My brief article on British Asian cinema published this week in Tehelka–it was originally written for a film-festival catalog edited by Sukhdev Sandhu:

The film is East is East. We are watching Damien O’Donnell’s 2000 recreation of scenes of England in the early 1970s. The Khan family — half-Pakistani, half-British, with Om Puri and Linda Bassett in the lead roles — is visiting for the day, negotiating an arranged marriage or two, catching a Hindi film: the usual.

En route, they have passed the sign for Bradford, which someone has, of course, altered to ‘Bradistan’. The family arrives at a movie theatre called Moti Mahal. With them we watch a popular song from the classic 60s hit Chaudhvin Ka Chand, but we are hardly moved. Why?

Because nostalgia by itself doesn’t cut it any more.

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Bird Trapping Station (Vogelfangstation), 1998-99. Metal, wood and nets - 21 parts, Dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. 2005. Andreas Slominski.

Okwui Enwezor delivered the Claflin lecture at Vassar tonight. The title of his talk was “Incarcerated Life: Contemporary Art and the Security State.” Enwezor spoke of “the recent weakening of the liberal model of open society by a range of forces––from the terroristic imagination to the futile calculus of total war and the creeping state of emergency within which both are being prosecuted.” The talk show-cased several contemporary artists (including Andreas Slominski, above, whose work on traps is very stark and eloquent) who have responded to the post-9-11 security state.

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Following a comment made on this site by a friend of mine who many years ago was a student in several of my classes, I’ll be screening a part of Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” during the last meeting of my “City” course. We’ll watch Mr Badii driving around the dusty, industrial outskirts of Tehran, looking for someone who will bury him after his suicide, or maybe even save him. For those wondering about the title, here’s a summary from this site:

During Badii’s conversation with the taxidermist–which Kiarostami cuts to in medias res, eliding how they met and how their conversation began–it’s the taxidermist who does most of the talking, explaining how close he came to suicide himself back in 1960, after a fight with his wife. Deciding to hang himself, he carried a rope to a mulberry-tree plantation, but before he could complete the deed he decided to taste a mulberry, then a second and a third. He looked at the scenery, heard the voices of children, and decided to live. A little later he asks Badii, “Do you want to give up the taste of cherries?”

In his comment, my friend has asked whether I’ll describe the changes in my teaching since the days when he was my student. (How long ago was it that I first provoked him in class? Thirteen years? Fourteen?) In lieu of anything I could say here myself, let me provide a pedagogical note provided by Kiarostami himself:

I think a good film is one that has a lasting power, and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don’t like the film in which the film-makers take the audience hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater.

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