Dibyendu's WallScript

The smell of dead sighs roams this room, ancient and circling. Only when Dipankar is alone does he sense it. A room means four walls and a roof. In the materialist’s philosophy, a space fenced by four walls means solitude and secrecy—individualism. A middle-class room means household; for saints it becomes a house of prayer. In this room, along the four walls, the idols of knowledge have risen in ranks—in the shape of books. Those books carry a faint sour-salty taste, like a tongue sliding along a brass plate— which, after a while, turns sweet upon the tongue. Thus this becomes a place where a person can rightly accuse himself. Beyond the tri-boundary of this room begins the indivisible world, and with that whole Dipankar keeps a single electric connection: upon the room’s only tea-table sits a pitch-black, ancient telephone. To dial even one digit on its wheel, you must spin it at least seven times.   Dipankar’s hair stands to the left, defying gravity. After an afternoon rice-sle...

He may well be called Europe’s great hero—though certainly not of mainstream celluloid. He was the great hero of art cinema. For more than fifty years he stood, in his own right, as Europe’s representative figure. In the court of world cinema, among the few actors who left a permanent mark, Marcello Mastroianni remains one. As an icon, he is the very emblem of cinema’s intellectual tradition.   Visconti, Blasetti, Fellini, Antonioni, Angelopoulos—Europe’s most renowned filmmakers discovered in him the distilled essence of European manhood. In Europe’s darkest hours of crisis, Mastroianni became its hero. In his performances, the anguish of the age, its doubts, anger, grief, despair—all found visible form. Fellini declared that the face of this introspective actor was none other than the mirror of Europe’s collective self-consciousness. It was Fellini’s La Dolce Vita that first gave Mastroianni international fame.   In early life he acted on stage, and during his days of impris...

Some images wander eternally as symbols of the invisible. Some scenes are not merely visual—they transform into rhythmic poetry.   The camera has only one eye. The gift of two human eyes lies in seeing the same scene from two simultaneous, divergent perspectives. But the camera’s single eye sees from only one end, one angle, at one time. And within that single frame, it must convey multidimensional feeling. In this sense, the one-eyed camera is a limitation. Yet it is also the staircase to transcendence.   I am reminded of Picasso’s cubism. An artist’s space is bound within the vessel of time, place, and object—what in the language of art we call dimension. Length, breadth, height, and time: four dimensions of reality. And yet artists have always invoked another—a fifth dimension, entirely imagined. A dimension that Einstein too uncovered, altering the very definition of creation in the twentieth century.   E = mc ²: Einstein’s new foundation for human history. Energy, ma...

He never was a poet of God’s making; The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull, With this prophetic blessing – Be thou Dull; Drink, Swear, and roar, Forbear no lewd delight Fit far thy bulk, do anything but write. — John Dryden   From Plato’s imagined Republic, not a single poet could truly be banished. Even today, with his thinning bag of tricks and a few lingering vagabond extravagances, he appears, undeterred. The city’s thousand blind Dhritarashtras search for him, wishing to seize him once as a “friend”—only then to shatter him to pieces.   And the poet? He hides himself in the shadows, presenting to society a decoy, a counterfeit self: a cold, lifeless, iron effigy of the poet. For self-preservation he remains beyond the grasp of blind hands—or, exploiting their blindness, extends toward them only his iron duplicate. Is this why, in resistance, the poets of the world today have all withdrawn, half-fox and half-ascetic?   My intent had been to write about the poet...

I had asked him only a single question—because I had the fortune of speaking with him only once. With Subrata Mitra, the greatest cinematographer India has ever produced.   His tall frame, his calm face framed by a halo of white hair, evoked wonder again and again. I kept thinking—these were the very eyes that first witnessed the world-famous images on celluloid. This was the man who, if he disagreed, never spared even Satyajit Ray or James Ivory.   There was a time when I was seized with the feverish urge to learn the philosophy of the cinematic camera. In that fever, I found myself seated, spellbound, as his student at the Film and Television Institute of India, in a cinematography class once conducted by Satyajit Ray. To sit in the presence of the god of cinematography, to swallow his words with open-mouthed reverence.   And then, after class, to nervously hurl one timid question, my heart pounding like a drum. Who knew that this would turn out to be the hardest questi...