6th Sept 2009; Kurosawa's RASHOMON

Rashomon
A film by Akira Kurosawa
Year:1950
Country:Japan
Japanese with English sub titles
Run time:88 min
6th Sept 2009 ; 5.45 pm
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/
Call 94430 39630

Main screening will be followed by an introduction to Rashomon by Robert Altman and interviews with Akira Kurosawa and Rashomon's cinematographer Kazuo Mjyagawa.

Rashomon opens in a ruined 8th century temple, where a woodcutter and a Buddhist priest, taking shelter from a lashing rain, ponder a bewildering crime that has shaken their faith in men. As they recount the crime to a cynical passerby, flashbacks picture the testimony at the trial and four differing re-enactments of the violent incident itself.

The story told by Rashomon is both surprisingly simple and deceptively complex. The central tale, which tells of the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of a man (Masayuki Mori), possibly by a bandit (Toshiro Mifune), is presented entirely in flashbacks from the perspectives of four narrators.

Each re-telling has its own tone, and distinct point-of-view. Director Akira Kurosawa does a brilliant job of manipulating the mood, while each of the main actors is excellent. Toshirô Mifune (Kurosawa’s long-time leading man) as the thief and Machiko Kyô as the rape victim are particularly riveting.

Kurosawa keeps things tight and intimate — much of it is essentially a filmed play — but keeps us off-balance with the pacing, which tends towards the glacial in any scene involving the woodcutter (whose initial walk in the woods seems to go on for minutes on end) but picks up and gathers tension when we flash back to the murderous dishonor played out amid the trees. Weather is also used ironically — the violent events unfold in harsh sunlight, while the post-mortem groping for truth happens against a backdrop of tears from heaven.

Thematically, Rashômon is a challenging philosophical exercise. Technically, the film is a tour de force of editing discipline and dramatic construction. The actors must recreate the same scene four times, playing their characters in completely different ways.
By the end of the movie, our emotions have been rubbed raw because we have been unable to empathize with a particular version of events. We finish in a moral quandary for we are no closer to determining the 'objective' truth than we were at the start of the film

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.

23rd Aug 2009;Documentaries on Art - 7 - TURNER

Documentaries on Art – 7

Turner
23rd Aug 2009 ; 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

J M W Turner
(1775-1851)

"A group of French painters, united in the same aesthetic aims...applying themselves with passion to the rendering of form in movement as well as the fugitive phenomena of light, cannot forget that they have been preceded in this path by a great master of the English, the illustrious Turner." (from a letter signed by Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, and others)

Over the course of six decades, J M W Turner transformed the genre of landscape through works that proclaimed him heir to the old masters even while they heralded a new and visionary direction in 19th-century painting. Known for his technical brilliance and startling use of light and color, he incorporated learned references to literature, mythology, and historical events in his pictures. His commitment to the idea that watercolor equaled oil painting in complexity and expressive power raised the standard for others working in the medium. And his exquisitely rendered works, heralded for their virtuosity, inspired generations of artists.
Turner was born in London, England, on April 23, 1775. By the age of 13 he was making drawings at home. Turner was 15 years old when he received a rare honor--one of his paintings was exhibited at the Royal Academy. By the time he was 18 he had his own studio. Before he was 20 print sellers were eagerly buying his drawings for reproduction. He quickly achieved a fine reputation and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. In 1802, when he was only 27, Turner became a full member. He then began traveling widely in Europe.
Suitable vehicles for Turner's imagination were to be found in the subjects of shipwrecks, fires, natural catastrophes, and natural phenomena such as sunlight, storm, rain, and fog. He was also fascinated by the violent power of the sea. In his later years he used oils ever more transparently, and turned to an evocation of almost pure light by use of shimmering colour.
A prime example of his mature style can be seen in Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, where the objects are barely recognizable. The intensity of hue and interest in evanescent light not only placed Turner's work in the vanguard of English painting, but later exerted an influence upon art in France, as well; the Impressionists, particularly Claude Monet, carefully studied his techniques.
His entire life was devoted to his art. Turner's art has always been controversial. Turner is a wonderfully contradictory figure: the passionate academic painter and the reluctant experimentalist.
(Source: Internet)

16th August 2009 ;A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire
A film by Elia Kazan
Country : USA
Year : 1951
English with English sub titles
Runtime: 125 mins
16th August 2009 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play made the transition from stage to screen with its director, Elia Kazan, and most of its cast intact, including the extraordinary young Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Marlon Brando burnt the screen in this milestone performance as Stanley (his second lead role), and is matched scene for scene by Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, Kim Hunter and everyone else in one of the most riveting displays of ensemble acting in American cinema.
Elia Kazan’s directing is excellent. He and Cinematographer Harry Stradling, manage to capture the explosive and hard-hitting moments of the film, like the infamous rape scene and “poker loosing” scene, where Brando after loosing the poker game erupts into madness and starts assaulting and destroying everything he finds. Also the immediate scene after that, where the camera manages to catch the immensity of the lust and the love that Stella and Stanley have between each other.
This film was extremely controversial when it was released back in 1951 since censors (damn them) criticized the film for its dealing with subjects and references like homosexuality, nymphomania, domestic violence, sexual obsession, hysteria, and rape. Kazan had to fight to let him give out a realistic portrayal that was truthful to the play, and lost. They forbid him of shooting certain scenes, and he was forced to cut several key moments of many scenes. Thankfully, five important minutes were restored later, and it made a big difference on the movie itself.
The movie was shot, of course, in black and white. Dramas made in 1951 nearly always were. Color would have been fatal to the special tone. It would have made the characters seem too real, when we need them exactly like this, black and gray and silver, shadows projected on the screens of their own dreams and needs. Watching the film is like watching a Shakespearean tragedy. Of course the outcome is predestined, but everything is in the style by which the characters arrive there. Watch Brando absently scratching himself on his first entrance. Look at the way he occupies the little apartment as if it were a pair of dirty shorts. Then watch him flick that piece of lint.

The film has a permanent place amongst the classics, and not only for the performances but for Tennessee Williams' raw writing about people raw with pain and fear and longing and complicated feelings.




Elia Kazan, (September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003), was an award-winning film and theatre director, film and theatrical producer, screenwriter, novelist and co-founder of the influential Actors Studio in New York in 1947. Kazan was a three-time Academy Award winner, a five-time Tony Award winner, a four-time Golden Globes winner, as well as a recipient of numerous awards and nominations in other prestigious festivals as the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival.

Kazan was born Elias Kazanjoglou in the Anatolian city of the Ottoman Empire, Kayseri,( Turkey) to a Greek family.His family emigrated to the United States in 1913 and settled in New York City.

A highly successful stage director and a co-founder of "The Actors Studio" in New York, Elia Kazan brought his psychological and emotional philosophy of stage performance to Hollywood in 1945 and sparked a radical redefinition of screen acting during the 1950s while at the same time producing socially conscious films which challenged societal norms and addressed such controversial topics as anti-Semitism, racism, alcoholism, public corruption and the cult of celebrity. Further marked by compelling personal stories, Kazan's films also showcased career-defining performances by such 1950s film icons as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Natalie Wood.

In 1983 Kazan was honoured for his Life Achievement in a Kennedy Center ceremony. When he received in 1999 the Honorary Oscar, Warren Beatty rose and applauded and Nick Nolte remained seated stony-faced. Kazan's films have earned 22 Academy Awards and 62 nominations, including two Directing Oscars. He was married three times; all his wifes were blondes. "Being Greek, blondness is my fetish," Kazan wrote in The Arrangement. In 1932 he married Moly Day Thatcher, a playwright; they had four children. She died in 1963. Barbara Loden, an actress, writer and director, whom he married in 1967, died in 1980. From 1982 Kazan was married to Frances Rudge. Elia Kazan died on September 28, 2003, at his home in Manhattan.

9th August 2009; Yi Yi - A one and a Two

Yi Yi
A One and a Two
A film by Edward Yang
Year : 2000
Country : Taiwan
Mandarin/Taiwanese with English sub titles
Runtime: 173 min
9th August 2009 ; 5.45 pm
Call : 97904 57568
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

The movie is a portrait of three generations of a Taiwan family, affluent and successful, but haunted by lost opportunities and doubts about the purpose of life. Only rarely is a film this observant and tender about the ups and downs of daily existence.

The hero of the film is NJ, an electronics executive with a wife, a mother-in-law, an adolescent daughter, an 8-year-old son and a life so busy that he is rushing through middle age without paying much attention to his happiness. He's stunned one day when he sees a woman in an elevator: "Is it really you?" It is. It is Sherry, his first love, the girl he might have married 30 years ago.

The movie is about the currents of life. But it's not solemn in a Bergmanesque way. NJ and his family live in a riot of everyday activity; the grandmother in a coma is balanced by Yang-Yang dropping a water balloon on precisely the wrong person. Some scenes edge toward slapstick. Others show characters through the cold hard windows of modern skyscrapers, bathed in icy fluorescence, their business devoid of any juice or heart.

The characters in "Yi Yi" live in a world that would be much the same in Toronto, London, Bombay, Sydney; in their economic class, in their jobs, culture is established by corporations, real estate, fast food and the media, not by tradition. Maybe the movie is not simply about knowing half of the truth, but about knowing the wrong half of the

Edward Yang, the Taiwanese filmmaker who wrote and directed this intimate epic of a middle-class Taipei's family's everyday struggles, knows that for a movie to be full of life, it must above all concern itself with specific lives. "Yi Yi" begins with the chaotic bustle of wedding preparations , a portrait of the bride and groom is hung upside down, the groom's jilted girlfriend arrives uninvited and makes a scene , and ends with the somber calm of a funeral.

Yi Yi is the work of a master in full command of the resources of his art. He uses the limitations of visual perspective to convey chaos without succumbing to it. "Yi Yi" was named best film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics.

Edward Yang

1947 - 2007

Edward Yang is in the intriguing position of being one of the most gifted, and least seen, filmmakers in the world, at least for American audiences. His films express the confusion, anxiety, and sheer beauty of societal transformation. Yang also equates the macrocosmic and microcosmic, making the lives of his characters stand in for the greater, less visible processes of social change. Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Yang is one of the most visible faces of the Taiwanese New Wave, possibly the most brilliant filmmaking movement in the world today.

Edward Yang was born in Shanghai in 1947, and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. After studying Electrical Engineering in National Chiao Tung University, he enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Florida, where he received his Masters Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1974. [2] During this time and briefly afterwards, Yang worked at the Center for Informatics Research. Yang always had a great interest in film ever since he was a child, but put away his aspirations in order to pursue a career in the high-tech industry. Also, a brief enrollment at USC Film School after graduating with his M.S.E.E. convinced him that the world of film was not for him - he thought USC film school's teaching methodologies were too commercial-oriented. Yang then applied and was accepted into Harvard's architecture school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but decided not to attend. [3] Thereafter, he went to Seattle to work in microcomputers and defense software.

While working in Seattle, Yang came across the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). This encounter rekindled Yang's passion for film and introduced him to a wide range of classics in world and European cinema. Yang was particularly inspired by the films of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (Antonioni's influence has shown up in some of Yang's later works). He married Taiwanese pop-singer and music legend Tsai Chin in May 1985. They divorced in August 1995, and he subsequently married concert pianist Kai-Li Peng.

Yang eventually returned to Taiwan to write and direct films. To watch Yang's work was to see the world through the eyes of a man who delighted in children, who sympathized deeply with the passions and burdens of teenagers, who wrestled with the demands of adulthood, and who was pained by the dehumanizing effects of progress and the big city. His movies focused on Taiwan, but they were not primarily about Taiwan. They were about humankind.

Yang died on June 29, 2007 due to cancer.

(Source : Internet)