where I’m at—cinema, books, et al.
In the last couple of days, I have been immersed in Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography titled, Something Like An Autobiography. I believe, it was written a few years after he directed Kagemusha, which was actually the very first Kurosawa film that I watched over a decade ago. Earlier this summer, I visited Varanasi with my family and went to Harmony The Bookshop at Assi Ghat and picked out two books that my father decided to gift to me. One of them is this, and the other one is Sartre’s War Diaries.
It was only natural to me to download Kurosawa’s entire filmography and make plans to acquire a poster of Kagemusha (I am still saving up for this). By combining literature with visual art, a truly rewarding experience was yielded. Going forward, I will always make it a point to supplement films with literature written by the respective directors. Here is an incredibly moving speech by Kurosawa upon receiving an honorary award at the 1990 Oscars:
There was a great deal of World War consequences that made film-making difficult in Japan, especially with its strained economy and imminent loss in World War II with the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which made me wonder about the state of affairs of the world during the 20th century. I was wary of documentaries and their propagandist tendencies—having taught a film course just last year to a class of 200 first-year students at university and so I didn’t quite know where to look for information.
I never considered myself to be someone who would enjoy historical non-fiction but I am beginning to think that revisionist history could be my new source of excitement and joy—especially if it is written by Timothy Snyder. As I make my way through the book, I am slowly compiling a list of films based on the World Wars to supplement my understanding of the war and also understand the role of cinema when war was all that the world witnessed and remembered. Once I finish compiling the list, I will probably put it up here.
On a lighter note, my friend Niloofar and I recently watched Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami on my projector last weekend with a huge spread of various cheese, red wine, bureks, fruits, dips, pita, dark chocolate dipped pecans, and cookies. One can tell that she and I are too Asian to simply settle for popcorn and chips. Here’s a beautiful still of the film being cast on my wardrobe doors by my projector: