The Art-House Party

In Kurosawa: The Last Emperor, Alex Cox's documentary on Akira Kurosawa, the great American auteur Francis Ford Coppola pays tribute to his Japanese counterpart: “One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn't make a masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces.” Three of those masterpieces were screened to Bangalore audiences last week at the Akira Kurosawa film festival, jointly held by the Suchitra Film Society and Shemaroo Entertainment.

The festival opened, appropriately, with Rashomon, Kurosawa's cinematic treatise on the subjectivity of truth and perspective. Based on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short fiction, Rashomon examines the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife from multiple angles, all told in flashback. Each of the five versions of the story – narrated by the two victims, the accused bandit, a priest and a woodcutter – claims to be the truth, and each contradicts the other. The only thing apparent by the end is that all involved have been motivated by self-interest, making it impossible to take sides with any one protagonist.

Rashomon was followed by Madadayo, a bittersweet chronicle of the life of Hyakken Uchida, a teacher and writer. It follows Uchida, an eccentric retired professor of German, as he advances in age, all the while sharing a close, paternal relationship with a group of his old students. Made in 1993, Madadayo is Kurosawa's final film.

Continuing the theme of fathers and sons, the festival ended with Ran, Kurosawa's loose historic biopic of the Japanese warlord Mōri Motonari, which also carries acknowledged influences of William Shakespeare's King Lear. One of the most expensive studio films produced in Japan at the time, Ran tells the story of a Lear-like nobleman named Hidetora who leaves the running of his kingdom to his three delinquent sons, only to see it destroyed by their inherited lust for power.

“Akira Kurosawa's greatest strength was his humanism,” says Girish Kasaravalli, acclaimed filmmaker and one of the trustees of the Suchitra Film Society. “He empathised with the plight of his characters. It couldn't have been easy making the kind of films he did back then. He began working in the studio era, you see, far before the advent of the independent cinema movement. There was a compulsion then to express oneself within a narrative-dramatic structure. But Kurosawa's cinema managed to trascend such constraints, and that's what makes him such an influence on later filmmakers – he was a technician and an artist combined, and a great one at that.”

Viewed as an exercise in curation, however, one would be hard-pressed to thematically classify the film festival. It followed neither a chronology, nor any readily identifiable artistic period in Kurosawa's life. Vidyashankar, the president of the Suchitra Film Society, candidly admits as much, when asked why they chose to screen these three films in particular. “It wasn't really meant to represent any specific aspect of Kurosawa's filmography. The idea was to sensitize audiences to his work. More primarily, the festival served to promote our partner Shemaroo's new world cinema DVDs.”

And this is perhaps the point really worth noting. The Indian market seems to have suddenly woken up to the allures of world cinema, especially over the last year or two. Moserbaer, Palador, and now Shemaroo, having acquired the rights to a buffet of auteur-driven parallel cinema, are flooding supermarkets and kirana stores with well-packaged, affordable and accessible titles. New television channels such as NDTV Lumiere and UTV World Movies, steadily rising in popularity among Indian viewers starved of intelligent programming, aid in virally marketing these films.

The one major problem art-house cinema has faced in the past, that of adequate distribution – and, thereby, public exposure – seems on its way to being solved collectively by proliferating cable television and the economy of producing DVDs. “In the 70s, you had to be a member of a film club to get to watch such quality cinema,” says Kasaravalli. “Now, the choices you have are fantastic. You can walk into a corner store and buy any movie you like, and these DVDs come with expert commentaries and remastered footage. If you are a film buff, these really are excellent times.”

Appearing today in The Hindu: Friday Review, Bangalore.

Mortal Combat

On a cold September evening in 1941, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two of the fathers of modern particle physics, set out from Bohr's home on a fateful walk together into the streets of Copenhagen. Heisenberg, the mathematician most famously responsible for the Uncertainty principle, was by this time firmly rooted in Germany, working against his will on weapons development for Adolf Hitler's government. He was visiting Denmark on the pretext of delivering a series of lectures under the benign gaze of the Nazi propaganda ministry. Heisenberg's real agenda, however, as he later claimed, was to catch his old friend Bohr alone. Niels Bohr, the distinguished theoretical physicist who had mentored and guided Heisenberg in his early years, was, like his younger colleague, highly regarded for his ground-breaking work on the structure of the atom.

As they walked, Heisenberg revealed that he had recently initiated a nuclear program for the Nazis, and that, much to Bohr's astonishment and revulsion, given adequate time and resources, it was indeed possible for them to manufacture an atomic weapon. What Bohr might have replied to this revelation has been disputed furiously by generations of historians and scientists. The subsequent actions of the two men, however, realigned the genetics of world politics: Heisenberg returned to Germany to continue work on the Nazi nuclear program, while Bohr escaped first to Britain, and then to the USA, to begin work on the Manhattan Project. How much of these decisions were affected by individual politics, ethics and egos has been subject to much speculation. In a recently-discovered unsent letter from Bohr to Heisenberg, Bohr says, “A great matter for mankind was at issue, in which, despite our personal friendship, we had to be regarded as representatives of two sides engaged in mortal combat.”

Nearer home, the last weekend at Rangashankara, a rapt audience was invited to speculate on the nature and effects of the 1941 meeting at a showing of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. “Copenhagen uses physics as a lens to explore the politics of identity, on the one hand, and the politics of power, on the other,” explains Prakash Belawadi, the director of the play. “The physics is merely an excuse to examine the nature of relationships.”

Starring Belawadi as Bohr, Balaji Manohar as Heisenberg and Smitha Chakravarthy as Bohr's wife Margrethe, Copenhagen began with the critical handicap of lacking a plot, a narrative arc or a determinate ending, while overflowing with explanatory conversation. Over roughly two hours, it deconstructed and reconstructed, over and again, the meetings between the two Bohrs and Heisenberg, and the various aspects of their relationship – the momentum supplied by intense monologues, punctuated by deep silences and classical music. Belawadi, however, believes that the discourse in Copenhagen outweighs the necessity for plot and action. “I am always excited by idea plays, those that don't conform to the standard idea of a plot, that essay a situation rather than a story. That being the challenge, I was amazed that Pampa Chowdhury, the sponsor of the play, had the courage to put money into such a production. The other thing that greatly amazed me was the audience's response to it.”

A response that was not inconsiderable, owing much to a nuanced performance by the three cast members, as well as the dialectic element of the play. Belawadi thinks that such a reaction is only appropriate from the residents of what is often branded the Knowledge City. With this confidence, he reveals that Copenhagen is to be the first in a series of three plays on science – he will next direct Sundar Sarukkai's play about Einstein, and another by Alan Brody on Newton – the beginning, if the new physics is any indication (and if the city's audiences continue to emulate fissile isotopes) of a fortuitous chain reaction.

Appearing today in The Hindu Metro Plus, Bangalore

Nu Releases

Click on images to view in large size:

Friends Forever, an anthology (set of two, illustrated and designed by yours truly)
Pub. by Hachette :













The Magic Store of Nu-Cham-Vu by Shreekumar Varma, recommended by Ruskin Bond (illustrations, me. design, not me)
Pub. by Puffin :
















(I'm summat miffed that they didn't use my charming blue cat, but oh what the hey.)

And a couple of pieces of interior artwork from the book (to see more, buy it :P) :













© illustrations from The Magic Store of Nu-Cham-Vu, copyright by Vinayak Varma, 2009