Can cinema be an art of deception?

Film Review: Malayalam movie 'Drishyam'

Not getting into the controversies about the originality of the cinematic theme, let me express some of my thoughts about a movie I watched recently. It is Drishyam directed by Jithu Joseph. Mohan Lal, Asha Sharath, Meena and Siddhik are part of the main cast. It has become a block buster and getting popular review comments and word of mouth publicity. 

The movie begins with the tag line 'Visuals can be deceiving'. At the end of the 150 minutes, one may wonder what is the visual that deceived us. It was the narrative and the entire movie screenplay that deceived us. Moreover it raised a few questions on my mind. 

Can cinema / literature be the art form of deception? The movie goes at length to showcase the efforts of the commonsensical hero to hide a secret. The hero is on a war of survival against the brilliant but morally drained and personally shattered police officer who has lost all sense of humanity to prove a crime.

So on onside we have a villager trying to hide a grave secret and on the other side we have a police officer who goes brutal to unravel the mysteries surrounding her son. Where is a social conflict here? 

There are sexual abuses happening at various parts of our country. Then where should we begin the story? Should we keep the camera on the life a person who commits a crime to protest the abuse and then praise his efforts and brilliance in hiding the secret for eternity? Of course not. 

Despite a decent behavioural acting by Mohan Lal and the other crew, the movie is a pack of spades and strained imagination. Like every other commercial film that boasts about the marvels of editing, this film tries to create a perspective that is just dependent on an actor. The story is dead somewhere in the middle. 

Not only visuals but every art form can be used as a device for deception. It is artist who applies creativity to expose anti social elements and express truth in its highest form of existence, whether it is dream or reality. 

Work of Art and Inspirations : A Late Night Argument

Night past 12, I was indulged in a water color, quite unknowing what is next going to happen in my canvas. Colors were shading and fading in my palette and the picture alike. Initially my intention was to use my brushes only in vertical strokes. I succeeded to a greater extent up to the middle. But as the colors began to dominate my senses, I gave my self to the freedom of the stokes. Vertical strokes became rectilinear  curves became horizontal sweeps, horizontals become horizons. And it went on to become a collection of a lot of lines, colors, shapes and shades.

My interest is not on the end product called an art work, but on the process of creating a painting  How are the lines leading the work of art to some specific direction? Is there a sense of beauty that leads and directs lines to take certain shapes or position. Is beauty an end in itself. Why should an art form be so much obsessed with beauty and its nuances. I feel that beauty is just an immediate realization of an artistic process. 

Art and artist transcends the demands of beauty by a necessity and urge to create a logical formation of lines, shades, edges, curves, depths and so on. This in a way leads lines to take more complex forms. When I had a lot of places in paper, lines had a different grammar and syntax. When the colors dominated the canvas, colors were more subtle and nimble. Thus I believe an art and artist is inspired by the totality of the conception than the urge of a pleasing experience of beauty.

+Gokul Alex 

Novel writing and the Historicity beyond

Novel Typology through Historical Lenses

Points: Abstract Synthesis in writing novel.

Dilthey’s method was having traces of Kantian philosophy.

It showed a kind of inclination towards irrational-ism.

Hegelian influence in theory of novel:

1.     Mode of totality in epic and dramatic art. 

2.     One important legacy of Hegel is the historicisation of aesthetic categories. 

3.     Towards a general dialectic of literary genres. 

4.     Question of life & relation to essence in epics 

5.     World of platonic forms and methodological archetypes. 

Frederic Jameson on Georg Lukács:

• As a cultural object, Marxism returns itself against general activity in general to devalue it and lay bare its class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment. 
• Hegelian Lukács of the Theory of the novel
• The chief conceptual opposition within which all of the examinations of literature have taken place is the famous Hegelian one of the concrete and abstract. 
• Epic, Tragedy and platonic philosophies. 
• Abstract idealism of Novel typology. How Don Quixote differs … Heroes of abstract idealism no longer find their justification in the moment of history, but increasingly to become arbitrary, mere grotesques. Here the external world is merely temporal. 
• Cases in Dickens, Balzac etc – we can see a sort of de-totalized totality. With Balzac novel of abstract idealism has exhausted as a form. 
• Novel of romantic disillusionment. Here the external world achieves temporal qualities. Flaubert’s ‘Education Sentimentale’. Here again novel achieves a sense of unity. 
• Goethe’s Wilhem Meister and in novels of Tolstoy – A third category of Synthesis type.
• Marx dissolved Hegelian series of ideal forms into empirical reality of History. 
• Trajectory from metaphysics to history in Lukacs.
• It is history rather than nature which constitutes the privileged object of human knowledge.
• Class consciousness is not so much an empirical and psychological phenomenon, or those collective manifestations explored by sociology.