Chelsea the Cinéaste

There is a notion that life is a futile pursuit of the ever-unattainable balance. Men are creatures of contrariety, incessantly flitting from one extreme state of mind to another; rarely predictable and always volatile. Human caprice has a way of conciliating the opposing sensations, of confounding their differing values and gradually assimilating them into one. That explains why we sometimes find ourselves irresistibly drawn to the things we fear, or react with sudden repugnance someone to whom we’ve harboured a long-standing affection. Balance has no part in this ceaseless tumult of the warring forces- and yet all our life we strive for it, even if the vision of it is a glimmering star that winks at us fools who try unavailingly capture it. Less about the ongoing, workaday struggle to find balance in life, Edward Albee’s  A Delicate Balance  is more concerned with the corrosive effect of keeping up a semblance of balance amidst the mounting chaos. At first glance ...

“Less is more” is a difficult balance to negotiate when dealing with proscribed subjects. There is always the concern that the illicit will no longer be as such if subjected to too much attenuation; or if the expression is couched in too abstract a language. Coarseness is at the nucleus of matters like sex and violence- attempt at over-refinement would be as ineffectual and absurd as giving a solemn speech to a table of revellers. In this case, less is definitely advisable, but only under the condition that it contains promises of the more. As with Noel Coward’s  Design for Living , there is barely any need for overexplicitness. The play centers on a ménage  à  trois in Paris 1932, during the period of  Les années folles , or the “Crazy Years,” which saw the city’s artistic culture reaching an insuperable peak. Characters were drawn from real life: Coward indebted the play to his actor friends, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, whose long marriage was bedevil...

Colour, as Alfred Hitchcock told   François Truffaut   in a 1962 interview, is nonexistent. Every image or vision can be reduced to the stark elements of light and shade. Lines and colours are the spectral creations that materialise momentarily when exposed to lights. In film there are more instances of metaphorical darkness than those of actual, plunging darkness- the fact that every story is in a sense only a fraction of reality conditions the extent of the reader’s knowledge: like peeping into the lives of others one does more divining than actual registering of information. Nonetheless we are intrigued, of what could possibly happen in the intervals of the course of events, the parts that the author decides to omit, or to deliberately keep in secret so the reader is unprepared for the surprise to come. Every time I saw Hitchcock’s  Shadow of a Doubt  I found myself wondering incessantly how Uncle Charlie and Young Charlie manage to conceal from others t...

Obsession is a disease, the gnawing void of a heart that can never be filled but is ever expanding. As is warned by Virginia Woolf- “All extremes of feeling are allied with madness”- any obsessive has the making of a madman. The causes are more often than not inconsequential: one simply pricks ears too incessantly at the subtle goings-on next door, gaping too indiscreetly at a habitué of the local diner, or harbouring too absorbedly amorous illusions of someone one knows never truly exists. In the long run an obsession invariably extends to something pathological: the overriding, engrossing focus on an object exterior to oneself comes to assume the importance of life and death, as though it were the indispensible excrescence of one’s growingly implausible existence. Obsession hovers around the diverse nominal subjects of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, most of which are at their core studies of human desire when bordering on destructive fixedness. Hitchcock has an unavowed proclivit...

In an interview with Paris Review James M. Cain made no bones of his aversion to films: “There are some foods some people just don’t like. I just don’t like movies.” Whether the avowal was merely an impulsive remark, or a manifestation of latent condour, it contradicted Cain’s fame with Hollywood and his past occupation as a screenwriter. From what can be gathered of the author’s reception of films that were derived from his works- the three most famous:  Double Indemnity ,  Mildred Pierce ,  The Postman Always Rings Twice were released successively from 1944 to 46- there is little indication of an abrupt shift of opinion later in life. Maybe it was less of a sudden repugnance of films than a nagging insistence of separating the authenticity of the books from the reduced value of their filmic translations. It is no easy task adapting Cain’s novels into films. His debut,  The Postman Always Rings Twice , was published in 1934 but it had taken Hollywood a dec...

John Buchan wrote what is perhaps his most known novel,  The Thirty-Nine Steps , the first of the five espionage thrillers that feature a bumbling, relatable hero Richard Hannay, in bed with a stomach ulcer. The bodily pain that accompanied the writing, and henceforth dogged his entire life, was recompensed with the fulsome reception of the book, especially from those who were fighting in the trenches during WWI. A soldier wrote Buchan: “The story is greatly appreciated in the midst of mud and rain and shells, and all that could make trench life depressing.” Buchan’s classic has all the stock materials that make up for a potent morale-booster: an everyman stumbles into an international conspiracy, undergoes every conceivable hazard and hardship, grapples with his limited means and amidst troubled water, finally and narrowly salvaging his own country from the boiling soup. Published in 1919 and at a time when the nation is battening down hatches for the imminent war, the s...

In 1946 the great American photographer Edward Weston, when being proffered the opportunity of capturing Point Lobos in Kodachromes, then a new invention, readily declined. He suspected that the intrusion of colours in a photograph would mar the peculiar beauty that only monochrome could achieve. Later, however, Weston confronted his undue reservations: “The prejudice against colour comes from not thinking of colour as form . You can say things with colour that can’t be said in black and white.” The notion of colour as form turns colour into an entity independent of the object to which it assumes an ontological subservience. In this new way of seeing we can say that an orange is regarded not as a fruit coloured with orange but a fruit that entails a contiguous existence of the colour orange. “Those of us who began photographing in monochrome spent years trying to avoid subject matter exciting because of its colour […] we must now seek subject matter because of its colour.” Weston u...