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NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm

King of hypocrites

King of hypocrites

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Woman in the Dunes (1964)

 


One of the 1960s’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic world of Hiroshi Teshigahara


Nothing can quite prepare you for the sheer macabre strangeness of this Japanese classic by Hiroshi Teshigahara from 1964, presented by the British Film Institute in a new print. It's a Dali-esque canvas or imagist poem on celluloid - but meaning what? - which pulses with claustrophobia, panic, eroticism and despair.

An entomologist wanders the dunes searching for rare specimens; he is persuaded by local villagers to spend the night in a young widow's tumbledown shack at the bottom of a pit. The next morning he discovers that the rope-ladder has been taken away and, like the woman, he is a prisoner, forced to shovel sand out from the foundations of this house every night. All the time, the sands of time come down in a thin, insidious drizzle.




Why are they being kept like this? The widow hints that if they allow the shack to become deluged with sand, the foundations to the village settlement will collapse, and the villagers are in any case selling the "salt sand" to unscrupulous construction companies. Or perhaps it is just a mad, bizarre spectacle of cruelty for the sake of it. What counts is their horrified, sensual intimacy.

The movie is in black and white, and I have never seen any film use those two colours in such bold, retina-popping compositions. It's like a dream - the kind from which you awake bolt upright in a cold sweat.





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