Tall Glass of Moving Images


Moving images. Isn't there a magic in those moving images? That feeling, am sure, we all as a kid must have felt when we gazed at the beam of light piercing into the darkened auditorium of a cinema hall from the projector room. Often wondering, what actually happens back there? How is it that those images that we see on the screen are rendered by a beam of light? Never mind, the intellectualized verbalization that we have now; but no mix of words (no matter how profound or how rich in grammar they get!) can ever accurately reproduce that emotional exhilaration that we felt in our bones.

Lumiere Brothers, the pioneers of film making and the leading inventors of camera that helped capture the moving images ensured that the world would never be the same again. Their silent documentary Arrival of a Train at the Station which was so humbly referenced and also tributed to in Martin Scorsese's Hugo has remained a touchstone image for movie buffs.

The singularly greatest thing about both Lumiere Brothers' original and Scorsese's tribute sequence is the perpetual sense of wonderment and a sense of rediscovery of not just the thrill; but also of the sheer magnetic pull of the moving images.

Take for example, the sequence in Lumiere Brothers' film thrills and even scares the audience because for the first time they discovered something that was moving (images) and they got scared that the train that was moving in a frame might actually barrage out of the frame and rush towards them. Such was the wonderment. And now in Hugo, when Hugo Cabret goes with the girl to the library to read about the history of cinema, the same scene from the earlier classic is rendered - only this time in color and in 3D. And the excitement and the exhilaration is still the same. What the use of 3D does to that scene is it retains the feeling of the train coming towards you and running all over you. Frankly speaking, I have never seen such a romantic tribute to cinema, ever! It only makes sense that Hugo was set in Paris, the romantic capital of the world.
 



















Edwin Porter, the man who directed The Great Train Robbery and many other classics, was the auteur who defined the cinematic grammar for a generation since. His contribution to shot-by-shot breakdown and continuity editing and by that extension to the whole cinematic language forever can never be measured in any terms conceived. We, the audiences and the film makers, can only be thankful and remain indebted to him for the rest of our lives.

Why do I write this piece? I don't know? What do I intend to achieve out of this? I am not sure. I guess, this piece is just my insatiable hunger for cinema that makes me write this. Off late, I have been watching a lot of movies, more old classics and less new. Venturing into the arenas of International cinema (not Hollywood!). There are classics enough there for people to spend their lives with. The images that such auteurs as Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Sergio Leone, Satyajit Ray, Fellini and De Sica and many more have created are so raw, yet so intimate, so human and so powerful that one can spend an entire leaf just looking at them and sometime wondering not just about the technical details behind those images; but the universality of emotions and human nature that at the end of it all screams in pain of only the decadence that the cultures world over have subjected themselves to in order to embrace momentary gains. We are living in a culture of momentary gains where art, imagination and interpretation are words that are spoken in hushed tones and a debate around them is crushed. This is a culture where blind obsession with money, fame and gloss have taken such firm root, that mediocrity is celebrated and encouraged.

 


 

What then happens to film makers who are still willing their necks out? What then happens to those film makers who lived to sign every frame of their film with their blood? This question brings only one image to my mind:

 


 

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