Just trying to cheer myself up.

Furthur explorations in the world of macro. The object in the image should be pretty easy to guess, right? If you look closely you might just make out my tripod and me! And I love the bokeh of this lens. For those who do not know, bokeh (from Japanese, pronounced ‘boh-keh’) is the rendering of out of focus areas in a photo by the lens. For example, in this photo it is the stuff behind the object. This is a simplistic way of putting things but the smoother the bokeh the better the photo looks. Someone in a review for this lens had commented that the bokeh it gave was like melted cheese…I concur!

I’m not a poet
I’m not even a writer
I’m just another word-dreamer

Q. Can you tell me something about your batch at FTII?
A. I was in the 1963-66 batch. Kumar Shahni was my batch mate, John Abraham was junior while Adoor Gopalakrishnan was a year senior to me. We lived in a very different era. The 1960s was a decade of great ferment and unrest. The environment at FTII was very loosely structured, perhaps it was something to do with the times. At the institute we all believed that we could make films expressing our individual vision. John worked with me on my first film Uski Roti.

Q. What was the narrative style of your first few films?
A. One of my major influences was the French film maker Robert Bresson. Bresson’s films reflected a particular strand of Christian belief called Jansenism which manifests itself in the way leading characters are acted upon and simply surrender themselves to their fate. I believe that cinema is not so much visual as it is temporal. But most film makers concentrate on the spatio-visual aspect. This has led to certain problems. What time reflects is more contemporary than the arrangement of a set of visuals. I do not want to focus on this visual aspect in my films, but want to make the temporal aspect primary.

Q. Did you use music in your films?
A. Film expresses itself through images and sound and to that extent I don’t believe that music is that important to the narrative. I have made a few movies that incorporate Indian classical music. I am inspired by the form of Indian classical music and have used this form in my films. Hindustani music is spontaneous and has highs and lows and climaxes. I like to elaborate on the narrative, just like music.

Q. Did you want to convey a certain message to your audience?
A. No. I made films because I wanted to make films. I didn’t do it with the intention of giving the audience a message. The act of making a film is a social act.

Q. You were part of the new-wave movement of films in India. What were the concerns of the movement and how far did the message penetrate the audience?
A. The new wave movement was a parallel movement to the mainstream cinema in India. We wanted to find a form that corresponded to contemporary reality. Usually, the mainstream films used a medieval idiom. So obviously there was a discrepancy. We tried to create something new.

Q. Were you disappointed that your films didn’t achieve mass appeal?
A. No, not at all. I was well aware that my films would have a limited audience. We were up against a distribution system that manufactured an audience by feeding them the same mainstream formulae. Though my films didn’t get released commercially, there were a number of film screenings.

Q. But there was a lot of debate about your films in the media.
A. Yes, at that time there were a lot of write-ups in the media about them. Journalists felt that it was important to let readers know about the parallel film movement, even though most people wouldn’t get to see my films commercially. Times are very different now. There is absolutely no debate or discussion about what kind of a world we are living in, no attempt to understand it. I was in America at the start of the Iraq war and I couldn’t find a single T.V. or radio station that spoke out in clear unambiguous terms against the war. The entire media toed the line of the American administration.

Q. Why did you stop making films?
A. For the last five years I’ve been teaching music, especially the dhrupad style, and exploring its form. I am thinking of getting back to film making now.

Q. You have also made documentaries. What difference do you see between your films and documentaries?
A. The dividing line between my films and documentaries is thin. Some of my films, like Siddheshwari, are like poetic documentaries. Another documentary, Arrival, is about labour migrating to cities.

Q. What do you have to say about Paheli?
A. The very meaning of a Paheli is that it can be solved whereas a Duvidha can’t be. In my film, the woman couldn’t choose between the material and the spiritual husband. So in that sense, for me the problem still continues. In Paheli, the woman makes a choice. I guess that’s why the film makers called it Paheli.

I had decided to enter this week’s Dyxum Photo C)and looking to enter another photo I played around with the original color photo of this. I liked the end result so much that I decided to post it here as well as enter it into the contest!

Another trawl through my archives. This one is from quite a while back, from my last trip to India to be exact. This was shot at the same place and time as the one here. However, in this case, I did not do much post-processing.

As the exif data suggests this is from a little while back. I haven’t shot anything over this weekend so I raided the archives and came up with this! There is something about the way he is looking at something, equal parts melancholia and plain curiosity that caught my eye.

On a slightly technical note I thought of cropping out the leg peeping into the shot on the left but in the end decided to leave it as the resultant crop was looking a bit abrupt.

Love is a warm feeling that makes people feel elevated. By the same token, love can also make people experience the darker side of human emotions like jealousy, anger, pain and trauma. The potential for love to go from good to sour is very real in every relationship. La Femme d’a Cote is a film about two lovers who experience this two-sided nature of love throughout their relation.

Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) lives with his wife and five year old son in a quiet little village. He is a loving husband and a caring father. The happy family life is shattered by the arrival of their new neighbours. Outwardly, everything is ok. The two sets of neighbours do the things expected of them, like invite each other over. But we learn that Bernard and Mathilde are in fact former lovers who separated due to misunderstandings. The passionate feelings they had for each other haven’t quite disappeared, though that they are married to other people. In fact, the proximity serves to reignite passions.

Throughout the film, their relationship displays a constructive and a destructive side. It is as if the ex-lovers, now reunited, are not able to decide whether to love fully or remain bitter about the past. Bernard is particularly affected by Mathilde’s re-entry into his life and shows it outwardly. Mathilde, is also equally affected, but her ardour is tempered by a conflicting feeling of wanting to move on.

The dynamics of the relationship are too much for Mathilde and she suffers a nervous breakdown. In hospital she experiences extreme mood swings and depression. Bernard meanwhile has managed to contain his emotions, barely.

Is the relationship doomed to be trapped in this conflicting mode? The only way out of it seems to be a violent catharsis. Mathilde returns home one night and makes love to Bernard. She then shoots him and then pulls the trigger on herself. At last the lovers are where they would have wanted to be; neither with anybody else, nor with each other.

But is this the only way it could have ended? I don’t believe so. In choosing a violent end for the lovers, the director (Francois Truffaut) seems to be suggesting that such conflicting emotions cannot exist without clashing and will self destruct. I don’t quite agree with this reading.

It was a chilly evening and I was waiting for the bus. When it finally arrived at the bus stop I boarded it. Inside, it was not so crowded that I couldn’t get any breathing space…but crowded enough that when I walked to the rear I brushed against elbows and stepped on some toes. People were cursing me under their breath. One guy was singing a song. He was standing facing the window and holding onto the overhead bar. His body was swaying to his own tune. I stood silently beside him. He finished his song and looked around for applause…there was none. Everyone around him was absorbed in their own thoughts. He caught my eye and saw that I was looking at him with interest…time for another song. ‘Pa, pa, pa, ni, dha, pa’…he sang. He was singing loudly and he was enjoying what he was doing. A few people around us gave a weary look, as though disturbed from some serious contemplation by a madman, shrugged, muttered to their neighbours about ‘public drunkenness’ and went back to staring out the window. ‘Mr Drunk’ didn’t notice. He had already moved on to his next song, an old MGR song that must have been quite a hit in its time. I didn’t understand the words, but did it matter? He rolled his eyes with each note, jerked his head this side and that as if indicating each rasa and gave me a big smile. “Saar, ne ennake marakave mudiyadu,�? (you will never forget me) he told me. I nodded and gave him an encouraging smile. That was what he needed. He launched into his next song. Maybe this was a Shivaji Ganeshan number. He was a single man, all-in-one movie orchestra. In between stanzas he would do the percussion and then the flutes and the veena. The low lighting of the bus lent a surreal-comic tinge to his face. A few people were now looking at us. What did they make of the spectacle? A drunk disturbing the ‘public peace’ and an apparently sober youg man egging him on! I was fascinated with my new found friend. The bond that had formed was only visible to the two of us. He evidently didn’t give two hoots about maintaining the decorum at public places. He was happy doing what he was doing, giving expression to his joy, paying obeisance to his screen idols, maybe living out his childhood fantasy of being a singer. And us sane people were pitying this ‘insane’ man? I looked around me. I saw the sad faces of my fellow travelers. Maybe the one sitting in front of me had financial problems, the one behind me had marital problems and the one on my left couldn’t get an erection. We put the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’ into air tight categories. And woe betide any man who accidently gets locked up in the jail marked ‘insane’. He is instanly judged by the world of the sane. But that night on the bus I couldn’t figure out who was really sane – the half-dead zombies all around me – and who insane – the merry man dancing to his own tune?

The last one, for now, from the macro studies I tried. Proper exposure is something I’ve to learn to do well.