The togetherness in writing: reflections after ‘hearing’ Adam David and Miguel Syjuco’s ‘ongoing conversation’

I haven’t finished reading this, but you can read this man here, and you might share his optimism. I did

Adam David and Miguel Syjuco’s conversation, as published by Ateneo’s Kritika Kultura, more than an unexpected yummy treat not exactly for aspiring writers but for ongoing-writers, is also a heartwarming exchange between two literatis that could make us realize the specialness of the act of writing vis-à-vis the calloused and complex lives lived in today’s society. In this exchange, the two actively engaged in a discussion of issues revolving the literary scene mainly in the Philippines but also in the international context. Issues such as the arguably persisting crab mentality within the “little kings and queens of Pinoy lit” as opposed to the characteristically Pinoy bayanihan unfelt within this same exclusive circle; the common ground between the long-standing divergence of art for art’s sake and art for man’s sake, however too general and simplified these terms might sound; and the problems of incorporating both local and international flavors and reaching for both these kinds of audiences were touched on.

This exchange appears to be a really stimulating one, exemplifying the kind of engagements, of communication, that is highly valuable for and between humans in this universe, in this society that recent documentations have said to be more and more alienating, despairing and apocalyptically self-defeating. It appeared as an unadulterated kind of passing of thoughts between each other, not much hampered by ideological or personal predilections or motivations, but made almost visibly vibrant by the willing meeting of the minds of learned and experienced individuals. David would recall his getting out of the Malikhaing Pagsulat program of UP while Syjuco would perhaps bittersweetly retell his early struggles not just to get published but more significantly, to survive day after day abroad. Less firsthand and concrete than these, though certainly not less acute and relevant is David citing Marianne Robinson or Sjyuco endlessly harking back on his (readerly) engagements with Bolaño. It is less of a debate with a tacit aim of declaring a winning side than a dialogue where judgments are provisional and ideas are put forth for its own and the others’ morphing into something less uncertain, something more tenable and worthwhile to keep.

What I find most endearing though, most afflatus-lifting, uplifting, is Syjuco’s insistence on the priority of literature, and hence, a necessary push for its diligent and prolific and demanding production. The question and scrutiny of the quality of these products shall come afterwards, when there are enough literary products already distilled after a painstaking and painful process of drafting and redrafting and revising and revisiting.

At first, this statement by Syjuco passed off to me as somewhat exorbitant with its impressions, but a closer reckoning made me imbibe the sense of goading the statement may have been originally intended to effect:

“All of us have much to do. But what’s the priority? Everything else, or literature?

Syjuco would downplay all the others, the ‘everything else,’ in favor of the pushing for, the crusade for literature, even one of the usually mentioned determining forces in the activities not just of writers but all of us – economics. Said Syjuco further, “I really don’t think it’s economics, because economics is an issue everywhere. I think it’s just getting out and spending the time and patience necessary to make the work work.”

Definitely, this is not a haphazard, outright bypassing of this important influence of the economics, as some hasty (non-)readers might make out of the above statement. I think, I believe, following Syjuco’s insistence on and for the utmost importance of literature, this statement on economics is merely his implication that in spite of the vastness of this economic factor, literature can trample it on, can hurdle it and more ahead towards its triumph.

And what do I think is this triumph of literature? I think it is not just being merely there, written movementless on the page, transcribed challengers-less in the minds of geniuses and tramps and artist – the triumph of literature shall constitute an endless movement, almost a cycle, a coming-and-going towards further development of the letters that we write and bleed for and whose shapes and postures we have culled from our everyday faring in the waves of traffic and human interactions and conversations, sunbathing and smoke-inhaling/exhaling, and after these again, painful and painstaking processes of transcribing, shall be read to others, shall be made to be read, or listened to by others, for the trickiest of their interpretations, for the most provisional of their judgments, for the wisdom of their evaluations, or we do not know, for the benefit or detriment of their actions.

See, literature is on the one hand produced, and on the other, received. In its production, there shall be an unrelenting will to forge ahead despite circumstances and impinging of the economic, or of the circumstantial or of the meticulously cosmic, to produce literature, to devote eons of time for it in the cubicle, in the streets, in the ruptures in the evening made by the moonlights, in the waiting areas of malls, in the often charming stillness of aftersex. There should be time for it as there is time for eating and pooping and buying the groceries. And there should be discipline too, there should be structure in it too as there is discipline and structure, at least ideally, in our diet and in our studies, in our lives.

In its reception, there shall be an openness and respect to the diversity of voices and opinions and impressions and the frankness to butcher letters, praise letters, recommend things to letters for their own sharpening and expanding. We should be writing literature, and we should be reading literature. Hell we care with belles-lettres and literary institutions and their teachings of the literary, if people are writing crap from our standards, if they are reading Precious Hearts and Tom Clancy, let us sulk and scorn a little and be more willing to engage them. Like David said, we need to work together; like Syjuco implied, there need not be a monopoly of the discourse, everyone should be encouraged to pitch in with their several-cents of thoughts; like the both of them performed in this conversation, writing and literature should be an ongoing engagement, where people will occasionally meet and sit down and discuss together after writing their lives in the wor(l)dpad of the universe separately and who knows, maybe afterwards, they will not just sit down and talk together, they will also do and then write down things in and about and for the world, together.

Something like a teary-eyed post for the Chicago Bulls

Last season’s and this year’s playoffs for the Chicago Bulls are marked by interesting semblances and contrasts. It is the contrasts however that prove to be more dramatic to the somewhat same, eerily wounded Chicago Bulls team.

Last year, they opened the playoffs with a win against the 76ers but lost their MVP pint guard to an injury and decisively turned the result of that first round match. After six games and crucial heartbreaking lapses in Game 6, they eventually bowed to the 76ers. This year, they opened the playoffs just like they closed the previous one, without Derrick Rose and with a loss. They were routed by the Brooklyn Nets in their home court and suddenly, at least for me, their chances are casted with a bleaky pall.

The next three games however, one of which was still played in Brooklyn and the two played in their home at Chicago, characteristically showed the kind of team this bunch of Chicago Bulls is and what they could achieve with their famed discipline and character. They limited the Nets to their worst shooting games of the entire season in Games 2 and 3 in order to seize a 2-1 lead. Once again, it proved that defense, on top of controlling the boards, is an effective weapon for the team-oriented Bulls who works together to pester their opponent’s rhythm in offense. Then in that one-of-a-kind Game 4, the Bulls erratically won by turning to their offense and specifically turning to perhaps their most erratic player, Nate Robinson. They went back from 14 down with less than three minutes on a scoring rampage by Robinson and then went in to force overtime. It took three overtimes before they eventually claim the victory with good defensive efforts and a key offensive board and putback by Nazr Mohammed off a Carlos Boozer free throw miss needed to finally pull away from the tough Brooklyn Nets. After that point, the Bulls had a seemingly comfortable 3-1 lead in the series and needing to win only one game out of the three remaining possible games to advance to the conference semifinals. But the Nets obviously had other plans. They won both Games 5 and 6, the latter just by a single possession, to force a do-or-die Game 7 on their home court. Notably, Kirk Hinrich sat out on Game 5 due to an injury, effectively eliminating an able defender to Deron Williams, one fot eh Nets’ top players. Worse, Luol Deng was also not able to play Game 6 because of another injury and so the Bulls were left not just without Derrick Rose, but also Hinrich, his backup and a vital cog in the Bulls’ defensive rotation, and Deng, another All-Star.

So Game 7 at Brooklyn, where Chicago will make a case against sheer talent being the most significant criterion in winning a basketball game , not to say a basketball playoff series, not to say a championship. With Rose, Hinrich and Deng out and with Taj Gibson and Nate Robinson suffering from illnesses but still playing through them, the Bulls wagered on the enormity of their hearts and their wills to secure the victory and finally advance to the conference semifinals against the Heat. The NBA announcer even called this Bulls team ‘the walking medical ward’ and yet they showed no signs of being fazed. Joakim Noah recording that double-double plus a play0ff career0high sic blocks; Marco Bellinelli rising to the occasion and stepping up in the absence of key players with his team-high 24 points; Jimmy Butler finally showing to get past the playoff jittery stage and playing for the entire 48 minutes of the game; and this entire Bulls team, covering and running after the Nets’ shooters, hustling for loose balls, deflecting passes and tipping in baskets or tapping the ball out for offensive boards.

On a Game 7, you discount talent. That should be a given for the case of both teams who have slugged out a heck of a series that needed a deciding game to see who advances and who does not. On a Game 7, what matters is heart and grit and determination and how well do you put those into court when the game begins until it ends.

Last Saturday, against the Nets, it was the Bulls who came out more passionate, more determined to extend not just their wonderful season highlighted by the precariousness brought by injuries, not to mention THAT injury nursed and being recovered from by Rose, but also their playoff stint where they continue to prove that winning can be done by a team who works and plays together and not rely on flashy superstars who make flashy moves.

So in anticipation of their semifinal series with the defending champion Heat (which actually already begun and which they won again, scoring an early upset), I continue to believe that this scrappy, gritty and team-oriented kind of play can stand a decent chance against the superstar-filled, ostentatious play of the Miami Heat. As we close out the sharp contrasts between the first rounds of the Bulls’ playoff stints last year and this year, we can move on and look forward to another good series against their brewing archenemy in Miami Heat. The operation of contrasts will be at the foreground again: it is Lebron, Wade and Bosh and their superstar statuses and capabilities versus the entire Chicago Bulls team willing to dive for loose balls, chase down shooters and pass the ball for open teammates and play together towards victory.

The Bulls are definitely the underdogs, just like they were against the Nets, and they are not far from stealing another in the Heat.

 

 

Poetry, and language, and sense, and the material

That is quite a charming phrase actually, “language’s resilience against sense,” coming from the collection of my poet-friend and which is difficult to lead astray from the memory of the signifier-signified. Ironically, the earlier Charles Peirce, once transposed well into the contemporary time, provides a necessary extension of the more famous ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, particularly the latter’s signifier-signified dichotomy. Peirce already formulated the needed inclusion of the ‘interpretant’ that shall mediate between the representation (‘tanda’ o ‘signos’) and the object, what I read as roughly corresponding to the Saussurean signifier and signified. This third term, the ‘interpretant’ is essential for it gives a material grounding to the signifier-signified pair whose analyses mainly revolves within the realms of language and thought (‘sense,’ in Janine’s author’s note). And the expansion of the horizon where poetry (first as thought or sense, and then as language) dwells and springs is complicated when we recall a key facet of its existence: the more material facet of the tangible, breathable world, more closely, the poet who wields the pen, who thinks and who utilizes language.

Hence, I suggest that poetry is more than the already gallant task of prodding language’s ‘resilience against sense,’ notwithstanding how charmingly we put into words such insights. Poetry, with all its encapsulating the poet and her thoughts and faculty and manipulation of language, anticipates attrition and then revival from its perpetuated engagement with the material world. This engagement does not exactly signify language’s resurgence against the material (the world), but its keeping at pace with this material unfolding, either through representing it, or challenging it, or transforming it.

Mula ito sa Adivay

We are kids amid this capitalism

Perhaps it is our non-dilemma that we are saturated with mostly feel-good images in today’s “infantile capitalism,” this term tenably employed by Jameson in his reversal of the usual tracing of the capitalist system into three stages (early, mature and late or advanced). Since most of us have “been born into it, takes it for granted and has never known anything else… the friction, the resistance effort of earlier moments having given way to the free play of automation and the malleable fungibility of multiple consumer publics and markets (Jameson 1991, 367),” Jameson’s term rightly corresponds to our generation’s lack of knowledge and awareness of the historical configurations that gave birth to our present.

On the one hand, this is a non-dilemma. That is ‘Ignorance is bliss’ operating on an unprecedentedly shameless and very public way that there is no longer a need to resort to overt slyness. On the other, we can always argue that our being engulfed in this ‘infantile capitalism’ punctures us more strikingly precisely because of this same ignorance, this same lack of awareness of the intricacies of our surroundings. We do not know the implications of buying the Nike logo more than the actual shoes; we do not know the subtleties of thievery in bank deposits and interest rates; we do now know who that guy named Che Guevara we often see in T-shirts and what are the things that he has done; we do not know why men in briefs in magazine covers are scarce compared to their ‘female’ versions.

*

Aimless wandering, Hundred Islands, Pangasinan

Our kind of play as ‘infants’ in this ironically advanced stage of capital is one that has been mostly prearranged and even reinforced by those who thrive in this makeup. The play we make in Farmville, in our monthly mall splurging, in our bar-hoppings and video-renting is a far-cry from the more essential childhood play of sheer preoccupation with fondling little toys or running in the streets. It was also Jameson who argued that this literal child’s play has by far been the most effective in bridging the gap between work and freedom; a gap that has become more and more agonizing in today’s world where seldom is the case when work is tantamount to offering as a sense of freedom, much more a sense of joy or fulfillment.

Is this fatalism once again and the preparation for the sudden eruption of the luminescent salvation that is called socialism? Somewhat yes but finally no. This is, as what all words are ideally to be taken as, an opening of a discourse, an effort to create a rupture in the current scheme of things. We are all infants and this system toys on us to protect the gluttony of a few. They seem to be feeding well on us; it is always opportune to spoil ourselves, to make ourselves spoiled. This gluttony needs to stop.

 

 

 

The tears are elsewhere in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men

Some time last week, just a few days after I had my copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, I came up with this list in Flavorwire. I just finished reading Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms — one novel I felt like ironically hating after it affected me so much, not only with the ending that surprisingly surprised me, but with the way Hemingway rendered this kind of ending and seemingly going away mindlessly with it, as if rid of the responsibility that he shall have with regards to his works, lest we adopt a misconception of the famous Barthesian death of the author, — and even before I totally recover from the sense of loss that is mysteriously not only vicarious, which I obtained after reading Mr. Henry’s tale in A Farewell to Arms, I read Steinbeck and thanked myself I am not suicidal.

This can make you cry. So do not read if you’re severely depressed.

I do not want to rehash my retrospectively self-interpreted easy simplification of the Modernist temper and all its supposed intertwinement to the anomie-plagued, Darwin-shocked and war-torn period. Although these are very significant details that need to be put in clearer context, especially since I do not advocate the fainting view of the isolation of the artist and her works. What is notable in Of Mice and Men is its selection of the ‘working class’ as its main characters, even going further in making one of them a “huge man” with “shapeless face” and the mind of a child. This short novel is about the buddies George and Lennie and how they built their dreams in a ranch only to see their gut-wrenching collapse. George takes care of the ‘dumb but not crazy’ Lennie who despite being such, George cannot leave not so because of selfish reasons.  We see right at the onset that George is often piqued by Lennie’s child-likeness yet in a world with attenuating companionship; the bond shared by the two well offsets their glaring differences.  George said that unlike most ranch workers, the both of them “got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us.” Lennie, arguably delighted by this reassurance they appear to do regularly, stated the principle by himself: “because I got you to look after me and you got me to look after you.”

They transferred to a new ranch to work in after a hapless stint in Weed and George and Lennie made friends with their fellow workers. Here, George continually made guard of Lennie in order for him not to imperil their stay in the ranch and consequently, their fulfillment of their dream to have their own land which they will fill with animals and wherein they will plant vegetables. Lennie, above anything else, was most excited about feeding the rabbits. Underlining this dream is George’s growing rancor about their condition, a rightful sentiment of workers: “if I was even a little bit smart, I’d have my own little place, an’ I’d be bringin’ in my own crops, ‘stead of doin’ all the work and not getting what comes up outta the ground.” Steinbeck brings into this short novel, via the consciousness of George, the familiar, albeit haunting reminder of a bleak condition that for the most part has begotten a call for drastic change: the ‘alienation’ of the workers from the fruits of their labor, by virtue of their inability to possess them. This condition of course has its provenance in the dominant economic system that is attracted more to the excessive production for the sake of profit than one that is concerned with the sustenance of all.

The relegation of this arguably more important matter to the background in favor of the eventually heartrending end of the relationship between George and Lennie is not at all deplorable. Steinbeck justified this tacit choice with a masterful rendition that can surely leave a mark on its readers, just like it did to me.

George had to kill Lennie after he unintentionally killed the wife of their son’s boss. This George did not without hesitations. Even a few moments before George shot Lennie, they reiterated their rather mushy “we-got-each-other” statement. But in the end, George killed Lennie, George killed Lennie and I want to believe he did it with a pang in his hands and a genuine twinge in his arms and a real blow in his conscience and a huge sense of regret and loss afterwards. Sometimes, I do not want to blame George with what he has done, thinking he was only impelled by his external conditions; but no, most of the time, I want to blame him and curse him for his cowardice, for his not standing with Lennie up to the end. This is what is bad, man. You read this piece of short novel and you want to be in there, in that world it creates, in a world you know is not entirely fictional, be there and change the flow of events and make them a bit more beautiful, a bit more bearable. In that case, Steinbeck mastered me, in that case, Of Mice and Men proved to be a noble piece of work. I try to say it does not swallow me after I finish reading it but it would be just false; it would be just blunt, self-denial. Flavorwire was incorrect though, Of Mice and Men did not make me cry. But Lennie and George is now holding hands with Holden and Gregor within me and my sympathy for the lost, modern individual.

 

 

Since now’s the time for summer outings

The camera thus makes a great deal in capturing us standing cheerily beside a tourist spot’s landmark. Encompassing De Certeau and Andre Bazin (“the charm of family albums… no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of the lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny….”) and feminists insisting on the politics of the body, the photograph, with its ironically frozen materiality, serves as a scintillating piece of object that designates our previous, but also in a way, eternalized situation. We ARE in, say, Camp John Hay, or the gondolas in Venice, or in Puerto Princesa, Palawan; we (care of our body) are in these tourist attractions (care of the markers of these attractions, following De Certeau). And this is a plus especially since we are a people who are proud of going to places, of making experiences.

Somewhere sa Burnham park, Baguio City

Vital lapses of (magnificent) images in Samsara

It is tempting to adopt the view that what Samsara provides us a venue for the ‘oriental gaze’ (in a cute mishmash of Said and psychoanalytic approaches to cinema, especially Mulvey’s ‘feminist’ overtaking of the theoretical dishing in the said medium) to be launched against the supposedly ‘orientalizing’ viewers. Post-colonialists already said a great deal about this, from Orientalism where Said spoke of the West conjuring and valuing the East according to it images and against its own standards, and Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry that afford the Oriental the potential to unsettle the power relations established by the West.

Notwithstanding the pitfalls of the dominant voices in post-colonial theory, namely in Bhabha, its appropriation of abstracted psychoanalytical concepts and in general for everyone, the usually susceptible identification of a particular category (gender, class, race among others) as the root of inequality and oppression and hence must be the basis of any struggle, they cannot help but be mentally retrieved in thinking about the experimental film Samsara.

At first, and even though it does not overtly claim it, Samsara can remind us of “The Man with a Movie Camera,” another experimental film, albeit a very early one, that aims to construct a filmic language completely distinct from the language of theater of literature. I am yet to finish watching this latter, although what I infer from it, aside from the usual realist bent purported by most films, is its wish to exist without an overt narrative. There will be no dialogues and characters, as in novels or plays, only sounds and images (including people, which are different from ‘characters’). Samsara appears to be following this principle and it proved to be very clever and ingenuous both in selecting and capturing the images it showed in itself.

The first and last images speak of the communality that is certainly stronger in the East than in the West. The dancing rituals, among other special, if not charming (hopefully not to verge towards an exoticizing tone) manifestations of traditions and cultures of communities say something about the traits of the people in these communities.

 

 

Aside from the sense of communality and the synchronicity and interdependence it carries, there are also the intense concentration and assiduity manifested in the sand art the men were doing inside their temples shown in the early part of the film.

A powerfully troubling transition occurs from the shot of a black woman with hair covered with some leaf (a cultural practice, my girlfriend and I agreed), silently but grimly looking at the camera, to the shot of an Asian superhighway, presumably in Tokyo. This I read as the transition from the more cherished traditional to the contradictory global and eclectic. A very admirable shot from the ‘traditional’ phase of the film is the one that captures, mostly in medium shots and in low-angles, the passing of day and night in a land with nothing or no one in it aside from sculptures of human faces. Many other passing-of-day shots can be located in the first part of the film, and they serve to show the less spoiled places of habitation and the surrounding environment of the earlier, more traditional people: the beautiful and intricate creations of nature, the various rock shapes, the waterfalls overlooking thick forests, the cave-like formation of soils. All these wonderful pieces of nature rightfully precede the ‘gaze’ of the traditional man with some white sort of painting over his dark brown face and a big accessory strapped on his head. He (or she?) is then shown with two others, all of them wearing beaded accessories, all of them gravely looking at the viewer, via the camera. After them are curly-haired, bare-breasted, black women, rich in necklaces, having their way to gaze too. A few shots before the shift to the city were allotted to survey the villages of these ‘traditional’ people, their domiciles and their tools inside them. Then we were transported, hopefully not with a shock after all the perhaps disconcerting images from a ‘distant’ space, if not time, to the more familiar images of the city: the rapid cars moving and making the city twinkle from afar, the ‘robotic’ 8-5 workers among others. An interesting scene here is Mr. Coat and Tie putting off his eyeglasses before disfiguring himself hysterically. These words hardly give justice to the blunt unfolding of the sequence. The madness in the office is made evident.

Rapidity comes again in the superhighway and then in gymnasiums and in golf courses and in amusement parks and the same story about the contemporary urban is made crisper here. The yakuzas of Japan, the countercultural emos and punks, the mostly delectable potential of interracial relationships – all these are shown I think as if to add vitality to the multitudinous in the city.

And then we get to my favorite part: the assembly line production of the everyday goods we put in our mouth, we stuff our bodies with: the chickens and cows and the fattened pigs and the microchips that we will purchase in the supermarkets and fastfoods in the form of oily hamburgers or ostentatious gadgets. Here, Lukacs could be smiling wryly, if not dejectedly, with his interpretations getting to live in the flesh: reification triumphs when in the process of our consumption, we are completely oblivious, if not unaware of the process of production which our consumed products underwent. In this production process, there are no people. There are only a mass of bodies with efficient hands and eyes and ears dressed in the same clothes, waiting for the others as they finish their task so they can do theirs. The product is the focus: the color of its cover, the fit of the screws and wires, the smoothness of its grip or the greatness of its size and the people who contribute in furnishing these products to everyday consumers are erased in the process. The disorienting gaze continues, Samsara seems to vow to slap us in the face not only with the images they show but more so, with these gazes from the very people who are part of these images. The Japanese geisha sheds a tear after the barrage of sex toys and the ‘real’ sex toys flood the screen.

The men and women in prison from the Philippines wearing the classic orange clothes are also shown looking at the camera deadpan, perhaps taunting and contending with the viewer, largely succeeding in refusing any taming, any interpretation, any judgment. To me, this is where Samsara is strongest, when the people in it disrespect the camera, when they annihilate, and ironically in a very quiet and peaceful manner, the illusion of a separation between ‘looking subject’ and ‘object-looked-at’ made by the camera. When the people in the ‘scenes’ are suddenly elevated from the screen in order to look at the viewer, not only to accomplish a Brechtian alienation effect that should disturb the assumed, lulled audience, but more terribly, following Zizek, to imply that these images are not “just strips of film, hence, not real;” but exactly the opposite: these images are real, they are not just part of a film. These are not just a screen away from the audience; they are all living in the same place as the audience.

After all these haunting, Samsara returned to our view the female dancers wearing complexly ornate and I assume, delicately made clothes. They then did their dance, or ritual, again showing synchronicity and harmony without an apparent effort. This scene made me feel awfully shameful of myself and my culture and the dominant culture of most people. We always mourn the consumerist culture and all its individualist, alienating, profiteering adjuncts and when we see something like this dance, this magnanimous display of sheer collective harmony harnessed in a tradition protected and developed over generations, the sickening feeling of being mired in the present, dominant culture only gets more puncturing.

The film ended with a tracking shot of a desert which I assume to be somewhere in Asia too and I try to refrain myself from reading this as the filmmakers’ discreet call for a return to nature, a supposedly more pristine, less corrupted nature.

Aside from being a passé one, it misses the entire complexity of existing social and economic conditions that underline everything the film showed. Indeed, images can barely speak, they can barely ramble an exposition; they can only show themselves. This is what I see as one of the major backlogs of the kind of film envisioned and already actualized by The Man with a Movie Camera and Samsara. Images, after all human intervention in the process of selection, editing and all that, when they are flashed in the screen, must not signal the end of the enterprise. These images must speak more explicitly. This is where narrative obviously helps. This is where actual characters, with their implied active human consciousnesses can help a lot. It is through these characters that the audience can be illuminated more and the situations depicted in the film shown to be alterable. This is the biggest loss in Samsara, after all its magnificent, wide array of shots and their various, significant implications, a loss that concerns what I believe should be the primary aims of cinema: an exposition of relevant social truths and the human agency that must continually come before and after these truths.