"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." ― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
There is this saying in Hindi: Yeh moonh aur masoor ki daal!
A few years ago, India's crossover queen Aishwarya Rai made it to the cover of the Time magazine. In India, it was then considered a nod to Bollywood's emerging international clout. 
But other players are also getting into the game in a big way. Sony Picture was the first to step in and its first film Saawariya, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali is releasing in November during Diwali. Viacom has inked a 50-50 joint venture deal with Raghav Bahl, head of Network 18. The venture, called Viacom 18, will produce and distribute TV shows, digital media and (eventually) 10 to 12 movies a year. Together, they have raised $112 million from a London Stock Exchange flotation. Also, three Indian studios held IPOs in London this year, raising a combined $220 million. Of the many things that are uniquely appalling about Gujarat 2002, three are particularly disturbing. The first that the genocidal killings took place in the heart of urban India in an era of saturation media coverage — television, print, web — and not under the cloak of secrecy in an unreachable place. The second that the men who presided over the carnage were soon after elected to power not despite their crimes but seemingly precisely because of them (making a mockery of the idea of the inevitable morality of the collective). And finally — as TEHELKA’s investigation shows — the fact that there continues to be no trace of remorse, no sign of penitence for the blood-on-the-hands that — if Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky are to be believed — is supposed to haunt men to their very graves.
Like Germany and Italy once, Gujarat begs many questions. How do a non-militant people suddenly acquire a bloodthirsty instinct? Does affluence not diminish the impulse to savagery? Does education not diminish the impulse to bigotry? Do the much-vaunted tenets of classical Hinduism not diminish the impulse to cruelty? If tolerance and wisdom will not flourish in a garden of well-being and learning, in the very land of Mahatma Gandhi, then is there any hope for these things at all?
The private sectors' refrain that affirmative action is good enough may not stand now. Fresh studies have proved that there is discrimination in employment.
It was subject of much dispute - many had been saying it, others contesting it. On Friday, a study was released by the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies in collaboration with Princeton University.
The study was conducted against 548 job advertisements with 4808 applicants over 66 weeks, across five metros.
It reveals that in fact a person's caste and religion could be a hindrance in getting a job, despite equal qualification.
The study says that a dalit had 60 per cent less chances of being called for an interview, and a Muslim had 30 per cent less, as against their higher caste peers.
American film scholar Prof Ray Carney on the Hollywood system of filmmaking:Why are Hollywood movies so bad? The best way to answer the question is simply to take you behind the scenes on a quick cook's tour of how movies are really made. I warn you. It's not a pretty picture.
The first thing you never want to forget about the movies in that–first , last and always–they are business deals put together to make a quick buck. To say the obvious, the goal is to take $7.50 out of as many pockets as possible. Everything is directed to that interest.
There was an interview in the last Saturday's Globe with Sydney Lumet that more or less sums up the current state of the art.
Lumet's comments are all the more telling in that they don't come from some wild-eyed radical, but from the ultimate Hollywood insider. Lumet has been making successful, money-making Hollywood movies for more than 40 years.
On the other hand, of course a Stalin movie would never really be made precisely because it would be controversial and would alienate blocks of viewers, and jeopardize profits.
What Hollywood is in favor of is not controversy, but pseudo-controversy. On the one hand, you want people to think that your movie is really new and different and controversial; but on the other, you don't want to actually create a disturbance. You don't want to force viewers really to have to think or to learn something. If you are dealing with politics in particular, the formula involves taking a topical issue–Watergate, Vietnam, the Holocaust–but making sure that it is situated at a certain distance from the average viewer's experience or knowledge.
Hollywood movies take our common-sense understandings and sell them back to us, with a slight change of clothes. It's a little like one of those MacDonald's Happy Meal promotions. You add a new spice or condiment or action figure to deep people's interest, but basically you give them the same fast food over and over again.
In terms of the production of these films, timidity is built into the system at every level. Movies originate as "deals"–business arrangements hashed out between producers, directors, writers, and a group of stars, in which the movie itself becomes an almost incidental after-thought: The real goal of each of the parties is to protect his or her financial interest, and to maximize the final product's "bankability."
In the service of doing that, the overriding goal is to secure a name star at any cost. When I talk to beginning directors, it's usually the first story they tell me: How they took their first script to a studio–sometimes a marvelous script–and were told the project could only get a green light if a particular "name" actor plays the lead–if Johnny Depp or Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise can be persuaded to do it–no matter how ludicrously inappropriate that particular choice might be for the role.
Then once a real "star" signs on to a production, the dynamics of the deal allow the star to demand as many rewrites as he or she wants until they are happy with the script.
Things have changed for Indian cinema. Foreign funding is on its way here. Venture capitalists are squeezing in through the door. Everyone from Bandra to Jogeshwari is making the next 'crossover' film. (If that's not enough, now there's even a company called Crossover!) Everyone's speculating as to who's the tallest poppy in the field.
Do we really believe all of this? We certainly seem to. But then why are our films not working? Where is all the insane amount of money pumped into the industry going? Why is everybody adding mysterious alphabets to their names? When successful cinema is all about the beauty of the story being told, then why are Mr 'Numerology' Jumani and Sunita 'Tarot' Menon key decisive factors in the success of our films?
Furthermore, he adds something that instantly links up with the Hollywood scenario described above by Ray:Every time I, as a filmmaker, go to a producer with my script, he asks me, before so much as laying a finger on the document, 'Who is the star?' Directors who don't have a single 'good' film (or a 'successful' one for that matter, as the two are not synonymous in this country) to their credit are heading corporates, taking decisions on how films should and shouldn't be made. They are so plum in their newfound job security that they don't take a decision until and unless it is everyone's decision. So that if they fail, everyone is responsible, not just them.
One head might roll. A bunch of heads generally gets a second chance!
Anurag's No Smoking is releasing today in India. Writes The Guardian: "While a slack pace, unsettled internal logic and a goofy subplot undo much of director Kashyap's hard work, the film has a slick look. If and when Bollywood does deliver a crossover hit, it's likely this film-maker will be behind it." No journalist in India watches cinema, unlike film journalists abroad. Go to a film festival, you see so many journalists there.
Indian journalists don't watch cinema, they only cover gossip. That is why nobody has a clue about cinema. They don't even know what questions to ask. They ask the same questions: 'What is John doing? What is Ayesha doing?'
The problem with this country is its media that covers cinema. Our cinema is immature. Our media is very immature. Our critics are worse than our filmmakers. Our film journalism is the worst in the world. Barring a few critics, nobody has a clue what they are talking about.
Like most people interested in the form, I was knocked out by these stories when I first read them, and I continue to reread them frequently with undiminished pleasure. I like their chaste preference of action, dialogue and curtly objective description, over the kind of ruminative authorial guff that blurs and sinks the work of so many other short story writers. I love the dead-on accuracy of what they choose to tell, and the uncompromising silence they maintain on what they choose not to. The image of a man sitting with the entire contents of his house out on the lawn becomes a totally fresh way of conveying the hurt of a broken marriage in Why Don't You Dance? About the marriage itself you learn nothing - but this too, this disciplined reticence, feeds its disturbing energies back into the situation.
So, finally, the verdict is out. To the disappointment of many, Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, has won this year's Booker:Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize for "The Gathering," an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family that its author called the literary equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.
Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain's most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy.
The prize, which carries a cheque for 50,000 pounds (US$100,000; ?75,000), was awarded during a ceremony last evening at London's medieval Guildhall.
She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville's "The Sea" in 2005.
"The Gathering" is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother's suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family's troubled, tangled history.
Enright said people looking for a cheery read should not pick up her book.
Disappointed though he will doubtless be, Ian McEwan can at least take comfort from his incredibly healthy sales. On Chesil Beach is far outselling the other books on the shortlist combined (not to mention the surge of sales for Atonement in the wake of Joe Wright's film). Sales figures of the other books, by contrast, exemplify the tough climate for literary fiction in the marketplace - and Enright's book has so far shifted just 3,253 copies. The latest figures from Nielsen BookScan show that the McEwan has sold a total of 120,362; Nicola Barker's Darkmans, 11,097; Mister Pip, 5,170; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist 4,425, and Indra Sinha's Animal's People 2,589.
WHEN Mohsin Hamid embarked on an 18-city book tour across the United States, he found readers receptive to his latest novel. It is the story of a young Pakistani Princeton graduate who feels empathy with America, but becomes so disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that he packs up and returns home to the city of Lahore.
The response was so strong that Mr. Hamid, 36, with only one previous novel, sold close to 100,000 copies of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist", enough to propel the book, a work of more literary tone than popular flavor, onto the New York Times best-seller list last spring.
Now Mr. Hamid is the center of literary attention in Britain, where the novel is on the short list for the Man Booker Prize to be announced Tuesday.
But while his novel has received critical acclaim in Britain, home to nearly two million Muslims, the commercial reception has been cooler. In a country where people are worried about what has become known as "the enemy within", sales of a novel that speaks unnervingly to fear and disquiet about Muslims have yet to reach more than several thousand.
To Mr. Hamid, the contrast is telling of the difference between the United States, and its embrace of newcomers, and Europe, particularly Britain, where immigrants can forever, it seems, be made to feel like outsiders.
Oh, the writers. What becomes abundantly clear from Frankfurt is that if you've got a book inside, it's really not a bad idea to keep it there. Why does anybody even want to be a writer? And I say that as one. Two weeks ago the BBC reported that it came top in a survey of the nation's dream jobs. I end up ranting about this at the Bloomsbury stand, and Alexandra Pringle, the editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury, rants with me.
'I know!' she says, 'It's mad. It's a horrible job. It doesn't pay well. It's lonely. It's depression-inducing. It's frustrating. There's no fun to be had. But everyone has a drive to be a writer. And everyone thinks they can do it.
'Whereas to be one is some sort of mental derangement! They're all bonkers. When my writers say I could earn more money at the till at Sainsbury's, I say, well go and do it. There's no point writing unless you feel that you have to do it. You have to really want to do it and to be prepared to suffer to do it. Or else you really might as well go and work on the till at Sainsbury.'
Patrick Janson-Smith, whom I find in the agents' centre looking rather gloomy, says: 'You look around and you think the world needs another book like it needs a hole in the head.' I know Patrick because he used to be the head of Transworld, and the publisher whose signature is on my contract. He's also one of the highest-profile publishers in recent years to jump ship and become an agent.
'If you're not in a three-for-two or Richard & Judy, forget it,' he says. 'There's no point. If you ask me, publishing is in a mess.'
Even in the last two years, he says, fiction has got tougher and tougher. 'The retail side, Borders and Tesco have squeezed them so much that they've become completely risk-averse. It really is all down to what sales and marketing think these days. And, frankly, there's no point even selling to a publisher if they can't get enthusiastic about it - you might as well chuck it in the bin.'
But you can't let it get to you. Or maybe here I mean me. Alexandra Pringle is right about the madness, I think. Fiction-writing is just not a logical thing to do, so you've got to either get on with it and not moan about it, or head off to Sainsbury's.
Do you care about Ingmar Bergman's work?My films involve good craftsmanship. I am conscientious, industrious and extremely careful. I do my work for everyday purposes and not for eternity; and my pride is the pride of a good craftsman.
Yet I know that what I tell myself is self-deception and an incessant anxiety calls out to me: What have you done that will endure? Is there a single metre in any one of your films that will mean something for the future, one single line, one single situation that is completely and absolutely real?
And with the sincere person's deep-rooted inclination to lie I must answer; I do not know, but I think so.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are completely without importance in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its creative urge the moment it was separated from worship. It severed the umbilical cord and lives its own sterile life, generating and degeneration itself. The individual has become the highest form and greatest bane of artistic creation. Creative unity and humble anonymity are forgotten and buried relics without significance or meaning. The smallest cuts and moral pains of the ego are examined under the microscope as if they were of eternal importance.
Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realising that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other, and cry out into the darkness without once receiving the healing power of communal happiness. We are so affected by our own walking in circles, so limited by our own anxiety that we can no longer distinguish between the true and the false, between the gangster's ideas and pure ideals.
If thus I am asked what I should like to be the general purpose for my films, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel or a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone. It does not matter which, it is the feeling of contentment that matters. Regardless whether I believe or not, regardless whether I am a Christian or not, I play my part at the collective building or cathedral. For I am an artist and a craftsman; and I know how to chisel stone into faces and figures.
I never need to concern myself about present opinion or the judgment of the posterity. I am a name which has not been recorded anywhere and which will disappear when I myself disappear; but a little part of me will live on in the triumphant masterwork of the anonymous craftsmen. A dragon, a devil, or perhaps a saint, it does not matter which.
What’s not so good is that writers write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course, the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker). It’s more like copping-a-feel reading. There’s something yucky about it.
Last year, I read scores of stories that felt ... not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.
I generally avoid writing about my personal life in my blog but this time I think it is too relevant to ignore. This will also help clarify, just in case, dear friends, you wondered why I wasn't updating my blog. 
Photo: Courtesy Lucy Cavender
You wrote your first novel while you were still in India, and your second novel has come out while you are based in Canada. When did you start work on this novel?
Indian writing in English (IWE), however celebrated at home and abroad, rather than catching our eyes for the seriousness of theme and material often grabs our attention for its "tinsel glitter of celebrity." 
Can't wait to read J M Coetzee's novel, Diary of a bad year. Unlike Life & Times of Michael K (1983) or Disgrace (1999), this isn't a book you'd press on someone new to this great writer. But it's much more than an exercise in letting off some steam inside a tricky fictional frame. Funnier than anything else he's written, if sometimes in a rather donnish way, it eventually becomes unexpectedly moving, offering surprises while avoiding a final thunderclap with the restraint that Coetzee's readers have learned to expect. The metafictional stuff is handled with more panache than it was in Slow Man, and the devices aimed at keeping the reader off balance work well. Towards the end of the book, Coetzee conveys absolute sincerity while scrupulously directing the reader's attention to the potentially fraudulent techniques he's using to convey it. Perhaps he's pulling a ladder up after himself, but you don't doubt that, as C puts it while discussing late Tolstoy, he's struggling in earnest with "the one question that truly engaged his soul: how to live".
His latest novel (and it is one, in spite of all its formal games) puts the angry sage under scrutiny as it marks the further progress of Coetzee's bracingly bold "late style". Just as Edward Said proposed in his book of that name, Coetzee seems to be detaching himself step by step in a long "crisis of farewell" from the conventions of his genre. As in Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, he edges away from fully-embodied fiction into hybrid territory where essays, fables and aphorisms bed down in the frame of an invented yarn.
As Diary of a Bad Year puts it, in relation to the ageing Tolstoy and similar late-stylists, "the texture of their prose becomes thinner, their treatment of character and action more schematic". Yet this depletion can also bring about "a liberation, a clearing of the mind to take on more important tasks".
Qurratulain Hyder, one of Urdu literature's grandest writers, passed away on Monday night after prolonged illness. Unfortunately, the news came to my notice only today.What counts, for her, is the human spirit and the relationships it generates and nurtures. That is where the linearity of time seems to curve into a spiral, urging us to recognize a past that never quite disappears. This, of course, may have a depressing side too: the more things change, the more they remain the same. What, then, is our choice as individuals? Here it may be worthwhile to recall the characteristically modest, even self-mocking, remarks that Hyder made in 1991 in her acceptance speech at the Jnanpith Award function: "My concern for civililzational values about which I continue writing may sound naive, wooly-headed and simplistic. But then, perhaps, I am like that little bird which foolishly puts up its claws, hoping that it will stop the sky from falling."
The novel is defined by a dizzying array of parables, love stories, letters, dreams and diaries, but Hyder successfully weaves this fictional universe together with a cast of characters that's not only diverse but also most intriguing. Hari, a monk in post-Buddha India, lives in a land inhabited by architects who fled the ashes of Persepolis. Kamaluddin, a 15th-century Persian thinker, has met Muslims in Andalusia who wrote Spanish in the Arabic script. Gautam, an opportunistic employee of the Raj, ends up in the kingdom of Oudh, where Muslim rulers celebrated Hindu holidays.The group rematerializes in various incarnations and eras, and the result is an enlightening portrait of the subcontinent, one that blurs the line between insider and outsider, Hindu and Muslim, and reveals the ceaseless cycles of greed and hate that disrupt the world's beauty. Hyder is my favourite kind of writer, one who spares nobody from her scrutiny, not the treaty-breaking English who "took away the glory and wealth of Hindustan" or the "anti-British leftists" who made "a bee-line for England, deserting the toiling masses for whom their hearts used to bleed."
She first published this book in 1959, 22 years before Midnight's Children bagged the booker. So why has no one in the west outside of academia or the pages of the literary journals ever heard of this one-time Fleet Street journalist?
Warner Bros. on Tuesday unveiled its first India production, the action comedy "Made in China," for which it will hold worldwide rights.
With the film -- helmed by Nikhil Advani ("Salaam-e-ishq") and produced by Indian shingles Ramesh Sippy Prods. and Orion Pictures --Warner joins Viacom, Sony and Disney in the accelerating Hollywood race to make movies in India.Though Hollywood fare flourishes overseas, it accounts for a small percentage of the box office in India --the world's second most populous nation. For example, Hollywood fare accounted for 85% of Spain's B.O. in 2006 but only 8% in India.
Since more multiplexes mean the Indian B.O. pie is growing, Hollywood is determined to increase its share -- and rather than bringing Western influence into the movie biz, the plan is to get into the Bollywood game.
The Godfather, as is with so many others, remains one of my favourite movies. I have watched it many times, the first time on Doordarshan in my early 20s when I was in college, and later on on DVDs. This film always fascinates me: its setting, the actors, the tension, the colors, the cinematography...one could just go on.
Contrary to what people believed at the time, despite being Italian, Puzo knew almost nothing about the mafia. He had heard the same gossip and stories as everybody else. So when he sat down to write, he invented an underworld based on honour and a sense of family. To make it seem authentic, he included a few apocryphal stories that were then current.
For instance, it was rumoured that Frank Sinatra had mafia connections, and that when his career was on the brink, the mob got him the co-starring role in From Here to Eternity that resurrected his fortunes. Puzo invented a Sinatra-like character and included the From Here to Eternity story, adding one dramatic flourish: When the studio boss refuses to cast the Sinatra character, the mafia guys behead his favourite horse and put its decapitated head in his bed.Stories such as this one—which Puzo dreamt up from the top of his head—made the book seem even more authentic than it really was and it became a number one best-seller. By the time Paramount Pictures got around to filming it, the Italian- American community was filled with outrage and the studio agreed to delete the words “mafia” and “La Cosa Nostra" from the script.
Pankaj Mishra on one of India's vanishing cultures:Perhaps this dwindling of middle-class culture was inevitable, part of the price of "progress". A generation ago, my own parents and their peers had moved out of their restricted settings and taken up jobs in remote cities and towns. Their children are now scattered across India (and increasingly across the world). Besieged by the usual middle-class anxieties of jobs and careers, we lose touch, forgetting names and faces. Few people show up when some of these children get married or have their thread ceremonies. Deaths and funerals have turned into lonely, often desolate affairs. Two years ago, one of my uncles, who was afflicted with Alzheimer's, watched his wife bleed to death after an accident at his home in a Lucknow suburb - a fate unimaginable in the close-knit world of his childhood.
Of course, the destruction of old bonds of family and community and shared culture has been faster elsewhere, in Europe, America - even China... Still, it is hard today, 60 years after independence, not to see poignancy in the Nehruvian elite's tryst with destiny; to realise how little the makers of modern India knew of their suburban future: the high-rise apartment complexes in which they would die pining for a patch of weak wintry sun on a green lawn.
The relationship between Indian writers and western publishers has been in many ways a necessary collaboration, and one that does not always take the form of accepting big advances from multinational conglomerates: for instance, Arundhati Roy, in spite of the bestseller status of her novel, The God of Small Things, has published most of her essay collections with the smallest of American publishers, the radical Cambridge-based South End Press. But publication in the west has also produced a kind of dual identity for the Indian writer in English. If successful in the west, especially in the amount of noise made by the publicity machine, the Indian writer is understood to be part of Brand India, using the "soft power" of literature to consolidate the more muscular geopolitical reach of the state. Some writers play along with this, performing the role of the native informant with ease. But for others, and I believe this is what makes them attractive to publishers and readers in the west, writing is shaped by their sense of literature as an engaged art, one that interprets the world as an imperfect, unfinished place rather than one where a universal system has laid down the perfect, eternal gridwork of inequality.
I don't think, by any means, that it is only Indian writers who are working in this manner, or that they have some sort of special dispensation to do so, but they seem to have the advantage (and the drawback) of using English, at a historical moment when the west has turned its attention on India and China. It is a crossroads that offers very different alternatives to Indian writers: that of cashing it in by becoming minor entertainers for the powerful and the privileged, or that of looking for new forms and new ways of engagement with the stories that demand to be told. The upheaval we are caught up in is so vast, and so uncertain - is this the best of times? the worst? - that Indian writing has barely begun to take the measure of the conditions in which it functions.
James Kelman recalls his early days as a writer in The Guardian:The lack of working time was a continual source of stress, as it still is. The frustration worms its way through rage and bitterness, and can lead to breakdown, and silence. I returned to the lives, as well as the works, of writers and artists, particularly Franz Kafka.
I saw it as the fundamental and shaping struggle in each, the need to do your work in the face of the socio-economic reality. There was no place in society for your work, as with Cézanne, van Gogh and the rest. Your only requirement was to do their work. Who the fuck were they? These bastards. Who wants to do their work? Let them do it themselves, tell them to go and fuck.
Young writers seek bonds of solidarity with older generations; we look for things in common. If a writer comes to mean something to us we want to discover affinities. How did they live their life? What hardships did they endure to pursue their art? How long did it take them to write a story? Kafka did The Metamorphosis in a couple of nights. Oh, I don't believe it, no, no, for godsake, no.
Yes. Now pick yourself up, brush yourself down. Van Gogh did not even begin until he was 28. And look at Tolstoy, a hero at 22, a hero at 72. Phew.
I still found difficulty in connecting with writers who had no reason to worry about money and job security. I was prejudiced against Turgenev for years, until it dawned on me how influenced I had been by Dostoevsky's judgment, arrived at through a suicidal gambling habit. I would have sat down for a game of poker with Dostoevsky but knew I would not have enjoyed it. I aye imagined him jumping up from the table and flinging a cape round his shoulders, This is too slow, too slow! and marching out into the night.
When acclaimed filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, died on July 30th, some remarkable obituaries were written in his memory. Critics wondered whether there was a general message in his films. Mr Bergman sometimes denied he had one. Yet he usually found a saving moment in the misery: a selfless communication, in word or gesture, between two human beings. At the end of “Wild Strawberries” the hero, an aged professor, is belatedly reconciled with his family and his past. As the scene was filmed, Mr Bergman noted, the old actor's face “shone with secretive light as if reflected from another reality”. That secretive light, or hidden love, was just what the director had been searching for.
The way Bergman’s work and Bergman’s pain were in equation struck me early on and almost by chance. In 1957, he made Wild Strawberries, in which a great man, a professor, is going to a kind of film festival to be honoured for his career. He is Isak Borg, played by Victor Sjostrom (the pioneering figure in the Swedish film industry and Bergman’s mentor). But as he travels toward his honorary degree, so Borg dreams and remembers and feels shocked by his private failures. We can see that he is a cold man attracted to the warmth of others - and I think Bergman saw himself the same way.
Wild Strawberries is a great film, struggling to reconcile inward failure and outward success. I realised that it was the same “story” as a film I had seen two years earlier - Citizen Kane, in which an old man dies and has his last thoughts filled by the same grim debate: was I wretched in all my glory? Maybe all great films say the same thing.
As a filmmaker what I have appreciated deeply are his brilliant scripts. He was an exceptional storyteller, his films always had very strong, powerful narratives. When I heard of the news of his passing away, I picked up The Seventh Seal (in which a knight plays a game of chess with Death) to watch it all over again. It is terribly powerful, philosophical and so wonderfully shot with such strong imagery.
He had pretty strong views on films and filmmakers. Film for him was something magical—film as dream, film as music. "No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul," he said. The act of making a film, to him, was like working out your dreams. He loved Andrei Tarkovsky for that reason. Bergman created dreamscapes on celluloid. It's not as though the characters were a dream, they were all very real and rooted but engaged in existential questioning. He was also appreciative of Luis Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, Bergman wrote that "a film is not a document, it is a dream". He looked up to Tarkovsky because he felt "he moves with naturalness in a room of dreams". Bergman thought that he himself could "creep inside" that room but only a few times. He was very critical of Antonioni. He felt Antonioni aspired to be in the same room of dreams but got "suffocated by his own tediousness".
