Dibyendu's WallScript

Shamit was astonished. As if cool white snow were falling from the sky. On the ground people’s minds were unwell. Everything seemed to be congealing. The field where Shamit stood was ringed by ancient banyan trees. In the slanting late afternoon, the sweat of those trees slid down into the soil and soaked the grass.   A flock of crows was driving a neelkanth—an Indian roller—before them. The colored bird, exhausted in flight, found the crows arrowing in with a hiss. From the left one crow jabbed its beak into the roller’s ribs; another clamped its throat like a pair of tongs. Staggering, the neelkanth began dropping toward the earth—only to snag upon a leafless branch. Four or five crows now circled and penned it in. Trapped in a wheel of assault, it suffered peck after peck until, at last, it fell lifeless onto the world’s wet breast. Such a cruel falling for so beautiful a bird left Shamit stunned. The snows truly were descending upon the earth, tireless.   Shamit began to s...

The world needs cinema now more than ever. It may be the last important form of resistance to the deteriorating world in which we live. In dealing with borders, boundaries, the mixing of languages and cultures today, to seek a new humanism, a new way. ~ Theo Angelopoulos   A faint blue—at times the boundless sky, at times the undulating surge of sea-waves, mist-filled horizons stretching into infinity—and a yellow that sometimes deepens into a reddish hue: a massive ship, a railway carriage, an old house, a boulevard, a cheap restaurant in the city, a bustling street. These few colors float with stoic indifference through Theo Angelopoulos’s parables, in his frames, in his worlds of social life.   There is, in color, some secret warmth of relationship. Blue—tranquil and cool—set against yellow—violent, fragmented—projects knowledge at the core of their dialectic. A scientist will tell you: at forty-thousand Kelvin, matter appears blue to the human eye; at only fifty-five hundr...

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...