| Thursday, April 30, 2009 5:45PM | | | | Literary Film Feast | Posted By: Robert Flynn
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| Tags: Instituto Cervantes, Rattapallax, Ram Devineni, DJ Kadagian, Pablo Neruda, Bob Holman, Allaen Ginsberg, India
| In 1991, the government of Spain opened the Instituto Cervantes in New York to promote the language and culture of the Spanish-speaking world. The institute has a gallery for shows by Spanish artists, offers classes in Spanish language, film, literature, wine and gastronomy, has a library with 83,000 Spanish books, magazines, DVDs and films and an extensive music collection. Outside the library is a small courtyard for readers on a pleasant day. The Amster Yard is believed to be the terminal stop of the Boston stagecoach on the Eastern Post Road. The gallery was once the studio of the sculptor Isamo Noguichi.
It’s a great place to spend days or evenings but we’re here for the Rattapallax/PEN Literary film feast. (Disclosure: I’ve always thought film as Cinderella’s cruel step-sister, trying to steal Art’s noble crown) Ram Devineni reminded us of the theme of the World Voices Festival: How does the world change, how do we change? Through evolution or revolution? Human beings used the same tools, harvesting and gathering in the same ways for centuries then there was an epiphany, an eruption, someone learned to make fire or the uses of a wheel and life took a dramatic turn, although some feared man would burn up the world or that wheels would crush someone’s foot.
At some point humans invented time. There was a future for which you should plan. And a past that you should record. Seeds were placed in the ground so that when you came again there would be grain to harvest. Animals and hunting stories were drawn on the walls of caves where they would be sheltered from the destruction of nature. Stories were told around campfires and retold so that they would not be forgotten.
Today, someone like DJ Kadagian sees poems in visual ways and uses music, dance, spoken words, stock film footage, and film so that others can see them the way he does. He wasn’t a student of poetry but reads a lot of poetry and some of it he wants to transform or translate as film. He has used poetry by Carl Sandberg, Robert Bly, Langston Hughes but for me the filming of Pablo Neruda's poem about oil did what art is supposed to do. Delight, enlighten and inform.
Bob Holman showed his film of Allen Ginsberg in India. I was more interested in India than in Ginsberg. As Holman said after showing his film, India changes you. India also assaults your senses. You are overwhelmed by the people, by the ugliness, by the beauty, by the sights, smells, tastes.
Anything can happen in India. In New Delhi a monkey toppled a pot off the roof of a building killing a tourist below. A tiger escaped from the Delhi zoo and killed a man. Our bus was delayed by a man driving a donkey herd down a major street in the city. We saw a camel pulling a wagon load of new computers. While I climbed a hill to see a temple to the monkey god, my wife waited below on a bench. A monkey sat beside her on the bench and to the amusement of tourists, the monkey urinated on her long skirt.
Ah, India. No wonder the British tried so hard to remain. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether Holman captured the spirit of Ginsberg but he filmed the spirit of India.
The evening ended with a disturbing film by Ram Devineni about the seduction of young black males by gangster movies. That takes me back to the beginning. It wasn’t cheap entertainment. It wasn’t art by committee. It wasn’t titillating. It was a powerful statement of the consequences of box-office morality. | | | |
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