Pi

I finally finished my final paper on the film Pi incorporating Plato, Sedgwick, and Freud. It was a stretch at times, but not really. Maybe it was just my organizational skills, which are rather lazy lately. Anyway, as always, I found new parts to pick apart. The sun behind the trees especially. I never noticed that in the last scene, the leaves are very much gray instead of black. And that nature prevails in so many other ways - the ants! And that some things are too bright for us to see and better left there in our darkness. And sometimes I think finding meaning in Pi is         i n f i n i t e.

The Forgotten

I saw Hiroshima Mon Amour. It was an "artsy" French black and white 1959 film about the idea of forgetting... or at least that's what I understood. The director fuses the storytelling narrative and techniques used in documentaries against the backdrop of the reconstruction of Hiroshima - well after the bombing. History and love are sort of made to parallel each other. It was strange, a Japanese man and a French woman making love, but trying to forget. Recognizing they will forget. Meaning their meeting is more than just a secret affair. Each has caught a glimpse of the other's history and believes they have seen. Neither allows the other to really see. Their reflections taking on new meaning. I'm not sure why I'm even writing about this. Towards the end, the French woman, an actress, becomes this symbol of what has been forgotten... maybe along with what happened to Hiroshima. The Japanese man, an architect, names her Nevers (in France) after the rural place where she was born, but hadn't returned to. The film made me think of December and how most people reflect during this time. Some people unknowingly are choosing what to forget. What should be forgotten. So they breathe new life into it. Or never see it again.