From: tstpcc@gwunix1.gwu.edu (Paul C. Chemmanoor)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.kerala
Subject: Nos Tacemus -- Icarus
Date: 15 Oct 1992 18:51:18 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


1] Its been some time now since the last column.
   Telnet access to tigger is so painfully slow.
   I am sending this through mail. Hope it arrives
   and in the right group.

   Any comments address to paulchem@tigger.cs.colorado.edu

2] The rest of this article is about 
	(i) Kundera and his book: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.
	    And the movie based on the book.

	(ii) What is meant by poetic, some reflections.

  ...................................................................
  . Statutory Warning: These musings may contain highly subjective  .
  . opinions, unsubstantiated allegations, assertions, imperatives, .
  . subliminal erotica and other material that may be of a harmful  .
  . nature to the extremely gullible or those under 21.             .
  ...................................................................


3] One of the last things I did before I got out of Boulder was to see 
   the Phillip Kaufmann version of Kunderas classic: The Unbearable 
   Lightness Of Being.
   Boulder has some very good film programs, within the university environment.
   In fact one of the classrooms called Chem-140 has the best sound system in
   Boulder better than the best theatres, complete with Bose speakers and profs 
   who compete with students to read the huge Periodic Elements Chart while the 
   reels are loaded. Silence of the Lambs and Exorcist were treats to watch 
   when you feel as if you are inside the movie.  And so was Kurasawa's 
   Rhapsody in August.

   Kunderas Unbearable Lightness of Being was the book I gave my dad as a 
   retirement gift. I had read most of it before the train or bus got me home
   and I had to wait till now to see how the book ended.

   The film starts with Tomas the protagonist being introduced to the audience
   as a young doctor who is in the process of sleeping with every woman he can.
   The first words that he utters is "Take off your clothes" to a nurse, who 
   in keeping with the tone of the plot proceeds to do just that.
   Kunderas success lies I think in conveying the sense of violence that goes 
   with passion, instead of the male dominant undertones that it would acquire
   in the hands of a lesser writer. 

   It ends with a scene which in my book rates as one of the best.
   We are told that Tomas and his wife die in a road accident on a rainy day,
   while returning home after a party at a friends place.
   The movie cuts to the inside of the cab of the truck that tomas is driving,
   his wife leans on his shoulder and asks him, "What are you thinking ?", 
   while the rain beats steadily against the windows and the sound of the rain
   fills the theatre, and you can almost reach out and touch the streams of 
   water that run down the trees that line that road, and he says "I am 
   thinking, how happy I am.", while the view of the road through the window
   turns a color of old lace and widens filling the whole screen, the rain
   drops falling off to a trickle and then stops completely.

   [Do readers know of any ending that they think is better ?
   Or any good endings at all ?
   I would be glad to hear of them.]

   The movie moves from Tomas personal life and takes on the embattled czech's
   during the dubchek years, with tomas' wife as a reporter who photographs
   the russian tanks that drive into Prague crushing the rebellion, attacks
   the communist regimes and the little hypocritical emigre circles that 
   formed in more hospitable lands, all the time retaining the sense of 
   poetic detachment.

   The movies title comes from one of the conversations that tomas has with 
   his wife.
   He says: "We can only see Life as an outline, we can not grasp its entire
   meaning until long after it has moved into the past, in the present it
   is so shadowy, so light, we can only see so much of it." [Paraphrase]

   And the letter his wife writes as explanation for going back to Prague
   abandoning the safety of Geneva, is as beautiful.
   She says: "Life is so light for you. It is so heavy for me. You are so
   strong, but I am weak. I am going back to the country of the weak where
   I will be at home." [Paraphrase]

   The movie is uninhibitedly erotic, and very beautifully so.
   The innocence of Tomas' wife about the interest men have in female bodies,
   comes across as very touching. "Are they so interesting ?" she asks before
   proceeding to photograph his mistress, in a sequence of controlled 
   eroticism, emotion and camera work.



4] I think of Kunderas book and film as poetic.
   But I couldnt pin down the exact reasons why I called them so.

   When Walt Whitman says "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking",
   [Assimov (PBUH) had a story based on this line.]
   and when  Eliot says "Will these bones live ? " they conveys something that
   goes beyond the mere words and rhymes and syllable schemes.

   In Gone with the Wind when Scarlet O'Hara vows never to go hungry again and 
   the camera zooms out against a backdrop of a blazing sunset with scarlet in
   silhouette and the trees outlined in that dusk, it freezes so much of 
   emotion it has lasted down the years as a expression of the rage of the 
   individual against fate and circumstance.

   Similarly the scene from "Pyaasa" where Guru Dutt enters the auditorium
   singing "...Woh Hind parvat ..."
   Or Lata singing "Inhi logon ne..."
   Or even Nargis and Raj Kapoor walking in the rain under that oversized 
   umbrella, in Awara [I Think]
   Or Apu throwing the stone into the placid surface of a pond which then 
   ripples in slow inevitable circles, while we watch, in Rays 
   "Pather Panchaali"

   Or the famous scene in a malayalam movie whose name I have forgotten,
   where a man explains to a friend why he became a communist, and just 
   as he begins to speak a train begins to pass, and we see his words drowned
   out in the screaming of the train.

   Or Scotts last words before his party lied down to sleep the last time,
   written to his wife, after his mission reached the Pole but could not
   return because of a blizzard and died just six or seven miles from where
   they had buried supplies: "...till we meet again, in a world after this
   when God will wipe away every tear from every eye."

   All these things I think are connected by a common thread of something 
   which I can not quite explain. Perhaps some reader can.

   5] I would be very glad to read anything that readers think of as poetic.
      I am very interested in the diversity of what different people view as
      poetic.
      E-mail preferably as reading sci is not very easy to do now for me.
      

Paul Chemmanoor.
 










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