A Complete Artist

LEAVE IT FOR IMAGINATION....some excerpts.

To my mind the rural ideal in art, philosophy & life, so deeply embedded in Chinese consciousness must be responsible for national and racial health today. Creators of Chinese pattern of life did more wisely than they knew in maintaining a balance between civilization and primitive habits of living. A sound instinct guided them to choose agricultural civilization, to hate mechanical ingenuity and love the simple ways of life; to invent comforts of life without being enslaved to them; and to preach from generation to generation in their poetry, painting & literature, ‘the return to the farm’. For, to be close to nature is to have physical & moral health. Man, in the country does not degenerate, only man in the city does. This aspect subtly but profoundly accounts for the long survival of Chinese civilization.

Chinese culture is one of the truly indigenous cultures of the World. Culture is a product of leisure and Chinese have had immense leisure of over three thousand years to cultivate it. In these three thousand un-interrupted years they have had plenty of time to drink tea and look at life quietly over their tea cups; and from gossip over tea cups they have boiled life down to its essence. And from this gossip & pondering came a great meaning. It came to be spoken of as ‘the Mirror’ which reflects human experience for the benefit of the present; which is like a gathering stream, un-interrupted, continuous. In this they crossed the threshold of all arts and entered the hall of the Art of Life itself; and Art & Life became one. They achieved that crown of culture, the art of living, which is the end of all human wisdom.

 Calm & harmony distinguish Chinese Art. The Chinese Artist is a man who is at peace with Nature, who is free from shackles of society & from temptations of gold. Above all, his breast must brood no ill passion for a good artist must be a good man. He ‘chastens his heart’ and ‘broadens his spirit’ chiefly by travel & contemplation. The Chinese artist does not learn painting by going into a room and stripping a woman naked. It is strange that spiritual evolution goes with physical elevation upon this planet & life always looks different from an altitude of five thousand feet. Thus, from the god-like heights the artist surveys the world with a calm expansion of spirit and this Spirit goes into his painting. Like ‘the fool on the hill’ who sees ‘the world going by’.

It is this spirit of calm & harmony, this flavor of mountain air, always tinged with recluse’s passion for leisure & solitude which is seen in all forms of Chinese Art. It is not supremacy over nature but harmony with her that Calligraphy, Painting, Poetry & architecture all have in common with a way of life. And through it all pervades The Spirit of Man, happy with himself and his Universe; poor in possessions but rich in sentiments, discriminating in taste, experienced and full of worldly wisdom; and yet simple hearted, contented & wisely idle. In China, man knows a great deal about the Art of all arts, The Art of Living. A younger civilization may be keen on making progress, but an old civilization must have a different standard of values for it alone knows ‘the durable pleasures of life’ which are merely matters of senses; food, drink, house, garden, women & friendship. That is what life comes to in the end, in essence. Any Nation, therefore, that does not know how to eat and enjoy living is uncouth and un-civilized.

rahatavalokit
cacareadings#3102

Elegy to the Chocolate Cream Soldiers of Cinema.

DESPAIR  NOT,  SET   ASIDE  REMORSE  …  WE   SHALL MAKE OUR  CAVEAT   AND    REJOICE

Some of us, faint-hearted chocolate-cream soldiers of Cinema, feel that, yes, there was a time when one could discern aromas & bouquets of a maturing wine that was Cinema …film form has soured up, they say, with Rate Of Acceleration Of Change, Digital Tsunami plus of course, mercantile interest of maximizing profit.  Do you also feel like that? Dear reader? I’m sure not, because if you did you won’t be reading this.

Tell me what happens to the idea  of “Cinematic Object” if you are using  Mitchell BNC, an Arriflex SR, or a digi-palm-corder with a chip that is better than fine grain, pre-fogged Ectachrome? I’d say nothing happens to it; and in terms of construction we have yet to arrive at Poetry, Dance and Symphonic Musical Orchestrations.  Now consider for a moment as to how long would it have taken for say Iambic Pentameter, Bharat Nattyam  or Stradivarius violin, an Oboe and a Bassoon fuge to cause visions of musical forms in side the head of a J.S.Bach? not generations and eons; dance , music & painting have probably been with Human Beings for the better part of our entire Evolutionary period.

Cinema, like Automobile is gifted to us by mechanical / industrial era, not much older than steam engine; internal combustion engine, gears, pulleys, fluid heads, chemistry & optics are but three hundred years old. Digital  technology  has already made all that obsolete. We shall soon have cars running on Water, emitting Oxygen as waste, but the Film Frame, like a stable marriage shall continue to stay. We shall have to discover aesthetic resolutions and accommodate ease of operation without diluting essentials of what we have built thus far, our understanding and praxis in the field of Cinema Art Practice.

The next point is that cheap imitation and plagiarism will die a natural death. It will just not do to physically lift  dance, drama, songs, music and the rest of it and hope that if a producer puts in lots of “Desi Ghee” and “Mughal Masalas” she will have a hit…!!  It is simply ridiculous to hope in Bolly, Tolly or even Whistling Woods. Some one is sure to blow a whistle on all of them sooner or later.

Cinema art practitioners will have to imbibe, internalize the many aesthetics and creativities like training of an Artist used to require in Schools of Chinese Art. So you create an “Artist” at the end of training; who would then go live a life, may  cook soups & steep tea, meditate, paint, write haikus or make pottery, make films may be but his entire, evolved aesthetic consciousness shall be present  active and energizing his creative act, his shoots will not require special dance directors, fight composers and Music Directors, Actors, story writers, script & dialogue writers; he will  not need lighting cameramen; he will just look at light and say yes…yes…nor will his sounds be echoing, base heavy phony, pressure selling lies & falsehoods. No…that shall not do…all that shall fall away like scabs somewhere along the way of Cinematic enlightenment, during evolution of Film Form, through Cinema Art Practice done by you & me, that done by our ancestors, mentors and teachers and Grand Masters whom we have not met but have seen and studied.

We shall thank digital cameras and advent of instant special effects as well as pain free digital editing procedures for they make our work so much free and un-encumbered. We no longer have to carry a whole cross section of society with us when we decide to go out filming. We can pay greater attention to what we want to do. And I think, you & I know, “What Is It That Want To Do…”

Rahatavalokit
Cacareadings#1174

Cinema As A Way Of Life.

CINEMA AS A WAY OF LIFE



I won’t be very elaborate yet this topic is worth contemplation due to increasing mental & emotional space virtual reality is gaining in Post-modern, rather Post-now generation across the World. We must have differing versions of this phenomenon depending upon the sort of life we lead.



I make films independently, non-commercially,  yet both these statements are  paradoxical.  I am completely beholden to ‘others’ as they have to act in my movies  & making a movie certainly requires funding!!  Yet I insist & do make non-commercial movies, in a linear fashion, one at a time.  With no hope of merchandizing & maximizing profits upon investment. I claim an altered ‘value paradigm’.  For me, therefore,  process of Cinema Art practice has a ‘yin yang’ oscillation between ‘Active & Contemplative’ phases namely:



I live a daily life. With my sensorium I perceive and make meaning of the  World that I bring Forth. This is active.



Then I sit, or sleep & dream, I contemplate & visualize in tranquility; picking up some pieces and leaving out a lot, to make my cinematic structures, my Scripts. Maybe I look for money & social support during the same period. Contemplative, I call it.



Then I go out to shoot, rather film, my film.  This I can say is active phase. My metabolism responds to filming periods in unique ways. New places, new sounds, smells, possibilities, un-certainties & euphoria of catching a sequence in perfect light & timing; a hundred different  pleasures & pains, all make up for this Active phase.



Then I sit on editing. This is club class contemplative period.  The heart of my entire enterprise. This is where I make my film. This is what was in my imagination when I was collecting fragments, discontinuous bits of what I heard & what I saw; or what I include and what I exclude from my frame. Which specific sounds with what degree of clarity do I manage to record. Each time an intuition, to be realized as structured composite here, when editing, this I can call a Contemplative phase.



Once the movie is ready, I go out and show it to people, friends, at film societies, at film festivals and once again I am living my active day to day life. This cycle repeats over and over again in my life; it has done so, so many times that I have started trusting it as my way of life. Yet all this is linear, no multi-tasking.

CACA reading #003
rahatavalokit4

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in ...

The Cinematic Object

The Cinematic Object.

Shall we say, in Cinema we are stuck with a ‘frame’ just as humans are stuck with marriage. If you wish to give form to content, you have to frame it.  A  frame is something Cinema shares with Painting and Photography. With the help of a frame, we can either include or exclude, depending upon whichever way one would like to look at the function. The ‘Motion Picture Frame’, however , can be differentiated by its fluidity. Not only does the frame move about freely in space, content within a frame can & does move.  All this, in ‘Cinema’ doesn’t happen, it has to be organized; orchestrated with a number of other elements that constitute ‘Film Form’. We shall come to them while correlating Cinema with ‘Western Classical Music’ and that shall be last of all in this unfolding narrative; such is language that we are using here. Cinema, incidentally, shares this ‘linear unfolding’ in time with literature even if you go somersaulting into ‘flash-backs’ , ‘dreams’ or ‘streams of Consciousness’….for the duration it still unfolds forward & linear. The viewer, just as a reader of lingual texts, however, is free to jump backwards and forwards at will within unfolded narrative thus far. (…sub-text : a touch of Destiny?. Memory..? )

So what is ‘Cinematic Object’?  Perhaps  an idea shall emerge. Perhaps it is something that can only be indicated for it is inherent in Cinema Practice, it can not be articulated outside of it. Yet a very clear indication will be given as reward for patience, just as ‘mise-en-scene’ brings about ‘The Cinematic Icon’ for anybody to look, listen & experience. Here is something,  this ‘iconicity’ I feel, Cinema shares with Sculpture as well as ‘Architecture’ where one can move around an ‘object’, live in it and even get lost. 

Apart from this business of the ‘Iconic’ ; that it stands alone in time & three dimensional space; Cinematic Articulation shares  structural affinities with Sculpture & Architecture.  To create a Cinematic object one can use either one of two methods. One can ‘chip away’ to reveal beauty /  Goddess within the marble mono block; somewhat like the cave temples of India, or alternatively, one can construct brick by brick (read: shot by shot) a structure.  Which, according to me, if pregnant with emotion shall constitute Cinematic Object.

The ‘Sound’, in collusion with perspective & montage is responsible for creation of ‘Virtual space’ in fourth dimension, where it is possible for viewers to transcend limitations of two dimensional frame… very much like the enlightened one who enjoys boundless love, beyond confines of marriage, me & mine! This is a state when Cinema arising from behind the screen, like some ozone rich breathing  material, engulfs the entire auditorium, raising en-mass, aesthetizing audience, saturating each individual, man, woman or child alike with emotion or what we call ‘Rasa’. A bit like moments of glory in  American soccer game, live in a stadium! …only richer, full spectrum, deeper, subtler, more meaningful, beautiful, perhaps  pointing to a sliver of the Truth.

So, here is a brief notional description of what I shall know as ‘Cinematic Object’. There is more to be said around the seven Muses; however, not now.

Rahatavalokit
Cacareadings#537