dianafilms

Happy Birthday Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power,
and where power predominates, love is lacking.
The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung, "On the Psychology of the Unconscious", 1917

on art, life and inspiration...

Artists & Creatives require time to stare out the window. The words are sometimes right outside, just waiting for your gaze to soften long enough to see without looking. If that does not work you can always glue your ass to the chair and get to work.

TFTD: Zinger

Even the best projects have difficult people, just make sure you're not one of them. Francesca Prada on set 2008

TFTD

To Be of Use The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy

catharsis, comedy and the importance of laughter

without laughter there's no insight and no growth. I've often thought that comedians at the height of their talents are also healers and philosophers. Actors, artists, writers and performers can also be healers and philosophers and in some cases therapists that heal rooms full of people, even if its just for a few hours. Those two hours can be all a person needs to get perspective and be drawn into a greater awareness of the human condition.

Proposition 8, hate speech at McCain Rallies, the rise of Bush and his ilk

This blog, well, so far, its mainly about work here and the occasional personal reflection. Instead today I'm appalled that prop 8 is even on a ballot, let alone gaining the support it has. I was equally stunned by the bear baiting that went on at McCain/Palin rallies, the hate speech against Obama, the lies, the smears.

I could talk about civil rights, human rights and dignity until I'm blue in the face.
Instead, I'm just posting a poem which was powerful then and as relevant than now.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. © Pastor Martin Niemöller 1976

creature comforts-art

Camus-tftd

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that one can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding them. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.--camus

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived  
forwards--camus

Colette & Nin

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anais Nin

Flying with one Wing

Every once in a while I see a film that stays with me.
Flying with one wing is a film that I can't get out of my head.
The same year it was released internationally, the film was banned in its native Sri Lanka.
That same year the prime minister made some absurd remarks about feminists and lesbians and women in general needing a good man to give them 'what for' of all the absurd things, the same day an international conference was taking place in Sri Lanka, the same prime minister released convicted rapists from a local prison while making that statement. Gender politics in Sri Lanka seem twisted from my western perspective. I'm sure there is more to it, more nuanced than translation permits, and far more complicated than this blog could hope to cover.

That being said, Flying with One Wing is an incredibly made film, people have compared it to Boys Don't Cry, but it goes further and shows trans identity as a slice of life rather than an anomaly.

If you ever get a chance to see this film, please do. Brave, beautiful and graceful. We should all be so lucky to make a film like this.

"It looks as though that the medial fraternity, artistic community and the so-called guardians of culture are getting organised to question me even more once the film has been shown (...)
I am ready to face your attack so that you can sharpen your weapons. Actually what I really want is for the film to be discussed."
Ashoka Handagama
(Excerpts of an interview in Sunday Island, 29/12/2002).

Here's a great write up from a Journo in France about the film:
The second cineaste is Ashoka Handagama whose This is My Moon was recently released in French theatres, author of, this time, a surprising Flying with One Wing, shot with a light budget specially on the sound side - Handagama is a bank employee who shoots his film during the week-ends or vacations.

http://www.chez.com/suriyakantha/flying4.jpg

Refused by many festivals except Saint Sebastian, then screened at Trois Continent at Nantes, the film slices with the aesthetical and narrative standards of the world cinema the good taste that jams the festivals.

Flying with One Wing amplifies the sexual tensions present in This is My Moon. Its subject matter is the male chauvinism and the sexism, that leaves the woman with an alternative in the job market: the enticing secretary vowed to the prostitution hardly disguised. Hence, the woman disguises as a man, like the heroine of the film who works as garage mechanic among other men, lives with a woman without disclosing his/her real nature. Commences then a complicated politico-sexual fable coupled with a joyful barbarity, sometimes cruel, deserving the best of Fassbinder in which everything is possible, from the sexuality's organic nature (and its possible misunderstanding) to the painful social organisation of a world based on the sexual differences. Caustic and really tonic.