.::Song Of The Little Road::.

I was lazing around in the afternoon and almost on a whim, I decided to attend the Avant-Garde movie screenings held at the Gallery Beyond. And it was so good that at the end of it, I cursed myself for being lazy and not attending on previous days.

The map for the festival does not pinpoint the location of the Gallery. And nobody except the a man standing outside Max Mueller could tell me where Gallery was. As a result, I arrived at the Gallery a full one hour late. To add to my woes, the watchman there told me that games were being played at the Gallery (Yahaan toh khel khila rahein hain).

Just as I was about to leave thinking that the event had been shifted to some other venue at the last minute for which notifications could not be put up on the website, a man told me that movies were indeed being screened at the Gallery and directed me to a door. I entered a darkened hall where the movies were being screened. It was only when my eyes adjusted to the light and I spotted paintings hanging on the walls around me that I realized I’d been ushered into the gallery itself.

The movies were perhaps the best ones I’ve seen in a long time. The immense poetry and purpose of the cinema that I was subjected to reminded me of the thing that I once wrote as a comment on some blog:

Cinema is visual panache and and an eye for detail… It is the story-telling which needs more than cinema to be successful… But after a certain stage, one loses the desire for incident in the movies one watches. As in literature, I want a deeply uninhibited artistic expose once in a while in the movies I watch (never mind if it is wrong or unpopular). So I have relished a movie that shows a sleeping face pass through its various stages of sleep, or an apple captured in the hands of a person with a certain staccato movement of the camera, and many others. It is these experiments that make up cinema for me, I’ve never looked for stories in the movies I like, though that is an added bonus. It is just that my attention is held by the camera and the way it moves much more than anything that it can capture… Cinema ought to have an essay-like pondering quality for it to be worthwhile…

What makes the grace and the nuances of the movies even more deserving of respect is the fact that the sort of cinematic experiments that were showcased in the movies must have been extremely difficult in the 1920’s and 1930’s without the benefit of tricks of our digital age.

The screenings included the following movies (not including any which I might have missed due to being late):

• Le Tempestaire (The Tempest) (France, 1947) directed by Jean Epstein, 22 minutes: Perhaps the only movie which had some sort of tangible story, The Tempest was perhaps the most lyrical of the day’s finds. It tells the story of a woman whose lover goes out to sea for fishing. Soon, a storm brews up and the woman fears for her lover’s life. Her mother tells her of a man who can sing a song to soothe the raging sea. She goes to the man and offers him her necklace. He refuses to accept anything, but sings a song into a crystal ball that soothes the sea and brings back the lover to the woman’s door. One of Epstein’s best, this movie makes use of slow motion visuals as well as audio. The way the tempest is captured is majestic to say the least.
• Romance Sentimentale (France, 1930) directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori V. Alexandrov, 16 minutes: Starring the mistress of a rich Parisian, the movie for the most part shows her singing a song. The notes said it bears the mark of Eisenstein in the beginning (though I would not know having watched Eisenstein for the first time myself).
• Autumn Fire (US, 1931) directed by Herman G. Weinberg, 15 minutes: Best described as a poem in the disguise of a movie, it revolves around the thoughts of two lovers. Shot by Weinberg as a marriage proposal to the star of the movie Erna Bergman, it draws parallels between the story of love and the changing seasons. Bergman married Weinberg within a week of seeing the finished movie. The movie is one of my favorites in the Avant-Garde series.
• Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason) (France, 1923) directed by Man Ray, 2 minutes: Ray’s attempt at creating surreal cinema, it was not accepted by the surrealists. It was created on a whim for being screened at one of the Dada soirées.
• Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) (France, 1926) directed by Man Ray, 16 minutes: Another one by Man Ray, it was a longer attempt at surrealism, the scenes of lucidity serving only to punctuate the surrealist escapades.

In fact, the last two of the list were repeats for those who had come late and missed them in the beginning.