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)