pyotra:

aaj ki chai is from this scene in tapan sinha’s ek doctor ki maut (1990). shabana azmi’s understated but poignant performance as seema, the wife of a brilliant doctor whose single obsession with his research brings selfishness and callousness to his marriage is so visceral, especially in small moments like this one. seema fries puris and make two cups of tea as she waits for her husband to come home, a familiar scene in the homes of many, especially within india. her husband talks about his research, the people he met, and lists all his complaints for the day before being cajoled into sitting at the dinner table. she serves the tea and the plate of puris and sits by his side, shoulder to shoulder, as a companion. then she talks about her conversation with her sister while gently reprimanding her husband for never calling those relatives back. he agrees to please her and then quickly grabs his cup of tea and two puris to leave for his lab. and seema! shocked and baffled, she tells him she’s not yet finished with her tea only to hear that familiar indifference–”then finish it”. and shabana azmi with all the subtlety she’s know for, moves from shock to bitter acceptance and then quickly back to the briefest expression of hurt. 

and she drinks her cup of tea alone.

one thing i like about tapan sinha’s work in this film is that seema is her own person, not the archetype of a wife in indian films (even noncommercial ones) who only exists to mutely support and share the burden of her husband’s dreams. later in the film she expresses how that callousness feels and affects her, especially against the expectations of what she thought their marriage would be like–one in which she is cared for, one in which there is companionship. i feel like i know too many women in marriages who drink their cup of tea alone. or put too much hope into what differences a cup of tea can bridge. 

haesthal:

Men are not inherently violent, predatory, or dangerous. Any feminist project worthy of the name needs to acknowledge that this behavior is taught. The idea of men being biologically predisposed to being abusers or rapists is actively used against abuse and rape survivors / victims
(does the phrase “boys will be boys” ring a bell at all to you?) and will never, ever work in our favor.

thevividgreenmoss:

Chacko was a self-proclaimed Marxist. He would call pretty women who worked in the factory to his room, and on the pretext of lecturing them on labor rights and trade union law, flirt with them outrageously. He would call them Comrade, and insist that they call him Comrade back (which made them giggle). Much to their embarrassment and Mammachi’s dismay, he forced them to sit at table with him and drink tea.

Once he even took a group of them to attend Trade Union classes that were held in Alleppey. They went by bus and returned by boat. They came back happy, with glass bangles and flowers in their hair.

Ammu said it was all hogwash. Just a case of a spoiled princeling playing Comrade! Comrade! An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

thirst-aid-kittt:

In addition to ‘the passage of time’ that Tarr has often talked about as his main goal to achieve from his long, oneiric takes in his films, Mihaly Víg talks a lot about silence and while i haven’t yet seen Tarr talking about it yet, his films seem to agree with Víg’s opinion that silence, like time, is an essential part of the real life but while we escape from time, silence often escapes from us. Víg then talks about how he needs complete silence to compose music, something which he seldom can.

It’s no coincidence that this line from the opening shot of Werckmeister Harmoniák is superimposed upon one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed, Valuska, by Mihaly Víg.

Werckmeister, i feel, has much more of a resonance between the film and the music and this is not to say that Satantango’s music is bad. It’s just not needed to take a form of its own as in Werckmeister and even though the latter has a giant dead whale and riots, the former’s quaint town with a bunch of villagers who do the devil’s dance every night is somehow much stranger.

Coming back to Víg and Tarr, while the latter feels the need to convey something that we fervently ignore, the former feels the need to convey something the likes of which we have probably never seen and while these intentions might seem different, they’re not exactly mutually exclusive. There’s a rhythm to the passing of time and there’s a duration for which a piece of music runs after which it must end or run the risk of becoming a ruin for time makes ruins out of everything— be it a Hungarian town, an old music composer or sheet music allowed to stay on for a minute more or repeated more than what is absolutely necessary. And out of this shared interest, a film and the death of a town and humanity, which takes its name from an old, dead music composer, takes shape.

ourladyofperpetualnaptime:

“We can certainly say that Oedipus is disillusioned and not [a] hopeful subject, but at the same time Lacan very much insists upon the fact that ‘he is shown to be unyielding right to the end, demanding everything, giving up nothing, absolutely unreconciled.’ Giving up hope does not mean reconciling oneself with what is — and trying to get the best out of it. On the contrary, it can be a condition in which we are able to engage with the world, and not simply with our personal hopes and expectations about it. Perhaps this is my philosophical (and political) bias, but my understanding of analysis is that, to some extent at least, it replaces hope with courage. The courage to fight.”

— too much of not enough: an interview with alenka zupančič