Nov 27, 2008

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 1
945 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.

Nov 17, 2008

23rd Nov 2008 ; Cutting Edge:The Magic Of Movie Editing

The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing
A documentary by Wendy Apple
Country : USA
Run time ;:98 min
English with English subtitles
23rd November 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Take a peek at the documentary :courtesy - You Tube

"The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing," a lively, occasionally illuminating tour of the "invisible art" of film editing, ultimately feels more like a textbook primer than an exhaustive study. Spearheaded by American Cinema Editors and featuring interviews with about 30 top-flight cutters, plus director collaborators, docu is lovingly rendered. Film buffs and general viewers alike will find much to enjoy .

A longtime dream project of the late editor and documaker Arnold Glassman (to whom pic is dedicated), "The Cutting Edge" has clearly been conceived in the mold of "Visions of Light," the 1992 study of cinematography co-directed by Glassman, Todd McCarthy and Stuart Samuels. But whereas that film benefited from a relative ease of construction -- the work of cinematographers being visible -- "The Cutting Edge" is beset by a far trickier proposition: How to show the work of craftspeople whose best efforts are supposed to go unnoticed by even the attentive filmgoer's eye.

To some extent, Apple has solved this dilemma by incorporating it into the finished film. Early on, she presents excerpts from films by the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison, in which the only "cuts" were those created by the stopping and re-starting of the camera.

Then, segueing to the likes of "The Matrix" and "Cold Mountain," she slows down and replays scenes featuring cuts made on matching action, allowing the viewer to become conscious of the film editor's work.

With some 50 movies featured, it's a little too easy to nitpick about the choices director Wendy Apple makes in picking films to profile. This documentary is precisely what it's title purports to be, an in-depth and instructive look at movie editing that literally spans 100 years of film history, from The Great Train Robbery to Cold Mountain.

Through interviews with a copious number of directors and editors, The Cutting Edge covers everything from basic editing techniques like the matching of cuts to modern editing theory as inspired by MTV and The Matrix. The film goes into extreme detail in parts, like when we get to see James Cameron's trick of removing one frame per second out ofTerminator 2 to give it more momentum and realism. It's all a little bit insidery and self-congratulatory, but the movie works far more often than not. Any film buff will find it hard not to like.

Nov 12, 2008

16th Nov 2008 ; screening of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar
A film by Robert Bresson
Year : 1966
Country : France

French with English sub titles Run time : 95 miin
16th Nov 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Asshwin hospital Auditorium

Additional screenings
1. An introduction by film scholar Donald Ritchie
2. A French TV introductory show about the film featuring Rober Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and members of cast and crew of this film.

Robert Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a donkey from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself--a dumb beast, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. Balthazar is not one of those cartoon animals that can talk and sing and is a human with four legs. Balthazar is a donkey, and it is as simple as that.

Bresson's greatest masterpiece, one of the best films ever made, is an astonishing simple tale about innocence and purity in the harsh world of reality. It's a profoundly heart-breaking human-nature drama about animal as the holy one. This stark parable features a donkey in rural France who is given the name of Balthazar (one of the Three Wise Men) by his gentle first keeper Marie, daughter of a recalcitrant teacher prone to making the same mistakes over and over. As Balthazar's passed onto different owners he will be a witness to mankind's cruelty as well as being a victim (receiving beatings and having tricks played on him--firecrackers tied to his tail and set off). Balthazar takes mankind's ignorance in with a reserved calm and silence, not understanding what is happening but remaining grounded in his pure nature as a noble beast of burden throughout. Filmed in revealing close-ups and viewed as poetry, this intense, unsentimental and pleasantly droll humored film is imbued with a magical quality that transcends its everyday ordinariness.

According to Bresson, as written by James Hoberman in his Village Voice review, "the tale was inspired by a passage in Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" where Prince Myshkin tells three giggling girls of the happiness he experienced upon hearing the sound of a donkey's bray in a foreign marketplace."
A donkey becomes the perfect Bresson character. Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it comunicates its physical feelings only in universal terms: Covered ith snow, it is cold. Its tail set afire, it is frightened. Eating its dinner, it is content. Overworked, it is exhausted. Returning home, it is relieved to find a familiar place. Although some humans are kind to it and others are cruel, the motives of humans are beyond its understanding, and it accepts what they do because it must.

Now here is the essential part. Bresson suggests that we are all Balthazars. Despite our dreams, hopes and best plans, the world will eventually do with us whatever it does. Because we can think and reason, we believe we can figure a way out, find a solution, get the answer. But intelligence gives us the ability to comprehend our fate without the power to control it. Still, Bresson does not leave us empty-handed. He offers us the suggestion of empathy. If we will extend ourselves to sympathize with how others feel, we can find the consolation of sharing human experience, instead of the loneliness of enduring it alone.

In fact, save for L'Argent, Balthazar is Bresson's richest, fullest, most complex film. Its pace is extraordinary (the first five minutes alone contain a fully realized and wonderful pre-story) and its form is epic (even though it's only 95 minutes long). Balthazar's sorrowful journey is paralleled by Marie's (Anne Wiazemsky), as she oscillates between purity (Jacques [Walter Green]) and evil (Gerard [Francois Lafarge]). There has never been made a film that is more pure, subversive or reflective of the human condition.

Robert Bresson has claims to being one of the cinema's true geniuses. An exquisite stylist, he created a cinematic language onto himself. His films are both light and profound, both severe and tender, both bleak and life-affirming. Au Hasard, Balthazar is masterpiece in a body of work full of great films.

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson’s 13 features over 40 years constitute arguably the most original and brilliant body of work over a long career from a film director in the history of cinema. He is the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of all major filmmakers, in the sense that he always tried to create precisely what he wanted without surrendering to considerations of commerce, audience popularity, or people’s preconceptions of what cinema should be. And although it might be argued that his venture into colour from Une Femme douce (1969) onwards was probably against his better judgement, he shows mastery in its use.

Born in central France and educated in Paris, Bresson’s early ambition was to be a painter. He ventured into filmmaking with the short Les Affaires publiques (1934), a satire with nods to Clair and Vigo, which was rediscovered in the 1980s after being thought lost. After a year or so as a prisoner-of-war he was approached by a Paris priest with a proposal for a film about the Bethany order of nuns, which became Les Anges du péché (1943). His next feature was also made during the Occupation, and filmmaking had by then definitely supplanted painting. The confusion over his date of birth, symbolic perhaps of his reclusive nature, caused reviewers of his final filmL’Argent (1983) to marvel over how a man "in his late 70s" or alternatively "in his 80s" could show such youthful exuberance in his filmmaking.

Three formative influences in Bresson’s life undoubtedly mark his films: his Catholicism, which took the form of the predestinarian French strain known as Jansenism; his early years as a painter; and his experiences as a prisoner-of-war. These influences manifest themselves respectively in the recurrent themes of free-will versus determinism, in the extreme and austere precision with which he composes a shot, and in the frequent use of the prison motif (two films are located almost entirely inside prisons).

All Bresson’s features after the first have literary antecedents of one form or another, albeit updated. Two are from Dostoevsky (Une Femme douceand Quatre nuits), two from Bernanos (Journal and Mouchette), one from Tolstoy (L’Argent), one from Diderot (Les Dames), while Un Condamné and Le Procès are based on the written accounts of the true events. In addition Pickpocket is clearly influenced by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Balthazar has a similar premiss to the same author’s The Idiot. Lancelot du Lac is derived from Malory’s Arthurian legends, while Le Diable probablement (1977) was inspired by a newspaper report, as is stated at the start of the film. A long-standing unrealised project was a film of the Book of Genesis (Genèse), but Bresson reportedly said that, unlike the human "models", he was unable to train the animals to do as they were told!

A critic once wrote that Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu (1954) "is one of those films for whose sake the cinema exists". For many of us, the same can be said of the work of Robert Bresson.

(Source : Roger Ebert , Senses Of Cinema , Ozu's World Movie Reviews )

Nov 3, 2008

9th Nov 2008 ; Screening of Mike Leigh's Secrets & Lies

Secrets & Lies
A Film by Mike Leigh
Year : 1996
Country : UK
Run time : 142 minutes
English with English sub titles
9th Nov 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Moment after moment, scene after scene, ``Secrets & Lies'' unfolds with the fascination of eavesdropping. We are waiting to see what these people will do next, caught up in the fear and the hope that they will bring the whole fragile network of their lives crashing down in ruin. When they prevail--when common sense and good hearts win over lies and secrets--we feel almost as relieved as if it had happened to ourselves.
With the heartbreaking ``Serets & Lies,'' English filmmaker Mike Leigh delivers his best and most accessible work to date.
``Secrets & Lies'' isn't the first indication of forgiveness on Leigh's part, but it's much kinder and wiser than anything he's done before. His actors are superb: Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Hortense, a 27-year-old optometrist whose begins the search for her real mother after her adoptive mother's death; and Brenda Blethyn, the best actress winner at this year's Cannes Film Festival, who plays her mother, the hapless, childish Cynthia.
Betrayed by the course her life has taken, Cynthia lives with her 21-year-old daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), and mourns for a youth she feels was stolen when her mother died and she was left to care for her dad and brother. To top it off, she tells the equally bitter Roxanne, ``I got saddled with you; that was my downfall.'
'Hortense, on the other hand, was raised in a loving family and given a proper education. When she seeks out Cynthia, she doesn't tell her at first that she's her daughter but cultivates a friendship.
Later, when Cynthia brings her home to meet her family-from- hell, all the secrets and lies, the deceptions and abscessed animosities come pouring out.
Like John Cassavetes, whose work is often held up as a standard for emotional rawness on film, Leigh goes right to the core of his character's lives and mines the place where we're weakest, most alone and sometimes the cruelest.
Leigh develops the story slowly, introducing us to each character, and, through actions and dialogue, allowing us to learn about their lives. We are not force-fed facts and details. There are no flashbacks nor is there a voiceover narration.
From beginning to end, Secrets and Lies is exceptionally well thought-out.

Mike Leigh

Given the choice of Hollywood or poking steel pins in my eyes, I'd prefer steel pins. ” — Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh completed his second feature film seventeen years after his stunning debut withBleak Moments in 1971. In those intervening years he solidified his reputation with innovatory theatre and television productions, but his ambition to be a film-maker looked in danger of being unfulfilled. Other directors, including Stephen Frears, retreated into television during this period, but Leigh was additionally hampered by his method of evolving a script through improvisational workshops - too uncertain a process for most film financiers.

Leigh was born in Broughton, Salford, Greater Manchester, the son of Phyllis Pauline and Alfred Abraham Leigh, a doctorin an overwhelmingly working-class area of Salford (near Manchester). Leigh was brought up in a Jewish immigrant family (whose surname was originally "Lieberman", but was anglicised before Leigh's birth). Initially trained as an actor at RADA, Leigh went on to start honing his directing skills at East 15 Acting School where he met the actress Alison Steadman.
He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1960. He later attended Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, the Central School of Art and Design, and the London Film School.He played small roles in several British films in the early 60's (West 11,Two Left Feet),and a part in the BBC TV series Maigret. In 1965 he began to write and direct his first plays. Leigh has made 21 movies – Bleak Moment (1971) to Happy Go Lucky (2008) – till date.

Leigh uses lengthy improvisations developed over a period of weeks to build characters and storylines for his films. He starts with some sketch ideas of how he thinks things might develop, but does not reveal all his intentions with the cast who discover their fate and act out their responses as their destinies are gradually revealed. Initial preparation is in private with the director and then the actors are introduced to each other in the order that their characters would have met in their lives. Intimate moments are explored that will not even be referred to in the final film to build insight and understanding of history, character and inner motivation.

The critical scenes in the eventual story are performed and recorded in full-costumed, real-time improvisations where the actors encounter for the first time new characters, events or information which may dramatically affect their characters' lives. Final filming is more traditional as definite sense of story, action and dialogue is then in place. The director reminds the cast of material from the improvisations that he hopes to capture on film.

In an interview with Laura Miller, "Listening to the World: An Interview With Mike Leigh," published on salon.com, Leigh states, "I make very stylistic films indeed, but style doesn't become a substitute for truth and reality. It's an integral, organic part of the whole thing." Leigh's vision is to depict ordinary life, "real life," unfolding under extenuating circumstances. He makes courageous decisions to document reality. He speaks about the criticism Naked received: "The criticism comes from the kind of quarters where "political correctness" in its worst manifestation is rife. It's this kind of naive notion of how we should be in an unrealistic and altogether unhealthily over-wholesome way"
(Source - Internet)