Paradise is a state of mind

Our latest technological household item is a DVD recorder, several years old and bought used from eBay last weekend. It will eventually replace our crappy VHS tape recorder, and one of the wonderful things it can do is digitize VHS tapes and back them up to DVD.

The first tape to digitize that I grabbed this morning happened to be a 35 minute video by Albert Falzon, called "Excerpt from The Kumbha Mela - Same As It Ever Was". Falzon (who got known many years ago for his surf movie "Crystal Voyager" with a Pink Floyd soundtrack) went to India in the early eighties to film various religious festivities, one of them being the famous Kumbha Mela, a Hindu festival and possibly the largest religious festival on Earth. This particular video shows part of his travel towards that place: on a boat across the waterways of Kashmir.

For an inhabitant of cold Europe like me, this magical landscape seems very close to paradise. Falzon's movie is completely filmed in slow motion, and he often uses a fish-eye lens - and there is of course the soundtrack by Harold Budd and Brian Eno. There are no words and there is no action - there is only a lush jungle landscape slowly drifting by, light reflections on water, people moving in slow motion. This stuff seems to come directly from a dream, from a timeless place.

How strange to enter this state of mind, watching this movie, while knowing that Kashmir has been the center and subject of wars for a long time, and is still far from being peaceful on many levels.

If you like the state of mind induced by Budd's "The Pearl" or Eno's "On Land", you will like this video. You can get it used on VHS tape if you search for it. Apparently it was also rereleased on DVD under the title "Same as it ever was", together with a movie about the Kumbha Mela festival.