THAT OTHER WORLD

Are some media, in their very forms, more powerful than others? I’m not a movie person, but the last few I’ve seen have had an impact on me disproportionate to their artistic merit. As a child I spent time in India with my grandparents at their homes in Tamilnadu and Kerala. Lion, with scenes set in Madhya Pradesh and Bengal, and starring an eight-year-old boy, brought back a sense of the county’s landscape and cities. And White Sun, set in a remote hilltop village in Nepal, and featuring two school-age children, brought back very particular memories of my childhood visits.

Though White Sun shows an entirely different country, geography, language, and era, many of its details are familiar to someone who has spent time in rural India. The movie shows us a line of mens shirts hanging on a rope strung to between two rafters, a woman coaxing a cooking fire by blowing through a mournful-sounding brass tube, the primeval darkness of a street lit only by stars. More remarkably, the movie brought back memories specific to my childhood. One sequence recalled the slope of lush, untended forest at the back of my paternal grandparents house, navigated by a run of steep stone steps, through monsoon rains. And one character, an orphaned boy from a neighboring village, reminded me of how unsettled I felt during those visits, without a deep understanding of the language and the customs. The film left me immensely sad that my grandparents and their ways of living are gone, and that my own daily life is, in comparison, sterile, less charged with sensuality and meaning.

Is there something essential about film that has the power to stir strong feelings? The form encompasses so many others: painting, speech, story, music, movement. And the film camera, in addition to its narrative, captures layers of incidental details that build its own convincing world. That other world, so particular, can catch on violently to a viewer’s. Is this a testimony to the richness of the medium, or to the viewer’s desires?

White Sun, 2016, by Deepak Rauniyar.

September 10, 2017 by Nalina Moses

How do we represent something too horrible to represent? When 27 people, 20 of them young children, were shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connectictut last month, many news outlets showed a photo of a police officer and a teacher leading a line of children to safety. Each child held her arms out around the shoulders of the child in front of her, as if it were some kind of playground game. There is fear on the children’s faces and one girl is shrieking. Yet the image doesn’t convey the extraordinary facts of the tragedy: that people are shooting at small children, and that twenty of them are dead. Except for a photo of the bloodshed, what could have conveyed that?

Six days later, after the victims' bodies had been identified and their families notified, The New York Times listed their names on the front page, in white letters, across a black field three-columns-wide and half-a-page high. Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC was unveiled in 1982, the act of listing victims’ names in memorial architecture has become standard practice, almost a design cliche. But the listing in the newspaper is especially powerful. It exploits the traditional broadsheet format: words on paper, black and white graphics, and the authoritative Times type face. The big black box, uncomfortably off-center, is severe. The italicized letters are stately, like those on a formal invitation, or a gravestone. Reading the list is wrenching. These children have the kind of enchanted first names (Chase, Grace, Aviella) we give children now, and last names (Irish, Italian, Chinese, hyphenated) that conjure something of their family life. Beside each victim's name the Times lists her age. All of the children were 6 or 7, and reading these numbers again and again is staggering. Even the ages of the adult victims, from 25 to 52, are irrationally young. The list capures a gravity and complexity that most photographs of the event just don’t.

January 23, 2013 by Nalina Moses