Skip to main content

Watch a piece of a movie, the middle piece if possible!, but not necessarily ...




I didnt know that Anna dies in the movie 'Annayum Rasoolum' till I watched the end of the movie the other day. Before that I have seen Rasool,stalking Anna. on another occasion Anna giving into the pursuit of Rasool. On yet another TV surf , I saw him land in Ponnani(?) after being involved in the clashes with the family of the girl. Then once I caught them moving to a new home and Anna living the waiting part for her man to return after work. This is how i lived through the patches of the movie piecemeal basis. Though that statement makes it read like a deliberate act, as if I have cut myself off intentionally far from cinematic truth. The truth was that sometimes the ad factor, often the travelling remote controller, occasionally the visitors, sometimes forgetfulness, may be running after a domestic errand, an abrupt call - these denied me, perhaps fortunately,  the rest of the movie. But that afforded me the advantage of living through a spectrum of possibilities. Will Anna give in? Will Rasool,move off? How did it all start? Where are they headed? Will those gazes stay? Whats in store in those side ways gaze of Anna, with wisps of hair playing curtain like?

How about watching a movie in the middle, one piece of it where you abruptly walk in to a scene out of nowhere and then walk off all of a sudden? Look taking a sneak peek into that piece of somebody else's  life? Since many movies, in a way contain very good snatches of art, slices of life, admirable life for that matter, why not cash in on the weird tangents of the possible? Since thousand of movies flirt with excellent possibilities, why not catch hold of that before it grows and takes the promised wind out of our / their sails?

When you surprise a movie by catching it in the middle, it affords the viewer the luxury of imagining it backwards. Well, forwards too. What could have gone by before the movie broke into you? Since you have the freedom not to know what went before, the movie opens a completely different kind of liberty, the kind which is different  for each one of us.  In this viewerly reading, the viewer has the freedom to be. The same happens once you break off from the movie in the middle. You are in the dark as to the ending and you end it your way. Overnight we know that we may not end it one way or another since we have been through numerous bad ends by the directors. You here have the right to imagine it forward too. Take the plot to a destination Art will cherish. 

Imagine you catching Jurassic Park with the shot of the camera gliding down the water fall? A breath taking scene worth a million sonnets, where the world of the extinct, pre-human, technology midwifed  creatures look impossible. What if you break off after that scene? How will your mind imagine the movie backwards? Forwards? Would  it be possible to imagine it backwards the way it really  happens in the movie? The girl and the boy at the edge the ship in the Titanic arms spread, taking the sea on their face and making us wish away to the ultra normal? If this is the only scene which encountered you, where will the movie go? Or , imagining walking into 'Bombay' with the heroine glimpsed in visual tatters in the a song scene...

Like the hundred of scenes we have left hanging on our lives, the movie adds the romance and retains the what next, what may next kind of curiosity. The boy and mom we caught arguing in the railway station, and the mom furiously walking off, the mon who was seen taking an auto and leave, where did that story end up? The two men who were leaning on the half wall at the marine drive in the morning, disregarding the rising sun and the life about to surround them, what happened to them?  The Japanese traveller on the train, with big tattoo on the broad calf , tugging his backpack and looking pensive, shifting the compartment a third time, with another man from the same country on the third time, what are they up to? Are these unlike the pieces of puzzle one can catch in the middle of a movie?

There are still scenes I have missed in the Anna movie. There is till avenues which it can open. Even when you know the beginnings and conclusions, we are not blind to the umpteen twists and turns the plot line can assume in the middle. The string of the tale can be unspooled long and twirled in many fashions. What's in a beginning or and end, except some stray freezes? Lets ebb fair to those parts too. It is not inadvisable to break off at the start or just pick a movie at the end too. It can happen anywhere!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Foregrounding the Backdrops

    On Foregrounding the Backdrops Much of my liking for large pictures has lot to do with the backdrops and the 'others' in the frames. By others I mean the also-rans, in a way! But this is more about the past when pictures were not so common, when not everything could be shot and framed, as we do now. Magazines with photos were a premium then and colour pics even harder to come by. Rather than the ones who were the focus, meant to be the focus, my eyes would involuntarily wander off to the rest of the things and people who have been caught by the camera. It is their looks, expressions, postures, feels, appearance, that my senses will work on. The man in the middle, or men, those on whom the story is supposed to zero in, will fade out and the backdrop will zoom in. Imagination tracking those to their illogical conclusions constituted my act of reading the pictures. It was such a delight as it helped one keep the trivial off and enjoy the core of the margins. When o...
13 comments
Read more

Can Politics Empathise?

  E. M. Forster wrote about the need for ‘tolerance’ and argued that the real force which can help rebuild the world after the World Wars will be not love or forgiveness, but 'tolerance'. Though I read that essay long back during student days, as it was ‘taught’ as part of curricular requirement, it was 'studied' and then abandoned, in a way. But still the argument of the essay kept coming back, as it does now. I didn't grasp quickly the inherent link between empathy and tolerance, but there sure is a reason why Forster showed up. There are many ways the two, tolerance and empathy, complement each other and the presence of the former can surely help build the other. Empathy is the capacity to know and experience how others feel, putting yourself in another's position. But is there something like political empathy? Why is it not there, generally speaking? I would like to explain political empathy as the capacity of one politica...
12 comments
Read more

The Profes'sorry'ate!

If what was reported in the social media sometime ago was true, an MLA once asked a Minister whether Professorship category existed in Colleges. The reply from the Education Minister was that it doesn't, even though, they say, the response was from the minister who designated himself as Professor! The tendency to brand oneself as professor among College faculty members is on the rise for while. Many of those who have even recently joined the educational service as faculty prefix a Prof. before their names. Or, that is what I feel when I go through some of the reports in the media regarding College activities. As a result almost all of the college faculty are entitled to be designated Professors that way! Some relate this with seniority. If you have been in service for a while, have been teaching long, then you can stick the label on you. Or you can allow others to stick it on you. It grows on you and you take a new feel about who you are! A Professor Babu enables you to be...
8 comments
Read more