Level

(They/Them/Their, 1998) "An incessant stream of words, relevant and irrelevant, useful and useless." - Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six and a Third Acres 📖 🙏🏽

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March 4 – Visited the Durga Temple. People who come here with the intent of offering a prayer to the deity usually do so with half a mind, the other half being on the monkeys. These animals go about the place as if they owned it. Irressistibly funny, they sometimes go for your bag of peanuts with alarming viciousness. But when they swing from the bell-ropes and perform an impromptu carillon, the sight and sound are no longer merely comic.

Satyajit Ray;Our Films, Their Films

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The Rose of Versailles (1979)

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When written by a gifted screen writer and spoken by an able actor, words can achieve a plastic quality which gives them a significance that is more cinematic than literary. But when an image or an action speaks for itself, it acquires a level of significance in its context which no spoken words can reach.

Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films

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The silent cinema was indeed a unique and self-sufficient art form which was wiped out of existence by commercial pressures with the coming of sound. It is a banished art not because the artist ceased to be, but because forces stronger than theirs willed its extinction. The least we can do as lovers of cinema is to pay homage, however belated, to as many of these artists as we can and make amends for the near-sighted historians neglect of them.

Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films

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As I pondered over the transient nature of the film profession, my host tapped me over the wrist and said he had a wonderful plan. He was going to produce a film about a great Indian; in fact, he had been thinking about it for a long time

He said with an earnestness that I found disconcerting. I remembered Roman Novarro as Karim, the son of Brahmin who wore the sacred thread and a Sikh turban; and I remembered Banerji, the westernised Hindu in The Rains Came, performing cabalistic rituals to appease the Rain God.

'Which great Indian?' I asked.

'The Lord Buddha,' he said. 'Light must come from the East, you know.'

I said: 'That's fine, but who're you going to cast in the lead?'

'Guess who,' said the Executive.

I made a quick mental survey of all the Oriental faces available to Hollywood, and could not think of one the filled the bill.

I said I could not guess.

The eyes of my host now gleamed with what I took to be a sneak preview of the light to come.

'Why,' he said, 'Robert Taylor, of course!'

Satyajit Ray, Our Films Their Films

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You could lead a horse to a charged room, but you couldn't make it read it.

Natsu Hyūga, The Apothecary Diaries (Light Novel Volume 13)a1

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One can imagine a utopian situation when the spread of literacy might have gone hand in hand with an attempt on the part of the producers to come out of the groove and present the film-going public with something more worthwhile than tired reworking of hackneyed old patterns. But this has not happened, and is not likely to happen for some decades yet, unless some chance revolution should bring about the process.

Satyajit Ray; Our Films, Their Films

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I am not sure I am happy about the minority audience syndrome either. This seems suspiciously like a defensive maneouvre on the part of the new film makers. Why not aim wider? I do not know of a single film maker who has been dismayed by a wide acceptance of his work.

Satyajit Ray; Our Films, Their Films

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Love was more dissembling than she herself!

Rabindranath Tagore, The Renunciation

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There is a dangerous fascination to be leaders of men, to which many strong minds have succumbed. To be accepted as the leader of a small circle of sycophants, in his own parlour, has the same fearful attraction for a man who suffers from a scarcity of brains and character.

Rabindranath Tagore, Giribala

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Anyway, the question was: do we or do we not undertake this one last exploration?

Satyajit Ray; Our Films, Their Films

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So, on we went, five friends on either side,

What a fearsome company! We'll, that's the way it is:

hobnob in church with saints, in pubs with sots.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno (Translated by Robin Kirkpatrick)

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With me went my small but precious collection of gramophone records of classical western music. I needed my second love because, in leaving the city, I was leaving my first love behind.

Satyajit Ray; Our Films, Their Films

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Love cannot prove its claim by any document which society accepts, and does not wish to prove it, it merely worships with double passion its life's uncertain treasure.

Rabindranath Tagore, Living or Dead?