Friday, December 27, 2013

स्वतंत्रता / लेओनीद मर्तीनोव/ वरयाम सिंह


मैंने यह बात स्‍पष्‍ट कर दी है -
क्‍या होता है स्‍वतंत्र होना।

इस जटिल और अति व्‍यक्तिगत अनुभव को
मैंने प्रयास किया है गहराई से समझने का।

आपको मालूम है -
क्‍या होता है स्‍वतंत्र होना?
स्‍वतंत्र होने का मतलब है
उत्‍तरदायी होना संसार की हर चीज के प्रति
हर आह, हर आँसू और हर तरह के नुकसान के प्रति
आस्‍था, अंधविश्‍वास और अनास्‍था के प्रति।
अन्‍य कोई हो न हो पर मैं उत्‍तरदायी हूँ
बँधा नहीं हूँ मैं किसी चीज से
इसीलिए प्रतिबद्ध हूँ -
हर चीज और व्‍यक्ति की स्‍वतंत्रता के प्रति।

स्‍वतंत्र होना
इतना आसान है क्‍या?
उस व्‍यक्ति की बात क्‍या करें
जिसे सहायता और सहारे की जरूरत है
ताकि वह उठाकर रख दे हर तरह के पहाड़ों को,
बाँध दे भविष्‍य की नदियों को,
मनुष्‍य तो मनुष्‍य है
उसकी बात क्‍या करें
स्‍वयं पहाड़ अक्‍सर कहते हैं -

आर्तनाद कर रही हैं उनकी निर्जन घाटियाँ
स्‍वयं नदियाँ चा‍हती हैं कि उनके ऊपर पुल हों
रोती है कि यानविहीन है उनका जल
आहिस्‍ता से कहते हैं रेगिस्‍तान-हमारे भीतर समुद्र हैं
जरूरत है बस भीतर तक खुदाई करने की,
यह इतना आसान है क्‍या
कि रेत और सिर्फ रेत में
नहाते रहना पड़े सहारा के रेगिस्‍तान को?
बहुत हो लिया अब मुक्‍त हो लें इस नरक से!
और ठीक इसी वक़्त
बहुत पास कहीं हलचल मचा रहा है अतलांतिक।
बता रहे हैं द्वीप -
किसी दूसरे महासागर के क्रोध के बारे में
जो समूल उखाड़ देना चाहता है उन्‍हें।

क्रुद्ध क्‍या केवल महासागर हैं?
दिखाई दे रहा है धुआँ, राख और धूल,
खून-पसीना थके शरीर पर।
मैं उपयोग कर रहा हूँ अपनी स्‍वतंत्रता का
कि हवा में उड़ न जाये द्वीप -
निगल न डाले पानी जमीन को
निर्जन न पड़ जायें लोगों की दुनियाएँ।
मैं लडूँगा
हर जीवित चीज के लिए
टकराऊँगा हर तरह की बाधा से
यही कामना है मेरी -
हरेक को प्राप्‍त हो सच्‍ची स्‍वतंत्रता।

साभार- http://www.hindisamay.com

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Outtakes: Steven Spielberg / SRIKANTH SRINIVASAN


WHO is he?
Extremely popular Hollywood film director, screenwriter and producer of enormously successful movies who has directed close to 30 films since the early 1960s. Spielberg took to cinema at a very young age, making 8-mm shorts at home. He co-founded the major production house Dreamworks Studios in 1994. He has won the Academy Award for Best Direction twice for Schindler’s List(1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Spielberg’s films are characterised by their childlike wonder for the new and the extraordinary. Aliens, dinosaurs, robots, adventurers — his films abound with the imaginative power of pre-adolescence. It has been widely noted that his films are full of father figures — which certainly owes something to John Ford’s influence — with whom the various children stand-ins have a strained relationship. Spielberg has also regularly brought to screen various events from world history, presenting narratives in which the struggles of one central character, often a white male, become the driving force that changes the course of History.
Style
Groundbreaking special effects, tracking shots, strong directional lights, expressionist silhouettes and a manipulative musical score are some of the features that comprise Spielberg’s style. One prominent cinematic device in these films is a tracking shot towards the characters looking with awe at an off-screen object, as if they are staring at something out of this world. Frequent collaborators include composer John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and producer Kathleen Kennedy.
WHY is he of interest?
Few directors could have been as highly praised and as harshly panned as Spielberg. Champions of his cinema rightly recognise his genuinely creative, highly cinematic, game-changing vision, while his critics, perhaps as justifiably, reprimand him for the dumbing down of American cinema and his manhandling of history. One fact that they can’t help but agree upon, however, is the immense impact his work has made across the world both in the way movies are made and received.

WHERE to discover him?
Far from being the quintessential Spielberg movie, and refreshingly so, his debut work Duel (1971), made for TV, centres on a Plymouth-driving salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) who is ceaselessly threatened by a rusty old truck. Through the course of this thrilling, minimalist portrait of the crisis of masculinity, the aptly named Mann’s psychological security and self-assuredness collapses to reveal a bed of neuroses and insecurities.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Outtakes: Wong Kar-Wai /Srikanth Srinivasan

 
WHO is he?
Hong Kong film director, producer and scenarist who has made over 20 feature and short films since his debut in the late eighties. Wong is notorious for his long shooting schedules and improvised scripts, which has often posed problems for his actors and producers. He won the Best Director prize at Cannes Film Festival for Happy Together (1997).
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
The majority of Wong’s films are set in Hong Kong and, directly or indirectly, deal with the impossibility and transitory nature of love in this vast, impersonal space. The protagonists in these films are chronic loners, inured to their isolation and solitude, and attempt to cotton onto any modicum of warmth they get in this commercial Mecca. Like Nicholas Ray’s films, Wong’s movies are obsessed with youth and present it with all its vitality, foolishness and quirkiness.
Style
Wong’s cinema could be described by what the French called the Cinema of Look — a pop-culture influenced, ornately stylised, primarily ‘visual’ style of filmmaking. The principal characteristic of Wong’s style of filmmaking is the intuitive, impressionistic cinematography — often helmed by Christopher Doyle — that attempts to represent the most fleeting impressions and emotions using wide-angle, handheld, slow-motion, low-frame rate shots. Other features include the use of a mixture of music from around the world, jump cuts, location shooting, accentuated primary colours, improvised scenes and voiceovers.
WHY is he of interest?
Wong’s is among the most visually distinctive body of work in contemporary cinema and his extremely stylised brand of filmmaking has enjoyed a widespread popularity, even in India. A true scion of the French New Wave, Wong’s cinema retains the free spiritedness and flamboyance of the movement while refracting them through the director’s eccentric yet truthful vision of life in contemporary Hong Kong, which might well stand for any automated metropolis in the world.
 
WHERE to discover him?
At once the most restrained Wong Kar-Wai film and his most profound, In The Mood For Love (2000) is set in a conservative 1960s Hong Kong milieu and revolves around a man and woman who discover that their spouses are cheating on them. Admittedly influenced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Wong’s sumptuously shot and scored film posits the centrality of performance and playacting in any relationship and captures the fragility and ephemerality of love. 

Courtesy- http://www.thehindu.com