11th Dec 2011; Jean Renoir's BOUDU

BOUDU
- Boudu Saved from Drowning -
A film by Jean Renoir
Country: France
Year 1938
French with English subtitles
11th Dec 2011;5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater
Perks School

Jean Renoir's effortless masterpiece is as informal, beguiling, and subversive as its eponymous hero, a tramp who is saved from suicide by a Parisian bookseller and ends up taking over his benefactor's home, wife, and mistress.

Michel Simon's Boudu is one of the great creations of the cinema: he's not a sentimental, Chaplinesque vagabond, but a smelly, loutish big-city bum; all he's got going for him is his unshakable faith in his perfect personal freedom.

The bookseller thinks of himself as a free spirit and a dedicated humanitarian; he wants to be both Boudu's brother and his benefactor, but the tramp resists all of his approaches. He won't be trapped in any roles; like the water of the river from which he comes (and to which he returns), his only duty is to keep moving.
Shot largely on location along the quays of Paris, the film features several early experiments with deep focus and nonnaturalistic sound, though its chief stylistic feature is Renoir's incomparable way of gently shifting moods, from the farcical to the lyrical to the tragic and back again.

A quirky look at class struggle no less fearsome in its implications because of its playfulness, Boudu Saved From Drowning was originally a theatrical hit by by René Fauchois, but the redoubtable Jean Renoir makes it seem intended for the screen. This seamless production, astounding given the limited tools available to the crew at the time, still has much to teach filmmakers today.

For the casual viewer it's as pleasing to the eye as to the funny bone. Boudu himself, of course, isn't a pretty sight for anyone, but nonetheless he sets his sights on the women of the household, and his anarchic wit often proves the undoing of the bourgeois saviour keen to display him as a mark of his own success.

Jean Renoir
1894-1979

Son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste, Jean Renoir had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir was his nephew. After the end of World War I, where he won the Croix de Guerre, he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married Catherine Hessling, for whom he began to make movies; he wanted to make a star of her. His next partner was Marguerite Renoir, whom he never married, although she took his name. He left France in 1941 during the German invasion of France during World War II and became a naturalized US citizen.

As a director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, Renoir, My Father (1962). Renoir exerted immense influence on subsequent auteur directors, including among others Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut. Best remembered for such cinematic landmarks as Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Renoir is considered one of the major figures of French and international film history.

Renoir's films were underestimated when they first came out. They were unconventional, complex, and so energetic and technically daring that few noticed their intricate structure. They were often dismissed as rough, not fully achieved artistically. The generation that came to the cinema in the '60s and '70s (perhaps the richest and most diverse era in European cinema) recognised Renoir as an ancestor who had already made the kind of films they admired or were setting out to make themselves, and justly hailed them as masterpieces.

20th Nov 2011; Satyajit Ray's NAYAK

Nayak : The Hero
A Film by Satyajit Ray
Year: 1969
Runtime ; 120 mins
Bengali with English subtitles
20th Nov 2011; 5.45 pm
Perks Mini Theater

Satyajit Ray’s Nayak : The Hero explores the Bengali film industry primarily through a successful but self-doubting movie star idol. Through the star’s mid-life crisis and self-examination, we also glimpse the challenges that face Bollywood itself: its lightweight escapist fare, commercial emphasis, and corrupt business practices. Nayak: the Hero, a lesser-known work of Ray, was a 1966 Berlin Film Festival winner.

The hero in question is Arindam Mukherjee, one of India's most popular film stars and so named for the roles he plays, and he's about to undergo a journey both physical and emotional. As the film opens he's preparing to depart for Delhi to collect a prestigious award, a journey he elects to do by train when all available flights are booked.

Once the journey gets under way, the story focus widens to include a collection of characters worthy of an Agatha Christie mystery, strangers on a train destined to interact in ways that could prove quietly life-changing for each other. Ray spends a good half-hour just sketching this characters and allowing them to energetically interact and frankly could have spent longer, so engaging are they and their exchanges.

The various reactions to Arindam's presence are of particular interest, from the feverish Bulbul's unbroken gaze to her father's disapproving bluster, dismissing the Indian film industry with the proclamation that "Our motto seems to be produce more and produce rubbish,"

Arindam (played with relish by real-life Bengali romantic lead Uttam Kumar) famously lives an indulgent life of adulation-his every move chronicled by the tabloid press. He is currently the subject of notable gossip for a drunken barroom assault. The only passenger that intrigues him is strangely indifferent to his stardom, who rarely watches any of his movies since she finds them trite and hopelessly unrealistic is Aditi (Sharmila Tagore), a journalist who seeks an interview for her obscure independent magazine.

The train journey is used by the director to explore other aspects of Bengali society in microcosm. By building the larger part of the film around Arindam’s memories of his rise to fame and his nightmares of losing it all, it does tread a familiar path of the trappings of fame and celebrity to the cost of the wider social aspects of the story. At the same time however, it allows Ray to retain a realistic human touch, the director finding a perfect expression for the hitting home of reality for each of the characters at the end of their journey, even if it doesn’t essentially change them.

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray was born in Calcutta into an exceptionally talented family who were prominent in Bengali arts and letters. His father died when he was an infant and his mother and her younger brother's family brought him up. After graduating from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1940, he studied art at Rabindranath Tagore's University in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. He took up commercial advertising and he also designed covers and illustrated books brought out by Signet Press. One of these books was an edition of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhya's novel, Pather Panchali, which was to become his first film. In 1947 Ray established the Calcutta Film Society. During a six month trip to Europe in 1950, he managed to see 100 films, including Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di Biciclette (1948), which greatly inspired him. He returned convinced that it was possible to make realist cinema and with an amateur crew he endeavoured to prove this to the world.

In 1955, after incredible financial hardship (shooting on the film stopped for over a year) his adaptation of Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) was completed. Prior to the 1956 Cannes Festival, Indian Cinema was relatively unknown in the West, just as Japanese cinema had been prior to Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950). However, with Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray suddenly assumed great importance. The film went on to win numerous awards abroad including Best Human Document at Cannes. Pather Panchali's success launched an extraordinary international film career for Ray.

A prolific filmmaker, during his lifetime Ray directed 36 films, comprising of features, documentaries and short stories. These include the renowned Apu trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito [1956] and Apur Sansar [1959]), Jalsaghar (1958), Postmaster (1961), Charulata (1964), Days and Nights in the Forest (1969) and Pikoo (1980) along with a host of his lesser known works which themselves stand up as fine examples of story telling. His films encompass a diversity of moods, techniques, and genres: comedy, satire, fantasy and tragedy. Usually he made films in a realist mode, but he also experimented with surrealism and fantasy.
(From - Senses Of Cinema)

Screening Postponed - EDVARD MUNCH'S The Scream

Contemplate & Konangal

Art Documentary Screening
Private Life Of A Masterpiece

Edvard Munch’s

THE SCREAM

SCREENING POSTPONED

Contemplate Art Gallery - Children's Workshop

Contemplate Art Gallery

Workshop for school children

30th Oct 2011; Costa Gavras's MISSING

Missing
A Film by Costa Gavras
Year 1982
English with English sub titles
30th Oct 2011; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater
Perks School

Costa-Gavras ("State Of Siege"/"Z"/"The Sleeping Car Murder") directs a powerful, influential and tense political thriller based on a true story of the execution of a left-wing young journalist during Chile's military coup in 1973, supposedly because he knew something that would involve his government in the coup. The controversial film unabashedly tells about the covert US involvement in the 1973 military coup of the democratically elected socialist Chilean president, Salvador Allende, something denied by the Nixon administration. It's based on lawyer Thomas Hauser's book The Execution Of Charles Horman, and is tautly and passionately co-written by Costa-Gavras and Donald Stewart.

It's the first English speaking Hollywood film made by Costa-Gavras. Jack Lemmon gives one of his best performances ever, earning him an Oscar nomination for best actor. It did win an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was shot in Mexico.

Conservative Christian Science New York businessman Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon) travels to Santiago, Chile, when his counterculture daughter-in-law Beth Horman (Sissy Spacek) informs him her spirited offbeat writer and filmmaker husband Charlie (John Shea) is inexplicably missing after the bloody right-wing military coup in September and the American Embassy is not helpful.

What's haunting is the violent street scenes and the excessive force mounted by the ominous military patrols, as they crackdown on curfew violators and known political rivals in a mind-boggling brutal fashion. They act like fascists, bolstered by their unreported American advisers, intimidating the population to the point that even during an earthquake the citizens fear going outside and violating the curfew.

Few films impact real life like do the films of Costa-Gavras. This one rattled the US government so much, that upon the film's release in 1982 the then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, appointed by President Reagan, was forced to issue indisputable denials of the film's allegations--a statement only believed by the gullible. (Source:Internet)

Costa-Gavras

Costa-Gavras,( born 12 February 1933) is a Greek filmmaker, who lives and works in France, best known for films with overt political themes, most famously the fast-paced thriller, Z (1969). Most of his movies were made in French; starting with Missing (1982), several were made in English.

Gavras was born in, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war Costa Gavras went to France, where he began his studies of law in 1951.

Costa Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work, especially relevant to his earlier films. Costa Gavras is an expert of the “statement” picture. In most cases, the targets of Gavras's work have been right-of-center movements and regimes, including Greek conservatives in and out of the military in Z, and authoritarian governments that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing.

In a broader sense, this emphasis continues with Amen. given its focus on the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church during the 1940s. In this political context, L'Aveu (The Confession) provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period.

15th Oct 2011; Art Documentary - Hieronymous Bosch

CONTEMPLATE & KONANGAL
present
Documentaries on Art

Hieronymus Bosch
The Garden of Earthly Delights
15th Oct 2011 ; 5.45m pm
Contemplate Art Gallery
Opp. PSG Krishnammal College Avanashi Road

Hieronymus Bosch, (born 1450, 's-Hertogenbosch, Brabant [now in the Netherlands]—died Aug. 9, 1516, 's-Hertogenbosch) brilliant and original northern European painter of the late Middle Ages whose work reveals an unusual iconography of a complex and individual style. Although at first recognized as a highly imaginative “creator of devils” and a powerful inventor of seeming nonsense full of satirical meaning, Bosch demonstrated insight into the depths of the mind and an ability to depict symbols of life and creation.

The Documentary:

In the second programme of his new series on Renaissance painting, artist and writer Matthew Collings steps into the mysterious invented world of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted c.1505.

This imposing work, full of strange and fantastical details, contains one of the most famous images in all of art: a man with a tree for a body, who gazes out at us from the section of the painting representing hell. The tree-man's face is generally thought to be the artist's self-portrait but, like almost everything else about Hieronymus Bosch - including the meaning of this, his most famous painting - no one knows for sure.

Using the latest high-resolution digital technology, Matthew Collings is able to explore this extraordinary painting in minute detail and unravel some of the arcane messages that Bosch has woven into it through his use of symbols and unsettling inversions of scale - giant birds drop fruit into the mouths of nude humans, slithering creatures invade paradise, a devil-bird devours a man whole.

Just as the images in Bosch's painting were unusual for the Renaissance, his technique was also unconventional for the time. Bosch worked quickly with gloopy blobs of thick paint to conjure up the fine details of a fish's eye or the spines on the back of a porcupine from a few brushstrokes. The liveliness of Bosch's technique is one of the qualities that makes his painting seem strangely modern.
The Garden of Earthly Delights reflects the new way of thinking about the world that the Renaissance ushered in - ideas about free will and morality that challenged the old religious order and which posed a question: perhaps heaven and hell are not places your soul might end up in, but states of being that are always inside you? (Source – BBC)

9th Oct 2011; Wong Kar-wai's Days Of Being Wild

Days of Being Wild
A Film by Wong Kar Wai
Year ; 1990
Country : Hong Kong
Runtime:94 minutes
9th Oct 2011; 5.45pm
PERKS MINI THEATER
Perks School

With his second feature, Days of Being Wild (1990), Wong Kar Wai clearly established his own unique style of cinematic expression. A cult was born. The story is essentially a relentless visual examination of unrequited longing, missed connections, and loneliness, and the events presented are centered around the life of Yuddy York (Leslie Cheung), a self-centred playboy who takes pleasure in manipulating others.
A shy shop assistant Lizhen falls in love with him. But Yuddy is a moody, fickle man in a strange love-hate relationship with his foster mother (Rebecca Pan), an aging Hong Kong prostitute, and is obsessed with finding his real mother, a Filipino. He soon ditches Lizhen and, in his callous, serial way, takes up with the somewhat comical drama queen Leung Fung-Ying. Then he leaves her also to go o Philipaines to meet his mother.
Wong Kar-wai creates a spare and elegant film on chance, fate, and unrequited longing in Days of Being Wild. Using a meticulously crafted mise-en-scene of damp streets, soaking summer rains, green reflected city lights, and saturated blue hues of the evening sky, Wong creates a pervasive, melancholic atmosphere to reflect each characters' wandering and sense of incompletion.
Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong is a genius of artistic resourcefulness, making much out of spare locations. And like Fassbinder, he finds an elusive, painful humanity in these small, cramped places. This makes the emotions even more concentrated. Almost everything in "Days of Being Wild" is filmed in claustrophobic rooms, hallways or street corners.
There's a sort of no-budget, corralled intensity to everything. He tells much with a little. A few passing shots of palm trees and the presence of a single fan in one room, for example, are all he uses (and needs) to convey a permeating humidity and steaminess.

This sultriness is precisely the right atmosphere for the gorgeous matinee idols in the movie. Leslie Cheung suggests an Asian, sleepy-eyed Peter Sarsgaard, forever combing his hair in front of mirrors. And Maggie Cheung has an incredible porcelain-doll beauty, her hair falling continually over her face. You could watch faces like these doing anything.
(Source - Internet)

Wong Kar-wai

Wong Kar-wai is undeniably an auteur of striking and salient cinema, standing apart from much mainstream Hong Kong cinema. Wong belongs to the mid-1980s Second New Wave of Hong Kong filmmakers who continued to develop the innovative and fresh aesthetic initiated by the original New Wave. The Second Wave, which includes directors such as Eddie Fong, Stanley Kwan and Clara Law.

After obtaining a diploma in graphic design from the Hong Kong Polytechnic School in 1980, Wong become a television production assistant. Following work on several television drama series, he began working as a scriptwriter for television and then later for films. Wong’s directorial debut As Tears Go By (1988) marked his unique visual style and was screened as part of the ‘Critics’ Week’ at the 1989 Cannes International Film Festival. Wong’s next film Days of Being Wild, which featured several of Hong Kong’s beautiful and popular young stars, won five Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Film and Best Director.

His following effort, Ashes of Time (1994), varied greatly in genre, successfully subverting the conventions of the period martial-arts drama. During a break in the post-production of Ashes of Time, Wong made Chungking Express (1994), which later became a cult hit. Following this came Fallen Angels, which received considerable critical success when it was premiered at the 1995 Toronto Film Festival. In 1997, Happy Together premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it garnered a Best Director Award for Wong. In 2000, Wong’s In The Mood For Love was also awarded Cannes accolades, including Best Actor for Tony Leung Chiu-wai and the Technical Prize.

With In the Mood for Love, the focus centres on the jilted figures of Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk). Their isolation and longing is transformed into a melange of intersecting paths and poignantly shared moments in which the possibility of a soulful connection is entertained. Again, Wong’s arbitrary rhetoric finds expression in the poetic and brightly drenched tones of his unique filmic aesthetic, and his much-loved themes of loneliness, isolation, and longing rise to the surface. However, whilst In the Mood for Love incorporates all of his usual stylistic and thematic traits, it also ascends to a new level where the cultural significance of Wong’s setting is explored in greater detail.
(Source - Internet)