[Reader-list] By a Danish, before ‘Danish Cartoons’

[Inder Salim]

Dear All,
For reasons well known, Danish Cartoons perhaps popularized Danish,
but some other kind of brains are working there too, which are of
serious nature…

Dancer in the Dark 2000 by Elars Von Trier, a Danish Film Director,
shot by a hand held camera, to match a documentary style, perhaps, to
convince the viewer that it is real, and it does, but

The Guardian said it was "one of the worst films, one of the worst
artworks and perhaps one of the worst things in the history of the
world.".

 But don’t  trust the films critics, watch this final clip from the movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu5f_T2wcRI

The title is profound, not only because Cinema happens in the dark,
but there is a strange inability to touch the pain of the other though
cinema,  beyond a point. As a medium it is entertainment at the best,
but the very for entertainment in life that we sometimes, unwittingly,
see a dark end of our personal lives even.  And at the point of time,
we have nothing to share, no words, not language to communicate.  The
politics, perhaps, begins from there as well, but strangley obfuscates
too...

"Aataye hain Gaib say yeh mazameen khayal mein". ( these thoughts
comes to from nothingness ,GHALIB), which is not far from  what
prophetic revelations claim . and If the source is
darkness/space-not-known, then we are mixtures of silences. That,
perhaps, means that our actions are not necssarily meant to be in sync
with our thoughts. “There is no doer behind the deed” Nietzsche. That
questions the State, and its machinery via Foucault’s Panopticism.

In the Film, the STATE, ( representing a country ) is deeply
structured to this promise of goodness (
entertainment/desire/security) and also the snatcher of very life on
this pretxt or that. So, the very seat of existence that gives us the
feeling of life bleeds for the sake for State.  The  death  penalty is
part of chain of event that mainfests State, as part of medieval
thinking, also as part of  present day American thinking  which
pretends humane but is clueless about humanity. The dance, or the pain
becomes personal, inwardly,  and we have only sadness to feel...

The plot in brief:
Selma is a Czechoslovakian immigrant, a single mother working in a
factory in rural America. Her salvation is her passion for music,
specifically, the all-singing, all-dancing numbers found in classic
Hollywood musicals. Selma harbours a sad secret: she is losing her
eyesight and her son Gene stands to suffer the same fate if she can't
put away enough money to secure him an operation.  Bill, ( typical
American ) his neighbour,  reveals to Selma that his materialistic
wife, Linda, has exhausted all of his savings and asks Selma for a
loan, which she declines to give. When a desperate neighbuor , steals
her money, and then falsely accuses Selma of stealing his savings, the
drama of her life escalates to a tragic finale.  “It is here that she
is pegged as a Communist sympathizer and murderess “

She was hanged, while she sang her favourite song.

A curtain separates the viewer and the one whom the STATE pushed into
a darkness.
In the cinema, in the end, it is only a metaphor, but chilling, to
realize for a moment, that what if something is forced on us (me).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62pLY5zFTtc
click for a bollywood song like, on the moving train,e sequence in the film

With love and regards
Inder salim




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http://indersalim.livejournal.com