5th Oct 2008 ; Screening of Divided We Fall

"You wouldn't believe what
abnormal times do to normal people."

Divided We Fall
A Film by Jan Hřebejk
Year :2000
Czech / German with English sub titles
Run time :122 minutes
5th Oct 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 9443039630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Too many films show their characters in terms of black and white, and World War II films doubly so. So when a WWII film shows its characters in shades of gray, it deserves double the praise. Divided We Fall, the new film from director Jan Hrebejk, does just that, painting a semi-satirical portrait of collaboration and resistance in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Film's hero — if he can be called that — is Josef Cízek, (Bolek Polívka) a former supply manager with hang-dog features and a bum leg. His union with longtime wife Marie (Anna Sisková) is a fairly happy one: Even though they're childless and he usually sleeps on the couch, they try to make the best of life under the German jackboot, neither collaborating nor resisting.

The same can't be said for Josef's former co-worker Horst (Jaroslav Dusek), who joins the Nazi party and confiscates property from deported Jews. An obnoxious but ultimately pathetic character who's a dead ringer for Heinrich Himmler, Horst stops by the Cízeks' house way too often, obstensily to give the unemployed Josef handouts, but really to lust after Marie.

One of the unnamed town's few Jews, David has recently escaped from a concentration camp, and returns to his hometown to collect a cache of jewels and seek shelter. Since Nazis will shoot the entire neighborhood of anyone caught sheltering Jews, the fugitive has a hard time finding shelter; even a member of the Resistance tries to turn him in.

Despite the film's dire setting, Hrebejk treats much of Divided We Fall as a low-key farce, focusing on laughable, screwball-like situations (David having to quickly hide whenever anybody knocks on his door) and making light of award social situations (a scary SS Sturmbahnfüer decides Josef is his best new friend). Unlike Life Is Beautiful, however, writer Petr Jarchovsky never lets events slip into silliness, successfully bringing the understated humor of his source novel to the screen.

“ The director manages to create a surreal tale and a philosophical apologue out of a historical tragedy. The director increases the suspense and the tension by resorting to cinematic tricks as low-frame shots, fuzzy focus, super-imposition ofimages, expressionistic shading, etc. and comic, slapstick-like scenes accompanied by circus music.”


Hrebejk's film, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2000, uses large doses of gallows humour to explore the limits of opportunism in abnormal times. The characters in Divided We Fall are reluctant heroes, affable collaborators, and putative resistance fighters. This a deeply humane and affecting movie, surprisingly gentle in spite of its black-comic tinge, and without the slightest hint of schmaltz

"It is an absurdist drama in which everyone has a role," says Hrebejk, the director of this film , who is part of the "velvet generation" of talented Czech film-makers to have come to light since 1989.

Jan Hřebejk

Jan Hřebejk (born June 27, 1967 in Prague) is a Czech film director. He studied together with his frequent scriptwriter Petr Jarchovský at middle school and, from 1987 to 1991, at FAMU, an arts college in Prague for film and television, studying screenplay and dramaturgy.

A Quick Chat With Jan Hrebejk - Click here to read

During his FAMU studies, Hřebejk directed and produced two short films, Co všechno chcete vědět o sexu a bojíte se to prožít ("Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Experience", 1988) and L.P. 1948 – 1989 to a script by his classmate Petr Zelenka. His professional directorial debut was a short film for Czech TV, Nedělejte nic, pokud k tomu nemáte vážný důvod ("Don't do anything, if you don't have good reason", 1991). His films caught the attention of viewers and critics, and entered student film festivals.

28th Sept 2008 ; Kurosawa Film Festival

SAMURAI SUNDAY


Akira Kurosawa Film Festival

Sunday ; 28th Sept 2008 ; 9.45 am to 6.30 pm
Coimbatore Cosmopolitan Club

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.

THE SEVEN SAMURAI
Director : Akira Kurosawa
Year : 1954
Run Time : 203 minutes
Japanese with English subtitles

Much imitated, still unsurpassed. By critical consensus one of the best movies ever made, THE SEVEN SAMURAI covers so much emotional, historical, and cinematic ground that that it demands to be viewed over and over again.


The film is set in the 1600s during the Sengoku era, when the once-powerful samurai were coming to the end of their rule. A small, unprotected village, which is regularly pillaged by murderous thieves, comes under the protection of a band of these samurai. Kambei (Takashi Shimura) is a veteran warrior who has fallen on hard times and who answers the villagers' appeal for help by gathering six comrades to help defend the town.
Bandits are waiting to attack an isolated village as soon as the rice is ripe. Some of the men go to look for help and run into a sage old Samurai warrior who consents to help them. Then follows a series of deft bits as the seven men are gathered and head for the village to prepare defenses, train the men, and get ready for the onslaught. They finally vanquish the bandits but not without losses.

Director Akira Kurosawa has given this a virile mounting. It is primarily a man's film, with the brief romantic interludes also done with taste. Each character is firmly molded. Toshiro Mifune as the bold, hairbrained but courageous warrior weaves a colossal portrait. He dominates the picture although he has an extremely strong supporting cast.



Lensing is excellent, as is editing in bundling together the immense footage and making its battle scenes monumental and exciting. Music is also helpful in mood, vacillating between western and eastern themes for telling effect.

The Hidden Fortress
Director : Akira Kurosawa
Year : 1958
Runtime: 130 minutes
Japanese with English sub titles

The focus of the story is on a pair of escaped thieves who, despite their initial bickerings, soon become friends of an almost co-dependent nature. When the fuedal state they are in is conquered, the princess Yuki (played by the lovely but strident Misa Uehara) escapes - only to have a reward of ten gold pieces placed on her head. Of course, what the conquerors want more than her head is the 200 pieces of gold she fled the Castle with.

Meanwhile, inept thieves Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matakishi (Kamatari Fujiwara) are captured, but manage to escape in a prisoner riot and go hide in the mountains. While there, they come across one surly man who claims to be the samurai General Rokurota Makabe (Toshiro Mifune). Playing on their greed, he enlists their aid to cart out the hidden stash of gold he has nearby, leading them to a secret fortress in a mountain valley.


While in the small fortress, the thieves try to double-cross Rokurota every chance they get, and also encounter the presence of a young girl who they do not realize is the princess. As Rokurota and the Princess engage in trick after counter-trick against each other and the thieves, their fates becomes entwined and the lowly pair of thieves are committed to escorting the General, the Princess, and the gold out of enemy lines and to a friendly neighboring state.

The Hidden Fortress represents a nearly perfect blend of absurd comedy and rousing adventure.

21st Sept 2008: Screening of Eternity And A Day

Eternity And A Day
A Film by Theo Angelopoulos
Country : Greece
Year : 1998
Greece with English subtitles
Run time : 132 minutes
21^st Sept 2008; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Additional screenings :
1. Introduction to Eternity And A Day by Angelopoulos scholar and Head of Film Studies of University of Oklahoma , Andrew Horton.
2. Analysis of a Shot

``Eternity and a Day '' from Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, is a gorgeous elegy of a film - a slow, austere meditation about a dying writer and his thoughts on family, art and mortality.

A winner of the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, it's the most uncommercial, least trendy of movie concepts -- which is part of its appeal. Angelopoulos returns to the same poetic terrain he explored in ``Ulysses' Gaze'' and ``Landscape in the Mist.'' In place of ``action'' and conventional narration, ``Eternity'' deals in philosophical ruminations, slippery shifts in time and long, hypnotic tracking shots that seem to whisper to us, ``Slow down, observe. Listen.''

German actor Bruno Ganz stars as Alexandre, a celebrated writer who closes up his seaside apartment in Thessaloniki after learning that he's terminally ill. As he spends his final hours outside of the hospital wandering around a seaside town, Alexander is overwhelmed with recollections of the one perfect day in his life. The memory may not be of things as they truly were, but instead of events as he wishes they could have been.

All of the present day action of Eternity and a Day takes place during a twenty-four hour period. The flashbacks, which really aren't "flashbacks" in the traditional sense since the aging Alexander replaces his younger self in them, are likewise constrained to a limited period of time. The most poignant and effective portions of the film are those in which Alexander removes his mind from the present and deposits it into that perfect memory.

Angelopoulos glides easily between past and present, between uncertain reality and the sweet, perfumed world of memory. Angelopoulos brings a lot of philosophical freight to his films but leaves them open to interpretation. They're occasions for our own memories and associations. The dialogue, though poetic, is very spare, relying mostly on visual cues and almost talismanic words to relay the script's meaning.

Overall, Angelopoulos' film gives the viewer a sense of the infinite . It contains moments of rare beauty and its contemplation of life, death, regret, and memory has a subtle power.

Theo Angelopoulos

Theodoros Angelopoulos (born 27 April 1935) is a celebrated Greek film director.

Angelopoulos studied law in Athens, but after his military service went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. He soon dropped out to study film at the IDHEC (Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies) before returning to Greece. There, he worked as a journalist and film critic.
Angelopoulos began making films after the 1967 coup that began the Greek military dictatorship known as the Regime of the Colonels. He made his first short film in 1968 and in the 1970s began making a series of political feature films about modern Greece: Days of '36 (Meres Tou 36, 1972), The Travelling Players (O Thiassos, 1975) and The Hunters (I Kynighoi, 1977). He quickly established a characteristic style, marked by slow, episodic and ambiguous narrative structures and long takes (The Travelling Players, for example, consists of only 80 shots in about four hours of film). These takes often include meticulously choreographed and complicated scenes involving many actors.

Angelopoulos has made 19 films so far. His regular collaborators include the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, and the composer Eleni Karaindrou.

At the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, during which Angelopoulos received the coveted Palme d'Or for Eternity and a Day, the filmmaker remarked, "I belong to a generation slowly coming to the end of our careers". Nevertheless, despite his seemingly resigned statement, he continues to work diligently at his craft, having begun filming the first installment of an ambitious, large-scale romantic trilogy on the star-crossed destiny of two people from Odessa during the early part of the 20th century. The century-spanning, international three-part epic—the latest chapter in Angelopoulos' evolving, 'work in progress' oeuvre—is scheduled for completion in 2004.

14th Sept 2008 ; Screening Of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious

Notorious
A Film by Alfred Hitchcock
Year : 1946
Run time : 101 min
English with English subtitles
14th Sept 2008; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium Call : 94430 39630

Alfred Hitchcock's ``Notorious'' is the most elegant expression of the master's visual style, just as ``Vertigo'' is the fullest expression of his obsessions. It contains some of the most effective camera shots in his--or anyone's--work, and they all lead to the great final passages in which two men find out how very wrong they both were.


This is the film, with ``Casablanca,'' that assures Ingrid Bergman's immortality. She plays a woman whose notorious reputation encourages U.S. agents to recruit her to spy on Nazis in postwar Rio. And that reputation nearly gets her killed, when the man she loves mistrusts her.

The story stars Bergman as a patriotic American named Alicia Huberman, whose father is a convicted Nazi spy. Alicia is known for drinking and apparent promiscuity, and is recruited by an agent named Devlin (Cary Grant) to fly to Rio and insinuate herself into the household of a spy ring led by Sebastian (Claude Rains). Sebastian once loved her, and perhaps he still does; Devlin is essentially asking her to share the spy's bed to discover his secrets. And this she is willing to do, because by the time he asks her, she is in love--with Devlin. Hitchcock was known for his attention to visual details. .The film is rich with other elegant shots.

Throughout Hitchcock's career, he devised stories in which elegant women, usually blond, were manipulated into situations of great danger. Hitchcock was the master manipulator, with the male actors as his surrogates. ``Vertigo'' treats this theme so openly it almost gives the game away. But look how it works in ``Notorious,'' where Devlin (like the Jimmy Stewart character in ``Vertigo'') grooms and trains an innocent women to be exactly who he desires her to be, and then makes her do his bidding.

So many movies have ended in obligatory chases and shoot-outs that the ability to write a well-crafted third act has almost died out. Among its many achievements, ``Notorious'' ends well. Like clockwork, the inevitable events of the last 10 minutes take place, and they all lead to the final perfect shot.

Source – Roger Ebert - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com

CLICK HERE TO ENTER

********
Basic Hitchcock Film Techniques

*********

Alfred Hitchcock

The Master Of Suspense

He was known to his audiences as the 'Master of Suspense' and what Hitchcock mastered was not only the art of making films but also the task of taming his own raging imagination. Director of such works as Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and The 39 steps, Hitchcock told his stories through intelligent plots witty dialogue and a spoonful of mystery and murder. In doing so, he inspired a new generation of filmmakers and revolutionized the thriller genre, making him a legend around the world. His brilliance was sometimes too bright: He was hated as well as loved, oversimplified as well as over analyzed. Hitchcock was eccentric, demanding, inventive, impassioned and he had a great sense of British humor.

He was born Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, his father was a green grocer called William Hitchcock (1862 - 1914), his mother was Emma Jane Whelan (1863 - 1942) and he had two older siblings, William Hitchcock (Born 1890) and Eileen Hitchcock(born 1892). He grew up in a very strict Roman Catholic family. He attended St Ignatius college and a school for engineering and navigation. In 1914, when Hitchcock was 15 years old, his father died.

It was around 1920 when Hitchcock joined the film industry, he started off drawing the sets (Since he was a very skilled artist) and he met Alma Reville, though they never really spoke to each other. It was only when the director for "Always tell your wife" fell ill and Hitchcock had to complete the film, that he started off in the directing part of the film world, then Alma Reville and Hitchcock began to talk to each other.

Hitchcock had his first shot of being the director of a film in 1923 when he was to direct the film "The Number 13", though the production was stopped. Hitchcock didn't give up then. He directed a film called "The Pleasure Garden" in 1925, a British/German production, which was very popular. In 1926, Hitchcock made his first notable film, "The Lodger". In the same year on the 2nd of December, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child called Patricia Hitchcock (born 7th July 1928).

His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of them which also made him famous in the USA. David O. Selznick, an American producer at the time, got in touch with Hitchcock and the Hitchcock family moved to the USA to direct an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940).

It was when Saboteur (1942) was made, that films companies began to call his films after him; such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy.

During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralyzing stroke which made her unable to walk.

He retired soon after making Family Plot (1976). He started to write a screenplay with Ernest Lehman called "The Short Night" then later David Freeman who completed the script. Though due to Hitchcock's failing health the film was never made. Freeman published the script after Hitchcock's death.

In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep