Love and Anarchy: Grigris

Grigris, an African film from Chad, that I saw at the Helsinki International Film Festival had pretty bad actors (or maybe I'm just not used to African style of acting) and very traditional storyline, but I just loved watching it. I felt so happy seeing the African landscape and the African dusty roads and villages. It must be pretty weird, but I felt a bit home-sick.

Too bad, my next holiday flights are already booked for Asia... 

Hmm, I guess I need to live Africa through culture for a while then. Luckily, I have a pile of African literature waiting for me and our last book club reading was The Last Flight of the Flamingo by Mia Couto from Mozambique. How funny, by the way, that we wanted to pick up an African novel by a female author and chose this one among many alternatives. So it was a bit of a surprise when I opened the book the first time and a photo of a white guy greeted me. Mia...

Love and Anarchy: Omar

Once again the Helsinki International Film Festival "Love and Anarchy" offered an excellent selection of movies. 

I went to see five films and while I can recommend all of them, I was perhaps mostly touched by the last film I saw on Saturday. It was a film called Omar by a Palestine film director Hany Abu-Assad. Probably I would have been satisfied just watching the gorgeous principal actor Adam Bakri, but not only that, the film was excellent. The story was like a Shakespeare's tragedy and the spectator can only wish the movie to end quickly so she knows how badly it will end. At some point you just realise that it won't end with a honeymoon in Paris.

Already the beginning of the film is powerful, showing the crossing of the wall surrounding West Bank. The wall is absurd and depressing, anyone should see that. However, the film is not strongly taking sides in the Israel-Palestina conflict. It rather shows the human tragedy taking place in this context - love, betrayal, loyalty, trust. The insanity of wars! The vicious cycles connected to this conflict. In short, a film worth watching, though be aware of some post-film anxiety. 

The conflict in the Middle East hasn't interested me for ages because it seems to be without an end. However, after a good friend of mine spent some time in Palestina as a volunteer, I have taken a new interest in the place. Omar also shows beautiful aspects of the country (and I'm not only talking about the actor playing Omar, but the film in general). Definitely a place to visit in the future.

Life out of balance

The Helsinki Festival had a special focus on the American composer / pianist Philip Glass this year. I went to see his beautiful piano recital, but of more interest was the film Koyaanisqatsi for which he had composed the music. The festival also presented the film in the Music Centre of Helsinki with live music, but I opted for the cheap version in the cinema (perfect!).

The film was absolutely gorgeous and the theme was obviously close to my heart: the exploitation of the planet by humans, the consequences and the craziness of it all. The film is directed by Godfrey Reggio and it was made already thirty years ago. However, the theme is even more actual now. In fact, it is devastating to see how things have only got worse. When will we learn that our way of life is not good for us or our surroundings?

The word 'koyaanisqatsi' is Hopi indian language, meaning 'life out of balance'. How wonderful that they have a specific word for that, it is a truly useful word. The film excellently portrays how life is out of balance: that is, humans and the nature are not in balance and humans are not in balance with themselves.

The film starts with amazing images from somewhere in Arizona or Nevada desert. At first, you think that it will be a film of the beauty of the nature. But suddenly, the tone of the music changes and emerge the tractors, the huge machines turning around the soil, explosions, oil rigs. Exploitation of the planet. After the beautiful images, it's a shock. The film goes on to show images of cities and human constructions. 8-lane highways in the USA. Skyscrapers. Big cities. You are simultaneously aghast but also admiring the capacity of the engineers to create and manipulate our environment. A capacity that is so grand that it makes you a little scared as well. 

However, all these constructions and destruction of the nature doesn't seem to make us happy. A sequence of the film with fast and almost psychedelic music and images makes you think of the craziness of our busy and stressed out lives. Like ants working working working without any idea why, no time to think what we are doing and why. And could there be any other way. We don't treat only the nature in a shameful way but also other nations, other people.

The films ends with the explosion of a spacecraft,  I guess the images were of Challenger exploding after its take-off. It was a great symbol for the capacity of the humans to create unimaginable things, but also how this engineering intelligence and greediness lead us to our own fall.

Fellini: on the realisation of mediocrity

I did a little Federico Fellini movie marathon this past week. Well, not so little actually, considering the length of his films (La Dolce Vita is almost 3 hours long). I saw four excellent movies:

8 1/2 (1963)

Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Il Bidone (1955)

Watching his movies with such an intensity might have affected my mood recently. First of all, after being immersed in his amazing surreal settings, my own life felt quite mediocre: no exciting parties with the aristocracy, no orgies with fantastic characters, no bohemian artists or gorgeous celebrities. And above all, no Marcello! Secondly, especially 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita have a melancholic undertone that raises the question of the meaning of life and offers fertile ground for wondering about the quest of love and existence in general. Something has also happened to me in the past few years, as I now understood the lost character of Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita much better than when I last saw the film.

The films were great, all of them, and Italy in the 1960s seemed wonderful. With the exception of Il Bidone, the fusion of dream and reality (which is also very dream-like) was the typical character of the films. Together with the great music by Nino Rota, I could have continued watching the beautiful moving images for hours.

Watching Marcello Mastroianni, I felt desperate about the Finnish guys and started thinking seriously about moving abroad again (obviously not only because of the guys, but because I feel more and more like an outsider in this society, and this can be an especially strong feeling in one's own home country). I miss those passionate-vibrant guys of Southern Europe, they seem to be more alive and more vulnerable to the beauty/exceptionality of women. After 1,5 years in Finland, I'd now be happy if someone called me in the street: "Mademoiselle, mademoiselle, vous avez de beaux yeux..." Sad.

Then, just before starting to write this, I read in the New Yorker book review about a British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: "Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise we are setting ourselves up for bitterness." His point is to avoid mourning for the lives we are unable to live - a source of an endless trauma.

In his book "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life" he writes about love: "There is a world of difference between erotic and romantic daydream and actually getting together with someone; getting together is a lot more work, and is never exactly what one was hoping for. So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction."

His book sounds really interesting, and I don't think his main message is that we should  necessarily settle for the life we have. Indeed, the article continues that Phillip believes that we are not forced (by others) to settle for the life we are living, but we choose to do so. In other words, we should take responsibility for our own lives - and for changing it as well if we wish to do so.

It is actually not a wonder that I end up from Fellini to modern psychoanalysis. Fellini undertook Jungian psychoanalysis during his mid-life crisis and probably in his film 8 1/2 we see some traces of his own process (Boston Review offers an interesting analysis of the film and Fellini).

In the next post, I will write about all the wonderful things happening in my life and in Helsinki...

Small is beautiful

There has been a long silence in the blog front recently, or more precisely, in my personal presence here. I think I have too big ambitions and not enough time. I see myself as a New Yorker journalist (apologies for all the New Yorker journalists) and then I try to write something here between work and yoga classes. As you might have seen, it's not working. From now on, I will be focusing on small things only, that's it, on small escapes, god dammit! Or they can, and certainly will, be big things, but I will write about them in a smallish way.

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The objective for the new year, in addition to enjoying small things, is to eat more vegan, do more yoga and find my inner Zen. Indeed, it's New Age stuff, baby! Well, to be honest, it's about things that increase my wellbeing - both mental and physical. Very simple (and selfish?). I get angry, upset or annoyed by things that I cannot change or have an impact on. Why bother? Hence, the thing about finding my inner Zen is about priorities of emotions and actions. (Next year, I might write a self-help book - not!)

This means focusing on the first two things on the following list. Number three is a lost case, I'll try not to waste time on those things too much.

1. Things that I can decide upon myself.

2. Things that I have an impact on.

3. Things that I can't influence.

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Small things, like telling about the small beautiful events that made my day. That should be the point of this blog because I don't have (concentration) skills or time or energy for anything else (please, I do research at work, I can't do it in my blog). 

Yesterday, I saw this amazing film "The Beasts of the Southern Wild". A wonderful and truly beautiful film with great music and an incredible young girl, Quevenzhané Wallis, as the main actress. This film really had a huge impact on me. It's a magical film that tells us about the connection between humans and the nature. It was so funny and so sad. It had a grasp of the real world in a fantastical way. It is a film that you need to talk about with a friend afterwards - and those are the best films.