KWAIDAN

A film by Masaki Kobayashi

1964 / Japan / 183 mins / Col

5.45pm /27th Dec 2015/ Perks Mini Theater

 Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan – which offers a four ghost stories based on old Japanese folk tales is one of the most meticulously crafted supernatural fantasy films ever made, and it  is also one of the most unusual.  This is a  a four-part, three-hour epic that turns each of its tales into full-blown cinematic symphonies. Kwaidan is based on the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, a folklorist of Greek-Irish ancestry who  became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1895, and changed his name to Yakumo Koizumi. As directed by Kobayashi, Hearn’s four tales unfurl across the screen like versions of the classic Japanese paintings of the historical periods in which the film is set.

Kwaidan’s  four short supernatural stories (Black Hair, Hoichi the Earless, In a Cup of Tea and The Woman of the Snow ) all involve an encounter with a ghost's presented in a highly stylized and intellectual manner, that serves up a colorfully exotic offering. The film's plusses are its strong imagery, haunting atmosphere and some memorably striking spooky moments. The best story is titled "Hoichi the Earless" and tells about a blind biwa player (Katsuo Nakamura) called by the spirits to recite his tale of the doomed Heike clan's defeat by their rival Taira clan to a samurai ghost.

"Black Hair" is the tale of a samurai (Rentaro Mikuni) who returns to the wife he deserted for a selfish, wealthy woman some time ago and, after sleeping with the neglected woman, discovers her skeletal remains in his bed and goes raving mad.

"The Woman of the Snow" is a story cut from the theatrical releases abroad but was restored when the film was released on DVD. A young apprentice woodcutter (Tatsuya Nakadai) is saved from death by a mysterious snow maiden who vows to kill him should he ever blab about what went down, as she kills his woodcutter boss with her breath. "In a Cup of Tea" A guard (Ganemon Nakamura) sees a samurai's face in his teacup and absorbs the ghost's soul into his body after drinking the tea.

The film took five years to make and was the most expensive Japanese film to date. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1965. Kaidan seizes on the both the analytical relevance and the irreducible poetry of the tradition it invokes. Despite the longeurs, it provides one of the richest, most entrancing cinema experiences around. (Source:Internet)

Masaki Kobayashi

Masaki Kobayashi is one of Japan's most outstanding  humanist filmmakers. A contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa, Kobayashi's personal experience of the Second World War has marked his pictures with a deep concern for social justice. His most acclaimed films are unflinching explorations into the dark side of Japanese culture, the side that drove men to commit gory suicide for the name of honor and commit horrific atrocities in the name of the Emperor. Kobayashi's exacting professionalism makes his films a visually and emotionally power experience.

Born in February, 1916, in Japan's northern-most island Hokkaido, Kobayashi entered prestigious Waseda University in 1933 . Kobayashi eventually left Waseda to enter Shochiku's Ofuna studios. Kobayashi worked as an assistant for a mere eight months before he was drafted and sent to the front in Manchuria. Opposed to the war, which he viewed as senseless, he refused to rise above the position of private. In 1944, he was transferred to the southern Ryukyu Islands, where he witnessed the war's final bloody tumult. There he was captured by the U.S. and held for a year in a detention camp in Okinawa.

In the fall of 1946, Kobayashi returned to Shochiku and served for six years as an assistant director under Keisuke Kinoshita. He garnered international acclaim and a prestigious San Giorgio prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1960 for his Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1958), the first installment of sweeping trilogy about the war. Kobayashi's films brought to life by the masterful performances of Nakadai in such Kobayashi classics as Harakiri (1962), Kwaidan (1964), and Samurai Rebellion (1967).With the acclaimed Kwaidan, his first color film, he pushed this emphasis on composition with his expressionistic use of color. Kobayashi died in of a heart attack in 1996.

(Source:Internet)

13th Dec2015; Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT

SHADOW OF A DOUBT

A film by Alfred Hitchcock

1943/ USA/ 108 min

13th Dec, 2015; 5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Screening starts exactly at 5.45 pm with a documentary on Hitchcock

Shadow of a Doubt is a disturbing and relentlessly modern look at the corruption of small town American life. In an era when the movies all but had to portray only positive images of this country, Alfred Hitchcock was testing the limits of decency and morality as defined by Hollywood’s Production Code. Hitchcock takes the all-American family and introduces malice so true it consumes.

The horror is, of course, Uncle Charlie. He visits his sister and her family in Santa Rosa, California, and develops a strange relationship with his niece, Charlotte, affectionately referred to as Charlie in honor of her uncle. She soon suspects her Uncle Charlie of being the Merry Widow murderer and is plunged into turmoil over her family obligations and the vulgarity of his acts.

When we’re first introduced to the Newton family, it’s a kind of clichéd look at bucolic family life. Everybody is nice and genteel and pleasant. This might appear dated when we, less as Americans and more as human begins, know that this isn’t the reality of daily life. But the light atmosphere Hitchcock cultivates in the film’s early scenes heightens the dark aspects of the story to follow, dark like the column of smoke snaking behind Uncle Charlie’s train.

Ultimately, Shadow of a Doubt remains one of Hitchcock’s best movies because it is a clear example of the director’s sense of the world. From out of the censored studio era, it’s refreshing that an artist could commit to celluloid a personal, cynical voice. Nothing, it seems, is as it should be in a Hitchcock film. While his films are certainly nail biters, the reason Hitchcock was so great was because he understood the human condition and its flaws. (Source: Internet)

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is known to his audiences as the 'Master of Suspense' and what Hitchcock mastered was not only the art of making films but also the task of taming his own raging imagination. Director of such works as Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and The 39 steps, Hitchcock told his stories through intelligent plots witty dialogue and a spoonful of mystery and murder. In doing so, he inspired a new generation of filmmakers and revolutionized the thriller genre, making him a legend around the world. His brilliance was sometimes too bright: He was hated as well as loved, oversimplified as well as over analyzed. Hitchcock was eccentric, demanding, inventive, impassioned and he had a great sense of British humor. 

His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of them which also made him famous in the USA. David O. Selznick, an American producer at the time, got in touch with Hitchcock and the Hitchcock family moved to the USA to direct an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940). It was when Saboteur (1942) was made, that films companies began to call his films after him; such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy.He retired soon after making Family Plot (1976).In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep

29th Nov 2015; Aki Kaurismäki's LE HAVRE

LE HAVRE

A film by Aki Kaurismäki

2011 / Finland-France / Runtime 93 minutes

5.45 pm / 29th Nov / Perks Mini Theater

Le Havre is a a perfect, deadpan, impishly optimistic fairy tale from the great Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. Le Havre offers the director’s usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message.  It is set  in the French port city where many of the cargoes are human: illegal immigrants arriving from Africa. The film's hero, Marcel Marx with no plan in mind becomes in charge of protecting a migrant African boy from arrest.

 

The movie's other characters are all proletarians from a working-class neighborhood. We meet Marcel's wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), who joins her husband in his scheme. Marcel and Arletty are long and happily in love. They cherish each other. Childless, they care for the boy and enlist others in the neighborhood to hide him from Inspector Monet.

 

Filmed in a high, nostalgic style that gives its setting the gleam and romance of another era, "Le Havre" is a movie composed entirely of fantastic faces. Another classic Kaurismäki characteristic very much in evidence is his vivid and idiosyncratic use of color. Working with his regular cinematographer Timo Salminen and French set designer Wouter Zoon, the director does wonderful things with a pastel palette and loves to put unexpected visual accents where you least expect them.

 

This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could have been. It takes place in a world that seems cruel and heartless, but look at the lengths Marcel goes to find Idrissa's father in a refugee camp and raise money to send the boy to join his mother in England. Finnish film maker Kaurismaki  has set his story of timely issues and timeless values in the French port city of the title.  (Source:Internet)

 

Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki was born in Finland in 1957. After graduating in media studies from the University of Tampere, He started his career as a co-screenwriter and actor in films made by his older brother, Mika Kaurismäki. His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment (1983), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel set in modern Helsinki. He gained worldwide attention with Leningrad Cowboys Go To America. Kaurismäki has been influenced by the French directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson. He  has tried and managed to stick totally to the inseparable realities of the real world.  His minimalist style is all his own (and that of the great cinematographer of all his films, Timo Salminen); he never entered the Finnish Film School (as he was suspected to be "too cynical").

Much of Kaurismäki's work is centred on Helsinki, such as the film Calamari Union, the Proletariat trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) and the Finland trilogy (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk). His vision of Helsinki is critical and singularly unromantic. Indeed, his characters often speak about how they wish to get away from Helsinki. Some end up in Mexico (Ariel), others in Estonia (Shadows in Paradise, Calamari Union, and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana). The setting of most of his films is the 1980s, or at least contains elements from that decade. Kaurismäki is, in fact, almost single-handedly responsible for rejuvenating the failing Finnish film industry in the 1980s with a series of highly original comedies made with his brother Mika. Over the past twenty years, Kaurismäki has become one of the pre-eminent auteurs of international art cinema, fusing minimalism and melodrama to poignantly depict the hardships of Finland’s blue-collar class.

8th Nov 2015; David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER

 

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

A Film by David Lean

1945 / UK / 86 minutes / B&W

5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater

Brief Encounter is about average and perfectly genuine people in an average and perfectly genuine situation. Here love, more than the grandness of life in total, is the cause for dramatic tension and identification.  Laura Jesson is  happily married.  A chance meeting with Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) sends her emotions reeling. She loves her husband; they don’t have any  domestic issues. But this brief encounter becomes something she never could have imagined. Indeed, she probably never dared. 

The story, set in pre-war England, 1938, is told quite sensitively through a series of flashbacks, with the same scene opening and closing the film (with a short addition included to finish it off.) The action centers almost exclusively on Laura's point of view, her eyes and facial expressions communicating a full range of emotions as she experiences her midlife whirlwind.

Brief Encounter is also a beautiful film to watch. Shot by Robert Krasker (who would photograph Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) – two other gorgeous looking movies), the images only add to the dream state of the characters. For Laura, this is exactly what’s it’s like – a dream, a fantasy. But can it be real,  or is this love only to be a fleeting one? Will she eventually just wake up? Either way, it’s extraordinarily romantic.

Touching, emotional, accessible and realistic performances are delivered by the two main, middle-aged characters. Brief Encounte is  one of the great romantic films of all time, with a very downbeat ending. The screenplay was adapted and based on playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act (half-hour) stage play Still Life and the film  maintains chaste minimalism.   ( Source: Internet)

 

David Lean

David Lean is one of the most popular and well-known of British film-makers.  He was the  chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films. In 1942 Noel Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.

After  Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) he returned to prominence again with the prisoner-of-war drama The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). It won seven Academy Awards. Lawrence of Arabia (1962 is often considered Lean’s finest film. It was followed by Dr. Zhivago (1965), a love story set against a backdrop of the Russian Revolution and the romantic Ryan’s Daughter (1970),  both exhibiting the grand scale, lush cinematography, and breathtaking landscapes that had become the hallmark of Lean’s work. His last film, A Passage to India (1984), based on the E.M. Forster novel, was regarded as his best work since Lawrence of Arabia. Lean was knighted by Queen Elizabeth that year, and in 1990 he was awarded the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time of his death, he was preparing a screen version of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo.

25th Oct 2015; Zhang Yimou's RAISE THE RED LANTERN

RAISE THE RED LANTERN

A film by Zhang Yimou

1991 / China/ 125 minutes /

5.45pm / 25^th Oct 2015 / Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

The film takes place within the gray stone and tile walls of the Chen complex, where the master lives in the central house and each of the four mistresses has a house of her own opening onto a central courtyard. Much of the action takes place on the rooftops, which link in a labyrinth of passageways and stairs, and include an ominous little house where, it is said, women have died--but in the past, of course.

The first three mistresses live in uneasy balance when the heroine Songlian arrives, and she becomes a catalyst for trouble. She learns that when the master selects the mistress he will favor for the night, a red lantern is placed outside her house. (The man who has the duty of announcing the nightly position of the lantern is puffed up with drama and importance.) 

The lucky mistress then receives a foot massage and is allowed to determine the menu for the next day. There is great competition to be selected, and Songlian eventually discovers intrigues within intrigues--even learning that she cannot trust those she thinks are her friends.

We know that rape is a crime of violence, not sex, and "Raise the Red Lantern" illustrates that, because these women are all essentially being raped as an effect of their position in a male-dominated society that holds them as economic captives. So the movie wisely focuses not on the sex itself, but on the situation that regulates and values it. 

Strange, how these women bow so completely to their situation, the will of the master, and to the "customs" of the family. There may be a feminist message here, but it is concealed well within the surface drama of the story."Raise the Red Lantern" is told so directly and beautifully, with such confidence, with so little evidence of compromise.

(Excerpts from Roger Ebert’s review)

  

Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou is an internationally acclaimed director working in the People’s Republic of China. He is one of the most prolific, versatile and significant of these Fifth Generation directors. His signature as a filmmaker is a storytelling mode dominated by visual display, especially of his female stars. This display is part of a complex picture of generation and gender in Zhang’s work that reaches back to debates on Chinese modernity in the early 20th century.

Zhang was born in Xi’an in 1951 . He grew up in socialist China where class struggle dominated life and literature. Like many young Chinese of the time, he was sent to farms and factories during the Cultural Revolution and so gained grass-roots knowledge of life in China. His directorial debut, Red Sorghum (1987), was also the first Fifth Generation film to capture a domestic mass audience and it catapulted him and his star, Gong Li, to local and international fame. It is widely recognised that Zhang’s visual imagery redefines the politics of Chinese self and identity. In the first decade, this imagery focused on the sexual power, reproductive continuity and spectacle of the female body onscreen.

Nevertheless, we could say that Zhang Yimou himself is a son of China whose filmmaking gazes at past, present and future through the “son”. In this sense, generation and gender are equally important in his films although the visual and often spectacular focus is on his female leads. Zhang does not claim that his films document China or its people; he creates fictional worlds through moving images that often defamiliarise, shock, seduce, and subvert. He documents desire instead, circulating themes that have long haunted the national psyche and using seductive image-ideas that marry reality, dream and nightmare. (From Senses of Cinema)

4th Oct 2015; Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST

NORTH BY NORTHWEST

A film by Alfred Hitchcock

1959 / USA / 136 minutes / Col

4th Oct 2015; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

  

At over two hours and ten minutes, this is one of the longest Hitchcock films, but it is action-packed all the way, from the opening scenes to the finale moments. The film opens with images of busy New York crowds rushing to make bus, train, and taxi connections, even as Saul Bass’s famous kinetic titling sequence is overlaying the opening credits and Bernard Herrmann’s driving music is ringing in the background.  

Cary Grant plays the suave and cultured Roger Thornhill - a twice married, twice divorced Madison Avenue advertising genius who finds himself inexplicably caught in a web of intrigue when he is mistaken for an international spy. Suddenly, Thornhill's tidy life is turned upside down.

As is the case with many of Hitchcock's films, including Rear Window and Vertigo, the director sets up his hero as the only one who knows the truth. His story is so preposterous that no one else believes him without a great deal of convincing. Another Hitchcockian element evident in North by Northwest is the idea of turning an "everyman" into a detective. Thornhill must use clues and intuition to unravel the complicated plot that has put him on the run from the police with his life in danger.

The iconic crop duster sequence where Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) is terrorised by a crop-dusting plane is one of the most emulated action sequences in Hollywood history. The hallmark of North by Northwest is the way in which Hitchcock develops tension. There is only one scene in which we are given information that the protagonist is not privy to - when the camera takes us into a government office to shed light on Thornhill's situation while adding deeper layers to the mystery. In fact, it's the complexity of Thornhill's trap and the seeming impossibility of getting out of it that builds suspense.            (Source: Internet)

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

He was known to his audiences as the 'Master of Suspense' and what Hitchcock mastered was not only the art of making films but also the task of taming his own raging imagination. Director of such works as Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and The 39 steps, Hitchcock told his stories through intelligent plots witty dialogue and a spoonful of mystery andmurder. In doing so, he inspired a new generation of filmmakers and revolutionized the thriller genre, making him a legend around the world. His brilliance was sometimes too bright: He was hated as well as loved, oversimplified as well as over analyzed. Hitchcock was eccentric, demanding, inventive, impassioned and he had a great sense of British humor.

His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of them which also made him famous in the USA. David O. Selznick, an American producer at the time, got in touch with Hitchcock and the Hitchcock family moved to the USA to direct an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940). It was when Saboteur (1942) was made, that films companies began to call his films after him; such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy.He retired soon after making Family Plot (1976).In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep

  

19th & 20th Sept : JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL