Episode #39 - Phillip Lopate (Charulata)

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"What I've learned from all my writing, is I can take my character and make him be a guide that can go out and fetch the world...and he wanders into my film writing."

Phillip Lopate has been writing for over five decades on a number of subjects - New York, family, marriage, art - but his initial love was the movies. Having seen the New Wave arrive in New York first hand (as well as watch the tide recede), Phillip recounts the stories behind many of his most celebrated essays in this conversation with Peter. He maps out his cinephilia over the years, including finding spirituality through contemplative films, considering the possibility of an essay-film, and thinking through the paradox of making a films about marriage. Finally, the two look at a fascinating work by Indian director Satyajit Ray, Charulata, examining how Ray finds a fascinating tension between East and West in a parable of a tragic housewife, as well as some of the most gorgeously poetic sequences put to screen.

0:00-1:38 Opening 

2:31-9:32 Establishing Shots - Lau Kar-Leung / Donations

10:17-1:03:18 Deep Focus - Phillip Lopate

1:05:53-1:21:26 Double Exposure - Charulata (Satyajit Ray)

1:21:30-1:23:09 Close

Purchase a number of Phillip Lopate's books on Amazon, including Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, American Movie Critics: From Silents Until Now, and The Art of the Personal Essay.

Notes and Links from the Conversation

-David Bordwell on Lau Kar-Leung
-Arthur Knight's The Liveliest Art
-Read Lopate's original NYFF piece on the Columbia Daily Spectator archive.-
Lopate interviewed in the Spectator for Saint At the Crossroads
-Lopate goes on a Fassbinder date
-"Confessions of a Shusher"
-Finding a spiritual life in film through Diary of a Country Priest
-Lopate's reflections of the New York Film Festival can be found in the festival's anniversary book
-An obituary for Stanley Kauffman.
-Columbia University's Double Exposure
-Gilberto Perez
-On Essay films: "In Search of the Centaur"
-Marriage films: Contempt, Saraband, Before Midnight
-Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness
-Melville's Two Men in Manhattan
-Charulata on Criterion

Theme Music: “Forward” by Northbound

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