26th Dec 2010; Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo

Fitzcarraldo

A film by Werner Herzog
Year :1982
Country: Peru
Run time:158 mins
German with English subtitles
26th Dec 2010; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater
Perks School

Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" is one of the great visions of the cinema, and one of the great follies. One would not have been possible without the other. This is a movie about an opera-loving madman who is determined to drag a boat overland from one river system to another. In making the film, Herzog was determined to actually do that, which is more than can be said for Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, the Irishman whose story inspired him.

"Fitzcarraldo" (1982) is one of those brave and epic films. Herzog could have used special effects for his scenes of the 360-ton boat being hauled up a muddy 40-degree slope in the jungle, but he believed we could tell the difference: "This is not a plastic boat."
Watching the film, watching Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) raving in the jungle in his white suit and floppy panama hat, watching Indians operating a block-and-tackle system to drag the boat out of the muck, we're struck by the fact that this is actually happening, that this huge boat is inching its way onto land -- as Fitzcarraldo (who got his name because the locals could not pronounce "Fitzgerald") serenades the jungle with his scratchy old Caruso recordings.

Herzog turned to Klaus Kinski, the legendary wild man who had starred in his "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) and "Nosferatu" (1979). Kinski was a better choice for the role than Robards, for the same reason a real boat was better than a model: Robards would have been playing a madman, but to see Kinski is to be convinced of his ruling angers and demons.

"Fitzcarraldo" opens on the note of madness, which it will sustain. Out of the dark void of the Amazon comes a boat, its motor dead, the shock-haired Kinski furiously rowing at the prow, while his mistress (Claudia Cardinale) watches anxiously behind him. They are late for the opera.

Herzog has always been more fascinated by image than story, and here he sears his images into the film. He worked with indigenous Amazonian Indians, whose faces become one of the important elements of the work.
Among directors of the last four decades, has anyone created a more impassioned and adventurous career than Werner Herzog? Most people have only seen a few of his films, or none; he cannot be fully appreciated without a familiarity with his many documentaries and more obscure features (such as "Heart of Glass" and "Stroszek"). corrupted by the thin gruel of mass media.
Again and again, in films shot in Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia and South America, he has been drawn to the farthest reaches of the earth and to the people who live there with their images uncorrupted by the thin gruel of mass media.
( Source: Roger Ebert - http://rogerebert.suntimes.com)

Werner Herzog

One of the most influential filmmakers in New German Cinema and one of the most extreme personalities in film per se, larger-than-life Werner Herzog quickly gained recognition not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in the history of the medium, but for pushing himself and his crew to absurd and unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demanded.

Werner Herzog (Werner Stipetic) was born Sept. 5, 1942 in Munich. He grew up on a farm in the Bavarian mountains. After his parents' divorce, Herzog and his mother moved to Munich where he attended High School (graduated in 1961). He travelled through Jugoslavia and Greece, worked in Manchester and - fact or fiction? - as a rodeo rider. At the age of 16 he converted to catholicism.

In 1974, he walked from Munich to Paris to see the sick Lotte Eisner. He wrote a dairy about his pilgrimage entitled Vom Gehen im Eis (Walking on Ice) for which he received a literary award (Rausirer Literaturpreis) in 1979. He said that when he was 14 years old, he knew that he would be making films. His first short was completed in 1962 (Herakles) and one year later he founded his own production company.

Herzog studied history, literature and drama in Munich and Pittsburgh (Fulbright) but not for very long. He never attended a film school and had no formal film education. 1964 he won the Carl Mayer Prize for the screenplay that was to become his first feature film, Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen), which was financed by the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (300.000DM) and won the Bundesfilmpreis for best first feature.

Among Herzog's most popular films, though not an immediate success, was Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) with Klaus Kinski, who also starred in Nosferatu (1979),Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987). One of his biggest successes was Every Man for Himself and God Against All / The Mystery (Enigma) of Kaspar Hauser (1974), which won the Special Award in Cannes (1975) and several Federal Film Prizes (1975).

Herzog is famous for dealing with marginalized figures and for his choice of 'exotic' sets (Peru, Brazil, Australia). Herzog, the "visionary" of the NGC, insists that "film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."

In recent years, Herzog released a number of documentaries and directed various operas. His latest feature film is Invincible. He lives in Munich and Los Angeles.

20th Nov 2010; Documentaries on Art : DALI

Contemplate Art Gallery
&
Konangal

jointly present

DOCUMENTARIES ON ART

SALVADOR DALI
20th Nov 2010 ; 5.45 pm
Contemplate Art Gallery
2nd floor , Rajshree Ford Bldg.
Opp- PSG Krishnammal College
Avanashi Road

1. Documentary on Salvador Dali

2. " Private Life of a Masterpiece"
documentary on Dali’s great masterpiece
“Christ of Saint John of the Cross"

Salvador Dali is considered as the greatest artist of the surrealist art movement and one of the greatest masters of art of the twentieth century. During his lifetime the public got a picture of an bizarre paranoid. His personality caused a lot of controversy.

Salvador Dali was born as the son of a prestigious notary in the small town of Figueras in Northern Spain. His talent as an artist showed at an early age and Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali received his first drawing lessons when he was ten years old. Dali began to study art at the Royal Academy of Art in Madrid. In 1928 Dali went to Paris where he met the Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro. He established himself as the principal figure of a group of surrealist artists grouped around Andre Breton,. He also partnered with the great surrealist film maker Luis Bunuel in the making of two films.

By 1929 Dali had found his personal style that should make him famous - the world of the unconscious that is recalled during our dreams. The surrealist theory is based on the theories of the psychologist Dr. Sigmund Freud. Recurring images of burning giraffes and melting watches became the artist's surrealist trademarks. His great craftsmanship allowed him to execute his paintings in a nearly photo-realistic style. No wonder that the artist was a great admirer of the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael.

Meeting Gala was the most important event in the artist's life and decisive for his future career. For him she was everything. Most of all Gala was a stabilizing factor in his life. And she managed his exhibitions in Europe and United States.

To evade World War II, Dali chose the U.S.A. as his permanent residence in 1940. He had a series of spectacular exhibitions, among others a great retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His art works became a popular trademark and besides painting he pursued other activities - jewelry and clothing designs for Coco Chanel or film making with Alfred Hitchcock.

In 1948 Dali and Gala returned to Europe. Dali developed a lively interest in science, religion and history. He integrated things into his art that he had picked up from popular science magazines. Another source of inspiration were the great classical masters of painting like Raphael, Velasquez or the French painter Ingres. In 1958 the artist began his series of large sized history paintings. Dali is the only known artist who had two museums dedicated exclusively to his works at lifetime.

Towards the end of his life, Dali lived in the tower of his own museum where he died on January 23, 1989 from heart failure.

14th Nov 2010; Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped

A Man Escaped
A film by Robert Bresson
Year:1956
Country : France
Runtime : 99 min
French with English subtitles
14th Nov 2010;5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater
Perks School
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Bresson’s finest film, ranks as one of the great artistic
achievements in cinema. With this work, alone,
Bresson assured himself a place in the Pantheon.
- Film Sufi

A Man Escaped succeeds simply as the most tingly, tension-filled prison escape caper you'll ever see, but given that the prison in question is Nazi sadist Klaus Barbie's holding pen for condemned French resistance fighters, the story, which is based on true events, becomes a good vs. evil parable for the ages.

A Man Escaped opens with the indelible image of a pair of restless hands belonging to a French resistance officer named Lieutenant Fontaine (Francois Leterrier). His face is inscrutable and impassive, concealing his calculated attempt to flee from the escorted prison transport vehicle. Fontaine (François Leterrier) is just as single-minded in his purpose. In the prison he examines the grounds, taps messages to people in the next cell, and takes inventory of the raw materials in his cell.

In marked contrast to another famous French parable of inner and outward bondage and freedom — “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Bresson’s contemporary and friend, existentialist philospher Albert Camus — A Man Escaped is not content simply with the struggle toward the goal in itself. Fontaine must really escape, not merely make the attempt. Yet so objective and unsparing is Bresson’s direction that how the story actually ends remains uncertain until the very last shot. With his final frame, Bresson completes his sublime rebuttal of Camus’ contention that “the struggle itself” is enough to “fill a man’s heart,” even if the quest is futile.

A Man Escaped offers newcomers to Bresson perhaps the most accessible point of entry into the work of this brilliant, challenging, artist. It’s also the film in which Bresson’s mature style fully crystallized, and provided the filmmaker with perhaps the ideal subject for his singular stylistic preferences.

Robert Bresson's spare imagery and poetic realism depict the harsh existence of the prison camp without emotional manipulation or overt symbolism. The objective distance of retrospective narration divorces the precise and factual revelation of the story from the bias of perspective associated with the tension of his singular objective.

Among Bresson’s hallmarks is the juxtaposition of onscreen images with sounds from unseen, off-screen sources — a device that seems uniquely suited to the world of a narrow prison cell, where Fontaine has both a limited range of vision, and ample reason to attend to every boot scrape and unknown creak. And Bresson’s insistence on eliciting bare performances stripped of all emotion from novice actors may better suit a prisoner reduced to a singular purpose, his will wholly bent to his course of action, than any other protagonist in his body of work.

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 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 )

Art Documentary Screening 30th Oct 2010

Art Documentary screening at

Contemplate Art Gallery

on 30th October 2010

Documentaries on Art

DOCUMENTARIES ON ART

Art 21
Place & contemporary art
&
REMBRANDT’S
Art & Technique

30th Oct 2010 , Saturday; 5.45 pm
Contemplate Art Gallery
1 Floor Rajshree Ford Buildings,
Avanashi Road
(Opp. Krishnammal College)
http://www.contemplate.co.in
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Contemplate: is an initiative that will incubate art events, collaborations with artists and art organizations to mount unique platforms, support workshops to encourage new dialogues and creating forums and opportunities for cultural exposure.

Konangal film society has been active since 2003 in Coimbatore. Apart from screening world cinema, screening of documentaries on art once every month was part of regular screening schedule of Konangal.

This is the second of the series of art documentaries that will be screened once every month jointly by Contemplate and Konangal. These documentaries will cover a broad range of disciplines of Art , from classic , to contemporary .

PART ONE

Art 21
Place & contemporary art

How does contemporary art address the idea of place? How do artists working today reveal and question commonly held assumptions about land, home, and national identity? The Art in the Twenty-First Century documentary “Place” explores these questions.

Richard Serra

The first featured artist in the “Place” hour is Richard Serra. The segment follows Serra as he guides the viewer through several massive installations he has done in New York, San Francisco, and Bilbao, Spain. Having worked with metal for the past forty years, Serra creates sculptures shape and stretch steel like rubber, carving intimate moments out of public spaces. "I was surprised that people who had absolutely no information about sculpture were able to enter into these pieces," says the artist. "The experience for them was fulfilling because, in some sense, it was startling, it was new, because they couldn't locate themselves."

Sally Mann

The documentary shifts to Lexington, Virginia where Sally Mann is working in her studio on a new series of "dog bone" photographs. “What I like about these dog bones is their ambiguity. I mean, I love that aspect of photography, the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it’s not interesting to me.” The work-ethic of Sally Mann, whose intricate photographic techniques record the historical scars and romanticism of the South, is as she takes photos both in her studio and outdoors. The farm where Mann lives and works becomes a meaningful backdrop as her inspired process of capturing it on film is revealed.

Part 2

REMBRANDT
The Great Master’s
Art & Technique

Rembrandt ( July 15, 1606 – October 4, 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is one of the greatest painters and print makers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age.

Konangal had already screened on 18th May 2009, two one hour documentaries – one on Rembrandt by Simon Schama and one on Rembrandt’s masterpiece Night Watch.

We will be showing chapters looking at Rembrandt's work and his painting and etchnique techniques. This is the best part of this documentary . It's a slideshow of his work, showing examples you've seen and others you're unlikely to have seen.

17th Oct 2010; DEPARTURES

Departures
A film by Yojiro Takita
Year: 2008
Country :Japan
Runtime:130 min
Japanese with English subtitles
17th Oct 2010 ; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater, Perks school
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Advised age limit 16 years and above

Departures" is a gentle film about a quiet man in conflict with his world, his father, himself. It is also about death and its rituals. Yet the film manages to be anything but dark; whimsy and sweet irony are laced throughout, a warmhearted blend.

Daigo, it's central character, is a cello player of great dedication but middling talent, a member of a Tokyo orchestra playing to half-filled houses while he dreams big classical dreams. The demons inside Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) are quiet too. They don't so much rage as roughhouse around inside of him.

When the orchestra falls on hard times and Daigo finds himself out of a job, his dreams are the first thing to go. Then the beloved cello, soon after the apartment in the city. Stripped of everything, including his dignity, he finally begins the journey back home with his wife, Mika.

There are powerful themes in "Departures," of failure and lost fathers, but Japanese director Yojiro Takita and screenwriter Kundo Koyama handle them gently too, creating a Minimalist painting of a film that uses the sweeping solitude of the countryside, the steamy intimacy of the public baths and the close quarters of Daigo's home to give us a measure of his moods. Takita is blessed with actors who move lightly, gracefully within this landscape.

Based on the novel Coffinman by Shinmon Aoki, the film offers a moving rumination on the link between the living and the dead along with a fascinating portrait of life in rural Japan and traditions gradually being discarded by the young. It’s also funny as hell in places.

In this film, Kore-eda's "After Life" and of course Kurosawa's great "Ikiru," the Japanese reveal a deep and unsensational acceptance of death. It is not a time for weeping and the gnashing of teeth. It is an observation that a life has been left for the contemplation of the survivors.

Yojiro Takita

Takita's film career stated as assistant director at Hiroshi Mukai's Sushi Productions in 1976 with his directorial debut in 1981 and directing over twenty films. Takita feature film Komikku Zasshi Naka Irani was featured at the New York Film Festival in 1986. His filmography includes The Yen Family, We are not Alone, The Exam and Secret. His special effects fantasy Onmyoji and Onmyoji 2 were box office hits as well as his historical drama When the Last Sword is Drawn. The latest films include Ashura and The Battery.