Hopper and Hitchcock...We're all Voyeurs to Some Extent

Alfred Hitchcock: “He's a real Peeping Tom. In fact, Miss Lejeune, the critic of the London Observer,. complained about that. She made some comment to the effect that Rear Window was a horrible film because the hero spent all of his time peeping out of the window. What's so horrible about that? Sure, he's a snooper, but aren't we all?”

François Truffaut : “We're all voyeurs to some extent, if only when we see an intimate film. And James Stewart is exactly in the position of a spectator looking at a movie.”

Alfred Hitchcock : "Nothing could have prevented my making that picture, because my love for cinema is stronger than any morality. "

(all quotes above from  Truffaut's 'Hitchcock', 1967)

 Diane Doniol-Valcroze shows how Hitchcock adopted the framing of paintings like Hopper’s Automat (1927), Night Windows (1928), Hotel Room (1931), Room in New York (1932) for shots of Rear Window’s “Miss Torso” and “Miss Lonelyhearts.”

In the photomontage below, you see Hopper's painting and associated still from Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rear Window' , 1954. 

Just as the power of Hopper’s paintings lies in what he chooses to exclude, so the tension and spectacle in Hitchcock’s Rear Window relies on what is obscured or unseen. In Hitchcockian cinema, the menace that often seems to lurk just out of frame in Hopper’s paintings can burst into the picture at any moment.

 

बंकिम चंद्र चॅटर्जी यांनी मराठी कादंबरी कशी पूर्णपणे बदलली...Bankim and Marathi Novel When 'Nature was Moderate and Orderly'

 विलास सारंग:

 "…मला कधी वाटतं, १८९० साली हरिभाऊनी जरा विचार केला असता: 'आपण कशाला ब्रिटीश वाङमयाचं शेपूट पकडून राहायचं?' आपलं कथाकथन विकसित करायचं. एवढं काही कठीण नाही. काफ्काच्या 'मॅटॅमॉर्फसिसचं पहिल वाक्य घ्या. 'पंचतंत्रातल्या एखाद्या गोष्टीत ते फिट बसलं असतं. एवढी फँट्सी झाली. उरलेल्या कथेत वास्तववाद आहेच… " 

 ('लिहित्या लेखकाचं वाचन', २०११)

"...स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व धुरीण पिढीने कवटाळलेले ध्येयवाद, सुधारणावाद १९६० नंतरच्या बहुजन लेखकांनी सब-कॉन्शस अनुकरणप्रियतेने स्वीकारलेला दिसतो. काही नवीन वैचारिक मार्ग शोधण्याचा प्रयत्न क्वचितच आढळतो..." 

(पृष्ठ ६६, 'वाङ्मयीन संस्कृती व सामाजिक वास्तव', २०११) 

कै. सारंगांची ही अवतरणे पूर्वी इथे येऊन गेली आहेत.  

 

पण मजा अशी की हरिभाऊ हे अशा पहिल्या पिढीतले मराठी लेखक आहेत की त्यांनी ती शेपटी एक जुनी पण यशस्वी शेपटी सोडून मुद्दामहून पकडली आहे!

 

... आणि त्याला जबादार आहेत  बंकिम चंद्र चॅटर्जी... 

 

Amitav Ghosh writes in his  'The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable', 2016:

 

"...Thus was the novel midwifed into existence around the world, through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday. The process can be observed with exceptional clarity in the work of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a nineteenth-century Bengali writer and critic who self-consciously adopted the project of carving out a space in which realist European-style fiction could be written in the vernacular languages of India. Bankim’s enterprise, undertaken in a context that was far removed from the metropolitan mainstream, is one of those instances in which a circumstance of exception reveals the true life of a regime of thought and practice.

Bankim was, in effect, seeking to supersede many old and very powerful forms of fiction, ranging from ancient Indian epics to Buddhist Jataka stories and the immensely fecund Islamicate tradition of Urdu dastaans. Over time, these narrative forms had accumulated great weight and authority, extending far beyond the Indian subcontinent: his attempt to claim territory for a new kind of fiction was thus, in its own way, a heroic endeavour. That is why Bankim’s explorations are of particular interest: his charting of this new territory puts the contrasts between the Western novel and other, older forms of narrative in ever sharper relief.

In a long essay on Bengali literature, written in 1871, Bankim launched a frontal assault on writers who modelled their work on traditional forms of storytelling: his attack on this so-called Sanskrit school was focused precisely on the notion of ‘mere narrative’. What he advocated instead was a style of writing that would accord primacy to ‘sketches of character and pictures of Bengali life’...

...Bankim has, in a sense, gone straight to the heart of the realist novel’s ‘mimetic ambition’: detailed descriptions of everyday life (or ‘fillers’) are therefore central to his experiment with this new form.

Why should the rhetoric of the everyday appear at exactly the time when a regime of statistics, ruled by ideas of probability and improbability, was beginning to give new shapes to society? Why did fillers suddenly become so important? Moretti’s answer is ‘Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a “calm passion”. . . they are part of what Weber called the “rationalization” of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings. . . . Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.’...

...Unlikely though it may seem today, the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and ‘modern’ worldview. Bankim goes out of his way to berate his contemporary, the poet Michael Madhusudan Datta, for his immoderate portrayals of Nature: ‘Mr. Datta . . . wants repose. The winds rage their loudest when there is no necessity for the lightest puff. Clouds gather and pour down a deluge, when they need do nothing of the kind; and the sea grows terrible in its wrath, when everybody feels inclined to resent its interference.’..."

 

There is a Short Period in Everyone’s Life when His Character is Fixed for Ever...Eric Blair Goes to Burma

Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace, 2000:

"...The British occupation had changed everything: Burma had been quickly integrated into the Empire, forcibly converted into a province of British India. Courtly Mandalay was now a bustling commercial hub; resources were being exploited with an energy and efficiency hitherto undreamt of. The Mandalay palace had been refurbished to serve the conquerors’ recondite pleasures: the west wing had been converted into a British Club; the Queen’s Hall of Audience had now become a billiard room; the mirrored walls were lined with months-old copies of Punch and the Illustrated London News; the gardens had been dug up to make room for tennis courts and polo grounds; the exquisite little monastery in which Thebaw had spent his novitiate had become a chapel where Anglican priests administered the sacrament to British troops. Mandalay, it was confidently predicted, would soon become the Chicago of Asia; prosperity was the natural destiny of a city that guarded the confluence of two of the world’s mightiest waterways, the Irrawaddy and the Chindwin..."

 George Orwell, 'Burmese Days': "There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed for ever." 

This is an epigraph of new novel by Paul Theroux "BURMA SAHIB", fictional account of Orwell's life in Burma from 1922 to 1927.

I have read Burmese Days, 1934 after I lived in Assam for about three years (1989-1992) and I could relate to a few things in the book easily. But in the end the novel left me sad. 

It is said that young Orwell's experiences in Burma made him the writer and thinker who became George Orwell

Reviewing Theroux's new book for TLS,  Alice Jolly writes:

"... Although Paul Theroux allows himself no authorial rhetoric or contemporary critique, Burma Sahib is a work of profound relevance to the present day for the way in which it demonstrates how human beings become enslaved to systems, institutions and social codes. It shows how such systems work to obscure the facts and make it impossible for the majority to rebel or even question. Blair is aware that the British Empire is a “racket” and a “colossal bluff”, but he can do little to oppose it. Only later, in his writing, does he begin to challenge it; and then only at a distance."

 

Eric Blair at 19 (Credit...Private Collection, via Bridgeman Art Library)