A Realist Metaphysical Turn in ‘Roma’
Siddhant Mohan It was one drunk night of November. I came back from Ayodhya and had finished a piece of reporting over the upcoming radical set up in Ayodhya which would demand for Ram Temple, yet again, to gather the political momentum in three states of north India. Soon I switched on to the YouTube app on my iPhone and began watching trailer of the movie “Roma (2018)”. The trailer, which lasted for about two minutes, made me sober up a little and I vowed to watch the film in its entirety. The film, as we know, of course has since then become somewhat of a cult across the globe. What might be the reasons? The culture of Mexican filmmaking and other art forms largely reflect the socio-political situation in and around that part of the world. Much of the creative development in the mainstream culture industry in Mexico used to deal with nudity, drugs, alcohol and so on for a long time in a merely representative sort of a way. This reflected in other creative media too. But soon came a new wave of Mexican cinema in 1970’s and 80’s when the movies started receiving global recognition. It led to the new wave of Mexican cinema, leading up to the contemporary ones, which still draws a great deal of enthusiasm from cinephiles outside of that nation. I am of course talking about moderate mainstream stuff: mostly owing to the works of the likes of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón who took the lead in Mexican filmmaking and blended their typical style with the Hollywood production techniques. Iñárritu made ‘Amores Perros’ as the new century started but soon made films like ’21 Grams’ starring Sean Penn and then arrived ‘Babel’. The films were critically acclaimed and received a lot of attention of film lovers too. This trend was on for a while with several low budget films made until 2014 when Iñárritu made “Birdman”. That film won the Academy Award. And surprisingly, Iñárritu also helped Leonardo Dicaprio win his first Academy Award of 2015 with ‘The Revenant’. Same goes for Guillermo Del Toro, who produced several films of Iñárritu, and went on to direct a few films on the sci-fi theme. That included a fair bit of work in animations as well. In 2018, Del Toro won Academy Award for his film ‘The Shape of Water’. The point I have been trying to make is that the new wave of global Mexican cinema pulled out several mythical and fictional plots and reached out to bigger audience. This approach draws from a fund of a far older Latin American archetypal imagination, then being globalized via films. The formula clicked. In the same trajectory arrives Alfonso Cuarón. He followed the same trend of low-budget Mexican filmmaking initially and grabbed the Academy Award for ‘Gravity’. But this is where Cuarón decides to deviate from the mythical and strange fictional imagination, and goes back to his roots, his early life, his ghetto in Mexico. This is an interesting reversal. He takes a steep turn backwards as it were, and goes on to produce and direct the film we are trying to discuss here: ‘Roma’. The film has has made an immediate impact. Is the world ready for a turn with such films? ‘Roma’, basically a locality in Mexico, is one autobiographical piece about Cuarón himself: on how his family survived through socio-political turmoils of 70s after Cuarón’s father left the family and went on to live with another woman. Cleo, an Indian housemaid in the same family steers the events around her, as it were. The character of Cleo, portrayed Yalitza Aparicio, a rookie actor, is one hell of a silent woman who does not utter a single word of complaint or remorse as she goes on through ordeals. When Cleo conceives a baby with her first and apparently only boyfriend, she and her employer comes to an a tacit agreement that women will always be alone. The story-line runs on a very linear manner, involving the very family in the backdrop of the Mexican society which got affected with the political turmoil, increased interference of US government and a slow and uneven paced settlements owing to developmental agendas and forms of neo-colonialism. Cuarón has portrayed history in a very deft manner, paying attention to every detail possible. Shots of Aeroplanes flying in the backgrounds every now and then remind us of the then political scenario; Mr. Antonio—the one who fell in love with another woman—parks his expensive car with such care so as to avoid any scratch-marks. This is deeply suggestive of an emerging class. And then the historical student-police clash is shown where police fires upon several protesting students killing many of them instantly. All these gets enmeshed within the plot-line. The plan to make this film in black &white is also a clever ploy. Cuarón takes a plausible risk, using simple shots. He has himself operated the camera, refusing to use zooms. Rather he fixes every shot. He does use longer trolley shots, pans too, but he fixes the camera by trying to make the story focus primarily over Cleo. This persolazizes history. This is clearly a moment of subjectivizing history in a new manner even as we deal with an apparently realist theme. ‘Roma’ is full of long takes and some are truly memorable. One can point out two such shots. In one, Cleo goes into the surgery-room after doctors fail to hear the child’s heartbeat inside her. In a single long take, Cuarón portrays the stillbirth of Cleo’s child: doctors giving CPR to the dead baby, passing the child on to Cleo for the final adieu, takes it back to prepare the baby from cremation and in fact, prepares the baby for its last journey by inserting cotton into its mouth, wraps it in a cloth while Cleo and the audience keeps on crying. And second one is when Cleo tries to save
Poetry Written By The Javelin
Prasanta Chakravarty ________ What the poet produces is akin to the javelin thrower’s act—a bit of the soil from the entrails of the earth, which hides concealed spots of blood. Ephemera it is; mere unearthed bits of soil. All around us are strewn these passing tableaux of shining ephemera, if we are able to touch their myriad forms, feels Monika Kumar, who is one of the leading contemporary poets writing in Hindi. Her maiden book is titled आशचर्यवत\ (Ascharyavat—Wondrous. Denotes both the state of wonderment itself/time that causes a state or wonder or the ability to feel wondrous. Just published from Vani Prakashan. Perhaps we could start from the middle, or stay in the middle, as Kumar does, in one of her finely wrought poems: बीच से शुरू करते हैं (Let us Begin at the Middle).To be attuned to the many miracles that are continually happening around us, perhaps we need to appreciate the role of the ongoing process of living itself—which means the capacity to remain in res medias and appreciate the staying power of things and relationships that bind us. The middle is neither the zone of hastened invasion nor that of an end which often engenders boredom and shrillness. मुझे तुम बीच का कौर खिलाना, न पहले जिसे तुम भूख के मारे निगल जाते हो न आख़िरी जिसे कहते हुए तुम बिरक्त हो जाते हो मुझे बीच का निवाला खिलाना, जिसे तुम बेध्यानी में बमौज खाते हो Easy marveling at the trivial and the ordinary comes with a sudden realization of this sense of बेध्यानी में बमौज(unselfconscious gaiety)throughout the collection. And we, the readers, acquiesce willfully to this magnetic pull—brought on par with the seeds and the flowers, the fruits and the animals. In fact, the animals that arrive in, and quicken, her poems are often the ones that populate our diurnal existence—ants, lizards, squirrels and rabbits. Do we pay enough attention to our feral neighbours? If we did we would know that— # अभी हम खड़े है उस बिंदु पर जहाँ हम चाहते हैं यह घर चींटों से मुक्त हो जाये और चींटे करते हैं कल्पनाएँ दुनिया की हर चीज़ काश बताशा हो जाये # छिपकलियाँ एकांत के पार्षद की तरह घर में रहतीं और मैं व्याकुलता की बन्दी की तरह # गिलहरियों को अलबत्ता मेरी बातों में कोई रूचि नहीं उन्हें दिलचस्पी है सिर्फ रोटी के टुकड़ों में जो स्कुल के बच्चे अपने डब्बे से गिरा देते हैं # यह नरम- नरम जो बचा हैं खरगोश में उस मासूमियत का शेष है जो कछुए के साथ दौड़ लगाने की स्पर्धा में थक कर नींद बन गयी In each of these sections Kumar deftly changes the viewpoint from the human to the non-human and the world immediately turns upside down and kaleidoscopic. And then she brings us crashing down to the comic situation where we are seen wallowing and indulging in our exaggerated sense of self-hood. In a similar vein there are some exquisitely refined and intimate portraits of the botanical—flowers, seeds and fruits—which cocoon our daily lives even as we are mostly oblivious to them. The wondrous comes to us in many forms; and the world that Monika Kumar opens up for us, the unexpected turns that her lines take, are startling indeed. The local habitations and surroundings turn strikingly vivid. And it is here that she gives us a chance to delve deeper, and vertically, some more: she often begins to take a flight in many of her poems, where the revelation begins to take a truly astonishing shape, and yet often the process then stops short of traversing the whole trajectory of such a flight. This happens, one suspects, owing paradoxically to her deep investment in the local and the communal, though we know that she is an avid reader of poetry from all parts of the world. It is this investment in the common and the earthy—school students and chowkidars, bus conductors, local sportspersons, the housewife, the sweetmeat shop, the petulant lovers in the locality—that keeps her grounded in the intermediate space of living. She is alive to the equity of life. But it is this same investment in the local that sometimes thwarts her from relating such wondrous everyday situations to two crucial dimensions of living itself. One: the inscape or the coutours of our inner worlds—a constant journey that happens within. The other: locating all shining objects and relationships with the cosmological and the astral. Those who are able to take cognizance of the wondrous around us have this special ability to string together a thread between the inner and the outer so that all dualism of existence evaporates. Sometimes Kumar does take a momentous leap and is able to make this vertical connection. The results are truly magical. One such poem is titled बूढ़ा और बच्चा उर्फ़ दादा और पोता(The Elderly and the Child, alias Grandfather and Grandson) Ostensibly the poem is a commentary on three generations—the elderly, the young adult and the child. But more than that, it is blessed with a remarkable realization that the elderly and the child are threaded together in a deeper relationship of wondrous existence that befuddles the adult world. The elderly reaches that state of childlike naiveté after a lifetime of journeying. विलम्ब बूढ़े लोगों का गुण है उनके भीतर स्पंदन है पर चेहरे स्थिर और विलम्बित है उनके चेहरे के सामने समाज अपने बदलाव पटकता है …बूढ़े लोग शांत चेहरों से युद्ध लड़ते है लहभग सभी विवादों और दुखों का अंत वे जानते है The elderly know the final results of all arguments and sorrows. Therefore they realize events intuitively and merely smile about such events—living in hope and curiosity about already known facts. In its his own way, the child naturally tries to sense all that is magical and true within his newly found world and finds the elderly to be the most conducive fellow traveler on that common journey. Thus, the grandfather and the grandchild form the secret, preternatural couple.
Inside and Outside of Time (अधूरी बातें )
Adhoori Baten (Click for the Full Essay in Hindi). HUG talks to Shubha, with reference to her reflective essay अधूरी बातें, on Time and Memory. _______________ HUG: Though your reflections in this composition flow from one thread to another, all sections, including the digressions, are woven into a tapestry. This is a weaving that I have often observed in your prose pieces. Here, I would like to talk about a seaming with Time. Time can be a prisoner, shackled and bound, but it also reserves the potential to be free, since its one end is always open and free—एक छोर खुला रहता है. Following this assertion, right at the outset, you hail time as limitless, unbounded (असीम), but then also as changing and transformative (सतत परिवर्तनशील). The first seems to indicate a geological, cosmological time, while the second leads to an identifying and measuring of time (शिनाख्त), and also its structuring (सांचे में ढालना) that eventually brings it to a visibility (पुनर्रचना, दृश्यमान)that is closer to historical time. How can the two things happen simultaneously? Shubha: See, what you call historical time, lived time, is often not enumerated and visibilized. Think of our freedom movement. How much do we know of the hardships, humiliations and inner fights? Much is still shrouded, since what we get are vignettes. All true yes, and yet only vignettes. The knowledge system through which we filter that time period is refracted via a methodologically subjective and perhaps even Western ways. With other methods, some of them doggedly indigenous, the same can be said. Often history misses the power of time—the zeitgeist-युगीन सच्चाई, which it bypasses. This part is complicated. A slice of time has at least two or more sides to it—पक्ष और विपक्ष. Can we measure its wholeness? Are humans equal to such a task? Appreciating time is at best, a divided and fractured possibility and in that sense, time remains open-ended and limitless. And yet we must keep measuring and keeping track of the predicament that time commands. Say, women’s history in a certain time period: her voice, tone, anxieties, force, her sharp criticality and her collective thought and action, these we can keep track of. Movements of resistance are often overlaid upon glaring elisions. How are we to capture that time, a time that precludes and forestalls? Here we are attempting to splice open duration in order to make it enumerable. This second effort cannot avoid histories. HUG: In this context of identification and structuring of time and also with reference to the question of labour, you also refer to trade unions. Shubha: Well, the trade unions have often debated and fought for a certain kind of time: the time of labour. They have often argued for a stipulated period of time for the worker, say 8 to 10 hours and so on. This is the time without, the measurable, quantifiable time within which questions of labour law and so forth are invoked. These are significant watersheds. But there is another kind of contiguity between labour and time. The relationships within the working class, the leisure time, its sense of beauty, the wage earners’ expressions which are also part of a certain time. What about the worker’s children, for instance? Or his health concerns? The feelings and anxieties that he has about his community members? The wholeness of it I mean-परिघटना. One must connect with existence and all existing tribulations. See, the trade union leader functioning within the late liberal climate has turned modern and smart, but is he sensitive and alive to the full social and cultural ambit of the wage earner? I sometimes wonder whether the unions ever were truly alive to human relationships emerging within a certain time-frame? How can one even think of total transformation of the social order without attending to the identification of such time on the part of the unions and such platforms? This has been the story of my life actually, this particular point that you are raising and I can go on and on. HUG:Right. You seem to take us away from individual memory and also from the ossified, repeatable orders and rituals of the collective. But this successful forging of a relationship between subjective individual recollection and communal memory seems to be the order of the day, is it not? We see this in the forging of quick identities around language, organized religion, nation, family and closed ties of loyalty. And all these remain shrouded and penetrated through relentless, conspicuous consumption creating a happy, addled, obedient and genuflecting world. How is one able to even conceive social time or social memory in such a climate? Shubha: I do not see social time distinct from the individual. That kind of decoupling is a mistake. One has always tried to understand and act the conflict, कश्मकश, enacted within the various forces in the social milieu. All kinds of navjagran, rebirth and renaissance dissolve the force of this conflict. These paper over power and the travails of the individual by talking merely about the individual! I mean, what have we done to the fabric of living? We have a mass of enlightened social beings but each one is feudal through and through. This is the primary diktat of the class system in our nation. There is no notion of humanity, and we use that word in lazy, daily recall. That kind of memorialization can only be ossified, alienating each one of us not into melancholy, but into happiness and more bubbling happiness. And thus, we turn more secretive and malignant by deploying memory, without actually visibilizing the hidden facets of time. We are not able to bring together the individual within the social at all, and the latter have remained an epiphenomenon. What might structural change mean unless we attend deeply to relationships? No one even records time and we shout from rooftops about transforming it? It is in this context that I have tried to think about the selection of
সাহিত্যমূল্যে তোরাহ্ /The Torah as Literature
‘স্বরান্তর’ পত্রিকা, তাদের নববর্ষ সংখ্যায়, জানতে চায় কোন বই পড়ে এখনো বিমূন্ধ বা বিস্মিত হই. আমার নিজের একান্ত ভাবনাই বা কি সে বই সম্বন্ধে. কেন পাঠক নতুন করে সেই বইয়ের প্রতি মনোযোগী হবেন . এসব প্রশ্নের উত্তর তো ঠিক দেওয়া সম্ভব নয়. তবু… Sahityamulye Torah ___________________________ The English Version: Swarantar, the Bangla magazine, asked me to name a book that still staggers my sensibility. Why should readers return to such a composition? Naturally, these are partly rhetorical questions. Still… The Torah as Literature ____________________ A literary appreciation of the Hebrew Bible/Tanakh– and especially the first five books of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch (the five scrolls) or the Torah (teachings/laws) – risks blasphemy. But it also risks something more fundamental: how to remain true to the spirit of the Torah and yet reserve an aesthetic sense while reading and immersing in an ancient journey. Harold Bloom had long ago observed that though Homer and Plato have turned safely secular for us, the Bible still retains an aura, even if one is not a fundamentalist. Does Yehwah’s numinosity disturb us in the same way as Lear’s or Prince Myshkin’s? What was that world of strange ordeals and aims that seems universal and yet so distant from our modern conditions of living and acting? How can one get closer to the literal sense of the Hebrew original and yet indulge in a cognitive music that is largely metaphorical and interpretative? Shakespeare or Homer does not help us to solve our problems, and neither does the Bible. On the other hand, the ethical urgency in the Torah is a consideration that one might like to address, especially since its ambit does not tally with modern expectations: it therefore creates an altogether different order of human and natural interaction, worked through a terse and coiled energy that comes from its language, narrative and worldview. The Torah can and must be looked at separately since strictly speaking the Bible is not a book at all but an anthology and “a set of selections from a library of religious and nationalistic writings produced over a period of one thousand years.” So there are diverse styles and points of view, though there have been certain attempts to homogenize it, like that of the whole ideological project in commissioning the King James’ version. There are also a series of textual issues like duplication, omissions, redactions, interpolations and contradictions. In this context, it is particularly important to dwell upon the forms that engage the Bible. For instance, many of the compositions in the Psalm-book, which were often used in the ceremonies of the Second Temple, are what modern literary scholars call lament. Similarly the whole text, especially the Torah, is filled with prophecies and oracles, short narratives (etiologies) and patriotic poetry, hero-stories, trickster-episodes, proverbs, pronouncements, and parables. This does not mean that the Torah is purely a sequential narrative. Each of the five books in the Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—are complete in themselves. In fact, the question of literary form in the Bible is complicated by the fact that Biblical writers often wanted to submerge their individuality in the chosen form. The personal stamp therefore, is concealed in the communal narrative. To make a journey through the Torah is also to be aware of the history of a people and how the God of ancient Israel, their deity, stepped into human history and arranged events in their midst and in the process revealed himself to his people. To quote from the Talmud about the origin of the narrative—“God spoke them and Moses wrote them with tears.” We start from a point with an understanding at which Yahweh chose one man Adam (later Abraham) as a special entity and promised that Adam’s descendents would one day become part of a great nation. The narrative of the Torah is constructed out of the stories of Israel’s ancient heroes and covers the first 700 years of Israel’s existence. After the creation of the world and humankind and its spreading all over the world, the account follows Abraham’s descendents into slavery and out of it and their gradual welding into a nation with a covenant relationship with Yahweh. Finally they come to the verge of a land (Canaan) that they have been promised as their own. This extended narrative has also been called a salvation history. Along with the narrative we also encounter two other gifts to humanity in the Torah: one, a sense of the gradual ritualization of an ancient travelling people and two, an understanding of civil laws (halakah) that becomes part of a commune as it evolves and matures. Reading the Torah is a basis of Jewish public life. Needless to say, the Torah was actually composed over a period of many centuries by a process of culling, patching, rewriting and amplifying by anonymous writers (this is sometimes called the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis). This is not to undermine the authority of the scripture but in fact to strengthen the power and force of numerous believers over centuries coming together to forge an extraordinary document. One can see right from the first book—Genesis—that a literary artist of great acumen composed it. The organization is precise, separate acts of creation are carefully set in parallel form and the movement austere, solemn and dignified. The deity creates Adam by descending to the barren earth, getting hold of some clay and then breathing life into it (the Hebrew word used is yatsar—to mould). The creator himself is one of the actors in the drama. While the first account of creation is complete in itself, the second in Genesis is an etiology bringing man to the threshold of history– and all of earthly time is now before him. The two voices that we hear in the opening chapters continue to be heard in the whole of Torah. The first voice seems to be preoccupied with order and regulation, a voice that often produces genealogical lists. At appropriate intervals this voice issues sweeping laws—for observing