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Sensei: Masanobu Fukuoka and the quiet Revolution

I still recall my first reading of the late Masanobu Fukuoka‘s ‘The One-Straw Revolution‘ (tr. 1978.) Illuminating experience does not quite do justice to the eye-opener that it was – apart from his radical, quietly determined challenge to all known forms of destructive agricultural ideas and techniques known to man; what lingered on was his overarching back-to-nature philosophy that permeated his thought and action – “It proceeds from the conviction that if the individual temporarily abandons human will and so allows himself to be guided by nature, nature responds by providing everything.” Read More…

Temple and Ingrasci: Living on One Dollar | 2013

Not quite poverty porn, but at best an experiment in hardship. Chris Temple (from New York), Zach Ingrasci (from Seattle) and film-maker friends Sean and Ryan – privileged white young American college students studying International Development at the Claremont McKenna College, decide to spend a summer at the rural Guatemalan village of Peña Blanca where a majority of the population are pegged much below the ‘poverty line.’ The daunting realities of existing through zero to no income, the hardships of deprivation of proper shelter and nourishment, drinking water and health amenities, makes them more than realize as to how more than a billion people around the world persist through the grim less-than-a-dollar-a-day. Read More…

Sylvain Chomet: Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003)

I come back to Sylvain Chomet and Evgeni Tomov‘s ‘Les Triplettes de Belleville‘ every once a while to participate in and relive a cinematic experience that is quite unlike any other. Dark, idiosyncratic, powered by memorable flights of imagination, while reveling in it’s oddly humourous, grotesque and irreverent universe. It is also a lesson in the possibilities of the animation film, that, when technical brilliance weds inventive storytelling, you leave behind a cultural artifact that attains significance on it’s own strengths. A visual style of part graphic novella meets comic strip, and part European caricature brilliance, the cinematic space becomes uniquely ‘mythicaly’ evocative, and the remarkable characters of Madame Souza, Champion, Bruno and the Triplets themselves, linger in memory long past the final credit roll. Read More…

Julia Kristeva: In Conversation

French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva occupies an enviable seat in the rarefied arena of female philosophers in the expansive traditions of western thought and philosophy; although, I do get the sense that she does not quite wear the singular ‘descriptor’ of ‘philosopher’ with ease, for her ‘oeuvre’ is anything but conventional and she continues to bring together insights from fields as far flung as religious scholarship, avant-garde literature, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy. In one of my quests to comprehend religious belief better, I picked up Kristeva’s ‘This Incredible Need to Believe’ (2011) a couple of years ago, and was much the wiser for it. Kristeva is possibly part of a philosophic tradition that takes the notion of ‘Subjectivity’ as a starting point. Read More…

Louie Psihoyos: The Cove | 2009

The idyllic Pacific coastal whaling town of Taiji, in the Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, with its community of fisher-folk, long held a terrible secret, a secret that was uncovered and put to global critical scrutiny (and subsequent outrage) by a team of concerned animal and environmental activists led by National Geographic photographer and later film director, Louie Psihoyos. Psihoyos’s ‘The Cove‘ was largely triggered by the work of former dolphin trainer and now long term dolphin welfare activist Richard O’Barry, who, along with Psihoyos and friends, undertook the investigation and documentation that led to the uncovering of the brutal mass slaughter of bottle nosed dolphins in the Taiji cove. Given the real dangers of undertaking such a project (threat to life, suspicious Japanese government officials, non-cooperative and tailing policemen, angry and potentially violent fishermen,) Psihoyos, O’Barry and team had to roll out a covert military style operation, keeping a low profile, using camouflaged gear and cameras, night vision apparatus, and discreet diving. Read More…

Noam Chomsky: Requiem for the American Dream (2015)

This is accessible, non-exhortative Noam Chomsky and although the focus of this dissertation of his is the systemic dismantling of American idealism, the questions that he raises certainly finds resonance in the countless democratic struggles against concentrated wealth and power in lands spread out across the globe, India included. Economic inequality, more than ever, is at the heart of the agonies of a majority populace embattled on all fronts, and their suffering made more acute by what Chomsky delineates as the ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power, principles articulated by the self interests of Adam Smith‘s minuscule minority, the “masters of mankind” following the vile maxim of “all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.” These principles are: 1. Reduce Democracy, 2. Shape Ideology, 3. Redesign the Economy, 4. Shift the Burden, 5. Attack Solidarity, 6. Run the Regulators, 7. Engineer Elections, 8. Keep the Rabble in Line, 9. Manufacture Consent, 10. Marginalize the Population. Read More…

Oliver Hirschbiegel: Das Experiment (2001)

German director Hirschbiegel‘s debut feature ‘Das Experiment‘ does not quite shine as an accomplished cinematic piece (it is plenty rough around the edges,) but what it does is that it brings ample material to the table for engaging in debates surrounding the psychological ramifications of incarceration, confinement and captivity. The distribution and struggle for power is thematically anything but novel, but in choosing to adapt Mario Giordano’s novel titled ‘Black Box‘, Hirschbiegel does manage to orchestrate (however imperfectly) a taut and bleak look at the ‘discipliners’ and the punished, housed in modern prison systems. Read More…

Arne Næss, Ecosophy and Deep Ecology

Norwegian professor and philosopher, late Arne Næss, remains a key figure in the awakening of 20th C occidental consciousness to the real threats of the ecological-environmental crisis. I am posting this on ‘Earth Day’ to bring his (often marginalized and neglected) ideas to the fore, and also to remind us (myself included) of our inter-relatedness with, and the common fate that we share with all life forms on our planet. My first brush with Næss, quite a few years ago, was through readings about deep ecology – I thought him too ‘white-male-crisis’ for my taste then, but with distance, and time, I have come to appreciate his ideas more. His personal philosophy, which he called Ecosophy (not to be confused with Félix Guattari‘s usage of the same term,) encompasses the complexity of the relationship of humans to their natural environment, and he calls for a higher spiritual and psychological evolution of humankind, to ‘Self-realization’, a set of ideas which he formulates later as Deep Ecology. The deep ecological attitude is not only a state of ‘Self-realization’, but also a state of questioning – asking the bigger questions of life, being, society and culture, natural diversity, human instrumentality. The deep ecological attitude is also ‘longitudinal’, the ability to envision human activities and the natural world in large sweeps of time – giving rise to the ‘deep long range ecology movement.’ Read More…

Damon Gameau: That Sugar Film (2014)

What you eat and drink is what you are, and what you become. In the broader tradition of diet/food/health awareness documentaries like Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Super Size Me‘ (2004,) Australian actor-director Damon Gameau, in ‘That Sugar Film‘ (2014,) inflicts a food and drink experiment on himself – of consuming the Australian ‘average’ of about 40 teaspoons of sugar a day for two months. What unfolds is a quirky, and at times, humourous look at the far reaching damage caused by the hidden sugars in our everyday, supposedly ‘healthy’ store brought food and drink. Read More…

Majid Majidi: آواز گنجشک‌ها (The Song of Sparrows) | 2008

In a ‘cinemascape’ of lyricism and allegory, Majid Majidi inhabits a space that is uniquely his own, where, with a flourish of quiet sentimentality and poetic poise, he unfurls for us a spiritual fable of a righteous man placed in the pastoral rural and the materialistic urban. Majidi is a relatively later figure in Iranian cinema, but to my mind, certainly not a lesser figure. In a telling moment in آواز گنجشک‌ها (The Song of Sparrows,) the protagonist Karim (played convincingly by the inimitable Reza Naji) breaks into a nostalgia soaked song that brings smiles to the saddened young boys surrounding him – “Our flowers have withered, our eyes are crying, I remember the good old days….The world is a lie, the world is a dream ….I’ve passed my youth in pain in this world.” The pastoral rural marked by close family ties, community living, and proximity to the ‘living world’ lies in stark contrast to the transactional, corrupting and materialistic core of the urban, and in straddling these seemingly incompatible universes, Karim has to be committed to his essential righteousness, to his faith. Read More…

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