KUROSAWA CENTENARY -4th April 2010 -Throne Of Blood

KUROSAWA

CENTENARY

SCREENING

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Throne of Blood

A film by Akira Kurosawa

Year: 1957

Country: Japan

Runtime:110 minutes

Japanese with English sub titles

4th April 2010 ; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theatre

Perks School, Off Trichy road.

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Call: 94430 39630

To mark the 100th birthday of Kurosawa, his all time classic ‘Throne of Blood’

with a documentary on Kurosawa’s life and art will be screened on 4th April 2010 by Konangal.

Akira Kurosawa's remarkable 1957 restaging of Macbeth in samurai and expressionist terms is unquestionably one of his finest works—charged with energy, imagination, and, in keeping with the subject, sheer horror. Incidentally, this was reputed to have been T.S. Eliot's favorite film.

In a time of feuding houses, Washizu, a general to the Lord of Spider's Web Castle, turns what promised to be a crushing military defeat into a decisive victory. While on his way to receive praise from the Lord, Washizu gets lost in a fog and encounters a forest spirit who tells him he will quickly rise the ranks until he himself is Lord of the Castle.

In terms of narrative, "Throne of Blood" stays close to the original, focusing on the overreaching ambition of samurai warrior Washizu (Mifune). Visually, though, "Throne of Blood" spectacularly transforms the source play - turning it into a terrifying journey through darkness, evil, and despair.

The elaborate costumes and sparse, striking sets are simply superb, giving the film a look that balances cinematic stylization and historical authenticity.

Toshiro Mifune is exquisitely brash and extravagantly mad as the ambitious Washizu; Isuzu Yamada is coldly brilliant and manipulative as his wife, for whom Kurosawa imagines a stillborn pregnancy. The final sequences showing Washizu's last stand, cackling insanely and getting his terrified subjects to cackle as well, before they all turn on him, is gripping.

Despite having none of Shakespeare's language at his disposal, Kurosawa brings off the remarkable trick of projecting the spirit of the poetry out onto the landscape and into the faces of his principals. An authentic classic.

Akira Kurosawa

1910 -2010

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.

21st March 2010; Wim Wender's PARIS TEXAS

Paris Texas

A film by Wim Wenders

Year: 1984

Country:USA

Run time: 147 min

English with English subtitles

21st March 2010; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theatre

Perks School, Off Trichy Road, Coimbatore

Call : 94430 39630

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

The man comes walking out of the desert like a Biblical figure, a penitent who has renounced the world. He wears jeans and a baseball cap, the universal costume of America, but the scraggly beard, the deep eye sockets and the tireless lope of his walk tell a story of wandering in the wilderness. What is he looking for? Does he remember?

This is a defiantly individual film, about loss and loneliness and eccentricity. We haven't met the characters before in a dozen other films. The characters in this movie come out of the imagination of Sam Shepard, the playwright of rage and alienation, and Wim Wenders, a West German director who often makes "road movies," in which lost men look for answers in the vastness of great American cities.

The lost man is played this time by Harry Dean Stanton, the most forlorn and angry of all great American character actors. We never do find out what personal cataclysm led to his walk in the desert, but as his memory begins to return, we learn how much he has lost. He was married, once, and had a little boy.

"Paris, Texas" is more concerned with exploring emotions than with telling a story. This isn't a movie about missing persons, but about missing feelings. The images in the film show people framed by the vast, impersonal forms of modern architecture; the cities seem as empty as the desert did in the opening sequence.

It's indeed a beautiful film, one that will surely convince doubters that Muller is one of the cinema's best cameramen. He gives the story a surface polish that hints of Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keefe Americana paintings. Some images are positively breathtaking.

This is Wenders's fourth film shot at least partly in America (the others were "Alice in the Cities," "The American Friend," and "Hammett"). It also bears traces of "Kings of the Road," his German road movie in which two men meet by chance and travel for a time together, united by their mutual inability to love and understand women. But it is better than those movies -- it's his best work so far -- because it links the unforgettable images to a spare, perfectly heard American idiom.

~ Source: Internet

Wim Wenders

Born in Dusseldorf just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for movies. After studying medicine and philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art study in and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich's Academy of Film and Television. Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own; in 1970 he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders' first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside Germany.

Wenders began his "road movie" cycle, inspired by such American pictures as Easy Rider (1970) and Two Lane Blacktop (1971). Three films in this genre followed in quick succession: Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976).

For his first English-language picture, The American Friend (1977), Wenders cast three of his American movie idols: actor Dennis Hopper (director/star of Easy Rider) and "cult" directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet). Wenders would later co-direct a film with Ray, Lightning Over Water (1980). Wenders' American-financed films Hammett (1980) and Paris, Texas (1983) were remarkable in their evocation of time and place.

Wenders' return to German filmmaking was rewarded in 1987 with the release of Der Himmel über Berlin, or Wings of Desire. The story of an angel who wants to become human after finding earthly love met with an enthusiastic international response, culminating in a slew of honors for Wenders (including a 1987 Cannes Best Director award, a 1988 European Film Academy award for Best Director, and a host of awards from the New York Film Critics Circle) and an eventual American remake, the 1998 City of Angels.

In the 1990s, Wenders' love of on-the-road location filming was again manifested in such films as Until the End of the World (1991) and Faraway So Close (1993. In 1995, Wenders made a road movie of a different sort with Par-Dela Les Nuages / Beyond the Clouds, which he co-directed with legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. A documentary about Cuban music, the film was the result of a successful collaboration between Wenders and musician Ry Cooder, who had previously supplied the score for the director's Paris, Texas.

~ Source: Internet