5th July 2009;Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard

Red Beard
A Film by Akira Kurosawa
Year : 1965
Country : Japan
Japanese with English Subtitles
5th Aug 2009: 5.45 pm
Call: 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Akira Kurosawa's "Red Beard" is assembled with the complexity and depth of a good l9th-century novel, and it is a pleasure, in a time of stylishly fragmented films, to watch a director taking the time to fully develop his characters.
It is also rather startling to find a director who values the positive human impulses; whose film considers not only violence and deception, but also sacrifice and healing. There has been so much despair in recent films: More than we realize, until "Red Beard" provides such a contrast. There is no such thing, perhaps, as the right time or the wrong time to see a film. But somehow, at the end of a decade that has seen so many things go wrong, "Red Beard" seems necessary. Kurosawa takes the time to develop his story in a leisurely fashion, establishing a rhythm more in time with the way we really live.
His film is about a young doctor (Yuzo Kayama) who comes to a free public clinic, more or less against his will, to work under the famous old doctor Red Beard (Toshiro Mifune). The time is about 1825. Modern advances in medicine are just seeping into Japan, and the young doctor is proud of the advanced training he's received at Nagasaki. He wants to be the personal doctor for a rich family; public clinics, repel him. For many days he even refuses to wear a uniform.
Kurosawa leaves his central narrative from time to time, to tell us stories about some of the patients in the clinic. He develops a subplot about a maltreated young girl, who refuses to talk to anyone and who becomes the young doctor's first real patient. The young doctor becomes sick himself, and old Red Beard subtly encourages the girl to nurse the doctor. By healing him, she is healed; and then she takes upon herself the care of a young thief and pauper in the neighborhood. So that three people are cured instead of one.
It's a story that is both deep and sweeping at the same time. The film continues Kurosawa's obsession with existential humanism, of which it is a culmination of his views . As the pinnacle of his artistry, "Red Beard" towers not only over most of Kurosawa's films, but over most movies in Japan, where it is revered as a "must see."

"Red Beard" is another lesson in attention to detail — a lesson fruitlessly taught in the past by Welles, Ophuls, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Ford, Scorsese, and so many others. Kurosawa's care with the story and image is masterly (it took the director a year to shoot the film). Everything in this movie holds together.

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.

28th June 2009 ; Documentaries on Art -8

Documentaries on Art -5
28th June2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 97904 57568
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer (1632 - December 15, 1675) was a Dutch painter. Vermeer is also known as Vermeer of Delft or Johannes van der Meer. Vermeer was born in Delft and stayed there all his life. He was buried in the Old Church (Oude Kerk) in Delft.

A Lady Drinking and a Gentleman

Vermeer is after Rembrandt the second most famous Dutch painter of the 17th century (a period which is better known as the Dutch Golden Age for its astonishing cultural and artistic achievements). His paintings are admired for their transparent colours, well though-out composition and brilliant use of light.

The Geographer

Little is known about the life of Vermeer. He married Catharina Bolenes in 1653. In that same year he joined the Sint Lucas painters guild. Later, in 1662 and 1669, he was chosen to preside over the guild. Vermeer did earn a meagre income as an art dealer rather than through selling his paintings. Sometimes he even had to pay his debts to local food stores with a painting. Vermeer died very poor. His widow had to trade all paintings still in her possession to the city council in return for a small allowance (one source even says this was only one painting, also Vermeer's last work named Clio).

The Art of Painting

After his death Vermeer was soon forgotten. His paintings were sometimes sold bearing the name of another painter to raise their value. Only very recently has Vermeer been recognised as one of the greats: in 1866 art historian Théophile Thoré (pseudonym of W. Burger) made a statement to this effect, attributing 76 paintings to Vermeer, a number that was soon lowered by others. At the beginning of the twentieth century rumours ran rampant that there were yet undiscovered Vermeer paintings.

The Milkmaid

Very few paintings of Vermeer are known today. Only 35 to 40 works that are attributed to him do exist (views on authencity of some works differ).

The Lacemaker

Technique

Vermeer's transparent colours were produced by bringing the paint unto the canvas in loosely granular layers, a technique called pointillé (not to be confused with Pointillism). It is thought that Vermeer possibly used the Camera Obscura to achieve a perfect perspective in his compositions.
(Source:Internet)

Francisco de Goya
(30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828)

Self-Portrait

Francisco de Goya is one of the greatest masters that Spain has ever produced and is considered the “Father of Modern Art”. His works, which are world reknown, changed the way artists would interpret the world. His works, paintings and drawings, spread on a span of 60 years covering from about the last half of the 18th century to the first quarter of the 19th century, and portray a celebration of life and a realistic view of the world.

Doña Isabel de Porcel

Goya was born in the province of Zaragoza. When he was a teenager, he entered the service of a local artist. Later on, he travels to Madrid, where he is greatly influenced by the last of the great Venetian painters. After several failed attempts to enroll in the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Goya travels to Rome. Returning to Spain in the decade of the 1770s, Goya paints frescoes in several churches of his native province.

With his wedding, Goya begins his ascension, working under Mengs, he finally enrolls in the royal academy and later on is named the King Charles III’s painter. By 1799, Goya becomes the official Chamber painter of King Charles IV. But by this time he had suffered an illness which left him deaf, and his alienation from the pomposity of the Court began. He produced dark works at this time.

Wife of Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez

Together with the critiques to his works, Goya undergoes a time of wild imagination, in which sordid images of a surreal world begin to appear. Unable to present his works to his old clientele, he is forced, under the threat of the Inquisition, to withdraw his works. Meanwhile he continued with his services as crown painter; and by 1800, he creates La Família de Carlos IV (The Family of Charles IV).

Will She Rise Again

By this time ,Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, re institutes Goya as the Chamber painter after the war, but by this time the artist’s convictions lead him to witness the vanity of court life. This begins his period known as the black paintings.

The Third of May, 1808

A decade later, after having witnessed the excesses and the attempt to enforce an absolutist regime by Ferdinand VII, Goya decides to leave Spain to settle in Southern France where he will die.

Self-Portrait in the Workshop

Because of the richness of works from Goya, one can witness how his attitude towards life and the world evolves and changes, as the socio-political events surrounding him shift. His works hardly stylized the Classical from prevalent of this time, but tended to be more of a romantic nature. In his old age, Goya becomes an embittered and disillusioned person towards society and its false pretenses.

Goya was no more than a man, but it is his humanity which allows us to view his personal turmoil in a world that was fast disappearing before his eyes Goya left Spain in May 1824 for Bordeaux, where he settled, and Paris. He returned to Spain in 1826, but, despite a warm welcome, he returned in ill health to Bordeaux, where he died in 1828 at the age of 82.

(Source:Internet)

21st June 2009; Federico Fellinl's Nights Of Cabiria

Nights of Cabiria
A Film by Federico Fellini
Country : Italy
Italian with English subtitles
Runtime : 110 minutes
21st June 2009 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/
Call ; 97904 57568

There is more grace and courage in the famous image of Giulietta Masina smiling through her tears in Federico Fellini's 1957 "Nights of Cabiria. The star's prize-winning, heartbreaking performance, the story's allegorical resonance and Fellini's sweeping, soulful vision of a Roman prostitute's resilient humanity mark "Nights of Cabiria" as a cinematic masterpiece.

Cabiria's eyebrows are straight, black horizontal lines, sketched above her eyes like a cartoon character's. Her shrug, her walk, her way of making a face, all suggest a performance. Of course a prostitute is always acting in one way or another, but Cabiria seems to have a character in mind--perhaps Chaplin's Little Tramp, with a touch of Lucille Ball, who must have been on Italian TV in the 1950s. It's as if Cabiria thinks she can waltz untouched through the horrors of her world, if she shields herself with a comic persona.

Cabiria is a woman seeking redemption, a woman who works as a sinner but seeks inner spirituality. One night she happens into a performance by a hypnotist, is called onstage, and in the film's most extraordinary sequence is placed in a trance (half vaudeville, half enchanted fantasy) in which she reveals her trust and sweetness. She also informs the rude audience that she has a house and a bank account.

Noted director Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote the screenplay of the intriguing film. Years after it was made, one realizes that the film was not as simplistic as it appears. It offers considerable questions for the viewer beyond the obvious.

In "Nights of Cabiria," Fellini weighs the cost of both isolation and connection, but it's such a graceful picture that his technique comes off as anything but ponderous -- it's more like a graceful soft-shoe, a muted shuffle on a sandy floor. "Nights of Cabiria" is almost vaudevillian in its structure and sometimes in its tone. It's not that it's broad or obvious -- it's that Fellini lets the story of Cabiria unfold as a series of discrete but connected episodes.

The allure of Fellini remains his social commentary—-he underlines this with Cabiria, in the final shot looking at you the viewer, bringing up the nexus between the character and the viewer. In fact, this final shot ought to wake up the sensibilities of the laid-back cinema viewer.
(Source : Internet)

Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini, a canonical name of personal expression and artistic fantasy in the cinema, had no formal technical training in his profession. Born in the seaside town of Rimini in Italy in 1920, he quit the provinces for Rome at age 18. Enrolled in law school, he abandoned the degree. He never considered attending Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, whose graduates he would later collaborate with. And unlike his contemporaries, he never frequented the cinema clubs that screened the best Italian directors' films and international titles from France, Germany and Russia. When pressed for his influences, Fellini preferred Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx brothers, Pietro Germi, and Buñuel (with his black humor) to "cine-club" names such as Dreyer, Griffith and Eisenstein. Young Fellini supported himself as a wandering caricaturist until hired by Marc'Aurelio in 1939. The famed humor bi-weekly served as an unofficial training ground for scriptwriters and directors of the postwar period.

Fellini's formative influences can be traced back to the popular Italian culture of the period, and not primarily the cinema. The cartoons, caricature sketches, and radio comedy that were his popular art métier brought him to the cinema as a gagman and scriptwriter. Novelist Italo Calvino diagnosed the influence of mass culture on Fellini's later sophisticated cinematic language as a "forcing of the photographic image in a direction that carries it from an image of caricature toward that of the visionary." Fellini trained for a professional life as a visionary with over ten years of scriptwriting and on-the-set apprenticeship.

For the postwar Left, a film's critical value was based on whether it depicted Italy's social problems and offered a Marxist remedy. Directors who followed their own imperatives were labeled conservative or reactionary. As a veteran of the scripting team responsible for two exemplars of Italian neorealism, Roma città aperta and Paisà (both Roberto Rossellini, 1945 and '46), Fellini was interested in moving toward a "cinema of Reconstruction." After Paisà, he redefined his artistic credo to "looking at reality with an honest eye - but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him."

His career compresses the comparable progress in literature from 19th century realism to the reflexive post-modernity of compatriots Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. Exposing the means of fiction, playwrighting, or filmmaking in Fellini's case (in contrast to the neorealist posture of delivering an unmediated story with newsreel aesthetics), all these authors uncover the "ploy" of authorship. It's as if Fellini critiqued realism as an impossible notion by pointing up its fabrication and adding the suppressed element of the fantastic. In his own words, "I make a film in the same manner in which I live a dream..
(Thanks to Senses Of Cinema )

14th June 2009: What's Eating Gilbert Grape

What's Eating Gilbert Grape
A film by Lasse Hallstrom
Year : 1993
Country : USA
Run time:118 minutes
English with English subtitles

So who's Gilbert Grape, and what's eating him? Gilbert (Johnny Depp, in another outstanding performance from the film) is the unofficial caretaker of the Grape clan, a rural Iowa family that includes his brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio), coming up on 18 years old, and the enormous Momma (Darlene Cates), a 500-pound woman who hasn't left the Grape house in nearly a decade. Taking care of Arnie and Momma is enough work for three people -- but sisters Ellen and Amy don't carry their weight, leaving Gilbert to do the heavy lifting
On the strength of DiCaprio and Depp's performances, What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a fantastic look at the anachronisms of small-town life and the myriad problems of coping with a go-nowhere existence. The dialogue is realistic to the point of putting you in the scene.
DiCaprio's remarkable performance doesn't stint on the erratic behavior, and also brings the kid alive as a human being who must be cared for and nurtured -- as hopeless a task as that might be -- thereby justifying Gilbert's devotion to him.Working with an opaque character who is almost a cipher where desires, emotions and ambitions are concerned, Depp manages to command center screen with a greatly affable, appealing characterization.
The special quality of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" is not its oddness, however, but its warmth. Johnny Depp, as Gilbert, has specialized in playing outsiders ("Edward Scissorhands," "Benny and Joon"), and here he brings a quiet, gentle sweetness that suffuses the whole film. Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Arnie, the retarded kid brother, has been nominated for an Academy Award, and deserves it.

The movie, written by Peter Hedges and based on his novel, has been directed by a Scandinavian, Lasse Hallstrom, for whom families seem to exert a special pull. Director Lasse Hallstrom and his fine cast have endowed the story with a good deal of behavioral truth and beguilingly unstressed comedy that expresses an engagingly bemused view of life.
(Source:Internet)

Lasse Hallstrom

Lasse Hallstrom was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1946. His father, a dentist was also anamateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries. Lasse embarked on that life at the age of ten when he shot "a three minute documentary about Gotland Island and the ten minute thriller, 'The Ghost Thief'". While in high school, Lasse made a documentary about a group of friends who formed a rock band. Later that year (1967) the documentary was aired on Swedish television. In 1970, Lasse began to train as a television producer. In 1974, the Swedish pop group ABBA asked Lasse to make promo clips of their songs (the forerunners of music videos) that the group could send to radio stations that they couldn't personally visit.

Lasse's first feature film was "En Kille och en Tjej" (A Guy and a Gal), in 1975. ABBA: The Movie followed in 1977, but it wasn't until 1985 with the film "My Life as a Dog" did Lasse gain international attention. "My Life as a Dog" earned Lasse a nomination for Best Director and a co-nomination for Best Adapted Screen Play at the Academy Awards.

In 1991, Lasse stepped onto the American film scene as writer and director of Once Around. Two years later he directed Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" a touching story about Gilbert, a young man who has to care for his mentally challenged younger brother and his obese mother.

About his films, Lasse says, "If you look at my films, you will see some moments where I have been moderately successful. But I am always struggling to find stories that are free of stylization and portray human behavior as it unfolds. There's a coded shorthand of expression many actors use to convey feelings today, and I ask why do we have to use these codes to portray truth? Why can't we give actors the freedom to surprise us with choices that more honestly reflect real life as it plays out?"

7th June 2009: Akira Kurosawa's High and Low

High and Low
A film by Akira Kurosawa
Year : 1963
Country : Japan
Japanese with English sub titles
Runtime :142 min
7th June 2008 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call 97904 57568
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

"High and Low" illuminates its world with a wholeness and complexity you rarely see in film. Akira Kurosawa weaves together character study, social commentary and police procedure. "High and Low" fully illustrates why Kurosawa is regarded as Japan's foremost director.
High and Low" focuses on Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a powerhouse executive in the Japanese shoe industry. In the midst of an attempt to take over his company, a proposition that throws him in hock down to his own furniture, he's hit by a huge ransom demand, with a twist. Paying the ransom will ruin him financially; not paying it will ruin him as a human being. Gondo's anguish plays against the backdrop of financial intrigue and a more conventional police thriller, as Kurosawa delves into the cops' massive effort to track the kidnaper, led by the sensitive, but briskly ruthless, Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai).
As Gondo grapples with his choice, the movie acquires a mythic depth -- it's not unlike the story of Abraham, as Gondo is forced to decide between the life of an innocent and fealty to an abstract code. And at the same time, without ostentation, Kurosawa alludes to the more general dilemma of modern Japanese life -- the conflict between humane values and the rigid loyalties that have made for its commercial success.
One aspect of Kurosawa's genius is the way he composes his tableaux to dramatic purpose . "High and Low" is, in a way, the companion piece to "Throne of Blood" -- it's "Macbeth," if Macbeth had married better. The movie shares the rigors of Shakespeare's construction, the symbolic and historical sweep, the pacing that makes the story expand organically in the mind.
The experience of watching this movie where every scene, every sequence, every shot are alive with confidence in the medium, you are totally immersed in the backwash of pure film pleasure, as you're introduced once again to the master.
(Source:Internet)

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.