Archive for December, 2006

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As you know, I’m involved in GalleryFilm, the film society which is part of The Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. A few weeks ago, we showed Deepa Mehta’s “Earth”, set in India during the weeks leading up to the partition of India and Pakistan. We themed the evening with free samosas and Indian tidbits sponsored by local foodstores SMBS and Cheeseblock in Lordship Lane and Cobra beer donated by Cobra. There was a prize draw to win tickets to lectures on Indian art at the Picture Gallery - and special bonus tickets to a talk by this year’s Turner prize winner Simon Starling.

Starting a new local society is always an uncertain affair. Will anyone come? Have we pitched the film selection just right - or completely wrong? This was only our second screening and while more people came to the first film “Mona Lisa” than we had expected, we were stunned to find we were fully booked for “Earth” even before the doors opened. We managed to squeeze in five more seats while the queue of people who hadn’t booked grew longer. We rushed in and out of the auditorium counting seats and panicking that we might have sold too many tickets. In the end we had to turn people away.

None of us on the GalleryFilm team had seen the film before the screening but I gamely invited the hundred or so audience to stay for a discussion afterwards. The events in the film are seen through the eyes of an eight-year old Parsee girl, whose kind but distant parents leave her in the care of the Hindu maid and her circle of Muslim, Sikh and Christian friends. As the country draws closer to partition, the ethnic and religious tensions come up to the surface and the friendships begin to tear apart, ending in violence, tragedy and betrayal. As I sat there watching all this, I was conscious of how starkly it contrasted with the mellow convivial pre-show drinks and nibblies we’d just had. I started to worry about the discussion I had promised after the film - would the emotions stirred up in the film spill out into the debate? Would people complain that this wasn’t the nice jolly evening they’d planned on?

As it turned out, when the lights came up, it was as if the film had made us all in that room connect with each other at a real and human level even though we had all one hundred of us only really met that night. In the audience were a mix of ages and among the Caucasian faces, there were Asian young people and families who had come - parent, grandparents and the younger generations. A younger English woman, referring to the legacy left by the British as portrayed in the film, said she felt shame at being British. Someone else pointed to the parallels in Iraq where different tribal groups were fighting amongst themselves.An older Asian lady shared that she had been around seven at the time of partition and had witnessed painful things that she had never talked about. An older Asian gentleman told me how crowds had come to his grandfather’s house looking for a man they were after to kill and how his grandfather had managed to disperse the crowd. I’m sure many of those families went home that night and talked and shared their personal stories in a way they might not have if they had not come to see the film.

One Asian lady emailed this to us afterwards: “Thank you so much for the recent showing of ‘Earth’. I had a particular interest in seeing this film. My mother had moved from her home town, G—-, to move to S—- to live with her new husband and new in-laws in 1947 after her marriage.

My mother always said that they were unable to understand how neighbours who had been their close friends suddenly became their enemies simply because they were Hindus. The partition of India was an extremely traumatic experience for all concerned.” *

I have always loved movies but that night was the first time I really experienced the true power of film.

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*I have anonymised the details for the purposes of privacy.

GalleryFilm is run entirely by volunteers - as is the Friends of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. All profits go to support the work of the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

The next film is Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” on Monday 18 December.

Our 2007 season takes off in the new year with “Now, Voyager”, “The Wings of the Dove”, “Jailhouse Rock” and “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”

To find out more about GalleryFilm and book tickets for our films, click here or go to www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk and follow the links to Friends Events.

The film is available in the US or UK versions. You can buy a UK version from amazon.co.uk, by clicking on the picture here:

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I am thrilled. Talented and dashing poet James Wood, whose anthology of poems “The Theory of Everything” I featured a few weeks ago has agreed to a podcast interview for Fusion View. I’ll be speaking to him on the phone this weekend and asking him about life as a poet, what it takes to get a collection of poetry published and the poetry scene in Edinburgh where he is based. He has also agreed to read a poem that is as yet unpublished - an exclusive first publication on Fusion View!

If you have any burning questions about the world of poetry that you’d like me to put to James, add a comment or email me by the end of Friday this week 08 December.

I’ll upload the podcast as soon as I’ve edited it - probably during next week.

James has also kindly donated three copies of his poetry book “The Theory of Everything” for a prize draw - winners will be picked from the Fusion View list of email subscribers. Stay tuned and I will let you have more details about the draw when I upload my interview with James.

Photo: thanks to bb c.co.uk

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PS. If you haven’t already taken my Book Lovers Poll, go to the blue box in the sidebar and click on the answer that most describes your reading habits. (It’s anonymous) Apparently Malaysians only read two books a year. I’m curious to find out how many books Fusion View readers read. I’ll review the results in a few weeks and offer you my analysis.

Beauty is an illusion. This telling commercial for Dove soap says it all.

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Matthew G., a regular commenter on Fusion View, wrote this in response to Jennifer’s comment to my podcast Two Voices (which I highlighted in my comment round-up Chop Suey). What he says intrigued me so I thought I would share his comment more widely by giving it a post-space all to itself.

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Matthew writes:

I am native English speaking with Japanese as second language and French as third (measured just by proficiency). I have exactly that sense that she mentions of adopting a slightly different persona especially when in Japanese and I do wonder about it sometimes (” is it real me, who am I etc”). Occasionally my British work colleagues have commented (not unfavourably, though) that I look like a somewhat different person when I am talking to a Japanese colleague in Japanese (though they don’t understand what we are talking about). But I don’t think it is about being some kind of chameleon with no “true” core. If that is how you express yourself in a certain linguistic context then it is from within, so it must part of you. I think it just goes to show that language and communication is not just about the spoken word.

It is often said that the ear is more important than the tongue. I would add that a “sense of immitation” is also the essential ingredient for a successful linguist. Every language is rooted in a context of cultural and social patterns / values and this is probably all the more so between say European and Asian languages (eg honorifics). So it should be no surprise that operating successfully across this linguistic divide involves more than just words. This leads into the bowing debate. Have you ever tried having a discussion (eg mutual thanks after an enjoyable business dinner) when your guest bows to you? It’s so difficult not to feel like bowing back! (or is that just me?) Many times I succumbed but I resist it now having seen so many westerners trying to bow and we are just not good at it! Get in with a handshake first! This is a bit off the subject but we all know how different English can sound according to who is speaking it (eg a Glaswegian versus a Home Counties type).

But how voluntary is our default accent or “presentation” in each of us? How easily can the Glaswegian sound like the HC type if he tries (not that he would want to)? I believe most people find it very difficult to immitate. In the Japanese case the difference between “standard” Tokyo type Japanese and, say, the Osaka dialect is huge, not just an accent but very often different words, verb endings etc. Yet I am always amazed to hear how easily the Osaka types for example switch into standard Japanese when say they are on the phone to someone in Tokyo. And then switch back without turning a hair when they put the phone down. There’s something different there!

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My thoughts on what Matthew has written above:

What intrigues me is the thought that one is someone different in a different language. I touched on it in my Two Voice podcast - I feel warmer and more exuberant speaking Malaysian English and more formal and verbose in English English. Matthew’s comment makes me think about the existentialist movement and those “who am I?” writers like Camus and the one who wrote the play about the cockroach (”Metamorphosis”). Would Camus’s books have been more devil-may-care if he had been fluent in American English rather than so angst ridden in French? Would the protagonist of Metamorphosis have changed into another kind of creature if the playwright had written in another language?

Body language is also a huge part of communication - some say it’s 90% of the message you are conveying. And I have experienced the “immitation factor” that Matthew mentions. With some French people I used to know, I started adopting the Gallic shrug which involves a shrug of the shoulders, an exhalation of breath through pouty lips to make the sound “boff” or “bouff”, ideally accompanied by the wave of a cigarette. I don’t smoke so a wave of the hand stands in for that part. Anyway, I’ve lost touch with the French friends but I’ve retained the Gallic shrug in my English life. The interesting thing is that I think the Gallic shrug has made me less uptight and worked up about things that I might have been exercised about in the past eg. Old me: “It’s outrageous! How can they do that!” (Slam table and rant); Gallic me: “Boff, what can you do? Let’s just forget about it.” (Languidly pour more wine/ slice more Camembert).

The prize draw to win a copy of Caro Fraser’s “A World Apart” is now closed.

The winners of the draw, picked at random from the Fusion View email subscribers list, are:

kaimun

rita

dlc

The above are first names only, taken from their email addresses, so that their privacy is respected. I have emailed them to let them know.

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed to Fusion View!

Yang-May

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I will be announcing the next prize draw in the next few weeks so stay tuned to see what else you might win as a subscriber to Fusion View….

There’s been a flurry of comments in the last few days and I haven’t had a chance to respond to all of them. Some of them are quite thought provoking so I thought I’d highlight them all in a post.

First, thanks to yeeton for your helpful factual corrections on planes and the Canadian constitution.

My Great-Uncle Jackie has also visited to listen to the podcast of his eldest brother, my Grandfather telling the story of our family. He says, “He (Grandfather) sounds wonderful… just like the good ole days.”

There’ve been three comments on my podcast about my Two Voices. Mika, who is Japanese, pokes a little fun at herself and her effort to speak English. David, who is English, is reminded of how he had to learn to switch from “army speak” (ie lots of swearing) to “civvy speak” (more genteel polite language) with his family at home. Jennifer, who is American I believe, describes how she has learnt to switch from her higher-education voice to her working class voice as she moves between her working life and her family. I am fascinated by these stories of two voices within what seems to my eye a single linguistic culture ie English-English and American-American. In particular, to my ear, all American voices sound the same - except for the exaggerated elongated vowels of the Deep South that one hears in cowboy songs and movies. I am going to ask Jennifer if she will do a longer guest post for us to tell us more about her two voices and I hope she will agree.

Jennifer also comments on the unavailable video of the Star Trek mash-up and the conflict between copyright and the wide enjoyment of artistic endeavours. My view is that these mash-ups and parodies and excerpts that are put out on the web are done by fans who want to share their passion for a particular movie or show. I say: what a great way of free advertising and marketing for the originator of that movie or show. The free viewings on the web don’t take a piece of the pie from the film etc - in fact, it increases people’s interest in the real thing. Take the ad for Molson beer that’s several years old, where Joe talks proudly about being Canadian - it is parodied by William Shatner (who of course himself is parodied in the Star Trek mash-up). Its being shown on YouTube raises millions of people’s awareness of the brand all over the world and not just Canada - a wider audience, I bet, than the original audience numbers when the ad was first aired on Canadian TV. The parody of it by William Shatner does the same, by making people go and seek out the Molson ad that it parodies. So Molson should be overjoyed about the ad being shown on YouTube rather than insisting on it being removed from this free viewing platform.

I also got a visit from Jim, the Grey Surfer I featured. I just love the weaving of the web and how so many connections can be made through comments and links with a diverse range of people who share one thing - the passion to communicate.

And speaking of oldies who blog, my Dad’s post on Memories of Malaya have been very popular. The most recent comment was from Khairudin, another young guy, this time in Singapore. It’s great that blogging seems to be reaching out across the generations.

Pey and Lydia, two Malaysians, have taken part in my Book Lovers Poll - and hopefully, they attest against the statement I heard that Malaysians only read 2 books a year. If you haven’t yet taken the poll, you can do so now by going to the blue box in the sidebar on the right. It’s anonymous and takes only one click, so please do take part!

And I must thank Pey for expanding on my post about the use of “-lah” in Malaysian English. It’s all about tone. So if I were to try to cajole you in Malaysian English to take the Book Lovers Poll, I would say, “Go on-lah. Takes only a second. Just for fun only-wat. Do the poll-lah.” “Wat”? What’s “wat”? That’s another cajoling noise like “-lah”: it just felt natural to put it there!

So this post is a bit of a chop-suey (English version of Chinese for mixed vegetables!) or campur-campur (Malay for mixed bag) but I wanted to thank everyone who left a comment and also highlight some of the comments that made me stop and think.