3rd May 2009; Masaki Kobayashi's Samurai Rebellion

Samurai Rebellion
A film by Masaki Kobayashi
Country : Japan
Year : 1967
Japanese with English subtitles
Run time: 120 minutes
3rd May 2009 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin hospital Auditorium
Call: 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

It is a film of grace, beauty and fierce ethical debate, the story of a decision in favor of romance and against the samurai code. Rebellion is set in the 18th century, midway through the Tokugawa era (1600-1868). The plot hinges on a refusal. A vassal, Isaburo Sasahara (Tôshiro Mifune) refuses to submit to his lord's demand to return his son Yogoro's wife Ichi to his castle as his lady.

Masaki Kobayashi presents a sublime and haunting examination of conformity, inhumanity, and abuse of power in Samurai Rebellion. Through highly formalized compositions and meticulous, rectilinear framing - usually shot against shoji screens and visually limiting passageways - Kobayashi reflects the rigid code of conduct, structured behavior, and suppression of individual will that define daily existence under the regional daimyo of the Tokugawa shogunate in a myopic and repressive effort to exert public control and eradicate dissent.

The expansive, panoramic exterior shots contrasted against the clinically spare and isolating interior scenes that figuratively bound interpersonal dialogue further serve to reinforce a sense of entrapment and inescapability of social class: Takahashi's intransigence in accepting Isaburo's refusal of the daimyo's offer; the matriarch, Suga's (Michiko Otsuka) preemptive admonition of Ichi's expected conduct at the end of the wedding ceremony; the formal presentation of Yogoro's written request; Ichi's intolerable inquisition at the courtyard.

Takemitsu's music is only one facet of what is a very arresting film. As Kobayashi suggests, that music provides a perfect counterpoint to Kazuo Yamada's beautiful black and white cinematography. Shinbu Hashimoto, who wrote for "Rashomon" had written screenplay for this film.

In the end, Yogoro's selfless act of defiance towards the oppressive laws of the capricious daimyo forges a lonely and noble path through the dark and forbidding frontier of oppression - innately guided by the illumination of hope, conscience, love, and humanity.

( Source; Senses Of Cinema & Strictly Film School )

Masaki Kobayashi

Masaki Kobayashi is one of Japan's most outstanding post-war humanist filmmakers. A contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa, Kobayashi's personal experience of the Second World War has marked his pictures with a deep concern for social justice. This is well illustrated by two of his most well known films, the epic WW II trilogy The Human Condition (Ningen no Joken, 1959-61) and the period drama Harakiri (Seppuku, 1962). The anti-feudal critique expressed in Harakiri is reiterated in Kobayashi's 1967 samurai film Rebellion (Joiuchi).

His most acclaimed films are unflinching explorations into the dark side of Japanese culture, the side that drove men to commit gory suicide for the name of honor and commit horrific atrocities in the name of the Emperor. Kobayashi's exacting professionalism makes his films a visually and emotionally power experience.

Born in February, 1916, in Japan's northern-most island Hokkaido, Kobayashi entered prestigious Waseda University in 1933 . Kobayashi eventually left Waseda to enter Shochiku's Ofuna studios. Kobayashi worked as an assistant for a mere eight months before he was drafted and sent to the front in Manchuria. Opposed to the war, which he viewed as senseless, he refused to rise above the position of private. In 1944, he was transferred to the southern Ryukyu Islands, where he witnessed the war's final bloody tumult. There he was captured by the U.S. and held for a year in a detention camp in Okinawa. In the fall of 1946, Kobayashi returned to Shochiku and served for six years as an assistant director under Keisuke Kinoshita.

He garnered international acclaim and a prestigious San Giorgio prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1960 for his Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1958), the first installment of sweeping trilogy about the war. Kobayashi's films brought to life by the masterful performances of Nakadai in such Kobayashi classics as Harakiri (1962), Kwaidan (1964), and Samurai Rebellion (1967).With the acclaimed Kwaidan, his first color film, he pushed this emphasis on composition with his expressionistic use of color. Kobayashi died in of a heart attack in 1996.

26th April 2009: Documentaries on Art 3 - Renaissance Masters

Documentaries on Art 3

Renaissance Masters

26th April 2009: 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Konangal presents the third episode of ‘Documentaries on Art” this Sunday, 26th April 2009. This series is planned with screenings of art documentaries on every fourth Sunday , introducing great masters from the renaissance period to the advent of Cubism with simple , easy to understand documentary presentations by art scholars Tim Marlow, Simon Schama and Waldemar Januszczak . Powerful and rich presentations of these BBC documentaries on great masters and their art of our times are definite eye openers to the wonderful world of art.

This week we present four 26 minutes BBC documentaries on renaissance masters of early 15th and 16th centuries , Rubens, Raphael, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. This will be followed by a 50 minutes BBC documentary “Private Life of a Masterpiece’ on Da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Last Supper”.

The section of documentaries highlighting renaissance masters ends this Sunday. Next month we are going to have a full screening devoted to the great Dutch master, Rembrandt. It will be followed by documentaries on great masters Vermeer and Goya in June.

Tim Marlow

Tim Marlow is a writer, broadcaster, art historian and Director of Exhibitions at White Cube in London. In 1993 he founded Tate: The Art Magazine. From 1991 to 1998 he presented Radio 4's arts programme Kaleidoscope, for which he won a Sony Award, and is currently a presenter of the World Service arts programme The Ticket.

As well as numerous arts programmes for Five, he presented a documentary on JMW Turner for BBC ONE . Other television work included presenting the now notorious Is Painting Dead? Tim Marlow is the author of various books including monographs of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin and the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele as well as a survey of great artists published by Faber. He has written extensively on art and culture in the British press including the Times, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and Arena, Art Monthly and Blueprint magazines.
He is visiting lecturer at Winchester School of Art and an examiner on the Sculpture MA and former Creative Director of Sculpture at Goodwood.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci - Self portrait

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 -1519, r.), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal There has never been an artist who was more fittingly, and without qualification, described as a genius. Like Shakespeare, Leonardo came from an insignificant background and rose to universal acclaim. His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance.
We can always tell a Leonardo work by his treatment of hair, angelic in its fineness, and by the lack of any rigidity of contour. One form glides imperceptibly into another (the Italian term is sfumato), a wonder of glazes creating the most subtle of transitions between tones and shapes. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.

The Private Life of a Masterpiece

Winner of the Royal Television Society Education Award, this landmark documentary is a scholarly look at Leonardo da Vinci‘s masterpiece Last Supper (1495-97).Viewers who watch it carefully will be rewarded with one of the most enjoyable educational show available on art. It is packed with information and more than that it is lively, entertaining and satisfying

Raphael ( Raffaello DSanzio)
(1483-1520)

Raffaelo Sanzio was the youngest of the three giants of the High Renaissance. He was born in Urbino in 1483 and received his first instruction in the techniques of painting from his father, Giovanni Santi, a minor artist.

In 1504 Raphael went to Florence. The intensive debates surrounding the new directions being taken in art at that time must have made a forceful impression on the young 21-year-old. It was a period in which Leonardo, just returned from Milan, was astounding the public with his Mona Lisa. One of the most frequently discussed and best-loved paintings of the Renaissance is Raphael's so-called Sistine Madonna. For many people it remains the supreme example of western painting, and its popularity is virtually as great as that of the Mona Lisa.

Titian
(Tiziano Vecellio 1490 – 1576)

Titian came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 he assisted him with the external fresco decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished paintings.

Titian was recognized as a towering genius in his own time (Lomazzo described him as the 'sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world') and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been seriously questioned. He was supreme in every branch of painting and his achievements were so varied - ranging from the joyous evocation of pagan antiquity in his early mythologies to the depths of tragedy in his late religious paintings — that he has been an inspiration to artists of very different character. Poussin, Rubens, and Velázquez are among the painters who have particularly revered him. In many subjects, above all in portraiture, he set patterns that were followed by generations of artists. His free and expressive brushwork revolutionized the oil technique: Vasari wrote that his late works 'are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance... The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.'

Rubens
(1577-1640)

Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. His work is a fusion of the traditions of Flemish realism with the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions.. He organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs in which limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement. Rubens' voluptuous women may not be to the taste of modern viewers but are related to the full and opulent forms that were the ideal of womanhood during the Baroque period.

19th April 2009 ; Jean Renoir's ' The River'

The River
A film by Jean Renoir
Year : 1951
Country : India
Runtime : 99 min
19th April 2009 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital auditorium
Call 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

The film is one of the simplest and most beautiful by Jean Renoir (1894-1979), one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema.

Based on the novel by Rumer Godden, who was born in India and lived here many years, it remembers her childhood seen through the eyes of a young girl named Harriet (Patricia Walters), who falls in love with the new neighbor. He is Capt. John (Thomas E. Breen), an American who lost a leg in the war and now has come to live with his cousin, Mr. John (Arthur Shields).
We meet Harriet's family: Her parents, her three sisters, her brother Bogey. We also meet Mr. John's daughter Melanie (Radha), whose Hindu mother has died, and Valerie (Adrienne Corri), whose father owns the jute factory that Harriett's father manages. There are others: The family's nanny, the young Indian man who courts Melanie, the Sikh gatekeeper, the young Indian boy who is Bogey's playmate.
Renoir insisted on filming it on location in India, which he did with his nephew Claude Renoir as cameraman (and young Satyajit Ray as an assistant director). It was the first Technicolor film made in India. The budget was small. There were no stars, and some of the players had never acted before.
Films have grown so aggressive and jittery that it takes patience to calm down into one like "The River." Its most dramatic moment takes place offscreen. Renoir is not interested in emotional manipulation but in regarding lives as they are lived. Not everyone we like need be successful, and not everyone we dislike need fail. All will be sorted out in the end -- or perhaps not, which is also the way time passes and lives resolve themselves.

Jean Renoir
1894-1979

Son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste, Jean Renoir had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir was his nephew. After the end of World War I, where he won the Croix de Guerre, he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married Catherine Hessling, for whom he began to make movies; he wanted to make a star of her. His next partner was Marguerite Renoir, whom he never married, although she took his name. He left France in 1941 during the German invasion of France during World War II and became a naturalized US citizen.

Jean Renoir with mother - painting by Renoir's father , the great impressionist master Auguste Renoir

As a director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, Renoir, My Father (1962). Renoir exerted immense influence on subsequent auteur directors, including among others Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut. Best remembered for such cinematic landmarks as Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Renoir is considered one of the major figures of French and international film history.

Renoir's films were underestimated when they first came out. They were unconventional, complex, and so energetic and technically daring that few noticed their intricate structure. They were often dismissed as rough, not fully achieved artistically. The generation that came to the cinema in the '60s and '70s (perhaps the richest and most diverse era in European cinema) recognised Renoir as an ancestor who had already made the kind of films they admired or were setting out to make themselves, and justly hailed them as masterpieces.

Shooting of 'The River"

12th April 2009 ; Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel according to St.Mathew

The Gospel According to 

St. Matthew

A film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Country : Italy

Year: 1964

Run time: 134 min

12th April 2009; 5.45 pm

Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Call: 94430 39630

Pier Paolo Pasolini was stuck in St. Francis' hometown of Assisi. He had come there in 1962 to attend a seminar at a Franciscan monastery. Although it was well known that Pasolini was an atheist, a Marxist and a homosexual, he had accepted the invitation after Pope John XXIII called for a new dialogue with non-Catholic artists. 

Now the streets were jammed because the pope was in town, and Pasolini waited in his hotel room. He found a copy of the Gospels, and "read them straight through." The notion of basing a film on one of them, he wrote, "threw in the shade all the other ideas for work I had in my head." The result was his film "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" (1964), which was filmed mostly in the poor, desolate Italian district of Basilicata, and its capital city, Matera. (Forty years later, Mel Gibson would film "The Passion of the Christ" on the very same locations.)

Pasolini's is one of the most effective films on a religious theme, perhaps because it was made by a nonbeliever who did not preach, glorify, underline, sentimentalize or romanticize his famous story, but tried his best to simply record it.

"The Gospel According to St. Matthew," was made in the spirit of Italian neo-realism, which believed that ordinary people, not actors, could best embody characters -- not every character, but the one they were born to play. Pasolini's Christ is Enrique Irazoqui, a Spanish economics student who arrived to talk to him about his work. For his other roles, Pasolini cast local peasants, shopkeepers, factory workers, truck drivers. For Mary at the time of the Crucifixion, he cast his own mother.

Whether these actors could handle the dialogue was beside the point. Pasolini decided to shoot without a screenplay, following Matthew page by page and compressing only as much as necessary to give the film an acceptable running time. Every word of dialogue is from Matthew. 
Like most of Jewish men of his time, Jesus he wears his hair short -- none of the flowing locks of holy cards. He wears a dark, hooded robe so that his face is often in shadow. He is unshaven but not bearded.His personal style is sometimes gentle, as during the Sermon on the Mount, but more often he speaks with a righteous anger, like a union organizer or a war protester. His debating style, true to Matthew, is to answer a question with a question, a parable, or dismissive scorn. His words are clearly a radical rebuke of his society, its materialism, and the way it values the rich and powerful over the weak and poor. 

The crucifixion is entirely lacking in the violence of the Gibson version. It is almost underplayed, and we note that for much of the way to Calvary, the cross is carried only by Simon, while Jesus walks behind it. There is a crown of thorns, but only a few drops of blood. Yet this version is not softened and dramatized in the style of Hollywood's biblical epics; in its harsh realism, it seems matter-of-fact about a cruel death.

The film, in black and white, is told with stark simplicity. 

(Source: Roger Ebert)

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini was born  in 1922, in Bologna, traditionally one of the most leftist of Italian cities. He was the son of a lieutenant of the Italian Army, Carlo Alberto 

Outside Italy Pasolini is usually remembered as one of the most significant of the directors who emerged in the second wave of Italian postwar cinema in the early 1960s but, within Italy itself, Pasolini was always much more than just a distinctive and innovative filmmaker. By the time he came to make his first film, Accattone, in 1961, he had already published numerous collections of poetry, two highly-acclaimed novels, had collaborated widely in cultural-literary journals and firmly established himself as one of Italy's leading writer-intellectuals. In the 15 years that followed, before being brutally murdered in 1975 — and always inspired by what he himself called "a desperate vitality" and a “love of Reality” — he made a dozen feature films and half a dozen shorts, wrote, translated and sometimes directed theatrical works, published several further collections of poetry, two volumes of critical essays, painted some 40 canvases and, through his numerous articles in journals and his caustic columns in daily newspapers, became the loudest dissenting voice in Italian political and cultural debate. Intensely passionate and iconoclastic, often paradoxical and contradictory, Pasolini was almost certainly, as Zygmunt Baranski has written in a recent critical reappraisal, Italy's major post-war intellectual.

As an established poet and writer, Pasolini came to embrace cinema above all as an alternative form of self-expression, equal in potential to writing itself. In fact, in the film theory that he would develop from the mid-1960s onward, Pasolini would characterise cinema precisely as a writing with reality, a writing that would yield what he called a "cinema of poetry" the more the filmmaker was able to stylistically manipulate it for the purposes of self-expression.  But self-expression, for Pasolini, was never merely a matter of aesthetics but always opened onto the social and political. In fact perhaps more than any other artist-intellectual in recent Italian history, Pasolini felt completely and personally co-opted by the massive social, economic and cultural developments that were profoundly transforming Italy during this time so that his films, as with everything else he wrote or said, became always, at some level, personal responses to, and ways of intervening in, that reality. His cinema was thus always to be a blend of the lyrical and the political, the poetic and the ideological, passion and analysis.

Pasolini was brutally murdered on November 2, 1975. 

(Source: Sences Of Cinema )