| Wednesday, April 29, 2009 9:22AM | | | | The Karma of Endangered Languages | Posted By: Peter H. Fogtdal
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| Tags: Bob Holman, Ram Devineni, literary film feast, Raphael Chevenement, Allen Ginsberg's Karma, Lucia | It's icily cold in Instito Cervantes on 49th Street. Maybe the Spanish institute wants us to forget it's a beautiful night outside. But we can live with this onslaught of air condition since we're going to watch a lot of short films.
And what a feast it is. For two hours we "visit" India, Chile, Israel, and Chicago. We travel through landscapes that touch us to films that are downright pretentious. However, all of them are poetry in motion, so to speak - they explore the relationship between words and image. So we laugh, we smile, we are enlightened and irritated - what more can you ask for, while you freeze to death in beautiful surroundings?
I fall in love with three films. The first is called Lucia from Santiago de Chile, a short film taking place inside the head of a small girl with a twisted imagination. It's wonderfully scary, the world seen from the point of view of a girl who's a liar. At least, let's hope so, or I never want to go to Chile. A stunning piece of work, dark, odd - a nightmare.
Another short that spoke to me was A Private Lesson by Raphael Chevenement. It's French and about a seventeen year old boy who is struggling with understanding a poem by Victor Hugo. At the same time he has a crush on his tutor. The film is subtle, funny, and poetic. If it had been made in Scandinavia, the student and the tutor would've had sex within minutes. Not so here. The film was extremely well acted and reminded me of my own securities when I was seventeen. Ah, those golden days of lost opportunities and pimples.
The centerpiece of the evening was Ginsberg's Karma, a documentary about the Beat poet's spiritual journey to India. I actually don't know much about Allen Ginsberg, but I thought Ram Devineni's film was wonderful. "Are drugs a short cut to Enlightenment?" Ginsberg asks at one point. The answer is no, of course. It's a short cut to poetry and mental institutions, but when you travel in India you often find that you've been committed to one.
I've been to India eight times myself and I could smell the cow dung and the incense - Ram Devineni brought it back to me. There were so many great scenes in the film. I loved the Sadhus with their red clay pipes, and I identified with Ginsberg and his longing for mind blessing and benediction. We're all universes of skin, he said while walking around beautiful, awful Calcutta with its ash smeared holy men, its burning corpses, and its tree demons that are out to get you.
The film also followed poet Bob Holman, one of Ginsberg's "students", to the India of today. Holman answered questions at the event - questions like why he had given his New York Metro card to a Sadhu in Calcutta. A philosophical question if I ever heard one. Holman also told us about his work with endangered languages - how he worries about them dying out because "languages are a poet's tool, a whole world dies out when they disappear."
Since I'm Danish I can relate to that. My language is spoken by only five million people and right now I feel like a traitor because I'm writing in English - the Great Satan of Blogging. So shame on me.
But believe me, I still get Holman's point. It's an important one because dialects and small languages disappear quicker than we know. The world gets less diverse by the minute - we're simply running out of unpronounceable words. And we don't read a lot of foreign literature, either. Or watch foreign films unless Penelope Cruz is in them.
However, PEN makes up for that, so what a great evening it was at Instituto Cervantes. The Literary Film Feast was a feast! And hey, I even survived the air condition. | | | |
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THE TSAR'S DWARF
My tragicomic historical novel, (translated from Danish by Tiina Nunnally), with blurbs from Joanna Scott and Sebastian Barry.
Read review from San Diego Union-Tribune,
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