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, July 01, 2026

Guru Dutt's Baazi @75...Great Mumbai Noir...Blurring the Distinction Between Formulaic Entertainment and Art Films

 James Naremore, “Film Noir:  A Very Short Introduction”, 2019:

“Many people recognize a film noir when they see one—or so we might assume from the numerous retrospectives, DVD sets, and books that deal with the subject. But defining the term is notoriously difficult. It’s usually associated with narrative, stylistic, and design qualities of black-and-white Hollywood pictures from the 1940s and 1950s: drifters attracted to sexy women, private eyes hired by femme fatales, criminal heists, corrupt police, young lovers on the run, flashbacks, offscreen narration, shadowy interiors, dark rainy streets, diners, swank nightclubs, snap-brim hats, cigarettes, hard liquor, snub-nose revolvers, and hard-boiled dialog. (“Is there any way to win?” Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past [1947]. “There’s a way to lose more slowly,” he replies.)

Such films occupy a fictional zone somewhere between Gothic horror and dystopian science fiction; as narrative formulas, they derive from what Jean-Paul Sartre called the literature of “extreme situations” and what Graham Greene called “blood melodrama”; and as commercial products, they blur the distinction between formulaic entertainment and art films….”

                                                     story by Guru Dutt and Balraj Sahni

J. I. Baker, "LIFE Film Noir: 75 Years of the Greatest Crime Films", 2016:

"...The film genre that the French would eventually dub noir (meaning “black”) was created when the visual tropes of German expressionism (think the stark, angular chiaroscuro and Teutonic angst reflected in such silent classics as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) were combined with the influence of the pulp and hard-boiled crime fiction that had been popularized in large part by an American magazine called Black Mask. Influenced by the terse realism of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, the stories limned a seamy world of fedoras, cheap booze, cheaper bars, guns and gumshoes, double-crossing dames, cynicism, doomed boxers, doomed dreamers, doomed gamblers, and doom itself. Often evocative but mostly pedestrian, the pulp tradition nevertheless spawned three authentic geniuses: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain...."


"Out of the Past", 1947, Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum

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