24th Nov 2013; Jan Troell's EVERLASTING MOMENTS

 

EVERLASTING MOMENTS

A film by Jan Troell

2008/Sweden/131 minutes/ Col

24th Nov; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

'Everlasting Moments" presents a paradox: It's a small, graceful epic. Set in southern Sweden during the first decades of the 20th century, the movie picks one face out of the tenement crowd: Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen), impoverished, overworked, saddled with a brutish husband named Sigge (Mikael Persbrandt) and a growing gaggle of children. Then it hands her a still camera and watches as, to Maria's own great shock, her creative fires are lit.

 

"Everlasting Moments" is beautifully attuned to tectonic shifts in the culture even as it attends to this one small life. We see Maria's marriage and art through the eyes of her oldest daughter, Maja 

 The movie is  is about Maria, who is a strong woman, resilient, complex. She raises the children, works as a house cleaner, copes with the family's poverty. Once, when newly married, she won a camera in a lottery. Now she finds it and takes it to a photo shop to pawn it and buy food. Maria is not sophisticated and may have little education, but she is a deep and creative woman and an instinctively gifted photographer. She has no theory, but her choices of subjects and compositions are inspired. 

 "Everlasting Moments" is quiet, observant, and intensely moving whenever Heiskanen is on screen, and it has a valedictory sweep that feels like a summing up. Troell lovingly re-creates a time when socialism and Charlie Chaplin movies represented the ways forward, and he anchors his social panorama in the meek, stubborn stare of an unnoticed woman possessed with looking at everything.

(Source- Internet) 

 

 

Jan Troell

Before becoming one of Sweden's leading film directors in the mid-'60s, Jan Troell spent nine years as an elementary school educator. In the early '60s, he began making amateur films. One of them, Stad, the story of a boy looking for his lost turtle, was aired on television in 1960. In 1961, Troell began making television documentaries such as Baten/The Ship. He got his start in feature films working as an assistant for Bo Widerberg in 1962. He was first a cameraman for Widerberg and then a co-editor. In 1965, Troell contributed to the portmanteau film 4 x 4. The following year he made his feature-length directorial bow in 1966 with Here's Your Life. He has since become known as one of Sweden's best directors for such internationally acclaimed films as The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). Troell has also directed a couple of films in the U.S., including Zandy's Bride (1974).

After Everlasting Moments (2008) despite his age (he is currently 81), Troell has remained productive until the present day. His recent films include As White as in Snow (Så vit som en snö, 2001), based on the life of Swedish aviatrix Elsa Andersson, a documentary called Presence (Närvarande, 2003), and his latest film Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick, 2008). His next feature film is called The Last Sentence (Dom över död man). It's a biographical film about the Swedish publicist Torgny Segerstedt and premiered in November 2012 at the Stockholm International Film Festival. At the same festival Troell was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award.

10th Nov 2013; Roman Polanski's KNIFE IN THE WATER

 

Knife in the Water

A film by Roman Polanski

1962/Poland/B&W/94 minutes

10th November; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials. If movies were music, Roman Polanski’s electrifying Knife in the Water would have to be classed as some kind of trio – intense, 94-minute combat between three human instruments.

The premise is famously simple: a married, bourgeois Polish couple called Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka) pick up a 19 -year-old hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz), and invite him on board their yach, mainly so that Andrzej can try and prove himself the alpha. 

almost all of its force – and it’s without doubt one of the most forceful feature debuts ever made – derives from truly magnificent black-and-white composition, credit for which must go to Polanski, his cinematographer Jerzy Lipman, and the camera operators too. 

You could hardly find a better teaching aid for the maximising of tension, suggestion and meaning through camera placement. It’s an exercise, and one you’d have to give top marks, in finding ways to place all three characters in the frame, or sometimes two, or occasionally just the one, to make every phase in their devious power struggle visually eloquent and compelling.

There’s hardly a shot that isn’t laced with purpose. Roman Polanski’s first feature is a brilliant psychological thriller that many critics still consider among his greatest work. The story is simple, yet the implications of its characters’ emotions and actions are profound.

 

Roman Polanski

Roman Raymond Polanski (born August 18, 1933) is an award-winning film director, writer, actor and producer. After beginning his career in Poland, Polanski became a celebrated arthouse filmmaker, and Hollywood director of such films as Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974). Polanski is considered one of the world’s great film directors.

1939, Poland was invaded and occupied by Germany and the Soviet Union, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Polański family was a target of Nazi persecution and forced into the Kraków Ghetto, along with thousands of other Polish Jews. Roman Polański's mother was subsequently gassed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His father barely survived the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen-Gusen. Polański himself escaped the Kraków Ghetto.

He was educated at the Polish film school in Łódź, Poland, from which he graduated in 1959. Polański speaks six languages: Native Polish language, Russian, English, French, Spanish, and Italian.

He is also known for his tumultuous personal life. He lived in German-occupied Poland during WWII and in 1969, his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson Family. In 1977 he was involved in an American sex scandal, he fled to France where he has lived a rather reclusive life with his wife the gifted and skilled actress Emmanuelle Seigner and their two children.

He has continued to direct films from Europe, including Frantic (1988), Death and the Maiden (1994), The Ninth Gate, the Academy Award-winning and Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or-winning The Pianist (2002), and Oliver Twist (2005).

Polanski is admired by many other filmmakers all over the world for his genius as a director.