive cinema then is involving cinema. And watching Memoria taught me that.

2. The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson - I picked this film because it seemed to deal with Australia's colonial past. It wasn't a bad film but I don't think I can recommend it. It was also the most mainstream of the films I saw in the festival. 

3. Mandabi - This 1968 Senegalese film was a conscious choice. Most of the films I generally watch are American, European or Indian, and a film festival seemed like the right place to expand my horizons and try something I won't watch otherwise. I enjoyed the film, mostly its bright, colourful images and Makhouredia Gueye's performance in the lead role. I have immense affection for a certain kind of tropic, sunny landscape (especially Caribbean) and Mandabi had many shots, particularly because they weren't self-consciously reaching out to me for compliments, that cheered me up.

4. Quo Vadis, Aida? - Sravani really wanted to watch this film after she discovered it was about the Srebrenica Massacre which she'd read a bit about a few months ago. I think its an important film, an interesting film and Jasna Duricic was incredible in the lead role. I also have a thing for erstwhile Soviet countries (maybe that also explains my abstract affection for townships) and the physical structures in the film were captivating.

5. Cow - Andreas Arnold's non-narrative documentary on Luma, a cow somewhere in a dairy farm in Britain, was the dare of the festival for me. A large portion of the film (a bit of the time is spent with one of her calves) is either focused on Luma or show us her subjective gaze with no context or voiceover and not even background music in the first half. It was a really good experience, including the queasiness I felt multiple times because of the jerky, intrusive camera angles. Setting aside its political and economic messages, which interestingly the film doesn't tell you and we fill in from our knowledge of news reports, what the film does wonderfully well is not let you avert your gaze away from another being. It forces you to see Luma and to imagine what she must be thinking and feeling. Apart from a shot of the fireworks, that in my opinion was misplaced, the film is a great achievement for keeping you engrossed in the life of a cow for 90 minutes.

6. Where is the friend's house? - Probably my favourite film of the festival. This 1987 Abbas Kiarostami film, my first time actually watching a Kiarostami, is gold. And what a find Babak Ahmadpour is! An incredible film and one I think every kid should be shown. The fable-like quality of the film, its gentle rhythms, the gorgeous score, the characters - just the pleasure of being in the cinema with a couple of hundred others, laughing and gasping together, entranced by the film while also being aware that you're sharing with experience with others, and feeling grateful for the innocence and sense of justice that children seem to possess. The last shot is a work of genius and probably one of the very few instances in my experience as an audience where I felt the entire theatre gasp, cheer and applaud instantaneously.

7. Drive my car - A film I picked because it was based on a Haruki Murakami story. I really enjoyed the film. I thought Ryusuke Hamaguchi was able to capture the psychosexual texture of Murakami's stories really well, especially in the long prologue. Even now, thinking of Oto's scenes is giving me a tingling pleasure. Later the film expanded into a lot more and went places far and wide. I especially loved the segment with the mute artist. While coming out, I felt like having taken a long, fruitful journey. We live our little lives, with our little social circles and assume that that is what the world is like. Good journeys and artworks bring us out of that self-confined space and give us a glimpse of the much, much larger world that we are a part of. And I felt that at the end of this film. 

8. River - Easily the worst film of the list. Probably one of the worst films I've seen in a while. Being the self-proclaimed climate change conscious liberal signaller that I am, it was a no brainer to watch this film that's ostensibly about rivers and how they're being impacted by our actions. The decision was made even easier when I learned that it was written by Robert Macfarlane and narrated by William Defoe. What a waste it was. I came out of the theatre not having learnt one new thing (except one fact about sediments), not felt one genuine emotion (except that of intense irritation) and was left underwhelmed by every one of those desperate-to-awe images. Not one memorable image in a film about nature. The bland, postcardish aesthetic of the images worked only to reinforce my belief that it is not the size or the scale of the spectacle that makes things great or epic but the breadth of the ideas that are being conveyed. Macfarlane's words were so flat, so devoid of feeling, so unimaginative that all of Defoe's pregnant pauses only underscored their triviality. 

9. The Hand of God - The first Paolo Sorrentino film I saw was The Great Beauty in the 2013 edition of the Chennai Film Festival. It was probably the best film I saw there. Most of my favourite artists are my favourites because they seem to be creating art that no one else is. It isn't that they are the best at something; It is that no one else can even comprehend that 'something'. Sorrentino's incredible ability to portray the effervescence of deeply moving aesthetic experience and the melancholy accompanying it is on show again in The Hand of God. This coming-of-age is less a portrayal of that phase in real-time than a middle-aged man's recollections of his last childhood summer with all the accompanying golden hues and deep, heartful laughs. The glorious visuals brought to mind our Italy trip and how the nature of light itself seemed to be so different, so sensuous there.

I've had a great, great ten days, and thanks to Sravani's encouragement watched a couple more films than planned, and I'm still surprised at the unalloyed pleasure I feel at having gone to the theatre and watched so many films. Ah, how fortunate it is to be able to watch, feel, think and discuss art cinema.