2nd March 2013; Impressionists: Painting and Revolution -Part 2

Contemplate and Konangal

Art Documentary Screening

The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution -Part 2

The Great Outdoors

A BBC HD documentary

Runtime: One hour

2nd March 2013; 5.45pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Avanashi Road, Coimbatore.

 The Impressionists were true revolutionaries, the Che Guevaras of the art scene whose sun-dappled lawns and bathing beauties opened the door on a world that was brave, bold and ballsy. 

 

 In this second part of the series, art critic Waldemar Januszczak continues his investigation of the Impressionists by taking us outdoors to their most famous locations. Although Impressionist pictures often look sunny and relaxed, achieving this peaceful air was hard work. Trudging through fog, wind and rain, across treacherous coastal rocks and knee-deep snow, Waldemar shows how the famous spontaneity of the Impressionists is thoroughly misleading. 

 

This episode visits the French riverside locations that Monet loved to paint, and where Renoir captured the bonhomie of modern life. Waldemar also introduces a number of technical and practical developments of the age which completely revolutionised Impressionist painting - the invention of portable easels; the use of hog's hair in paint brushes; as well as the introduction of the railway through France.  

And a scientific demonstration in a Swedish snowdrift explains just how right the Impressionists were to paint brightly coloured shadows in their winter scenes, despite being accused of 'hallucinating' at the time.

 Finally, Januszczak explains Cezanne's part in the Impressionist story from his dark and challenging early work to his first rural landscapes in France, and then his departure from Paris and separation from the Impressionist gang. Januszczak is fantastic at fleshing out little-known biographical and contextual details which can open our eyes to new ways of thinking about an artist.
 (Sorce: BBC)

10th Feb 2013; Adoor Gopalakrishnan's KATHAPURUSHAN

Kathapurushan

(Man of the Story)

A film by Adoor Goplakrishnan

1995/India - Kerala / Col/ 102 min

10^th Feb 2013; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Main screening followed by documentary - 
Adoor on Kathapurushan -16 minutes

Kathapurushan is arguably Adoor Gopalakrishnan's most ambitious film, epic in scale but intimate in tone, covering nearly forty-five years of Kerala's history.  Adoor has described it as "an emotional journey through time and history" to distinguish it from a socio-historical document which it superficially resembles. The film begins with the protagonist Kunjunni's birth and ends with the publication and subsequent banning of his first novel, The Hard Consonants.

Thus, in many respects, Kathapurushan is a cinematic Bildungsroman, charting the emotional and psychological evolution of a man and his consciousness, framed by some of the key developments that have shaped Kerala's complex transition from feudalism to modernity. Kunjunni, in fact, belongs to a land-owning family whose decline is linked to unfolding historical events.

Kunjunni enters the world precariously. As a result of a breach delivery, he has to be held upside down and smacked so that he can take his first gulp of air. He will, later in life, develop a stammer and a limp. Along with these markers of ‘otherness’, which point to his physical and emotional frailty, he must also live with the social stigma of having been abandoned by his father.

Thus the protagonist of Adoor's epic is not the prototypical tough-guy landlord but an ordinary - even flawed - human being whose private destiny is linked to the social and historical processes shaping Kerala as well as India as a nation.  He is the ‘Man of the Story’ (as per the English title of the film) who will step outside his own class, become author of his life, and find the common humanity he shares with everybody.

Kathapurushan begins in 1937 and covers the following historical events:

• The assassination of Gandhi;
• The Communist electoral revolution of 1957;
• The Land Reforms Bill of 1959;
• The Naxalite uprising of 1968;
• Indira Gandhi's declaration of the Emergency in 1975;
• The return of the Left Alliance in Kerala in 1980.

These events define the context of Kunjunni's evolution and the reciprocal nature of his relationship to them. As he interacts and struggles with the forces unleashed by history, Kunjunni is moulded by them just as he, in turn, moulds them to a certain extent. For Adoor, history progresses through such a struggle between the individual and the system within which he/she functions. He believes it is the duty of every man and woman to question and oppose all political systems - even the ones they create - as soon as they become (inevitably) rigid and oppressive.

(Excerpt from the booklet essay by Suranjan Ganguly. - 

http://www.secondrundvd.com/release_more_man.php )

Adoor  Gopalakrishnan

Satyajith Ray's role in revolutionising Indian cinema during 1950s with his first film Pather Panchali was taken-up by Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Kerala to create a drastic change in Malayalam cinema. Adoor's first film Swayamvaram (1972) pioneered the new wave cinema movement in Kerala.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan was born in 1941 in Kerala. He belongs to a family with strong links to the performing arts, especially Kathakali, a highly-stylised form of dance drama. From the age of eight Adoor began acting for the stage, later producing and directing over twenty plays, several written by him. He is the author of two books on the theatre as well as a book on the cinema, "The World of Cinema", for which he won a national award in 1983. In 1962 Adoor enrolled in the Film and Television Institute in Pune and graduated in 1965 with a diploma in Scriptwriting and Direction. The same year he founded the Chitralekha Film Society of Trivandrum as well as the Chitralekha Film Cooperative. Both played a key role in the development of film culture in Kerala. In 1972

Adoor made Swayamvaram/One's Own Choice, his first full-length feature film. It launched the New Cinema in Kerala and became one of the major films of the Indian New Wave. He has since made seven more films (along with over 25 shorts and documentaries), all of which have won major national and international awards: Kodiyettam/Ascent (1977); Elippathayam/Rat Trap (1981); Mukhamukham/Face to Face (1984); Anantaram/Monologue (1987); Mathilukal/The Walls (1990); Vidheyan/The Servile (1993), and Kathapurushan/Man of the Story (1995).

Elippathayam received the prestigious British Film Institute Award in 1982; Mukhamukham won the FIPRESCI prize in 1985; Kathapurushan was honoured in India in 1995 with the National Award for Best Film. Retrospectives of Adoor's films have been held in Pesaro, Helsinki, La Rochelle, Nantes, Munich, and New York. All of Adoor's films draw on the history and culture of his native Kerala. Kerala's transition from feudalism to modernity serves as a backdrop to his complex meditations on the psychology of power, the nature of oppression, the corruption of patriarchy, and the coexistence of the modern and the feudal in post-Independence democratic India.

Elippathayam, his masterpiece, vividly captures the descent into paranoia of a man trapped within his feudal universe. In Mukhamukham, a study in failed idealism, a Communist leader gives up on revolution and decides to go to sleep instead. Vidheyan, a parable-like story, deals with the abuse of power, the plight of the outsider, and the nature of a master-servant relationship.

The more recent films--especially Anantaram, Mathilukal and Kathapurushan--display a new concern with interiority and reflexivity, foregrounding time, memory, consciousness, and the nature of storytelling itself. Adoor's genius lies in his ability to create visually complex films that operate on multiple levels, that are culture-specific and yet universal in significance.

Source : http://www.cinemaofmalayalam.net , http://www.adoorgopalakrishnan.in/profile.htm 

2nd Feb 2013; Impressionists:Paintings and Revolution

Contemplate & Konangal 

Art Documentary Screening

 The Impressionists: 

Painting and Revolution

Episode 1 of 4: Gang of Four

Duration: 1 hour

2nd January 2013; 5.45 pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Rajshree Ford Bldg, 

Opp. PSG Krishnammal College, Avanashi Rd.

Art writer Waldemar Januszczak explores the revolutionary achievements of the Impressionists. In the first episode, Waldemar delves into the back stories of four of the most influential Impressionists - Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Bazille - who together laid the foundations of the artistic movement. He finds out what social and cultural influences drove them to their style of painting, how they were united and how ultimately they challenged and changed art forever.

Januszczak is fantastic at fleshing out little-known biographical and contextual details which can open our eyes to new ways of thinking about an artist. Pissarro was a Jew, and this information mattered, because he was the first Jew to defy rabbinical law and become an artist, whilst Renoir was apprenticed at the age of 14 as a painter of porcelain plates, and this was where he had honed his flickery, feathery technique.

Januszczak's one-offs on Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec were utterly compelling. One could learn much from them. And because he makes the biographies so rich, so vivid, a sketchier group show seems, well, sketchier, lacking in that full-bodied richness of colour.

Waldemar journeys from the shores of the West Indies, to the progressive city of Paris to the suburbs of South London, where these four artists drew inspiration from the cities and towns in which they lived. Whether it be the infamous spot on the river Seine - La Grenouillere - where Monet and Renoir beautifully captured animated people, iridescent light and undulating water or the minimalist, non-sensationalised illustrations of Pissarro's coarse countryside paintings, Waldemar discovers how the Impressionists broke conventions by depicting every day encounters within the unpredictable and ever changing sights around them.

30th Dec 2012; Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL

BRAZIL

A film by Terry Gilliam

1985/UK/ 142 mins/Col

30th Dec 2012; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

Not only does this film Brazil cover universal issues of human aspirations and feeling, but it also shows us how these are being jeopardized within the ever-enclosing social frame of our modern world.  This concern about oppressive social control, of course, is not new. Indeed the issues that Brazil raises concerning how the misuse of information threatens the viability of our social enterprise go back to the 1949 publication of George Orwell’s novel 1984, a story which is Brazil’s thematic inspiration.  But in some ways, Brazil presents this threat as an even more comprehensive and disturbing problem than Orwell did.

The narrative In this retro-future milieu concerns the fate of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a low-level employee of the government’s Ministry of Information.  By means of this ministry, the government maintains a pervasive level of surveillance on society and urges all citizenry to be suspicious and to report everything they see. 

The cinematography and special effects in Brazil are remarkable even by today’s standards.  There are all sorts of eccentric but mood-inspiring moments, and they flow together into a smooth continuity, even affording such moments as Gilliam’s explicit homage to Segei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925). 

It is the illusion of superficial information connectedness that is soul-destroying in Brazil, and Sam Lowry’s soul has not fallen to it. Where Sam’s mind lives is somewhere else – in the world of human aspirations and dreams.                                                                     -excerpts from review by Film Sufi

Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam, born in suburban Los Angeles eight years before the publication of Orwell’s 1984, was both an artist and a social rebel when he came of age in the mid-’60s. And his talent and political irreverence served him well, first as a cartoonist for Harvey Kurtzman’s New York-based Help! magazine, then as the illustrator for the London-based Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

As Gilliam’s career expanded, to include a codirecting assignment with Terry Jones on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and solos as director of Jabberwocky and Time Bandits, so did his horizons. After the success of Time Bandits, a movie rejected by every major studio, Gilliam declined an offer to direct Fox’s big-budget sci-fi adventure Enemy Mine, determined instead to make an antibureaucratic fantasy he called Brazil. 

The inspiration for Brazil, as Gilliam explains, came from several intersecting ideas inside his head, all of them having to do with the craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible.

1st Dec 2012; Art Documentary : Da Vinci: Lost Treasure

Contemplate and Konangal

Art Documentary Screening

Da Vinci ; The Lost Treasure

A BBC documentary presented by Fiona Bruce

Saturday , 1st Dec 2012; 5.45 pm

Duration: 1 hour

Contemplate Art Gallery 

2nd floor, Rajshree Ford Building

Opp. PSG Krishnammal College, Avanashi Road

Leonardo da Vinci is considered by many to be one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Yet his reputation rests on only a handful of pictures - including the world's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.  As the National Gallery in London prepares to open its doors on a remarkable exhibition of Leonardo's work, Fiona Bruce travels to Florence, Milan, Paris and Warsaw to uncover the story of this enigmatic genius - and to New York, where she is given an exclusive preview of a sensational discovery: a new Leonardo. Locked away in a secret location in New York is a painting believed by experts to be a Leonardo, thought to have disappeared centuries ago. Fiona Bruce meets the people behind this sensational discovery to learn how it came about, and is given an exclusive preview of the picture, never filmed before.

Fiona begins her journey in the small town of Vinci in Tuscany where Leonardo was born. She follows in his footsteps to Florence, the jewel of Renaissance Italy, where Leonardo was apprenticed to work with the master painter Verrocchio. In the Uffizi gallery there she sees the first glimpses of the hand of Leonardo the painter. In Florence Leonardo was feted as an exceptional talent . But it was here too that Leonardo was accused of the crime of homosexuality - punishable by death.

In Paris, Fiona is given a private view of the Mona Lisa and learns the secret of how Leonardo achieved the extraordinary effect that the picture has had on generations of art lovers: by meticulously applying layer upon layer of paint thinly mixed with oil to produce a smoky, mysterious finish.  (From – BBC )

25th Nov 2012; Ozu's Early Summer

EARLY SUMMER

A film by Yasujirô Ozu

1951/Japan/124 mins

25^th Nov 2012; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

As far as cinema is concerned, Ozu was ahead of his time, and Early Summer is a great example of the way his films show us the inertia of change in the lives of extended families slowly disintegrating in the wake of modernization. In this installment, a mother and father are trying to find a proper husband for their aging daughter so that they can retire to a rural town.

 Matchmaking conversations and strategies at work and home strain the already creaking structure of this extended family, and through the cracks we begin to see the startling differences between each of the three generations involved.

Ozu is fascinated with all the things that we lose as time progresses through generations, war, and the disorienting march of modernization. In Early Summer, these reflections take the form of balloons slipping away, caged birds, or a broken loaf of bread. His slow pacing gives us time to explore this curio shop of gestures, images, and unspoken reflections on the quiet bonds of family.

Several times, Early Summer also slips out of Ozu’s typical low angle, and wide shots of the sea or fields of barley punctuate the film with the grace of simple geometry. This list would be incomplete without Ozu’s formative reflections on what happened in the middle of the 20th century, the fallout of which has settled across the way we see ourselves as part of families, societies, and the patronizing pace of progress.

Yasujiro Ozu

12th Dec 1903 - 12th Dec 1963

"I have formulated my own directing style in my head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others." – Ozu

Ozu was born on December 12, 1903 in Tokyo. He and his two brothers were educated in the countryside, in Matsuzaka, whilst his father sold fertilizer in Tokyo. Ozu developed a love of film during his early days of school truancy, but his fascination began when he first saw a Matsunosuke historical spectacular at the Atagoza cinema in Matsuzaka. Ozu's uncle, aware of his nephew's love of film, introduced him to Teihiro Tsutsumi, then manager of Shochiku. Not long after, Ozu began working for the great studio—against his father's wishes—as an assistant cameraman.

Ozu's work as assistant cameraman involved pure physical labour, lifting and moving equipment at Shochiku's TokyoThe Sword Of Penitence that became his first film as director (and only period piece) in 1927. Ozu was called up into the army reserves before shooting was completed. No negative, prints or script exist of The Sword Of Penitence—and, sadly, only 36 out of 54 Ozu films still exist. studios in Kamata. After becoming assistant director to Tadamoto Okubo, it took less than a year for Ozu to put his first script forward for filming. It was in fact his second script.

Days Of Youth (Wakaki Hi, 1929) is Ozu's earliest extant picture, though not especially typical (and preceded by seven others, now lost) as it is set on ski slopes. Stylistically it is rife with close-ups, fade-outs and tracking shots, all of which Ozu was later to leave behind. Three years later came what is generally recognized as Ozu's first major film, I Was Born, But... (Umarete wa Mita Keredo..., 1932). This moving comedy/drama was a great success in Japan both critically and financially. It was one of cinema's finest works about children.

Thirty years into his filmmaking career Ozu was making films which, like Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), questioned the sense of spending your whole working life behind a desk—something that many of his audience must have been doing.

Ozu's films represent a lifelong study of the Japanese family and the changes that a family unit experiences. He ennobles the humdrum world of the middle-class family and has been regarded as “the most Japanese of all filmmakers”, not just by Western critics, but also by his countrymen

18th Nov 2012; Andrey Zvyagintsev's THE RETURN

The Return

A film by Andrey Zvyagintsev

2003/ Russia/ Col/ 105 mins

18th Nov 2012; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

The Return is the stunning feature film debut of Andrey Zvyagintsev, a 39-year-old Russian director who here renews the grand tradition of Russian cinematic mysticism epitomized by Andrei Tarkovsky.

 With a story line at once enigmatic and psychologically acute, "The Return" draws on biblical motifs to tell a story of Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov) and Andrey (Vladimir Garin), adolescent brothers who have grown up in the care of their mother (Natalia Vdovina) in a small, depressed town, their father having disappeared sometime after Vanya's birth. 

 The boys come home one day to discover that their father (Konstantin Lavronenko) has returned without a word of explanation. He is a hard, independent man with skills that suggest a military background. The father — remote, impossible to please, harshly judgmental and violently punishing — is a godlike figure to the boys, and possibly to the director as well.

Visually the film is a marvel, full of unsentimental images of a living, pulsing natural world. The boys' mysterious trip takes them from one body of water (a relatively benign-looking lake, where their mother is still in charge) to another (a treacherous, roiling sea, which the father)

Mr. Zvyagintsev creates a most moving tension between his archetypal themes and the bristling specificity of his characters. The film, is at once highly naturalistic and dreamily abstract, playing out its mythic themes through vibrantly detailed characterizations

Source:  New York Times

Andrey Zvyagintsev 

Andrei Zvyagintsev - Russian actor and film-maker noted for his exceptionally successful debut in directing with award-winning drama The Return (2003). Born on February, 6, 1964 in a northern city of Novisibirsk, he graduated from the Novosibirsk Actors School in 1984 and started to play on stage in provincial theatres. In the early 1990s he came to Moscow - the centre of film industry - with ambition to star in movies. Moscow was tough for a newcomer. 

As Znyagintsev put it later in one of his interviews: "I was hungry, in need of work, I auditioned for everything. I even did not have money to buy a bus ticket." From 1992 to 2000 he appeared as "extra" on numerous TV series and feature films but with no positive results. Suddenly his friend offered him a job as director at REN TV, an independent production company that makes cop shows and day-time soaps. When he got his chance to direct, Zvyagintsev did his best, he directed several episodes for popular TV series and impressing producers with his skills, he got the offer to direct a feature length. 

The Return - a low budget, artful family drama- turned out to be a great success for Zvyagintsev and an international triumph for Russian cinema. The film won the Venice Festival's Golden Lion in 2003-the first Russian film to be awarded such an honor for a number of years.When Zvyagintsev returned in Moscow from Venice, he was given a hero's welcome. He unexpectedly found himself in the centre of a media storm and after a series of interviews and appearances on TV he became a recluse.

- IMDB