Ashes of Time (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994)

This bizarre wuxia movie brings to your mind some clichés. This is inevitable; because you find yourself blank by the time you finish the movie. You are at a loss for words, for memory, even ideas. You don’t take sides; like all good movies, it presents life with stunning fidelity. The plot confuses you, but it really is a direct story, only the story loops around at the end, so you’re left with the searing realisation that you’ve actually started much farther into the future than is convenient for you. Everything is mixed up, and time, understandably, is distorted by memory, in memory.

In passing, I would like to point out that Yimou’s Hero was made in 2002, and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, and Yimou’s own Shanghai Triad and House of Flying Daggers (the first one is a gangster movie and the second one wuxia) were made in 1995 and 2004 respectively. Though wuxia is ever in vogue in Hong Kong, this was a trailblazer of sorts; it is easily the pick of the lot.

Visually, there have been more striking films; of course, Yimou is a master at locating the subject at its grandest (some shots from Hero are unforgettable; quite understandably, Hero has done more business in the international market than any other Chinese movie to date). In contrast, Ashes of Time is a low-budget movie (at least as far as special effects are concerned), employed rising stars (who would become Wong’s regulars and superstars). Creditable attempts have been made in providing thrills, but the main attraction is, and will remain, Wong’s inimitable existential storyline and incredible screenplay. He taps into everything oriental—cyclical time, reversal of time, the ‘tunnel-vision’ provided by time; there’s also the seething undercurrent of loneliness, as virtually everyone realizes that man’s greatest gift as well as burden is his memory. Deep in the wake of a self-inflicted separation, a woman comes to the grinding realisation that without love, which she easily chucked on a fancy a few years back, she is nothing; even her son does not count. The protagonists are nearly all similar in that everyone needs to forget his or her past or reclaim it and relive it; their helplessness leads them into individual ways of pursuing ways to hurt others. In the process, they realise the futility of their own lives, the futility of war, the senselessness of personal glory and fame.

Ouyang Feng, the hero of the story, is a good storyteller. He often lends his place (as storyteller) to the others, if only to insulate him or to make the others express their stories better. The movie as a whole is a journal, with the entries filled in occasionally by the guests. Ouyang Feng astonishes us with his omniscience; he reveals little of the story, little of himself, and only as much of the other players as is absolutely necessary. So, in time, he leaves us with a stunning montage of what could be called a truly postmodern narrative wherein the men and women, heroes and heroines all, are all self-obsessed, selfish, vainglorious, and ultimately tragic. The lives of these are contrasted favourably with those who grabbed at the chance of leading a natural, risky life and perished. The story...is that of the winners, the bookish calculators who nevertheless lose out in the end to their own wiles. Ouyang Feng, the most calculating, the wiliest, and also the most detached, must be crowned king in the end but it matters so little. He has outlasted them all because he alone kept himself detached, never indulging his weakness, never giving in to his passion, always his own master, always sure of himself, always the egoist. It is a hollow victory, and even he seems remorseful when he reminds us, in his own words, that he will outlast them all.

True to tradition (well, this must have been the making of that tradition), Wong’s men are brooding, active, heavy-drinking, and very decisive (they either kill or get killed, the exception being Feng who is always in control of the strings). Women are their undoing: they are led by their passion, and their passion is their downfall (Feng being an exception, of course). Women are needy because the language spoken by the world is essentially one of the swords, not of the heart. They manipulate men, and emerge victorious; but it is a hollow victory because they simply see their men killing each other and getting killed. In a monumental passage, Maggie Cheung, as ‘Peach Blossoms,’ tells Huang Yaoshi, Feng’s friend, of her loneliness and her fateful decision to spite Feng by rejecting him out of whim. The ashes of time has laid her waste as well, and she regrets her failed life, one in which she failed to be the one she loved the most during her best years. Ruefully, she notes Yaoshi’s extreme ‘honesty’ to Feng in not telling him she’s still waiting. It is a staggering monument to acting employing kabuki, wrenching sentimentality, and immensely tricky screenplay.

Ashes of Time is also a love triangle (quadrilateral? pentagon?) which is never resolved. Lives bleed into one another and are finally resolved by death or decay. Each one loves, fails, decays, and suffers a death in due time, their life (and love) spent, wasted. Sexual identity is meaningless; man becomes woman becomes both, and at times, men and women seem merely conveniences imposed by visual reality. What they see in their half-dazed, sun-stroked desert mornings and afternoons, are but visions, and in those visions they hear voices, colours, but not real men or women. The hit-men dream about new contracts, spiteful lovers dream about revenge, and these dreams and hopes bulge out and bend reality; only the heat and the hunger are real. In the end, the swords speak, there is clangour and the spurt of blood, and men are scattered dead. In their dying breaths, men see a new wisdom, and they die happy. The women are left to rue their men, and they mourn themselves dead.

Feng is unique among the characters as he alone desires not to forget. He is an orphan, and has learnt to protect himself by not allowing others in. He knows that only the dear ones can hurt; so he rejects everybody. In so doing, consciously registering those moments which he could grasp to return to a normal life, he knows that he is a slave of the rules and the rulebooks (his favourite is an almanac, from which he quotes time and again to prove to us the sagacity of his travelling choices). In the end, he succeeds, reclaiming his home and hearth and clan, defeating his friend Yaoshi. And in the process, he leaves a bloody trail of mangled lives, smouldering in the ashes of time.

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[1140 words in 55 min]

Гамлет (1964) ~ A Quick Look

This essay is the outcome of a recent viewing of the celebrated adaptation Gamlet (`Hamlet', 1964, directed by Grigori Kozintsev).

This movie deserves a special mention purely for personal reasons; after a gap of nearly six months I have watched a film in its entirety.

A racy, gripping, pared-down Hamlet, not the bumbling three-hour act that we habitually see, coming from reverent classicists like Olivier (who has the dubious distinction of putting out the worst of the celebrated Hamlet portrayals), Branagh (who perhaps took a cue from Kozintsev by setting his version in Victorian England), and the rest of them (Kurosawa's version does justice to Hamlet, but he has considerably altered it), where we are left wondering how a procrastinator and philosopher like Hamlet would ever find the resourcefulness or the energy to match the revenge-crazed Laertes in a swordfight. In my opinion, this is perhaps how Shakespeare would have directed a Hamlet film. Of course, it is unquestionably Romantic (even though the costumes would place the action somewhat earlier to that). It is surprisingly contemporary, and the hero, as well as everyone else, is remarkably modern. As someone has already remarked, this is the only version which looks like a film. The castle, about which everything revolves, is a real Estonian castle. So is everything else–real and cold–and the attention to detail is breathtaking. In a close-up of a tapestry (lasting about five seconds), the director successfully conveys the "reality" of the production–we're sue that that wall curtain can only belong to a castle; it is not a piece of textile that you can buy. It is a reminder of the immense pains which must have gone in to the production of such a smooth, cavalier film. But there are other reminders as well. Ophelia is shown under clear water, and not floating; Hamlet takes light steps on a steep flight of steps (indicating how well familiar he is with those forbidding steps—‘my backyard’), and the gravedigger converses and sups as if it was a matter of course. There are heightened moments (you cannot avoid the fanfare and the drama in Hamlet), but Shostakovich's regal music score raises it out of the earthly plane. The horses are shown in full gallop, and we are aware of the painful absence of any report of hooves. Suddenly there is the rap of hooves over the drawbridge, and suddenly we become aware of being in the presence of a supremely talented director who has done all the homework for our benefit.

The movie has been shot in wide-angle (aspect ratio 2.5), with a sepia-tone to it. Sets and costumes are superb, and the castle plays a tremendous role as the only prop. Everything of importance is tied intimately to the castle and its inescapable confines; the castle is never shown in its 'form.' There are a few times when Hamlet breaks free (only Hamlet is able to do so; but so can the gravedigger and the commoners), and at such times (which includes the famous soliloquy where Hamlet mostly has his back towards the viewer), his thoughts are free, and borders on the resolute decisions that he comes close to making. In true Hamlet fashion, however, reality has its own way of presenting things but Hamlet is ready for any eventuality. He is supremely talented as a swordsman, articulate as a conscientious son and a citizen and a Dane (for all purposes he is a dashing Soviet, but do let's keep up appearances). By the time we get acquainted with him we fall in love with him but he is already a distracted lover who is irked rather than amused by the innocent purity of his sweetheart (and in true Shakespearean vein, the adaptation does not speak anything about Hamlet's romantic past or anything else).

The meeting with the ghost (the first of the many breathtaking shots in the movie) gives Hamlet's life a definitive turn. He might have been a brooding swordsman or an intellectual or both rolled into one, but the ghost propels his son headlong into a flurry of difficult choices. To make things easy for him, the ghost, who has the advantage of knowing nearly everything related to the murder, offers Hamlet the easy way of sparing his mother, which must have been his most vexing problem. But this Hamlet is surely not tied down to his mother's skirt-strings. Prince Hamlet is heroic, accomplished, and in every way the true heir to the throne. The death of King Hamlet and the subsequent coronation of Claudius, followed by the new king's marriage to the deceased king's queen, all managed quite admirably, has somehow appeased the citizens and they seem reconciled to the realities. They (as well as Hamlet) are not aware of what happened, nor do they seem to care. The castle and the insinuations that go inside are as far away from the common man and his homestead as the stars from the earth. Much like how it was really like in those days (the adapters have taken the liberty of placing the story in the 16-th century rather than in the Dark Ages), the common man, or the king's subjects, is hardly more than an occasional speck on the screen. It is palace intrigue at its dramatic best, and all the reins seem to be safe in the hands of Claudius until a few things conspire against the usurper. In the absence of any real talent (his only claim to the throne being his cunning—Claudius is perhaps the most cunning of all those in a palace which was perhaps teeming with scheming ministers and soldiers), Claudius has to constantly forge and foster uneasy relations with very dangerous men each of whom could dispatch him. And in the end, his worst dreams come to torment him and he is disgusted with the reflection of his own face in the mirror.

Among the highlights of the film, the ones I thought truly outstanding include the scene where Hamlet is summoned by his mother after the play. In a brilliant sweep, he razes his mother to the ground and finally stops short with an empty share into the distance, at which his mother finally breaks and gives in. Few cinematic occasions equal, let alone surpass, this sequence in its originality and sheer madness. Hamlet trips with a light step, playing dangerously close to the borderline, yet everyone has to listen to him and keep their distance because he fires off idea after unnerving idea in the fashion of a raving lunatic. Yet everyone is aware that this is the man who alone has been hurt by the death (murder) of his father. Little by little, as he performs alone to deliver the shocks that would finally implode the royal family in the catastrophic finale, rehearsing his lines and improvising his reactions, Hamlet pulls everyone into his private gloom. Closest to him in her innocence, truly unable to fathom the depths a kind-hearted soul could suddenly reveal, Ophelia breaks first and dies in a gully. Ophelia is meant to be a prop, for this is a serious man-to-man affair. It is the tragic story where a brave and worthy man has to sacrifice his family and all that he loved—in addition to himself—to destroy a coward. And how this unfolds over two-and-a-half hours of unsurpassed cinematic compression, while retaining poise in the occasional long-take, is an immense exhibition of supremely gifted adaptation (Kozintsev and Pasternak) of what has been called, along with Oedipus Rex, a perfect dramatic plot. There can be nothing, better than this.

02:21 22-Jul-09

[1270 words in 50 min]

Modern Theater Does Not Take (A) Place by Julia Kristeva A (Not Too Sympathetic) Discussion

•To Raphæl•

After I had written this essay, I decided to look up the Wiki on Kristeva. It confirmed most of what I'd surmised from my reading.

Basically, my response to this illustrative piece of Kristeva's writing is the basic opposition I have towards structuralism. If you favour structuralism, then you had better read Kristeva and appreciate her by yourself. This is, strictly speaking, not an appreciation.

Then why have I written this? Well, I have pored over this four-page essay for over four hours. I found elements in it which were poetic and truthful, but I have also found elements which are merely wordplay, dogma, and erroneous.

Kristeva uses the word semiotic in her own terms (perhaps for lack of a better word, perhaps to gain a foothold. When you start out, especially in a foreign country, you need stays. Kristeva is not Kant.) It is not related to the more popular Saussurean definition. This difference is not easy to surmount. In my opinion, she has deliberately chosen this word to undermine the classical definition, which is a common tactic adopted by all feminists (with the exception of Simone de Beauvoir).

I have retained the numbering of the original essay. The critique is not a polished one, nor do I suppose that it will ever be reworked.


1. "[...] Semiology is a theory of the existent."

The extent to which this idea is true is debatable. It would involve a rather involved discussion of what is not illusory.

However, since this is the fundamental building block, the starting premise, I accept it without argument.

[Question: How does semiology actually accomplish its task - that of describing the functions of signs and symbols -? The answer need not cause you any surprise. It is a tautology; it can do so only by the contrivance of signs. By the very same yardstick, the entire project of semiology - apart from a simple and functional understanding - a description of its subject matter - must be treated as highly speculative.]

"Modern theater [...] does not take (a) place."

Modern theatre is supposed to be a very symbolic one. (Take Beckett, for instance.) Again, I accept the argument without proof.


2. The only remaining locus of interplay (of modern theater) is the space of language. Hence modern theater does not exist outside of the text. This is not a failure of representation but a failure of demonstration. It is the failure of theater as demonstration.

[Question: What really seems to be the problem: the inability to demonstrate the sound and fury of a spacecraft taking off? The inability of effectively portray the effects of weightlessness in space? Maybe the inability to show a tree growing over 15 years? What is this problem of demonstration which a good playwright cannot address/manage?]

(I completely agree with the implicit idea behind all this: drama was the medium in Shakespeare's time, it is no longer. It is the Internet and then TV, and to a lesser extent, the movie.)

The technocratic explosion is rightly pointed out as the reason for this deficiency: the audience seem to expect more, more technically demanding plays or demonstrations. (As I correctly surmised.) As it stands, theater has always been severely limited in its demonstrative capacities: and the talents of the actors themselves have remained more or less the same over 100 generations.

Kristeva quotes Mallarmé, who anticipated the disappearance of the sacred locus of the theatre and its ultimate retreat into language.

[Question: Is it any more relevant? I have no experience of modern theatre as such; in Malayalam it has been a resounding failure. In Malayalam, it was present in the works of G Sankara Pillai. The said retreat has already taken place so long ago that the current generation - the 25-somethings - do not know what theatre is, and it is no wonder that they do not even suspect the existence of any. Since the "dolding back" has already taken place, can we still talk about it any longer? It has lost its meaning. It is a fact, and it has happened. We must therefore make something new, invent something afresh, rather than fondly remember what we were used to.]

Kristeva concludes this brilliant and sweeping argument thus:

"...the most advanced experiments in writing address themselves uniquely to the individual unconscious, without speculating on the fantasies of the larger group."

3. Kristeva now stresses on the interplay - the interaction - of life and representation - of symbol and the signified - of the self and the other - or whatever complementary pairs you can think of. When there is an interaction ("to see, to act, to know" - the so-called 'scopic' drive - which I don't know what), it can happen in one of two ways:

a. Without the use of language. (Silent theatre.) It uses colour, sound, and gestures. That is, it does not use speech.

b. Make use of verisimilitude (semblance, appearances). (Stereotypical characters, such as we see in Beckett's plays.) It uses a semiotic assemblage, in a sort of doll's house populated by madmen. It uses speech but only traces of colour, sound, etc. The feeble characters "speak the text." The play is boring, but not by an accident; as the playwrights themselves are under no illusion that their work will be witnessed only by a few who really know what they are seeing. They are writing to an intelligent, albeit severely reduced, audience. (This is also a main difference between Greek drama - which was a sacred ritual - and modern theatre, which is becoming more and more like "going through with the motions."

[May be because :
The dialogues (monologues) are monotonous, and doctored, and seem as such; no attempt is made to infuse "freshness" into the dialogues, because the dialogues have already been written down by the playwright.
]

4. Kristeva discusses the first type of silent film (or theatre).
The silent theatre of colours, sounds and gestures depicts a time and a place where a deadly impulse of forgetfulness or of death operates. This is essentially semiotic.

• semiotics (philosophy) a philosophical theory of the functions of signs and symbols

That is, this sort of film shows how communication was done when there was no language. (There is a subtle difference here, in that in the making of the silent film, the filmmaker is probably aware of the possibility, and the importance of speech in demonstration.)

Since there is no language, there is no question of information storage. There is no question of fidelity or realism either; though it can be argued that speech itself is artificial, it is a losing argument. What results is a purely symbolic abstraction, an attempt to pre-empt consciousness as we know it. If it is not a human consciousness that we are depicting in a silent film, the question arises as to whose consciousness it is. This is a socially relevant question which cannot be wished away by answering that it is experimental. If so, then to what end? All experiments have a purpose. Art, in particular, always has a purpose.

It may also be argued that the filmmaker is aiming at evolving a language of colour, tone, sound etc. But the problem with this sort of withering argument is that these are not standard languages, and there is no way one could translate it. This "untranslatablility" is different from the limits of language and expression that we encounter when we try to translate a work from one language to the other. Colour and sound do not speak even similar languages. The only thread that connects all of these different languages is that all of these evoke response from a human. This response is, however, tempered by language, and as such, renders all of such 'experimental' efforts just that - 'experimental.' And without a purpose. If at all it has a purpose then that purpose will only be known to a handful, in which case it reduces to the petty state of private property.

"The only event within this semiotic limit [...] is death [...]"
Indeed!? Why should death be the only event? (Is it an event?) What is the significance of death here? (The difficulty may only be removed if I actually chance to watch this movie by Michael Snow.) Why should death be important in this rather detached language of chromatic patterns?

"Cruelty is a technique."
One has to agree completely with this statement of Artaud:
"... cruelty is above all lucid, a kind of rigid control."
A delicious finale, but quite irrelevant to the subject in hand.

Cinema and theatre, after all, economise representation. The maker chooses what to show, and in which way to show it, and things are done in a way as to evoke a specific set of responses. An effort is made not only to elicit particular responses by showing a select set of images, every effort is taken to snub any indication to the contrary. The blatantly political films are a case in example. Some are so well disguised that even the objectionable main theme is transparent. By watching and appreciating the film, the audience is condoning the content - the symbolism.

"How can we think this economy?"
Kristeva now engages in an 'explanation' of this 'economy.' This is the part which I find most irksome, because what she says - never mind the jargon - is redundant and not relevant. In the first place, experimental cinema can only be minimalist. (Dogville is a modern example.) Such films choose a very few things to concentrate on, reducing everything else to the bare essentials. With the full realisation that the fare is not wholesome, the avid viewer immerses himself in this minimalist demonstration. The fact that a house is depicted by a square marked in chalk and announced by a nameplate does not detract from the real themes. The relevant question is, "How can it ever be otherwise?" Kristeva's question might have been relevant some time back in the 1920s (Metropolis, for instance - which is the epitome of a lavish experiment if there ever was one). At the end of the spectrum we also have Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, which is a brilliant minimalist film.

"In the type of representation which I just described, S2 encompasses S1, but this inclusion remains outside of the representation."
Then why mention it? This is merely wordplay. She goes on to say that the content (symbolism) of such movies ultimately signifies death. Which is akin to saying nothing at all.

5. [This section introduces intractable jargon, and, despite its lyricism, might best be described as philosophical speculation. A few of these words are given below. Readers are requested to enlighten me on their meanings.
lektonic
actant (defined simply as acting elements - she should haveconsidered reactant, which is a well known chemical term that means the same. Question: are we actually acting, or reacting? Can there be an action, which is not a reaction as well? Is an actor acting, or is he reacting? Pretty useless, these questions. Maybe such questions do not have a place in Kristeva's philsophy.)
aphanisis
]

The second variant of the silent theatre employs a minute semiotic assemblage of the acting-out and of "madness". There is interplay between the acting elements, and the signified elements manifest themselves in a catastrophic progression towards an act of violence - such as the discovery of an object or the discovery of a scientific object - which burst forth. Each entity remains problematic, incomplete, as a crisis, as a catastrophe.

6. Kristeva expounds that other experiments are also exercises in "taking sides". In order to economise the representation, the maker takes sides, and thus economises both the demonstration as well as the message.

7. From the above discussion, it is easy to see the extent of participation required of the audience to make the experiment meaningful. Hence the traditional division of audience and actors is obliterated. In such a disconcertingly self-conscious effort, it is not easy to overlook the fact that the actors (if at all there are any) are men and women like us; we can no longer watch these movies like we used to watch when we were young. The act of speaking out a script would be calamitous, so we arrive at a new locus of representation.

8. In this incredibly nebulous passage, Kristeva almost destroys the edifice she has built up painstakingly. No one would ever feel that clarity is a quality in continental thought, let alone Kristeva's. Yet, one hopes that this passage would not be there. She rounds up the political situation accurately, but, she refuses to take sides and she puts sand in our eyes as well. The incredible suppleness of the American political system - struggling in the face of Soviet and its own internal economic pressures - is indicated, yet Kristeva tries to save her face by not damning it outright. Instead, she posits the birth of a new theatrical and cinematic oeuvre which is based on a new sensibility, and a new subjectivity, to counter the dangers of dogmatism.

In trying to rise above politics - there was no need - and somehow establish that art is above it, Kristeva shoots herself in the boot. What results is a polemic which is, predictably, quite isolated in its impact as well as its content.


Directors/Artists Referred to in the Essay

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1. Antonin Artaud
2. Michael Snow. (Film: Wave Length)
3. Bob Wilson. (Surrealist filmmaker, who made films about Queen Victoria, Stalin, and Einstein)
4. Yvonne Rainer
5. Connie Bently
6. Richard Foreman ("Ontologic Historic Theater")
   

Critics/Philosophers Referred to in the Essay

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1. Bertolt Brecht
2. Samuel Beckett
3. Antonin Artaud