Ulisse Lendaro and Jitendra Mishra
A short while ago, I sat down over a zoom call with the two masterminds behind a gorgeously shot 14 minute film that is a celebration and commemoration of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, Ode to the West Wind. It is called “Human O.A.K.”. An actor, producer and director, the multi-talented Ulisse Lendaro is the Italian creative genius behind the film. Lendaro’s co-production partner is Jitendra Mishra, a producer who has already been associated with the production, distribution and promotion of more than 100 films in different categories in various capacities. Many of them have received worldwide acclamation and recognition in global film festivals. For me it was a thrilling and inspirational conversation that was at times philosophical and at times profoundly emotional. Afterwards, Ulisse wrote me to say that our call had “quenched a thirst in my soul”. I share that emotion. I was so inspired by this conversation and what Lendaro has accomplished that I decided to go far beyond a typical interview and delve deeper into the topics we discussed. I hope you will enjoy what follows and become as inspired as I was. Together we can change our world for the better.
Art in the Time of Pandemic
An Interview With Ulisse Lendaro and Jitendra Mishra
by Graham Henderson
Ulisse Lendaro is an Italian actor, producer and director now living in Vincenza. He first encountered the writing of Percy Bysshe Shelley in high school thanks to his French teacher - it left a profound impression (as Shelley can do!). Ten years later he revisited the poet and then again in 2020 when he was seeking inspiration for a short movie he wanted to make about the effect the pandemic was having on our lives. A very passionate, creative individual, Ulisse believes in the power of art to renew and advance the human race. In the midst of the current crisis he set himself the goal of making a film. He wanted to create a work of art which demonstrated our ability to reinvent and renew ourselves. Ulisse told me that he wanted to use a poem as the narrative foundation of his film - a poem which spoke to the possibilities for renewal and also which demonstrated the resilience of our species. Indeed, he hoped that the mere act of making this film would serve as a beacon of hope, telling me that creators are in effect at “the disposal of humanity to help create a better future”.
But where was he to start? “Believe me”, says Ulisse, “I looked everywhere: Italian poets as well as English poets like Byron and Keats and even Shakespeare.” This is when it occurred to him to look to Shelley. He quickly realized that it was only Shelley that inspired him. It was “the power of his poetry,” he said, “it speaks in a revolutionary way to our times. His words are also perfect for the cinema.” This is a topic I have written about many times. And the poem he settled on was Ode to the West Wind - a poem enjoying its 200th anniversary just now.
Ulisse with his wife Anna Valle and children Ginevra and Leonardo (all of whom appear in the film).
Ulisse went about his task with his characteristic passion and thoroughness. He immersed himself in Shelley’s poetry and his life. Soon his entire family was reading Shelley’s poetry and experiencing the power of the poet’s words to do something Ulisse found quite remarkable - as he put it: “to influence people from generation to generation to generation.” Like me, Ulisse marvelled at Shelley’s fervent desire to change the world through a revolution of the imagination. As Ulisse remarked,
“I read Shelley at different times in my life and he always fascinated me because his poems always acquire new and relevant revolutionary meanings. Shelley was a visionary dealing with universal themes and that's why I think he is so very contemporary.”
“I read Shelley at different times in my life and he always fascinated me because his poems always acquire new and relevant revolutionary meanings — Ulisse Lendaro”
This led Ulisse and I into a discussion about Shelley’s theory of the “cultivation” of the imagination as a moral power — something that sets him apart from all other Romantic writers. A lot of ink has been spilled over what the term “cultivated imagination” actually means, but I think Shelley’s theory was expansive enough to allow for many different coherent explanations.
For me it starts with Shelley’s aversion to the authoritarian political systems with which he was all too familiar. And, much like the Deists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Shelley looked upon established religion as an enabler of those structures and he looked upon religious faith as little more than superstition. “Religion,” he said, “is the handmaiden of tyranny.” To attack these structures, Shelley relied on skepticism - an ideal tool to undermine entrenched power structures of any kind and in particular religion. Put simply he advocated questioning and undermining all authority.
To replace these structures was an entirely more difficult problem, and one which Shelley would rely on a different programme. Shelley talks and writes a lot about love - to the point that many people think of him primarily as a love poet - a writer of harmless romantic poetry. And indeed, Shelley frequently wrote about romantic love and also sexual love. But mostly when Shelley talked about “love” he was very clearly thinking about that psychological capacity that would come to be known as “empathy”: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another person. This alone would not suffice for Shelley, however, because Shelley wanted to change the world, to make it better, to help people, and so Shelley’s empathy is always infused with compassion. To change the world, he thought, required an imaginative revolution; people had to learn to see the world very differently - but how? I think of his response to Coleridge’s partially plagiarized poem about Mont Blanc, “Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni”:
Ye Ice-falls! ye that from the mountain’s brow
Down enormous ravines slope amain --
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice,
And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge!
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?—
God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God!
God! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
Like most of his era, Coleridge believed that God was responsible for all that is beautiful and sublime in our world. In this poem he challenges his readers to look at the natural world and not see the handiwork of god. Shelley, writing his own poem dedicated to Mont Blanc some years later, accepted this challenge and tacitly denounced Coleridge’s worldview. Whatever you think about the plagiarism charge, one thing we do know, Coleridge was never in the “Vale of Chamouni”, he never actually saw Mont Blanc - Shelley was and did. Shelley believed it was essential that we look not for “hand of god” in our lives and demanded that we assume responsibility for not only our actions but the world in which we live. To rely on superstition and external powers is to shirk personal responsibility for our lives.
But to actually see the world differently would require a cultivated imagination that could break the great chain of superstition and reliance on “faith” which inhibits our imagination and holds us hostage to the past. And such an imagination is only possible if we adopt a skeptical view of accepted dogmas and entrenched institutions and cultivate our powers of empathy and compassion. The best way to do that is really quite straightforward - it is done through immersing yourself in the lives and experiences of others - something that can be done though experiencing art in all its formats; I would argue particularly, reading. Ulisse agreed. “I think this is very important,” he said because this is in fact the theme of his film:
“The Oak tree represents the family tree of humanity - it is to this that the little girl in the film is drawn. And it is through literature that she can experience not only the past but the future as well. Reading, literature and art, is the bridge between the past and our future. This is how humanity can regenerate and renew itself.”
“Reading, literature and art, is the bridge between the past and our future. This is how humanity can regenerate and renew itself. — Ulisse Lendaro”
It was for this reason Ulisse selected Ode to the West Wind. A deeply personal poem, the Ode central metaphor is the wind. As Paul Foot noted, “the wind, and everything associated with it, became a series of shifting symbols each connected with Shelley’s ideas [and] his revolutionary inspiration….” The same is true for Ulisse’s cinematic realization of Shelley’s poem. In the film, the wind is the protagonist, a silent, observing presence that interacts with the actors. Shelley’s poem is somewhat despairing. He regrets the ideals of his youth for revolutionary change seem to be ever more out of his grasp. Yet, the poem ends with a call to the wind which he wants to maintain and spread the revolutionary spirit of his words in what Foot called a “mighty agitation which would reach and awaken all humanity.”
Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
His invocation has been answered; though ignored, censored and outcast in his own time, Shelley’s poetry went on to inspire generations of enthusiasts, activists and creators - including Ulisse whose film is a literal response to Shelley’s closing stanzas. I find Ulisse’s reinterpretation of Shelley’s masterpiece to be altogether uplifting and full of hope. Shelley would be profoundly gratified. You will need to see for yourself the manner in which Ulisse has developed the Shelley’s ideas.
Ursula K. Le Guin.
I reminded Ulisse of Shelley’s famous remark in The Defense of Poetry: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I have always unpacked this to mean that creators are the representatives of the people. and that their works incarnation of the hopes and desires of humanity. Take this a step further and what Shelley seems to be saying is that creators speak for the people and are therefore an essential if not critical component of the political system. It also makes them a formidable foe of authoritarians, which probably explains why they view writers in particular as such a threat — and often imprison or even kill them. As Ursula Le Guin once remarked, “Dictators fear poets.” My friend Ciaran O’Rourke defined this role particularly well, in his article Shelley in a Revolutionary World, he wrote of James Connolly the famous Irish republican and socialist:
“If Shelley conceived of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, a great part and purpose of this role lay, for him, in the capacity to perceive and express the radical aspirations of the toiling “many” (in Ireland and farther afield)”.
One of Le Guin’s other well known statements was that “we read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” Remarks like this are why I believe Le Guin was a Shelleyan through and through. Her thinking her almost exactly aligns with Shelley - and Ulisse as well — in his film, literature (specifically books), play an essential role in his vision of the renewal of humanity.
“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. — Ursula K. Le Guin”
All of this put the importance of creators in our society in the front and center of our minds, and so our conversation turned to the plight of creators today in the wake of the pandemic. Ulisse talked about dancers he knew who were now unable to dance, shuttered theaters and out of work actors. I pointed to the music community where an entire way of life has been almost destroyed. While both Ulisse and I agreed that art forms such as music and theater will never die, neither of us fully understand what it is into which they will morph.
Something else is clear as well, during the current crisis, the rich are getting fabulously wealthy and the middle class and the poor are being squeezed. This form of inequity is exactly what Shelley himself railed against two hundred years ago. I have often said that I think the things that would shock Shelley the most were he to time travel to our time would not be computers and rockets, but rather that the share of wealth concentrated in the hands of the few has become even greater. He would have expected better of humanity after the passage of two hundred years. We should be ashamed. If Shelley and Ulisse are right about the role of the creator in shaping our future (in fueling our resistance, our renewal and our resilience) then it really feels like the survival of the artistic community becomes increasingly important.
Rabindranath Tagore. 1861 - 1941
There was another undercurrent to our conversation and that is the Indian connection here. Jitendra, Ulisse’s affable, thoughtful production partner remarked that there was in fact strong link between his country and Shelley. I pointed out that Shelley was actually extremely interested in Indian art and poetry. He had read extensively about India and the imagery in Prometheus Unbound was heavily influenced by mythological motifs drawn from there - Stuart Curran writes extensively about this in his book “Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis”. Toward the end of his life he wrote to Hogg remarking that he was thinking of going to India "where I might be compelled to active exertion and enter into an entirely new sphere of action". Later however, he despondently wrote to Byron saying "I feel sensibly the weariness and sorrow of past life.” The idea of doing something new in India had become for him, "I dare say a mere dream".
Jitendra responded by pointing out the fact that Gandhi was fond of quoting lines from The Mask of Anarchy. Shelley, as is well known, was one of the very first writers to express the idea that the most effective response to oppression and force was massive, non-violent resistance. We can not underestimate exactly how revolutionary that would have seemed at the time. Some have guessed that Shelley’s ideas may have been transmitted to Gandhi during the time he spent in England; possibly through the medium of Henry Salt. But the link has never been established. What we can say is that Shelley and Ghandi shared a particular outlook on life at least insofar as pacifism is concerned.
Another influential Indian thinker who was certainly aware of and influenced by Shelley was Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941). He was sometimes described as the “Bengali Shelley” for reasons even a cursory examination of his biography will make plain. The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), Tagore was a Bengali poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter who was highly influential in introducing Indian culture to the west and vice versa. However, the connection that interested Jitendra the most was between the Tamil poet Subramania Bharati (1882 - 1921) and Shelley. Bharati is perhaps one of India’s most famous poets (and one of the least known outside of its borders). Bharati was phenomenally prolific and influential - he was also a nationalist and revolutionary in his outlook. And one thing we know for certain - he was profoundly influenced by Shelley - to the point he adopted the pen name “Shelley-Dasan” - meaning “disciple of Shelley”. One of his poems, entitled “Wind”, appears to be designed as a meditation on and reinterpretation of Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. It is infused with a Shelleyan revolutionary spirit - a spirit Bharati has made entirely his own:
Wind, come softly.
Don’t break the shutters of the windows.
Don’t scatter the papers.
Don’t throw down the books on the shelf.
There, look what you did — you threw them all down.
You tore the pages of the books.
You brought rain again.
You’re very clever at poking fun at weaklings.
Frail crumbling houses, crumbling doors, crumbling rafters,
Crumbling wood, crumbling bodies, crumbling lives,
Crumbling hearts —
The wind god winnows and crushes them all.
He won’t do what you tell him.
So, come, let’s build strong homes,
Let’s joint the doors firmly.
Practise to firm the body.
Make the heart steadfast.
Do this, and the wind will be friends with us.
The wind blows out weak fires.
He makes strong fires roar and flourish.
His friendship is good.
We praise him every day. (Translated from the Tamil by A.K. Ramanujan)
Ulisse Lendaro, through the medium of film, is clearly following in this august tradition!
The links between Shelley and India strike me as poorly understood. I was able to locate what seems to be a seminal book by Dr. John G Samuel of the Institute Asian Studies: “Comparative study of the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, English Romantic poet, with the poetry of C. Subrahmanya Bharati, 1882-1921, Indian revolutionary poet”. A quick scan of the literature turns up very little in the way of current scholarly investigations of Shelley’s influence on either Tagore or Bharati. Given the current climate in academic romantic circles, this would seem to be a glaring oversight. I welcome my readers to point me in the direction of anything of interest. This is a subject I wish to pursue.
“Creators are at the disposal of humanity to help create a better future. — Ulisse Lendaro ”
Jitendra and Ulisse very kindly provide me with a link to the film's trailer. And I am pleased to be able to share that with you today.
The film is scheduled for release in the new year and I will have many more details which I can provide you with in due course. What I can say is that this is very clearly a work of art that was created in a distinctly Shelleyan revolutionary spirit with great sensitivity and love. The film expressly commemorates the 200th anniversary of the publication of Ode to the West Wind. Human O.A.K. is beautifully scored and the production values are extraordinary — all the more so due to the fact that this was filmed during the pandemic under very difficult circumstances. Ulisse and Jitendra are themselves the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit they so admire in Shelley; a spirit of resistance, resilience, and ultimately renewal. In these difficult times, their film is a breath of fresh air and an inspiration.
“Resistance. Resilience. Renewal.”
Ulisse Lendaro is an Italian director, producer and actor. He received a special mention for his acting from the theater critics at Premio Hystrio in 2004. After appearing for many years in theatrical productions, Lendaro produced a cult horror film directed by Jonathan Zarantonello. In 2017 he directed Imperfect Age, a movie that premiered at the Rome International Film Festival and which was warmly recieved. Produced by Aurora Film and Rai Cinema Imperfect Age was been described by Rolling Stone Magazine as a mix between Black Swan and All about Eve. In 2020 Lendaro directed the short film En Pointe with the participation of Roberto Bolle. The film was entered in the competition at the Giffoni Film Festival in 2020.
https://www.linkedin.com/company/24647461/admin/
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0501764/
https://filmfreeway.com/UlisseLendaro450/photos
Jitendra Mishra is one of the few Indian film producers & promoters who have been able to create a
benchmark in ‘Alternative method of Film Production, Distribution & Promotion’ at international level. Committed towards meaningful cinema, Jitendra has already been associated with the production, distribution and promotion of more than 100 films in different categories in various capacities. Many of them have got worldwide acclamation and recognition in global film festivals like Venice, Cannes, Berlin & Toronto. His recent feature film production ‘The Last Color' has already been selected in more than 50 international film festivals and won 15 awards as of now. The film had a special screening at the prestigious UN
headquarters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitendra_Mishra
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4251856/