Etudes by Aseem Kaul

I've been reading Etudes, a collection of very short fiction, written by Aseem Kaul. The works in this collection have earlier appeared on his blog. Aseem Kaul is a talented writer is very good with words and this is especially evident in his poems, which I think have an astounding quality about them. But as for the short fictional pieces in Etudes themselves, I didn't really enjoy them as much. Although to be frank I haven't read all the works in the book yet, and there might be some exceptionally good pieces in there that I haven't yet read. But the works I read so far don't have the quality that you see in his poems and dialog pieces.

Freaky stuff!

Freaky stuff happening here: I was reading a booklet accompanying a DVD of Chris Marker's two movies La Jetee (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983). La Jetee is supposed to be a movie composed entirely of photographs. I remembered reading about similar movies in Susan Sontag's collection of essays "On Photography", which I'm also currently reading. I kept the DVD booklet aside and picked up "On Photography" and the first word I read on the page I've accidentally opened is "Chris Marker" and about another of his movies called Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966) that is also composed entirely of still photographs. I kid you not! This is wierd!

By the way La Jetee is supposed to have been the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995), which in my opinion had one of the most elegantly time travel plots I've seen so far. Turns out the main time travel plot is from La Jetee, which is amazing considering Chris Marker made the movie in 1963!

Ballad of a Soldier

Last week, while browsing the DVD collection in the local public library I came across a Russian movie called Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada O Soldate). While the name of the movie didn't sound familiar the synopsis did - of a soldier going home for a very short visit to see his mother. I remembered having seen a similar movie with my family a long long time ago, probably when I was ten years old or younger. Of the movie I'd seen I could only remember the visuals of two distinct scenes - one of them involved the soldier rolling cigarettes out of a newspaper in a train for his fellow soldiers (and then at one point pulling a cigarette back from someone and unrolling it to show his own photo), and the second was where he's met his mother and going back. I couldn't even remember what language that movie was made in - it was that long ago. I wasn't sure if this was the same movie, so I rented it to find out.

Turns out it was indeed the same movie. Watching it brought back some fond childhood memories of watching rented movies on cassettes on a VCR. :-)