Movies: Truth in cinema or Cinematic truth?

Three weeks elapsed without blogging. Admittedly blogging is an innovative modern way of expressing ones inner feelings. Even three weeks is a long period without it. I thought of writing about some good movies I watched over last few years. I am not a fan of typical Hollywood model of movies. They usually try to tell some serious story with lot of puzzles in the middle. All those puzzles are solved in the logical ending (if the movie is GOOD in Hollywood standards). On another side we have Bollywood movies that are complete entertainment packages containing glamor, action, horror, romance, humor, etc. Both models are well suited for today's consumer-centric world where a movie is a product consumed by people who expect a thrilling experience in return for their money.

However, there is a totally different third model of movies developed particularly in Europe and Iran. Few less popular Hollywood movies also fall into this category. While still being consumer products under the capitalist economy these movies are significantly different from Hollywood and Bollywood movies since they are not made to be entertainment packages. If a typical Hollywood movie lover watches one of these movies he may blame the producers for wasting his money. Some common characteristics of these movies are long and silent scenes, illogical screenplay, irrational dialogs, unattractive characters,  less usage of music and technical gimmicks. This category has been my favorite for a long time.

When in Sri Lanka I watch movies either in the computer or in occasional film festivals (thanks to embassies that organize them). When I was in Sweden there were some theaters that showed only this type of movies and I made the maximum use of it. There were many good movies among these and like many other viewers I had my own criticism after watching each one. I only have a fake memory on them now. I try to assemble those broken pieces before forgetting them forever.

1. The Piano Teacher [Michael Haneke]

This is one of the best movies I ever watched. It's about a middle aged piano teacher with pervasive fantasies (well, we all got them, huh). She is unmarried and lives with her mother. She is an excellent musician and a tough teacher. On the other side of her life she maintains an absurd relationship with her mother and does many things that even a typical European woman would not do (such as going to watch erotic movies in public places). She gets paired with a handsome young student of her. After a certain period of this relationship she tells him that she needs him to humiliate her severely. The guy becomes sick after knowing this. 

2. Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick]

This is a long great movie. An upper middle class american man jeopardizes his psychological balance after participating in a sex ceremony. The story is anti-logical and the plot contains many excellent symbolic meanings.

3. Dogville [Lars von Trier]

This is a very different movie. It revolves around the concept that people do not really need physical things to concretely stand for meanings. The complete movie is shot in a stage representing a village. Houses, roads, environment, etc in the village are represented by lines drawn on the stage. Actors play as if those lines are real things.

4. Last Days [Gus Van Sant]

Van Sant is a director who introduced a new type of movies into the world. His movies contain long still scenes with nothing significant happening. Scenes are not logically connected and in some places the same scene is shown many times in the perspectives of different people. You will not see a great story or enjoy a thrilling experience by watching his movies. It's only a unique cinematic experience. I have watched many of his movies and "Last Days" was the best of them. It is centered on the last days of the life of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the rock band Nirvana.

5. The Castle [Michael Haneke]

This movie is based on a novel with the same name by Franz Kafka. A person named "Mr. K" enters into a village with the intention of going to a nearby castle in which he got a new job. However, strangely he is not allowed to enter into the castle. The plot is full of his attempts to get into the castle. The events in the plot have absolutely no meaning. They are completely ridiculous. Like in all writings of Kafka, the story centers on the concept that all serious things in the world, at their roots, are purely ridiculous and meaningless.

6. Brown Bunny [Vincent Gallo]

This is another Van Sant type movie by a different director. The plot is about a guy who desperately tries to recover from a broken relationship (the reason is unclear). The director tries even to go beyond Van Sant in the screenplay. This is a movie full of emotions. A great one to watch after having a drink.

7. Crash [David Cronenberg]

Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors. I have watched many of his movies. Another good one is "M-Butterfly". But this one is unique. It's about a small cult in US where people experiment to find the greatest sexual pleasure. They assume that it should be similar to the feeling of a victim of a car crash just before death. They simulate reported car crashes and get injured too. They think that one needs an accident to feel the greatest sexual pleasure. In the last seen of the movie, a guy crashes his girlfriend's car deliberately to see whether he gets the "maximum sexual pleasure". However, he feels that this too is not the maximum pleasure. While having sex with his wounded girlfriend he says "May be the next time". Fatally this is what we also say after feeling that what we achieved at the end of a long chase is not the pleasure expected.

8. Children of Heaven [Majid Majidi]

This is a beautiful Iranian movie (a must watch in my standards) centered on children. A kid misplaces his little sister's only shoes which she is supposed to wear to school. They belong to a poor family and the kids are afraid to tell this to their father. The movie is about their struggle to handle the situation in their own way. This way, which makes us laugh and cry at times, is common to any child in the world I guess. The movie is beautifully plotted around a simple story. The beauty stems from the honesty of the film maker in bringing elements of humanity to the screen. Pedar (Father) and Baran (Rain) are two other very good movies by the same director that I can recommend.

9. The Girl in the Sneakers [Rasul Sadrameli]

This is another very nice Iranian movie I watched in a film festival. A girl belonging to a rich family in Iran gets friends with an interesting guy in school. He talks rebellious things that amaze the girl. She gets fascinated when he says that he hopes to walk to infinity someday. The girl is bored by her lonely life at home under strict rules by parents. She decides to leave her family and does that by escaping after the school one day. After a long journey with ugly experiences she finally manages to meet the guy. The things change after that. The guy tells that walking to infinity is easier said than done and begs that she goes back to her family. The guy who talked rebellious things looks far less brave than the docile girl who had guts to leave her rich family.

10. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema [Sophie Fiennes]
This is a documentary starring the well known philosopher Slavoj Zizek. He talks about masterpieces in world cinema by directors like Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslovsky, Hitchcock and Lynch. His psychoanalytic perspective is superb and is several levels beyond the ideas of conventional critics. It's an enlightening 2 1/2 hours. He formulates the idea that cinematic masterpieces try to bring a cinematic truth which is unique to cinema rather than trying to represent an already existing truth in the everyday world. 

Bolero: The beauty of repetition

Some time back I got the opportunity to work in Goteborg (Gothenburg in English) which is the second largest city in Sweden. I was amazed by the rich culture of the city and was used to go to some event everyday after work with the intention of exploring the city as much as possible. Goteborg opera house was one of my favorite places. I watched about 10 shows in it. One of them was a ballet named 3xBollero. It comprised 3 dance performances to Ravel's Bolero. I particularly liked the third performance which was called "Episode 17" choreographed by Alexander Ekman. I guess other two performances were too advanced for me to grasp. It was the first time I listened to Bolero and I started liking it. 

Bolero is a orchestral work by Maurice Ravel which is known to be ultimately romantic. Special thing about it is that it repeats the same short theme over and over again. Instead of a complicated long theme we hear the same piece repeating in different melodies. Each repetition adds a new color to the work and the listener does not get bored by the recurrence. I do not know much about music and I can describe my feeling as "A masterpiece highlighting the beauty of fine details of a simple thing using repetition". Bolero is said to be inspired by a painting created by Valentin Serov (Painting is the one in the beginning of the article).  A brilliant performance of Bolero is available here:

In the modern world we get continuously bombarded with lot of stuff and usually are not given a chance to stop and look at something closely. Repetition is regarded as waste of time and people always ask for "new" things. We have been trained for fast moving TV screens for a long time. However, my experience is that I need some time to feel or understand something properly; even a really simple thing. I get emotionally attached with a thing only after keep looking at it for a long time. The same goes with problem solving too. I solve a math or engineering problem only when I have the patience to think about it repetitively for 100 times. After the same problem revolves in the head for a prolonged period, the patterns associated with it  and the very reasons that made it a problem start emerging. After this stage the solution appears like a obvious one that should have been uncovered in the first see.

My opinion is that the overwhelming amount of data we get exposed to does more harm than it helps. Serious encounter with anything needs close attention and patience. Works like Bolero just remind this fact to us who are compelled to run with gigabyte speeds.