Accidental Blogger

Fateless -The Movie

It's not often that a book or a movie makes me cry. A few weeks ago I watched Fateless, a film that brought tears to my eyes. For quite some time afterwards I could not get over the sepia tinted images of melancholy, gloom and suffering. Even more difficult to shake off was the impression made by the detached incomprehension of the young protagonist caught in the violent maelstrom.

Fateless is based on a novel by Imre Kertesz, a Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author who spent a year in Nazi concentration camps as a young boy. The movie is the account of one year in the life of fourteen year old Gyuri (Gyorgy ) Koves (some have speculated, Kertesz himself) after being shipped to Auschwitz, later shifted to Buchenwald and finally to Zeitz, a lesser known concentration camp in 1944. Through it all we experience the young boy's plight not as mere viewers but often as "Gyuri," the teenager who has been transported from a life of middle class predictability to one of unfamiliar, unprecedented horror which is in equal parts, carefully planned out regimental cruelty and random violence.  As Primo Levi pointed out in his brilliant books about Auschwitz, one needs some distance in time and place from carnage and degradation to truly recognize the scars left by past traumas. With proximity to pain, over time, mindless brutality and soul sapping privation can begin to look routine and mundane. And tragedy is multiplied many times over when children's fates are shaped by the corruption of the adult soul. 

A book or movie about the Holocaust may be expected to be filled with vivid sounds and sights of horror. But the narrative in Fateless is spare and largely devoid of excessive emotions. A series of bleak images, as seen through the eyes of young Gyuri - of emaciation, loss of dignity, proximity to disease and death, have the effect of putting us alongside him on the ground. Although there is little or no Nazi iconography to be seen throughout the film and the enforcers themselves are rarely on the screen, the presence of the Nazis and their murderous philosophy is the palpable backdrop. The film focuses on the pathetic and disoriented inhabitants of the death camps - the exhausting drudgery, senseless punishments and Gyuri's rapidly deteriorating physical condition.  Fateless is a chronicle of dreary events in which a piece of meat surfacing unexpectedly in a pitiful bowl of soup is a stunning event, where one can lie quietly next to a dead body in a filthy hospital bed day after day in order to receive the extra ration doled out to the dead man by mistake, where amidst utter isolation and hopelessness people find moments of respite to joke and sing. The individual instances of loss, pain and indignities suffered add up to an atrocity of monumental proportions.

There are many striking cinematic moments in Fateless - flashes of hope and confusion that are heartbreaking in their simplicity and because with our 20/20 historical hindsight we know the end results. The policeman who rounded up Gyuri with other young boys to be transported to Auschwitz, signals secretly for Gyuri to run away at a traffic stop while the group is being herded to a holding station. Ignorant and unable to imagine what lies ahead, Gyuri stays. The boys, separated from their families, plan and plot with childish glee in the train to stay together when they reach their destination. A woman touches up her lips with lipstick as the sealed train pulls into Auschwitz.

Gyuri's "normal" emotions resurface when he returns to Budapest after the liberation of the camps. He feels anger, frustration and confusion when upon his return he finds that those who had evaded a fate similar to his own, even members of his family and friends, do not want to hear what went on in the concentration camps. They welcome him back but tell him "It is all in the past. The Nazis have been defeated," when he wants to talk and ask questions. The most heartbreaking scene of the film occurs at the end - not inside the hellish confines of the camp but in freedom, at a street corner in Budapest in approaching dusk. Gyuri leaves the apartment of some old friends who are delighted to see him and offer him his favorite dishes to relish but don't want to hear about Auschwitz, Buchenwald or Mauthausen. Rebuffed, Gyuri leaves to go and look for his estranged mother. (His father, another victim of the camps, did not return) He stops on the street outside the apartment and thinks back on his life in the camp which now seems less confusing to him than the freedom outside. He recalls wistfully that the year spent in the camps was not one of just horror and suffering; there were "magic hours" there too. He thinks back on his favorite hour, just after dinner, a respite from the day's backbreaking labor and indignities, ["which I waited for and loved most in the camp"] when he would joke and sing with his fellow prisoners. It is at this wrenching moment that we realize that for Gyuri, the camps are not the past. They are his searing and present reality and they will remain so for the rest of his life.

(Author Imre Kertesz said in his 2002 Nobel Lecture : "... nothing has happened since Auschwitz that could reverse or refute Auschwitz. In my writings the Holocaust could never be present in the past tense.")

Fateless is an extraordinary film made all the more remarkable by its ascetic treatment of human suffering. The cast is wonderful. The character of Gyuri is brought to life by the hauntingly beautiful and innocent face of actor Marcell Nagy. If you have 2 hours and 20 minutes to devote to a really good movie, do try Fateless. For more on the story, see the New York Times review here.

Preservation: A Modernist View

My hometown Houston is a modernist city. By that I don't mean its shiny new suburbs and exurbs but the older public buildings that are all lines, angles and occasionally, futuristic domes. Unfortunately, local politicians and the builders who line their pockets, can't wait to tear something down that is more than three or four decades old. There is always a fight going on between them and residents who want to preserve historic mid-century buildings and neighborhoods. Now that the Astros, Houston's baseball team, have moved to the Minute Maid Park in downtown, the latest controversy is about what to do with the abandoned and forlorn Astrodome, the nation's first modernist indoor sports stadium.  Most Houstonians don't want it pulled down and would like to see it preserved as a sports and architectural legacy.  But there are others who would like it torn down to make room for yet another "modernist" parking lot for the Reliant Stadium next door where the Houston Texans play football.

Instead of a book or a single newspaper/ magazine article, this post highlights an entire issue of a journal. Rather than focus on older classical edifices, the latest edition of Preservation, a magazine published by the The National Trust for Historic Preservation, turns a contemplative eye on America's modernist architectural icons. The special issue devoted to the importance and difficulties of preserving modernist architecture, was brought to my attention by the magazine's senior editor, Sudip Bose.

What defines modernist architecture?  Bose explains.

Trying to define modernism can be a frustrating exercise. As a style, it is less coherent, its boundaries looser, than, say, classicism. Many critics would argue that modernism is not even a singular style, that it incorporates a great variety of aesthetics and sensibilities. And just who were the modernists? Frank Lloyd Wright vehemently opposed being grouped with them, but modernist architecture would not have been the same without him.

Modernism roughly spans the time between World War I and the early 1970s. What we generally think of as the modernist ethic evolved first in Europe, among such architects as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, the latter two of the German Bauhaus school. The European modernists imbued their work with an inherent morality and social consciousness and were often associated with left-wing politics. Intrigued by the emerging technologies of the day, they embraced concrete, glass, and steel in their revolutionary creations. They eschewed ornament, rejecting what they saw as the frivolous strokes of Victorian and art nouveau styles. Their work was both spare (think of Mies' famous dictum "Less is more") and lyrical. Perhaps above all, they believed in function dictating form, though many architects, such as Le Corbusier, would eventually distance themselves from that tenet.

In his thoughtful essay, The Modernist Manifesto, architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New Yorker, presents his views on the crucial need to save modernist buildings.

Lost in Translation? (Sujatha)

This recent review of a translated version of noted Urdu author Joginder Paul (Ruchira's father-in-law) sparked the question: How much is being lost in translation?

(Thanks to Ruchira for the link to the Library of Congress recordings and Bio. page)

Cat Quote

Seventy four adoring (and adorable) cat quotes by a mad poet - all of them apt!

My favorites:

19. For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
42. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
70. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.

Note: Brought to the front from the comments section of a previous post. (Link: Dean)

"Apostrophe"

Matt's found sound - through punctuation. Should we give him "a posh trophy?"

And here are some folks who have made the "apostrophe" their life's misson.

"... his mother taught him how to sew"

"Did you know when Dr. DeBakey was a little boy, his mother taught him how to sew? How lucky for all of us. She could not have imagined then that the little hands of her little boy would become some of the finest surgical instruments the world has ever known."  - House Speake Nancy Pelosi on Dr. Michael DeBakey

The recipient of numerous honors, Houston's best known doctor, Michael E. DeBakey received the Congressional Gold Medal yesterday. The medal was presented to the 99 year old DeBakey by congressional leaders with fellow Texan, President George W. Bush in attendance at the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. Also present were Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and elected representatives from Texas.

Bush's tribute to DeBakey here and a report of the ceremony in the Houston Chronicle here.

Food, Fuel and Famine

In recent days we have repeatedly heard news reports of the rising cost of food and food shortage. The effects have been mild to moderate in wealthy, developed nations like the US, more worrisome in Asia and severe in some poorer parts of the world. Namibia and Haiti have already seen food riots. The cause of the shortage and soaring prices are manifold, some of it brought about ironically, by rising standards of living in Asia and a proportionate increase in demand for food. 

The recent issue of the Economist calls the burgeoning world food crisis The Silent Tsunami and suggests ways to bring it under control - generous aid from richer nations, scientific innovations for high yield crops, end of government interventions to manipulate international food markets and re-assessing the cost of biofuels .

PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.

Today's pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil (see article); even China is worried (see article). Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.

Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat, vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The desperate—those on 50 cents a day—face disaster.

Among the many causes cited in the article, the alarm bell about the negative effects of diverting staple crops like corn, wheat and soy to manufacture fuel has been sounded by many in the past. Not only has the practice made those crops too expensive for poor people who depend on them for food, it has also raised the price of other staples like rice because farmers are increasingly choosing to grow crops for fuel rather than for food. While the idea surrounding ethanol as the clean-green fuel has gained successful foothold in wealthier nations concerned about pollution and global warming, biofuels are coming under increasing attack in less affluent countries. 

(See also Anna's article of February 2006 where among other things, she argued that ethanol as the affordable and environmentally friendly fuel is a notion that is mostly bunk, promoted by the corn lobby)

Vestments: The Voice of the Vatican?

Pope Benedict XVI recently wrapped up his high profile visit to the US, his first after becoming pope. Benedict attended many functions that drew wide media attention. He visited the White House on his 81st birthday, held mass at several cathedrals as well as in the Yankee Stadium, met with victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, presided over inter-faith seminars and visited a synagogue and Ground Zero in NYC. Amidst all that, he had a message for Catholics as well as the rest of the world - a message that E.J. Dionne, of the Washington Post calls "countercultural." Actually, I would call it more "counter-counter-cultural" - two negatives adding up to a definite positive here for tradition. The current Pope wants to revert to the stricter culture of the Church, as it was prior to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) of nearly half century ago in which both Benedict and Pope John Paul II were participants.  Writes Dionne:

The most jarring word that Pope Benedict XVI is using during his visit to the United States is "countercultural." The American sense of that term is shaped by the 1960s: free love, drugs, hippies, rock music and rebellion. Needless to say, that's not what Benedict is preaching.

That word is the key to understanding how Benedict's message runs crosswise to conventional liberalism and conservatism. Benedict came to the United States as a quiet but forceful critic of "an increasingly secular and materialistic culture," as he put it during yesterday's Mass. Almost any American who paid attention to his sermon had to be uncomfortable because all of us are shaped by the very forces he was criticizing.

Benedict directly challenged an assumption so many Americans make about religion: that it is a matter of private devotion with few public implications.

Not true, said the pope. "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted," he told the country's Catholic bishops on Wednesday. "Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel."

I have some thoughts regarding Pope Benedict's admonition to society and his take on the church's role in shaping moral and cultural forces that guide our lives.  But rather than get into a serious discussion on where I agree or differ with the pontiff, I wish to point to a sartorial analysis of the pope's message.

I am not terribly attentive to religious rituals (relating to any faith) and ecclesiastical attire.  Whatever little I do know is the result of casual observation of real life, art, movies and TV news.  I am aware that compared to the relative austerity of Protestant churches, worship rituals in the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Church are elaborate and their clergy more impressively dressed .  But I have scant knowledge of the various details of priestly garb and their significance (see here for a list of papal vestments. The nineteen linked pages describe what adorns the pope from head to toe). Despite my inattention to holy haute couture, I couldn't help but notice since his ascension to the papal throne in 2005, that Benedict XVI is a nattier dresser than John Paul II.  While John Paul did dress as befits a pope, Benedict seems to favor a touch more ermine, velvet, silk, lace, fringe, embroidery and papal bling than did his predecessor. Apparently, the current pope's choice of clothing and accessories reflects more than simply a keen sense of fashion and aesthetics. Like E.J. Dionne, who parsed the pope's words and found old world conventionality, David Gibson of Religious News Service studied the pontiff's style and concluded that Pope Benedict is signaling a deeper, more orthodox philosophical message through his tasteful and intricate papal regalia.

Dukh-Pain: A Review

"And a flower is crying / Along with the Roma"

Reading DUKH / PAIN by Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic - Sukrita Paul Kumar

The very title of Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic’s Dukh/Pain draws me as an Indian to this book of poems.  The bi-lingual title does not merely suggest a linguistic proximity to Indian languages but much more. Philosophically, the word “dukh” echoes the cultural import of the Buddhist/ Pali word “dukkha.” The word “pain” gets loaded with greater meaning and intensity, linked side by side with “dukh”.

The simplicity of Hedina’s poems is indeed deceptive. These poems reflect the dukh of a long history of discrimination, persecution and prejudice against the “wandering” Roma. But even while they have been on the move, they have carried within themselves their beliefs, myths, way of life and even superstitions. While Hedina’s poems celebrate harmony with the non-Roma people in a dream, they also play with the metaphor of “fleeing” from the nightmare of being bitten by “Big-headed, winged, red insects” (“I Flee”). The continuous persecution of the Roma is recorded in the history of their expulsions, through the “Caravan Law” of Hamburg, their exclusion from social life, denial of social welfare and a whole series of humiliations suffered in  Europe and elsewhere. It is as if the poems in “Dukh/Pain” articulate the pregnant silences of the suffering : “In a dream my child speaks,/ awake, he doesn’t want to speak./ …My child cries,/ I do not know what pain is.” And yet, it is only the mother who can probably understand the meaning of that cry!

Hedina’s verses are the voice of the insider, so full of the pain of her people that for her “....it is suffocating/Sorrow has smothered my soul,/ and it is sinking” (“Sorrow”). The energy emanating from the poems flows towards healing. There is also a quest to know the truth of the multiple histories of their plight in different places. It is quite evident that in this decade of Roma inclusion (2005-2015), while poetry can help heal the physical and psychological wounds inflicted, it can also create a suitable sensitivity to the demeaning mis-recognition of their identity.

“I am a stranger to myself”, says Hedina in one of the poems. While there is the constant experience of being an “alien”- in exile even, in the country of birth, there is also an acute desire to retain whatever cultural heritage they are left with. In the poem “Amanet for Daughter”, the poet entrusts the daughter with the task of passing on the Romani culture to the next generation: “…Endow her with the charge/ As I endow you.” This alertness to pass on the mother tongue for instance, to ensure the survival of the Roma identity, actually brings out the pride of the Roma despite the stigmatization afflicted on them as “gypsies”. It is difficult not to notice the faith of the poet in the Romni (woman), usually the mother-figure: it is the Roma women who must “save the earth”, it is they who must transmit their culture to the future generations and it is they who can protect the Roma when even the flowers “cry along with” them!

"My voice is imprisoned/ I can’t talk”, says Hedina when in fact this book of poems gives us her voice in two tongues: her poems are a release from captivity of place and time, from the bitter memories of  Bosnia, of a painful burden of history….  But she has to move on: "I have to go from here./I have to go there./ I have to get better." It is with such conviction that in the poem “I Have To Go From Here”, the poet declares her freedom to actually connect with her essential self - the wandering Roma! This reminds me of the book The Roads of the Roma: A Pen Anthology of Gypsy Writers which introduces one to the many roads taken by the Roma after leaving India in the eighth century. The outpourings of the writers help demystify their lives, making it easier for the rest of the world to shed irrational associations built around the Roma identity.

Reading “Dukh/Pain” is an experience of traveling inside the world of the Roma, to partake of their “dukh” and celebrate the vibrant togetherness despite the sufferings caused by wide dispersal.

Editor's Note:

Thanks Sukrita, for the review.  Dukh-Pain, a book of Roma poetry was featured here some months ago. (some of Sukrita's own poems here)

"M.F.A. is the new M.B.A." (Dean)

When a car company like G.M. is in the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.

Rather than extend a discussion in which I’ve been a vociferous—maybe even loudmouth—participant below the comment line of Ruchira’s post regarding poet-doctor Fady Joudah, I thought I’d take her and Joe’s suggestions to address in a new post a recent related article in the New York Times. In my comments to the former post, I’ve been trying to defend the vocation of poet against its marginalization and appropriation within an ethos of scientific mastery. With respect to Joudah, I detected an implication in the article and in Ruchira’s comments that his poetry could be no more than an afterthought—a quaint, refreshing occasion of self-expression and incisive poetic observation, but clearly secondary—to his demanding day job, and that while a rigorous scientific pursuit such as medical science can muster the cognitive wherewithal to appropriate, master, apply, and create poetry, the converse does not obtain. I maintain that such an implication is wholly in error.