23rd June 2013; Jean renoir's THE RULES OF THE GAME

The Rules of the Game

A film Jean Renoir

France/1939/ 110 min

23rd June ; 5.45pm 

Perks Mini Threater

There are about a dozen genuine miracles in the history of cinema, and one of them is Jean Renoir's supreme 1939 tragi-comedy The Rules of the Game.  The Rules of the Game follows the amorous exploits of a group of aristocrats invited to a hunting party at a French château. Their hectic intrigues find an uncanny echo in the affairs of their servants, upstairs and downstairs comically crossing paths on the way to a tragic conclusion.

The movie takes the superficial form of a country house farce, at which wives and husbands, lovers and adulterers, masters and servants, sneak down hallways, pop up in each other's bedrooms and pretend that they are all proper representatives of a well-ordered society.

The film's dazzlingly labyrinthine script never mentions the coming war, yet its menace permeates a milieu that seems to have lost all moral compass, and where the ideal of happiness had been sacrificed to one of mere amusement. And amuse themselves these people do—along with us.

Their spineless yet sympathetic host, the wealthy, Jewish Marquis de la Chesnaye (brilliantly played by Marcel Dalio), when he's not attempting to rid himself of a cumbersome mistress, entertains himself with mechanical toys—player pianos, artificial warbling birds—that mirror his own vacuity. Meanwhile his beautiful, foreign-born wife must contend with the adoration of a dashing aviator (Roland Toutain)—a romantic hero thrust into a society devoid of illusions.

Shades of an 18th-century French farce—yet who can forget, in the thrilling scene of the hunt when white-robed servants beat the trees to flush out the game, that within a few years similar forests would be hunted for partisans and Jews? Renoir's artistic sensitivity seems to have endowed him with a kind of second sight.

The Rules of the Game provoked something like a riot at its Parisian premiere. The film was cut twice, and its original negative was destroyed by Allied bombing. Now it has been  completely  restored  from a master print.

(Source: Internet)

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.

9th June 2013; Hou Hsiao-hsien's A Summer at Grandpa's

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A Summer at Grandpa's

A film by Hou Hsiao-hsien

1984 / Taiwan/ Col/ 102 mins

9^th June 2013; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

A Summer at Grandpa's (1984), follows events in the lives of the story's adult characters from a child's limited point of view, demanding that the spectator alone make sense of what's onscreen, just as the young protagonist does. The child's slow education becomes an allegory for the process of gradual understanding in which the viewer engages.

Shot in a summer palette of greens and blues, and everywhere evoking the gentleness of nostalgic pastoralism, Hou's film subtly demonstrates how the violence, desire, and strife of living, thinly veiled by the conventions of adult society, are nonetheless impressed on the protagonists.

In A Summer at Grandpa's, director Hou Hsiao-hsien uses the techniques he developed in his earlier work with young actors to create an entire narrative following two child protagonists as they learn about the complexities and problems of adulthood. Based on the childhood experience of Hou's frequent collaborator, Chu T'ien-wen, the film follows Tung-tung and his sister, Ting-ting, as they are sent to the country home of their mother’s father while their mother lies ill in hospital.

Tung-tung is beginning to learn to communicate his feelings and interpretations in the letters he writes to his parents, even if they sometimes overwhelm him. “So many things happen each day that I can't keep track,” he tells them. “I'll tell you later if they come back to my mind.” As spectators, we are often similarly overwhelmed, but Hou's film places demands on our powers of observation, insisting that we, like Tung-tung, attend to the minutiae, ironies, and deeper meanings it offers us. (Source:Internet)

Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou Hsiao Hsien , born April 8, 1947) is a Taiwanese actor, singer, producer and director. He is a leading figure of Taiwan's New Wave cinema movement. Director Hou Hsiao Hsien, in a 1988 New York Film Festival World Critics Poll, was voted one of three directors who would most likely shape cinema in the coming decades. He has since become one of the most respected, influential directors working in cinema today. In spite of his international renown, his films have focused exclusively on his native Taiwan, offering finely textured human dramas that deal with the subtleties of family relationships against the backdrop of the island's turbulent, often bloody history.

 All of his movies deal in some manner with questions of personal and national identity, particularly, "What does it mean to be Taiwanese?" In a country that has been colonized first by the Japanese and then by Chiang Kai-Shek's repressive Nationalist Government, this question is pregnant with political connotations.