19th May 2013; Henri-Georges Clouzot's WAGES OF FEAR

The Wages of Fear
A film by Henri-Georges Clouzot

Year 1956; Runtime: 141 mins

19th May 2013; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

One of cinema’s most revered thrillers,  The Wages of Fear is the acknowledged masterpiece of the brilliant French director Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-77). Clouzot’s sixth film and the predecessor to his terror classic Diabolique, it was voted the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1953 and Best Film of 1954 by the British Film Academy.

The film's extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema. Desperate men, broke and stranded in a backwater of Latin America, sign up on a suicidal mission to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerin 300 miles down a hazardous road. They could be blown to pieces at any instant, and in the film's most famous scene Clouzot requires them to turn their trucks around on a rickety, half-finished timber platform high above a mountain gorge.

Their journey also requires them to use some of the nitroglycerin to blow up a massive boulder in the road, and at the end, after a pipeline ruptures, a truck has to pass through a pool of oil that seems to tar them with the ignominy of their task.

The movie is heart-stopping once the two trucks begin their torturous 300-mile journey to a blazing oil well. The cinematographer, Armand Thirard, pins each team of men into its claustrophobic truck cab, where every jolt and bump in the road causes them to wince, waiting for a death that, if it comes, will happen so suddenly they will never know it.

The journey, which comprises the second half of the film, is heartstopping. Georges Auric’s score and Armand Thirard’s cinematography, which dramatically opposes light and shadow, add to the tension. And Clouzot’s editing style “based on constant shocks,” punctuates the narrative perfectly. Consequently, as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “You sit there waiting for the theater to explode.”

Henri-Georges Clouzot

Like so many others, Clouzot found his chance to move from scriptwriting to directing during the Occupation, a time when there was a paucity of directors in France. His first effort, L'Assassin habite au 21, was a safe film. Its script followed two similar films he had written which had been well-received by audiences. These witty police dramas were exercises in style and cleverness, befitting the epoch. Le Corbeau, made the next year, was in contrast a shattering film, unquestionably hitting hard at the society of the war years.

In the mid-1950s when The Wages of Fear and Diabolique gave him a reputation as a French Hitchcock, interested in the mechanics of suspense. In France, however, these films, especially Diabolique, were seen as only well-made studio products. His 1960 La vérité, starring Brigitte Bardot, was designed to win him favor in the youth culture of the time, which was obsessed by New Wave life and movies. While the film outgrossed its New Wave competition, its cloyingly paternalistic style showed how far Clouzot was from the spontaneity of the New Wave. The cafe scenes in the film are insincere, and the inevitable indictment of society rings false.

12th May 2013; Michael Haneke's AMOUR

AMOUR (LOVE)

A film by Michael Haneke

2012/ France, Austria/127 min

12^th May ; 5.45 pm ; Perks Mini theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s meticulous, superbly crafted portrait of an elderly couple facing the end of life chronicles a chapter that many viewers either have experienced or are confronting themselves.

“Amour” is a tribute to two aging legends of the French screen and the cinematic tradition they represent. Both actors give complicated and heartbreaking performances, but Riva’s unstinting portrayal of a composed and generous woman who knows that everything – her mental clarity, her physical control and life itself – will soon be stripped from her is absolutely unforgettable.

“Amour,” while relentless, has compassion not only for the couple’s struggles and isolation, but also for the fumbling of outsiders. Other people mean well, but they’re from a world where death remains offstage. Haneke leaves us with more questions than answers, but I will agree with him that there is no note of irony in his title.

This is an unforgettable love story set at the close of day, as tragic and beautiful in its way as “Tristan und Isolde,” and a portrait of the impossible beauty and fragility of life that will yield new experiences to every viewer and every viewing.

Michael Haneke

Born  in Munich in March 1942, Haneke spent his early years in a working class suburb of Vienna before an early attempt at fame as an actor and pianist. Failing to achieve early success, Haneke attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy and psychology, and became a film critic and stage director before making his eventual debut as a television director with After Liverpool in 1973. Setting in motion a television career specializing in literary adaptations and small screen films, Haneke would work successfully in that medium until his feature debut with The Seventh Continent in 1989.Laced with the theme of muted emotions resulting in stark violence that would become his calling card.

Haneke took the modern obsession with cinematic violence to a level rarely attempted in 1997, with the tale of a happy family relentlessly tortured in Funny Games. Violence is not fun in Haneke's world and this is where his optimism comes into play. Haneke took home the Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival for The Piano Teacher, a compelling tale of sexual repression that also won that film's stars, Benoit Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards at the festival.He earned some of the strongest reviews of his career for the 2005 thriller Cache.

In 2007 he remade his film Funny Games in English with a cast that included Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt. He scored another international hit with 2009's The White Ribbon, and had arguably his biggest American success in 2012 when his film Amour garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and Best Director, and won the coveted award for Best Foreign Language Film 

4th April 2013; Art Documentary : The World's Most Expensive Paintings

Contemplate and Konangal

Screening of Documentary on Art

The World’s Most Expensive Paintings

A BBC documentary – Duration 1 hour.

4^th May 2013; 5.45 pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Art critic and journalist Alastair Sooke explores the remarkable stories behind the Top Ten Most Valuable Paintings in the World. What are the ten most expensive paintings to have been sold at auction? Why do some pay millions for a painting? Who are the buyers? Why is art so valuable?

In seeking the answers to some of these questions, Alastair uncovers stories of scandal, war, exile, revolution, paranoia, and economic turmoil - stories which range from the Holocaust to the discreet banks of Zurich and the boom of Japan in the 1980s.

Alastair Sooke tracks down the ten most expensive paintings to sell at auction, and investigates the stories behind the astronomic prices art can reach. Gaining access to the glittering world of the super-rich, Sooke discovers why the planet's richest people want to spend their millions on art.

Featuring works by Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Klimt and Rubens, Sooke enters a world of secrecy and rivalry, passion and power. Highlights include a visit to the art-crammed home of millionaire author Lord Jeffery Archer; a rare interview with the man at the heart of the sale of the most expensive old master of all time; privileged access to auctioneers Christie's; and a glimpse of the world of the Russian oligarchs.These revelatory journeys allow Sooke to present an eye-opening view of the super wealthy, and their motivations as collectors of the world's great art treasures

Sawdust and Tinsel

A film by Ingmar Bergman

1953/ Sweden / 93 minutes/ B&W

28^th April 2013; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

 Ingmar Bergman's thirteenth film is a landmark in the Swedish filmmaker's oeuvre; it's the beginning of a uniquely distinctive style that became known to the international community as a Bergman film. The Baroque style is adapted from the silent screen German expressionism cinema. It's a misanthropic melodrama that has a dim view of marriage and love, believing it only leads to humiliation. It has great performances and is a visual treat, but its masochistic storyline might not be for all tastes.

It's set at the turn-of-century Sweden. Aging, portly, traveling circus owner and ring master Albert Johansson (Ake Grönberg) is passing with his down-and-out troupe through a provincial town where his tobacco shop owner wife Agda (Annika Tretow) lives with his children. He hasn't seen her for three years and has since taken as a mistress his headstrong gypsy bareback rider, the much younger Anne (Harriet Andersson).

 Anne visits a rehearsal of the suave womanizing lead actor of a theater production, Frans (Hasse Ekman). She's humiliated  and  she has been taken for a fool. When Albert learns of her indiscretion, during the nighttime circus show he challenges Frans to a fight in the main ring and gets beaten up. The humiliated Albert thinks of shooting himself.

The memorable film explores such things as betrayal and Bergman's main theme of humiliation between the sexes. It's a scathing look at the human condition, and a key beginning to the filmmaker's vintage trademark films. Film unfolds  the happenings of a day – from the time the circus troupe pitches the tent to the packing up and leaving  the village with extraordinary visuals. In America, the film was titled The Naked Night; Sawdust and Tinsel is the British title.

(Source:Internet)

Ingmar Bergman

Universally regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, Bergman has often concerned himself with spiritual and psychological conflicts. His work has evolved in distinct stages over four decades, while his visual style-intense, intimate, complex-has explored the vicissitudes of passion with a mesmerizing cinematic rhetoric. His prolific output tends to return to and elaborate on recurrent images, subjects and techniques.

Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden. In 1937 Bergman entered the University of Stockholm, where he became an active member of the student theatrical group. In 1942, after a brilliant production of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, the aspiring director was appointed to the Swedish Royal Opera. In the years following he divided his talents equally between stage and film efforts.

In 1945 Bergman directed his first film, Crisis, the story of an unhappy love affair which ends in suicide. Several films followed closely, but in 1956 Bergman reached the peak of critical and popular praise with The Seventh Seal. It was followed by masterpieces like Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispers etc. In addition to film, he directed over 70 plays.

Although apparently not influenced by other filmmakers, with the possible exception of Carl Dreyer, Bergman himself has had a wide-ranging influence on a generation of filmmakers. A unique and powerful presence, his genius has made an extraordinary contribution to the art of the cinema. He died peacefully in his sleep, at his home on Fårö island, on 30 July 2007, at the age of eighty-nine.

(Source: Internet)

20th April 3013; Documentary on Sculpture BERNINI

Contemplate  and Konangal
present

Documentary on Sculpture

Italian master

BERNINI

(from Power of Art BBC series by Simon Schama)

20th April 2013; 5.45pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Rajshree Ford Bldg. , Avanashi Rd, Coimbatore

Born in Naples, Bernini was an exceptional talent from an early age and went on to dominate the art world of 17th century Rome. His work epitomised the Baroque style and his sculpture, church interiors and exteriors and town planning could be seen everywhere. He was also a painter, playwright, costume and theatre designer. 

Bernini worked under successive Popes; Pope Gregory XV made him a knight and Pope Urban VIII took him as his best friend. He was revered in his time until a jealous rage caused him to have the face of his mistress slashed after discovering her romance with his brother. His reputation fell further after his bell towers for the Cathedral of St Peter's started cracking in 1641. He redeemed himself and kick started his career again with arguably his most famous work, The Ecstasy of St Theresa, in 1652.

Simon Schama on Bernini :
"A century after the creation of The Ecstacy of St Theresa, a French art lover doing the Tour of Rome entered the Church of S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome, peered at the spectacle and said: "Well, if that's divine love, I know all about it". 

What Bernini's managed to make tangible is something that we all, if we're honest, know we hunger for, but before which we're properly tongue-tied. Something that has produced more bad writing, more excruciating moments of bad cinema, more appalling poems than anything else. No wonder when art historians look at this sculpture they tie themselves in knots to avoid saying the obvious, that is, that we're looking at the most intense convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience."

Beasts of the Southern Wild

A film by Benh Zeitlin

2012/USA/Col/Runtime 93 mins

24th March 2013; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

The Bathtub is a place of myths and wonders, a broken down teardrop of Louisiana marsh and mud in "Beasts of the Southern Wild"and the setting for an extraordinary new drama whose fierceness, like its 6-year-old heroine Hushpuppy, grabs on and won't let go. This is the debut film of the young independent director Benh Zeitlin.

 The story begins on an ordinary day in Hushpuppy's life, played with a stunning tenacity by young Quvenzhane Wallis. She lives in a jerry-built shack in a backwater bayou. It's raised on stilts in deference to the water that can rise deadly and fast. There's no sign of a mother, though her presence will be felt at every turn. Her father, Wink (Dwight Henry, a New Orleans baker making an impressive acting debut), lives within shouting distance in the rusted out shell of a bus. It is a reflection of the relationship — there is love, but a certain distance as well.

 Most of the action takes place in the Bathtub, a tiny community of impoverished locals—black and white, some descended from Cajun or Indian fishermen—in South Louisiana's bayou country. Because the Bathtub lies outside the levee system, it will overflow in an impending hurricane, and Hushpuppy knows as well as everyone else that ramshackle homes and precious possessions will be swept away. "Any day now the fabric of the universe is comin' unraveled," she declares. 

Shot on a shoestring, Beasts is some kind of miracle, a tribute to the people who stay rooted to home against flood and forced evacuation. The shimmer of magic realism pervades the film, written by Zeitlin and playwright Lucy Alibar, and cinematographer Ben Richardson catches its grit and grace.

Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius. 

(Source:Internet)

Benh Zeitlin

Benh Zeitlin was born in Manhattan on  October 14, 1982 and raised in Sunnyside, Queens, New York City, and in the suburbs of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He was born to folklorists Mary Amanda Dargan and Steven Joel "Steve" Zeitlin, who founded City Lore in New York City.
In 2004, he cofounded the Court 13 independent collection of filmmakers, named after a neglected Wesleyan University squash court that Zeitlin and his friends used as a filming site. He moved to New Orleans while making his first short film, Glory at Sea, in 2008.
In 2012, his first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, won the Caméra d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Grand Jury Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival. The film went on to earn the Los Angeles Film Festival's Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature and the Seattle International Film Festival's Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director.[12] Zeitlin was also given a Humanitarian Award for his work on the film at the Satellite Awards 2012.
For his directorial work and screenplay in Beasts, Zeitlin continues to collect additional independent film awards and nominations.

2nd March 2013; Impressionists: Painting and Revolution -Part 2

Contemplate and Konangal

Art Documentary Screening

The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution -Part 2

The Great Outdoors

A BBC HD documentary

Runtime: One hour

2nd March 2013; 5.45pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Avanashi Road, Coimbatore.

 The Impressionists were true revolutionaries, the Che Guevaras of the art scene whose sun-dappled lawns and bathing beauties opened the door on a world that was brave, bold and ballsy. 

 

 In this second part of the series, art critic Waldemar Januszczak continues his investigation of the Impressionists by taking us outdoors to their most famous locations. Although Impressionist pictures often look sunny and relaxed, achieving this peaceful air was hard work. Trudging through fog, wind and rain, across treacherous coastal rocks and knee-deep snow, Waldemar shows how the famous spontaneity of the Impressionists is thoroughly misleading. 

 

This episode visits the French riverside locations that Monet loved to paint, and where Renoir captured the bonhomie of modern life. Waldemar also introduces a number of technical and practical developments of the age which completely revolutionised Impressionist painting - the invention of portable easels; the use of hog's hair in paint brushes; as well as the introduction of the railway through France.  

And a scientific demonstration in a Swedish snowdrift explains just how right the Impressionists were to paint brightly coloured shadows in their winter scenes, despite being accused of 'hallucinating' at the time.

 Finally, Januszczak explains Cezanne's part in the Impressionist story from his dark and challenging early work to his first rural landscapes in France, and then his departure from Paris and separation from the Impressionist gang. Januszczak is fantastic at fleshing out little-known biographical and contextual details which can open our eyes to new ways of thinking about an artist.
 (Sorce: BBC)

10th Feb 2013; Adoor Gopalakrishnan's KATHAPURUSHAN

Kathapurushan

(Man of the Story)

A film by Adoor Goplakrishnan

1995/India - Kerala / Col/ 102 min

10^th Feb 2013; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Main screening followed by documentary - 
Adoor on Kathapurushan -16 minutes

Kathapurushan is arguably Adoor Gopalakrishnan's most ambitious film, epic in scale but intimate in tone, covering nearly forty-five years of Kerala's history.  Adoor has described it as "an emotional journey through time and history" to distinguish it from a socio-historical document which it superficially resembles. The film begins with the protagonist Kunjunni's birth and ends with the publication and subsequent banning of his first novel, The Hard Consonants.

Thus, in many respects, Kathapurushan is a cinematic Bildungsroman, charting the emotional and psychological evolution of a man and his consciousness, framed by some of the key developments that have shaped Kerala's complex transition from feudalism to modernity. Kunjunni, in fact, belongs to a land-owning family whose decline is linked to unfolding historical events.

Kunjunni enters the world precariously. As a result of a breach delivery, he has to be held upside down and smacked so that he can take his first gulp of air. He will, later in life, develop a stammer and a limp. Along with these markers of ‘otherness’, which point to his physical and emotional frailty, he must also live with the social stigma of having been abandoned by his father.

Thus the protagonist of Adoor's epic is not the prototypical tough-guy landlord but an ordinary - even flawed - human being whose private destiny is linked to the social and historical processes shaping Kerala as well as India as a nation.  He is the ‘Man of the Story’ (as per the English title of the film) who will step outside his own class, become author of his life, and find the common humanity he shares with everybody.

Kathapurushan begins in 1937 and covers the following historical events:

• The assassination of Gandhi;
• The Communist electoral revolution of 1957;
• The Land Reforms Bill of 1959;
• The Naxalite uprising of 1968;
• Indira Gandhi's declaration of the Emergency in 1975;
• The return of the Left Alliance in Kerala in 1980.

These events define the context of Kunjunni's evolution and the reciprocal nature of his relationship to them. As he interacts and struggles with the forces unleashed by history, Kunjunni is moulded by them just as he, in turn, moulds them to a certain extent. For Adoor, history progresses through such a struggle between the individual and the system within which he/she functions. He believes it is the duty of every man and woman to question and oppose all political systems - even the ones they create - as soon as they become (inevitably) rigid and oppressive.

(Excerpt from the booklet essay by Suranjan Ganguly. - 

http://www.secondrundvd.com/release_more_man.php )

Adoor  Gopalakrishnan

Satyajith Ray's role in revolutionising Indian cinema during 1950s with his first film Pather Panchali was taken-up by Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Kerala to create a drastic change in Malayalam cinema. Adoor's first film Swayamvaram (1972) pioneered the new wave cinema movement in Kerala.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan was born in 1941 in Kerala. He belongs to a family with strong links to the performing arts, especially Kathakali, a highly-stylised form of dance drama. From the age of eight Adoor began acting for the stage, later producing and directing over twenty plays, several written by him. He is the author of two books on the theatre as well as a book on the cinema, "The World of Cinema", for which he won a national award in 1983. In 1962 Adoor enrolled in the Film and Television Institute in Pune and graduated in 1965 with a diploma in Scriptwriting and Direction. The same year he founded the Chitralekha Film Society of Trivandrum as well as the Chitralekha Film Cooperative. Both played a key role in the development of film culture in Kerala. In 1972

Adoor made Swayamvaram/One's Own Choice, his first full-length feature film. It launched the New Cinema in Kerala and became one of the major films of the Indian New Wave. He has since made seven more films (along with over 25 shorts and documentaries), all of which have won major national and international awards: Kodiyettam/Ascent (1977); Elippathayam/Rat Trap (1981); Mukhamukham/Face to Face (1984); Anantaram/Monologue (1987); Mathilukal/The Walls (1990); Vidheyan/The Servile (1993), and Kathapurushan/Man of the Story (1995).

Elippathayam received the prestigious British Film Institute Award in 1982; Mukhamukham won the FIPRESCI prize in 1985; Kathapurushan was honoured in India in 1995 with the National Award for Best Film. Retrospectives of Adoor's films have been held in Pesaro, Helsinki, La Rochelle, Nantes, Munich, and New York. All of Adoor's films draw on the history and culture of his native Kerala. Kerala's transition from feudalism to modernity serves as a backdrop to his complex meditations on the psychology of power, the nature of oppression, the corruption of patriarchy, and the coexistence of the modern and the feudal in post-Independence democratic India.

Elippathayam, his masterpiece, vividly captures the descent into paranoia of a man trapped within his feudal universe. In Mukhamukham, a study in failed idealism, a Communist leader gives up on revolution and decides to go to sleep instead. Vidheyan, a parable-like story, deals with the abuse of power, the plight of the outsider, and the nature of a master-servant relationship.

The more recent films--especially Anantaram, Mathilukal and Kathapurushan--display a new concern with interiority and reflexivity, foregrounding time, memory, consciousness, and the nature of storytelling itself. Adoor's genius lies in his ability to create visually complex films that operate on multiple levels, that are culture-specific and yet universal in significance.

Source : http://www.cinemaofmalayalam.net , http://www.adoorgopalakrishnan.in/profile.htm