Living

What a beautifully written piece! Shared by a dear friend. And it was such a wonderful surprise to see Pico Iyer also in there! I missed Kurosawa's Ikuru - need to find it. 

"Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, has been nominated for the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Living" - which is based on Kurasowa's "Ikiru". 

"One of the things about the original Japanese film that really appealed to me," he explains, "it emphasizes the fact that you can't rely on the applause of the wider world to tell you whether you've lived well or not. Public acclaim may be nice to have, but ultimately, it's not worth very much. It's treacherous, fickle, it's usually wrong... you've got to take a lonely private view of what is success and failure for you. I think that is what it's saying. You've got to try and find a meaning that's within yourself, and I found that quite inspiring."

How should we be 'Living'? Kurosawa and Ishiguro tackle the question, 70 years apart

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161482211/kazuo-ishiguro-living-ikiru-oscars

The capacity to love

Andrei Tarkovsky:

“I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols.

In the end, everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life.

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.”

http://calmthings.blogspot.in/2016/01/famous-as-one-who-smiled-back.html

Stories

"When you have no one  to tell them to, you forget all your stories."


The Lunchbox

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/13/lunchbox-bollywood-review-banked-emotions

Coping

Ingemar is a 12 year old boy who has his own means of coping with all the injustices that life heaps upon him:

"It's not bad if you think about it. It could've been worse.
Just think how that poor guy ended up who got a new kidney in Boston. He got his name in all the papers, but he died just the same.

And what about Laika, the Space Dog?
They put her in a Sputnik and sent her into space. They attached wires to her heart and brain to see how she felt. I don't think she delt so good.

She spun around up there for five months till her doggie bag was empty. She starved to death.

It's important to have things like that to compare with."

from the Swedish film " My life as a dog" by Lasse Halstorm

The Mill and the Cross

Remember Bruegel's 'The Fall of Icarus', how "everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster"?  This absolutely stunning movie is a must for anyone who appreciates art, drawing, painting - or the latest, most mind-blowing techniques in film-making.

The Mill and the Cross, trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZeCX_zevJ0

You can watch the movie here: http://mubi.com/films/the-mill-and-the-cross

"Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 epic masterpiece, The Procession to Calvary, portrays Jesus staggering to his crucifixion, lost in a panoramic landscape crowded with hundreds of villagers and red-caped horsemen. In depicting Jesus’ plight as one among many vignettes, while soldiers on horseback loom threateningly, Bruegel boldly transposes Christ’s passion and death to sixteenth-century Flanders—a time when the Belgian people were suffering terribly under brutal Spanish occupation.

Now one of Poland’s most adventurous and inspired filmmakers, Lech Majewski, translates The Procession to Calvary into cinema, mischievously inviting the viewer to live inside the aesthetic universe of the painting as we watch it being created. As various lives unfold within the film frame, Bruegel, too, appears as a character, capturing shards of their desperate stories on his canvas-in-the-making.

A vibrant meditation on art and religion as ongoing, layered processes of collective storytelling and reinterpretation, The Mill & the Cross is also a feast of stunning visual effects and a provocative allegory."

* Photo from Google Images

The Tundra Book

The Tundra Book: A Tale of Vukvukai, the Little Rock

Director: Aleksei Vakhrushev
Russia I 2011 I 105 minutes I Russian and Chukchi with English subtitles

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpQjoFWsoKY

The Tundra Book: A Tale of Vukvukai, the Little Rock presents a rare and stunning documentary about the lives of the Chukchi people who inhabit a remote Russian peninsula in the Arctic Circle, leaving them virtually isolated from modern life.

The story centers on Vukvukai and his community. Vukvukai, the Little Rock, is Chukchi from eastern Russia and lives along the Bering Sea region. He has lived his lifetime as a reindeer herder and thus is known in his community as a true man of the tundra whose life is inseparable from the reindeer. The Chukchi herd more than 14,000 reindeer. Vukvukai lives in one of the harshest climate zones in the world, the Arctic Circle.

His story and that of the Chukchi is one of a nonstop struggle for survival, but the people believe that following the practices of their ancient, nomadic, cultural traditions contributes to the perseverance of their survival in the unyielding, frozen tundra. The film presents a glimpse into a land, culture, and people that few have ever dared to capture, since it is so remote. For now, the nomadic Chukchi culture remains virtually intact away from the influx of modernity.

By the All Roads Film Project: http://events.nationalgeographic.com/events/all-roads/film/

 All Roads Seed Grant

This grant funds film projects by or about indigenous and underrepresented minority cultures from around the world and seeks to support filmmakers who bring their community stories to light through first-person storytelling.

*Photo from Google Images

Apatheia, holy stillness

"From Remigiusz Sowa best Documentary Transmitter Award winner at the Crystal Palace International Film Festival; a truly remarkable story of Father Lazarus El Anthony, university lecturer, Marxist who abandoned his life in Australia and went in search of God and freedom. His pilgrimage eventually brought him to a life of a Christian Coptic monk and live in solitude on the Al-Qalzam Mountain (Egypt) in the pursuit of what the Desert Fathers called apatheia, holy stillness."

The Last Anchorite Part 1 (8.55 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKXf_7Tt0-c&feature=related

The Last Anchorite Part 2 (10.01 minutes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag6WE__82Q8&feature=related

Anachōreō: To withdraw: http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.in/2012/02/anachoreo-to-withdraw.html

Photo from Google Images

The Second Time

"....You haven't met yourself as yet. But the advantage of meeting others in the meantime is that one of them might present you to yourself."

From the film 'Waking Life', by Richard Linklater

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

"We saw Lazarus arise and walk. Took off.
And was not seen thereafter.
No one saw him die the second time."

'The Garden of Epicurus and Other Poems'
Ulla Hahn

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

"Catch me, I am falling."

Woody Allen, 'Zelig'

Falling

"You see, madness is like gravity. All you need is a little push."

The Joker, in 'The Dark Knight'

A film on Bon

Mustang Jhong Cave

Bon is Tibet’s oldest spiritual tradition, before Buddhism. This film on Bon, which was shot in Nepal and the Menri monastery in Northern India, was the Offical Selection at the Montreal festival. Came upon one of the producers, Rose Gordon, on LinkedIn.

http://www.bon-mustang-to-menri.com/

You can buy a DVD for $20 plus shipping, directly from Rose. They also need donations to support the work at Menri monastery, the Mustang project, pending film expenses, and for distributing the film. All collaborators worked for free. Contact Rose Gordon.

Page on Facebook, here.

Photo from Google Images.

Economic Localization, the need of the hour?

The Economics of Happiness: a documentary film about the worldwide movement for economic localization.

Site: http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TheEconomicsofhappiness

"The Economics of Happiness' describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.

We hear from a chorus of voices from six continents, including Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Samdhong Rinpoche, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Michael Shuman, Zac Goldsmith and Keibo Oiwa. They tell us that climate change and peak oil give us little choice: we need to localize, to bring the economy home. The good news is that as we move in this direction we will begin not only to heal the earth but also to restore our own sense of well-being. 'The Economics of Happiness' challenges us to restore our faith in humanity, challenges us to believe that it is possible to build a better world."

Isolation

From the German movie 'The Lives of Others' (Das Leben der Anderen),

Director and Writer: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz: "I have to show you something: "Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists: Based on Character Profile".

Pretty scientific, eh? And look at this: "Dissertation Supervisor, A. Grubitz". That's great, isn't it?

I only gave him a B. They shouldn't think getting a doctorate with me is easy. But his is first-class. Did you know that there are just five types of artists?

Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a "hysterical anthropocentrist." Can't bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them.

Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later.

After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won't cause us any more trouble. Know what the best part is?

Most type 4s we've processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present."

For we are also what we have lost...

"For we are also what we have lost."

from the film Amores Perros

We'll always have Paris...

From 'Casablanca'


Ilsa: But what about us?
Rick: We'll always have Paris.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpoyshqB8-o

Samsara

"How can one prevent a drop of water from ever drying up?
By throwing it back into the sea."

from the film Samsara by Pan Nalin

Pan Nalin: "...Samsara is the world; both inside the monastery and outside it. It is the story of a lama, Tashi, who leaves the monastery to become a farmer, to live a worldly life. And it is the story of Pema, his wife, who possesses the qualities of a sage, while living in the world. In short, it's all about living or leaving or both. We all, at one point or another in our lives, are tempted to change things, escape or leave everything and go somewhere.

Samsara is the story of that somewhere."

Isolate

"..A church and a fortress. A fortress in ruins. All that's meant to protect us is bound to fall apart. Bound to become contrived. Useless. And absurd.

..All that's meant to protect us is bound to isolate.

And all that's meant to isolate is bound to hurt."

from the film Calendar by the Armenian director, Atom Egoyan.

You

"....You haven't met yourself as yet. But the advantage of meeting others in the meantime is that one of them might present you to yourself."

Quote from the film
Waking Life
by
Richard Linklater

Strugatsky: Reason

Excerpt from 'Roadside Picnic' by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the book on which Andrei Tarkovsky's haunting film 'The Stalker' is loosely based on.

Tarkovsky really takes the story to another plane altogether. He builds in layers of philosophical meaning on a story about an extraterrestrial visitation. I got the book from here - http://www.flipkart.com/.

............................................................................

"...All right, I'll tell you. But I must warn you that your question, Richard, comes under the heading of xenology. Xenology: an unnatural mix of science fiction and formal logic. It's based on the false premise that human psychology is applicable to extraterrestrial intelligent beings."

"Why is that false?" Noonan asked.

"Because biologists have already been burned trying to use human psychology on animals. Earth animals, at that."

Forgive me, but that's an entirely different matter. We're talking about the psychology of rational beings."

"Yes. And everything would be fine if we only knew what reason was."

"Don't we know?" Noonan was surprised.

"Believe it or not, we don't. Usually a trivial definition is used: reason is that part of man's activity that distinguishes him from the animals. You know, an attempt to distinguish the owner from the dog who understands everything but just can't speak."

"....Or how about this hypothetical definition. Reason is a complex type of instinct that has not yet been formed completely. This implies that instinctual behaviour is always purposeful and natural. A million years from now our instinct will have matured and we will stop making the mistakes that are probably integral to reason.

And then, if something should change in the universe, we will all become extinct - precisely because we will have forgotten how to make mistakes, that is, to try various approaches not stipulated by an inflexible program of permitted alternatives."

Page 100.

Pliancy and the Freshness of Being

"…And most importantly let them believe in themselves

Let them be helpless like children.
Because weakness is a great thing
And strength is nothing.
When a man is just born,
He is weak and flexible
When he dies, he is hard and insensitive.
When a tree is growing,
It is tender and pliant
But when it is dry and hard, it dies.

Hardness and strength are death's companions.
Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being
Because what has hardened will never win…"

The Stalker's prayer at the well, before he takes the two men into the Zone.

from the film 'The Stalker'
Andrei Tarkovsky

Mtsnobari

"In the mountains of Georgia, where they graze their flocks of sheep, there exists a special profession-that of mtsnobari, or diviner.

His function is to carry stray lambs back to their mothers in the middle of the enormous flocks.

The mtsnobari infallibly carries each suckling lamb to the right mother, in a flock of hundreds of animals, finding her by means of a particular "sense of smell". He has nothing to help him except the answering voices of ewe and lamb. However, if you take into account the fact that entire flock is bleating, that is clearly not going to simplify things much."

7 February, 1976
Time Within Time - The Diaries 1970-1986
Andrei Tarkovsky