Aug 30, 2011

4th Sept 2011; Carlos Sarin's The Window



The Window (2008)
A film by Carlos Sorin
Country: Argentina
Year :2008
Run time :85 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles
4th Sept 2011;5.45pm
PERKS MINI THEATER
The Window (2008) is a gentle masterpiece of cinema written and directed by Carlos Sorin. It is about living and dying and how, hopefully, we all can approach that last day on earth. Filmed in Argentina's Patagonia by cinematographer Julian Apezteguia with an emphasis on sunshine and landscape this little film humbly presents the final day of living of 80-year-old writer Antonio (Antonio Larreta) . This is a big day for Don Antonio. His son, a noted European pianist whom he hasn't seen in years, is coming to visit him, and the housekeepers are buzzing about preparing for the prodigal son's return.

In The Window the images are not heavy and portentous, but play as a background soundtrack to the sensory impressions and ambiance within the confined spaces of a man's last day on earth. Sorin's plot less film deals with the light and not the shadows, and with an airy leisure and humor that belies the melancholy and foretold destiny of a dying old man.
Sorin infuses his film with visual landscapes both interior and exterior and deconstructs the final day from dawn to dusk with the symphony of life -- chirping birds, the wind, discordant notes from a piano tuner, even water in the pipes as someone takes a shower. Life is all around Don Antonio and Sorin lets him see and hear it all.
Employing simple camera setups, he lets the spectacular Argentine light fill the house and wash over the surrounding fields. What interests Sorin isn’t emotion, really, but process. When the processes are mundane - tuning a piano, taking Don Antonio’s blood pressure - he manages to make them engrossing. And when the process isn’t at all mundane - the surrendering of life - Sorin handles it with impressive circumspection.
Death for Don Antonio is a reluctantly willing journey of transcendence where cinematic images (a key, a 40-year-old Champagne bottle, a first edition, a toy soldier) become the remaining sparks of precious remaining hours of life. Significantly, at the end of the film, when the old man dies, the last image and sound is of a scratchy and faded film running to its end as if projected through an old camera.

Carlos Sorin
Carlos Sorin is an Argentinian film director, screenplay writer, cinematographer, and film producer. At the age of six, Carlos Sorín got a hand-crank projector with comic strip tapes made of paper. In those times television was not very common, and instantly, from the moment when he switched off the lights, closed the windows and projected the images onto a sheet hung on the wall, he was sure that cinema was going to be his future.

When he was 8 years old, he got another projector capable of showing 16mm movies, and one year later, he received a motorized projector. At the age of 14 he worked with the first camera, a 16mm rope-Kodak. Later on, as the years went by, the motorized Bolex, the Arriflex, Aatons and finally the 4K digital cameras arrived. For him, there was no doubt that technology was the way of entrance into cinema. When he left the film university Escuela de Cine de la Universidad de La Plata he became camera assistant, and only a little later director of photography. After ten years in this job, he successfully became a director of commercials—a job he exercised for too many years.

In 1986, he made his first theatrical motion picture, La Pelicula del Rey (A King and his Movie), which was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and the Goya Award of the Spanish Film Academy for the Best Foreign Film, among many other awards. Encouraged by these accolades, he rapidly launched himself into the making of his second movie, Eversmile New Jersey, a film that became an experience of failure. After this failure, he began directing commercials again.
In 2002, when he was ready to settle an open personal account with cinema, he directed and produced Historias Mínimas (Intimate Stories). The film won an innumerable series of international awards (among others the Special Prize of the Jury at San Sebastian 2002 and 8 Silver Condors) and opened the door again to other opportunities.

At that point in time, he finally gave up his career making commercials in order to concentrate on directing dry cinema. In 2004, he directed Bombon, El Perro (Bombon, the Dog) (FIPRESCI award in San Sebastian 2004) – a worldwide theatrical success – and in 2006 El Camino de San Diego (The Road to San Diego). In 2008 he directed The Window.


Aug 21, 2011

28th Aug 2011; Sydney Lumet's Fail-Safe

Fail-Safe
A film by Sydney Lumet
Country :USA
Year: 1965
Runtime: 112 minutes
28th Aug 2011
Perks Mini Theater

A 16 minutes documentary on Failsafe with
Sydney Lumet and others will be shown.


Based on the novel "Fail-Safe" by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Sidney Lumet directed this shocking masterpiece of cold-war realism. Fail-Safe was and remains a real crackerjack of a film. It is an uncompromising look at the folly of total reliance on machines at a time when the smallest error can have catastrophic consequences.
Today, we live in an age when the world has taken a small step back from the game of nuclear brinksmanship that characterized the 1950s and '60s, although the threat of isolated nuclear terrorism is still very real. Even in such a climate, the situation portrayed in Fail-Safe still seems frighteningly possible, so at the time of its original release, one can only imagine its effect on thinking people.
Due to astronomically unfortunate computer error, a flight of Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers originating in Alaska carry 2 nuclear warheads past what is known as the 'fail-safe' point. With Russian military jamming their communication they cannot be recalled. They are headed toward Moscow to drop their bombs and complete their mission. The options of stopping them are both limited and extremely time sensitive.
Henry Fonda portrays the President of the United States in a role he wears like a tailor made suit. Attempts to abort the mission fail and the President is left with no more options... aside from the unthinkable.
Communicating with the aptly crippled Secretary of Defense, various military personnel, visiting political scientist Groeteschele (Walter Matthau) and the Russian Premier (through his his translator 'Buck' played by Larry Hagman) a most impossible, totally unacceptable decision is absolutely believably concluded.
Stunning is an understatement. This is without question, the best Cold-war film ever made. The performances are outstanding, the messages are both subtle and coldly obvious with a conclusion as eviscerating as any. A great film to introduce to friends as so few people have seen it before.
(Source : Internet)



Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors--and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York--Lumet has made over 40 movies, often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. He often tells intelligent, complex stories. His politics are somewhat left-leaning and he often treats socially relevant themes in his films.

As social criticism, Sidney Lumet addresses throughout his long career on numerous issues related to American society - on corrupt police (Serpico, 1973, The Prince of New York, 1981 and in the Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)), on television (A Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 ), on Justice ( Twelve Angry Men In 1957, The Verdict, 1982 ) on MacCarthyism (Daniel, 1983), on alcoholism (Lendemain From Crime, 1986) and on racism (Counter-survey, 1990).

Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s (such as "Dead End"), and his acting debut in films came in One Third of a Nation (1939). In 1947 he started an off-Broadway acting troupe that included such future stars as Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach, and other former members of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio who had become unsatisfied with Strasberg's concepts.

Lumet made his stage directing debut in 1955. He made his feature film directing debut with the critical and financial hit 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted
Screenplay, and is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history.

Lumet has made over 40 movies, which earned nearly 50 Oscar nominations. In 1993 he received the D.W. Griffith Award of theDirectors Guild of America and in 2005 a well-deserved Honorary Academy Award. He died at the age of 86 on 9th April 2011.