Category Archives: Movies

Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter

Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a ‘scurvy bilge rat.’ Rather, he buys DVDs, makes multiple copies of them using a ‘duplicator’ and ships them to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has not kept an official count but estimates that he topped 80,000 discs a year during his heyday in 2007 and 2008, making his total more than 300,000 since he began in 2004….

That sounds like massive copyright infringement to me. And it is. But Mr. Strachman is not going to be brought to justice any time soon. Not even by the MPAA:

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said he did not believe its member studios were aware of Mr. Strachman’s operation. His sole comment dripped with the difficulty of going after a 92-year-old widower supporting the troops. “We are grateful that the entertainment we produce can bring some enjoyment to them while they are away from home,” Mr. Gantman said.

Mr. Strachman’s activity, if carried out by anyone else, for any other reason, would have brought the wrath of the Righteous Copyright Enforcers, sorry, the MPAA, on his head. But Mr. Strachman is doing it for ‘the boys over there,’ fighting for our freedom. So Mr. Gantman eases up, knowing well that if there is one line you do not cross, it is the one that would turn you into a non-supporter of the troops. (Except when you are going after retired generals speaking unfavorably about the conduct of wars overseas; then you load both barrels and fire.)

Of course, the studios have tried to help ‘our boys’ as well, ‘sending military bases reel-to-reel films…and projectors for the troops.’ The reason studios send ‘reel-to-reel films’  to military bases and not DVDs is that they are well aware that DVD-burners and laptops are a dime-a-dozen on bases, and that the young, just-above-teenaged soldiers who make up a sizable portion of the troops overseas are quite likely to respond to DVDs in precisely the same way that young, just-above-teenaged men and women in the US react to DVDs back home: They’d make copies of them or rip them and pass those on. The studios love ‘our boys,’ they just don’t trust them to observe the laws they are defending.

Note:  As expected, the New York Times article linked to above uncritically parrots an MPAA talking point:

Although the most costly piracy now takes place online through file-sharing Web sites, the illegal duplication of copyright DVDs — usually by organized crime in Eastern Europe and China, not by retirees in their 90s in the American suburbs — still siphons billions of dollars out of the industry every year.

It would be extremely useful for the Times to tell us how these staggering ‘billions and billions‘ numbers are calculated. For I have no idea. It would also be a useful enhancement of this debate if once, just once, the Times might talk about how movie attendance is enhanced by the word-of-mouth buzz created by the presence of ‘pirated’ DVDs and torrented versions of movies. Just once.

RIP Levon Helm, Thanks For The Memories

Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71. The only live performances of his that I have witnessed were on film, or rather, in one movie, The Last Waltz. And in particular, there was one that stood out, whose memories have endured, clearly, distinctly, across the many, many years that have passed between that day and this one: Helm’s rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Some of what was distinctive about that song and Helm’s take on it  is alluded to by Jon Pareles’ in yesterday’s New York Times:

In the Band, lead vocals changed from song to song and sometimes within songs, and harmonies were elaborately communal. But particularly when lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the American South — like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Ophelia” and “Rag Mama Rag” — the lead went to Mr. Helm, with his Arkansas twang and a voice that could sound desperate, ornery and amused at the same time.

But let’s back up for a second. I saw The Last Waltz in the company of high-school mates, at what might be termed a pre-matinee show, the so-called “morning shows” that used to be so common in Indian movie-houses in the 1970s and 1980s (and possibly before). The tickets were often sold at marked-down prices, and many off-beat gems could be found there. So off-beat in fact that there was often little publicity or hype associated with their release. The Last Waltz saw its release in such a time-slot. We knew little about the movie; we didn’t know it had been made by Martin Scorsese, and had no idea either, that its cast included  Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Ronnie Wood, and Neil Young. All we knew was that it was a concert movie featuring a band called, well, The Band. So we played hooky, scraped together the money required for the tickets, caught the right buses, traveled to the movie-house, bought our tickets, and filed in.

When Helm began singing “The Night..”, I was surprised; I had never seen a drummer do the vocals for a rock band before. And it quickly became clear to me that this was not just a fill-in gig; this man knew how to sing, and he sang with a ‘desperate’ passion that showed, in the urgency of his voice (and facial expression!), in the intensity of his pathos every time he sang “The night they drove old Dixie down/And the bells were ringing/The night they drove old Dixie down/And the people were singing.”

Truth be told, I didn’t understand what the lyrics meant, I didn’t understand, then, what time and place they had as their referents. All I knew, all I could sense, was that I was in the presence of a spirit pushed to the edge of his tether, brought to the brink of heartbreak by circumstance. That much I could somehow identify with, even if I was just a young Indian schoolboy, and the man inducing that feeling in me was from Arkansas, singing about a land, a people, and a time, very far away.

RIP Levon.

David Simon is a Little Too Proprietary About The Wire

David Simon has made some waves recently in a series of interviews regarding the Wire (here; here; and here), viewer’s relationships to it (and its characters). I’m not going to repeat or reproduce Simon’s remarks here; please do chase down the links. But in a nutshell: Simon (was) is unhappy about the ‘pop’ understanding of the Wire that seems to have made its way into our broader culture, a function, he thinks of its late uptake by a whole viewer demographic that wasn’t around when the show was struggling with ratings, an understanding that is obsessed about characters rather than the overarching theme or narrative, and that ‘misunderstands’ the show.

Simon’s remarks are peculiar for several reasons. For one, there is something rather quaint and old-fashioned in the suggestion that viewers are getting it wrong, that they misconceived the show, that there is, so to speak, some sort of gap between their understanding and take on the show and the meaning that Simon intended, and that this is a crucial lacunae. I hate to break the news to Simon, but once the show was made and released, any kind of control that he might have exerted over its meaning was gone. The show doesn’t exist in some autonomous region of meaning that Simon controls access to; it is in a place where its meaning is constructed actively by its spectators and in many ways by the larger world that it is embedded in.

What if, during the fourth season,  a fierce Diane Ravitch–Michelle Rhee-type debate had been  dominating airwaves elsewhere? Wouldn’t viewers of the Wire have had a very different interpretation of the show’s characters and action in that period? Is this something Simon could control or even cater for in his writing and direction? What if California and Washington had legalized marijuana during the third season? Would that not have affected viewers’ understandings of that season’s themes? This co-construction of meaning is a well-established trope in our understanding of how artworks acquire and establish traction. Simon might have had a vision and meaning for the show but having decided to give it to  viewers he must realize the work isn’t his anymore in any meaningful sense of the word.

The other peculiar point in Simon’s interview is his insistence that the Wire is a long-form story, that it is a coherent whole, and that it be understood as such and that the episodic reaction to it so typical of the long-running series relationship with its fans, gets it wrong. But Simon chose to work in a particular medium that afforded him freedom for lengthy development of character and plot.  The periodic release of the episodes meant–just as above–that their meaning was always going to be constructed over a period of time, subject always to those sort of short-term reactions typical of the television show. Why would Simon be surprised or upset by this? The Wire was the best television show ever and a great story. But those that watched also made it.

Side note: Much as I liked the Wire, I think Simon needs a reality check if he thinks his work was nothing but gritty realism (not that he ever makes any such claim in those interviews above but there is a kind of insistence on his having provided a social documentary). McNulty is a cliché in some ways; Omar, no matter how fascinating a character, is an implausible one; the drug markets in season three were ridiculous; the fifth season’s McNulty-creation of the serial killer was by far some of the most contrived story-telling I’ve ever seen. Simon might think he had transcended every single genre in making the Wire but he didn’t.

Tourism and the Invented Tradition

Ian Johnson interviews Tian Qing (New York Review of Books Blog, April 6th, 2012), the head of China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center, ”an institution set up by the government to protect China’s native traditions in the performing arts, cuisine, rituals, festivals, and other forms of culture” in an attempt to figure out whether these cultural forms are “being recovered as living traditions or as objects for urbanized Chinese to enjoy as tourists in their own land?”

In the course of his interview, Johnson asks whether modernization can be reconciled with the imperatives to protect, preserve and promote culture:

Can’t one unite the two? For example, Bach’s sacral music is now more often than not performed in a concert hall. The music has been preserved but has a different function in society.

Tian replies:

It’s possible. But it can lead to horrible things too. In Yunnan Xishuangbanna [a popular tourist area in China’s far south] there’s a Water Splashing Festival of the Dai minority. It’s related to the birthday of Sakyamuni and used to be once a year. But now people splash water on you every day. As long as tourists come, they splash water. It’s lost its religious function. Or after [the director] Zhang Yimou filmed Red Sorghum and showed the bride in a sedan chair. That used to take place in a really small area of Shanxi province. Now across the country at every tourist spot are people with sedan chairs for hire—hey, for 50 yuan you can ride in it. Tourism. It’s terrible.

Here tourism has performed a function similar to mass-manufacture: it has taken an artifact, possibly one crafted and custom-made, available only to a few in particular contexts and settings and suddenly, dramatically, made it available to all, to ‘the masses.’ In doing so tourism has made it more generic; its accessibility has increased, but it has lost a placement that made it possible, for instance, to possess the “religious function” whose loss Tian is concerned about. So, ironically, the ‘preservation’ of the cultural artifact or ritual require its displacement from those ‘privileged’ locations in time and space that granted that ritual its original meaning and raison d’etre. Its displacement from those locations preserves it by granting it popularized longevity at the cost of an acquired ordinariness.

And as Tian notes, now the ritual has a new function, that of ‘tourist-pleaser’, one that in time could acquire new significance;  future generations might view the water splashing followed by 21st century Dai residents of Yunnan Xishuangbanna as one about welcoming tourists;  presumably, this would be an interesting discovery about our times. In the case of the sedan chair ritual a cinematic force brings about the creation of a tradition; once the origins of the ritual are  forgotten, a new creation myth can come about which might ascribe that ritual a more elaborate and elevated provenance.

So tourism and cinema then most broadly can be seen as  bringing about what Hobsbawm termed the ‘invented tradition‘:

[R]esponses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.

The interventions of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center are bound, then, to create new cultural forms even as they seek to preserve older ones.

Aguirre and the Rainforest: Madness in a Theater Made For It

Werner Herzog‘s Aguirre: Wrath of God is a supremely effective cinematic meditation on madness; broadly speaking, it is able to marshal several progressions–that of the cinematic narrative; the journey into, through, and hopelessly within, an alien jungle-land; the simple passage of time–and run them alongside the descent into insanity of the movie’s eponymous central character.  It is this relentless, fatal, spiraling downward into a place we wish we never will see that remains the movie’s grimmest and most compelling attraction. It is entirely unsurprising to find this movement toward the darker regions of mind and space features a soundtrack that enjoys critical acclaim; Aguirre’s journey into madness has a symphonic majesty to it that demands, and finds, an appropriate musical accompaniment.

And this journey does not just take place anywhere. It  has a very singular location: the Amazonian rainforest.

What is truly peculiar about the rainforest is that it runs the contrasts of the wild densely together in an unrelentingly claustrophobic space: here is life, thick, lush, green, omnipresent, struggling constantly for space, water, air, sustenance; here too is death, the generations of plant and animal life trodden down, buried, integrated into the flesh of the rainforests’ new inhabitants; here is open space, untouched by man; here is space colonized by the forest’s growth.  All wildernesses remind us of remoteness from human concern; the rainforest throws up perhaps the thickest barriers against the exertion of human will.  This is a theater of madness par excellence.

When Aguirre’s daughter, Flores, is told by their Indian prisoner that they will never leave the rainforest, that they are doomed, the chill the viewer feels has been building for a while; the Indian has merely articulated what has thus far remained unsaid. He has finally forced attention to the elephant in the room: this journey is doomed, not just because of its leader’s megalomania, greed, and insanity, but also because of all the places in the world that he could have chosen to exercise his fevered, misguided vision, he has done so in a place so implacably indifferent and hostile to human ambition and desire. The backdrop for Aguirre’s story is that of the conquistador’s ‘conquest’ of the Americas; here, even that unstoppable juggernaut must finally come to a grinding, muddy, watery halt, strangled in the flora and fauna of the rainforest.

Aguirre’s book-ends possess a beautiful structural perfection: the opening scene captures the descent of a chain of tiny, struggling, destined-to-be-outmatched humans into a misty valley, accompanied by the soundtrack’s haunting opening notes; the final scene shows us Aguirre’s insanity is complete; he has announced his hallucinatory vision of his promised kingdom; the forest has crept up to the edge and started picking off stragglers; the monkeys–possibly symbolic of the forces of madness set loose in Aguirre’s mind–run rampant over the raft; all is lost. And the raft floats on, toward its final union with the ocean, carrying on it the latest victims of the encounter of human hubris and nature’s indifference.

Art House Double Features: A Day (or Night) at the Movies

The impecunious graduate student’s best friend is the arthouse cinema double-feature. The evidence is in and the case is clear: for payoff in a diverse set of dimensions, the cinema double-feature is a winner hands down. Sure, the wine-and-cheese reception might get the budding academic a date or two–paper acceptances, book contracts, meaningful academic conversation,  and completed grant proposals are all unlikely–but a arthouse double-feature uses up many hours of the day, provides easy procastination, relief from the relentless call to decision-making, and a rich storehouse of namedropping material to sustain one through lean times.

In the past, I’ve leaned heavily on arthouses to help occupy hours that otherwise would have been spent digging through tomes of assigned reading from class and exam lists.  Circa 1997-2000, I relied on the Anthology Film Archives in the Lower East Side on 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street. (I lived close by on 5th Street, between Avenues A and B). The Archive ran several series of double-features as part of festivals or retrospectives. Tickets for these were available at student discount rates; for double features this meant $5 for a pair of movies. In terms of the time-money equation, this worked out to roughly $1.25 per hour of movie watching.  (The dollar rates were a little lower when I saw Pasolini’s Medea and Oedipus twin-bill.) The Archives were never a fancy venue;  its main theater was a little ragged around the edges in its seats; I never remember buying any snacks; even if there were any, I had no money for them. I got my seat, snuggled in, and settled down for a double-dose of distraction. A simple business indeed.

A couple of years later, then a post-doctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales, I found myself patronizing Sydney’s Chauvel Cinema, an institution where I apparently needed to make an appearance if I was ever going to earn any local arthouse cred. I lived on Bourke Street, all the way down at the intersection of Bourke and Cleveland Streets in Redfern, and the walk to the Chauvel in Paddingon took me the better part of 20 minutes (or more). But that walk down Oxford Street’s many attractions always put me in the right frame of mind for cinematic self-indulgence. My need for distraction in Sydney was greater than it had been in New York; I was on my own, and still finding my way around. The double-feature at Chauvel’s Cinematheque quickly became a staple item in my entertainment plans for the weekend, only displaced in the spring and summer by cricket season. Once inside, it was the glory of complete immersion in the movies, lost for a few hours as I worked my way through the pair of offerings on display.

If there ever was any doubt that movies are meant for solitary enjoyment, the double-feature dispenses with it. They just aren’t the sorts of things you do in company; a double-feature at the movies is a solo enterprise, where the cinephile discovers just how comfortable he is being by himself with just the movies to keep him company; when it comes to movie fandom, it separates the men from the boys.

Reflections on Translations – III: The Pleasures of Iranian and German Movies

I like many products of contemporary Iranian cinema: for instance, the movies of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Majid Majidi–to name only three of a long and distinguished line-up of directors. Theirs is a neorealism with a compellingly different grammar from that of other products of the genre. There is another, not-so-overt reason for the pleasure I take in watching Iranian movies: their soundtracks are in Persian. Given the history of Persian influence on Urdu, Hindustani and Hindi in the Indian sub-continent and the significant presence of Persian words in the vocabularies of these languages, to watch an Iranianmovie is to be able to enjoy little, pleasurable moments of comprehension even while being the slave of the subtitle.

In some ways, this pleasure of mine is related to that I take in watching German movies. I’ve taken precisely one semester of German: the Grundstufe Eins at the Max Mueller Institute. That brief but rigorous introduction equipped me with enough German to conduct rudimentary conversations and to understand some movie dialog as I follow subtitles. But there is a crucial difference. I learned German during my university years. My sense of familiarity with the language is of a markedly different kind. The little starts of recognition as I watch a German movie trigger a largely  intellectual sympathy; my pleasure is partially grounded in being able to pierce the veil of linguistic unfamiliarity and in making a connection with an acquired knowledge and skill. There is perhaps some relief at having postponed intellectual decrepitude.  (And who knows, perhaps there’s a little art-house, movie-snob smugness too. Why deny it?)

In the case of movies in Persian, when I hear and recognize a Persian word as one that I know in Urdu/Hindustani/Hindi, something deeper seems to stir. While in a straight-forward sense, I’m reacting to the insightful pleasure of a quasi-etymological lesson–here lies the root of a previously familiar word–perhaps it’s also the sense of having come into contact with an entire history, of having made a connection with a diverse set of cultures, of reaching out into a span of time that, at the very least, extends for several hundred years. The impenetrability of the Iranian context, made even more fraught by its location in the current political geography of my mind, and seemingly shrouded by an incomprehensible language, suddenly lifts at that moment, and I feel a resonance, through the spoken word, with the characters on the screen. (As is ironically appropriate, these moments of connection are more likely to take place while I watch an Iranian movie than when I watch movies in some Indian languages. Adoor Gopalakrishnan‘s movies–in Malyalam–would be considerably less informed for me; to watch them requires exclusive dependence on the English subtitles. This is not the case with movies in say, Bengali or Gujarati.)

This brief encounter is transitory; I cannot understand all the spoken lines, and I certainly cannot read Persian. Then the box snaps shut again, and I’m back on the outside looking in.

The Oscars as Inducers of Cosmic Disillusionment

Many, many years ago, as a mad-about-the-movies young–very young!–lad, I was in the habit of eagerly awaiting the announcement of the year’s Oscars, my cinematic antennae quivering with anticipation as the suspense mounted. My spatio-temporal geographic location being what it was, this enthusiasm manifested itself most visibly in a speedy dash to our front balcony where I would scour about for the morning newspaper, expertly tossed up some twenty-five feet by the delivery man. (If my calculations are correct, this undignified scramble took place on Wednesday mornings, in the days when the Oscar ceremonies were staged on Monday nights on the US West Coast; I was some ten hours away.) A bizarre notion underwrote this enthusiasm: that the Oscars picked out, somehow, magically, from on high, ‘The Best Movie in the World’ or ‘The Best Actor in the World’ or whatever. The Oscars seemed like a definitive anointment of movie royalty; a final, beyond-reach placement and establishment of the Real beyond the Apparent.

Then, still, I think, a pre-teen, I read a pulp novel–the name escapes me now–that proved an unlikely vehicle for a radical species of disillusionment. In it, an elaborate intrigue is mounted to sneak into the offices of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, break into the safe containing the envelopes with the names of the Oscar winners and to replace them with  envelopes containing our miscreants’ favored candidates. (I have forgotten why this elaborate, Watergate-style conspiracy was required; I dimly remember a studio’s box-office fate resting on the success of the bait-n-switch.)

When I reached this point in my reading, I remember being stunned: Wait, that’s ALL the Oscars were? Just the result of voting by some Academy? Made up of humans voting their preferences? Why was that so special? Couldn’t they just vote for their favorite movies? I knew somehow, dimly, that human beings often differed in their utility allocations; schoolyard rumbles had at least taught me that much. Somehow, I had imagined that the Oscars resulted from a non-earthly assessment of cinematic quality, that their awards were free of the taint of human subjectivity and bias. A second wave of paradigm-shattering debunk soon washed over me: Even if I had always imagined the US as the Center-of-the-World, this Academy seemed to be located in a very particular place, California, and–of course!–the movies were all American or seemed to be, all in English, with a special award for ‘Foreign Language Film’. (I knew, thankfully, that movies were made elsewhere in the world. How could I not, living in India?)

Clearly, I was then in the grip of a deep confusion, an unawareness as it were, that the ‘trail of the human serpent is over everything.’ To be debunked of such unawareness at a young age can only be a good thing; but it isn’t so easy to get rid of. A fully-lived life is often required, a little humility, and the realization that when it comes to naming, lower case letters do much better work than upper-case.

Bernard Rose’s Kreuzer Sonata: Sex and Jealousy Forever

Bernard Rose‘s The Kreuzer Sonata might be the best cinematic treatment of insidious, corrosive, and ultimately self-destructive sexual jealousy that I have seen recently. Based on Leo Tolstoy‘s 1889 novella, and part of a trilogy of Tolstoy-adaptations by Rose–I have not seen his Anna Karenina and Ivan’s XTC yet, but I intend to–the film belongs to the transposition genre; it sets Tolstoy’s story of 19th century Russia in 21st century Los Angeles. The locale changes; the plot details are modified in response accordingly, but the essential component of the lurid sexual imagination–made more feverish by imagined infidelity–is faithfully preserved. Rose’s rendering has the visual look and feel of a low-budget quasi-cinema-verite production in both its dark color palettes and camera work; the dialogue is often clipped and overlapping, and thus unfailingly rings true. These elements of Rose’s style combine to give the Rise and Fall of Marriage Founded on Carnal Love the feeling of a terrifying headlong rush toward the final, inevitable, tragic denouement.

In Tolstoy’s story, the narrator repels and fascinates us as we realize his jealousy is grounded in his own uncomfortable positioning of sex within his self: he is unable to shake loose its demands on him, and yet repelled by his response to it. His wife is sullied by her acceptance of his sexual desires but her rejection would have enraged him; so from the very beginning he despises his wife even as he makes love to her. Caught in this bind, he is an easy mark for the green-eyed monster. Without exaggeration, Tolstoy’s story was about sex–talked about, referred to, and obsessed over–but in the context of that tale never made explicit in its pages (Tolstoy’s treatment was still explicit enough to get the novella banned in Russia and–briefly–in the US). In the cinematic version, the sex is explicit, frank, and center-stage; it makes clear precisely what the husband is fantasizing about. This is what his wife did before him with other men; this is what she did with him; this is what she now does with her ‘new lover’. The husband’s obsessions are made worse, of course, because the sexual component of their monogamous, child-producing, buzz-killing relationship is in terminal decline; this precipitous fall is neatly paired off with a correspondingly dizzying rise in his obsessive desires to control her sexual being, to know her more than he had ever wanted, or is ever possible in this world of ours.

Rose has pulled off the rather neat trick of making Tolstoy’s story more relevant for our times by his adaptation: Tolstoy’s original narrator made himself distant by his idiosyncratic, religiously-inspired, crankish attitude toward sex; but Rose’s central character is worldly, sophisticated, even sexually powerful in his attractions and charms. He is not asexual, reluctantly drawn into its sordid embrace; he is an active player in the sexual arena, one who conquers frequently and successfully. And yet, he is ultimately defeated by its unique challenges. Tolstoy’s central character always appeared ill-equipped for the challenges of the sexual relationship; what leaves us shaken about Rose’s pseudo-hero is that even one so apparently strong is humbled by the seemingly-perennially paired companions of sex and jealousy.

Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings The Blues”

This past weekend’s viewing pleasures included a long-standing, and much-awaited, resident of my movie queue: Nina Paley‘s 2008 graphically and musically eclectic reworking of the Indian epic Ramayana, Sita Sings The Blues. The movie incorporates four elements: a reworking of the traditional narrative of the Ramayana; a Mystery Science Theater-like commentary on the Ramayana carried out by shadow puppets (in my mind, the highlight of the movie); musical episodes from the Ramayana, featuring blues classics performed by Annette Hanshaw; and an autobiographical parallel tale featuring Paley herself.

Sita Sings The Blues is musically and visually diverse. The episodes from the Ramayana resemble 18th-century Rajput painting featuring characters in profile; the shadow puppets converse in silhouette about the Ramayana’s plot; the musical episodes featuring Hanshaw’s songs featuring vector graphic animation are the most modern looking; and lastly, Paley’s autobiographical tale is told using Squigglevision. The Ramayana’s sometime-baroque narrative is simplifed to concentrate on the Rama-Sita subplot and its persistent obsessions of wifely devotion and idealization of female sexual purity; the shadow puppets with their distinctive urban Indian accents showcase the ambiguously irreverent and idiosyncratic readings that generations of Indians have carried out on their epics; the Hanshaw interludes remind us that underneath the fun and games, the story of Sita, which lies at the heart of the Ramayana, can be read as a tragedy; and lastly the contemporary tale of relationship-breakdown shows us that exile, heartbreak, and rejection are perennial features of our encounters with other human beings.

Paley’s movie is not, of course, just about animation, music, and the epics. It also constitutes a statement in the modern debate over how artistic creations in this day and age are to be distributed, consumed, and paid for; Sita Sings The Blues was released under a Creative Commons Share Alike Common Attribution License. On an extra on the DVD, Paley, in the course of an interview with WNET, offers some passionate thoughts on culture control and lockdown, and how her decision to release the movie under her chosen license came about. (Incidentally, the use of Hanshaw songs almost crippled the movie thanks to the licensing rules and fees associated with them; on this and on other aspects of the movie’s positioning within the modern ‘intellectual property’ debate, it is well worth reading some of the informational material on the movie’s website.)

Lastly, according to Paley, the movie attracted some flak from both left and right – the Indian ones, that is. From the ‘left’: Paley’s movie is an act of cultural and artistic appropriation that fails to situate the movie in its correct position in post-colonial discourse. From the ‘right’: Paley’s movie is an act of cultural and artistic appropriation, which, in suggesting that modern gender and sexual relations can enlighten us about the presuppositions that lie at the heart of religious epics, and in providing a not-so-pompously-moralistic alternative retelling of a Scripture, is insulting and disrespectful of the sentiments of millions of Hindus.

When fire is directed from both flanks, all is well. Go see the movie.