Claire Pentecost

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David Thomson
, Film critic, in an obit in the Guardian

Long before the end, Ingmar Bergman elected to live on a small island off the coast of Sweden. It was a way of saying he was alone with his work and his lovers - and probably no one knew the loneliness better than the lovers, and the children, who saw how he put their smiles, their eyes, their meals, their untidy beds on the screen. They had to live with his ruthless and obsessive use of their smiles, their faces and their youth. It was not unkind, but it was not kind either, in the way of reassurance or loyalty. It told everyone that everything changes, yet remains the same. So he would live on an island and then perhaps the foolish film festivals would stop asking him to come and be honoured. Didn’t they know that making the films was the only thing that kept him alive or anywhere near calm?

The way Bergman’s work and Bergman’s pain were in equation struck me early on and almost by chance. In 1957, he made Wild Strawberries, in which a great man, a professor, is going to a kind of film festival to be honoured for his career. He is Isak Borg, played by Victor Sjostrom (the pioneering figure in the Swedish film industry and Bergman’s mentor). But as he travels toward his honorary degree, so Borg dreams and remembers and feels shocked by his private failures. We can see that he is a cold man attracted to the warmth of others - and I think Bergman saw himself the same way.

Wild Strawberries is a great film, struggling to reconcile inward failure and outward success. I realised that it was the same “story” as a film I had seen two years earlier - Citizen Kane, in which an old man dies and has his last thoughts filled by the same grim debate: was I wretched in all my glory? Maybe all great films say the same thing.

Bergman saw the resemblance between the medieval dance of death and the modern waiting for apocalypse. But that tension was only the larger projection of a small, ordinary anxiety: will love last or betray itself? The director who strikes me most as a direct descendant is Andrei Tarkovsky - the latter’s The Sacrifice is as true a Bergman film as Liv Ullmann’s Faithless. But every great director, every one committed to the work, and prepared to live on an island as opposed to the Beverly Hills Hotel, has surely found themselves making their own variant of a Bergman film.

Cast an eye back over the great Bergman pictures, from Sawdust and Tinsel to Fanny and Alexander, from Cries and Whispers to Smiles of a Summer Night, and this is how you know them - there is hardly a special effect in the canon. Save one: the human face in joy and terror, lost or in flux. For Bergman, the face was always the same: always constant and always fresh.

Via

A couple of weeks ago, I was drawing up a list of books to assign for the coming semester, and, by chance, I came across an old piece on Slate about the most influential books some folks had read in college. Which book would I offer from my own past? No title seemed to suggest itself in a way that didn’t seem the result of a narrow narrative of literary self-fashioning. The more interesting query was what I could offer my students that would make an unforgettable impression on them. And there too I drew a blank, or, more accurately, was faced with many, ambiguous answers. Why shouldn’t literary love also be about the unplanned, the inexplicable, or at the very least, the accidental? In any case, here’s an excerpt from the Slate piece, this one by Christopher Hitchens whose other statements and fulminations these days make less and less sense:

He who hesitates is lost. If I gave myself any time to reflect, I might come up with Peter Sedgwick’s edition of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary. But to answer the question about “most influential” is really to choose the indelible, and the book I most remember reading between 1967 and 1970 is The Mill on the Floss, borrowed well away from Oxford in a “youth” camp in Cuba. Only Shakespeare and Proust are superior to George Eliot in guessing at the real springs of human motive and in describing the mammalian underlay of social forces. At the time, I may have believed that literature was of less importance than politics, but when I shook off this fatuous illusion I went straight to the Eliot shelf and didn’t stop until I had read it all, which I suppose will serve as a paltry definition of influence.

Sanjay Kak’s documentary about Kashmir, “Jashn-e-Azadi” (How We Celebrate Freedom), was not allowed to be screened in Mumbai. Here’s a report at Mumbai Mirror. Also see here, here and here. Ranjit Hoskote from PEN-India has this statement:

We write to bring to your notice yet another violation of the freedom of expression in India. On Friday, 27 July 2007, a posse of policemen attached to the Dadar police station in Bombay broke into a private screening of Sanjay Kak’s documentary, ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’, and confiscated the DVD. The screening, which was hosted by the Vikalp group of independent filmmakers, was intended to bring to a Bombay audience an eloquent cinematic argument for dialogue beyond anguish and antagonism; for an understanding of the ‘Kashmir issue’ in human and cultural terms. Kak’s ‘Jashn-e-Azaadi’ dwells on the experience of the Kashmiri people during the protracted period of strife they have suffered — with equal elements of militancy, State repression, criminal violence, and a struggle for self-articulation. According to the Bombay police, it contains “scenes of a provocative nature”. To disrupt the screening of such a documentary is only to re-enact the brutality that has become the tragic norm in the Valley. We strongly deplore this violation of the right of Indian citizens to examine, express and discuss questions of great public importance, without falling in line with the official view on these questions. Such high-handedness cuts at the very root of democracy.

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If Bush vetoes the bill designed to provide state health insurance coverage for children, Barbara Ehrenreich proposes that we demand that he “open up pet health insurance to all American children now!”

This year, Americans will spend about $9.8 billion on healthcare for their pets, up from $7.2 billion five years ago. According to the New York Times, New York’s leading pet hospitals offer CT scans, MRIs, dialysis units and even a rehab clinic featuring an underwater treadmill, perhaps for the amphibians in one’s household. A professor who consults to pet health facilities on communication issues justified these huge investments in pet health to me by pointing out that pets are, after all, “part of the family.”

Well, there’s another category that might reasonably be considered “part of the family.” True, they are not the ideal companions for the busy young professional: It can take two to three years to housebreak them; their standards of personal hygiene are lamentably low, at least compared with cats; and large numbers of them cannot learn to sit without the aid of Ritalin.

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1. Nobody gets hurt.
2. Nobody fights.
3. Nobody doesn’t be mean to each other.
4. Nobody can drop nobody else’s pictures.
5. Nobody gets drained. [She looks at the drain in her bathtub.]
6. Nobody lies down [in the bath].
7. Nobody when you’re eating bubblegum swallows it.
8. Put on your seatbelt.
9. Nobody stays up all night.
10. First eat your dinner before you have candy.
11. Every one take a bath every single day. [She wants the towel.]

With a name like Preston Merchant, and with the sort of work he does, documenting the farflung Indian diaspora, you’d have expected him to be a good Parsi boy. No, he says, he isn’t. (He’s good, but he isn’t Parsi.) In which case, his interest and diligence is all the more remarkable. Preston is also a blogger for SAJA, but what I most admire is the breadth of his work: Shah Rukh Khan watches the snow fall from a billboard above the street in Jackson Heights; Phagwah is being celebrated by Caribbean Indians in Richmond Hill, New York; shipworkers sit in dingy holds inside MSV Shree Mahalaxmi, docked at the port in Sharjah; a wedding takes place connecting Houston and Chennai; there are details of domestic lives in Kenya and South Africa; you see Indian workers in a sugar refinery in Guyana, and gold merchants in Dubai; young Indian women put on make-up for Miss Teen India pageant in Georgia, and desi gay men sweat it out on the dance floor in a nightclub in Manhattan. What is it that unites these photographs? For the most part, you’d think it is the color of the skin of the folks portrayed in them. But that’s not all. It is more the colors that Preston finds to put into his frames that tell a unique story of the movement of peoples. Take a look at the picture above of a township in Durban. The massed clouds, the windblown, overgrown grass. The only piece of stillness comes from those homes in the distance, their simplicity underscored by the play of those somewhat unfamiliar, even unIndian, colors. In every picture in the series, no clash of civilizations, only the clash of colors. The paint on a boat, white silk worn by the bride’s father, brocade on a sari, a debutante’s dark lipstick, and often, many times, wherever people have gone in search of a better future, the changing hue of the sky.

Image top: Phoenix, South Africa. Image below: Houston, Texas.

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“Have you ever been stung by a bee?” Anjali asked.
“Sure, a couple of times,” Rahul said. “Back in the village, papa built a big open tank next to the tube well in the field. We called it the hamam, and it was a lot of fun bathing in it during the summer.”
“Did you ever go in?” Anjali asked.
“Of course! During summer vacation I’d run down there at night with a bar of soap and a towel and jump in. It was great fun. Even the soap had a strong scent there that it doesn’t have here.”
“How’s that possible? Soap’s the same everywhere.”
“No, it’s not. In the forest, near the fields, and at night, soap smells more sweetly. It’s true,” Rahul said. “There were jasmine bushes growing next to the tank, and at night the blossoms smelled even more fragrant.”
“What are you talking about?” Anjali was getting a bit irritated. “First you were talking about the sweet smell of soap, and now jasmine?”
“Oh! You too. You’ll see if you ever go there. When I swim there at night, the soap and jasmine both smell sweet. Sometimes I feel like I’m washing myself with jasmine instead of soap. And sometimes I could swear soap bushes are growing next to the tank. But since you’ve never swum there at night, how could you have any idea?” Rahul was also getting a bit irritated.
“But you were talking about bees. What do they have to do with all this?” Anjali glared at Rahul.
“The bees are during the daytime. In the afternoon they hover around the water flowing near the tank—swarms of them. One afternoon when I went swimming, I hung my clothes and towel on the pipe of the tube well. A bee stung me when I started to dry myself off after I got out. They’d hidden in the towel.”

From “The Girl With the Golden Parasol,” by Hindi writer Uday Prakash, translated by Jason Grunebaum

Uday Prakash is someone I’ve written about before on this blog. He’s visiting the U.S. for a conference and I had lunch with him today. I asked him to tell me about younger writers who he has been reading, and he mentioned three names: Shilpi, especially her story (it’s a Hindi story with an English title) “Quality of Life,” my friend Asad Zaidi (who runs the Three Essays Collective), and Pawan Karan, one of whose ineptly translated poems I found linked here.

A few of Uday Prakash’s own poems, both in Hindi and in English translation, here.

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Barkha Dutt on the outrage–and the hypocrisy–over the detention of the bombing suspect in Australia:

Our schizophrenia as a people is astounding. Right now we are consumed with self-righteous indignation over how Mohammed Haneef, an Indian citizen and an initial suspect in the Glasgow bomb blast, is being treated by the Australians. In his humiliation, we see a sinister attack on our national pride. In the decision to scrap his visa, we see the premature death of our own emigration dreams. We want our government to be less effete in its intervention. We think this is about racism, not terrorism.

In itself, this is a worthy (if slightly selfish) and laudable emotion. By all accounts, the 27-year-old doctor from Bangalore is being victimised, hounded and tortured. A magistrate has already ruled that there is no evidence to link Haneef with the bombing conspiracies in either Glasgow or London. And yet, an innocent man continues to be held in solitary confinement with the ludicrous explanation that the solitude is actually designed to give him more ‘privacy’. Haneef has eloquently argued his own innocence, describing himself as a “Muslim with moderate views” who believes that “every drop of blood is human”. When Australian Prime Minister John Howard still goes on to declare grandly that he is “not uncomfortable” with the young doctor’s continued detention our outrage is spontaneous and entirely legitimate.

But, what if Haneef had been arrested in Bangalore instead of Brisbane?

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Artist Wayne Gonzales at the Paula Cooper Gallery