Scenes from the life of flowers

[imomus]

I've been watching romantic Hindi musicals, retro ones from the 60s and 70s. I've been watching them for their breathtaking floral references -- sometimes it seems like flowers are the main characters -- but also listening to their arrangements, which I find admirable, and would like to learn from.



It's a style given to unison, solos, and turn-taking. Only one thing is foregrounded at any one time, but over the course of the song many elements come to the fore one by one, each with its own texture. A man's voice, a woman's voice, a sitar, a cimbalon, a flute, a string section, a rhythm, a synth. Here's a scene from "Ghar" (1978):

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When you listen to that (it sounds a bit like Ariel Pink, the way some things jump out of the mix "too loud"), you almost feel like you're recording the parts one by one. They aren't mixed down into sludge yet. Everything is distinct and fresh.

Of course, the actors aren't the ones singing. A playback singer -- in this case, Lata Mangeshkar (the female voice) and Kishore Kumar (the male) -- has laid down the song, and the actor only lipsyncs, pirhouetting in a landscape of flowers. I like the deep focus on male-and-female in these clips. Somehow, we never take male-and-female seriously enough in the West. We're embarrassed by it. We skirt around it, trouser it. We'd like everything to be male-and-male. Maybe it's because we trace our culture back to Christianity and ancient Greece. We think we've advanced "past" male-and-female, but it may well be that it's something we've really yet to discover, something still ahead of us.

Even the bit where Vinod Mehra blows cigarette smoke in Rekha's face is sort of cute. She doesn't seem to mind. And the dresses... Anyway, here's another one, it's from "Saathi", a melodrama made in 1968. Here a blind man falls in love with his guide. But the main characters in this clip are flowers, representing sexuality but also the beauty of the world the blind man can't see:

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I love the sinuous hummed melody (so catchy, despite the weird key change!), the rich colours, the surprisingly funky rhythm fills. Here's another, from an unidentified film featuring heaving branches of blossom and ethereal mountain views:

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The actress is dressed, herself, like a white flower. The strings cascade as her lover climbs the slopes to be with her. Later, they're on a boat and there's a moment similar to the cigarette-smoke moment we saw earlier: the man splashes water in her face, and instead of reacting in fury the woman smears it suggestively across her mouth. The play of capitulation and resistance is super-stylized.

Here's a clip set in an orchard heaving with apples:

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The point that human fertility is part of the natural cycle is screamingly obvious, but it's rare to see Western films in which people are treated like fruits and flowers. For some reason, this seems to be a thought more entertainingly entertained in India and Asia. It appears least of all in American and British films, and is particularly absent in our cinema since the 70s. We have become unfertile, or uninterested in fertility, it seems.

Here's a scene from "The Jewel Thief" (1967):

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This is from "Shagird" (1967):

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That's a bit more earthy and comic. There's a parallel made between the girl and a monkey in a tree. The actors hardly even bother to lipsync properly. The emphasis is on the over-emphatic dance moves -- and the flowers, of course.

Let's end with a song in English. This is from "Julia" (1975):

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"My heart is beating, keeps on repeating", sings Laxmi. "My love encloses a flood of roses... Spring is the season that drops the reason of love in our dreams."

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

My feeling is that it's surprising a civilisation based on Plato and St Paul isn't even more anti-flesh and anti-hetero-fertility than it turned out to be. And I'd say that, as a rule of thumb, the more ancient the religion, the more attuned it is to agrarian rhythms -- the lives of plants and flowers, the festivals of sowing and reaping, and the proximity of these things to human fertility cycles.

And yet the land of Shinto has the lowest birth rate in the world! And super-Catholic Ireland has the highest birth rate in Europe! I don't know about this theory, Momus!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and Luxembourg has the world's highest GNP per capita!

This is where we get when you ask "where's the evidence" for a statement about our culture's embarrassment about hetero-fertility. Where can I find the figures for Gross National Embarrassment? Does the EU keep them on file? How about the State Department?

Basically, you have to live in a culture for most of your life and then get exposed to other cultures and see how they differ. That's the method, and it's inevitably impressionistic.

[(Anonymous)]

So we just have to accept your word for it then? Buck up, Momus, you can do better than that! Of course such things as a culture's embarrassment can't be scientifically quantified, but that doesn't mean you can't muster evidence or examples, otherwise all cultural discussion would come to an end. Is the West really more embarrassed about male/female relations than other cultures? I, for one, am not convinced. We live in a culture saturated in heterosexual imagery.

[(Anonymous)]

Although really, I don't know why I'm bothering to argue with you. Your blog is interesting and there are things on here I've read that have modified my feelings about some things. But I've never seen you budge one iota from any position following an exchange of views in the comments thread.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's just that example and counter-example can go on endlessly, and it's tediously empirical, and finally each example can really only speak for itself, and framings (the place where we decide to put the boundary on each example) count for a hell of a lot.

The films I've linked here are my "evidence", and I've added my own impressions, not just of the culture itself, but of what I feel are core differences from the culture I was raised in. I'm not really interested in the one-step-forward-two-back logic which then asks "Ah, but do you think someone raised in Scotland is the same as someone raised in Alabama?" or "Ah, but do you think someone raised in Kerala is the same as someone raised in Calcutta?"

Please think of this entry as poetry -- or poetry about poetry!

[(Anonymous)]

Well, from the exchange above, it was you that tried to link your idea of cultural embarrassment about hetero-fertility to relative fertility rates and that connection doesn't seem to hold true. You could still be on to something with your original idea but that wasn't the way to illustrate it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You can only say "that connection doesn't seem to hold true" if you can find an empirical measure of embarrassment, though, surely? Otherwise, I'd be wasting my time trying to "prove" any such thing (the conclusion both of us came to, as you can see).

y' scutterin' gobsheen

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

Super-catholic my arse, we discovered money in the late twentieth century and now we worship property and over-sized forms of vehicular transport.