21st Sept 2014; Satyajit Ray's TEEN KANYA

TEEN KANYA

A film by Satyajit Ray

1961/ Bengali with Eng. Subtitles / 173 mins

21^st Sept 201; 5.45pm / Perks Mini Theater

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Released in 1961, this Bengali film has three of Tagore’s stories presented as three different short films in one. Satyajit  Ray made this film as a tribute to mark Tagore’s birth centenary. In all three stories, female characters are in focus and the director beautifully portrays their emotions on-screen.

The first story, The Post Master, is about a young orphan girl of about 8-10 years, Ratan (Chandana Banerjee), who works as a maid in the village postmaster’s house. Her new master is a young man from Calcutta, Nandalal (Anil Chatterjee) who misses the hustle-bustle of city life and his family back home. Unlike her previous masters, Nandalal is kind to Ratan and starts teaching her Bengali.  The story is simplicity itself, seeming to touch on Ray’s interest on the variety of forms of learning and cultural exchange, taking in issues of family, friendship, education with a socially conscious eye towards equality, fairness and justice. Thogh the segmant  is short, it conveys such a wealth of revelation and understanding with its few dramatic strokes that it stands as a thing of full expression, a cinematic gem.

Monihara (The Lost Jewels) is the second story in the film and is a psychological thriller. Manimalika (Kanika Majumdar) is married to a rich man Phanibhusan (Kali Banerjee) and stays in a large mansion in a village. Bored at home, her only companions are her pieces of jewelry. She loves her jewels more than anything and her obsession with them becomes visible when her husband faces financial crisis.

Samapti (The Conclusion), the third piece in the film is a love story. Mrinmoyee (Aparna Dasgupta) is a carefree young girl, who as per her mother does nothing what good girls of marriageable age should do. 

She spends her time playing with kids, chasing squirrels and enjoying the swing next to the river. She catches the attention of Amulya (Soumitra Chatterjee), a young man who is returning to his village after taking his exams in Calcutta. His mother has already found a suitable match for him but he convinces her to arrange an alliance with Mrinmoyee. 

 

The film captures the innocence of a young married couple who are different from each other and one of them does not even understand the meaning of marriage or love.

Teen Kanya presents three different films in one and all are masterpieces in their own genre. The script, the direction and the music, all created by Ray, make a blend of poetic creation that is almost majestic. ( Source:Internet)

 

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921 in Calcutta into a Bengali family of a distinguished cultural lineage. He gradually developed a passion for films and with a few friends founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947.French director Jean Renoir came to Calcutta and the great filmmaker's encouraging words motivated Ray to tread the path of filmmaking. Next year Ray went to London as D.J. Keymer's art director and there he got an opportunity to watch Vittorio de Sica's film 'Bicycle Thief.' The film, a neorealist classic, kindled the filmmaker in Satyajit Ray.

Despite being dogged by financial hassles, Ray and his ensemble of amateur crews finally completed Pather Panclali in 1955. The film won rave reviews all over the globe and heralded the arrival of a master filmmaker. Satyajit Ray made two more films Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959) based on the life cycle of central protagonist Apu. Ray unleashed a slew of memorable films such as Jalsagar (1958), Devi (1960), Teen Kanya (1961), Abhijan (1962), Kanchenjunga (1962), Mahanagar (1963)) and Charulata (1964). Some of his prominent films are Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), Pratiwandi (1970), Jana Aranya (1975), crime fiction Sonar Kella (1974), Jai Baba Felunath (1978) and Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977), his first film in Hindi. Considered as one of  world's most respected filmmakers, Satyajit ray  received many awards, including 32 National Film Awards by the Government of India, numerous awards at international film festivals and honorary doctorates and citations from universities world over.

In 1983 a severe heart attack crippled Ray's mobility and. Satyajit Ray breathed his last on April 23, 1992.

7th Sept 2014; Coppola's THE CONVERSATION

 

 The Conversation

A film by  Francis Ford Coppola

1974/ USA / 113 mins / Col

7th Sept ; 5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater

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Harry Caul (Hackman) is pre-eminent in his field. His trade magazine is called "Security World" and sound is his universe. Harry Caul is an expert professional eavesdropper. From his troubled childhood, Harry has grown up into a lonely man. He lives alone, has no entertainment except playing his saxophone with jazz records . No woman has any influence over him.

Coppola, who wrote and directed, considers this film his most personal project. He was working two years after the Watergate break-in, amid the ruins of the Vietnam effort, telling the story of a man who places too much reliance on high technology and has nightmares about his personal responsibility. 

 

Harry Caul is a microcosm of America at that time: not a bad man, trying to do his job, haunted by a guilty conscience, feeling tarnished by his work. 

Harry has been hired by the director of a large corporation to investigate and report the movements of his wife Ann. ‘The Conversation’ comes from another time and place than today’s thrillers, which are so often simple-minded. This movie is a character study, about a man who has removed himself from life, thinks he can observe it dispassionately at an electronic remove, and finds that all of his barriers are worthless. The cinematography (opening scene by Haskell Wexler, the rest by Bill Butler) is deliberately planned from a voyeuristic point of view; we are always looking but imperfectly seeing.

 The Conversation allowed Francis Ford Coppola to engage in a more personal style of storytelling, crafting a small-scale character study that's steeped in minor-key melancholia. The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America's body politic in the era of Watergate, the wiretapping scandal that brought down the Nixon administration, though the timing of the film's release was coincidental. (Source:Internet)

Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola  was born in 1939 in Detroit, USA, but he grew up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family. Francis Ford Coppola graduated with a degree in drama from Hofstra University, and did graduate work at UCLA in filmmaking. He was training as assistant with filmmaker Roger Corman, working in such capacities as sound-man, dialogue director, associate producer and, eventually, director of Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola's first feature film. During the next four years, Coppola was involved in a variety of script collaborations.

Coppola won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for Patton (1970), Coppola's 2nd film brought him critical acclaim and a Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas established American Zoetrope, an independent film production company based in San Francisco. The company's first project was THX 1138 (1971), produced by Coppola and directed by Lucas. Coppola also produced the second film that Lucas directed, American Graffiti (1973), in 1973.Coppola's film The Godfather (1972) became one of the highest-grossing movies in history and brought him an Oscar for writing the screenplay with Mario Puzo.

Following his work on the screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), Coppola's next film was The Conversation (1974), which was honored with the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival.Also released that year, The Godfather: Part II (1974), rivaled the success of The Godfather (1972), and won six Academy Awards, bringing Coppola Oscars as a producer, director and writer. Coppola then began work on his most ambitious film, Apocalypse Now (1979), a Vietnam War epic that was inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1993).With George Lucas, Coppola executive produced Kagemusha (1980), directed by Akira Kurosawa, and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), directed by Paul Schrader.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of America's most erratic, energetic and controversial filmmakers.