Chelsea the Cinéaste

Youth is a bitter mystery even to those who have outgrown the initial perplexity of being young. We thought that being young was synonymous with staying ever at the moment. To the looming presence of time we imparted the same significance as we did the cautious words of our harrying parents – we habitually chose to ignore the warning of an imminent storm, the vague but approaching sound of thunder we pretended not to hear. We told ourselves: what may come will come inevitably; so long as the sky is still vaulted over our heads, we always survive. But survival is invariably an occasion for painful remembrances, from which we are less likely to release ourselves without certain lasting agonies or scars. Dimly we began to notice the flight of time, and we read James Joyce’s words in  The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  with a premature forlornness: “Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.” Time shall be no more but time also etched in us indelible imprints ...

Jean Luc Godard’s first feature feels oddly like a swansong: in many respects the film seems a self-mockery of what it ostensibly celebrates – the new, the bold, the reckless; the 60s zeitgeist that resurrects the anguished ghosts of the 1920s, who, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, grow up to “find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” For the children of the ‘60s, their wars are of a kind in which the opponents constantly change roles: sometimes they are the unmerciful authorities bent on making miserable lives out of their inferiors; in other times they are the society at large, weeding out in its insidious and devious way the errant law-breakers. They all seem to be donning the same masks, through which the warriors recognise themselves. This fight with one’s inner demon necessarily evokes concerns of mortality and death - timeless concerns that acquire an added pungency in the 1960s: would a dangerous, unheeding spell of hedonism finally defy life’s in...

During the period when F. Scott Fitzgerald was working in Hollywood, he was visited once by a fledgling writer who begged Fitzgerald to teach him the ropes of writing a good script. The young man’s first lesson was to compose a scene which involves only three characters; three different coloured pens were assigned to write the lines, with each colour representing one of the three characters. Enraged by the impression that Fitzgerald was mocking his inexperience, the young writer asserted aloud his qualification for the job and asked for a more constructive assignment. Fitzgerald’s response was one of even greater rage: the young writer was summarily dismissed on the ground of his irreverence for, what Fitzgerald considered, the rudiments of screenwriting. The virtue of Fitzgerald’s little exercise finds its most manifest justification in Ernst Lubitsch’s films, which regularly explore, often in a tone of frivolity or thinly-disguised sarcasm, the conflicts and the absurd dyn...

As a storyteller, Yasujiro Ozu insists on an implausibly objective stance that refrains from direct commentary or criticism; his camera customarily assumes the role of a detached observer, to whom the characters in the film, staring or talking straight to the camera, occasionally address, with an intimacy akin to that between a host and his guest, a closeness that is underpinned by a mutual recognition of the psychological distance that separates the two. The audience, whose perspective, in this case, conflates the camera’s (the director’s), an invisible character’s in the film (to whom the other characters address) and their own, is thus situated amidst this spatial complexity which, as a rule, every work of art necessarily creates. In Late Spring (1948), the camera serves in part as an underlying comment to the story, which is noted by its economy of details. A prolonged shot of a departing train, on which the father and daughter travel to the city for a one-day excursion,...