Thursday, March 3, 2011

Rashomon

And like a trained handler of large audiences, Pamuk bit into each one of them, cutting them short, rephrasing their questions impatiently, hurrying on to the next. One somewhat long-winded but patently sincere questioner was waved disdainfully into stammering silence. Perhaps Pamuk did not intend to be rude at all and I am certainly not suggesting that there was a touch of Ottoman arrogance about it. Perhaps it was only a combination of his somewhat didactic manner, his heavily deliberated sentences and a quicksilver intellect, eager to get on with things. In any case, the spell was broken and I found myself wishing that at least I should have been seated. - Navtaj Sarna in The Hindu

Mr. Pamuk is very funny in person.[..] We also liked the masterful way he guided the audience during the question-and-answer session, since the people who ask questions often seem to be completely unconstrained by any sense of the passage of time and only vaguely aware of the distinction between question and soliloquy.[..] To the relief of the audience, he cut off one man, who made sundry remarks—including the fact that he had read the novel in three days—before beginning to share his thoughts on the quality of the translation. - Report in Wall Street Journal

One involved this old gentleman who gushed on about Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red and wondered aloud about how good the translator was to have captured the essence and beauty of Pamuk’s storytelling. I’m not sure if the question was posed in the right way, but Pamuk’s dismissal of the point/question and person was a bit of a sad comment, more so after the topics that he spoke at length on and will do so in later events. - Bookchums.com

“Let’s move on to the next question before I am deported,” he added hastily, much to the amusement of the audience and Chandrahas Choudhury, who was interviewing him. The Telegraph

But in Rashomon they did not video tape what happened in the forest. These humans: subjectivity, etc, even for simple things! Ottoman arrogance or an intelligent, smart man's humour? Who talked about deportation, Chandrahas or Pamuk?

But, thanks to modern technology, the subjective can be made a lot less one. The questions start at ~ t=10 minutes.



Also, it can be reasonably concluded that the cameraman went for a cup of tea during the shooting of this session. A photographer's head come into the view in the video, it gets auto-focused, then Pamuk is back in focus, and then the photographer's head again, until he moves out. May be the cameraman didnt like Ottoman arrogance :-)