Shivaji Sengupta

What is love? Is it the longing one nurtures for the same woman for fifty-one years, without ever being in love with anybody else, without ever getting married? Or is it the first one you've ever loved but couldn't marry, or even consummate it, married someone else, but, deep inside, never loved your spouse the way you loved your first one? Is love sex, bedding 622 women without giving away your heart that you've been nourishing for that one woman for fifty-one years? Or is love simply caring for someone, or even someones, never meaning harm to anybody, being gentle and sweet and sexy? Love in the Time of Cholera, the film, explores these questions, not just through narrative but also cinematic techniques. And although it does give a final answer, at the very, very end of the film, the other questions about what love is, do not entirely disappear: they linger in your memory like the vivid colors the film uses, through fade-outs and zoom-ins. Love in the Time of Cholera (henceforth, just Love) is about romantic love: love's capacity to find its object (and objective) regardless of social and/or natural obstacles. From the film's perspective (I haven't read the book yet) you cannot vanquish love because of "self erasure." It forms, increases, intensifies and then simply fades out, but never goes away. Withdrawn, it lies dormant waiting, waiting for the opportune moment when it can appear again, as a different incarnation, a different god. Then, it zooms in. The film as a medium lends to this phenomenon of self erasure, reappearance. Heidegger used the term first, stating that sous rature is the practice of erasing a word when it does not - cannot - convey the meaning the author wants to convey. Literally, it means "under erasure." Jaques Derrida, the late French critic and philosopher, popularized the term by printing his deletions in a text. He explained sous rature - as the typographical expression that tries to identify sites within texts where terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self-undermining, rendering their meaning unstale. An example: Emotion's as a mill, Busy standing still. If emotion is a vector - ie it gives direction to desire - then the poet's description of the (human being) standing still, shows a cultural bias in how humans think of emotions, while contrasting it with motionlessness, thereby reinforcing the motional quality of emotions. The signifier, emotion, erases itself, as it were, to increase its impact on the reader of the poem. The poet, however, has tto depend on tthe reader's ability to recognize the motion in emotion, and note the contrast - standing still - in order to appreciate the metaphor. The film maker does not have that problem. It is my contention that sous rature works as well in films than in written text, although the spectator does not see the various previous shots. She only sees the final product, but can trace the previous deleted shots in the previous frames. The film is liquid text. It shifts even as we see it. Almost like in real life, the frames in a film move sequentially so rapidly that it simulates real life. Indeed, we sometimes forget we are not watching real life. Furthermore, film makes absence present more impactfully than written text. While both film and printed text create the illusion of presence, film, by the use of pictures, is more illusional.