More “night watch” than “guardian angels” perhaps?
The Night Watch is the subject of a 2007 film by director Peter Greenaway called Nightwatching, in which the film posits a conspiracy within the musketeer regiment of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch, and suggests that Rembrandt may have immortalized a conspiracy theory using subtle allegory in his group portrait of the regiment, subverting what was to have been a highly prestigious commission for both painter and subject. His 2008 film Rembrandt’s J’Accuse is a sequel or follow-on, and covers the same idea, using extremely detailed analysis of the compositional elements in the painting…
I was certainly richly educated and entertained by both films — and am a great admirer of his The Draughtsman’s Contract — but not quite convinced.
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h/t @peterjmunson.
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Madhu:
March 29th, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Slip, slide, perish. Slip, slide, perish.
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What is it about three words together that is so pleasing when spoken? Is there a neurobiological linguistic reasoning behind the pleasingness of threes? The obvious point would be an artistic trinity of words that should be spoken.
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What a poem. Why did I ever think I didn’t like poetry? I think I do like it, now.
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And the word Quartet reminds me that Barbara Pym’s Autumn Quartet is on my ever increasing antilibrary list. It grows and grows and I blame all of you for my desire to read everything, just everything….
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🙂
Madhu:
March 29th, 2012 at 2:08 pm
As a young girl, I went to a kind of makeshift “puja,” which was held in different homes among the various families within our tiny “Indian American” circle in that small town in that square-ish state, in the middle of the country where the cold wind howled in winter and the idea that I was born on a great hot plain that has seen ancient battles seemed ridiculous, magical, and strange.
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Who held these pujas? I can’t remember. Maybe one of the more religiously educated or literate parents, maybe a traveling iternent kind of Hindu preacher. I never cared for any of it, except for the sound of my mothers voice when she sang because she sang beautifully the various religious songs.
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I hated the focus on the immaterial. I felt it sinful, almost, the idea that I should someday wish to turn away from all earthly things, my mother, my father, my future husband, my future children. As a I child, I resented it. I liked the “prasad,” (always a coarse kind of halwa with coconut) and the chai afterwards. I liked the cold skies and hint of snow outside in winter (did we ever have puja in summer?)
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None of it stuck except the sweetness of good people living simple lives, raising children, working, balancing the new world and old. That was the religion that stuck.