MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI'S CINEMA IS POETRY FOR THE MIND
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
I learn to see through films. It is both frightening and delightful at times. Scything through wheat fields, poring over cracks in buildings, gazing at faces of people and animals, yawning at the sky, looking at traffic through a thirty five mm wide-lens in the immediate aftermath of a dash of rain: all of these possibilities come to me through cinema. It’s like a training to both appreciate as well as have a critical eye towards objects in your vision. The kind of cinema you consume consumes you over time. Your thoughts meddle over trivial affairs or think of ruses like the characters of your films. Your eyes incessantly hover like the passionate lens of the camera. By expanding your tastes you come across realist film-makers and their films that destroy all interpretation. The consequent numbness now crawls on your skin like the itch of the serial killer.
The voice of sense-making is glib and porous. Seconds of belief get doused in years of nonchalance. The phrase making sense dates back to the 17th century, and was used in the context of something being reasonable or clear to comprehend. But what is clear may only be to the trained eye. Because what do you call problems that an untrained eye keeps trying to solve and constantly fails at? Let’s call them the great problems.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are about some of these great problems –
How does one keep sanity in the new world?
How does one reconcile to the fact that one’s utmost desires are impossible to attain?
How does one attempt to live when everything appears tragic?
Why do my thoughts seem unfaithful to how reality appears to me?
Why do I feel so separate from the other?
How does one experience aliveness ?
In Red Desert, his first colour feature, the camera lingers on images of silhouettes, streets, and people in motion. Everything is alive yet dead. There is no magic, nor laughter. Merry-making is available only in the form of carnal desire or in the productive use of nature. Monica Vitti’s character is in a steady decline towards madness, and wants to run away to a place where images have no interpretative value.
"I am sick. But I must not think about it. I have to think that whatever happens to me is my life"
What is valuable? The question is a recurring theme in his films. His characters are never constricted. They are at cliffs overlooking oceans, in high altitude cable cars, and in cars that they drive across for hundreds of miles. They want to see beyond. It’s unclear if Antonioni is urging us towards, or if he is cautioning us against these adventures. Everyone yearns to feel alive. New and shiny things are put in contrast with an overarching malaise or ennui his characters face. In The Passenger, one of his few English language films, Jack Nicholson can only see the dust and ruins during a work trip in Chad. Faced with an opportunity to forge his identity, he takes it up and runs away. He continues to flee but as the cops chase him, the, illusory nature of his escapade dawns on him. His character had his time in the sun. Monica Vitti’s character in Red Desert towards the end confesses that she feels ‘separate’ and perhaps that sums up Jack Nicholson’s character in The Passenger, a sublime film whose images show the path to salvation for a doomed character but he just cannot see.
Jack Nicholson in 'The Passenger'
In La Notte, perhaps his best film one attends to one of his other great ideas – the spectacle. Developed from Marxist theory, the film is an enchanting watch, scenes build off one another akin to a literary thesis. The examination of the spectacle includes self-critique, its merits and its contours across social-strata. The characters’ inner worlds represent themselves in the images of the spectacle we are privy to, giving a sense of of the onset of modernity and how it restructures society now, and even responsible for the gulf between people.
It is with people and characters though that Antonioni shines with perhaps no other film-maker showcasing human relationships with such elan and artistry. The characters suffer. Still, they confront life never shirking, always embracing contradiction as a key principle of living. The conversations between characters either feel like an intrusion on a private space, or are a commentary from Antonioni on the state of things. It is a simple and refined approach from the film-maker who exudes high taste. This comes across most strongly when one were to examine the conflicts in his films. The central conflicts arise typically through philosophical positions, or as an examination of one of the great problems.
In L’Avventura, the first in his modern alienation trilogy, moral decay is shown as the central cause of strife. A sensuous internal study of its characters, the images of the film are symbolic, while events seem co-incidental. Such is the remarkable complexity of the film that if one where to put it the other way around, there would be no complaints. It’s interesting that in the famous strip club scene in La Notte, when Jeanne Moreau’s character jokes to her increasingly estranged husband that she “doesn’t have a thought now, but she is expecting one soon. She can see it coming”, we get a sense of the consequent malaise in L’Avventura. The pattern of his ideas, the internal worlds, and the movements of his camera, all of this can be grasped if one were to see a repertoire of his films.
Cinema is the only medium that one can afford to get sloppy with. Antonioni never afforded himself that. I watched five to six of his best works with the intention to watch his earlier and later works over time. But to try and understand his evolution I watched a few early documentaries (both freely available to watch on YouTube) – one his first ever film, a documentary on the Po river and the community that lives around it, and the other a foreigner’s gaze on the Kumbha Mela which he happened to visit in the 70s. Commanding the camera like a master, he displays a remarkable empathy at a fledgling period of his craft. Opting for his signature long takes, he lingers on people or things that he finds to have forged a connection with the camera. Discovery perhaps is his biggest weapon. Fully evident across his thirty years of filmmaking one sees his ideas marinate and mature, and in that sense his vision will always be eternal for the searchers and the seekers. To capture on film the tension of the generation is no easy feat, but he draws us in to the great problems, never providing any answers but only aesthetic input, and the eyes chico they never lie…
Scene from Red Desert
THE EVOLUTION OF MAN VIA NIETZSCHE, RAY, MAKARAND DESHPANDE, AND TALEB
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
There is an acknowledgment now that as a society we face a much different set of problems than before. Why not postulate if the individual too has evolved from this lens?
Starting with Nietzsche, a colossal but exhausting figure. Widely accepted as an original thinker, one of his seminal works provides some clues –
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Old and New Laws – Tables, No.5:
“He who is of the mob wants to live gratis; we others, however, to whom life has given itself – we are always considering what we can best give in return!
And truly, it is a noble speech that says: ‘What life has promised us, we shall keep that promise – to life!’
One should not wish to enjoy where one has not given enjoyment. And – one should not wish to enjoy!”
This has lived and breathed among men for centuries, but Nietzsche here reframes it. There is no onus on you – but merely an opportunity to give back to life what it has given you, that is itself. Life is a living breathing sacrificial lamb; and Nietzsche affirms us to give something back, not devour life for free. Yet even amidst this inspiration, Nietzsche adds –
“For enjoyment and innocence are the most modest things: neither want to be looked for. One should have them – but one should look rather for guilt or pain!”
Why guilt or pain? Because these are qualities that elevate us. Guilt or pain is a consequence of longing, desire, becoming, possessing – qualities that Nietzsche admires, and key attributes that encapsulate his most well-known idea of the rapturous man or Superman. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in the 19th century posits a reframing of the human condition. But Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Superman’ was a call for man to rise above the masses.
Now, the masses have since undergone much socio-political revolution throughout the 20th century. Here we move to auteur extraordinaire Satyajit Ray and his ideas on universal humanity as picturized in his films set in post-independence Bengal.
A set of his films, called later the Calcutta trilogy is a commentary on the condition of the Bengali youth in 70’s Calcutta, a period when the spirit of new India grappled to find meaning under a newly elected Leftist regime. Indoctrinated in the ideas of revolution, the youth were promised stable futures, at a time when the structures of commerce and capitalism were taking shape.
In the first of these films, Pratidwandi, Ray introduces the aspiration of capitalist stability via an idealistic and existential protagonist. An intellectual, he is forced to drop out of medical school due to his father’s death. His lack of agency in earning a living wage is juxtaposed against the searing anguish of the times. His intellect equips him to see the oppression around him, yet he remains in the process of seeing, and consequently acting out of it.
In Seemabaddha, the second film in the trilogy, Ray reflects on a different kind of protagonist. It is the story of a mature, successful man who is driven by ambition and wealth, yet whose ethics are questioned by his sister-in-law, a person he has grown to admire. This lack of validation from one of the few people he innately respects leads him to lament his choice to transcend the traditional Bhadralok ideas of virtue and modesty. How could he ever have imagined that his actualization lay in a life of status and monetary success?
In the final film, Jana Aranya, Ray creates a malleable protagonist. He has no job or woman, and after bustling about trying to find a job, he is by chance led into a life as a small-time businessman selling office supplies. He is in the jungle (Aranya means jungle in Bengali). Feet on the ground, working with numbers, and commissions, all proceed as planned until one day he is required to bend his personal book of morals. The film ends on a piercing note, the moral boundaries of a seedy businessman’s life confronting the virtuous tradition that enabled his upbringing. This man sees but is also seen, and via the gullible eyes of the deceived father, his shame is our shame.
This trilogy shot over a decade is symbolic of a psychological evolution. From seeing injustice and oppression to transcending first-order thoughts to arriving as a man of action in the capitalist jungle, to eventually being able to perceive oneself, as seen in Jana Aranya, Ray arrives at an epistemological conclusion.
This final phase of grasping himself as an object to be seen is captured in a recent play by theatre legend Makarand Deshpande. Titled Manushya, this post-modern play tells the tale of a man who in his penultimate quarter of life decides to now be seen as an object of enjoyment. He becomes a clown, an act to be enjoyed by others. Breaking the Fourth Wall at will, this is an experimental piece symbolic of what Nietzsche had principled – to arrive finally as the ultimate object of enjoyment. Deshpande in an eccentric performance roars and postulates, informing the audience to make the movement from Drishti (seeing) to Drishta (perceiving), deploying the clown act as the ultimate analogy to how he wants the world (or at least his loved ones) to perceive deeply.
Nietzsche had speculated the arrival of his man, a man who could give enjoyment and not just wish to enjoy. Deshpande in Manushya operates from a similar vantage while introducing Drishta and thus becomes the ultimate man who provides ‘enjoyment’ to all.
Advancing further, there is a need to demonstrate the man of our age, someone who has arrived as sneakily as the advanced capitalist era that we inhabit.
Within the context of collective systems and technologies that function systematically, the onus is on YOU to thrive. And while the collective mass, an essential majority stake in the societal machinery is busy seeing, the only way to thrive as the ultimate man is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes is to have Skin in the Game.
Taleb talks about men who encounter risk, who enjoy risk, who enjoy uncertainty, who can accurately perceive systems designed to exploit, and thus are not rent seekers or slaves, but are people who talk and do. He talks of a society designed for effect, where political hoo-ha and privilege afford status, where half-baked intellectuals use language to wrangle themselves out of positions, where incentives are misplaced, and where legal systems are not necessarily ethical.
All of this requires a new age Drishta, a new outlook to thrive and overcome the masses. He calls on the need for less abstraction, more courage, the ability to identify asymmetries and inequalities, and above all the need to develop the sense of a collective good. And that collective good is how we see through the systems that engulf us.
The linear and transcendental understanding of Ray,
The Superman – or how to overcome Man by helping them perceive and enjoy, as championed by Nietzsche,
The ability to be seen as an object of excitement and enjoyment, as a work of Art, as imagined by Deshpande,
The capacity to distinguish and discern amidst complex modern systems by Taleb,
All constitute the all-new courageous man.
As Nietzsche writes – “He who sees the abyss, but with an eagle’s eyes – he who grasps the abyss with an eagle’s claws: he possesses courage.”
Bibliography
1. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for Everyone and No One (1883-1884)
2. Satyajit Ray, Director, Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970); Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971); Jana Aranya (The Middleman) (1976)
3. Ansh Theatre, Makarand Deshpande, Manushya (2023)
4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game – Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (2018)
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV: DOSTOYEVSKY'S SEMINAL WORK THAT TEACHES YOU HOW TO LIVE
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
Six hundred pages in and the Brothers Karamazov ceases to be a book you are reading. Instead, it turns into your daily aide. The premise has been set. You are drunk on the characters. The characters themselves have undergone a personal revolution each, their inner worlds fraught with the complexity Dostoyevsky is famous for weaving. It stops being a novel and becomes a manual on life and the various ways it can be lived. Correction, the various ways it should and should not be lived. But we will suspend that moral judgment for later in this essay when there again is a need to re-evaluate your ideas on people and what has driven them to their actions.
It is a book that confronts you. Dostoyevsky invents the Karamazov spirit, a spirit that beckons one to live and confront the human condition head-on, the sons of Karamazov representing three divergent paths of living.
One, a man of passion, nobility, and love. The second, a man of piety, compassion, intellect, and good. And the third, a man of rationality and reason. In the worlds of Dmitry, Alyosha, and Ivan, the reader discovers a fragmented yet shared morality. Their eclectic dispositions radiate a unique conscience yet through the plot and its various strands, the objectivity of the human spirit dawns on you. Each of the brothers represents an ideal that you could have lived by and yet haven’t. They represent the totality of human nature if it were uncurbed.
The principles that drive us to behave in 2023 are a combination of Dmitry, Alyosha, and Ivan because society detests extreme proclivities, instead incentivizing people to adopt traits that go about solving one personal problem to the other. The approach serves the need to propel ourselves, sometimes in order to solve problems created in the last decade itself.
The spiritual evolution of the brothers’ is a story of grasping yourself in your eternal contradiction – a tension of opposites. What we think, and what we do. What we see, and what we perceive. Whom we think we are, and what runs through our minds. Development typically aims to reconcile these contradictions over time but Dostoyevsky depicts a journey of thinking minds, of minds whose inward worlds are a repository of ideas and reflections. Within this spectrum of reconciliation, there lies the suite of characters:
Alyosha is the reconciled man. Positioning the youngest brother as a monk who leaves monkhood to become a man of the world, Dostoyevsky expounds upon one of his famous principles – of man’s discovery of God and the spirit of Christ setting him off on a personal journey instead of settling into a faction of contemplative monkhood. It is an exploration of the redeemed man who is seen as such by those around him and who takes upon the responsibility of wisdom and virtue in an ever-suffering world.
Dmitry is the protagonist and the heartbeat of inquiry in the novel. Epitomizing the Russian ideal, he resounds with a love for passion and expression yet is driven by the urge to be loved. A depraved childhood notwithstanding, this man suffers from his own self with his traits of nobility, honor, and love superseding any inkling of self-preservation. His love for a woman trumps all his urges, and his heroic journey leading to a tragedy enables Dostoyevsky to put forth one of his lifelong principles –
‘Conscience without God is horror; it can deviate to the most immoral things’
The fact that Dmitry knows this yet prefers to chase other delights can be read between the lines. Dmitry is a walking-talking contradiction borne out of his needs and whose naturalism embodies the recognition of man’s own spirit.
Ivan, the oldest brother is the persona of modern reason. Here Dostoyevsky paints the picture of the modern intellectual, one founded on the ideals of subjective personal freedom. Without recourse to a God or religion, Ivan’s love for mankind is juxtaposed against Weltschmerz, that regardless of personal freedom, the acute awareness of the crippling nature of reality and the self-induced sufferings of people and consequent inability to ascend the ladder of freedom, creates a terrible sadness. Via Ivan, Dostoyevsky posits some ideas –
One – the idea of self-suffering as The Devil incarnate. It is the belief that the Devil is everything that is wrong and distasteful about man. Ivan contracts a hallucinatory fever through which he speaks to an inward Devil. The conversations are replete with the contradictions that arise out of his suffering, his conscience, and a mind unable to come to terms with reality.
An Ivan lives among us all. He is a part of us that lives in the crevices fed occasionally by the news, the people around us, and a fantastical grandeur lurking amidst the smidgen of personal freedom.
Second – everything is lawful, everything is permitted.
Everything is lawful, says Smerdyakov, a minor yet crucial character who stands as the nihilistic pillar in the novel. A phrase interesting enough to write a few academic papers on, Dostoyevsky refers to a psychological state that arrives, and if nourished stays. Combine a slavish upbringing and a lack of a belief system towards anything except one’s wit, and you get Smerdyakov. While Smerdyakov operates at an opposing spectrum of morality to an Alyosha, he has reconciled his contradictions unlike a Dmitry or an Ivan. He is nihilistic and has expounded upon the subjective personal freedom enjoyed by Ivan but without the love for mankind, instead harboring hatred for all, chiefly brought about through his rotten fortune and a supreme belief that unbelief alone can alleviate self-suffering of the mind.
The Karamazov spirit runs in all of us. Suppressed by conditions, economic or social, it is only when let amok do we get to see ourselves in our original design. The novel discourses on the moral and social degeneration of 19th-century Russia but there is a hint of a shining light in the epilogue. Through remembrance, gratefulness, and a collective conscience can we defeat the ill effects of time and the condition that governs us all – a sponge-like self-consciousness that has the ability to forget.
ON UNFETTERED FREEDOM WITH JAMES JOYCE, SARTRE, HAMLET AND SEVEN-TIME OSCAR WINNING 'EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE..'
BY PUSHKAR SANYAL
“To discover the mode of life and of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom” stated the young Dedalus, our protagonist from James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’. He asserts that this will be the central construct of his life. He is 20, or there around.
Unfettered freedom. A bewitching phrase that can turn into an obsessive goal. It needs foregrounding in the same way that most phenomenological things do.
My body and mind are plagued. It constrains me that I know. My physical environment – the weather, the sounds, the choking air, the calls, and the messages, the unfiltered waft of hustle culture and productive work for mass or niche consumption – constrain me. The transcending of my beliefs and conditions with knowledge or art confronts the fallibility of my essential nature, and it constrains me. The sheer seclusion amongst the herd impinges on the power I have to reflect. It constrains me.
But Dedalus just like his creator recognizes that artists are born. Not manufactured or talented but their mind is born in a way that only they can grasp themselves. Such is the big joke on them. Within the confines of their minds, there rages violence of objects. For it to bear the brunt of concealment remains a herculean task, and the sparks emerge in moments. At first, the intensity has nothing to say requiring stimuli to cultivate the language and content, and then if honed with time and discipline, there is a direct accession to existence.
In ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre’s noted work, the self-conscious individual confronts nothingness from an ontological lens meaning what it is not what is deduced or understood. Nothingness thus just like perhaps in meditative practices supersedes being. Sartre continues to remark that nothingness is not a void but an active force that creates the possibility for new beginnings and possibilities. And from it emerges radical freedom and space to create.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet suffers existentially but his suffering emerges from the knowledge of the despicable world he is a part of. His inner sanctum is as Jung may have put it centuries later gone through individuation because through it reflects a self-conscious individual who recognizes the dynamism and activity he is graced with. He takes it upon himself to act and speak only with the abandoned wheel of a ship that knows that the ocean is boundless. And thus, we have the unhinged madness that is Hamlet, and that is Shakespeare.
Sartre also views the human subject as purposive without actually having any purpose. A baffling view with various implications, one of them being the importance of subjectivity. For Sartre, subjectivity can have no function. Cut to figures of repute in society, amongst your friends, and your family, it seems that their grasp of the subjectivity of their human experience tilts the scale in their favor. It is sophisticated uniqueness that while Sartre describes for a metaphysical examination, I apply to this framework of being.
Subjectivity or a uniquely human experience has no function, it is the function. It is the point.
In living, there are various points of departure of thinking. Your gaze is refreshed. It is a renewal of your spirit, a frothy mess of your abilities. And at those times, you apprehend your subjectivity. For a moment it is rewarding, and only for that moment do you believe that the society we inhabit is right.
For the river after the turn, I will refer to ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, a film that seemed to transcend the above and punch in the final piece. Its literal rendition of infinite possibilities is grounded in the human subjective experience. It is a theory that can be explained but must be experienced to be believed. While technology is the obvious candidate in the movie to explain what cannot be explained in a movie, the ability of the mind to fully grasp itself in all its infinitude possibilities renders a possibility where the bridge may exist to all of these possibilities. After all evolution itself is a statistical probability. The quantum leap made by the film is only a leap for pop culture not for 21st-century philosophy whose obsession has been teleology and yes ‘unfettered freedom’.