VIPs and VVIPs

I'll break the celebrity-gossip silence of this blog with the following article, from the Mumbai daily DNA India:

HYDERABAD: It would have been the ideal film script except that nobody is in a mood to oblige. Last week’s elopement by Telugu megastar Chiranjeevi’s daughter Srija has set the film industry and the elite of Hyderabad on alert to the likely dangers from their rebellious offspring. The star, though, said that all was forgiven and extended his blessings to the young couple.

Despite the olive branch from dad, the next day the same paper reported that Srija was seeking police protection from Delhi for her husband, who was still threatened by angry family members. It's easy to focus on the silly side, but I should note that the sense of threat (and, for the "aggrieved" family, shame/dishonor) presumably make a lot more sense in a non-Western, less-individualistic cultural context (though the role of Indian film stars in adapting Western-style stardom adds some shades of irony). In any case—and back to silly—if Chiranjeevi's film roles are any indicator, he's not someone you want on your bad side:

The DNA article continues:

Film producers, directors and financiers in the city have tightened security arrangements and cut short holiday trips of their children. They have now sent them to closely guarded resorts and bungalows around the city where their contact with “friends” and associates is restricted.
The city police have also been considering a special cell to keep a tab on children of VIPS and VVIPS as a matter of routine exercise.
...
Hyderabad is home to nearly 1,275 powerful families of industrialists, politicians and settlers from West Bengal, UP and Delhi. There are 27 private security agencies of which seven specialise in personal security for children of the rich and famous.

It took me a second or two to figure out what VVIPs meant (think Very, Very). I guess in a country the size of India you need the distinction. I wonder what the cutoff is to garner the extra V? Also I love the humble specificity of "nearly 1,275".

All this brought to mind—and this will be no comfort for the concerned powerful families in Hyderabad—this catchy song, by the androgynous (and on multiple other counts bizarre) French pop artist Katerine:

Very Early Cinema: Moon Guns and Rubber Heads

This week I watched a very interesting French documentary Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois about the manic-obsessive-brilliant-wonderful film preservationist who founded the Cinémathéque Française. Along the way, he mentioned the two contrasting foundational figures of French cinema, the Lumière Brothers, and George Méliès. Here's a sample of the former:

The Lumière clips they included were definitely fascinating—how could documentary footage of people walking around in 1895 not be fascinating? but the Meiloc ones really piqued my interest (as they did Langlois'—he used to pull out the old, flammable prints to show them as a special treat to the Cinematique's imployees). I'd heard him mentioned in Michael Silverblatt's interview with Brian Selznik, whose illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is full of magical Méliès referencces and tips-of-the-hat. The thing that stuck with me there was the comment that, although Méliès discovered and pioneered all of these amazing and surreal special effects, he never discovered (or at least used) that most basic of effects: moving the camera. All of his shots are framed more or less like a theater stage—or, better said, the stage in a magic show.

Here are two Meiloc films from YouTube, L'homme a la tête en caoutchoc ("The man with the rubber head", 1901) which is a more basic magic-show setup, and the delightfully surreal (and famous-in-places) Le voyage dans la lune ("A Trip to the Moon", 1902), which crams near-infinite motion into that non-moving camera.

Le Bac

France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast has been doing their annual in-depth coverage of le Bac, the graduation exams that French secondary students take before (and to qualify for) moving to university or various skilled vocations. There seem to be about as many bacs as there are, say, college majors—tests in construction or wetlands management or cooking as well as the sciences, math, psychology, etc. The tests are spread out over a week or two, which makes for lots of coverage of students preparing (preferred shot: group of students lounging on the lawn like so many high school seniors, but boning up on their last-minute Sartre).

The odd thing to me is the level of scuriny the exam gets every year on the news. It seems comparable to what my friends and I gave when we were taking the SATs—chatting about possible questions, quizzing each other about how we did after it's over. But then again, we were the ones directly involved. With the bac, which has a much more centralized (c'est France after all), one-time-only nature, there's more of the sense of a rite of passage.

Yesterday was the philosophy bac, which I think is one of the media's favorites. Students have to write essays on topics like "can there be happiness" ... so every year France 2 gets a bunch of real philosophers to take the test along with the students, and then compares their answers ("the pursuit of happiness is problematic and ends in futility"). Imagine if we in the US had our public intellectuals all write SAT essays every year to lead on the nightly news (and in a legislative election week)!

Here are some video clips from yesterday's mid-day news. The evening one had the actual questions but I can't find it:

Le bac démarre avec l'épreuve de philosophie ( JT 12/13 - 11/06/2007 )
Cinq écrivains et l'épreuve philo du bac ( JT13h - 11/06/2007 )