THE POETICISM

Viktor Shklovsky taught that art must “make objects unfamiliar ,” shaking us from the automaton of perception. In cinema, this defamiliarization (ostransenie) can turn even the most familiar love story into something new and startling. When a couple’s first kiss or a simple song lyric is framed as if seen for the very first time, we pause and feel its strangeness. Such is the power at work in Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara (2025) and John H. Lee’s A Moment to Remember (2004): two romantic dramas that use memory, time, and silence to estrange the everyday. Both revolve around a young wife’s early-onset Alzheimer’s and her husband’s devotion, but each film’s tone, editing, and narrative rhythm make us truly re-perceive love, loss, and memory. In these films, the director’s craft — from lingering silences to abrupt emotional beats — breaks our cinematic habits and makes the familiar pulse with fresh intensity. “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and...

In Elsinore’s cold night watch and in Sicilia’s sunlit garden, two tormented kings pivot on the sharp hinges of jealousy and grief. Hamlet Broods in the dim halls of his mind, dagger in hand but vision blurred by doubt; Leontes rages beneath the bright Sicilian sky, hurling accusations like lightning. Both kings become tragic sculptors of their own suffering – yet the raw emotions that rend their souls can be read through a common aesthetic lens. By the Indian poetics of Rasa and Dhvani (suggestion), Hamlet’s turmoil and Leontes’s anguish reveal unexpected harmonies. We see Hamlet’s fury and Leontes’s suspicion not just as plot points but as rasas – emotional “flavors” – that the audience savors. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, emotion is as palpable as action: Hamlet drops poison not only in a cup but in Claudius’s ear, stirring Raudra (fury) and Bībhatsa (disgust). The Winter’s Tale casts Hermione as a saintly goddess of patience, only to suffer Leontes’s baseless wrath – an ago...