5th Sept 2010 ; The Ascent

The Ascent
A film by Larisa Shepitko
Year:1977
Country: Russia
Russian with English subtitles
Runtime:111 mins
5th Sept 2010 ; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theatre, Perks School

Survival and sacrifice are at the forefront of Larisa Shepitko’s World War II drama “The Ascent” – only fitting since the film, at once simple, at the next complex, is ultimately an allegorical portrait of Christ and Judas in a world turned topsy-turvy by the senseless strife and slaughter during the German invasion and occupation of Belarus.

For the Ukrainian-born Shepitko, herself a student of Master Ukrainian filmmaker Olexander Dovzhenko, it is clear why this story resonated with her and why she applied such staggering Dovzhenkian compositions to the picture. Coming from Ukraine, a country and culture that had been under the yoke of occupation and suppression almost from its very beginnings.

The story is a simple one. It is also both tragic and compelling. Ultimately, however, it is the simple narrative backbone that allows Shepitko to inspire an audience’s engagement in the proceedings as well as opportunities for contemplation and reflection both during and after seeing the film.

The Ascent follows the path of two peasant soldiers, cut off from their troop, who trudge through the snowy backwoods of Belarus seeking refuge among villagers. Their harrowing trek leads them on a journey of betrayal, heroism, and ultimate transcendence.

Shepitko’s emotionally overwhelming final film won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and has been hailed around the world as the finest Soviet film of its decade. Set during World War II's darkest days .

Larisa Shepitko

1938 - 1979

The career of Larisa Shepitko, an icon of sixties and seventies Soviet cinema, was tragically cut short when she was killed in a car crash at age forty, just as she was emerging on the international scene. The body of work she left behind, though small, is masterful, and her genius for visually evoking characters' interior worlds is never more striking than in her two greatest works: Wings, an intimate yet exhilarating portrait of a female fighter pilot turned provincial headmistress, and The Ascent, a gripping, tragic wartime parable of betrayal and martyrdom. A true artist who had deftly used the Soviet film industry to make statements both personal and universal, Shepitko remains one of the greatest unsung filmmakers of all time.

Shepitko was married to another dominant figure of Soviet cinema, Elim Klimov, and died shortly before the completion of the latter's film Farewell which she was supposed to direct.

29th August 2010; De Sica's The Children Are Watching Us

The Children Are
Watching Us

A film by Vittorio De Sica
Year:1944
Country : Italy
Italian with English subtitles
Run time: 84 minutes
29th August 2010; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater, Perks School
Off Trichy Road
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

The child knows. Although just a diminutive four-year-old, utterly naive about the world around him, he senses--he knows--that something is not right with his parents.
Vittorio De Sica’s The Children Are Watching Us (I bambini ci guardano), a precursor to Italian neorealism that relates the heart-breaking account of a family’s dissolution and the destructive effect it has on the child perpetually caught in the middle.

Telling the story almost entirely from the point of view of the child (note how low the camera always is), De Sica exposes how the failings, hypocrisies, and selfishness of parents can render them not only useless in protecting and guiding their children, but actively hurtful.The child in question is Pricò, who is played with absolute conviction and tenderness by Luciano De Ambrosis.

There's always a sense of harsh movement in the film, lines of action isolating objects and characters into different stratums of the frame. A geometric, spider-like pattern emerges throughout, with little Pico caught in the center, gasping for breath like an ensnared animal, threatened from either side by all sorts of twin pressures.

No one feels this pressure more than Pico. In the film's single greatest scene, father and son lock eyes like hunter and prey, one asking the other for the information he already knows, the other resisting because he knows submission will completely devastate the family.

There is an elevator in the film that only goes up, a symbol of Andrea's lack of foresight. Similarly, De Sica's camera often travels forcefully in one direction away from his characters. During a wonderfully hypnotic beach scene, an effete gentleman with a little dog tries to seduce Nina with his eyes and the movement of the camera suggests the woman is being torn apart like a piece of taffy—on one side by her pleasure-seekingness, on the other by her dedication to her son, whom she holds in her hands trying to teach how to swim.

It is in the final scene that The Children Are Watching Us builds to its powerfully emotional climax. It is a heart-rending moment in which you feel a human connection being literally ripped away, making the film one of a handful that treats the difficulties of childhood with such a deft, tender hand as to avoid all sense of cloying sentimentality.

The Children Are Watching Us is a marvel of complex visual and emotional scope -this is the first neorealist gesture, a sign that the Italian film was about to grow up.

VITTORIO DE SICA

Vittoria De Sica, was one of the great directors of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, which represented a large, loud break with Hollywood tradition and dealt with life as it might exist outside sound stages.

As one of the world's most influential filmmakers, and as an actor who starred in some 150 movies, Vittorio De Sica built a remarkable film career that spanned half a century.
De Sica directed 34 feature films, for which he won numerous international prizes. He was honored with four Academy Awards: two Special Awards, preceding the creation of the Best Foreign Film category, for "Shoeshine" in 1947, and "The Bicycle Thief" in 1949, and Best Foreign Film Awards for "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" in 1964, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in 1971.

De Sica was born in 1902 in Sora, near Rome, and grew up in Naples in a middle-class family. His father, Umberto De Sica, a bank clerk with a penchant for show business, encouraged his good-looking son to pursue a stage career. At 16, he appeared in the film "The Clemenceau Affair." His career took off in the 1920s when he joined a local theater company and became a matinee idol. He later formed his own company, producing plays and co-starring with his first wife, Giuditta Rissone. At the same time, he made a name for himself as a suave leading man in Italian films, and became immensely popular with female audiences.

During World War II, De Sica turned to directing. His first four films were routine light productions in the tradition of the Italian cinema of the day. But his fifth, "The Children Are Watching Us," was a mature, perceptive, and deeply human work about the impact of adult folly on a child's innocent mind. The film marked the beginning of De Sica's collaboration with author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, a creative relationship that was to give the world two of the most significant films of the Italian neorealism movement, "Shoeshine" and "The Bicycle Thief."

To finance his directorial efforts, De Sica worked as an actor throughout his career. He turned almost exclusively to acting in the late 1950s, enjoying great popularity in the role of the rural police officer in Comencini's "Bread Love and Dreams" (1954), and in a subsequent comedy series of the same name co-starring Gina Lollobrigida.

He made a dramatic comeback with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis , produced by Arthur Cohn. The director's next movie was "A Brief Vacation" (1973), a moving film, also produced by Arthur Cohn, about a working-class Italian woman's first taste of freedom in a society dominated by males. His last film, "The Voyage" (1974), was based on a novella by Pirandello.Vittorio De Sica died in 1974 at the age of 72.

21st Aug 2010 ; Documentaries on Art - Van Gogh

DOCUMENTARIES ON ART

Vincent Van Gogh

21st August 2010 , Saturday; 5.45 pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

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 from 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 first 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 .

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh, ( March 30, 1853), generally considered the greatest Dutch painter and draughtsman after Rembrandt. With Cézanne and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. He powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking colour, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide.

In 1869 van Gogh went to work in The Hague. In 1873 he was sent to the London and fell unsuccessfully in love with the daughter of the landlady. This was the first of several disastrous attempts to find happiness with a woman. His father was a Protestant pastor, and van Gogh first trained for the ministry, but he abandoned his studies in 1878 and went to work as a lay preacher among the impoverished miners of the grim Borinage district in Belgium.

From this time he worked at his new `mission' with single-minded frenzy, and although he often suffered from extreme poverty and undernourishment, his output in the ten remaining years of his life was prodigious: about 800 paintings and a similar number of drawings.

From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'.

In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. `Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,' he wrote, `I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'.

In February 1888 van Gogh settled at Arles, where he painted more than 200 canvases in 15 months. During this time he sold no pictures, was in poverty, and suffered recurrent nervous crisis with hallucinations and depression. He became enthusiastic for the idea of founding an artists' co-operative at Arles and towards the end of the year he was joined by Gauguin. But as a result of a quarrel between them van Gogh suffered the crisis in which occurred the famous incident when he cut off his left ear (or part of it), an event commemorated in his Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear .

In May 1889 he went at his own request into an asylum at St Rémy, near Arles, but continued during the year he spent there a frenzied production of tumultuous pictures such as Starry Night (MOMA, New York). He did 150 paintings besides drawings in the course of this year.

In 1889 Theo married and in May 1890 van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise to be near him, lodging with the patron and connoisseur Dr Paul Gachet. There followed another tremendous burst of strenuous activity and during the last 70 days of his life he painted 70 canvases. But his spiritual anguish and depression became more acute and on 29 July 1890 he died from the results of a self-inflicted bullet wound.

He sold only one painting during his lifetime (Red Vineyard at Arles; Pushkin Museum, Moscow), and was little known to the art world at the time of his death, but his fame grew rapidly thereafter. His influence on Expressionism, Fauvism and early abstraction was enormous, and it can be seen in many other aspects of 20th-century art. His stormy and dramatic life and his unswerving devotion to his ideals have made him one of the great cultural heroes of modern times, providing the most auspicious material for the 20th-century vogue in romanticized psychological biography.(Source:Internet)

15th August 2010; EL NORTE -(The North)

El Norte

(The North)

A film by Gregory Nava

Country : USA

Year: 1983

Spanish/Maya with English subtitles

Runtime:141 minutes

15th August 2010;5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater , Perks School

Immigration has become one of the most heated issues of our times. The subject is rife with emotion, conflicting values, and cold economic realities. El Norte, a politically charged Mexican film, addresses this issue by speaking to the heart rather than to the head. Through the odyssey of two Guatemalan Indians, we experience the courage and fortitude necessary for individuals to make a new life for themselves.

"El Norte" tells the story of a Guatemalan brother and sister who flee persecution at home and journey north the length of Mexico with a dream of finding a new home in the United States. They are illegal aliens, but then as now, the California economy can not function without their invisible presence as cheap labor. "El Norte" (1983) tells their story with astonishing visual beauty, with unashamed melodrama, with anger leavened by hope. It is a "Grapes of Wrath" for our time.

El Norte is broken into three acts: the first act is set in Guatemala, the second in Mexico, and the third in "The North," or "El Norte"--America.

The movie begins in the fields where Arturo, their father, goes to a meeting to protest working conditions and is killed. Their mother disappears. Enrique and Rosa, who are in their late teens, decide to leave their village and go to America. It shows a side of American life not often portrayed in the movies. It shows that life for the working poor is difficult all over the world, and that it takes more than strong will to overcome systemic oppression

In the years since the film was released, the underlying reality of illegal immigration has remained essentially the same: America forbids it, yet requires it as a source of cheap labor.

Someone like Cesar Chavez, who fought for the rights of Chicano farm laborers, was attacked because he revealed the nation's underlying hypocrisy on the subject.

"El Norte" is a great film for two different kinds of reasons. One is its stunning visual and musical power; the approach of the film is not quasi-documentary, but poetic, with fantastical images that show us the joyous hearts of these two people. The second reason is that this is the first film to approach the subject of "undocumented workers" solely through their eyes.

Gregory Nava

Gregory Nava (born April 10, 1949 in San Diego, California) is a film director, producer and screenplay writer, of Mexican and Basque heritage.

Nava graduated from St. Augustine High School in San Diego and went on to attended film school at UCLA where he earned an MFA in 1976. At UCLA he directed the short film The Journal of Diego Rodriguez Silva (based on the life of García Lorca), and for this work, won the Best Dramatic Film Award at the National Student Film Festival.

While an instructor at Moorpark College teaching classes in cinematography, Nava's first feature film, The Confessions of Amans, won the Best First Feature Award at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1976. Later, he came to the attention of Hollywood producers due to the success of El Norte, which garnered Nava and his wife Anna Thomas an Academy Award nomination, among other accolades, for the screenplay. In 1995 the film was registered by the Library of Congress, National Film Registry. According to Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, "El Norte tells the story with astonishing visual beauty, with unashamed melodrama, with anger leavened by hope. It is a Grapes of Wrath for our time."

Further collaborations with his wife Thomas include: The Confessions of Amans, A Time of Destiny, My Family, and Frida (screenplay), and other works. Nava had further directing success in 1997 with the film Selena, starring Jennifer Lopez, who was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.

From 2003 to 2004, Nava executive produced the television series American Family: Journey of Dreams for PBS. He also directed a few episodes. In 2006, Nava produced, wrote, and directed the film ‘Border town’ which made its debut at the Berlin Film Festival on February 15, 2007.