THAT OTHER WORLD
Are some media, in their very forms, more powerful than others? I’m not a movie person, but the last few I’ve seen have had an impact on me disproportionate to their artistic merit. As a child I spent time in India with my grandparents at their homes in Tamilnadu and Kerala. Lion, with scenes set in Madhya Pradesh and Bengal, and starring an eight-year-old boy, brought back a sense of the county’s landscape and cities. And White Sun, set in a remote hilltop village in Nepal, and featuring two school-age children, brought back very particular memories of my childhood visits.
Though White Sun shows an entirely different country, geography, language, and era, many of its details are familiar to someone who has spent time in rural India. The movie shows us a line of mens shirts hanging on a rope strung to between two rafters, a woman coaxing a cooking fire by blowing through a mournful-sounding brass tube, the primeval darkness of a street lit only by stars. More remarkably, the movie brought back memories specific to my childhood. One sequence recalled the slope of lush, untended forest at the back of my paternal grandparents house, navigated by a run of steep stone steps, through monsoon rains. And one character, an orphaned boy from a neighboring village, reminded me of how unsettled I felt during those visits, without a deep understanding of the language and the customs. The film left me immensely sad that my grandparents and their ways of living are gone, and that my own daily life is, in comparison, sterile, less charged with sensuality and meaning.
Is there something essential about film that has the power to stir strong feelings? The form encompasses so many others: painting, speech, story, music, movement. And the film camera, in addition to its narrative, captures layers of incidental details that build its own convincing world. That other world, so particular, can catch on violently to a viewer’s. Is this a testimony to the richness of the medium, or to the viewer’s desires?