3rd February 2008 ; Screening of Sydney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon

Dog Day Afternoon

A Film By Sidney Lumet.
Year : 1975 ; Country : USA
Running time : 124 minutes
English with English sub titles.
Won Oscar. Another 10 wins & 17 nominations
3rd Febryary 2008 ,5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

"Dog Day Afternoon" is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously ill-planned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.

CLICK HERE FOR TRAILER OF DOG DAY AFTERNOON

If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it's reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids easy speculation.

Each of the several principal lives it touches has been grotesquely bent out of shape. The director and Frank Pierson, who wrote the fine screenplay, don't attempt to supply reasons. The movie says only that this is what happened. No more. Thi

s severely limits the film's emotional impact, though not its seriousness or its fascination. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a gaudy street-carnival of a movie that rudely invites laughs at inappropriate moments, which is in keeping with the city's concrete sensibility.

The incident on which the film is based was the attempt to rob a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank on Aug. 22, 1972. The two bandits, one of whom was seeking money for a sex-change operation for a boyfriend, failed miserably, after they held the bank's employes hostage for 14 hours.

Most of the time the film stays contained within the bank. This concentration in space and time is responsible for much of the film's dramatic intensity.So too are the brilliant characterizations by the members of the large cast, including Al Pacino, as the (probably) more than a bit mad mini-mind of the holdup, a man with bravura style when he plays to the crowds outside the bank but apparently quite demented in his personal relationships.

"Dog Day Afternoon" is Sidney Lumet's most acc

urate, most flamboyant New York movie—that consistently vital and energetic Lumet genre that includes "The Pawnbroker" and "Serpico" and exists entirely surrounded by (but always separate from) the rest of his work. Mr. Lumet's New York movies are as much aspects of the city's life as they are stories of the city's life.

Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors--and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York--Lumet has made over 40 movies, often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. He often tells intelligent, complex stories. His politics are somewhat left-leaning and he often treats socially relevant themes in his films.

As social criticism, Sidney Lumet addresses throughout his long career on numerous issues related to American society - on corrupt police (Serpico, 1973, The Prince of New York, 1981 and in the Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)), on television (A Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 ), on Justice ( Twelve Angry Men In 1957, The Verdict, 1982 ) on MacCarthyism (Daniel, 1983), on alcoholism (Lendemain From Crime, 1986) and on racism (Counter-survey, 1990).

Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s (such as "Dead End"), and his acting debut in films came in One Third of a Nation (1939). In 1947 he started an off-Broadway acting troupe that included such future stars as Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach, and other former members of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio who had become unsatisfied with Strasberg's concepts.

Lumet made his stage directing debut in 1955. He made his feature film directing debut with the critical and financial hit 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, and is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history.

Lumet has made over 40 movies, which earned nearly 50 Oscar nominations. In 1993 he received the D.W. Griffith Award of theDirectors Guild of America and in 2005 a well-deserved Honorary Academy Award.

Click here for complete filmography of Sidney Lumet.

27th January 2008 : Documentary Film Screening : Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin (2003)

Cinema’s First Icon on our Screen

Charlie: The Life and Art of
Charles Chaplin (2003)

Director-writer: Richard Schickel
Narrator: Sydney Pollack
Producers: Richard Schickel, Doug Freeman, Bryan McKenzie
Editor: Bryan McKenzie
Music: Charles Chaplin
Directors of photography: Kris Denton, Thomas Albrecht, Rob Goldie, John Halliday, Ross Keith, Graham Smith
Running time -- 133 minutes
English with English sub titles.
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium, Ganapathy, Coimbatore
27th December 2008 ; 5.45 pm

The film was directed and produced by Richard Schickel, also a film critic for Time, and it's a pretty thorough going-over of both the life and the work, with a decided (and thankful) emphasis on the latter. Sydney Pollack narrates this story of Cockney music hall performer who found glory in Hollywood with a tattered bowler hat, a rickety old cane, and a bit of greasepaint—Chaplin's Little Tramp may be the most identifiable and imitated screen icon of all time.

He was also instrumental in inventing the film grammar that we all take for granted, and for helping to expand the possibilities of this new medium. It's easy to point and shoot, but Chaplin figured out how to expand and compress space, how to use editing for the best possible comic timing, and how to find poetry in little more than two people walking down a street.

Charlie, Richard Schickel's clip-and-chat portrait of Charlie Chaplin, the most celebrated and arguably the most compelling persona on planet earth during the first half of the 20th century, opens by asking the spectator to imagine a world before Chaplin. It's almost impossible.

Richard Schickel's documentary about the 20th century's greatest cinematic figure is a worthy addition to the growing catalog of film history chronicles. This mix of biography and cultural history assembles archival film clips, rare behind-the-scenes footage, and recent interviews to track Chaplin (1889-1977) starting with his harsh childhood in the London slums and his youth as a working-class music-hall performer. We witness the seminal moments of Chaplin's screen career with his improvised mugging in Kid Auto Races at Venice, the 1914 short that records the nascent Little Tramp's first onscreen appearance.

What follows is Chaplin's unprecedented rocket to world-class recognition and wealth. The film spends quality time on his early years with Mack Sennett, the build to his greatest shorts (such as The Immigrant and Easy Street), and the classic features The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, and Modern Times. Two of Chaplin's later, and lesser, features, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, are placed in good context. Schickel — perhaps to avoid mood-shattering cantankerousness — barely even glosses over the two painful failures that capped the old comedian's career, A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong. Home movies give us a warm peek at Chaplin in his twilight years as an exile and doting father in Switzerland.

An impressive array of talking heads add their own personal insights and reflections. Actors Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Bill Irwin, and Marcel Marceau illuminate the intricate physical and emotional components of Chaplin's Little Tramp. Joining fellow directors Woody Allen and Richard Attenborough, Martin Scorsese offers a gleeful exegesis of A Woman of Paris, and Milos Forman gives a personal remembrance of The Great Dictator's impact on Europe under the Nazi threat. Also on hand are critics and biographers Andrew Sarris, David Robinson, David Thomson, Jeannine Basinger, and Jeffrey Vance; Chaplin collaborators Norman Lloyd, Claire Bloom, and David Raskin; and his children Geraldine, Sydney, and Michael. All the while, Schickel reminds us that in multiple mediums he is an engaging writer, and Sydney Pollack makes an able narrator whose authority as a gifted director is equaled by his casual delivery.

Not exactly starstruck but pretty much all celebration all the time, Charlie concentrates mainly on Chaplin the artiste. The documentary comes full circle with some wonderful home-movie performances shot in Switzerland in the 1970s. The mugging octogenarian is not so different from the 25-year-old who forces himself on the audience in Kid Auto Races.

Richard Schickel

Richard Schickel is a film critic and documentary film maker . A film reviewer for Time magazine since 1972, Richard Schickel has attained the stature of a dean of movie history and criticism. Rather than merely turn in his weekly copy, collect columns in occasional book form, and appear as a guest in other people’s documentaries, Schickel has quietly built a respectable body of studies on film .

Richard Schickel has tackled Charlie Chaplin before, in a spirited essay collected in his 1989 book Schickel on Film. There he revealed himself to be that rarest of enthusiasts, an unabashed fan who can celebrate the object of his affection yet won't look away when his subject's hagiography deserves a poking. Schickel is also the writer-director-producer of documentaries on Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, and other filmmaking A-listers. In 2003 he crafted this affectionate, thoughtful documentary on Chaplin. And although he has softened his gruff-love a bit, that distinctive Schickel voice still comes through even as it's spoken by narrator Sydney Pollack.

Richard Schickel has written over 30 books, among them The Disney Version; His Picture in the Papers; D.W. Griffith: An American Life; Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity; Brando: A Life in Our Times; Matinee Idylls; and Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip . His 30 documentaries include Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin; Woody Allen: A Life in Film; and Shooting War , which is about combat cameramen in World War II. He has just completed a book about Elia Kazan and a documentary about Martin Scorsese, which is the eighteenth in the series of portraits of American film directors he has made over the course of his career. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was awarded the British Film Institute Book Prize, the Maurice Bessy prize for film criticism, and the William K. Everson Award for his work in film history. His recently completed reconstruction of Samuel Fuller's classic war film, The Big One , was named one of the year's Ten Best Films by the New York Times , and he has won special citations from the National Society of Film Critics, The Los Angeles and Seattle Film Critics Associations, and Anthology Film Archives. He has been reviewing movies for Time since 1972 and writes a monthly column, Film on Paper, for the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Periodicals:
1965-1972, Film Critic, Life Magazine
1972-present, Film Critic, Time Magazine
2002-present, Film on Paper, monthly column, Los Angeles Times Book Review
1954-present, Essays, articles and reviews, most major publications
Selected Book Publications : 23
Selected Television & Film Productions : 30

20th January 2008; Screening of George Sluizer's The Vanishing

…fiendishley intelligent..chilling and perverse, spell-binding,
a gripping psychological thriller. -  New York Times

. . . . moving; its rigor isn’t alienating, and its symetries are
evocative rather than merely ingenious .The Vanishing has the
elusive but unshakable poetry of nightmare.
- The New Yorker
  
   

A Film by George Sluizer
Year : 1988   Country : Netherlands / France
Dutch / French with English sub titles.
Run time : 107 min
20th Sunday 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital auditorium, Ganapthy, Coimbatore

The Vanishing

This stylish Dutch movie creates one of the most frightening movie monsters in recent history. An unforgettably chilling psychodrama which twists the slenderest of plots into a hellish exploration of human potential. On a driving holiday in France, a young Dutch couple, Saskia and Rex (Ter Steege and Bervoets), stop at a service station to refuel. What happens after that will keep you in a world of sheer suspense till the end .Three years after Saskia's disappearance , an embittered Rex finds himself drawn into a nightmarish relationship with Raymond Lemorne (Donnadieu), who via taunting postcards promises to reveal the fate of his lost love. Consumed by his desire for knowledge, Rex resolves to confront his nemesis and end the Nietzschean conflict of wills in which he is embroiled..

Adapted from Tim Krabbé's novel The Golden Egg, this is a beautifully understated study of obsession that investigates the edges of rationality and the destructive capacity of idealistic devotion. At the heart of its icy spell is Donnadieu's utterly plausible evocation of everyday madness, a resolutely banal picture of evil. Sluizer's direction is seamless throughout, effortlessly juggling domesticity and damnation as it ploughs inexorably towards an appalling dénouement.

How Raymond's experiments tie into Saskia's disappearance makes for a fascinating game that eventually takes on cat-and-mouse proportions — but does not go down the roads you will expect.

The performances are uniformly excellent, with Johanna Ter Steege particularly affecting as Saskia, whose spirit hovers over the proceedings even during long absences from the screen. And Gene Bervoets as her tormented husband and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu as Raymond are also very good.

George Sluizer's "The Vanishing" has a horrifying everydayness that makes it feel close-in and inescapable. It's a thriller, but it doesn't work you over with the usual genre manipulations, the standard tightening and loosening of its grip on your emotions. Its pulse is carefully measured, yet the surface blandness is all the more disturbing because its features are so familiar, so like your own life, so searingly plausible.


George Sluizer

Director, producer and screenwriter George Sluizer is Dutch, but was born in Paris in 1932. He attended the IDHEC film academy in Paris. He made his first film in 1961, HOLD BACK THE SEA, a documentary that won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

During the 1960s until the early 1980s he produced and directed many documentaries and TV specials. He also worked as a producer on numerous films, including Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO and CANCER RISING with Rutger Hauer.
As a writer/director he made his first feature film in 1971, JOAO AND THE KNIFE, which was followed by TWICE A WOMAN with Anthony Perkins and Bibi Andersson, and RED DESERT PENITENTIARY.

With SPOORLOOS (THE VANISHING) in 1988 he received worldwide recognition. The film won him many awards and was the Dutch entry for the 1989 Academy Awards. In 1992 he directed a remake of THE VANISHING for 20th Century Fox, starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock.

In 1991 Sluizer directed an adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s novel UTZ, starring Armin Mueller-Stahl (Best Actor in Berlin 1992), and in 1993 DARK BLOOD, kept unfinished because of the death of its leading actor River Phoenix. CRIMETIME followed in 1995, a thriller about the dangerous effects of reality TV, starring Stephen Baldwin and Pete Postlethwaite. In 1996, Sluizer produced and co-directed the nostalgic comedy DYING TO GO HOME and in 1997 he directed THE COMMISSIONER with John Hurt and Rosana Pastor. And in 2002 THE STONERAFT based on the novel by Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago.
During his career, Sluizer has directed films in six different languages and regards himself as a truly European director. A master of the thriller genre, Sluizer is known for his unique signature, his “going to the edge” and “search for one’s limits”.

Outreach Programme Screening : Mon Oncle

Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot Ventures Into Suburbia...
And Disrupts...Disassembles...And Demolishes
With His Very Subtle Satire

Mon Oncle
A Film By Jacques Tati
117 minutes, French with English subtitles
13^th January 2008
Aruna Thirumana Mandapam , Opp Spencer’s , NSR Road , Saibaba Colony.

Five years after Monsier Hulot’s Holiday proved a major critical success, Jacques Tati and Monsieur Hulot returned to cinema screens across the world in Mon Oncle, a film which proved to be one of the cinematic highlights of 1958. As with Tati’s previous film, Mon Oncle delighted the critics and was a commercial success. The film won not just the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but also an Oscar (in the best foreign film category).

One of Tati’s favorite themes is our enslavement to technology, or more precisely, how technology makes us do ridiculous things. in Mon Oncle, the central family lives in an ultra-modernized home. Everything is button operated and the layout is a cross between a space station and a museum. It is all for show, of course; the dolphin fountain in the front yard is activated only when guests arrive, causing the porcine matron, Madame Arpel, to rush maniacally to her master control switch each time the doorbell rings. For Tati, repetition was an inexhaustible source of comedy. Watching Madame Arpel push the same buttons over and over again is like watching a circus animal perform the same trick. We are mesmerized by her mechanical, inhuman quality.

Click here to see Tati in the kitchen ecene

Most of the characters in Mon Oncle, with their bizarre costumes and stiff body language, look and act robotic (with the exception of Monsieur Hulot, of course). The secretary at Monsieur Arpel’s plastics factory walks with a metallic clip-clop which clearly announces her arrivals and departures. We don’t think of her as a human; she is an institutional creation designed to serve her masters. To a certain degree, we watch all of Tati’s characters with a similar level of impassivity. There isn’t a single close-up shot in either movie. Observing them from a distance, we may at times empathize with his characters, but seldom do we like them very much.

We do, however, benefit from the presence of Tati in the form of Monsieur Hulot. Never the center of any of his movies, Hulot is part of a larger ensemble cast, and more often than not, he is deliberately placed off to one side of the screen or is partially concealed. His elusiveness makes him all the more likable; it’s as if he has stumbled quite by chance into his scenes. Tall and gangly, Hulot is so likable that we hardly notice that he is virtually mute. Adults regard him as a curiosity, a kid who never grew up, while children take to him almost immediately. Eventually, his personality grows on everyone.

Tati was a perfectionist who designed each shot with excruciating levels of precision. He planned all the details in advance, even if most of them would go unnoticed by the audience. Tati took particular pride in the use of sound effects, which is somewhat surprising because he had his start in silent films, and before that, in live theater. He created specific sounds for each object in his movies, and he would repeat each sound over and over again as a way of giving personality to that object or to the place where it is found.

Not only is Mon Oncle an a greatly entertaining piece of cinema, it is also frighteningly prophetic. Almost fifty years on, the charming world inhabited by Monsieur Hulot has all but disappeared and, to a greater or lesser extent, we have all ended up slaves of technology, much of which is of dubious benefit. To this audience, watching Mon Oncle can be a poignant experience. As we laugh at the exploits of Monsieur Hulot and his inability to adapt to a changing world, we see something of ourselves and perhaps nurture a secret yearning to return to a simpler, less technologically orientated way of life.

Screening supported by Hollywood DVD Shoppe, NSR Road , Saibaba Colony

Jacques Tati
October 9, 1907 – November 5, 1982

Jacques Tati is one of the great comic icons of French cinema, a Gallic equivalent of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, whose works as director, writer, and actor are regarded fondly by audiences as well as harder-to-please critics. Like a true auteur, Tati essentially made only one kind of film, in his case, the physical comedy. There is little to no dialogue in his movies, and the action, frenzied but tightly choreographed, is invariably set to a breezy musical score. The main protagonist of all his movies is also his screen alter ego, the ubiquitous Monsieur Hulot who, with his pipe and trenchcoat, eventually came to personify the Tati canon. From 1953 to 1974, Tati played Hulot a total of five times, winning an Oscar and two Cannes prizes along the way. Two of the best known Hulot films, M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958 They represent Tati at peak form. They are precisely calibrated films that successfully merge farce with darker social commentary.

Jacques Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff, the son of Russian father Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff and Dutch mother Marcelle Claire Van Hoof, in Le Pecq, Yvelines.

After a career as a professional rugby player, Tati found success as a mime in French music halls. In the late 1930s Tati recorded some of his early supporting cameos on film with some success and thus began his career as a filmmaker. One of his short films, L'École des facteurs (The School for Postmen) provided material for his first feature, Jour de fête. His films have little audible dialogue, but instead are built around elaborate, tightly-choreographed visual gags and carefully integrated sound effects.

In all but his very last film, Tati plays the lead character, who - with the exception of his first and last films - is the gauche and socially inept Monsieur Hulot. Tati's comedic work, most notably in Mon Oncle, Playtime, and Trafic include Western society's obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France's various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.

Tati’s Playtime (1967) was his most ambitious project, Tati invested everything he had in the film, even going so far as to create a set the size of a small town (nicknamed Tativille). Tati, who had used up his own financial resources and turned to friends and relations for money, would be paying of the debts he had accumulated in making the film right up until his death.

As a result of these financial difficulties, Tati found he had lost his freedom as a director, but he still retained his creative urge. He made two further films, Trafic (1971), a satire on mankind’s ill-fated love-affair with the motor car , followed by Parade (1974), a low-budget circus-based film for Swedish television.

In recognition of his contribution to cinema, Jacques Tati was awarded a César d’honneur in 1977. Tati’s final project, Confusion, was aborted at an early stage when the director died from a pulmonary embolism, on 5th November 1982 in Paris.

Since his death, Jacques Tati’s films have grown to be appreciated by increasing numbers of film enthusiasts across the world. The style of the films, based on the language of physical comedy, makes them accessible to all cultures, all ages. They are as entertaining to children as they are to adults, whilst those who regard cinema as an art can only be impressed by Tati’s creativity, discipline and imagination. Although recognition of Tati’s genius has been a long time coming, few would now dispute that Jacques Tati is one of the greatest names on the history of cinema.