The Mystery of Picasso (Le mystère Picasso) (1956)

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
France, 1956, b/w and color, 78 min.
French with English subtitles

Blurb from the HFA website: "Clouzot could not have followed up his shocking Les Diaboliques, with its impossibly pessimistic view of human nature, with a more different film. Here, the viewer is allowed to watch Pablo Picasso in the act of creation, sketching and painting on a translucent screen, accompanied by a soundtrack ranging from bebop to flamenco. Interspersed are shots of the 75-year-old genius mugging for the camera. Many of the paintings in this technically adventurous and life-affirming work were destroyed after its production, and exist only in this unique film."

Outstanding:
The movie is completely free of talking, interviews, etc. and is a direct line into Picasso's act of creation as it happened, with the camera in the painting itself. Being a naive non-artist, I was completely hypnotized seeing these amazing paintings emerge, one after the other, out of this non-linear path starting out as an empty canvas and then with the brush racing around painting, re-painting and re-painting as he plays around with different ideas till suddenly an idea catches fire and it furiously comes into shape.

It's even more incredible because it doesnt have any of the usual corrupting mediations of voice, concepts, stories, history, without anybody telling us what the critics thought, what his friends and family thought, what people thought, why and how great he was, and even what he himself had to say about his work -- just the raw, emergent process of art

The Saga of Anatahan (1954)

Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Japan, 1954, b/w, 92 min.
With Akemi Negishi, Suganume, Ikio Sawamura
English and Japanese with English subtitles

Blurb from the HFA website: "Josef von Sternberg’s rarely seen last film reaches the height of stylization: he re-creates the Pacific island setting in a Japanese studio out of paper and cellophane, employing Kabuki-trained actors with no knowledge of English. Based on a factual incident, the film tells of a dozen Japanese merchant seamen shipwrecked in 1944 on Anatahan, where they find a man and a woman. By the time they are persuaded that World War II is over, in 1951, five men have died in fights over the woman. Von Sternberg’sbaroque vision is fully realized in the film he himself considered his best."

Note: Much like the Picasso movie, this movie caught me off guard. The movie was in Japanese without subtitles and dubbing, but had a voice-over explaining the story at regular intervals with the narrative being from the perspective of one of the surivors of Anatahan. When the realization that the entire movie was going to be this way began to sink in, some of the folks in the audience left. Funny how the expectation that a foreign film be either subtitled or dubbed or silent, could itself becomes a distraction while watching one.

The Tarnished Angels (1958) & To Have and Have Not (1944)

The Tarnished Angels

Directed by Douglas Sirk
US, 1958, b/w, 91 min.
With Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack

"Adapted from William Faulkner’s Pylon and considered by the author to be the best film realization of any of his novels, The Tarnished Angels is set in New Orleans during the 1930s. Reuniting the cast from director Douglas Sirk’s previous film, Written on the Wind, the film stars Robert Stack as a World War I ace who works as a carnival flier, Dorothy Malone as his parachute-jumper wife, and Rock Hudson as a newspaper reporter who looks on as Stack’s unhappy family fights a battle forsurvival. Through the film’s striking black-and-white CinemaScope camera work, Sirk’s preoccupation with the spaceof interpersonal relationships has never been more clearly or dynamically expressed. The illusion of freedom afforded by flight stands in stark contrast to the hobbled, earthbound concerns of Sirk’s characters. As German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder succinctly noted: "I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film.""


To Have and Have Not

Directed by Howard Hawks
US, 1944, b/w, 100 min.
With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Walter Brennan

"Only nominally based on Hemingway’s novel, Hawks’ World War II-era morality play underscores the necessity of responsibility, even when burdened with the failure of others. Set in Martinique, the film features Humphrey Bogart as a cynical fishing-boat privateer who finally decides to fight for the French Resistance after falling in love with a girl (Lauren Bacall, here in her debut). To Have and Have Not is above all an atmosphere piece, however. Night clubs and hotel lobbies, strange shafts of light reflecting on the surface of the South Sea, witty exchanges and sexual double entendres—these are what has made the film a classic."

Blurbs from the HFA website

Note: Two absolutely bad-ass movies complete with cruel, world-wise men and women. It was funny how almost every scene in To have or have not involved somebody either lighting up or putting out a cigarette.

India has largest no. of HIV infected outside South Africa

Something to boast about from the just released UN Report on the global AIDS epidemic. The short summary about the situation in India is below with some surprising (if not shocking) facts:

Some general notes before the extract from the report:

1. To give you a qualitative sense of 4.6 million (the total number of known cases in 2002) - it is roughly the population of Bangalore city, about 1/3 of Mumbai's population, and 1.5 times the population of Greater Boston (if you have a better intuition for US cities).
   
2. It's not in this report but the estimate is that Mumbai accounts for about 4.7% of AIDS cases in all of India

"...The region includes the world’s most populous countries—China and India—with 2.25 billion people between them. National HIV prevalence in both countries is very low: 0.1% (range:0.1–0.2%) in China and between 0.4% and 1.3% in India. But a closer focus reveals that both have extremely serious epidemics in a number of provinces, territories and states...

India has the largest number of people living with HIV outside South Africa—estimated at 4.6 million in 2002. Most infections are acquired sexually, but a small proportion is acquired through injecting drug use. Injecting drug use dominates in Manipur and Nagaland in the north-east of the country, bordering Myanmar and close to the Golden Triangle. In this area, HIV infection levels of 60–75% have been found among injecting drug users using non-sterile injecting equipment.

In the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, HIV is transmitted mainly through heterosexual sex, and is largely linked to sex work. Indeed, according to selected surveys, more than half of sex workers have become infected with HIV. In all four states, infection levels among pregnant women in sentinel antenatal clinics have remained roughly stable at over 1%, suggesting that a significant number of sex workers’ clients may have passed on HIV to their wives.

In India, knowledge about HIV is still scant and incomplete. In a 2001 national behavioural study of nearly 85000 people, only 75% of respondents had heard of AIDS and awareness was particularly low among rural women in Bihar, Gujarat and West Bengal. Less than 33% of all respondents had heard of sexually transmitted infections and only 21% were aware of the links between sexually transmitted infections and HIV.

HIV transmission through sex between men is also a major cause for concern in many areas of
India. Recent research shows that many men who have sex with men also have sex with women. In 2002, behavioural surveillance in five cities among men who have sex with men found that 27% reported being married, or living with a female sexual partner. In a study conducted in a poor area of Chennai in 2001, 7% of men who have sex with men were HIV-positive. Attention currently focuses on areas with high recorded prevalence, but there is concern about what might be happening in the vast areas of India for which there are little data...."

Drought update

Uh-oh, within two days of posting the link to an article from 2003 about Mahbubnagar, look what happened today (see below)

As Sainath would contend, the coverage of the event by The Hindu is as an "event" rather than a "process" i.e. the govts response is treated as a being in response to the event of farmer suicides. Yet again it remains to seen if this typical governmental response to such an 'event' by a onetime doling out of a large sum of money will make any difference to the processes underlying Mahbubnagar's woes.

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PM announces Rs. 45-lakh package for AP village

Mahbubnagar (AP), July 1. (PTI): Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, today announced a package of Rs 45 lakhs for the development of Dharmapur -- a backward village in Andhra Pradesh's Mahbubnagar district.

Singh, who interacted for about 35-minutes, with the 13 family members of farmers, who committed suicide at Dharmapur, about eight km. from the district headquarters, assured them that the Centre and State Government will provide all possible help to the farmers to tide over their financial crisis.

Providing solace to family members, Singh announced Rs. 50,000 each to the kin of the deceased from the Prime Minister's Relief Fund. Of the Rs. 45 lakhs to be spent on development of villages, Rs. 16 lakhs will be spent for the construction of hostel buildings, Rs. 8 lakhs for
building four classrooms in a high school, Rs. 8 lakhs for drinking water, Rs. 8 lakhs for construction of pucca roads and Rs. 5 lakhs as special assistance for the village Gram Panchayat.

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Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya) (1970)

Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky
USSR, 1970, b/w and color, 104 min.
With Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Sergei Bondarchuk, Yekaterina Mazurova
Russian with English subtitles

Blurb from the HFA website: "Cited by both Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin as one of the best film versions of Chekhov’s work, Andrei Konchalovsky’s interpretationest focuses on the unique space of a decaying dacha that serves as a clear metaphor for the sense of loss contemplated by each of the characters. The first-rate cast includes War and Peace director Sergei Bonardchuk as Astrov. The film inspired scholars Mira and Antonin Liehm to declare that "the sorrow, the nostalgia and the hopelessness of the Russian intelligentsia had found a true poet."

Note:This movie was more like a play that was filmed rather than a film per se. This is no shortcoming. I was surprised by how intensely I got involved in the film despite the distraction of having to read the subtitles.