James Ivory's second documentary, The Sword and The Flute, also dealing with schools of art, grew out of his experience in making 'Venice: Theme and Variations'. Only here, instead of photographing works by the Italian masters, he has used superb examples of Indian miniature paintings. Ivory's intelligent script, narrated with feeling by Saeed Jaffrey, and accompanied by the music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, traces the history of Indian miniature painting after the Moghul invasion as it develops into two principal schools, the Moghul (Muslim) and the Rajput (Hindu). The Moghul miniatures reflect an interest in current events and the life of the court, while those of the Rajput emphasize other-worldly concerns, the yearning for transcendence, but both involve the reader immediately in a world that is exotic and ravishing. Ivory is fascinated by the faces and prominent eyes of the figures, the garments they wear and the sharply noted detail of their surroundings: the figures seem almost to leap at the viewer. Compared to Venice, the dramas Ivory creates through the Indian scenes are tauter and give a greater sense of complexity, which comes in part from the tension in Ivory between his intellectual role as a close observer of culture and his intimate, empathetic response to the paintings' exceptional sensuousness and romantic feeling. The cameraman for the film was another USC cinema student, Mindaugis Bagdon, and his and Ivory's photography of the Indian miniatures <b>...</b>

Published: 2009-04-28
Uploaded: 2010-07-03
Author: gulantat