M.J. Rose

Beautiful old film footage…Enjoy!

From The Public Domain Review,

Raja Harishchandra (1913)

“Directed and produced by Dadasaheb Phalke, the “father of Indian Cinema”, this 40-minute-long silent film is the very first full-length Indian feature — the beginning of Bollywood. The narrative of the film is based on the eponymous legend recounted in the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The story centres around the hero Harishchandra, a noble king, who, to honour his promise to the sage Vishwamitra, sacrifices his kingdom, his wife, and eventually also his children. By the end, however, having pleased the Gods with his actions, Harishchandra’s former glory is restored…

Unfortunately, Raja Harishchandra only exists now in fragments (1475 feet of it), which you can see above, with both Hindi and English intertitles…”

For more on this, click here.

Unsanitized tales…

The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear

By Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)

“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.”

“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited with proclaiming, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Intelligence, of course, is a loose grab-bag term that encompasses multiple manifestations, but the insight attributed to Einstein applies most unequivocally to the ninth of developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences: existential intelligence.

Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet….”

More here.

A visual treat for today —

From Lost at E Minor,

Flowers that demand you give them a second look

By Kenny Ong

“We do not demand much from our flowers. They look quite pretty as they are and their role in our lives are also pretty standard thus far. But a few have gone beyond their call of duty and they certainly demand a second glance when the first didn’t quite catch the amazing similarity they withhold. We are talking about parts of or even the entire flower that resemble something else altogether.

On closer look, for instance, the Dracula Simia orchid doubles up as a monkey’s face, the Impatiens Bequaertii blooms are dancing girls in disguise, the Ophrys Bomybliflora laughs like a bumble bee and we even have a Darth Vader in the form of an Aristolochia Salvadorensis…”

For the rest and all the pictures, click here.