#6. May 2024
The sixth one! Our senses tell us that running a newsletter with a team of six (yep, some changes in the core team) may kill one a bit but this thing ain't turning into a ghost anytime soon.
INTRODUCTION
'It's been getting really hot lately', and no, this is not a dialogue from a raunchy teen rom-com, it is the go-to phrase for most of us here at Team Cut and Print as we battle the summer months one sweat at a time.
There are other battles to be addressed,
, writes about the need for a film like Alex Garland's Civil War [2024] in an age where we have learnt how to scroll past news of global war, domestic and international strife passively without reflecting on the consequences of the same. Speaking of the numbing veil of virtuality, (mostly actor, sometimes a guest contributor here) reviews Dibakar Banerjee’s LSD 2: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2024), a film that looks at the aftermath of constant connectivity that consumes us. Continuing the conversation about consuming passions, , moves Beyond the Screen, tracing cinema and the act of archiving as explored in non-fiction films over the years. In the segment This Month, That Year, writes on the never-ending Cinderella-esque charm of Roger Michell’s Notting Hill [1999] as it completes 25 years. Triptych departs from one film structure and opens its arms to more thematic deliberation with a focus on Summer Blockbusters. It includes ’s piece on how films imprint themselves on our childhood memories via a personal reflection on his relationship with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man [2002]; dives into Jean-Luc Godard’s subversion of summer flicks in Pierrot Le Fou [1965]; Abhinav Nath Jha making a second appearance with his piece on Spike Lee’s single summer day drama Do the Right Thing [1989]. And to conclude this issue, in The Rare Window, invites you to look at Daisy Jacobs's animated shorts, drawing in on a wall-breaking artwork and its mind-transforming experience.Happy reading :)
REVIEWS
1. Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)
Civil War: A Dystopia rooted in the Present
ABHINAV NATH JHA
Whenever one mentions Civil War in the American context, one thinks of the war between the Confederate States and the Union States, led by Lincoln. That association got a new makeover when, on the 6th of January 2021, the Senate was attacked in the aftermath of Trump rejecting the election results. Following the attack on the Capitol, The threat of a civil war was widely discussed in a polarised American electorate. Retaining these elements, Alex Garland's Civil War is set in a dystopian America where various regional coalitions are engaged in a civil war with the President of the United States, and entire swathes of the country are on a lockdown. Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) are photojournalists willing to risk their lives and travel to Washington DC to interview the President. They encounter multiple challenges, pass through multiple war zones that they are compelled to cover as part of their professions, and avoid getting killed in the process.
The choreography and blocking of the actors, the way in which the action scenes are set up, and the cinematography and sound design place the viewer right in the middle of the war. It forces the viewer to participate in what's happening (even against their will) and not be a passive viewer. The gunfire sounds are set on such a high level that you feel like you are one of the people on the ground directly threatened by it. When it comes to the treatment of violence, there is no shying away from it, and the brutality of war is not toned down in any manner. It’s hard to look away from these scenes, and I remember being contorted in my seat and crying in one such scene.
Kirsten Dunst does a great job playing Lee, a veteran photojournalist. She is a character so traumatised by her past experiences of being on ground in a war situation that she can appear cold in pursuit of her objective by suppressing her emotions and needs. In fact, she is even seen smiling subtly in one such situation in the aftermath of covering a violent standoff. However, there is one scene where she visits an empty retail store and tries out a green dress. She looks at herself and pauses for a long time to perceive herself rather than the violent subjects of whom she clicks photos. This entire moment says a lot about Lee, and it is executed brilliantly. Cailee Spaeny, as Jessie, also puts up a compelling performance. Jessie is a newcomer and is exposed to this world for the first time. and is scared and distraught by it but then finds her own and emerges as a completely different person chasing the story as a photojournalist, undeterred by tragedy. In one scene, Jessie tells Lee, ‘I've never been so scared in my entire life. And I've never felt more alive.’ Joel, on the other hand is somebody who enjoys a sense of thrill and fun. He actively seeks out violence, it excites him, and he tries to lead the others towards adventure.
Silence is a major element in the film. In one scene where Lee is all coiled up in her bathtub and reliving traumatic memories from the multiple conflicts, the horrors are cast upon the viewer in the form of a montage in abject silence. In another shot, when a major character dies, Joel stands distraught, breaking down, but again we hear no sounds. Another consistent feature is shots that have out-of-focus backgrounds that enable extreme focus on character interactions. This helps in building anticipation for what’s coming next.
Civil War is an uncomfortable watch and not the kind that makes eating popcorn any easier. Yet, in an age where we have learnt how to scroll past news of global war, domestic and international strife passively without reflecting on the consequences of the same, Civil War is an incredible attempt at introspecting our beliefs and questioning where we are headed next.
2. LSD 2: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (Dibakar Banerjee, 2024)
Love Sex aur Dhokha 2 is an overdose of metaphors on our obsession with social media, reality TV and news channels
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: SANSKAR AGARWAL
For more than a few minutes into watching LSD 2, you may find yourself wondering whether you have walked into the wrong cinema hall. The first segment of the three-part movie is entirely staged as though you are watching a reality TV show (a hybrid between Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa and Bigg Boss). At the centre of this show – which is both outlandish and eerily close to reality –- is Noor, a transwoman (at one point her mother joins the “Bigg Boss House” and very seriously sings a song that goes ‘Yeh sexy taal hai ispe tum mat nacho. Main ganda, tu gandi’). Noor goes through waves in both the audience's acceptance of her and of her gender. I, on the other hand, went through waves of ridiculing how shallow these people are to be marvelling at the intricacies of how people fabricate almost their entire lives to get famous. A feature where contestants are allowed to be “on-cam” or “off-cam” is used as a clever metaphor for how filtered our lives are on social media. And yet, all of this was never used to make me reflect on my own self. The point of view (quite literally, given that a lot of the film is shown through the lenses of in-world cameras) was always me peering at these characters from outside – never connecting with or feeling for them. And that is exactly where LSD 2 lost me.
By the time I got to the second segment I had already gotten so numb to human behaviour that it was hard to sympathise even with a rape victim. But perhaps that is the very effect Dibakar Banerjee intends to have on us. To make us realise how the sensationalised bombardment of news leaves us numb and empty. LSD 2 does a great job of highlighting the dirty, selfish, and evil within us. The victim Kulu’s story becomes a game of “Dog and the Bone” between her employers and the media, both using her story to promote their brand image and gain traction. All Kulu wants is her salary, not justice; she was happy to never complain about the perpetrators if that meant avoiding getting into this mess.
The third segment – about a teenaged social media influencer hit by leaked deepfake videos of him having gay sex – comments on everything from social media to bullying to stardom to the metaverse. But in the end it boils down to the presence of the internet in our lives as a drug. The internet provides both social validation and dopamine. The older notion of ‘‘Padosi kya kahenge?’ has now translated into ‘What will the million random people watching on social media say?’. The pressure on teenagers today is immense and Banerjee does a great job of capturing that. And yet, in the end, it is the lack of love in the story that left me disconnected once again. Banerjee holds his mirror to a world addicted to LSD – in the second instalment, they expand to Like, Share and Download. He strips it of any possibility of Love, Sympathy or Dharma. Does storytelling still require the presence of one of those latter three to keep us engaged? I’d still like to believe so.
BEYOND THE SCREEN
3. Archiving as Seen on Film
PRAKHAR PATIDAR
Tracing cinema and the act of archiving as explored in non-fiction films over the years: Man with a Movie Camera [Dziga Vertov, 1929]; Toute la mémoire du monde [Alain Resnais, 1956]; Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois [Jacques Richard, 2004]; Celluloid Man [Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, 2012].
When the Soviet avant-garde documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov experimented with a city symphony (a genre that emerged in 1920s; structured around a day with the urban city as both the setting and the protagonist) to demonstrate cinema’s distinctive universality, separate from the language of theatre and literature, the result was remarkable but mostly unwatchable: Man With a Movie Camera. It begins with a man holding a camera climbing a larger camera, the visuals achieved by double exposure and an optical trick, the subtext reads, ‘The camera is at work, something is being recorded, a kind of documentation is in progress.’ The very first frame becomes a glimpse behind the curtains, letting the audience know what's to come is no conventional cinema. Interestingly, in the very next scene we are inside a theatre slowly being filled by an audience for whatever the man with a movie camera has recorded. What follows is a scene from life in a Russian city at random, with occasional reminders that this is constructed through visuals of the cameraman himself, his camera, and the editor. There is so much happening! So much to observe from the second the city wakes up to the minute it sleeps. In essence this experimentation, beyond the commentary it does on the universality of the cinematic language, is an act of archiving the act of archiving itself.
Archives are labyrinthine, the act of creating them is no less of a maze. A fitting visual to this can be found in Alain Resnais’ most direct treatment of “memory” (a thematic element that often appears in his cinematic oeuvre), a 1956 process film the national repository of France; Bibliothèque Nationale called Toute la mémoire du monde [en. All the Memory in the World]. Here too we meet the camera first, then a microphone as the narrator comments ‘because he has a short memory, man accumulates countless-aid memories’. Once again we are faced with signifiers of archiving, documenting, remembering, immediately relating to it because the compulsion to preserve is deeply human and universal [Derrida, 1995]. The camera lingers over the hoards of printed material collected in the archive and passes through unending shelves stacked with innumerable books as the background score cues in one to feel a sense of falling into an abyss. Derrida has famously and confoundingly described archives to externalised spaces of collective memory that mirror our minds. They are complex, unorganised and unreliable structures. And where there’s a structure, Foucault is there as well to remind you that there exists power. Building on this power that arises out of what is preserved, by whom, for what purpose, Derrida proposes that the relationship between the archive and the past is less of “preserver-preserved” and more of “creator-created”. We often go looking for the past in the archive, points of origins but as Steedman has pointed out ‘nothing starts in the archive ever’. History (archives) is merely whatever little of an instance in time we are able to preserve, never whole, always incomplete. And yet, the archivists yearn for the points of origin, the preservation of that which is original, succumbing to a condition that Derrida calls the archive fever. A quest for that which doesn’t exist undertaken with an immense ethical responsibility of preserving the past unadulterated.
Perhaps it is this condition to compulsively preserve, a fanatical feverish passion that is needed to build an archive. Go big or go home? The sentiment is recurrent in Jacques Richard’s Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois [2004] and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Celluloid Man [2012] as both tell the tale of two very different men who undertook very similar journeys. These two documentaries, the former dedicated to the very eccentric pioneering Turkish-French film archivist Henri Langlois and the latter dedicated to his mentee, India’s pioneering film archivist of quiet diligence PK Nair, are pivoted on their drive to preserve cinema’s history, extend film’s life and shape a vision for filmmaking. Though not very similar stylistically, the former is carved out of archival material and testimonies while the latter is set in the present and walks back into time with Nair himself; both documentaries have a lot in common: the one man showmanship that the painstakingly mammoth task of setting national archives demanded when cinema was barely considered an artform, their cornerstone presence in institutions central to shaping cinematic voices of the future (Langlois in Cinémathèque Française; Nair in FTII and NFAI), creating channels of interaction between world cinema and international audiences, bending rules to make dupes to defying the state altogether. The most exciting of these commonalities is the who’s who of serious cinema from both these parts of the world - France and India - make an appearance as a testament to the impact of their work. What echoes is their contribution in shaping a generation of filmmakers by introducing them to the ones that came before them as well as the ones who surrounded them around the world.
Jean Luc Godard describes Langlois as “first and foremost a producer because he produces the vision of the films”, a statement that very well applies to PK Nair, as exemplified by the anecdotes of various renowned names of Indian cinema featured in Celluloid Man from Ritwik Ghatak to Sriram Raghavan.
If you’ll ask anyone who loves cinema, in any form — be it the most pretentious of the lot who wear the term “cinephile” like a badge on dating apps or that one academic who can't help but over intellectualise the artform or the purist filmmaker who won’t stop shoving Citizen Kane [1941] supremacy down the throat of every “G.O.A.T conversation” or the dedicated practitioner of the “first day - first show” fan ritual — what is it about cinema that demands such admiration, the answer will always be something of magic. It can be found in an old film that Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois shows of Langlois explaining why he dedicated himself to archiving cinema. He says, “My goal was to show shadows of living co-existing with shadows of the dead for that’s the essence of cinema. It supersedes time and space.” Nair too, in recounting where this love affair began, emphasises on the unforgettable, “magical experience” of having watched a Tamil film by K Subrahmanyam as a child.
Featured in Celluloid Man, Kumar Sahani, speaking about Nair, archiving, and cinema, evokes the film’s capacity to preserve ephemerality. Langlois, Nair, Sahani, the pretentious cinephile, the overt academic, the purist filmmaker, the “first day - first show” fanatic of massy entertainers, you and I may have myriad meanings of cinema, many ways of engaging with it but not one of us can deny this ‘“magic” we all can feel. I’d take it a step further and claim it isn’t just the magic of experiencing the moving image, it is that time bound, uniquely “original” instance of happening across it. When an archived film meets its recipient — a someone from the future, something like when the audience comes to watch Vertov’s man with a movie camera’s documentation of reality, this instance of meeting as per an archivist’s bible, must be in service to an “original”. Albeit this original doesn’t really exist as it can’t be traced, for the sake of argument or practicality or to avoid succumbing to archive fever, we must imagine an original and strive towards recreating it. Preserving a film closest to as it would have been in the time it was made, so its magic can be felt unadulterated. Film archives, then, can also be described as an attempt to bottle this essence of cinema, thrown into the sea in hopes someone looking for it will happen across it in the waves of time.
THIS MONTH, THAT YEAR
4. Notting Hill (Roger Mitchell, 1999)
Seeing Silver Linings: Twenty-Five Years of Notting Hill
VARUN OAK-BHAKAY
Gender-flipping is quite the norm in pop culture today, and invites diverse but equally vociferous opinions: the suggestion that Daniel Craig’s successor as James Bond could be a woman was met with backlash from 007 loyalists, whose reaction to the blonde-haired Craig’s casting way back in 2005 had been just slightly milder. I found myself backing the loyalists, though my reasons were slightly different: there hasn’t been an earnest stab at creating a spy franchise led by a woman, though there was evidence of great characters existing in recent releases – David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde [2017] starred Charlize Theron as an ass-kicking MI6 operative, and Daniel Craig’s swansong as Bond – No Time to Die [Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021] – featured Ana de Armas in a deliciously fun cameo as a CIA agent.
But if someone walked up to me and said they’d flip genders and tell a Cinderella-esque story, they’d have my attention and my curiosity, though I foresee a similar reaction if a khayali pulao was being cooked up about something like The Shining [Stephen King, 1977]. Sure, the nitty-gritties will need to be worked on a bit, and Kubrickians fended off, but there’s no reason Jack Torrance has to be a man in a contemporary adaptation.
The same logic can be applied to Roger Michell’s Notting Hill [1999], which recently completed twenty-five years. Like any British romantic comedy of the time, the film’s choice of leading man is Hugh Grant, the Cinderella to Julia Roberts’ Prince Charming. He’s William, a specialist seller of travel books (no, he does not stock any John Grisham, nor any Dickens or A.A. Milne, thank you very much!), she’s Anna, a mainstream Hollywood actress with a home in Beverly Hills. Two people who should not have met but they do because that is the conceit of the film.
Notting Hill is aspirational, rose-tinted romance at its peak: because it deals with the idea of falling in love, it doesn’t have to combat the prickliness of the relationship itself, and Michell manoeuvres his actors such that nothing but them getting together matters. After all, who doesn’t want to meet the love of their life in a bookshop? Chance’d be a fine thing, really.
In a day and age where the mid-budget romantic comedy is practically dead and repeatedly mourned, Notting Hill works despite its age because it doesn’t wear the genre as much as it develops into it: there is a sense of effortlessness about the way the narrative unfolds. The comedy, for instance, is situational: the characters aren’t funny in themselves, but the things they say have an everyday humour about them. The romance is the stuff of fantasy set in a very real world, and Michell often drags the viewer back to reality, but love does ultimately conquer all.
Part of why it works so well is because Michell and writer Richard Curtis (the man the world loves and I hold responsible for Love Actually [2003]) cast Roberts, an all-conquering American star who, at her peak, was the among the highest-earning actors in Los Angeles, and Grant, who had a dedicated fan following internationally but was nowhere near as well-known as Roberts. But this imbalance is what adds to the film: Grant has an everyman nature about him in comparison to Roberts’ hundred-watt smile. He does the awkward conversations, and she the dialoguebaazi. If Grant had been the one to do the bit about being a boy who was asking a girl he loved to love him back, it would’ve looked ridiculous, but Roberts’ place in the film, and outside of it, lends credence to that interaction. His responses are akin to those many of us have likely offered to people who have caused butterflies in our stomachs: halting, a little meandering, but ultimately arriving at the conclusion that she is way out of his league. I was reminded of a moment from the show After Life [Ricky Gervais, 2019-22]: Tony [Gervais], sitting on a bench, reminisces about his late wife and says, ‘Women are better than men and they never stop trying to bring us up to their standard.’ It doesn’t really align with how William feels about Anna, but there is a sense of inadequacy and difference that he acknowledges when he turns her down (also very rare in on-screen romances). Maybe he feels that way too, or perhaps I’m projecting because I subscribe to Tony’s view.
I have stubbornly insisted upon the view that any artistic work – writing, music, cinema – must have something that grounds it in the human experience, and I substantiate my opinion through the magnificent Indiana Jones films, or two of them anyway. How many of us are actually like the adventuring archaeologist? Precious few. But Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford embed in the films’ details a sense of relatability, be it the bhaichaara Jones shares with Sallah and Marcus, his relationship with his father, and the idea of being caught between the moral right and the practical right. Notting Hill’s relatability comes not only in the desire one may have of meeting the love of one’s life in a bookshop, but also of the idea that such a thing could happen between a neo-aristocrat like Anna and a commoner like William. Haven’t we all wished, at least once in our lives, that Audrey Hepburn would smile at us the way she does at Peck in Roman Holiday [William Wyler, 1953] or Bogie in Sabrina [Billy Wilder, 1954]?
TRIPTYCH
5. Summer Blockbusters
I. Spider-Man (Sam Raimi, 2002)
Summertime and Spider-Man: How Our Childhood Informs Us
VANIJ CHOKSI
The first time I ever experienced heartbreak watching a film wasn’t – like many – at the end of Titanic (1997) when Jack drowns. I remember Manchester by the Sea (2016) tore me apart as a teenager, but no, the first time I ever experienced heartbreak was when Uncle Ben died in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002). Then he died again in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). Thankfully the Tom Holland reboot spared me of the experience a third time. Can you imagine losing someone thrice? Well, I guess the possibilities of killing off a character who doesn’t really die when he dies are infinite in the Marvel-isation of cinema. And although it now feels trivial and my discussing this may be a sharp departure from what I generally write about – Spider-Man, specifically, to me, is unassailable.
Long before this writer traded in his obsessive comic-book superhero film fanaticism for, what his family considers pretentious useless knowledge and to agree with and worship at the altar of one Martin Scorsese (yeah , I definitely switched sides), he hung Marvel posters in his room (I still have them) and went to bed in a Spider-Man t-shirt (I still do). I guess you’re still captured by whatever it is you used to like as a child, and although I can say I’ve had my time with it and have probably grown out of enthusiasm for it (I don’t regret it), Spider-Man somehow stands the test of time. What exactly about it I still cling onto is ambiguous, yet I know for a fact it has something to do with the qualities of film as a time capsule, crystallising a memory by mere association.
Forget about first heartbreaks, the first time I probably ever fell in love was with Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane. Talk to any of the boys I grew up with, you’d get the same answer. That upside-down kiss – wow! Nothing short of scandalous when I watched it as a kid but as I grew, it became something I thought would be cool to have a go at (I did, it was awesome). I genuinely thought I was Spider-Man (I don’t think it’s totally off the cards that I might still be). I remember Spider-Man-themed birthday parties (if you’ve gotten this far into the piece I don’t need to tell you that I definitely had one), if you were lucky enough to have a birthday coincide with a new Spider-Man film, best believe there was a show booked for everyone, and for those who you really love, a Spider-Man figurine was the safest bet for a gift to convey that (you know who you are). My infatuation eventually rubbed off on my dad, and when Spider-Man was rebooted in 2012, I remember standing in line with him, and even though he still considers animation childish, he’d happily watch the Spider-Verse films.
I associate Spider-Man with the smell of monsoon arriving. Yes, a new Spider-Man film would usually come out in India in June/July which technically is the beginning of monsoon in Bombay, yet it’s such a summer film. Well, June/July is summer in the States and if it's summer for the Americans, it's summer for the entire world, right? Look, I don’t have anything clever to write about Spider-Man, I could talk about its moral tales of great power and great responsibilities, but we all know that, quite well actually. Spider-Man is one of those films that’s more about its feeling and relationality than anything else, especially now when I feel like I’ve breached the cusp of adulthood, where summer vacations don’t exist and I don’t feel the heat as I did before. Yes, my taste and sensibilities as a cinephile and filmmaker are drastically different now, leaning more towards the apparently scandalous remarks of Mr. Scorsese, so allow me to swing back for a second and make a comparison that I may well be the first to make: Spider-Man was our Fellini. We grew up when we did and the movies that played then were the ones that we received. What I’m trying to say is yes, I see the need to champion so-called “real cinema” but what I watched as a child did make me fall in love with the movies, did give me the curiosity to search for “real cinema” in the first place, and it's something I don’t intend to betray. Many times I have excluded myself as a person of my generation, yet I realise now that my sensibilities are inextricably entwined with it. And when we watched all three Spider-Men come together, I knew yours were too.
Summertime and Spider-Man – two beautiful markers of a childhood you and I shared.
II. Pierrot Le Fou (en. Pierrot the Fool, Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
AADHYA KANCHARLA
Sweaty, sinewy bodies. Palpable tension, simmering like the undercurrents of heat in the air. A musical number that solidifies the oozing chemistry between the leads. Summer Nights from Grease (1978) and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing (1987). These are the images that usually pop up in one’s head when one thinks of a whirlwind summer romance film. One would hardly envision an artistic meditation on philosophy and politics with references to the Vietnam War, communism, love and life itself. Pushing the form of beach movies, particularly popular in the 60s, Godard allows an ethereal tone of summer to spread in this artwork, like dust over the surrounding surface of social and political commentary. Imagery of a Mediterranean summer-the glimmering sea, the blazing sun in the stark blue of the summer sky, girls in white bows and pinafores, footprints in the coastal sand, summer dresses, sounds of cicadas and the pleasant respite of the shade of dark green trees — are set against the stark colour grading of reds and blues throughout the film, perhaps to represent France itself or perhaps to distinguish between the two personalities of the titular protagonist. Visual contradictions are plentiful in the film- fireworks amongst thunder, fire burning against the water, intentional car crashes amongst the lush greenery. Space (the switch between wide landscape shots and zoomed in glimpses of their expressions), sound and colour are used to drive home the point of the contradictions in not just the lead duo, but in life and politics itself — throughout the film, the French are juxtaposed against the Americans who are looked down upon. Godard presents us with self discovery in the form of a summer movie, he shows us the odd intimacy that exists even in exaggerated theatrics, the abstractness of the wild, youthful summer theme eventually reveals a far more complex relationship dynamic — while his protagonists might care more about “feeling alive” and “broadening their minds” through travel and idealistic island getaways than the consequences of their actions, their true spirits are revealed through the complex rhetoric they engage in — sometimes towards the camera, sometimes through a voice-over style narration and not as frequently through mutually understood conversation.
Godard’s muses Jean Paul Belmondo (whose frowning countenance represents every nihilistic philanderer-cum-self-proclaimed philosopher ever) and Anna Karina (whose bright eyes scream summer, life and youth) play Ferdinand/Pierrot and Marianne Renoir, an old flame who represents joie de vivre in contrast to Ferdinand ( aptly nicknamed "Pierrot" a stock male character in French pantomime, by her)whose soul has been sucked out by the despair and idiocy of the superficial people he usually surrounds himself with. He is indifferent towards his wife’s infidelity that takes place right in front of him at a party where degeneracy seems to thrive, and soon she becomes irrelevant as he embarks on a wild ride towards an Italian summer paradise with Renoir, his Manic Pixie Girl Friday. “Lovers long for the warm evening air”, he tells disinterested yet amused persons they meet along the way, changing seasons and unexpected encounters are the only reason to live life, as far as he is concerned. He declares that he has found his mirror as they wade through the shimmering sea after crashing their first getaway car — the first crack in the mirror that brings him his not-so-metaphorical 100 years of bad luck appears when they successfully isolate themselves from the rest of society and Marianne realises that she is sick of the sea, sun and sand and Pierrot (“My name is Ferdinand'', he corrects), is an insufferable bore. Their relationship quickly transforms from hooking up in cars to realising that he is more of a thinker, and she is more of a feeler. The spell of the summer breeze is lifted and the quietness of their summer paradise gets deafening — the events that follow almost feel like a fever dream come to life, with unusual animals like foxes and macaws appearing out of the blue and other elements that throw the audience for a surprise. .
“All she cares about is fun", Ferdinand declares, talking to the audience, Godard frolics with the form of storytelling as well as the cinematic elements, adding to the elusiveness of the characters who exist as “a huge question mark hanging over the Mediterranean horizon”. Renoir looks at the camera knowingly when the depth to her character is revealed, a welcoming gesture compared to the sly glances at the camera from earlier on in the film. She is effervescent, full of life, not self-flagellating like Pierrot, who is mostly motivated by sexual desire and a will to escape his life. An issue I had with the first Godard film I chanced upon (and walked out of), A Woman is a Woman (1961) was the infantilization of women and outdated humour in doing so. Although Pierrot Le Fou is also guilty of reinforcing racist stereotypes through its humour (the yellowface was particularly painful to sit through), Marianne Renoir proves to be somewhat of an exception to his seemingly narrow vision of “the feminine mystique”. From her ideas of falling in love being a disgusting habit and the ease at which she commits crimes, to the quiet knowledge she possesses of Pierrot seeing her as a childlike woman, calling her “his fairy” and underestimating her intelligence- she is full of contradictions and is summer personified.
Unlike any other summer film or buddy crime comedy/romantic-comedy that I have seen, Pierrot Le Fou has not only given me lessons in philosophy set against the summer aesthetic, but it has heightened the importance of restored cinema in my mind- with the translations being as complex as the original language (“language often retains only what is pure”) and the artistic nature of Godard’s filmmaking being retained with its intense colour grading.
Anything goes in the South of France, an idea I was all too familiar with but I can no longer detach the idea of a European summer from the imagery of garish red blood in quaint cafes that serve cold glasses of lager, Jean Paul Belmondo munching on a giant block of cheese in a sailboat on the Toulon waterfront while an old Lebanese rich lady (strikingly similar to Jennifer Coolidge in the second season of The White Lotus [2022]) rambles on and the performance art of a zanily brutal waterboarding scene. It was indeed a cruel summer.
III. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
Do the Right Thing: Where Does One Start?
ABHINAV NATH JHA
Written and directed by Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing is set on the predominantly Black street of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, which is also home to Italian-American and Korean-American families. The film's timeline is restricted to a single day, the hottest day New York City has ever witnessed. The film focuses on the interactions between the different characters in this neighbourhood, and yes, they do end up talking about how the hot weather is. Even in scenes where the heat is not mentioned in a conversation, the viewer can still feel it with an over-excessive use of the colour red, either through a production design or costume. The film is graded with shades of yellow, too, to translate the essence of a hot day.
Another consistent element of the film is the song “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy which keeps playing on repeat on the boombox Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) always carries with him. If one were to analyse its lyrics, it calls forth its listeners to fight back against racial and economic inequality, a theme that becomes even more clear as the film progresses.
The two major characters that drive the narrative forward are Mookie (Lee himself), an African American delivery boy in his mid-twenties who works at a pizzeria, and Sal (Dan Aiello), an Italian American who owns that very pizzeria. Mookie stays with his sister Jade (Joie Lee). He also has a girlfriend, Tina (Rosie Perez), who is Latin American, from whom he has a son – Hector. He tries to cut corners and spend more time with Tina. Sal meanwhile tries to assuage the tensions of the African American community after they object that he has only put photos of prominent Italian celebrities on his pizzeria’s walls and not featured a Black celebrity. Despite tensions that have existed between the Italian American community and the African American community, Sal and Mookie get along pretty well, with Sal never uttering a racist comment or indicating a gesture of any such kind, even as a joke.
And yet, things are not as they seem. Yes, the heat has been referenced as a direct element, but it’s a metaphor for the suppressed prejudices emanating from ethnocentric attitudes waiting to erupt and break free. Things finally breach the simmering point when Sal is fed up of being told to change things around in his pizzeria, and in a subsequent fit of rage, he smashes Radio Raheem’s boombox, leading to a fight that takes the form of a riot when the police get involved and a major character dies in the ensuing violence.
Do the Right Thing is revolutionary in the way in which xenophobia can take root in communities due to improper power structures in place, a status quo that benefits a certain class and clan and how the most mundane, everyday interactions between people from two different ethnicities are important revealers about their position in the power hierarchy that operates informally and at times invisibly. The earth didn’t get so hot all of a sudden one fine day due to decades of climate mismanagement. Similarly, Do the Right Thing depicts how a riot or a major conflict is a result of disparities that haven’t been resolved or reconciled and brushed under the carpet for years to come before it finally takes a deadly form.
‘People, people, we are the same,
No we're not the same,
'Cause we don't know the game,
What we need is awareness, we can't get careless’
These lyrics from “Fight the Power” sums up the thematic crux of the film aptly.
THE RARE WINDOW
6. The Bigger Picture (2014) and The Full Story (2017) by Daisy Jacobs
The Art of Expression
MAHIKA KANDALGAONKAR
One brother asks, “What are you looking at?” The other brother responds, “Death,” as they both stare at us. Then they erupt laughing.
The writer-director-animator Daisy Jacobs in her stop-motion short film The Bigger Picture [2014] showcases the struggle of two brothers taking care of their ageing mother as they themselves grow old with each passing motion. A film about grief and the loss of a loved one surely seems full of life in its technique of expression. Jacobs uses life-sized wall paintings, along with 3D papier-mâché and props to bring her art to life. The imperfection or perhaps the deliberation in leaving behind the traces of the character’s askew movements further adds ambiguity to Jacob’s self-expression.
The same grief, loss, and artwork are expressed in Jacob’s next stop-motion short film The Full Story [2017], which showcases a man who travels through his childhood memories of his loving family that breaks apart during a divorce as he shows his house to an estate agent. Jacobs adds to this project an element of live-action that literally brings her wall-painted characters to life by resembling similar movements to their 2D selves. The visual aesthetics resemble Vincent van Gogh's painting style where the painting's foreground merges into the painting's background, immersing it in the surrounding space and conveying the narrative’s emotional truth.
The meaning behind the proverb “The walls have ears”, and also its continuation in the Elvis Presley song that goes like “Ears that hear each little sound you make,” is taken into actuality in Jacob’s animated shorts as indeed the walls hold memories and speak the stories of the entrapped ghosts of the past while interacting with the space and those who occupy it. The question then arises, should one let these ghosts haunt or heal them?
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” said Dr. César A. Cruz. It is this sentiment that Jacob embodies in her animated shorts. She incorporates surrealism by portraying dreamlike scenarios. Some of the surreal elements include one of the brothers overfilling a teacup with water and flooding the room to escape the responsibility of caring for an ageing mother in The Bigger Picture, and the young boy drowning himself into the floor to escape the pain of his parent’s fights in The Full Story. Jacobs intentionally distorts the already distorted forms through the mise-en-scene’s interaction with camera movements and also incorporates the movement of lights for a cinematic effect. The audio aesthetics too has a form of its own as it echoes the turmoil experienced by the characters.
Neuroaesthetics is the scientific field that studies how the brain responds to art. Ivy Ross, the co-author of the book Your Brain On Art states in the Rethinking podcast with Adam Grant that, “Art experiences tend to be salient experiences that literally make new synapses in the brain. Being engaged in the arts not only gets you more in touch with yourself and self-expression, but it also helps create breakthrough moments.” I believe Daisy Jacobs not only created a wall-breaking artwork but she also left us with a mind-transforming experience. Literally!
Picks of the Month
A short list of the writers each choosing the best film/show they’ve watched in the preceding month (1st April onwards).
1. Abhinav: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
2. Prakhar: Baby Reindeer (Weronika Tofilska; Josephine Bornebusc, 2024)
3. Varun: Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)
4. Vanij: Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)
5. Aadhya: A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)
6. Mahika: Aatmapamphlet (Ashish Avinash Bende, 2023)
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