4th Jan 2008; Screening of SPARTACUS

Spartacus

A film by Stanley Kubrik

Year : 1960

English with English subtitles

Run time :196 minutes

4th Jan 2009 ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Call 94430 39630

The film tells the story of the Roman slave Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), who toils for the Roman Empire while dreaming, the narrator assures us, "of the death of slavery - which would not come until 2,000 years later." He is sentenced to death after biting a Roman guard, but spared by Peter Ustinov, as Batiatus, a broker of gladiators. Spartacus is trained in the arts of combat at Batiatus' gladiatorial academy, where one day two powerful men and their wives arrive from Rome. The spoiled women ask to be entertained by the sight of two fights to the death, and Spartacus is matched with a skilled black gladiator (Woody Strode), who spares him and is killed.

The notion of being forced to fight for the entertainment of spoiled women enrages Spartacus, who leads a slave revolt that eventually spreads over half of Italy. Leading his men into battle against weak and badly led Roman legions, Spartacus stands on the brink of victory before his troops are finally caught between two armies and outnumbered.

All of this takes place against a backdrop of Roman decadence, and we become familiar with the backstage power plays of the senate, where Crassus (Laurence Olivier) hopes to become a dictator at the expense of the more permissive and gentler old man Gracchus (Charles Laughton). There are also sexual intrigues; Gracchus is a womanizer, and Crassus a bisexual who is attracted to a handsome young slave (Tony Curtis) but is also driven by the desire to win the love of the slave woman Varinia (Jean Simmons), who is the wife of Spartacus.

The movie was inspired by a best seller by Howard Fast, and adapted to the screen by the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. Kirk Douglas, who produced the film, effectively broke the blacklist by giving Trumbo screen credit instead of making him hide behind a pseudonym. The direction is by the 31-year-old Stanley Kubrick, who realizes the ideas of Douglas, Fast and Trumbo .

 The movie is about revolution, and clearly reflects the decadence of the parasitical upper classes and the superior moral fiber of the slaves

Stanley Kubrik

July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999

Stanley Kubrick was an influential and acclaimed American master of cinema and producer considered among the greatest of the 20th Century. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres in his movies and his reclusive personality about his films and personal life.

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 in the Bronx, New York City. By age 13 he had developed passions for jazz drumming, chess, and photography. At 17 years of age he landed a job at Look magazine as a photographer. Worked there for several years, traveling all over America. He enrolled as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University and attended the Museum of Modern Art film showings as often as they changed the program.

In 1951 at 23 years of age, Kubrick used his savings to finance his first film, a 13 minute documentary . After short films like Flying Padre and The Seafarers , in 1953 he raised $13,000 from his relatives to finance his first feature length film Fear & Desire and in 1955 he raised $40,000 from friends and relatives and shot his second feature Killer’s Kiss. After that with the release of Killing & Paths Of Glory, Kubrick never looked back. 

Till the day he died . Kubrick was involved in his films and gave the world nothing but masterpieces - Spartacus (1960) , Lolita (1962) ,Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) , A Clockwork Orange (1971) , Barry Lyndon (1975) , The Shining (1980) , Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) .

28th Dec 2008 ; The journey of Riding Solo To The Top Of The World

The journey of Riding Solo To The Top Of The World.

A documentary by Gaurav Jani

94 minutes

28th Dec 2008 ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Call : 94430 39630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

This is  a documentary  film about filmmaker Gaurav Jani's solo motorcycle journey from Mumbai to one of the remotest places in the world, the Changthang Plateau in Ladakh, bordering China. The film is even more extraordinary for the fact that Jani was a one-man  crew who loaded his 200 kg motorcycle with over 100 kgs of equipment/supplies and set off on a journey to one of the world's most difficult terrains.

“I wanted to make a documentary series about the romance of travel in India: Five bikers on a two-year ride without a proper film unit or a plan. Without a pre-planned screenpl ay and film unit, the documentary was to capture the real experience of travel. “Let’s just go there and take it from there”, like a lot of us who travel footloose without a plan. The film was to capture the little moments that stay with us for a lifetime; the places, the people, the highs and lows of travel. 

   With minimum luggage, I started off from Vivek Sharma's house in Delhi. The maximum amount of space was occupied by the camera box and  camera accessories. The heaviest bag had the bike spares and tools.  Once on the road, each time I had to take a shot, I had to untie the camera bag and tripod, remove the camera, tie the camera bag back onto the bike, set the frame, wear the helmet, ride away from the camera, come back to unpack the camera bag on the bike and pack the camera and tripod back onto the bike. Sounds like a lot of work but any film-maker would go to any length to get a good shot. 

There are two shots in the film where I have not operated the camera. One shot is in the trailer where the camera pans while I am riding. That shot was taken by  a cameraman of the Zee News channel.

 Zee News was doing a feature on paragliding near Rohthang pass at Manali and they too were using the same Panasonic camera. I actually wanted to inquire from the cameraman on what all precautions I should take while taking shots in sub-zero temperatures. Second shot was taken by a Royal Beast (a Royal Enfield club from Delhi) member whom I had met en route. 

I wanted the Zee News shot in the film as it was the only shot where the camera moves while I am riding, But quite a few people after seeing the shot thought that my claim of filming my own journey was bogus, so in the DVD cut, we have replaced that shot with me riding past the milestone of Rohthang pass. 

Filming my own journey on the high altitude region was tough physically, but mentally  it was satisfying. Any first-time director would be nervous on the sets, crew and cast waiting for his directions. But for Riding solo... there was no one to judge me or look at me for further instructions. I was filming without any plan or schedule and most importantly, I had complete freedom. A perfect scenario for a first time director . “

-    filmmaker Gaurav Jani

Gaurav Jani

Gaurav, also known as Jani, Bhatku (wanderer) or GJ, directs films for Dirt Track Productions. Riding Solo To The Top Of The World is his debut film. Gaurav is a travel freak and a biker. He likes to collect antiques, but doesn’t have the money for it! He is also the founder member of 60kph, Motorcycle Travel Club India. Gaurav functions as a one-man film unit to capture the true essence of travel and it’s highs and lows. He neither believes in planning nor research, preferring instead to trust his instincts and firm resolve. Sometimes things work out the way he wants and sometimes they bomb, but he doesn’t change. He likes to keep things simple and basic, letting his heart rule over his head.

Phone : +91 9833013039

Email : gaurav[at]dirttrackproductions[dot]com

Source : http://www.dirttrackproductions.com/

21st Dec 2008; Screening of Come and See

COME AND SEE

A film by Elem Klimov

Country : Russia

Year : 1985

Run time : 142 min

Russian with English sub titles

21st Dec 2008 ; 5.45 pm

Ashwin hospital auditorium 

Call: 94430 39630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Russian film maker Elem Klimov explores the horrors of war in his classic coming-of-age drama "Come and See." Directing with an angry eloquence, he taps into that  hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness . And though he draws a surprisingly vivid performance from his inexperienced teen lead, Klimov's prowess is his visual poetry, muscular and animistic, like compatriot Andrei Konchalovsky's in his epic "Siberiade."

"Come and See," an impassioned, pastoral indictment of the Nazis, haunts us with its painterly after-images of World War II as seen through a 14-year-old farm boy's eyes. Alexei Kravchenko, who has never acted before, plays Florya, the innocent destroyed. He suffers with an agony torn from his Russian core. He was, in fact, hypnotized during filming to aid him in his physical transformation from an apple-cheeked waif to a  wizened, hollow-eyed witness of genocide.

It begins when Florya steals a gun from a soldier's shallow grave and runs off to join the Resistance fighters in rural Byelorussia in their stand against the ruthless storm troopers.. Florya  escapes physical harm, but his soul is destroyed.

Florya’s face is the most dominant image in the film, and much of Klimov’s style relies on uncomfortable close-ups that not only are a bit too close, but are also at either eye-level or below and looking up: positions unnatural, submissive for an adult viewer. We're not used to looking a child straight-on, let alone looking up at one. The overall result is surreal, gruesome, horrific, off-putting, often brilliant -  the film is always powerful and memorable because of it.

Images float across the screen like unmoored hallucinations -- during the village massacre, a reeling Kravchenko catches sight of an androgynous Nazi sucking the meat from a crustacean's claw in the front seat of a truck -- and characters frequently stare right into the lens, as if confronting our right to be witnessing any of this. It's more than a little hysterical, but Klimov's intensity gets under your skin, and the effect is, finally, searing.

"Come and See" sounds like an invitation to a child's game. Nothing could  be further from the truth.

Elem Klimov

9 July 1933 – 26 October 2003

Elem Germanovich  , born in Stalingrad, current Volgograd, was a Soviet Russian film director. He studied at VGIK, and was married to film director Larisa Shepitko.

Western audiences know Klimov-the-director chiefly from his later films, especially Agoniia (Rasputin, 1975, released 1984) and Idi i smotri (Come and See, 1985). Both are historical films, the first a sensationalist but serious portrait of the improbably sensationalist "advisor" to Nicholas II, Grigory Rasputin, the second a harrowing account of Nazi brutality in Belarus in 1943.

But Klimov launched his career with comedy. Klimov studied at VGIK, the premier Soviet film school, in the turbulent, exciting late 1950s and early 1960s, along with a raft of talented young men—Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Konchalovsky, Vasily Shukshin—and at least one talented young woman, Larisa Shepitko, whom he married. After graduating in 1964, Klimov made his debut with Dobro pozhlovat', ili postoronnim vkhod vospreshchen (Welcome or No Trespassing, 1964).

In 1979, Klimov's wife Larisa died in a car crash while at work directing a film based on a famous Russian novel by Valentin Rasputin calledFarewell to Matyora. His wife's death had a profound impact on Klimov - all his films after this were tragedies. He finished the film that his wife had been working on and also directed a 25-minute tribute to her called Larisa.

In 1986, fresh from the success of his film Come and See, and with the changes brought by perestroika in the air, Klimov was chosen by his colleagues to be First Secretary of the new, revamped Film-maker's Union. His reign saw the belated release of hundreds of previously banned films and the reinstatement of several directors who had fallen out of political favour. However, Klimov was frustrated by the obstacles that still remained in his way. He gave up his post in 1988 to Andrei Smirnov, saying that he wanted to make films again. Plans for an adaptation of The Master and Margarita and a film about Joseph Stalin never materialized, however, and eventually Klimov lost interest in making films, saying that there was no topic left to filmHe died on October 26, 2003.

14th Dec 2008 ; Vittoria De Sica Film Festival

VITTORIA DE SICA
FILM FESTIVAL

Screening of two rare classics of the Italian master
Shoeshine and Brief Vacation
14^th December 2008 ; 10 am to 6 pm
Coimbatore Cosmopolitan Club, Race Course
Call : 94430 39630

VITTORIA DE SICA

Vittoria De Sica, was one of the great directors of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, which represented a large, loud break with Hollywood tradition and dealt with life as it might exist outside sound stages.

As one of the world's most influential filmmakers, and as an actor who starred in some 150 movies, Vittorio De Sica built a remarkable film career that spanned half a century.
De Sica directed 34 feature films, for which he won numerous international prizes. He was honored with four Academy Awards: two Special Awards, preceding the creation of the Best Foreign Film category, for "Shoeshine" in 1947, and "The Bicycle Thief" in 1949, and Best Foreign Film Awards for "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" in 1964, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in 1971.

De Sica was born in 1902 in Sora, near Rome, and grew up in Naples in a middle-class family. His father, Umberto De Sica, a bank clerk with a penchant for show business, encouraged his good-looking son to pursue a stage career. At 16, he appeared in the film "The Clemenceau Affair." His career took off in the 1920s when he joined a local theater company and became a matinee idol. He later formed his own company, producing plays and co-starring with his first wife, Giuditta Rissone. At the same time, he made a name for himself as a suave leading man in Italian films, and became immensely popular with female audiences.

During World War II, De Sica turned to directing. His first four films were routine light productions in the tradition of the Italian cinema of the day. But his fifth, "The Children Are Watching Us," was a mature, perceptive, and deeply human work about the impact of adult folly on a child's innocent mind. The film marked the beginning of De Sica's collaboration with author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, a creative relationship that was to give the world two of the most significant films of the Italian neorealism movement, "Shoeshine" and "The Bicycle Thief."

To finance his directorial efforts, De Sica worked as an actor throughout his career. He turned almost exclusively to acting in the late 1950s, enjoying great popularity in the role of the rural police officer in Comencini's "Bread Love and Dreams" (1954), and in a subsequent comedy series of the same name co-starring Gina Lollobrigida.

He made a dramatic comeback with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , produced by Arthur Cohn. The director's next movie was "A Brief Vacation" (1973), a moving film, also produced by Arthur Cohn, about a working-class Italian woman's first taste of freedom in a society dominated by males. His last film, "The Voyage" (1974), was based on a novella by Pirandello.Vittorio De Sica died in 1974 at the age of 72.
(Source ;: Internet)

SHOESHINE

Year ; 1946
Country : Italy
Italian with English subtitles
Run time :93 min

Frequently referenced excerpts and critics' polls proclaiming The Bicycle Thief (1948) one of the finest films ever have brought fame to Italian Neo-realist Vittorio De Sica, but he also deservedly won an honorary Academy Award for Sciuscià (Shoeshine) two years after its 1946 release. As with all post war Italian neo-realism, an air of tragedy looms over the tightly constructed black and white drama, and expectations for eventual heartbreak are exceeded. It's easy to see why Luis Buñuel cites De Sica's earlier film as inspiration for his devastating portrait of Mexico City slum life in Los Olvidado.

A master at portraying stark realities of poverty while retaining glimmers of hope and humanity, De Sica constructs a poignant yet unsentimental film that compels audiences to weep openly by the end.

As Pauline Kael describes, "It is one of those rare works of art which seem to emerge from the welter of human experience without smoothing away the raw edges, or losing what most movies lose--the sense of confusion and accident in human affairs."

Vittorio De Sica creates a l ucid, sincere, and impassioned portrait of poverty, corruption, and desolation in Sho eshine. From the introductory images of ubiquitous American soldiers at an economically (a n d perhaps, militarily) ravaged town (note their presence at the sanctuary of the horse rental stable as well as the high-traffic streets where the shoeshine boys eke out a meager living from their almost exclusively foreign patrons), De Sica establishes a recurring metaphor for the pervasive external, environmental factors that invariably exert an influence (if not govern) Giuseppe and Pasquale's lives that exist beyond their control.

In essence, it is this external force - the "outside gentleman" that the fortune teller foretells - that serves, not only as an oblique reference to the presence of Allied occupation forces in postwar Italy, but also as a representation of th e country's sentiment over their ambivalence and inutility towards the direction and scope of the reconstruction in their own country. Moreover, Pasquale's orphaning during the war and the status of Giuseppe's family as refugees forced to share a single room at a multi-family boarding house further underscore the boys' (and, in turn, the country's) sense of transience, dislocation, and impotence over their own plight and the determination of their future. It is through this systematic disillusionment that the indelible bookend image of the two friends and their beloved white horse becomes, not a euphoric expression of unbridled freedom, but a desperate, resigned rejection of its severe, inscrutable, and dehumanizing course.
(Source : Internet)

BRIEF VACATION
Year : 1973
Country : Italy
Italian with English subtitles
Run time : 112 min

In movies like "Shoeshine" and "Bicycle Thief" he told the stories of poor people trying to survive in a system geared up to manhandle them. His films grew slicker and more commercial by the 1960s, but he never lost his gift or his heart, and there were masterpieces like "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" (1972) and now this final return to a working-class subject.

It's a "woman's picture" of the new sort, the kind in which women make up their own minds and make their own mistakes. His heroine, Clara (a luminous performance by Florinda Bolkan), is harassed and bone-tired and driven to shouting things like "I'd do better as a whore" while she faces the bathroom mirror at dawn. But she has resources she never dreamed she owned.

She leads a grim existence as a factory worker. Her husband has been hit by a motorcycle and is laid off with a broken leg. Her brother-in-law spies on her and her mother-inlaw spits on her. She's been diagnosed as a tuberculosis victim and sent to a sanitorium in the mountains, courtesy of the National Health Service. And now she has met a young man who is desperately in love with her.

De Sica quotes Appollinaire: "Sickness is the vacation of the poor." That's the case here, and as the doctor tells Clara of the spot on her lung and prescribes a month or two in the mountains, the faces of her family shrink into meanness and envy. There is the thought, never quite spoken aloud, that her duty as a wife and mother is to stay in Milan and die. But she packs and goes.

This is a woman who tells her husband it will take the police to get her back to Milan, but at the movie's end we're not told what she will finally do. We have a notion. though. and we've met a tough, beautiful person.

For the screenplay of "A Brief Vacation," de Sica returned to his old collaborator Cesare Zavattini, the man who wrote "Bicycle Thief" and "Shoeshine." It's as if, at 73, he wanted to touch base again in case this was going to be his last film.
(Source : http://rogerebert.suntimes.com)

7th December 2008; Screening of Fassbinder's Veronika Voss

VERONIKA VOSS
A film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Year: 1982
Country :Germany
Run time ; 104 minutes
German with English sub titles
7th December 2008; 5.45 pm
Ashwin hospital Auditorium
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/
Call : 9443039630

VERONIKA VOSS was the next-to-last film made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died on June 10, 1982 in Munich on account of a fatal combination of drugs and alcohol. It tells a story of a German actress, famous in the 1940s, who tried to revive her flagging career with alcohol and drugs, and fell into the hands of a sadistic woman doctor who provided the drugs as a means of controlling rich patients. The film is based on the life of Sybille Schmitz, "the German Garbo," who starred in many glossy postwar West German films before becoming addicted to drugs and killing herself in the late 1950s.

VERONIKA VOSS is the third film in his trilogy about the West German "economic miracle" of the 1950s and 1960s; the other two films were THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN and LOLA.

If MARIA BRAUN made its heroine into a symbol of Germany pulling itself together after the end of the war, and LOLA was about the conflict between corruption and duty, VERONIKA VOSS seems to be about Germany's lingering fascination with the images of the 1930s, with the carefully cultivated aesthetic of decadence, domination, perversion, and sinister sexuality.

It gives us a heroine who, at one time in her career, stood for the sort of sophisticated, chic sexuality associated with Marlene Dietrich. But by the time we meet Veronika Voss, she can't even pull herself together to do a tiny scene in a movie. She seeks comfort from strangers. She is hopelessly addicted to drugs, and is the captive of a psychiatrist who enjoys having a fallen star around the office.

Fassbinder's visual style is the perfect match for this subject. He shoots in the unusual combination of wide screen and black and white, filling his frame with objects: clothes, jewelry, furniture, paintings, statues, potted palms, kitsch. This is a movie of Veronika Voss's life as Veronika might have pictured it in one of her own nightmares.

The elaborate camera moves and the great attention to decor are just right for the performances., which come in two styles: stylized and ordinary. Veronika Voss is elegant even in her degradation, but she is surrounded here by plainer folks like Robert, the sportswriter she picks up in a cafe. There are times during the movie when we can almost see everyday, ordinary postwar Germany picking its way distastefully through the smelly rubble of pre-war decadence.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Controversial and prolific German director and playwright, who attracted attention with his politically committed and disillusioned stage plays and films. Fassbinder's central theme was the political and social corruption of postwar Germany.

Few filmmakers lived their private lives more publicly than Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), and few have had those lives so relentlessly linked to their artistic output. Starting at age 21, this self-created enfant terrible made over 40 films in 15 years along with numerous plays and TV dramas.
















Born in 1945 to a bourgeois Munich family, Fassbinder rebelled early.He shifted his aesthetic allegiance from German culture, in which he was well versed, to Hollywood, often seeing as many as 15 features a week. His own films would borrow equally from classic and modern European sources from Thomas Mann to Artaud to Brecht, and the melodramatics of Hollywood genre pictures. To this mix he would add extensive theatrical experience gained through association with groups like the “Anti-Theater,” where he would learn writing, directing,

This homely, overweight gay rebel generated the fiercest loyalties among his troupe, and repaid them by eliciting a gallery of brilliant performances from actors who would never, with rare exceptions like Hanna Schygulla, repeat what they achieved under his tutelage.

Fassbinder ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity; his films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society, and the individual, thwarts it. His main characters tend to be naifs, either male or female, who must be rudely, sometimes murderously disabused of their romantic illusions, which threaten the social and philosophical status quo.

This prodigiously inventive artist distilled the best elements of his sources — Brechtian theatrics, Artaud, the Hollywood studio look, classical narrative, and a gay sensibility that wasn't ghettoized — into a body of work that continues to enlighten and disturb.

There is no other director whose work constitutes the history of a (now defunct) country, West Germany, in personal everyday termsFassbinder was that rarity - a truly (and repeatedly) dangerous director.

Fast living and fast working Fassbinder died of drug overdose in Munich, at the age of 36, on June 10, 1982. His death marked symbolically the end of the most experimental period of the German cinema since the 1920s.