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Tag Archives: Othello

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #41: Omkara [Othello] (2006)

06 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abhishek Chaubey, Ajay Devgn, Bipasha Basu, Kareena Kapoor, Naseeruddin Shah, Omkara, Othello, Rekha Bhardwaj, Robin Bhatt, Saif Ali Khan, Shakespeare, Vishal Bhardwaj, Viveik Oberoi

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 2

41. Omkara [Othello] (2006)

With the exception of The Tempest, the plots of Shakespeare’s plays are not actually original to him. What is original is the exceptional psychological depth that he granted the characters in these plays, and the exquisite language with which he chiseled their psychologies into existence.

So when artists adapt Shakespeare onto film, altering the settings and contexts of Shakespeare’s plays seems to me like a Shakespearean move itself. When actors find new interpretations and new meanings in Shakespeare’s scripts, that is essential to the joy of Shakespeare’s work. The characters and their psychologies become alive, as if for the first time, despite these texts being around for four centuries.

One potentially unsettling move that can make us see the plays anew, however, is to not only discard the setting and the historical context of a play, but Shakespeare’s language, too. Perhaps it’s my own prejudice as an English speaker, but that bold move seems more interesting in foreign films—or perhaps visionary foreign adaptations, such as those by Kurosawa, make me forget the exquisite English that was lost, and let’s me focus on the psychology of the story with a strange new immediacy. The thrill in part emanates from my own ignorance of Japanese or any other language except English, as well as the intrigue of translation, in which meaning is not only lost, but gained as well.

This is precisely how I feel about Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, a retelling of Othello set in a wild country district on the fringes of Indian society.

omkara-poster

The themes and story of Othello play out in rewarding ways, and Omkara actually seems better developed in terms of world-building and characterization.

Omkara is a respected mid-level gangster and assassin who works for Bhaisaab, an organized crime boss who has decided to enter politics. As Bhaisaab prepares to enter Parliament as a way of legitimizing his business, he ceremoniously names Omkara his successor.

omkara-5

At that time, Omkara nominates Kesu, an American, as his own successor rather than Langda, who has served him faithfully longer; Kesu is popular with college students and can therefore garner votes for Bhaisaab.

omkara-4

Amidst all this activity, Omkara has stolen Dolly from her wedding to Rajju, drawing the wrath of her father, who is an associate of Bhaisaab, who sides with Omkara when Dolly reveals that she chose to go with Omkara.

omkara-1

Omkara is a half-caste. He brings Dolly to his family’s home, where his sister greets her sister-in-law to be with great warmth.

We see Langda be slighted by Omkara, and his sociopathic friendship with Rajju develop.

omkara-7

We see Kesu’s relationship to the beautiful Billo, a popular singer and dancer, is developed.

In Othello, the role of the Duke of Venice is merely procedural. Bianca seems like a romantic cipher, merely procedural, too. Emilia, Iago’s wife, does little except to stupidly empower her husband to destroy the court, and only after it’s too late call foul on the authorities.

Naseeruddin Shah, as the godfatherly Bhaisaab, has a remarkable and likeable gravitas.

Billo, as portrayed by Bipasha Basu and sung by Rekha Bhardwaj, has much more to do than serve as a generic court tart for intrigue.

omkara-9

The two songs she sings—which allows the musically ecstatic extravagance of Bollywood into what is basically a gritty drama—both advance the plot in direct ways, and point at the dangers of sexuality in this story about the destructive forces of jealousy.

Indu, Omkara’s sister, appears to have a romance with Langda that grants him the ability to set his nefarious plan in motion.

omkara-10

Indu has more of an equal relationship to Dolly than Emelia could have to Desdemona, and so their emotional bond makes the story that much more powerful. Indu is not as passive as Emilia.

Othello is only a soldier off stage. Omkara is a soldier on screen, which makes his demeanor with Dolly that much more menacing.

Omkara 9.png

I have spent little time discussing Ajay Devgn as Omkara, Saif Ali Khan as Langda, Kareena Kapoor as Dolly, or Viveik Oberoi as Kesu. The acting all around seems stellar to me, which makes isolating acting performances almost beside the point.

omkara-6

I cannot say how realistic the setting is for present day India, but the new setting did seem plausible to me, and the overall vision of this relatively new Othello is a remarkable thing. The screenplay by Robin Bhatt, Abhishek Chaubey, and Vishal Bhardwaj does visionary work.

Normally, I balk at films, even Shakespeare films, that run two and a half hours, but Omkara is an exceptional film.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #15: Othello (1995)

31 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Kenneth Branagh, Oliver Parker, Othello

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

#15. Othello (1995)

Othello poster

If we can agree, dear readers, that Olivier’s Richard III (1955) is both perfect and, in its own way, a bit old-fashioned, Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) manages to treat the tragedy realistically, with some degree of historical accuracy and dramatic poignancy, so that the story seems timeless, which is a feeble word we use to describe work that feels simultaneously old and terribly relevant.

Othello 2

Let’s begin by talking about the casting of the ever-underrated Laurence Fishburne  as the title character (five years before his first turn as Morpheus in The Matrix). Parker’s Othello is now 21 years old, so it bears observing that this was the first time that a black actor was cast as Othello in a prominent feature film. We were spared the grotesque spectacle of seeing a white actor such as Orson Welles (1952) or Laurence Olivier (1965) in blackface.

othello 4

Visually, Fishburne offers a legitimate case for why Desdemona would fall in love with him despite the absolute opprobrium of her father.

Othello 3

As a Hollywood film actor, he manages the difficulty of the text perfectly, and makes the play the sublime experience it is meant to be.

Othello is a Moor, and since we don’t quite know exactly what a Moorish accent sounds like, Fishburne goes with a somewhat eloquent Caribbean voice, with some Arabic accents added, so that on a linguistic level, his cultural otherness is expressed by his very voice. The court of Venice spoke with believable Italian accents (not to be confused with whatever Paul Sorvino was doing in Romeo + Juliet). The courtiers and soldiers speak with English accents. By having his actors make such precise choices with some logic to them, Oliver Parker’s version of the play has a vocal texture that seems intoxicatingly real, unlike the motley casting in the Shakespeare films Branagh has directed since Henry V.

Iago

And if we are spared Branagh the director, we are treated to Branagh the actor, one of the best actors in the history of cinema, giving perhaps his best performance as the tortured Machiavellian officer Iago. It’s hard not to root for Iago, who takes such pleasure in his evil schemes, in his own thoughtful soliloquies, in his insults. (Othello has Shakespeare’s sharpest insult, by the way: “You are a Senator!”) Branagh gives him the occasional mugging for the camera, as if we are confederates for this virtuoso performance.

Othello 7.png

As the plot promises to grow more bloody, Iago, like any great liar, appears to believe in his own lies. Perhaps he does.

For writers, Othello is a remarkable study in the craft of characterization. What makes this play the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies–in your rogue’s infallible opinion–is how much we understand and care about all of the characters, including Iago, despite the fact that he will not explain himself for his crimes. This story shows us how frightening it is to define ourselves as others see us, when others overlook us, and how love is, for so many people, the most destructive force in the world.

Othello1

Certainly, these themes appear in Macbeth and Richard III, but the naivety and stupidity of many of those characters make me less filled with dread in the watching. The tragedies in those two plays seem too inevitable, people functioning themselves and one another to death. Macbeth in particular I have to be tricked into liking.

Even Desdemona, Job-like in her willingness to suffer, enters into the final night of her life with open eyes. She would rather risk whatever violence he intends than dishonor her love for him. By strangling her, Othello knows on some level he is destroying himself, too.   This is the metaphysics of love–we overlap into another person, and sacrifice part of ourselves to it. Of course this could seem like average codependence, too, if you are cynical.

Oliver Parker’s Othello is a masterpiece. It is fun and heartbreaking. As compelling as a devouring rose.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

21st Century Brontë #7: The Unlikeable, Likeable Character

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in 21st Century Bronte, Blog Post

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Dungeons and Dragons, Ethics, Iago, Katniss Everdeen, Othello, Shakespeare, South Park, The Hunger Games, Unlikeable Character

21st Century Brontë #7 by Brontë Betterncourt

The Unlikeable, Likeable Character

Late last year I started a Dungeon & Dragons 5e campaign. The decision occurred around 2:30-3:00 A.M.

Dungeons and Dragons

Previously, my D&D experience ranged from on and off participation in my friend 3.5th edition, and the inkling of participation in my other friend’s Pathfinder edition. Both campaigns had separate rules and overarching stories. One was successful enough to last two years (and still running), while the other ended five months or so after launch, when an arrow impaled a bird crucial to the plot of our entire story, leaving our Dungeon Master speaking in tongues.

Learning an entirely new edition of game mechanics, lore, and creatures, and compiling them into my own homebrew campaign sounded like a totally sane thing to do.

So far, nothing has exploded. I’ve had the mass slaughter of innocent carnies and ceilings collapse onto unsuspecting players. One character nearly drowned in sewer water. There was also a debate involving the consumption of sentient beings and malicious rats.

I can only take credit for the first one.

I hope that my players’ characters make it to the end of the campaign. If played well, they’ll develop within the chaotic world of my fictional continent and its accompanying realms. But as it stands, a few of the players have considered abandoning one of their own. The character is only 13 years old, but has already attempted to steal, lie, and cook the corpses of those slain in battle. She also killed a highwayman after he gave up fighting due to being too injured.

I applaud my players for staying true to their characters, but they must also adhere to the rules of the game. For me, the DM acts as a referee. I believe our job is to stand back and allow the players to interact with the surrounding world, intervening only to roleplay and set scenes. My enjoyment results from their interaction with the story I’ve created.

But what do you do about a character who may not cooperate with the others? Is there merit to keeping a morally corrupted character around, and what does that add to everyone else’s experience?

Can an unlikeable, likeable character persist in Dungeons & Dragons?

It’s a mouthful to say, but the phrase stands for characters that we find fascinating in their universe, but would not associate with in real life. Think Eric Cartman from South Park: an overall fucked up kid. In just one episode he coerces the town to take down the Jews, leading droves of citizens down the street Third Reich style. He’s clad in the signature Hitler-stache and uniform, shouting broken commands in German, which the citizens blindly parrot. This scene is so outrageous that I find it hysterical. If I knew this kid in real life, I’d consider throwing him into oncoming traffic.

Cartman

The problem then rests in the fact that an unlikeable likeable character in art works in a realm separate from our own. With D&D, we aren’t given that separation, nor a window into that character’s thought processes (otherwise that would be meta-gaming, which is highly frowned upon). We have to directly interact with this character’s socially unacceptable traits, hampering our ability to appreciate this character’s nuances and motivations through mere observation. Considering that the other players know basic ethics, I doubt they’d laugh at an unlikeable likeable character forming a racist-fueled regime in the forests.

Well, the character in question is still young. Though her actions aren’t acceptable, they could be excusable to an extent. What is unlikeable now may change through a pivotal event in the campaign that she could ultimately grow and change from. The easiest fix would be a redemption arc.

Or what if the character didn’t follow this predictable arc?

Maybe the character could balance her questionable morals, remaining good enough to remain with the party, while engaging in shady dealings with demons or devils? If done well, she wouldn’t need to apologize. Instead, she ends up betraying the party, and one of the final battles consist of everyone fighting her?

But this brings us back to my original concern: Does it matter if a character is complex if we don’t like that character enough to follow her thought-processes? Can likeability be forsaken for writing an unapologetic character?

One of the reasons why I find an unlikeable-likeable character appealing is how unrelenting they are. Eric Cartman is still capable of coincidental good if there is personal gain for him. But the character is unapologetic in how outrageous his actions are, and if his character were to suddenly become good, I would feel cheated.

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have a character whose actions are deemed good, but her personality is not one that people would gravitate to. In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is sent into a walled off micro ecosystem where only one person can leave alive. We automatically root for her because she’s the narrator, but her personality isn’t an easy one to like. She’s sacrifices herself to keep her sister from entering the Games, but toward others she is emotionally walled off. The gifts sent from sponsors are attributed to the more likeable personalities working behind the scenes on her behalf, not because she’s charismatic. And sometimes her bluntness beckons a laugh from the reader.

The Hunger Games

Katniss doesn’t kill many people, and she doesn’t take pleasure in the act. But murder is made redeemable due to her dire circumstances and the psychological trauma that she never fully recovers from. I can see why she’s likeable, or at the very least respected. But what if The Hunger Games was written in a point of view from one of the wealthier districts? We see the nature of the tributes from District 1 and 2 taking glee in murdering others, but we can attribute that behavior from how they were raised. They were brought up to fight, to see the Games like the Romans do gladiatorial combat, and returning home victorious bestows a great honor on the family.

The Hunger Games Katniss

We wouldn’t even know anything about Katniss if we followed their narration, instead seeing her as a chick who’s good with a bow and arrow, standing between them and glory.

Would we root for this point of view? Quite possibly.

Humans in general are curious. We can’t ignore a car collision; it’s more eerie to not see any bystanders ogling at public tragedy. Some may walk away, and maybe those individuals wouldn’t be interested in reading about morally ambiguous characters. But through these incidents, and through these characters we’re able to spectate these grey areas without clouding our own values. We don’t have to feel guilty since we have that safe distance between Cartman spewing profanities, or teenage carnage. Instead, we can gain a better understanding on how the minds of these characters work. That doesn’t mean we agree with their actions, but we can further understand the inner workings of the mind, and how others can possibly believe that what they’re doing is right.

Let’s go old school for a moment: Shakespeare’s Othello. If we’re discussing characters that we would hate to know in real life but enjoy witnessing from a distance, Iago definitely fits this description. He is the driving force of this story, manipulating and killing to undo Othello’s life. To Iago, everyone else is … collateral damage. Speculations of Iago’s motives span from the bitterness of not receiving a promotion, to fears he has been cuckolded, to even homoerotic desires, but by the end of the play, nothing has been confirmed. The lack of an answer for why he’s so hell-bent on ruining Othello’s life is mind-boggling. We want to ask, why would any sane person do such a thing?

Iago

Why do we need an explanation?

I believe the problem rests in the fact that Iago is an extremely likeable character, one who makes us uncomfortable for liking him. The stage or screen lights up every time he appears, and he played the parts of friend, of confidant so well that I forgot about his treachery until his soliloquies reminded me that he is evil. It’s like he’s the director of the play, reminding us of what is really happening because he knows he’s that damn good as an actor that he might fool us along with everyone else in Othello’s coterie.

I find him the most interesting character of this play. Everyone else is clear cut with their emotions and motivations, but Iago exists outside of our comprehension. Even at the very end when Othello asks him why he would do such despicable things, Iago refuses to speak.

A personality so unapologetic could definitely work in a medium such as D&D. Unless such players verbalize their thoughts in roleplay, we don’t know their intentions. Players who are ready to trust everyone unless proven otherwise are in for a rude awakening if they come across a man like Iago, and the pain of his betrayal would continue to sting long after the wounds were inflicted. Which, if we’re considering a D&D Homebrew campaign as an art medium, sends a powerful message of smearing good and evil boundaries. The blow would be more direct since the players are directly interacting with said character, instead of viewing them from a distance.

So I’ll have to see what the character in question will do, though I might not rely on her for a performance of Iago’s magnitude.

I may just draw that inspiration for myself.

_______

21st Cen Bronté

Brontë Bettencourt (Episode 34) graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelors in English Creative Writing. When she’s not writing or working, she is a full time Dungeon Master and Youtube connoisseur.

Shakespearing #28.1: Four Observations About Othello

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespearing, Theater

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Tags

A.C. Bradley, blackface, Fintan O'Toole, Iago, Laurence Olivier, Othello, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Shakespeare

Shakespearing #28.1 by John King

Four Observations About Othello

28 Othello1. In Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life, the Irish theater critic Fintan O’Toole says,

If you look at the character of Othello in isolation, and in particular if you look at him through the notion of the “tragic flaw’, then he is not, for all his facility with words, very bright. He can talk up a storm, but he’s not much for thinking. His tragic flaw is jealousy and he carries it around like a crutch, just waiting for someone to kick it from under him. He is manipulated by Iago, a man he didn’t enough trust enough in the first place to make him his lieutenant, without ever attempting to ascertain facts for himself. Suspecting his wife, he fails to confront her with her supposed infidelity, or to question her alleged lover, or to ask any of the other people who could tell him what’s going on. He is driven demented by a handkerchief. (69)

Now O’Toole is setting up a discussion of the chaotic Elizabethan context of the social construction of social status and political power, but if we look at Michael Cassio as being the hero of the play, then his tragic flaw is that he cannot hold his liquor. Sad, really.

Shakes is Hard2. Othello is about race, or more particularly, it is like a litmus test about race. We out ourselves in how we react to the race and racism of the play.

O’Toole remarks on how icky 19th century scholarship was about the interracial couple at the core of the play (76-77). O’Toole is so keen to show how progressive he is that he misreads A.C. Bradley entirely.

Shakespearean TragedyIn a lengthy endnote in his Shakespearean Tragedy, Bradley chronicles the ridiculous debate over whether or not Shakespeare actually intended Othello to be a black man because, you know, Othello would have kissed Desdemona, which means that our beloved bard has perhaps accidentally almost wanted people to consider interracial love. This dimwitted denial among otherwise intelligent people so enervated Bradley that he writes wearily in the first person plural, in this endnote, “We do not like the real Shakespeare” (416). Bradley’s dry sarcasm was lost on O’Toole.

I once got to hear James Earl Jones discuss his career, and on the subject of Shakespeare, he said that he preferred the part of Michael Cassio to Othello.

When portraying Othello for the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival, Kevin Crawford forewent any pigmented make up at all so as to avoid the stench of blackface, and considering the emotional and political climate post-9/11, made Othello a converted Muslim.

White actors are still drawn to this perplexing role in Shakespearean tragedy, but have stopped using blackface since at least the 1990s. There are so many black actors that the grotesquerie of blackface is easily avoided, and while this has long been true, we are now at least two generations into being fully aware that this is true.

If many audience of previous ages have found the color of Othello’s skin disgusting to contemplate, when that skin color is the bizarre co-optation of blackface, I must confess that the spectacle does make me queasy, as in Olivier’s turn as the Moor.

othello

3. From Olivier’s perspective, the convention of using make up to render him black was an established stage convention, and the connection to Step and Fetchit perhaps seemed especially remote to him.

I have, over the years, shrugged off my aversion to Olivier and his seemingly old-fashioned acting. In his own ways, he was bold, and funny, and worthy of some indulgence (not that the blackface thing in Othello is tolerable). Olivier was a term used throughout my childhood to indicate an absurdly perfect actor, when in fact he was a human actor devoted to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare thing is why, for so many people, he wasn’t quite real.

OlivierFor Olivier, the challenge of Othello was finding an appropriate voice for the Moor. In his autobiography, he writes,

I decided to have a bash at that voice. I have always felt nervous about roaring and screaming at home, but feel no self-consciousness if I can get out into the hills. I remember once screaming King Lear at a group of cows that had formed a ring of curiosity around me. “God,” I thought, ‘I hope the audience is as patient as they are.’

4. In 2009, I got to see Philip Seymour Hoffman portray Iago in Peter Sellars’ production  of Othello in the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU. Very little of that experience stands out to me, although I may have been a little drunk and certainly gastrointestinally encumbered by too much Arturo’s pizza.

Othello and Desdemona’s bed was plexiglas and filled with television images, a tableau that looked stupid rather than expressionistic or meaningfully postmodern, since sleeping on plexiglas seems like a non-starter no matter what such weird behavior is supposed to mean.

But what I do remember is the strangeness of Iago himself–the play seemed to be about Iago’s attempts at having human relationships with his wife, with Othello, with Desdemona, and his transgressive ways of breaking some unspoken barrier between human loneliness and the emptiness of convention to the secret authentic core of other people’s lives. Hoffman’s Iago seemed, in his soliloquy, to be having a hard time having a relationship to himself, an outsider, even when he is all alone.

_______

1flipJohn King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

Shakespearing #28: Othello

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Othello

Shakespearing #28 by David Foley

Othello

28 OthelloOthello is about as streamlined and relentless a play as Shakespeare ever wrote. It’s as if he’s inventing the form of the psychological thriller—the claustrophobic dread, the implacable villain, even the false hope of a reprieve dangled before us.

And it’s a tragedy, too, of course, but it’s a strange kind of tragedy. In school, we were given Othello’s jealousy as an example of a tragic flaw. But if Othello’s tragic flaw is jealousy, why is everyone so insistent that he’s not jealous? “I think the sun where he was born,” says Desdemona, “drew all such humors from him.” And Lodovico says, “Is this the nature/Whom passion could not shake?” The terror of the play is not the destruction of a man by a tragic flaw; it’s the idea that even a man like Othello can be consumed by a demon.

He may be the most admirable of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. He’s the kind of leader Shakespeare seems most to approve of: like Henry V, a people’s warrior. When he breaks up the fight between Cassio and Montano, he berates them for brawling “in a town of war/Yet wild, the people’s hearts brimful of fear.” This concern for the effects of war on the common folk is always for Shakespeare the sign of a noble heart. Yet in this same speech, Othello says, “Now, by heaven,/My blood begins my safer guides to rule,/And passion, having my best judgment collied,/Assays to lead the way.” In high school, we called that foreshadowing.

Browsing the internet, I find a 1916 essay about the “moral enigma” of Othello, in which the author worries in a 1916 sort of way about critics who are ready to lay the blame for the tragedy on Iago: “[I]t must be said that there is no Shakespearean tragedy in which the responsibility for the deed of the hero and the subsequent tragedy can be shifted from him to another person of the play.”

But if Othello is responsible, how is he responsible? Even in the speech I’ve quoted, his passions have begun his “safer guides to rule” because of a fight Iago has ginned up. Our 1916 critic wants to leave room for legible moral choice, but 2015 me can’t help reading Othello as a bitter parable about the susceptibility of even the best of us to irrational forces.

We go so quickly—in one long, shifting scene—from a serenely confident Othello to one looking for “some swift means of death” for his wife. You can read this as Elizabethan cultural prejudice—the noble Moor revealing his savage nature—but that doesn’t make the spectacle any more edifying or the moral less enigmatic.

It also puts us on the side of Iago, who’s adept at manipulating cultural prejudices to his own ends, whether those prejudices are against Moors or women. He himself is not irrational, but he has the power to breed irrationality in others. With Othello, he does it by guiding his thoughts away from the woman herself into the phantasmic beliefs about women floating in the culture.

It’s strange how often in these plays a minor character becomes the raisonneur. It’s left to Emilia to break through the nightmare, with some sharp words about men and women in her scene with Desdemona and some sharper ones for Othello in the final scene.

But even she is involved in the great mystery at the center of the play. Why can no one see through Iago? Why are the things that lead us through our worst fears to our worst ends so hard to make visible?

_______

David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

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