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25th Oct 2009; Ramin Bahrani's CHOP SHOP

CHOP SHOP
A film by Ramin Bahrani
Year: 2007
Country: USA
English with English subtitles
Runtime: 84 min
25th Oct 2009 ; 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

If you own a car and you live in or around New York City, you've at least heard about the Iron Triangle of Willets Point. Not because it's a zone of spectacular urban blight right in the middle of the continent's richest and most expensive city -- although it certainly is -- but because it's where you can get your dents banged out, your windshield replaced and your muffler repaired at rock-bottom prices, at least if you're paying in cash and you're not too concerned about things like receipts and warranties.

This dilapidated and disreputable 20-block stretch of junkyards and body shops, some of it actually unpaved streets, sits in the shadow of Shea Stadium (home of the New York Mets) and the National Tennis Center (home of the U.S. Open); except for those points of reference, it's barely plausible as the United States.

It's oversimplifying Ramin Bahrani's extraordinary film "Chop Shop," which was showered with love at Cannes, Berlin and Toronto . Bahrani sees the Iron Triangle as the place where the American dream goes to die. He never judges the place or its people, who are neither heroes nor villains. You could just as easily say that "Chop Shop" is a classic American fable of immigrant pluck and zeal, of an innocent swept away in the undertow of capitalism, fighting like hell to keep his head above water.

Ale is enterprising and optimistic. In exchange for his work, he lives in a knocked-together plywood room under the roof of a shop owned by a man named Rob. He gets $5 for every passing car he flags onto the premises. This income he supplements by selling candy on the subway, peddling bootlegged DVDs, stealing hubcaps and snatching purses. He is not a criminal. He is a survivor. He goes at things as he has taught himself, and will make the record in his own way: first to knock, first admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes not so innocent.

But if the story of Ale's life in a plywood-paneled room atop a Queens body shop, a room he shares with his gorgeous 16-year-old sister (Isamar Gonzales), who makes her own way in the world just as gorgeous older sisters have been doing since forever, is an American parable, Bahrani's movie is something else again. It's a near-masterwork of low-budget precision and improvisation, constructed and rehearsed over many months in collaboration with the actors and the entire Willets Point community.

Bahrani never forces the "Chop Shop" metaphor. He doesn't have to. In places like the Iron Triangle, Alejandro is just another of society's interchangeable spare parts.

Click here for Bahrani’s Top 10 movies

Ramin Bahrani

Ramin Bahrani (born March 20, 1975 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.) is an American director and screenwriter. Film critic Roger Ebert called Bahrani "the new great American director" in his review of Goodbye Solo.

Bahrani received his BA from Columbia University in New York City. His first feature film, Man Push Cart (2005), premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2005) and screened at the Sundance Film Festival (2006). The film won over 10 international prizes, was released theatrically around the world, and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards.

Bahrani's second film Chop Shop (2007) premiered at the 2007 Director's Fortnight of the Cannes International Film Festival, and then screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (2007) and the Berlin International Film Festival (2008) before being released theatrically to wide and universal critical acclaim. Bahrani was awarded the prestigious 2007 Someone to Watch Independent Spirit Award. In 2008, he was nominated for Best Director Independent Spirit Award.

With Bahrani’s third release, “Goodbye Solo” (2008), the filmmaker earned the prestigious critic’s prize at the Venice Film Festival and was now widely regarded as a key figure in a new wave of international filmmaking. Again he offered a story where class, nationality and worldview try to coexist with the tale of a Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina hired to ferry an old white Southerner to the site of his promised suicide. Bahrani earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director for his third success, prompting film critic Roger Ebert to comment “After only three films, Bahrani has established himself as a major director."

11th Oct 2009; Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto

Il Posto
A film by Ermanno Olmi
Country :Italy
Year: 1961
Italian with English subtitles
Runtime:93 min
11th Oct 2009
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Olmi’s Il Posto is much more than just a Neorealist film. Like de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Olmi’s Il Posto transcends the dimensions of Neorealism and stands as one of the great and universal films of any era.. There are several factors that contribute to the virtues of Il Posto – the cinematic craftsmanship, the affecting and natural acting, and the compelling narrative, itself, which is not just about a particular people at a particular time, but about the very nature of modern life.

Il Posto depicts the hopes and uncertainties of Domenico, a 19-year-old boy from a working-class family who has left “middle school” and is looking for his first job. He takes the train to the big city, Milan, hoping to get an office job at a large company.

The character of Domenico is of course the central force in the film, and it is partly his own diffident nature that defines the questionable value of the job-for-life goal. His slowness to react, whether it's to answer questions or to take action, make us wonder if he is capable of ever moving beyond a job with the company once he has it. His actions in respect to the young woman Antonietta, in whom he becomes interested, lack the resolve and fervour needed to get what he really wants. Something will have to change in him to make him ever move beyond the job-for-life once he has it. The role is nicely played by a somewhat sad-faced Sandro Panseri.

Plot is deceptively simple, but every frame of pic is rich with shadings and nuances. Olmi's keenly observant camera is of major assistance, as are his actors. Olmi's genius in Il Posto is in his beautifully composed, lingering shots. Whether in a medium, hand-held, or close-up, Olmi studies a face or a scene long enough for us to see its platitudes with subtle power. Domenico's face is a landscape of emotion, though heavily suppressed — in small smiles, dejected eyes, and embarrassed blushes, we virtually watch him grow before our eyes. Some critics couldn't stomach Olmi's passive Domenico, but there's nothing pathetic about him, he's just a shy, confused person right at the start of life.

Martin Scorsese borrowed shots from Il Posto for Raging Bull, and there are similar echoes in Clockwatchers (director Jill Sprecher credits Olmi as an influence on that film), Office Space, and Time Out. It's startling to notice that, before computer cubicles, desk jobs were just as dismal 40 years ago as they are today

(Source:Internet)

Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”


Ermanno Olmi ranks as one Italy’s finest film makers. He is known for making realistic films about the lives of average people that are infused with an almost austere subtlety and rare ambiguity that is sympathetic yet not overly sentimental. A native of Bergamo, Italy, he was the son of peasant factory workers.

Following his father’s death during WWII, Olmi and his mother supported the family working in the Edison-Volta electric plant where Olmi worked as a clerk. While there, he became involved in company-sponsored filmmaking and theatrical projects. Most of the films he made for the company had industrial themes. Eventually, he came to head the company film department and over the next seven years made many documentaries, notably his last Edison-Volta film, Il Tempo Si E Fermato (Time Stood Still), in 1959. It was with this film, a chronicle of the relationship that gradually developed between an elderly nightwatchman and his assistant while stationed at the construction site of an Alpine dam, that evidenced the sensitivity that would characterize Olmi’s later works.

The success of the film led Olmi to become a feature filmmaker. To that end, he traveled to Milan and co-founded the Twenty-Four Horses, an independent film co-op where he made his semi-autobiographical feature-film debut with Il Posto in 1961. Both this and his subsequent effort, I Fidanzati (The Fiancés) (1963), quickly earned him a good reputation and led him to make his one mainstream film, And There Came a Man (1965), an epic biography of Pope John XXIII. Unfortunately, this film, the only one in which he did not use nonprofessional actors, was a box-office flop and after making one more feature, Olmi became a television director. He did not make another feature until 1978. The film was The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a complex interweaving of the lives of five peasant families struggling to survive, and is considered Olmi’s finest work.

4th Oct 2009; Shyam Benegal's ANKUR

ANKUR
A film by Shyam Benegal
Country:India
Year:1974
Hindi with English subtitles
Runtime: 131 min
4th Oct 2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Ankur opens to a surreal shot of a modern day feudal village in rural India, as an attractive young peasant woman named Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) participates in a ritual pilgrimage to the shrine of the mother goddess bearing offerings for the tribal ceremony in the hopes that the goddess will answer her prayers to have a child. The scene then cuts to a group of university students comparing the results of their final exams - among them, a zamindari (feudal landowner) heir named Surya (Anant Nag) who barely makes the grade with a "pass class".

Returning home to announce his successful completion, he is angered by the brazen appearance of his father's longtime mistress Kaushalya, and their grown son Pratap in the house, and retreats to the kitchen in order to enlist his mother into cajoling his father to allow him to continue with his studies despite his mediocre grades. His father remains unmoved by his selfish request, and compels him to go through with a pre-arranged marriage to an underaged young woman from a privileged family named Saroj (Priya Tendulkar) and assume responsibility for managing the family's neglected feudal estate. Unable to bring his new wife to the zamindari until she comes of age, the lone Surya arrives unexpectedly at the gates of the farmhouse and is greeted by the housekeeper Lakshmi, and her unemployed, deaf-mute husband Kishtaya (Sadhu Meher) who live in a nearby hut.

Surya soon disrupts the dynamics of everyday life in the village by flouting tradition and local custom: asking the lower caste Lakshmi to brew his tea and cook his meals (a task customarily reserved for a Brahmin priest); denying access to the reservoir used by villagers to fill their water vessels; redirecting the water supply to Pratap's adjacent farm; ordering the overseer to actively pursue thieves and exact severe punishment in order to dissuade others from a similar act. However, despite Surya's seemingly progressive ideas on the irrelevance of the caste system, his moral integrity proves suspect when he develops an irrepressible attraction towards his enigmatic and beautiful servant.

Shyam Benegal creates a sublime and provocative examination of hypocrisy, economic disparity, and the social status of women in Ankur. Capturing narrative realism and understated, naturalistic imagery and sounds, Benegal underscores the dichotomy of rural life in contemporary India, as the inequitable and exploitative legacy of outmoded, but deeply ingrained repressive traditions continue to pervade daily life, despite encroaching urbanization, enactment of laws, and assimilation of Western education: the father's socially tolerated mistress that is contrasted against the public spectacle of a tribal court judgment against a woman who deserted her husband; the inconstancy of punishment for pilfering by the overseer, Lakshmi, and Kishtaya; the class stratification that bounds Lakshmi and Kishtaya to a life of poverty and subservience under an omnipotent zamindar.

Through compassionate, yet objective observations of the country's inertial progress towards modernization, Benegal chronicles the subtle, ideological shift of the villagers under an unfair and opportunistic hierarchical society. Inevitably, it is through Lakshmi's exposure and condemnation of the culturally tolerated hypocrisy that the proverbial catalytic seedling of social revolution is germinated.
(Source: http://www.filmref.com)

Shyam Benegal

Contemporary Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal has been an important figure in the new wave of Indian directors. Benegal originated what has come to be called "middle cinema". He was initially involved in the advertising industry and produced over 900 advertisements before his interest turned to films.

Shyam Benegal was born on 14 December 1934 at Aliwal, Hyderabad, British India (now Andhra Pradesh, India). The son of a still photographer and one of 10 children, Benegal's love affair with motion pictures began when he made his first home-movie using a hand-cranked camera at age 12. He is nephew of the famous Indian Actor Director Guru Dutt.

As a young man, he went on to found a film society and get involved in acting while studying at Osmania University where he earned an MA in economics. After graduating, Benegal found a job as a copywriter at a large ad agency in Bombay. Soon he was promoted to writing scripts and directing advertising shorts and commercials. He remained there for over a decade.

His film directorial debut was Gher Betha Ganga in 1962. Benegal shot to fame with Ankur 1973, which introduced Shabana Azmi, who also starred in Nishant 1975. The success that New India Cinema enjoyed in the 1970s and early 1980s could largely be attributed to Shyam Benegal's quartet Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977), which were artistically superior yet commercially viable films. Tapping fresh talent mainly from the FTII and NSD, Benegal has made several sensitive and stimulating films.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1976 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991. On 8th August 2007, he was awarded the highest award in Indian cinema for lifetime achievement, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for the year 2005. He is only director to have won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi five times.

27th Sept 2009; Documentaries on Art - 8

Documentaries on Art - 8
27th Sept 2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 97904 57568
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

IMPRESSIONISM

The impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.

Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.

Edouard Manet
(1832 - 1883)

French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time. His Déjeuner sur l'herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass”), exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, aroused the hostility of critics and the enthusiasm of the young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionist group. His other notable works include Olympia (1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

In 1850 Manet entered the studio of the classical painter Thomas Couture. Despite fundamental differences between teacher and student, Manet was to owe to Couture a good grasp of drawing and pictorial technique. In 1856, after six years with Couture, Manet set up a studio that he shared with Albert de Balleroy, a painter of military subjects. There he painted The Boy with Cherries (c. 1858) before moving to another studio, where he painted The Absinthe Drinker (1859). In 1856 he made short trips to The Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. Meanwhile, at the Louvre he copied paintings by Titian and Diego Velázquez .

In 1863 Manet participated in the famous Salon des Refuses, an exhibition consisting of works rejected by the official Salon, and he came to be viewed as the hero of the nonconformists. Though Manet regarded himself as working in the tradition of the great masters, his approach was to rethink established themes in modern terms. His early notoriety was based on the subject matter of paintings such as Dejeuner sur l'herb, and Olympia rather than their style.

Manet was highly independent, and extraordinarily original. Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. If Manet's work seems to be full of contradictions, or to employ a lack of perspective from time to time, then perhaps that was the true reality of Paris in Manet's time. Always controversial, Manet sought to record the days of his life using his own unique vision. From beggars, to prostitutes, to the bourgeoisie he sought to be true to himself and to reproduce "not great art, but sincere art." He died, in Paris, on April 30, 1883.

Claude Monet
(1840 - 1926 )

French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures--Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)--gave the group his name.

His youth was spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist but was then converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse and formed a friendship with Pissarro. After two years' military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre and met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye'.

He then, in 1862, entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group. Monet's devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden (Musée d'Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.

During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) he took refuge in England with Pissarro: he studied the work of Constable and Turner, painted the Thames and London parks, and met the dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists. From 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley. In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris.

From 1890 he concentrated on series of pictures in which he painted the same subject at different times of the day in different lights---Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the best known. He continued to travel widely, visiting London and Venice several times (and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana), but increasingly his attention was focused on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely (in 1914 he had a special studio built in the grounds of his house so he could work on the huge canvases).
In his final years he was troubled by failing eyesight, but he painted until the end. He was enormously prolific and many major galleries have examples of his work.

20th Sept2009; Fellini's 81/2

8 ½

A film by Fderico Fellini
Country : Italy
Year : 1963
Italian with English subtitles
Run time : 138 min
20th Sept 2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call:94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Followed by video commentaries on 8 ½
1. Terry Gilliam’s (Brazil) introduction
2. Comments on cinematography of 8 ½
by legendary Vittorio Storaro

Federico Fellini's manic, larger-than-life 8 1/2 rules as the king of all Italian movies. 8 1/2 weaves fluidly through the visually intoxicating landscape of Federico Fellini's subconscious, seemingly to seek inspiration and validation for his life and work. In an opening scene that symbolizes much of Fellini's films, a suffocating man, trapped inside his car, inexplicably begins to float into the skies, only to be abruptly tugged back to the ground. But it is also an indelible image that shatters any preconceived illusion of "typical" elements in a Fellini film.

Fellini made better films earlier in his career, but no other film so perfectly outlines his thought process, and captures his evolution from a realist to a spectacle-maker."8 1/2" is the best film ever made about filmmaking. It is told from the director's point of view, and its hero, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is clearly intended to represent Fellini.

It begins with a nightmare of asphyxiation, and a memorable image in which Guido floats off into the sky, only to be yanked back to earth by a rope pulled by his associates, who are hectoring him to organize his plans for his next movie. Much of the film takes place at a spa near Rome, and at the enormous set Guido has constructed nearby for his next film, a science fiction epic he has lost all interest in.

The film weaves in and out of reality and fantasy. Sometimes the alternate worlds are pure invention, as in the famous harem scene where Guido rules a house occupied by all of the women in his life--his wife, his mistresses, and even those he has only wanted to sleep with. In other cases, we see real memories that are skewed by imagination. When little Guido joins his schoolmates at the beach to ogle the prostitute Saraghina, she is seen as the towering, overpowering, carnal figure a young adolescent would remember. When he is punished by his priests of his Catholic school, one entire wall is occupied by a giant portrait of Dominic Savio, a symbol of purity in that time and place; the portrait, too large to be real, reflects Guido's guilt that he lacks the young saint's resolve.

All of the images (real, remembered, invented) come together into one of the most tightly structured films Fellini made. The screenplay is meticulous in its construction--and yet, because the story is about a confused director who has no idea what he wants to do next, "8 1/2" itself is often described as the flailings of a filmmaker without a plan. Fellini's camera is endlessly delighting. His actors often seem to be dancing rather than simply walking. Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn't know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.
(Source:Internet)

Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini, a canonical name of personal expression and artistic fantasy in the cinema, had no formal technical training in his profession. Born in the seaside town of Rimini in Italy in 1920, he quit the provinces for Rome at age 18. Enrolled in law school, he abandoned the degree. He never considered attending Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, whose graduates he would later collaborate with. And unlike his contemporaries, he never frequented the cinema clubs that screened the best Italian directors' films and international titles from France, Germany and Russia. When pressed for his influences, Fellini preferred Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx brothers, Pietro Germi, and Buñuel (with his black humor) to "cine-club" names such as Dreyer, Griffith and Eisenstein. Young Fellini supported himself as a wandering caricaturist until hired by Marc'Aurelio in 1939. The famed humor bi-weekly served as an unofficial training ground for scriptwriters and directors of the postwar period.

Fellini's formative influences can be traced back to the popular Italian culture of the period, and not primarily the cinema. The cartoons, caricature sketches, and radio comedy that were his popular art métier brought him to the cinema as a gagman and scriptwriter. Novelist Italo Calvino diagnosed the influence of mass culture on Fellini's later sophisticated cinematic language as a "forcing of the photographic image in a direction that carries it from an image of caricature toward that of the visionary." Fellini trained for a professional life as a visionary with over ten years of scriptwriting and on-the-set apprenticeship.

For the postwar Left, a film's critical value was based on whether it depicted Italy's social problems and offered a Marxist remedy. Directors who followed their own imperatives were labeled conservative or reactionary. As a veteran of the scripting team responsible for two exemplars of Italian neorealism, Roma città aperta and Paisà (both Roberto Rossellini, 1945 and '46), Fellini was interested in moving toward a "cinema of Reconstruction." After Paisà, he redefined his artistic credo to "looking at reality with an honest eye - but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him."

His career compresses the comparable progress in literature from 19th century realism to the reflexive post-modernity of compatriots Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. Exposing the means of fiction, playwrighting, or filmmaking in Fellini's case (in contrast to the neorealist posture of delivering an unmediated story with newsreel aesthetics), all these authors uncover the "ploy" of authorship. It's as if Fellini critiqued realism as an impossible notion by pointing up its fabrication and adding the suppressed element of the fantastic. In his own words, "I make a film in the same manner in which I live a dream..
(Thanks to Senses Of Cinema )

13th Sept 2009; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A film by Julian Schnabel
Year : 2007
Country : France
French with English subtitles
Run time : 112 min
13th Sept 2009; 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/
Phone : 94430 39630

The film is based on a real man who suffered a stroke and the book he astonishingly succeeded in writing .. The man was Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who was the editor of Elle, the French fashion magazine, when he had his paralyzing stroke. His memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was published in 1997, shortly before he died.

This is almost unbearably poignant memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who found himself immobilized by "locked-in syndrome" after a stroke, becomes a ready-made canvas for the painterly indulgences of Julian Schnabel in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Most compelling in its attempts to re-create the experience of paralysis onscreen, gorgeously lensed pic morphs into a dreamlike collage of memories and fantasies, distancing the viewer somewhat from Bauby's consciousness even as it seeks to take one deeper.

Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood capture all the inner demons – the shame of having to be cared for, the suicidal thoughts, the defeatist attitude, the embittered selfishness – that Bauby, played by Mathieu Amalric, had to battle. The film doesn’t make him out to be an inspirational hero, because he was all too human.

Bauby told the truth and nothing but in his autobiography, and Harwood and Schnabel faithfully depict his ordeal onscreen without filtering it through subjective editorializing. They don’t sugarcoat the fact that Bauby could be horribly disagreeable and difficult to deal with, but the viewers could still relate to him and care about his plight.

Janusz Kaminski, the cinematographer, is in large part responsible for freeing the film from its own dangers of being locked in. From the cloudy opening POV shots of Jean-Dominique regaining consciousness, Kaminski fills the screen with life and beauty.

Curiously enough, a movie about deprivation becomes a celebration of the richness of experience, and a remarkably rich experience in its own right. In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.
(Compiled from Internet)

Julian Schnabel

Painting is like breathing to me. It’s what I do all the time.
Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie

Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American artist and filmmaker. He has been acclaimed at Cannes and has won a Golden Globe, as well as BAFTA, César Award, Golden Palm and two nominations for the Golden Lion and an Academy Award nomination. He has directed four films which were widely acclaimed, including Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award nominated role, and the four-time Academy Award nominated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. He is the interior decorator of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City.

He received his B.F.A. at the University of Houston. After graduating, he sent an application to the independent study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His application included slides of his work sandwiched between two pieces of bread. He was admitted into the program. Schnabel worked as a short-order cook and frequented Max's Kansas City, a restaurant-nightclub, while he worked on his art. In 1975, Schnabel had his first solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Over the next few years he traveled frequently to Europe, where he was enormously impressed by the work of Antoni Gaudi, Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys.His art works are in museums throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

6th Sept 2009; Kurosawa's RASHOMON

Rashomon
A film by Akira Kurosawa
Year:1950
Country:Japan
Japanese with English sub titles
Run time:88 min
6th Sept 2009 ; 5.45 pm
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/
Call 94430 39630

Main screening will be followed by an introduction to Rashomon by Robert Altman and interviews with Akira Kurosawa and Rashomon's cinematographer Kazuo Mjyagawa.

Rashomon opens in a ruined 8th century temple, where a woodcutter and a Buddhist priest, taking shelter from a lashing rain, ponder a bewildering crime that has shaken their faith in men. As they recount the crime to a cynical passerby, flashbacks picture the testimony at the trial and four differing re-enactments of the violent incident itself.

The story told by Rashomon is both surprisingly simple and deceptively complex. The central tale, which tells of the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of a man (Masayuki Mori), possibly by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), is presented entirely in flashbacks from the perspectives of four narrators.

Each re-telling has its own tone, and distinct point-of-view. Director Akira Kurosawa does a brilliant job of manipulating the mood, while each of the main actors is excellent. Toshirô Mifune (Kurosawa’s long-time leading man) as the thief and Machiko Kyô as the rape victim are particularly riveting.

Kurosawa keeps things tight and intimate — much of it is essentially a filmed play — but keeps us off-balance with the pacing, which tends towards the glacial in any scene involving the woodcutter (whose initial walk in the woods seems to go on for minutes on end) but picks up and gathers tension when we flash back to the murderous dishonor played out amid the trees. Weather is also used ironically — the violent events unfold in harsh sunlight, while the post-mortem groping for truth happens against a backdrop of tears from heaven.

Thematically, Rashômon is a challenging philosophical exercise. Technically, the film is a tour de force of editing discipline and dramatic construction. The actors must recreate the same scene four times, playing their characters in completely different ways.
By the end of the movie, our emotions have been rubbed raw because we have been unable to empathize with a particular version of events. We finish in a moral quandary for we are no closer to determining the 'objective' truth than we were at the start of the film

Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa was the youngest of seven children, born in Tokyo on 23 March 1910. A talented painter, he enrolled in an art school that emphasized Western styles. Around this time he also joined an artists' group with a great enthusiasm for nineteenth-century Russian literature, with Dostoevsky a particular favourite. Another influence was Heigo, one of his brothers, who loved film and worked as a benshi, a film narrator/commentator for foreign silent films. His suicide deeply affected the director's sensibilities.In 1930 he responded to a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors at a film studio and began assisting Kajiro Yamamoto, who liked the fact he knew 'a lot about things other than movies'. Within five years he was writing scripts and directing whole sequences for Yamamoto films. In 1943 he made his debut as a director with Judo Saga (Sanshiro Sugata), with a magnificent martial-arts sequence.

His early films were produced during the Second World War, so had to comply to themes prescribed by official state propaganda policy. It was Drunken Angel which was Kurosawa's first personally expressive work, made in 1948 and featuring Toshiro Mifune who became Kurosawa's favourite leading man.

For those who discover Kurosawa, they will find a master technician and stylist, with a deep humanism and compassion for his characters and an awe of the enormity of nature. He awakened the West to Japanese cinema with Rashomon, which won the top prize in the Venice Film Festival of 1951, and also a special Oscar for best foreign film. A golden period followed, with the West enthralled by his work. Seven Samurai, Yojimbo etc.

Following Red Beard (Akahige) in 1965 he entered a frustrating period of aborted projects and forced inactivity and when in 1970 his first film in five years (Dodeska-den) failed at the box office, he attempted suicide. Directing a Soviet-Japanese production, Dersu Uzala helped him to recover and took four years to make. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1975 and a gold medal at the Moscow Film Festival.

A true auteur, he supervised the editing of nearly all his films and wrote or collaborated on the scripts of most. His memoirs were published in 1982, titled Something like an Autobiography. In 1989 he won an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Kurosawa died in 1998.

23rd Aug 2009;Documentaries on Art - 7 - TURNER

Documentaries on Art – 7

Turner
23rd Aug 2009 ; 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

J M W Turner
(1775-1851)

"A group of French painters, united in the same aesthetic aims...applying themselves with passion to the rendering of form in movement as well as the fugitive phenomena of light, cannot forget that they have been preceded in this path by a great master of the English, the illustrious Turner." (from a letter signed by Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, and others)

Over the course of six decades, J M W Turner transformed the genre of landscape through works that proclaimed him heir to the old masters even while they heralded a new and visionary direction in 19th-century painting. Known for his technical brilliance and startling use of light and color, he incorporated learned references to literature, mythology, and historical events in his pictures. His commitment to the idea that watercolor equaled oil painting in complexity and expressive power raised the standard for others working in the medium. And his exquisitely rendered works, heralded for their virtuosity, inspired generations of artists.
Turner was born in London, England, on April 23, 1775. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home. Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor--one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction. He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe.
Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires, natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was also fascinated by the violent power of the sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour.
A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.
His entire life was devoted to his art. Turner's art has always been controversial. Turner is a wonderfully contradictory figure: the passionate academic painter and the reluctant experimentalist.
(Source: Internet)

16th August 2009 ;A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire
A film by Elia Kazan
Country : USA
Year : 1951
English with English sub titles
Runtime: 125 mins
16th August 2009 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play made the transition from stage to screen with its director, Elia Kazan, and most of its cast intact, including the extraordinary young Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Marlon Brando burnt the screen in this milestone performance as Stanley (his second lead role), and is matched scene for scene by Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter and everyone else in one of the most riveting displays of ensemble acting in American cinema.
Elia Kazan’s directing is excellent. He and Cinematographer Harry Stradling, manage to capture the explosive and hard-hitting moments of the film, like the infamous rape scene and “poker loosing” scene, where Brando after loosing the poker game erupts into madness and starts assaulting and destroying everything he finds. Also the immediate scene after that, where the camera manages to catch the immensity of the lust and the love that Stella and Stanley have between each other.
This film was extremely controversial when it was released back in 1951 since censors (damn them) criticized the film for its dealing with subjects and references like homosexuality, nymphomania, domestic violence, sexual obsession, hysteria, and rape. Kazan had to fight to let him give out a realistic portrayal that was truthful to the play, and lost. They forbid him of shooting certain scenes, and he was forced to cut several key moments of many scenes. Thankfully, five important minutes were restored later, and it made a big difference on the movie itself.
The movie was shot, of course, in black and white. Dramas made in 1951 nearly always were. Color would have been fatal to the special tone. It would have made the characters seem too real, when we need them exactly like this, black and gray and silver, shadows projected on the screens of their own dreams and needs. Watching the film is like watching a Shakespearean tragedy. Of course the outcome is predestined, but everything is in the style by which the characters arrive there. Watch Brando absently scratching himself on his first entrance. Look at the way he occupies the little apartment as if it were a pair of dirty shorts. Then watch him flick that piece of lint.

The film has a permanent place amongst the classics, and not only for the performances but for Tennessee Williams' raw writing about people raw with pain and fear and longing and complicated feelings.




Elia Kazan, (September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003), was an award-winning film and theatre director, film and theatrical producer, screenwriter, novelist and co-founder of the influential Actors Studio in New York in 1947. Kazan was a three-time Academy Award winner, a five-time Tony Award winner, a four-time Golden Globes winner, as well as a recipient of numerous awards and nominations in other prestigious festivals as the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival.

Kazan was born Elias Kazanjoglou in the Anatolian city of the Ottoman Empire, Kayseri,( Turkey) to a Greek family.His family emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in New York City.

A highly successful stage director and a co-founder of "The Actors Studio" in New York, Elia Kazan brought his psychological and emotional philosophy of stage performance to Hollywood in 1945 and sparked a radical redefinition of screen acting during the 1950s while at the same time producing socially conscious films which challenged societal norms and addressed such controversial topics as anti-Semitism, racism, alcoholism, public corruption and the cult of celebrity. Further marked by compelling personal stories, Kazan's films also showcased career-defining performances by such 1950s film icons as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Natalie Wood.

In 1983 Kazan was honoured for his Life Achievement in a Kennedy Center ceremony. When he received in 1999 the Honorary Oscar, Warren Beatty rose and applauded and Nick Nolte remained seated stony-faced. Kazan's films have earned 22 Academy Awards and 62 nominations, including two Directing Oscars. He was married three times; all his wifes were blondes. "Being Greek, blondness is my fetish," Kazan wrote in The Arrangement. In 1932 he married Moly Day Thatcher, a playwright; they had four children. She died in 1963. Barbara Loden, an actress, writer and director, whom he married in 1967, died in 1980. From 1982 Kazan was married to Frances Rudge. Elia Kazan died on September 28, 2003, at his home in Manhattan.