3rd Nov 2012;Documentary on Art -PICASSO

Contemplate and Konangal

Art Documentary Screening 

BBC Power of Art
Presented by Simon Schama

PICASSO

3rd Nov 2012; 5.45pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Avanashi Road, Coimbatore

 http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso's many styles and prolific work rate have marked him out as one of the most recognised artists of the twentieth century. Not limited to one medium he created sculptures, etchings and prints. His artistic career only began to boom once he moved to Paris in the early 1900s. His Blue Period, reflecting the colour and his mood at the time was followed by his Rose Period, work inspired by primitive art and then Cubism, which shocked the critics, but ultimately made his name.

This documentary concentrates on one of the strongest  anti war statements expressed  by art, Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a painting  created during Picasso's Surrealist period and captures the horror of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. By the end of World War II, Picasso had become an internationally known artist and celebrity.

None of our modern masters followed the rules handed down to them by academic tradition and art history. Picasso was inspired by the African masks and tribal sculpture that he discovered in Parisian flea-shops, whereas most young artists of his era were dutifully studying antique sculptures in the Louvre. The life of Pablo Picasso is an exciting story of rebellion, riches, women and great art. 

Simon Schama on Picasso : "Pablo Picasso's Guernica is so familiar, so large, so present. It's physically bigger than a movie screen. But what is the painting about? Is it an account of the Spanish town obliterated by Nazi warplanes - a piece of reportage? Is that why it's in black and white? 

This is the reason why the painting has such an impact. Instead of a laboured literal commentary on German warplanes, Basque civilians and incendiary bombs, Picasso connects with our worst nightmares. He's saying here's where the world's horror comes from; the dark pit of our psyche." 

(Source :Internet)

28th Oct 2012; Shyam Benagal's BHUMIKA

BHUMIKA

A film by Shyam Benegal 

with Smita Patil,Amol Palekar,Anant Nag,

Naseeruddin Shah,Amrish Puri

1975/Hindi/ B&W and Colour/142 mins

28th Oct 2012; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

Loosely based on the life of the Marathi stage and screen actress Hansa Wadkar, Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika (1977) deals with a woman’s search for identity and fulfillment. Usha grows up in a near destitute family of performers. She learns music from her singer grandmother but is constantly berated by her mother Shanta (Sulabha Deshpande), who has found some respectability in marriage.. She does not want the performer stigma for her daughter and keeps telling her that marriage is the way to respectability.

Keshav Dalvi (Amol Palekar) helps Usha join the field of Cinema. She grows up (Smita Patil) to become the most desired actress of her time. Her mother continues to restrict her life and in a bold bid for freedom, Usha marries Dalvi. She dreams of giving up cinema to become a full time wife and mother, but forced to continue as  an actress. Her life gets entangled with other men she comes across in her life.

The film boasts of an A-list of actors who deliver top-notch performances. The men are led by Amol Palekar who excels as the oily, self-serving Dalvi. He bullies and beats Usha and uses every trick in the book to keep her subjugated so she can keep earning money for him.

Benegal creates a complex character in Usha – a woman who at the same times wants conventionality and yet is willing to defy every convention. She will be wife/mother/provider but on her own terms. She wants love but again on her own terms. 

This is not a Madame Bovary like search for romantic fulfillment, but rather a search for a complete life, an ideal life where she can be mother, wife, lover, yet never bound.

 Smita performs the role of a lifetime wherein she grows from a vivacious teenager who sets the screen on fire, to an embittered middle-aged woman with a grown daughter. She drifts from man to man in her search, because in that era a woman could try to be what she wanted to be, but still needed a man to achieve that goal.

(Source: http://pakhipakhi.wordpress.com/)

Shyam Benegal

Contemporary Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal has been an important figure in the new wave of Indian directors. Benegal originated what has come to be called "middle cinema". He was initially involved in the advertising industry and produced over 900 advertisements before his interest turned to films.

Shyam Benegal was born on 14 December 1934 at Aliwal, Hyderabad, British India (now Andhra Pradesh, India). The son of a still photographer and one of 10 children, Benegal's love affair with motion pictures began when he made his first home-movie using a hand-cranked camera at age 12. He is nephew of the famous Indian Actor Director Guru Dutt.

As a young man, he went on to found a film society and get involved in acting while studying at Osmania University where he earned an MA in economics. After graduating, Benegal found a job as a copywriter at a large ad agency in Bombay. Soon he was promoted to writing scripts and directing advertising shorts and commercials. He remained there for over a decade.

His film directorial debut was Gher Betha Ganga in 1962. Benegal shot to fame with Ankur 1973, which introduced Shabana Azmi, who also starred in Nishant 1975. The success that New India Cinema enjoyed in the 1970s and early 1980s could largely be attributed to Shyam Benegal's quartet Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977), which were artistically superior yet commercially viable films. Tapping fresh talent mainly from the FTII and NSD, Benegal has made several sensitive and stimulating films.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1976 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991. On 8th August 2007, he was awarded the highest award in Indian cinema for lifetime achievement, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for the year 2005. He is only director to have won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi five times.

14th Oct; Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger

The Passenger
A film by Michelangelo Antonioni
Year:1975
English with English sub titles
Runtime: 126 mins
14th Oct 2012 ; 5.45 pm
Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

There is an emptiness in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni that the director seems to love more than the people who intrude upon it. His films are never crowded. "The Passenger" (1975) begins with a man in a North African village surrounded by desert.
 

He hires a boy to lead him out into the wilderness, and then a man appears to lead him farther still and abandon him. Emptiness surrounds him. The man returns to the town alone. He is David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a journalist who was seeking an interview with guerrillas rumored to be somewhere in the desert hills.

A fatalistic tale of identity, destiny, coincidence, existential malaise, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined, Antonioni's pensive examination of the deceptive, destructive sway that dreams hold on their creators derives its magic from a deliberate inscrutability, an opaqueness in which familiar storytelling conventions are upended, and clear-cut analysis and categorization prove frustratingly insufficient.

 

  As it hurtles toward its climactic moment of transcendent liberation, The Passenger offers only answers that lead to more questions, its larger meaning(s) as open to interpretation as the vast Saharan desert that provides the film's initial setting.

Antonioni’s style, with the notable exception of his masterpiece BlowUp, is much more langorous and demanding. But like his earlier works L’Avventura and La Notte those willing to sit through it will be amply rewarded. The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are aesthetically complex – critically stimulating though elusive in meaning.

 They are ambiguous works that pose difficult questions and resist simple conclusions. Classical narrative causalities are dissolved in favour of expressive abstraction. Displaced dramatic action leads to the creation of a stasis occupied by vague feelings, moods and ideas. Confronted with hesitancy, the spectator is compelled to respond imaginatively and independent of the film.
(Source:Internet)

Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni was born in 1912 into a middle-class family and grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. In Bologna he studied economics and commerce while he painted and also wrote criticism for a local newspaper.
In 1939 he went to Rome and worked for the journal "Cinema" studying directorship at the School of Cinema. As he was indebted to neorealism his films reflect his bourgeois roots like in his first movie Cronaca di un amore (1950) or La signora senza camelie (1953) or Le amiche (1955).

His biggest success was the trilogy L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962), with which he won several prizes. This success allowed him to go abroad and to work on international scale in English: e.g. Blowup (1966) in London and Zabriskie Point (1970) in the USA as well as Professione: reporter (1975). A stroke in 1985 severely inhibited his productivity until his death in 2007.

(Source:Internet).