Mining in Orissa

The BBC website has a piece on the Dongria Kondhs taking on the Vedanta Resources mining company (a somewhat ironic choice of name given the circumstances).

Apparently it is for the bauxite. And the main use "for the metal is in food wrappings for things like chocolate bars, potato crisps and snack foods."

Surely the monumental stupidity of this can escape no one.

Penelope and Amelie

Of late most fiction has left me disenchanted even when book reviews suggest otherwise. Plot devices are shop worn; the characters stereotypes and most are imbued with a kind of immature socio-political thinking that passes for radical these days. Perhaps I am jaded, understandable given I read a book every week. Then you pick up a book that’s so strangely thrilling that you cannot name the sensation you feel each time you pick it up. Other readers appear to concur. After all The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald’s fictionalization of the early life of the German romanticist Novalis has made it to many lists and appears to have been the most garlanded book of its year of release. And it is singular, wondrous, fresh, distilled and beautiful. More wondrously it was published when the author was nearly 80. You finish the book and for a moment, you want to stand in Fitzgerald’s shoes and see the world through her eyes.

Then I read Amelie Nothomb. If Fitzgerald flowered in her 60s, Nothomb appears to have been born with all petals unfurled. Even when she is charmingly arch and egoistic, even when a book meanders as with The Life of Hunger, her voice is so distinctive and so – well, Nothomb – that one can’t but be swept along. Sadly, her fiction is not as appealing as the recreation of her childhood. Which of course is so completely strange and spent in so many countries that none of it could have been made up (and Nothomb assures us often that it is all true). Nothomb writes as an adult but somehow the voice in the book is that of her younger self. Like the 20 something Nothomb of Fear and Trembling (her account of a year working in a Japanese corporation), you stand pressed to the glass pane of Nothomb’s fiction ready to boldly fling oneself into it.

And here's the Guardian on Nothomb.

Life as a book that has been put down

There are certain classes of books I am allergic to: self-help books, management books, new age books, airport novels, chick/lad lit and anything with the words chicken soup, seven, habits or globalisation in its title. To this can be added cookery books. Judging by sales, there are people who buy these books and cook from them but I am not in their legion. Nor do I like looking at book plates of improbably good looking food whilst ordering in the takeaway. Food should be simple and edible, beyond this I ask nothing else of it.

So I was a bit surprised to find Gay Bilson's Plenty in my hands. Something attracted me to the book, perhaps because it is part memoir, part philosophy and only incidentally a cookery book (though Bilson clearly thinks a lot about food). The most interesting thing for me was the book as a culinary history of Australia. Like many people who grew up in the 50s, Bilson disses the gruesomely English food culture of the post war generation. In the 70s, Tony Bilson, her then husband and she set up Bon Gout, a French inspired eaterie and these sections of the books are the most interesting perhaps because it captures the 70s intellectual culture of Sydney in which the food was merely an interesting adjunct (Bilson herself was young with small children, so much of this I think must come from the up for anything attitude of youth, this section also put me in mind of another article I had read which discussed the toast and tea "non foodie" culture of 1920s Sydney bohemia). Bilson then moved on to Berowra Waters Inn. Having been to the Hawkesbury, I can vouch for the beauty of the region and the madness of setting up a restaurant that could only be reached by water. It seems to have been a lot of hard work and Bilson also takes us behind the scenes, in a way Orwell did in Down and Out in London and Paris, with her experience with cooks, grease traps, grocery trips et al. Nevertheless, the restaurant itself hardly seems appealing, a sort of temple to high food and also symbolic of the 80s. Pretty much similar is her attempt at running Bennelong at the Opera House where she also seems to have fallen foul of Sydney's food critics.

The present seems to have found Bilson on her own in McLaren Vale - its a much simpler life, if still filled with food (natural given her occupation) in tune with the age's preoccupations with local and slow food. In some ways this section seems far richer than the preceding sections because it has a sense of achieved wisdom and perspective. The book itself has a tone of candour and Bilson also intersperses it with her other precoccupation, literature. To arrive at this destination at 61 speaks of a life of thought and reflection making this one of few books that so elegantly combines life, food and philosophy.

The Age review here.

A Painting + Sydney winter

When I lived in Killara, the steep roads and landscape would often remind me of Grace Cossington Smith's paintings of Turramurra (which is not in any case very far from Killara). I quite like GCS's city paintings, especially "The Lacquer Room", below. And her rare Bowral landscapes, all dusty grey and pinks from memory in contrast to her later brilliant yellows.



The winter I spent in Killara was fairly severe, in part because the suburb is quite green. This winter hasn't been as cold and the city itself seems more rushed than when I first arrived here. Nevertheless I love Sydney in the winter, with its blue evenings, cool winds whipping through arcades, soup takeaways, the bobbing of black clad figures on any given day in the city, fallen gingko leaves at the botanical gardens, the odd wet day and the crazy bastards who are always found swimming around Bondi & Bronte.

Bromeliad

A close look at a bromeliad (taken at Mt. Coot-tha by SKM)

Rivetted

Long films are not my cup of tea. I like my films to clock in at the 90 minute mark which is perhaps unusual in someone brought up in a pre-Internet era and in a country where films are rarely less than 3 hours. So I approached Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) with some trepidation. 252 minutes is of course not that much for Rivette given that the Out 1 screening seemed to stretch through the day. I did watch all 252 minutes but it was a very long film and not easy watching at all, even more so because the cinema it was held in was prone to amplify the simplest of noises like someone shifting in their chair. Rivette's work has been reviewed by every serious critic so the bare bones of the film - the length, the exploration of the creative process by way of theatre rehearsals of Racine's Andromache and its bleeding into personal life, the use of different film gauges for different sections of the film, the parallel story of the disintegrating relationship of the theatre director and his actress wife (and the rumour that the trashing the apartment scene was inspired by Godard and Anna Karina) and the excellent performances from Kalfon and Bulle Ogier are all well known. I can, many months later, still remember most of the movie which I don't think has very much to do with my own powers of concentration. Rivette's film is unusual in that it is cinema as an intellectual exploration which one usually finds only in literature. A book rarely translates well into film because it has an internal life, ideas and juxtapositions which cannot readily find its way into the film. Yet Rivette's work is the cinematic equivalent of a book - it isn't just visual story-telling or even a "pure cinema" of images but an exploration of an infinite number of ideas by way of a film. I mentioned in a previous post that watching a film at a cinematheque is infinitely better than a DVD viewing at home. But Rivette's work is an exception - like a book it must be an engagement between just the viewer and the work, you need to go back to certain sections to understand it better, you need to re-view sections to savour them, you need to revisit so you can derive fresh meaning from what you see. All of this is impossible if one is allowed only a single, sustained viewing. I would put Rivette's work in my top ten list any day and would have really liked to have seen the rest of his work. Till his work is on DVD, L'Amour Fou will have to suffice.

Happiness is a fruit that tastes of cruelty

Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur is a bit like nature itself and coincidentally it makes ample use of the natural element. By this I mean, that on the surface it looks like a gentle, warm film shot through with autumnal hues but beneath it is amoral, fierce and chilling in a manner I have not encountered before. I think it is perhaps wrong to read the film as simply feminist/anti-feminist though it appears to have been read both ways. In part, this may be its theme, though the central character, if at all, is the man. In Varda’s film the pleasant, humdrum rituals of lower middle class provincial life (I assume this to be the case, given the occupation of the husband and wife) are swiftly recorded in the initial scenes of a picnic, visits to relatives, the scenes of work followed by an excursion and the introduction of infidelity in this setting. The title tells us that this movie is about “happiness” and at one point in the movie the husband confesses that his happiness has increased not lessened as a result of the affair i.e. the crowded relationship is a happier one. But the movie is not a simple examination of happiness or anything along the lines of infidelity invigorates a marriage (though Varda does have a scene where the young husband is more passionate in his ardour post the beginning of the affair). The death of the wife in fact may well be a result of her unhappiness, alternately it could be a gift, and alternately it may be to induce a sense of guilt. If the last is the case, it fails because Varda’s film ends as it begins with the same colour codes as a family of four makes its way to a picnic. Only the wife this time is the lover setting in process another cycle. Varda’s end may be seen as chilling or anti-feminist but in a way it reinforces both the cyclicality of nature as well as its amorality. Life goes on in much the same way, the husband mourns for a period of time, perhaps the children miss their mother but in the end the normal patterns of life resume. Varda has a cool, impersonal touch in this film though she paradoxically brings a great deal of warmth to the images themselves; they radiate the cool heat of the sunflower motif of her film. I think her approach is enigmatic and extremely effective in muting the inherent painfulness and drama of the situation. We observe from a distance but sans sentimentality and morality. In the end the film is effective in tying the human self to nature and its implacable, unchanging rhythms. All of us are indeed replaceable and no one happiness seems greater than the other. Varda's editing, her framing of scenes, her use of music also add to the picture.

I had seen The Gleaners (Varda and the film discussed here) prior to this movie which is what brought me to Varda. Judging by the movies I saw, there is something in her approach that greatly appeals to me. Unfortunately I couldn’t catch the rest of her screenings.

Le Bonheur also put me in mind of other French movies I had seen (all of which bar Gilles' Wife were made by women), especially in the way it approaches the depiction of ordinary work. The unhurried camera recording the minutiae of women's work seems to be something of a French specialty in movies like Gilles' Wife and Brodeuses. With Lady Chatterley, the movie also shares a minute recording of the elements of nature and the integration of people into it. It put me most in mind of Gilles' Wife because of the story – i.e. the effect of infidelity on a marriage. Otherwise the films are different with the second movie being mostly concerned with the burdens placed on a wife attempting to understand her husband's infidelity. Gilles' Wife (with an excellent performance from Emmanuelle Devos) is observed from the wife’s viewpoint and we can feel her suffer as she tries to save the marriage – the morality of the situation is all too clear, indeed the wife is the only “good soul” in the troika.

An interesting review of Le Bonheur here.

French New Wave@GoMA

Rather fortuitously, the Gallery of Modern Art, itself new to Brisbane, had a French New Wave retrospective when I lived there last year. There were the better known directors – Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer - but I also caught Varda, Malle and Rivette’s work as well as the new new wave, Dumont & Garrel. All in all, it was a fairly comprehensive retrospective (with the odd glitch which meant I missed Chabrol’s The Good Girls), even more so if you consider that most of the films are not available on DVD. Further, it was the first time I had indulged in serious film-viewing (bar when Akashvani screened a lot of arthouse cinema in Mumbai in the 80s) – it’s an entirely different experience to going to the cinemas or watching a film on DVD. So much so that I am still on the lookout for a film club or catch the odd feature at AGNSW – it’s the best way to view serious cinema. Also, one of the pleasures of the retrospective was how particularly successful the films as a whole were in evoking the Paris of the 50s (and most of the films were set in Paris).

The biggest disappointment for me was Godard's work, though I think this has to much to do with the fact that I am in my 40s. No doubt I would have adored it when I was younger – Godard is particularly successful in capturing the zeitgeist of youth, it was not surprising that the average age of viewers at the retrospective was consistently lower at a Godard screening. Godard is also the film-maker’s film-maker. His idiom is still fresh, one can sense its influence on much that is made today. However, whilst the more accessible films like Bande à Part were charming enough, more serious work like The Little Soldier was particularly adolescent in its political views (a viewpoint which might not be shared by all) and even Vivre Sa Vie left me a little cold bar the section on statistics on “fallen women” in Paris and the long philosophical discussion which Nana engages in. The endless referencing of popular culture also gets tiresome after awhile and not necessarily because its common these days. And of course there is the misogyny of the films. Similarly Truffaut is something of a one note film-maker and the high points remain 400 Blows and Jules et Jim, which I had seen earlier. Rohmer also makes similar films; nevertheless I quite liked his earlier shorts that were screened at the retrospective.

The most interesting films at the retrospective were Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur and Jacques Rivette’s Mad Love, both of which I shall post on later.

Of the new new wave Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers, a bittersweet postcard to May 1968 although a bit tedious and self-indulgent had its moments, helped along by two attractive leads. Although I am no film student, I felt that Garrel’s film was an attempt at pure cinema and it does succeed quite well in that. For all its faults - its almost intolerably long length and the seeming inability of Garrel to edit as well as to bring to his subject matter an unsparing sentimentality - the movie is salvaged by being deeply personal and intensely poetic as well as having some of the most beautiful images that I have seen in recent cinema.

Foux da Fa Fa

I have been planning a review of some of the nouvelle vague movies I saw at GoMA, hopefully at least a few will get done this month.

In the meantime, beginners' French from Bret and Jemaine. With sub-saturated colours it could well have featured in a parody of Love Songs :-)