Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Wednesday, May 09, 2018

व्हर्टिगोचे पोस्टर आणि श्याम जोशींचे मुखपृष्ठ....The Best Film Ever Made, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo@60

#HitchcockVertigo60

Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' was released, sixty years ago, on May 9 1958

मी 'व्हर्टिगो', १९५८ मुंबईच्या आलिशान स्टर्लिंग सिनेमात १९८५-८६ च्या सुमारास पहिल्यांदा बघितला आणि भारावून गेलो. त्या सिनेमातील काय नाही आवडल? अगदी सॅनफ्रान्सिस्कोच्या सुद्धा प्रेमात पडलो. किम नोवॅक तर बरेच दिवस डोक्यातून गेल्याच नाहीत- कित्येक महिन्यांनंतर समजले की त्यांनी पूर्ण सिनेमात ब्रेसीयर घातली नाहीये ते!.....

त्यानंतर 'व्हर्टिगो' इतक्या वेळा पहिला की आता बघून, बघून पाठ झाला आहे. अलीकडे मला स्वतःला व्हर्टिगोचा त्रास झाल्यानंतर तर जिम स्टीवर्ट यांचा अभिनय आता अगदी आतपर्यंत पोचतोय.

'सिटीझन केन' ला मागे टाकून व्हर्टिगो अलीकडे पहिल्या क्रमांकाला चढला आहे. (माझ्या यादीत टोकियो स्टोरी हा, मी तो पाहिल्या दिवसापासून, एक नंबरला आहे.)

David Thomson, LRB, June 2018:
"...Novak was a rarity, the shy knockout, a beauty who had no confidence. Her voice was hushed. There was a faraway look in her eyes. She was a ravishing blonde, but seemed uneasy being photographed or even seen. She was anxious to be respected (she had once been Miss Deepfreeze), and it was rumoured that she was the favoured project of Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, the studio that signed her up in 1954. There were whispers that she couldn’t act; she was a restrained version of Marilyn Monroe early in her career, the kind of actress who was cast as a voyeur’s delight but seldom trusted with a serious part. Instead, she got the socialite wife in The Eddy Duchin Story. She was actually loaned out for Vertigo. Cohn profited hugely on her salary. She was being exploited in the standard Hollywood way while being asked to fit into a male dream...."

François Truffaut:
“...The whole erotic aspect of the picture is fascinating. I remember another scene, at the beginning, when Stewart hauled Kim Novak out of the water. He takes her to his place, where we find her asleep in his bed. As she gradually comes to, there's an implication, though it's not specifically stated, that he's probably taken the girl's clothes off and has seen her in the nude. The rest of that scene is superb, as Kim Novak walks around with her toes sticking out of his bathrobe and then settles down by the fire, with Stewart pacing back and forth behind' her. Vertigo unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a contemplative rhythm that contrasts sharply with your other pictures, which are mostly based on swift motion and sudden transitions...”

David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition:
“…I found Orson Welles saying, “I believe that the movies—I’ll say a terrible thing—have never gone beyond Kane. That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been good movies, or great movies. But everything has been done now in movies, to the point of fatigue.”

Now, we may wonder just how pained Welles was by that vision. But in the recent “stir” that replaced Kane as the best film ever made—with Vertigo—his point was hard to escape. Vertigo is so much more old-fashioned than Kane, so clammy with self-pity, and so desperate to be sincere and significant. Those were never Hitchcock’s strengths, or things Welles bothered with. It’s not that film has stopped, or died, but it has not advanced like the sensation it was in its first fifty years. The realization that F may be for fake, and film, grows on us.,,,”