Feb 15, 2016

21st Feb 2016; Robert Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHAZAR


Au Hasard Balthazar
A film by Robert Bresson
1966/ France/ 95 minutes
21st Feb 2016/ 5.45 p.m / Peks mini theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/


Great French master Robert Bresson is one of the saints of the cinema, and "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film's title character/protagonist is a donkey -- not a humanoid, Disney donkey but a realistic animal who, in the film's opening sequence, is adopted by three young children in rural southern France and "baptized" in their own makeshift religious ceremony.


Balthazar is a farm animal - a donkey - born into a life of servitude: a beast of burden destined to work the land, carry bales of hay and provide occasional transportation. His harsh, often exploited existence is paralleled through the life of Marie, a reticent young woman whose father has been asked to maintain a friend's farm. The owner's son, Jacques, returns to the farm to profess his support for Marie's father, whose reputation has been ruined by  debt and rumors surrounding the ownership  of the farm. Jacques is devoted to Marie, but Marie is drawn to Gerard, a cruel young man. Meanwhile Balthazar's ownership passes hands to a baker and to Gerard and so on.

French new wave  film maker Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident, characters, mystery, and social detail, its implicative use of sound, offscreen space, and editing, have the miraculous effect of turning the director’s vaunted austerity into endless plenitude, which is perhaps the central paradox of Bresson’s cinema. So concentrated and oblique is Balthazar, it achieves the density, to extend Godard’s metaphor just a little, of an imploded nova.

Au Hasard Balthazar is a haunting, subtly disturbing, and thematically uncompromising portrait of man's innate cruelty and destructive impulses. Through the transfiguration of a mistreated animal as an allegorical symbol of virtue, purity, and redemption, Robert Bresson creates a visually spare and indelible film of startling intensity: the symbolic image of Marie, Gerard, and Balthazar in the snow; the framed shot of a humiliated Marie against the back closet of the farmhouse; the final, sublime shot of Balthazar with the grazing sheep. Alone in the countryside, wandering and without direction, Balthazar finds a place of peace...his sanctuary. (Source: Internet) 





Robert Bresson 

Robert Bresson’s 13 features over 40 years constitute arguably the most original and brilliant body of work over a long career from a film director in the history of cinema. He is the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of all major filmmakers, in the sense that he always tried to create precisely what he wanted without surrendering to considerations of commerce, audience popularity, or people’s preconceptions of what cinema should be. And although it might be argued that his venture into colour from Une Femme douce (1969) onwards was probably against his better judgement, he shows mastery in its use.

Born in central France and educated in Paris, Bresson’s early ambition was to be a painter. He ventured into filmmaking with the short Les Affaires publiques (1934). a satire with nods to Clair and Vigo, which was rediscovered in the 1980s after being thought lost. After a year or so as a prisoner-of-war he was approached by a Paris priest with a proposal for a film about the Bethany order of nuns, which became Les Anges du péché (1943). His next feature was also made during the Occupation, and filmmaking had by then definitely supplanted painting. The confusion over his date of birth, symbolic perhaps of his reclusive nature, caused reviewers of his final filmL’Argent (1983) to marvel over how a man "in his late 70s" or alternatively "in his 80s" could show such youthful exuberance in his filmmaking.



A critic once wrote that Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu (1954) "is one of those films for whose sake the cinema exists". For many of us, the same can be said of the work of Robert Bresson.

Feb 3, 2016

7th Feb 2016; Terrence Malick's BADLANDS



BADLANDS
A film by Terrence Malick
1973/ USA / 93 minutes
5.45 pm/ 7th Feb 2016
Perks Mini Theater


The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return ... I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.
– Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands
 

When making a film, Terrence Malick speaks to his collaborators in poetic images. To Martin Sheen in Badlands (1973), he said: ‘Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.’


Among the great American crime movies, 1973's "Badlands" stands alone. It’s main characters Kit and Holly are inspired by real life  Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate who went on a wild ride in 1958 that ended with eleven people shot dead. Reclusive writer-director Terrence Malick  gives no psychological explanation and there are no symbols to note or lessons to learn from the movie. What comes through more than anything is the enormous loneliness of the lives these two characters lived, together and apart. He interweaves dull stretches of South Dakota and Montana with fierce young love, giving the film a chilling and spellbinding realism.



Nature is always deeply embedded in Malick’s films. It occupies the stage and then humans edge tentatively onto it, uncertain of their roles. Kit is ten years older than Holly, but they’re both caught up in the same adolescent love fantasy at first. 




Kit and Holly are fleeing toward nowhere, although Kit talks vaguely of “heading north”. Holly follows along not so much because she must, but because she had a crush on Kit and hated her father who angered her by forbidding her to see him and even shot her dog to punish her. Refracted through Holly’s naive, emotionally flat narration and Malick’s poetic visual style, this tale is transformed into something strange and oddly beautiful.  


Kit and Holly are fleeing toward nowhere, although Kit talks vaguely of “heading north”. Holly follows along not so much because she must, but because she had a crush on Kit and hated her father who angered her by forbidding her to see him and even shot her dog to punish her. Refracted through Holly’s naive, emotionally flat narration and Malick’s poetic visual style, this tale is transformed into something strange and oddly beautiful.

Scenes from "Badlands" just never leave you. There's a constant tension between the beauty of the landscapes -- and of Holly and Kit -- and the banality or craziness of their behavior.  Terrence Malick's debut film "Badlands" captivates us  with its unique blend of deadpan lyricism, eerie violence and wistful romanticism. (Source:Internet)









Terrence Malick

Malick grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Texas, working on oil fields as a young man. He moved to Austin, Texas and graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School. Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After a disagreement with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Malick left Oxford without a doctorate degree.

In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons. Moving back to the United States, Malick taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist. He wrote articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life.

Malick got his start in film after earning an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing Lanton Mills. At the AFI he established contacts with people such as Jack Nicholson and agent Mike Medavoy, who acquired freelance script-doctoring work for him. After working as a screenwriter and script doctor, Malick directed Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick moved to France and disappeared from public view for 20 years. He returned to film in 1998 with The Thin Red Line. The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but did not win any of them.

His fourth feature was The New World, whose script he finished in the late 1970s. The film features a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, filmed in his customary transcendental style. And nextcame his great  master piece Tree of Life in 2011. Malick is famously reclusive. His contracts stipulate that no one may photograph, and he routinely declines requests for interviews. Malick married Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace in 1998. They reside in Austin, Texas.

(Source:Internet)