my review: bab aziz (the prince who contemplated his soul)

“there are as many paths to god as there are souls on earth.” thus starts “bab aziz” a film by tunisian artist, writer and director nacer khemir, which explores sufism – the islam of mystics. khemir believes that sufism represents not only the tenderness of islam but also its pulsating heart. far from being a marginal phenomenon, it is the esoteric dimension of the islamic message.

abou hassan al nouri, a great sufi, once said: “sufism is the renouncement of all selfish pleasures because true love cannot be selfish. a true sufi has no possessions, and he himself is possessed by nothing.” khemir insists that “one cannot understand the aesthetics of islamic culture without studying sufi texts.”

the film follows bab aziz, an old sufi, and his granddaughter as they travel through the desert on a quest to find a gathering of dervishes that only takes place once every 30 years. they find many fellow travelers on this journey. everyone has their own story, their own gift, their own holy grail. each must find his or her own path. “he who has faith never gets lost,” bab aziz reminds them. yet whether they’re in search of a lost love, a dream palace, or god himself, the characters and their stories are partly steeped in melancholy. there is this sense of the human search for something ephemeral, something unattainable which slips through one’s fingers like fine desert sand. this gentle sense of disquiet builds up throughout the film and reaches a climax at the end. as bab aziz prepares for his own death, he comforts hassan, a young man who finds death disturbing, with some of the most brilliant, satisfying words in the film:

bab aziz: if the baby in the darkness of its mother’s womb were told, “outside there’s a world of light, with high mountains, great seas, undulating plains, beautiful gardens in blossom, brooks, a sky full of stars and a blazing sun. and you refuse all these marvels and stay enclosed in this darkness.” the unborn child, knowing nothing about these marvels, wouldn’t believe any of it. like us when we’re facing death. that’s why we’re afraid.

hassan: but there can’t be light in death because it’s the end of everything.

bab aziz: how can death be the end of something that doesn’t have a beginning? don’t be sad on my wedding night.

hassan: your wedding night?

bab aziz: yes, my marriage with eternity.

the complementary title of “the prince who contemplated his soul” comes from a ceramic plate painted in 12th century iran with the exact same inscription. according to an afghan fable, a handsome prince left his throne to sit day and night by a small pool of water. people said: “you’d think he’s looking at his reflection in the water.” but a dervish explained to them: “maybe it’s not his image. only those who are not in love see their own reflection. he’s contemplating his soul, don’t wake him, it might take wing.”

shot beautifully in both the iranian central desert and in the tunisian desert in tataouine, the film brings together actors from iran, iraq, tunisia, kurdistan, and algeria. the musical score is equally rich and diverse. khemir explains: “in arab culture, poetry’s raison d’être is singing. songs and music create ambivalence between presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, reality and mystery. mysticism runs through both the popular and scholarly traditions of arab, persian and turkish cultures. the “baraka” (the blessing) springs out of this mystic voice. it envelops and permeates humans, places, objects. vocal music is often accompanied by dance, as in the performances of whirling dervishes who dance with one hand directed towards the sky, in order to receive the divine blessing, and the other hand directed towards the earth, to transmit this blessing to the audience. these sacred and popular types of music convey an extraordinary vitality and a communicative joy from asia to africa, from the arab world to the persian world. they guarantee a cohesion that asserts its unity and its desire for life.”

bab aziz is more of an audio-visual allegory than a linear story. khemir encourages the viewer to put aside his or her ego and open up to the world. the film “borrows the structure of the visions narrated by dervishes and the structure of their spiraling, whirling dances. characters change but the theme remains the same: love in its many forms.” in the words of the famous sufi ibn arabi:

my heart can take many shapes:
for a monk it becomes a monastery, for idols – a temple,
for gazelles – a pasture, for the faithful – kaaba.
it can become a roll of the torah or the koran.
my belief is love; wherever its caravan might lead me,
love remains my religion and belief…

review: “the illusion” adapted by tony kushner

CHRIS. […] Well, let me put it this way. Everybody has a sense of reality of some kind or other, some kind of sense of things being real or not real in his, his – particular – world…

MRS. GOFORTH. I know what you mean. Go on.

CHRIS. I’ve lost it lately, this sense of reality in my particular world. We don’t all live in the same world, you know, Mrs. Goforth. Oh, we all see the same things – sea, sun, sky, human faces and inhuman faces, but – they’re different in here! [touches his forehead] And one person’s sense of reality can be another person’s sense of – well, of madness! – chaos! – and, and –

MRS. GOFORTH. Go on. I’m still with you.

CHRIS. And when one person’s sense of reality, or loss of sense of reality, disturbs another one’s sense of reality – I know how mixed up this –

MRS. GOFORTH. Not a bit, clear as a bell, so keep on, y’haven’t lost my attention.

CHRIS. Being able to talk: wonderful! When one person’s sense of reality seems too – disturbingly different from another person’s, uh –

MRS. GOFORTH. Sense of reality. Continue.

CHRIS. Well, he’s – avoided! Not welcome! It’s — that simple … And – yesterday in Naples, I suddenly realized that I was in that situation. [He turns to the booming sea and says “Boom”.] I found out that I was now a – leper!

[from tennessee williams’ “the milk train doesn’t stop here anymore”]

i read “the milk train doesn’t stop here anymore” when i was quite young but i remember being struck by the idea of how reality is entirely relative. it is a terrifying concept in some ways – terrifying in how alone we are in perpetuity and how thin and arbitrary the line is between reason and insanity.

last week, i went to see “the illusion” at todd’s theater (university of rochester) and it triggered some of the same thoughts. tony kushner’s adaptation of corneille’s “l’illusion comique” is self-admittedly loose with terrific results. the play talks about love, jealousy, betrayal, revenge, and murder with 17th century grandiloquence but its wit, edge and compacted structure propel it gently into postmodernism.

on a dark night, pridamant comes to the sorcerer alcandre’s cave to find out whatever he can about his runaway son. in a series of illusions created by alcandre and his perennially abused servant, pridamant sees his son at different times in his life. however, names, relationships and allegiances keep shifting with each new illusion. pridamant’s reactions to his son’s adventures are equally intractable.

the idea of a play within a play, an illusion within an illusion, the artifice of theater mirrored by the deception of magic tricks, and the osmotic interplay between reality and madness, all add an evanescent, contradictory, elusive quality to the plot. this eeriness was further reinforced by nigel maister’s brilliant staging. the design team’s minimalist, creative interpretation should also be applauded, especially the use of a one-way mirror that turned transparent as if by magic. ominously lit from the inside, it was like watching apparitions stuck inside a life-size television.

the acting, by university of rochester students, was spot-on. however, john amir-fazli who played matamore, a pompous buffoon with unexpected sparks of kindness and profundity, was by far the most magnetic character in the play. alcandre’s long suffering servant was at once imbued with servility and sinister poise by anna kroup.

“the illusion” adapted by tony kushner

review: jane campion’s “bright star”

jane campion’s “bright star” recounts the love story of john keats and fanny brawne. keats is played by ben whishaw, a slight young man with an intelligent demeanor and sensitive eyes. abby cornish plays fanny brawne as a bold, youthful, captivating girl who knows more about fashion than poetry.

the film progresses quietly, almost humbly, with none of the sheen or melodrama we expect from hollywood. campion has an eye for sensuous textures and the successful coupling of light, landscape and human emotion and the film is rich with such gifts. scenes of intimacy are modest and unaffected – devoid of an operatic music score that tries to adorn or elevate. we all know what place keats will occupy in the annals of english poetry, yet that knowledge does not inform the tone of the film.

keats’ poetry is meshed beautifully with quotidian scenes and dialogue. “ode to a nightingale” which i learned by heart as a child seemed to tumble out of my memory. a delightful multi-sensory experience. keats sits distractedly on a simple wooden chair. he’s in an english garden plump with blossoms. he listens to the soft, mellow song of the nightingale. the words begin to pour forth from his imagination. we are mesmerized.

keats’ death at the incredibly young age of 25 is expected yet still heartrending, especially when we are confronted by fanny’s violent grief.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?

(From “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats, May 1819)

heddy honigmann’s “forever” – art and immortality

i believe patterns exist everywhere – in life, in art, in relationships. lovely patterns, ever-repeating, delicately wrought like lacework – patterns which crave balance and symmetry.

lately my conversations with friends have been about art – art as a radical change agent, a transformative force that can show us possibilities without reiterating the constraints of our thinking and therefore our being; art as a new language that bypasses the rigid, state-defined categories of religion, history, politics and culture; art as “the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test.”[1]

at the same time i have had discussions about the necessity to see each individual as unique – unfettered by perceptions related to race, ethnicity, nationality or religion; every human being a rich and complex amalgam of thoughts, emotions and physicality, with the potential for both good and evil.

it was in this state of mind that i saw “forever.” shot mostly at the père lachaise cemetery in paris, “forever” is a truly captivating documentary. it’s directed by heddy honigmann, a citizen of the world: her parents were holocaust survivors who immigrated to peru, she studied filmmaking in rome and now works in the netherlands. honigmann is interested in exile, loss and nostalgia. maybe that’s why i was strongly drawn to the emotive pull in her work. she is an innovator. when she begins to sketch a documentary idea, she imagines certain characters and it is up to her research staff to discover them in real life. thus, the line between fiction and non-fiction becomes blurred and the documentary form, already an arresting medium on account of its spontaneity, is exalted to the perfection of true artwork.

“forever” is an ode to art, artists and the people they inspire. père lachaise is famous for the many celebrities buried there – jim morrison, chopin, marcel proust, oscar wilde, ingres, modigliani, sadegh hedayat, yves montand, simone signoret, maria callas, george méliès. however, the real stars of the film are regular people who visit these graves (and those of loved ones buried side by side with them), spruce up tombstones, and tell stories. each story is beautiful, profound and unique, yet all the more human in its reverberations.

an old woman who visits her husband’s grave talks about escaping franco’s spain. she saw prisoners being executed in cold blood and lost her faith in god when a priest walked in to finish off survivors with a final gunshot.

a man pays his respects to sadegh hedayat. he’s a taxi driver but his passion is music, traditional persian music. it’s an important release for him, a way to stay connected to his culture, the only way to survive a life of exile. honigmann prods him gently to sing for her. he hesitates, demurs then obliges. he sings a poem by hafez.

this instant hook into the past via language is something i know intimately. there is my three decades long love affair with the french language. as i lost fluency – my ability to dream in french – my sense of grief was acute. with urdu it’s another kind of relationship. i have never had an urdu vocabulary comparable to french but it’s the language i feel at “home” in – where the discrepancy between my inner life and the rest of the world disappears and there is a level of unified calmness, a certain truth. after many years of living in a pakistani cultural void, when i listened to a faiz ahmed faiz poem sung by the inimitable noor jehan, a poem about how you cannot insulate yourself with romantic love once you’ve been exposed to humanity’s terrible suffering (“there are other sorrows in this world, comforts other than love. don’t ask me, my love, for that love again”), i was astonished by my own emotion.

talking about remembering the past, one of the most visited graves in père lachaise is that of marcel proust. stephane heuet, an ardent proust admirer, explains how he was so moved by the striking visuality of “a la recherche du temps perdu” that he decided to render it into a graphic novel. he sees proust primarily as a painter. prompted by honigmann, he attempts to explain the mystique of the madeleine. he differentiates between voluntary and involuntary memory – exerting effort to recall the past vs being spontaneously transported to another time and place. the madeleine acts as a trigger and suddenly proust is enveloped by his past, as vivid and palpable as when he was a child. heuet explains how this concept endows us with immortality. if all the places and times we have ever experienced reside simultaneously within us then we become a conduit for eternity. he goes on to talk about proust’s pursuit of happiness – in relationships, in possessions, in society – and his ultimate discovery that happiness can only be found in art.

a solemn-looking man talks about modigliani’s love of the human face; the way he uses light and color to abstract and imbue with emotion. along the way we find out that he’s an embalmer. he takes his work seriously. he feels responsible. when the family of the deceased takes a final look at their loved one, they should be able to remember them as they were in life.

a guide reminisces about his childhood visits to the cemetery with his grandfather. how death used to be a part of life – funeral processions would pass through the city center. he tells a lovely story about a young woman he once knew who changed him forever. in a moment of sharp clarity, his future seemed to spread out before him and he knew that he would never know boredom, for he would always have access to art.

an older woman tells a story of true, all-consuming love. her husband of two months, the love of her life, a much younger man whom she found in her fifties, killed by a bee sting. no, he had no idea he was allergic. he had lived in africa for many years. he could never have imagined. her pain is still keen. it’s hard she says. it’s hard when it happens to you.

throughout the film there are brief musical interludes. they sometimes underscore the stories being told but there is a consistent presence – chopin’s music. a japanese young woman who moved to paris to learn to play chopin the right way, talks about her father’s untimely death. he loved chopin. for her, playing chopin’s music is a mystical experience, a way to commune with her dead father. the film starts and ends with her and chopin is a grand finale to a small, sensitive film about exalted, universal themes.

thanks to my friends: terry for making me watch “forever” and damien and christopher for our discussions about art and humanity.

[1] mark slouka, “dehumanized – when math and science rule the school”, harper’s, sept 2009

review: inglourious basterds

i know it’s unfair to compare everything tarantino does to “pulp fiction” – it’s just never gonna happen again. i know that. but “inglourious basterds” left me disappointed.

the premise of the film is unusual – an alternative end to WWII in which hitler, his henchmen, a large number of german officers and their escorts are mowed down by machine gun fire, burned in a film theater, and finally exploded with dynamite.

this abrupt (and dramatic) end to the war is brought about by two separate forces, acting independently of each other: (1) the basterds – a group of american jews led by brad pitt, a hillbilly from tennessee, who are sent in by the CIA to terrorize the nazis. their rule is to kill every nazi they encounter and then scalp him. (2) shosanna – the sole survivor of a jewish family discovered and killed by hans landa, a nazi colonel nicknamed “the jew hunter.” she becomes the proprietor of a film theater and decides to burn it down at a nazi film premiere.

ok, so here’s what i thought of the film. there is much gratuitous violence, as expected (including frequent scalping shots replete with blood and squelching sound effects) but it isn’t a catalyst for much tension, irony or humor. it’s just gratuitous. the film seems to imply that there is an automatic pleasure to be derived from this mindless savagery. after all, the jews get to stick it to the nazis and it is justifiable payback for the holocaust. but there’s something awful about humanity’s quick race to the bottom of hell. the whole revenge fantasy doesn’t feel right. whether jews are being shot or germans are being scalped and machine gunned in the back while trying to escape a burning building, it’s all part of the same circle of brutality and evil.

in spite of a bevy of characters with immense potential, all abundantly supplied with catchy names, nicknames, histories and quirks, the film doesn’t give most of them the chance to develop into anything concrete or fully realized. they remain juicy tidbits that can never coalesce into a fully formed, captivating plot.

finally, sorry but brad pitt’s curled lip and hillbilly accent didn’t quite work for me. mike myers, as a british officer, is surprisingly calm and convincing. hans landa, played by christoph waltz, is probably the most compelling character in the film. wish he had had a much larger role.

inglourious basterds

feminine writing: some thoughts on hélène cixous’ “le rire de la méduse”

as i began to read hélène cixous, the first thing that struck me was the awesome power of her writing. it’s hard to describe — it’s poetic, non-linear, complex, yet cogent enough for “the laugh of the medusa” to have become a celebrated treatise on rhetoric and feminism.

cixous’ thesis is equally forceful. she advocates feminine writing, writing that inscribes femininity. women must return to their bodies, write through their bodies — bodies that have been confiscated in the name of modesty by the “great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism” and become the “cause and location of inhibitions.”

“censor the body and you censor breath and speech,” proclaims cixous. she writes a particularly brilliant paragraph about how women speak in public and how their style of speech is quite different from that of men:

“listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn’t painfully lost her wind). she doesn’t “speak,” she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into the voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the “logic” of her speech. her flesh speaks true. she lays herself bare. in fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. in a certain way she inscribes what she’s saying, because she doesn’t deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. her speech even when “theoretical” or political, is never simple or linear or “objectified,” generalized: she draws her story into history.”

like speech, feminine writing must originate from, be expressed through and give voice to female sexuality. but how is that possible when the logical structure of language itself is phallocentric, set up to maintain male dominance and exclude female bodies? western culture is based on the dichotomy between binary opposites – male/female, good/evil, light/dark, language/silence, speech/writing. in each of these pairs the first term has primacy over the second.

cixous talks about freud’s description of women as being the “dark continent.” women are synonymous with darkness, otherness, africa. men are the opposite. they represent lightness, selfhood, western civilization. women are the colonized, men the imperialists. this same apartheid is imbedded in language.

given these rigid, linguistic hierarchies, whoever uses language is inadvertently taking up the position of a “man”. but cixous sees these restrictions as being historico-cultural and surmountable. to her writing must take place in the spaces in-between, without any preference for or reference to opposing terms. women are more than equal to the task on account of their “gift of alterability.” as mothers, women are naturally adept at nourishing, eliminating separation, re-writing codes: “in woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history.”

women must not remain trapped inside men’s language and grammar but explode that structure and invent a language they themselves can get inside of. this is why cixous describes feminine writing in non-representational ways such as song, milk, flight, rhythm.

feminine writing is important because “writing is precisely the very possibility of change” and since most “history of writing is confounded with the history of reason” and “one with phallocentric tradition,” women cannot change the world until they change the ground rules of writing itself.

personal aside: this article puts me in the indelicate position of having to compromise my absolute faith in the equality of the sexes. generalizations make me squeamish. i have always believed that individual differences within groups (whether they be based on gender, race, ethnicity or religion) far outweigh collective differences between the groups themselves. generalizations are therefore always reductive, always misleading. however, there is so much that i recognize in cixous’ thesis that i have to think about how male and female writing can be essentially different and how the very structure of language makes it difficult for women to express that difference.

i changed over from writing exclusively in french to english sometime in high school. as i began to write in english, i retained some of the vividness and fecundity i so cherished in french. my writing was picturesque, creative, unorthodox. however, in business school i took two classes in business english and the intensity of my writing was slowly whittled away. i started to write more simply, clearly, in a much more structured and ordered fashion. my personal style of writing was sacrificed to the god’s of lucidity and succinctness. in cixous’ words, my writing became neutered. who knows how neutered it was already on account of linguistic constraints i could not even grasp, but there was a decisive switch at that time.

cisoux’ description of how women speak with their entire bodies and how they can integrate (rather than divide into opposites) by perceiving world history as an ever-mutating patchwork of billions of personal histories like their own, is spot-on, magnificent.

it reminded me of ismat chughtai (1911-1991), the grande dame of urdu literature. she was not only a prolific writer who changed the rules of urdu wrtiting but she was also a fierce feminist who challenged ideas about what it meant to be a good muslim woman. her short story “lihaaf” (the quilt) came out in 1941. it dealt with lesbianism. she was charged with obscenity and taken to court in lahore. however, her lawyer was able to argue that public morality would remain safe as only lesbians would get the sexual drift of the story! chughtai’s seminal work is her semi-autobiographical novel “terhi lakeer” (the crooked line). in it she explores the quotidian rhythms of women’s lives, the expression of female sexuality within the phallocentric confines of cultural mores, women’s relationships with both men and other women and their struggles to self-actualize through work and career. chughtai’s writing is intimate, explosive, unflinching, voluptuous. it’s hard to contain within the structure of the urdu language. it’s feminine writing.

for my friend damien who made me read cixous.

review: donnie darko

so after years of being egged on by my brother, i finally saw “donnie darko” last night. what a trip!

the film is a rich mix of psychological thriller, science fiction, comedy and drama. it doesn’t have a single dull moment. jake gyllenhaal is a paranoid schizophrenic teenager who begins to have regular encounters with an imaginary friend named frank. frank happens to be a really tall man with a really deep, darth vader like voice, in a really ugly-ass, disturbing-looking bunny suit! frank tells donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds. as donnie sleepwalks to the golf course to meet with frank and heed his ominous warning, a mysterious jet engine lands on top of his house and crashes into his room. the meeting with frank saves his life.

the countdown to the end of the world begins and frank’s appearances continue. he instructs donnie on the possibilities of time travel. if destiny is pre-ordained then wouldn’t it be possible to see everyone’s inevitable path into the future? and wouldn’t that factor in free will if u were witnessing this phenomenon from inside god’s channel? donnie starts seeing wormholes, shortcuts in time and space, tunnels that connect present and future. real people and events in donnie’s life as well as frank’s overarching, self-fulfilling sway over his mind, seem to bend him in random yet inexorable ways toward a fixed future – the end of the world.

as things become increasingly ugly in his life and people he cares about start getting hurt, donnie begins to understand what he must do. he must shut down the tangent universe that came into existence when he escaped death. he must close that loop in order to save the primary universe and all those he loves. by sacrificing himself, he reverses the irreversible march of time and all those involved wake up to the universe at it was meant to be with some vague, residual knowledge of their trip back home. way cool film.

donnie darko

review: cassandra’s dream

dark woody allen film in the tradition of “crimes and misdemeanors”. inspired by greek tragedies, it explores the apparent steadiness of family bonds, the moral blindness engendered by ambition and greed, the finality of crime and the psychosis that it can produce in the form of guilt. erfectly directed and acted, especially by colin farrell who gives a stellar performance.

“awaiting for men” and much more

katy lena ndiaye’s “awaiting for men” is set in the beautiful red-walled city of oualata, in southeastern mauritania. the film is based on a series of intimate interviews with three women who speak with candor about their relationships with men. the cinematography is rich with the bold colors, patterns and textures of northwest africa. the pace of the film is unhurried, almost languorous. there is a stillness to the film. it has an uncluttered, poetic quality.

oualata was one of the four ksours (arabic for village) erected between the 11th and 12th centuries in what is now mauritania. these settlements were built around a mosque, mostly a simple unadorned prayer hall comprising a madrassa or islamic school, with the houses radiating outwards from this center and getting progressively bigger. the entire ksour was contained within a single continuous wall and many of the village’s amenities were shared – there were common storehouses, ovens, baths, shops, etc. the four kasours were immensely prosperous until the 16th-17th centuries. not only were they trade posts for caravans traveling across the sahara but they also became renowned centers of islamic thought and culture, attracting a multitude of foreign students. it is said that some mauritanian libraries and schools have managed to preserve over 40,000 extremely rare, priceless islamic manuscripts. however, with the gradual desiccation of the sahara much of the farmland that was fertile enough to feed local inhabitants has now become buried in sand.

a faltering economy is apparent in the film, as most oualata men seem to be employed elsewhere. it’s the women who inhabit the kasour for the most part. they take care of the cattle, run their shops, deliver babies, gossip while sipping mint tea, and wait (sometimes for months) for their men to return.

the women who are interviewed speak directly to the camera. they are frank, self-assured, articulate. they are also quite different from one another, a fact that belies western perceptions of other societies (especially muslim ones) as being homogenized, where the individual is largely overshadowed by the collective. many of them have had multiple marriages.

one woman, who exudes sheer power on screen, explains how she can only live with a man as long as she loves him. once she falls out of love, she divorces him. if he annoys her, she has no qualms about beating him. this woman is all business. she frequently challenges the director, the woman behind the camera, with a certain brazenness that’s rarely seen in interview subjects, irrespective of race, religion, ethinicity or gender. this woman is single right now, after going through 5 marriages. she supports herself by painting tarkhas (beautiful murals involving endlessly repeating designs that are painted exclusively by women on the exterior and interior walls of houses in order to highlight doors, windows and alcoves). she also makes money by using henna to draw the same arabesques on the hands and feet of women, and by playing conga drums.

another woman introduces herself by confessing that she is not the prettiest woman around but she likes to talk and men enjoy that. she is lively, down to earth and happy to share her innermost thoughts and feelings. she works as a midwife and runs her own clinic. she is madly in love with her fourth husband and isn’t shy about expressing her physical attraction to him. “a handsome man around here” she explains, “is a man who is generous and tall and can please his woman.”

the third woman is the most reserved. she owns a shop and dreams of one day owning an entire market. she is demure and when prodded too much about her sex life, she turns away, saying “that’s enough, you tire me.” she struck me as being better off than the other two. for her, painting tarkhas is a hobby, not a source of income.

i moderated a discussion after the film. it was most interesting. some in the audience were frustrated by the lack of information, the focus on three women only, the conversations about men and women to the detriment of the women’s interactions with their children, families, communities. some thought the film was a bit too slow, every shot even though beautiful was held for a bit too long. someone thought the women were “sad” because one of them posits that girls don’t need to be educated and another confides how she staged a fall in order to abort an unwanted pregnancy.

others enjoyed the film’s lyricism. they compared it to a piece of music. i agree. as with poetry, everything does not need to be explained away. sometimes a film, even a documentary, can simply create a mood, a feeling, a thought without having to formulate a formal beginning or end. that’s certainly true of french cinema – much of it is open-ended, something that american audiences find frustrating. i like to fill in the blanks and make the film my own. viewing becomes more participative, more active.

i certainly didn’t find the women “sad”. it’s unfortunate that we apply a rigid western or maybe even “christian missionary” filter to how we view other cultures. we have such confidence in our achievements as a society that our instinctive, gut level reaction is one of condescension towards what is different. it’s like this discussion i took part in on facebook, where someone asked if “third world” was an offensive term. many agreed that it was a judgmental term. to me it almost sounds like “third rate”. someone exclaimed: why not just call them poor countries? my answer was: poor in terms of what, really? over-consumption? obesity? materialism? capitalistic greed? production of waste? many third world countries r much richer in how families and communities function. their relationship to the environment is far less toxic. if first world countries stopped exploiting and interfering in third world countries, the gap between them would lessen over time. we seem to transpose our template for what we see as “civilization” onto other cultures without trying to develop an understanding of their circumstances – climate, geography, history, economy, ethnography.

to me the women seemed quite independent, both financially and emotionally. they were used to living on their own. they were well-adjusted, content, confident in who they were. education does not mean the same thing to them as it does to us. i don’t think that the men were much more educated. education refers mostly to studying the quran and hadith. mauritanians are a mixtures of original african agriculturalists, nomadic north african berber tribes and yemeni arabs who conquered the region in the 11th century. in berber society women have a preeminent role, as mothers of the clan. they r the ones who are educated in the histories of their ancestral tribes and they pass on that oral tradition from one generation to another. some of that matriarchal culture is reflected in the attitudes of the three women. the ease with which they divorce men is probably made easier by islam, which gave women the right to divorce in the 7th century.

as far as abortion, with all our western civilization and its legal protections for women, isn’t it sad that a doctor who performed late term abortions was recently shot in the united states? harassment, death threats, murder and terrorism are used to stop women from having abortions. we have a long way to go before we can criticize mauritanian culture.

the slow rhythm of the film with its abundance of still shots, seemed to be informed by photography. i was happy to learn from an interview with katy nadiaye that the film was in fact inspired by a book of photographs called “africa paintings”.

“red shift” by cildo meireles

another cildo meireles installation at the museu d’art contemporani de barcelona was called “red shift”. in physics the term describes the stretching of light as it travels through expanding space on its way to the earth. but meireles is referring to a shift in perception.

the installation occupies a u-shaped space, starting with what looks like a studio apartment done up exclusively in red. there is a normalcy to this environment. the monochromatic color scheme is soothing although the abundance of red objects could also point to a hoarder’s obsession with collecting/acquiring/consuming. to me it was a capitalist’s sanctuary. this first part is called “impregnation”.

the second part of the installation connects this first room to a second room. it is a winding path along which a tiny bottle lies sideways, spilling a disproportionately large amount of red paint. already the installation starts to feel a bit odd and unsettling. as we move along this pathway the paint spill seems interminable. the lights dim. it gets progressively darker. this part is called “entorno”, which means both spill and environment in portuguese.

we finally reach the second room, the most dramatically staged yet. it is pitch black now. we cannot see the contours of the room. a spotlight is mounted on top of a large white sink, floating in space at a crooked angle. there is blood-like fluid gushing forth from the faucet, making a loud splashing sound. like the spill, this spurt seems never-ending. the effect is that of a crime scene, something cinematically staged in a horror movie. it is ominous, terrifying. this part is called “shift”.

our perception has effectively shifted from familiar and comforting, to odd and surprising to downright frightening. the work is said to have been inspired by the murder of a journalist by brazilian police, when the country was struggling under a military dictator in the 1960s. the message seems clear. unbridled capitalism or accumulation of private wealth, which for many countries goes hand in hand with dictatorships, can only be achieved through exploitation and violence.

cildo meireles – mission/missions

saw this stunning installation in barcelona. a group of 2,000 bones hang from the ceiling. lit beautifully, they look like an opulent, heavy chandelier that looms over a sandbox filled with glistening pennies. the money is connected to the bones by a tall stack of communion wafers. brazilian artist cildo meireles is talking about the jesuit exploitation of the tupi-guarani people – how the church used religious conversion to further economic gain. the installation is enclosed within sheer black curtains – the “mission” being hardly veiled.

Cildo Meireles. Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals), 1987. Approximately 600,000 coins, 800 communion wafers, 2,000 bones, 80 paving stones and black fabric, 235 x 600 x 600 cm. Daros-Latinamerica © Cildo Meireles

film review: the house of sand

directed by andrucha waddington, “the house of sand” was shot in brazil’s northern state of maranhão with its pristine beaches, lagoons and sand dunes. the landscape is so stunning and otherworldly that it conflates into mood, theme and character. the film’s soundtrack is a constant lament of howling wind, washing over ever-shifting sand. it is overwhelming.

the characters in the film could have been dwarfed by the beauty and vastness of their surroundings but real life mother and daughter fernanda montenegro and fernanda torres are superb. in a tale that extends over 60 years they move seamlessly from youth to old age, playing three generations of daughters and mothers. dragged from the city into this remote part of brazil by her husband, a pregnant young woman and her mother are left to fend for themselves after the husband dies in a freak accident. they turn for help to the runaway slave community that inhabits a tiny fishing villages nearby.

throughout the film, antithetical forces are at play – the urge to leave and change one’s destiny vs the acceptance of one’s fate, the desire to experience the unknown vs the comfort of what is familiar, isolation vs human civilization, victorian etiquette vs abandonment to natural impulses, youth vs old age, nature’s dominance vs man’s resilience.

the film feels more like an ancient fable, set in a dreamland of luscious white sand and glittering water, where time can only manifest itself through the gradual aging of the characters. there is something ethereal and poetic about how it looks and something vast and cosmic about how it unfolds. the ending is perfection.