Word: mahabharata
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...hours the stage -- caked with earth, puddled with water and transformed into a dusty plain in primeval India -- resonates with such ritual images, haunting metaphors, aphoristic dialogue and spiritual searching. The event, viewable in a marathon day or in three installments, is The Mahabharata, the most ambitious production yet by Peter Brook, 62, the visionary elder statesman among stage auteur directors. A French version originated in Avignon in 1985, then played to sold-out houses in Paris in 1986. The English-language premiere transfers this week from the Los Angeles Festival, where it played in a cavernous studio...
...source material is the longest epic of world literature, a 100,000- stanza poem about seven times the combined length of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Like those works, the Mahabharata is a glorious welter of incident and digression, evoking not just a central story of ruinous war but an array of myths and human archetypes and an animal world aquiver with magic. It would be hard to overstate its role as a wellspring of Indian culture. Brook, however, was drawn to its transcending themes: man's joyous awakening to nature and love and duty, the menacing lures of vanity...
Indians know the stargazers have not always been wrong. In January 1934, there was a conjunction of seven planets just before the great Bihar earthquake destroyed 13 Indian and Nepalese cities and killed 10,000 people. Seven planets also came together in 3102 B.C.-the year of the Mahabharata war, which the old Hindu epics say brought bloody death to millions of Indians and, with their deaths...
...WORLD OF APU. In this concluding section of a trilogy (Part One: Father Panchali; Part Two: Aparajito) by Satyajit Ray, contemporary India is born in suffering, and the film itself emerges as a modern Mahabharata, one of the most generously vital movies ever made...
...Each of the three lasts about an hour and 45 minutes and stands as a separate and complete cinema experience in its own right. But the moviemaker intended his trilogy ultimately to be seen and judged as a single immense discursive epic in the Indian tradition-as a modern Mahabharata...