2nd December 2007: Screening : Pedro Almodovar's VOLVER

A Film By
Pedro Almodovar

Country :Spain , Run time : 121 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles.

There is no director alive more connected to the hearts, minds and mysteries of women than Spain's Pedro Almodovar. Almodóvar's "Volver" -- the title means "to return" -- is inspired by the filmmaker's own memories of growing up in La Mancha. In "Volver," the central character -- the movie's life force, if you will -- is a ghost. She may be a real ghost or a metaphorical one, but the distinction is inconsequential. "Volver" is the story of a family of women, and at the root of this particular tree is a mother and grandmother, Irene (played by the wonderful Carmen Maura): She has two daughters, the tough, capable but somewhat insensitive Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and the more retreating, eccentric Sole (Lola Dueñas). At the beginning of the movie, we learn that Irene is dead: She was killed, with the girls' father, in a fire, quite a few years ago.

In the memorable tracking shot that opens "Volver," a bevy of scarved women are scanned as they vigorously scrub the graves of loved ones. This animated tableau is a testament to the ritualistic devotion that the mothers of this community, located in the rural Spanish region of La Mancha, lavish upon their dead. The image also provides an apt metaphor for the meticulous, one could say maternal, care with which the filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar, constructs and polishes his movies about women.

“Volver,” full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. Ms. Cruz plays Raimunda, a hard-working woman pulled in every direction by terrible events and by the needs of the women around her. With this role Ms. Cruz inscribes her name near the top of any credible list of present-day flesh-and-blood screen goddesses, in no small part because she manages to be earthy, unpretentious and a little vulgar without shedding an ounce of her natural glamour.

It is about what American feminists of an earlier era called sisterhood, and also about the complicated bonds of kinship and friendship that Mr. Almodóvar observed as a child growing up among women in traditional, patriarchal, gender-separated (and fascist) Spain. Raimunda’s troubles may be extreme, but she bustles through them with passionate determination, making room for every emotion except self-pity.

“Volver” is often dazzling in its artifice — José Luis Alcaine’s ripe cinematography, Alberto Iglesias’s suave, heart-tugging score — but it is never false. It draws you in, invites you to linger and makes you eager to return. It offers something better than realism. The real world, after all, is where we all have to live; for some of us, though, Mr. Almodóvar’s world is home.

(Courtesy : Salon.com , New York Times & Newsday.com )

Pedro Almodovar

There is no director alive more connected to the hearts, minds and mysteries of women than Spain's Pedro Almodovar.

Pedro Almodóvar is the cultural symbol par excellence of the restoration of democracy in Spain after nearly 40 years of the right-wing military dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Since Almodóvar's emergence as a transgressive underground cineaste in the late 1970s and early 1980s , he has gone on to establish himself as the country's most important filmmaker and a major figure on the stage of world cinema.

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on September 24, 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quixote. He was born as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or write worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station, and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.

Against his parents' wishes, Pedro Almodóvar moved to Madrid in 1967. After completing the compulsory military service, the young man from rural Spain found in Madrid of the late 60s the city, the culture and the freedom. His goal was to be a film director, but he lacked the economic means to do it and besides, Franco had just closed the National School of Cinema so he would be completely self-taught. To support himself, Almodóvar worked a number of odd jobs.

Around 1974, Almodóvar began making his first short films on a Super-8 camera. By the end of the 1970s they were shown in Madrid's night circuit and in Barcelona Almodóvar was influenced by such directors as Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Luis Buñuel, Edgar Neville, Federico Fellini, Luis García Berlanga and neorealist Marco Ferreri.

Almodóvar made his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), in 1980 with a very low budget and a team of volunteers shooting on weekends. His last film was Volver which was released in 2006. Almodovar has made 29 films till date.

25th Nov 2007 ; Documentary film screening ; Visions Of Light

Visions of Light will enthrall lovers of movies and photography buffs alike. For those who happen to fall into both categories, it's a rare treat.

Konangal's launching of regular screening on 4th Sunday

Visions of Light:
The Art of Cinematography (1993)

Documentary on Cinematography , English – 92 minutes.
Screening at Ashwin Hospital Auditorium on 25th Nov 2007 at 5.30 pm

Visions of Light states that cinematography is the art of light -- blending it so it enhances the director's vision. Often, one of the most overlooked elements of a film is its cinematography. Paradoxically, it is also the most important, whether specifically noticed or not. Movies are a visual medium where the pictures shoulder the lion's share of the burden. A movie can have a good director, accomplished actors, and a riveting script, but if the photography is poor, the production is doomed.
. "Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography" is the vibrant, gloriously documented tale of the evolution of motion-picture photography, told in the words of the cinematographers themselves and in scenes from 125 films.
This 90-minute documentary is so energizing that when you leave after seeing "Visions of Light", you'll want to rush out to see, or see again, virtually every film that has just been recalled. "Visions of Light" may not change your life, but it will certainly enrich your appreciation for the whole complex, collaborative process by which random ideas are somehow transformed into films that occasionally exalt.
The clips in "Visions of Light" recall virtually the entire history of cinematography, from D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" (1915) through such 1990 releases as "Goodfellas" and "Do the Right Thing." Though it has the manner of a conventional anthology film, this documentary is no mere exercise in nostalgia. It's a vastly entertaining introduction to an art that's not always easy to see.
The film is divided into three sections. The first, and shortest, traces the early days of Hollywood and the importance of camerawork in silent films. The second section deals with the black-and-white era after the introduction of sound. Covering roughly the years between 1930 and 1960, Finally, color movies are presented. From Gone with the Wind to films of the eighties, the various techniques used by color photographers to achieve moods and portray emotions are detailed.
Film, whether it's "Coconuts" (1928) with the Marx Brothers, Orson Welles's "Magnificent Ambersons" (1942) or Jules Dassin's "Naked City" (1948), the immediate response is to the entire experience, not to the particular elements that make up that experience. One remembers general feelings: pleasure, pain, laughter, boredom, anger, joy. Films, even bad ones, have a way of being so totally involving that only great and terrible moments are remembered. The craft by which effects are achieved goes unnoticed. This is the way it should be, according to the 27 cinematographers who are interviewed here.
There are exceptions. There's absolutely no way that anyone can look at "The Magnificent Ambersons" for the first time and not emerge from the theater bewitched by Stanley Cortez's remarkable deep-focus camera work. It's almost as if the movie were in 3-D. Deep-focus, the method by which characters and objects far from the camera are seen as clearly as those that are close, had been used many times before, most memorably in "The Long Voyage Home" (1940) and in Welles's "Citizen Kane" (1941). Yet in "Ambersons," deep-focus becomes the film's resonant "voice": as important to the story as the information supplied by the soundtrack narrator.
It was also impossible to ignore the effect of color in the first great Technicolor films of the 1930's. Indeed, the Technicolor movies were shot in a way to constantly remind audiences they were seeing color, as when in "Becky Sharp" (1935), photographed by Ray Rennahan, the heroine's cheeks turn a decided red when she's suddenly embarrassed.

Mostly, though, the cinematographer's art is supposed to go unremarked upon by everyone except other film makers. "Visions of Light" recognizes the possibility that today's more sophisticated, more cinema-literate audiences stand to have their enjoyment enhanced by these insiders' comments on their art.

Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels share credit as the directors of "Visions of Light." In such circumstances, it is usually difficult to tell who contributed what, though Mr. McCarthy, a critic for Variety as well as a writer of other film documentaries, is also credited with having written "Visions of Light" and conducted the interviews. Some extra credit must therefore go to him for somehow managing to obtain remarkably informative testimony from the sort of artists who are not usually all that articulate.
Or, as Conrad Hall, the man who shot "In Cold Blood" (1967), says at one point, "I think visually." He and his associates may think visually, but before the camera in "Visions of Light" they also talk extremely well about what they do best.

Ernest Dickerson, Spike Lee's long-time collaborator, remembers when he was a boy and first saw David Lean's "Oliver Twist" (1948), photographed by Guy Greene. The huge emotional impact, he says, was at first mysterious to him; then he realized that "it was the light." His story, like those of the others interviewed here, is a story of light and the absence of light. In cinematography, it's a magical, constantly shifting equation.
"Visions of Light" follows the history of cinematography from the remarkably productive collaboration of Griffith and his cameraman, the great Billy Bitzer, into the Golden Age of the silents when, the interviewees agree, the camera was free, being small and portable. "Sound," says Vilmos Zsigmond ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," among others), "was a great catastrophe for movie making." Because the early sound cameras were so big and cumbersome, movies almost stopped moving.

"Visions of Light" recollects, among other things, how movies (and cinematographers) recovered their freedom, how cinematographers invented what they needed to develop along the way, how individual studios established their own visual identity through the kinds of films they specialized in, and how the "look" of movies changed in the 1960's when directors moved out of the studios to actual locations.

It's a documentary loaded with its own memorable first-hand moments, as when Gordon Willis talks about his contributions to the "Godfather" films, which earned him the nickname "Prince of Darkness." "Sometimes I went too far," Mr. Willis says of the deep shadows he favored when lighting Marlon Brando. He pauses, then adds with no false modesty, "I think Rembrandt went too far, too, sometimes."

"Visions of Light" is a sumptuous achievement of its kind. The responses to Mr. McCarthy's questions are so good and so rich that its text might well make a book. In any case, that text exists in "Visions of Light," accompanied by a dazzling array of clips to show what the interviewees are talking about. This is not a movie to be seen on anything except a screen that is at least three times taller than the person sitting in front of it.

Visions of Light will enthrall lovers of movies and photography buffs alike. For those that happen to fall into both categories, it's a rare treat. This documentary presents an insider's view of the cinematographer's role, It's likely that in the next film you see, you'll be far more aware of camera's role in the creative process.

Courtesy : reviews from New York Times & James Berardinelli

18th Nov 2007 Screening : Satyajit Ray's Jana Aranya

Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.

– Akira Kurosawa

JANA ARANYA

A Film By
SATYAJIT RAY

1975, India. 131 min., B/W
In Bengali with English subtitles
5.45 pm, 18h Nov 2007
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium, Ganapathy CBE

Somnath Banerjee is a sweetly handsome young man. At the outset, he is about to graduate from Calcutta University when he is victimized by a myopic instructor who cannot read his exam answers, depriving him of a graduation with honors. And so Ray starts out by offering a biting satire of a ludicrous educational bureaucracy. Yet all of Somnath's experiences while a student, and all of his book learning, have left him ill-prepared for the cruel realities he will face while attempting to enter the job market. Harsh fact first intrudes when he is told, "You're so young. It'll be ages before you're established." These words are prophetic.
At its core, Jana Aranya is a story of tainted innocence. Its hero is an unsophisticated young man who is surrounded by depravity. None of the rogues in his midst are blatantly evil. Rather, their villainy is subtle, and they justify their unsavory ethics in the name of rat-race survival.

In Jana Aranya, Ray also explores a theme that is a constant in his work: familial relations, and the psychology that exists between parent and child. Somnath's obstacles are not all job-related, in that he is influenced by his widowed father's high expectations for him. The old man, lacking in understanding of the manner of the modern world, accordingly is alienated from Somnath.

Satyajit Ray creates a clever, highly engaging satire on capitalism and moral integrity in The Middleman. Using incongruous imagery and lyrical narrative, Ray depicts the hypocrisy of economic prosperity and professional success. Somnath's daily trips to the employment offices invariably take him through city streets riddled with homeless people and beggars, under a graffiti sign that reads: "1971 is the year of victory". Mr. Shaha's (Santosh Dutta) description of a luxurious British colonial mansion is juxtaposed against a hypnotic, frenetic tour of a dilapidated building. Ironically, the potential sale of optical whiteners proves to be Somnath's darkest hour. Note the minimal, candle lit scene where a disillusioned Somnath alludes to his unpalatable task.

The Middleman is a fascinating, contemporary parable on the corruption of the human soul, a poignant tale of an idealistic young man who stumbles into a corrupt world outside of his creation, and is swallowed into the chaos.

This is the final film of Ray’s trilogy known as the Calcutta Trilogy. The first two were Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970) and Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971). All the three films study the effect the big city of Calcutta has on the educated youth and the price it extracts from them.

( May 2, 1921 - April 23, 1992 )

Satyajit Ray is perhaps the most well known Indian filmmaker to the World and inarguably among the dozen or so great masters of world cinema.. Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta into an exceptionally talented family
who were prominent in Bengali arts and letters. His father died when he was an infant and his mother and her younger brother's family brought him up. After graduating from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1940, he studied art at Rabindranath Tagore's University in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. The desire to learn about Indian arts to be successful as a commercial artist and the lure of Tagore, perhaps, were too strong to ignore.

Tagore had been a close friend of his grandfather and father. Trips to nearby villages for sketching exercises, were his first encounters with rural India for the city-bred Satyajit Ray. He took up commercial advertising and he also designed covers and illustrated books brought out by Signet Press. One of these books was an edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhya's novel, Pather Panchali, which was to become his first film.

In 1947 Ray established the Calcutta Film Society. During a six month trip to Europe in 1950, he managed to see 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thief - 1948), which greatly inspired him. He returned convinced that it was possible to make realist cinema and with an amateur crew he endeavoured to prove this to the world.

In 1949, the great French master of cinema, Jean Renoir had come to Calcutta to scout locations for The River. Ray walked into the hotel where Renoir was staying and sought a meeting. Soon Ray was accompanying Renoir on his trips in search of locations to outskirts of Calcutta during the weekends. Seeing his enthusiasm and knowledge about cinema, Renoir asked him if he was thinking of becoming a filmmaker. To his own surprise, Ray said yes and gave Renoir a brief outlineof Pather Panchali, which he had recently illustrated.

In 1950, with absolutely no experience in moviemaking, Ray started working on "Pather Panchali" In 1955, after incredible financial hardship (shooting on the film stopped for over a year) his adaptation of Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) was completed. and on August 26, 1955. Pather Panchali was finally released in Calcutta. The film did only moderately well in the first two weeks but was a box-office hit later. The success of Pather Panchali gave Ray total control over his subsequent films. in all his numerous functions — as screenwriter, director, casting director, and composer. With 40 years of filmmaking, Ray of course have a lot to say and a lot more to know about.

Prior to the 1956 Cannes Festival, Indian Cinema was relatively unknown in the West, just as Japanese cinema had been prior to Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). However, with Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray suddenly assumed great importance. The film went on to win numerous awards abroad including Best Human Document at Cannes. Pather Panchali's success launched an extraordinary international film career for Ray.

A prolific filmmaker, during his lifetime Ray directed 36 films, comprising of features, documentaries and short stories. These include the renowned Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito [1956] and Apur Sansar [1959]), Jalsaghar (1958), Postmaster (1961), CharulataDays and Nights in the Forest (1969) and Pikoo (1980) along with a host of his lesser known works which themselves stand up as fine examples of story telling. His films encompass a diversity of moods, techniques, and genres: comedy, satire, fantasy and tragedy. Usually he made films in a realist mode, but he also experimented with surrealism and fantasy.

About forty years of filmmaking, with a film a year, was interrupted by his fragile health in the mid-1980s. Ray's Ghare-Baire (Home and the World, 1984) based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, was a return to his first screen adaptation. While shooting, he suffered two heart attacks and his son, Sandip Ray, completed the project from his detailed instructions.

Ill health kept Satyajit Ray away from active filmmaking for about four years. In 1989, he resumed making films with Ibsen's An Enemy of the People as the basis for his Ganashatru (Enemy of the People, 1989). This was followed with Shakha Prashakha (Branches of the Tree, 1990) and Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991).This series of three films were to be his last. Many film critics and film historians found these films a marked departure from his earlier work.

In 1992, He accepted a Lifetime Achievement Oscar from his sickbed in Calcutta through a special live satellite-television event and Bharat Ratna(the Jewel of India), the ultimate honour from India.

Beisde a film-maker, Satyajit Ray was an extra-ordinarily good story teller. Most of his books are written for children except few. He was the creator of many famous characters such as Professor Shonku, Felu-da, Tarinikhuro and so on. Fictions , short storires, illustrations etc. written by were fascinating. He gave life to Felu-da through two of his movies, "Sonar Kella" and "Joy Baba Felunath". Sandip Ray too is working on Felu-da movies even after he has passed away.

Satyajit Ray died on April 23, 1992.

11th Nov 2007: Outreach Programme Screening : The Chorus

Lift Every Sweet Voice and Sing, Rascals, Sing
- New York Times

Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 11 wins & 21 nominations
A Film By Christophe Barratier ,
Year : 2004 , Country : France ,
French with English Subtitles
Screening at Aruna Thirumana Mandapam
NSR Road Sai Baba Colony Coimbatore
11th Nov 2007 at 6 pm.
Call : 94430 39630

The Chorus - "Les Choristes"- is a Golden Globe-nominated, French-language drama - its characters are well drawn and it delivers its uplifting message with succinctness, sincerity and skill.

1949, post-War France – In a dark room, doom-filled school for troubled boys where hope itself in short supply, a mild-mannered new teacher has just arrived, only to find himself surrounded by prepubescent thieves, inveterate liars, unapologetic rebels and lost souls beyond reach. When Clement Mathieu introduces these supposedly hard-core delinquents to something they’ve never experienced before – the freedom and joy of music – he discovers there is far more to these children than anyone dared to believe.

Click here for trailer of The Chorus

The inspiring teacher here is a sweet- spirited bumbler and failed composer , who, with no other options in his life, takes a job as an instructor at a nightmarish, state-run boarding school for problem teenage boys.

The school is administered by the usual ogre, a self-important, incorrigibly petty bureaucrat whose philosophy is what he calls "action-reaction," or severely punishing everyone for the slightest infraction of the individual.

Of course, this Draconian approach doesn't work very well in practice, and the school is a blackboard jungle and a particular hell for the sensitive new teacher. But one day he gets the idea of funneling some of that youthful energy into a boys' choir, and the rest is history.
Inspired by the 1945 French drama, "La Cage aux Rossignols," the story is seen in flashback from the contemporary point of view of one of the students who is now a famous symphony conductor and is reading a memoir left by the teacher.

The performances are affecting and believable, the script never overdoes the brutality or schmaltz, and you leave the film impressed by the undeniable truth of its message: that a good teacher can make a profound difference in a lot of lives.


Christophe Barratier

“What I discovered is that directing is like being the captain of the boat. One of the most important things for the director is to cast well, not only the actors, but also the technicians. You don't really direct the kids, you just choose the right kids, because these kids didn't know about acting. You had to show them for who they are...really, themselves. Likewise for a DP or sound engineer, if you make the wrong choice, you are in an impossible situation.”
- - Christophe Barratier


Christophe Barratier was born in 1963. had undergone classical musical training from the age of seven . An acclaimed guitarist , he has won prizes in several international competitions. In 1991, he joined the production company of his uncle Jacques Perrin, Galatée Films. There he learned the art of film production and participated in the production of acclaimed documentaries including Microcosmos, the people of the grass (1995), Himalayas, Children of a head (1999) and Le Peuple migrateur (2001) as executive producer.
Click here for Christophe Barratier's interview.

In 2001, he started to experiment with the short film , The Gravestones , adapted from a story by Maupassant. It was selected for the Festival Short of Clermont-Ferrand. THE CHORUS is his second feature film. He is working on his third fim .