Raol Peck: Robust Conscience of Patrice Lumumba

by Pradip Biswas

This seminal paper on Patrice Lumumba is dedicated to my perpetual mentor Mrinal Sen, the Guerilla fighter of International Cinema
 
“History will one day have its say”.
Patrice Lumumba
             
 
Raoul Peck, the resonant voice of Haitian cinema, is the first ever filmmaker with a robust courage to showcase the atrocities of sub-African political reality through his films. It is indeed at Haiti that he was born and that he has created an indelible history by making a stirring film on Patrice Lumumba, the revolutionary figurehead of Cong. Called Lumumba: The Death of A Prophet, the feature-length documentary by Haitian director Raoul Peck, it is a film that must be seen. It is a brilliant and majestic work which documents the extraordinary contributions and self-sacrifice that the 1960's Congolese leader Patrice Emery Lumumba in attempting to safeguard the territorial integrity and tremendous wealth of the Congo against the greed and power plays of the United States of America, CIA  and its allies. Incidentally, he was the Minister of Culture at Haiti during the shortest reign of Patrice Lumumba. The most significant thing is that 2011 completes just historic 50 years since the Communist father figure of Congo Patrice Emery Lumumba was murdered. This is the reminder year to celebrate and remember the undaunted Guerrilla fighter that Lumumba was.

Lumumba: The Death of A Prophet is the depiction of story, the gory and historic one, of the rise to power and brutal assassination of the formerly vilified and later redeemed leader of the independent Congo , Patrice Lumumba. Using newly discovered historical evidence, Raoul Peck renders an emotional and tautly woven account of the “mail clerk and beer salesman” with a flair for oratory and an uncompromising faith in the capacity of his homeland to construct a prosperous nation independent of its former Belgium overlords. Congo , as time of history mirrors, was colonized by Belgian ruling clique. Patrice Lumumba in the context of political upheaval in Congo emerges here as the heroic sacrificial lamb dubiously portrayed by the international media and led to slaughter by the brutish commercial and political interests in Belgium, the United States, the international community, and Lumumba's own administration. It narrates a fierce tale of political intrigue and murder where political entities, pirates of commerce, and the military dovetail in their quest for economic and political hegemony over Congo.

For the entire write up follow the link : http://www.thescape.in/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1981

Mohsen Makhmalbaf :Flight of A Genius

by Pradip Biswas

Noted Film Critic Pradip Biswas in this invaluable account rediscovers the ideology of Iranian Film Maestro Mohsen Makhmalbaf. His critique on Makhmalbaf films gives a complete domain of understanding of Iranian Cinema.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the maestro of Iranian cinema, is now a household name, an artist with a robust conscience. He bleeds for the oppressed and the marginalized people of the globe through his cinema, very soul-stirring and riveting.  His appearance on the horizon of humanist cinema is not a sudden event. Much struggle lies behind his raging rise. His first three films such as Boycott (1985) The Street Vendor (1986) and The Bicyclist (1983), were praised at every corner of International film festivals of the globe. The Bicyclist, it may be emphasized, because of its stark realism and epistemic exposure, has made Mohsen Makhmalbaf an icon of liberating cinema in Iran, affected by class bias, religious bigotry, social orthodoxy and domestic taboos. But despite all kind of threats issued by the establishment and hidebound laws in Iran, Mohsen Makhmalbaf wriggles through these iron bars to snatch global attention for his films. In one word, his films, if counted till this day, are a reminder to the fact that we are not living in the best of all possible worlds. Thus he becomes a citizen of the world; his courage and grit make him a much sought-after director growing out of passion and respect for his total works.

Said Mohsen Makhmalbaf: “I made a film named Bicycle Run/Bicyclist, having Afghanistan as subject. To make that movie, I travelled to Pakistan, crossed southern parts of Afghanistan and shot parts of the film in Pakistan.” The Bicycle Run is the story of an Afghan émigré who’s wife is in hospital and to meet the expenses, he has to work seven days a week, riding on his old bicycle, running from one side of the city to another and, as he gets weaker and emaciated, a Bazaar that is in the making is getting larger, stronger and fatter every day. The job is sternly demanded by the stark necessity to save a human life, in this case his wife. Its structure is strongly straightforward but also elliptical at the same stroke. One seems easy to get the drift of the film and enumerate the ribbon of hard hours, days, weeks and slogged-times, a force the petty commoners must have.

In this context, I like to reveal to the cinephiles how Mohsen, given rough-hewn reality and red claws, did summon courage to make and present the film to the world audience. Said he: “I used that metaphor to highlight the realities of Afghanistan of those years, when the Russians were still in Afghanistan, caught in an internal-nationalistic and epic war that was ruining the country while some were getting fat, a war the West, confronted with the Eastern bloc, would approve of.” There is a tale about the film. It is like this: In fact, the idea of making another film about that country that was always under foreign yoke that brought nothing but poverty and destruction was in his mind. After Mollah Mohammad (Omar, the Taleban’s supreme leader) whom no one had heard his name came with a white flag, the poor Afghan people, tired and sick of years of internal wars, welcomed him without knowing that the government he represented was a joint product of the Saudis and the Pakistanis. Mollah Omar had never written a letter to see if he makes mistakes or not. The anecdote is nothing but a wave of vibes the film evoked during its life-time run at theatres. In Iran, however, the Bicyclist did raise eye-brows and hiccups among the Islamic groups, controlling the Government stridently. The pity is that the same film is banned in Iran even today, even now. This in a way truncates the freedom of an artist, director who sensibly cares to open the wounds of a society, antagonistic to the ordinary living of the masses.

A critic normally travels by analogy while engaged in critical study of any work of art. One has to remember one De Sica rose to limelight with his film Bicycle Thieves in the forties when the movement of neo realism just started with a splash. The film in course of time became an epic work and a primer to all beginners in filmmaking. In the process, the neo-realist movement bred a band of very strong filmmakers all over the world, sparking off a history of sorts. The record remains still unbroken. Mohsen, however, has not definitely drawn any elements but inspiration from De Scia for his cinema. Like other directors, Mohsen seems surely enthused and inspired to pick a name “bicycle”, maybe, from the past experience. His film discoursed above modestly mirrors it.

Given the agitation Mohsen has suffered due to various shortcomings in Iranian society, he chose the subject of a blind boy Khorshid in his film The Silence (1998). In many a way, the The Silence is a sympathetic tribute to the cursed blindness that grips millions of children all over the world. In the film, the focus is much on ambience in Iran where the blind boy, out of dark tunnel, gradually sees and perceives nuances of music of life and living. Here again, there is no similarity between Bergman’s renowned film The Silenceand Mohsen’s The Silence. While Bergman captures the elements of alienation and lack of communication between two souls, Mohsen’s The Silence pins on the elegy of the blind boy and his transcendence to pulsation of realization leading to the meaning of life on a barren, loveless society. The noted critic Jeffrey Anderson hails the films thus: “Makhmalbaf is mostly concerned with the specific world that Khorshid has created for himself. He hears music everywhere he goes and becomes obsessed with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which he equates to his landlord's knock on their door.”

For the entire write up follow the link : http://www.thescape.in/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1735

Miguel Littin rips open wounds of Chilean history in film DAWSON ISLAND

by Pradip Biswas

This critic has met Miguel Littin, the rebel director of Chile at least four times in India. He is also a close friend of Mrinal Sen whose films have inspired him a lot. On each occasion, we have renewed our camaraderie and vowed to make and write cinema that has an aesthetic assault on conservative taste. Our friendship is still in tact and grows from strength to strength. A book authored by this critic called CINEMA OF MIGUEL LITTIN is now in the pipeline.

The agitprop director Miguel Littin of Chile has since ripped open the cruelty and wounds of political history of Chile during the era of Salvador Allende, the first communist President of Chile through his latest film on Dawson ISLAND, 10. Based on the diary of a prisoner of war by Sergio Bitar, the film traces the darkest times of Chile when the CIA along with the rabid cruelty of the military Junta overthrew the legitimate, popular Government of Allende, destroying the democratic power-sharing of thousands of Chileans. "A story starts when someone is born, someone dies, someone leaves, or someone arrives."—says director Miguel Littin, quoting Ernest Hemingway. Dawson Island 10 is a cinematic manifesto that highlights the abysmal horrors imposed upon the ministers, senators and deputies of Allende who were banished in a hill-ridden, deserted island by the Military regime backed by CIA.

The digesis of the film exposes the arrival in September 1973 of approximately 50 former Chilean President Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity ministers, senators and deputies to Dawson Island, a concentration camp "at the end of the world". The latitude estimated signals 53 South at the western end of the Strait of Magellan—and introduces a political crime largely unknown by the world, let alone most Chileños; a calculated historical omission that acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littin sought to redress through his feature film Dawson Island 10 (2009)."We wanted to change history, but destiny led us to this strange sensation of uncertainty and defeat. What did we do wrong? What mistakes did we make?", lamented Sergio Bitar, a Dawson Island prisoner, and author of Isla 10. To bolster the significance of the political film, Baldovino Gomez, Dawson Island prisoner said: "I felt like the protagonist of one of those World War II movies. When we arrived at the camp, some of us cried to see so many wire fences. There were 27. It was difficult to believe”. The film is the first Chilean-Brazilian co-production and likewise represented Chile at Spain's Goya Awards.

While tackling an issue of highly pointed political nature, Littin hinges much on obtaining materials and memoirs related to Jose Tohá whose testimony at the Chile Information Project looks vital and relevant. According to Jose Toha: "The island produced an enormous feeling of isolation, of intense cold, wind, few sunny days. It was a prison, surrounded by water, with absolutely no escape. One of the great things was to be allowed to carve the stones: it relieved the stress and for some brought in some income.” Sharp agonies of the prisoners and their hellish life in concentration island is captured with vibrant authenticity by Littin. Each political character, given his cool and polite tolerance under cannibalistic ruling force, stands out. What is sharply evident is the inhuman tortures and humiliations inflicted on the innocent politicians, more human than humans. A reading into the ensemble visual frames, marked by treachery, damn lies and furious military treatment, tends to acquaint us with the tragic history of betrayals, ignominy, animalism and macabre acts of CIA pulling the strings. All that appears is ghastly, infernal and subhuman. Littin has made it clear in his interview: "that the book and the film were two different bodies, but with the same soul." 

For the entire write up follow the link : http://www.thescape.in/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1515

Julia Kristeva: Semiotic Voyage

by Pradip Biswas

 

 

Julia Kristeva, the poststructuralist icon in post-modern literature, is a vigilant outsider. Thus is she widely known among the women filmmakers of the international cinema. Often addressed as “bonkers”, Kristeva could defy any slanging match pelted against her works and her semiotics. She is famous for discovering “inner garden” that helps her followers to make shape of intimacy, call for digression in conventional codes and iconoclast in defining cold-layered “modernism” running strong in time-flows.

While this film scholar and semiotic analyst took some women directors and their films from France , Peru and Danemark, he finds an unique conflation of Kristeva’s semiotics found in interpretation and those image-oriented films of the said filmmakers. The women directors are Claire Denis, Claudia Llosa and Sussane Bier whose films have a close propinquity with feminist agenda. As always, Kristeva seems to be associated with three concepts she now likes to pass off as gaff. Le semiotique is the glittering idea that speech thrives on through sub-verbal codes as by what is actually said. According to her the real pulse of signification is done in the "cleavage between words and meanings". Such proclivity of Kristeva indicates the sub- or pre-verbal construct is something that, in a way, she now associates with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. Said she:” "All my childhood was bathed in this.”

The critic John Sutherland of Britain has noted: “The second of Kristeva's hallmark ideas is what she calls `abjection’. Why, Kristeva inquires, are we fascinated by things that disgust and horrify us?.” Sutherland refers to Kristeva’s understanding that reveals:  "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced."

For the entire write up follow the link :  http://www.thescape.in/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1906