Before the "Hunger Games"....

...there was real hunger, at least there were masterly attempts at representing the actual human experience of hunger in all its un glamorous details.

Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray's The Distant Thunder (1973), is such an attempt. I recall having seeing the movie with my parents. My parents would not miss any Ray movie, so around the time that this particular Ray movie was released, they dragged the entire family, including us little kiddies and our paternal grandmother, to the theaters.

Everybody knew that the film wouldn't have a long run because the theme--of famine--wasn't "entertaining. So, it had to be seen right away.

The Distant Thunder (translated from the Bengali Oshoni Shongket) did not treat hunger as a trope or metaphor, but as a direct result of, as film reviewer Richard Brody says, the "inexorable and abstract machinery of economics."  

The film is a fictionalized account of the great Bengal famine of 1943, when India became a victim of a war it was part of not by choice but by compulsion.

Colonial India had rich reserves of grain, which Great Britain diverted to its troops in an effort to shore up its war against imperial Japan. At the time of the famine, Japan had invaded Singapore and GBR was on the side of the Singaporeans.

My father said he had faint memories of the famine, but his extended family, being Brahmins, were spared the worst of its effects in the countryside.

We watched the movie, spellbound: My parents were spellbound by the artistic mastery on display on screen, while we were spellbound because there was nothing in this film for kids. It was an altogether joyless movie.

The only person who interrupted the visual experience was my grandmother. She fidgeted and at the end of the film, outside the theater, she said she hated the film.

The Western Canon, graphically

Graphic artists, Huxley King and Terrence Boyce have converted their still-graphic representation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, into an animated graphic.

King and Boyce are among many other gifted artists who have contributed to two volumes of The Graphic Canon, edited by Russ Kick.

The Graphic Canon is just what the title says it is: a collection of classics of Western literature in the form of images.

As reviewer Annie Weatherwax says, so many of us readers have often imagined how a Captain Ahab, in the throes of his monomaniacal pursuit of the whale, or a Hester Prynne, parading in broad view of a judging public with the letter "A" emblazoned across her chest, would look.

Now, the artists of The Graphic Canon have given form to these imagined figures.

Finding a different kind of stillness...

Be still and write... in your head.