3rd Nov 2012;Documentary on Art -PICASSO

Contemplate and Konangal

Art Documentary Screening 

BBC Power of Art
Presented by Simon Schama

PICASSO

3rd Nov 2012; 5.45pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Avanashi Road, Coimbatore

 http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso's many styles and prolific work rate have marked him out as one of the most recognised artists of the twentieth century. Not limited to one medium he created sculptures, etchings and prints. His artistic career only began to boom once he moved to Paris in the early 1900s. His Blue Period, reflecting the colour and his mood at the time was followed by his Rose Period, work inspired by primitive art and then Cubism, which shocked the critics, but ultimately made his name.

This documentary concentrates on one of the strongest  anti war statements expressed  by art, Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a painting  created during Picasso's Surrealist period and captures the horror of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. By the end of World War II, Picasso had become an internationally known artist and celebrity.

None of our modern masters followed the rules handed down to them by academic tradition and art history. Picasso was inspired by the African masks and tribal sculpture that he discovered in Parisian flea-shops, whereas most young artists of his era were dutifully studying antique sculptures in the Louvre. The life of Pablo Picasso is an exciting story of rebellion, riches, women and great art. 

Simon Schama on Picasso : "Pablo Picasso's Guernica is so familiar, so large, so present. It's physically bigger than a movie screen. But what is the painting about? Is it an account of the Spanish town obliterated by Nazi warplanes - a piece of reportage? Is that why it's in black and white? 

This is the reason why the painting has such an impact. Instead of a laboured literal commentary on German warplanes, Basque civilians and incendiary bombs, Picasso connects with our worst nightmares. He's saying here's where the world's horror comes from; the dark pit of our psyche." 

(Source :Internet)

28th Oct 2012; Shyam Benagal's BHUMIKA

BHUMIKA

A film by Shyam Benegal 

with Smita Patil,Amol Palekar,Anant Nag,

Naseeruddin Shah,Amrish Puri

1975/Hindi/ B&W and Colour/142 mins

28th Oct 2012; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

Loosely based on the life of the Marathi stage and screen actress Hansa Wadkar, Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika (1977) deals with a woman’s search for identity and fulfillment. Usha grows up in a near destitute family of performers. She learns music from her singer grandmother but is constantly berated by her mother Shanta (Sulabha Deshpande), who has found some respectability in marriage.. She does not want the performer stigma for her daughter and keeps telling her that marriage is the way to respectability.

Keshav Dalvi (Amol Palekar) helps Usha join the field of Cinema. She grows up (Smita Patil) to become the most desired actress of her time. Her mother continues to restrict her life and in a bold bid for freedom, Usha marries Dalvi. She dreams of giving up cinema to become a full time wife and mother, but forced to continue as  an actress. Her life gets entangled with other men she comes across in her life.

The film boasts of an A-list of actors who deliver top-notch performances. The men are led by Amol Palekar who excels as the oily, self-serving Dalvi. He bullies and beats Usha and uses every trick in the book to keep her subjugated so she can keep earning money for him.

Benegal creates a complex character in Usha – a woman who at the same times wants conventionality and yet is willing to defy every convention. She will be wife/mother/provider but on her own terms. She wants love but again on her own terms. 

This is not a Madame Bovary like search for romantic fulfillment, but rather a search for a complete life, an ideal life where she can be mother, wife, lover, yet never bound.

 Smita performs the role of a lifetime wherein she grows from a vivacious teenager who sets the screen on fire, to an embittered middle-aged woman with a grown daughter. She drifts from man to man in her search, because in that era a woman could try to be what she wanted to be, but still needed a man to achieve that goal.

(Source: http://pakhipakhi.wordpress.com/)

Shyam Benegal

Contemporary Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal has been an important figure in the new wave of Indian directors. Benegal originated what has come to be called "middle cinema". He was initially involved in the advertising industry and produced over 900 advertisements before his interest turned to films.

Shyam Benegal was born on 14 December 1934 at Aliwal, Hyderabad, British India (now Andhra Pradesh, India). The son of a still photographer and one of 10 children, Benegal's love affair with motion pictures began when he made his first home-movie using a hand-cranked camera at age 12. He is nephew of the famous Indian Actor Director Guru Dutt.

As a young man, he went on to found a film society and get involved in acting while studying at Osmania University where he earned an MA in economics. After graduating, Benegal found a job as a copywriter at a large ad agency in Bombay. Soon he was promoted to writing scripts and directing advertising shorts and commercials. He remained there for over a decade.

His film directorial debut was Gher Betha Ganga in 1962. Benegal shot to fame with Ankur 1973, which introduced Shabana Azmi, who also starred in Nishant 1975. The success that New India Cinema enjoyed in the 1970s and early 1980s could largely be attributed to Shyam Benegal's quartet Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977), which were artistically superior yet commercially viable films. Tapping fresh talent mainly from the FTII and NSD, Benegal has made several sensitive and stimulating films.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1976 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991. On 8th August 2007, he was awarded the highest award in Indian cinema for lifetime achievement, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for the year 2005. He is only director to have won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi five times.

14th Oct; Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger

The Passenger
A film by Michelangelo Antonioni
Year:1975
English with English sub titles
Runtime: 126 mins
14th Oct 2012 ; 5.45 pm
Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

There is an emptiness in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni that the director seems to love more than the people who intrude upon it. His films are never crowded. "The Passenger" (1975) begins with a man in a North African village surrounded by desert.
 

He hires a boy to lead him out into the wilderness, and then a man appears to lead him farther still and abandon him. Emptiness surrounds him. The man returns to the town alone. He is David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a journalist who was seeking an interview with guerrillas rumored to be somewhere in the desert hills.

A fatalistic tale of identity, destiny, coincidence, existential malaise, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined, Antonioni's pensive examination of the deceptive, destructive sway that dreams hold on their creators derives its magic from a deliberate inscrutability, an opaqueness in which familiar storytelling conventions are upended, and clear-cut analysis and categorization prove frustratingly insufficient.

 

  As it hurtles toward its climactic moment of transcendent liberation, The Passenger offers only answers that lead to more questions, its larger meaning(s) as open to interpretation as the vast Saharan desert that provides the film's initial setting.

Antonioni’s style, with the notable exception of his masterpiece BlowUp, is much more langorous and demanding. But like his earlier works L’Avventura and La Notte those willing to sit through it will be amply rewarded. The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are aesthetically complex – critically stimulating though elusive in meaning.

 They are ambiguous works that pose difficult questions and resist simple conclusions. Classical narrative causalities are dissolved in favour of expressive abstraction. Displaced dramatic action leads to the creation of a stasis occupied by vague feelings, moods and ideas. Confronted with hesitancy, the spectator is compelled to respond imaginatively and independent of the film.
(Source:Internet)

Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni was born in 1912 into a middle-class family and grew up in bourgeois surroundings of the Italian province. In Bologna he studied economics and commerce while he painted and also wrote criticism for a local newspaper.
In 1939 he went to Rome and worked for the journal "Cinema" studying directorship at the School of Cinema. As he was indebted to neorealism his films reflect his bourgeois roots like in his first movie Cronaca di un amore (1950) or La signora senza camelie (1953) or Le amiche (1955).

His biggest success was the trilogy L'avventura (1960), La notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962), with which he won several prizes. This success allowed him to go abroad and to work on international scale in English: e.g. Blowup (1966) in London and Zabriskie Point (1970) in the USA as well as Professione: reporter (1975). A stroke in 1985 severely inhibited his productivity until his death in 2007.

(Source:Internet).

26th & 27th Art of Cinema

22nd Sept 2012; Art Documentary :- Art of Persuasion- How Art made The World - Episode 3

Contemplate and Konangal  present

Documentary on Art

 The Art of Persuasion

(BBC How Art Made the World –Episode 3)

22nd Sept 2012; 5.45pm

Runtime 55 minutes

Contemplate Art Gallery

Avanashi Road , Opp PSG Krishnammal College, Coimbatore

The Art of Persuasion - The power of images

A lively and provocative investigation into the far-reaching influence of art on society

The leaders of most modern countries exploit a powerful political tool - the power of images. These techniques, in fact, were invented thousands of years ago by the leaders of the Ancient World. But how do politicians actually use images to persuade us - often without us even knowing? How did they do it thousands of years ago?

An ancient gravesite near Stonehenge revealed an important man buried with beautifully crafted gold ornaments - probably the only such gold objects in Britain at the time. This gold, so impossibly rare, would have dazzled the locals, creating the image of a leader. So clearly it was learned early on in human history that art as personal adornment enhanced your status.

In other parts of the ancient world, however, many leaders had vast empires with many disparate conquered people to rule, and possessing fine jewelry was not enough to get their kingly message across. Darius the Great, King of the Persians, came up with the first art political logo, with Alexander the Great later expanding on the concept by imprinting his face on coins that flooded his empire. 

Augustus of Rome, forty years before Christ, fabricated the first political lie by creating a series of statute portraits that made him appear to be a man of the people, while ruthlessly exterminating the competition. Modern politicians use techniques similar to those invented by rulers of old, but instead of paint and marble, they use digital technology. But whatever the final form, people remain as vulnerable now as ever to the persuasive power of art. Modern politicians use political techniques invented by rulers of old, but instead of paint and marble, they use digital technology. 

16th Sept 2012: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
A film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Turkey/2011/Col/150 mins
16th Sept 2012; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the most significant moviemakers to have emerged this century, an original figure in his own right and a major force in reviving a belief in the kind of serious, ambitious, morally concerned European art-house cinema that was taken to new heights by Bergman, Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Angelopoulos. His finest work to date, ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’, is a carefully controlled masterpiece.

 As the title suggests, it's a sort of fable with a very specific location in the Asian part of his native land. The action extends over a single, rainy, sleepless night and into a grim morning at the workplace.

A convoy of official vehicles, containing police officers, the state prosecutor, a medical examiner and guys with shovels are accompanying two prisoners out into the eerie expanse of the Anatolian steppe: the plain where Asia reaches west into Iran, Armenia and Turkey. The men are murder suspects, but are evidently about to plead guilty and, perhaps in a sentencing deal, have promised to lead officers to a body.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who wrote the screenplay along with his wife, Ebru Ceylan and the actor Kesal, has another essential collaborator: his regular cinematographer, Gohkan Tiryaki, who brilliantly uses light as a storytelling tool. From the car beams and lanterns of the night to the clinical glare of the autopsy room, the bare facts of the case emerge from the shadows, and the essential mystery deepens: How little we know of the inner lives of those around us.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of Turkey's best directors, has a deep understanding of human nature. He loves his characters and empathizes with them. They deserve better than to be shuttled around in a facile plot. They deserve empathy. So do we all.
 (Source:Internet)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Born in Bakırköy, Istanbul on 26 January 1959, Nuri Bilge Ceylan spent his childhood in Yenice, his father's hometown in the North Aegean province of Çanakkale. His father, an agricultural engineer. In 1976, having graduated from high school, Nuri Bilge began studying chemical engineering at Istanbul Technical University. In 1978, then switched courses to electrical engineering at Boğaziçi University.

The university's extensive library and music archive played a significant role in fuelling his passion for the visual arts and classical music in particular. Meanwhile, the elective film studies course he took with Üstün Barışta and the film club's special screenings did much to reinforce his love of cinema, which had taken root earlier during showings at the Cinémathèque in Istanbul's Taksim.

His travels in the east and west first in London, then in Kathmandu lasted months and on return to Turkey he had to do his military service. After that he started studying film at Mimar Sinan University andtook commercial photographs as a means of livelihood.He began by acting in a short film and then bought the Arriflex 2B camera. By the end of 1993, he began shooting the short film KOZA (Cocoon), which became the first Turkish short to be selected to be sreened at Cannes in May 1995 and.

 Three full-length feature films followed.They have also been described by some as his 'provincial trilogy': KASABA (The Small Town, 1997), MAYIS SIKINTISI (Clouds of May, 1999) and UZAK (Distant, 2002). In all of these films, Ceylan enlisted his close friends, relatives and family as actors and took on just about every technical role himself. When UZAK, the final film of the trilogy, won the Grand Prix at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Ceylan suddenly became an internationally recognized.

In 2006 Climates was  premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and also got the FIPRESCI Prize. The lead roles in this film were shared by Nuri Bilge and his wife Ebru Ceylan. Competing at the 61st Cannes Film Festival with his 2008 film Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge won the Best Director award. In 2009, the director returned to Cannes, this time as a member of the main competition jury. In 2011, his film "ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA" won the Grand Prix again at Cannes Film Festival.

2nd Sept 2012; Ingmar Bergman's SUMMER INTERLUDE

Summer Interlude

A film by Ingmar Bergman

Sweden/1951/ 96 minutes

Perks Mini Theater; 2nd September 2012; 5.45pm

Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance, the inescapability of the past—Ingmar Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery. In one of the director’s great early female roles, Maj-Britt Nilsson beguiles as an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student.

The film opens up with Marie receiving a package containing a diary. She is so moved by its emergence that shortly after decides to take a trip to the archipelago near Stockholm where she first met Henrik.As Marie remembers Henrik the film moves back and forth and shows how her life has changed.

As a ballerina, Marie has accomplished everything she ever wanted. But the truth is different. After Henrik, Marie could not love again. Her career would keep her mind busy and for a while she would forget about the pain.

The tenderness of their tentative lovemaking serves as a contrast with the older Marie's experience of disappointment. The film, Bergman's first with a female protagonist, marked a new maturity in the young Bergman’s  filmmaking.  The famous French director and critic Jean-Luc Godard once described Summer Interlude as "the most beautiful of films."A film that the director considered a creative turning point, Summer Interlude (Sommarlek) is a reverie about life and death that unites Bergman’s love of theater and cinema. (Source: Internet)

 Ingmar Bergman

Universally regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, Bergman has often concerned himself with spiritual and psychological conflicts. His work has evolved in distinct stages over four decades, while his visual style-intense, intimate, complex-has explored the vicissitudes of passion with a mesmerizing cinematic rhetoric. His prolific output tends to return to and elaborate on recurrent images, subjects and techniques. 

Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden. In 1937 Bergman entered the University of Stockholm, where he became an active member of the student theatrical group. In 1942, after a brilliant production of William Shakespeare's Macbeth, the aspiring director was appointed to the Swedish Royal Opera. In the years following he divided his talents equally between stage and film efforts.

In 1945 Bergman directed his first film, Crisis, the story of an unhappy love affair which ends in suicide. Several films followed closely, but in 1956 Bergman reached the peak of critical and popular praise with The Seventh Seal. It was followed by masterpieces like Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispers etc. In addition to film, he directed over 70 plays.

Although apparently not influenced by other filmmakers, with the possible exception of Carl Dreyer, Bergman himself has had a wide-ranging influence on a generation of filmmakers. A unique and powerful presence, his genius has made an extraordinary contribution to the art of the cinema. He died peacefully in his sleep, at his home on Fårö island, on 30 July 2007, at the age of eighty-nine.

(Source: Internet)

12th August 2012; Asghar Farhadi's A Separation

A SEPARATION
Written, produced, and directed by Asghar Farhadi
Cinematography by Mahmoud Kalari
Edited by Hayedeh Safiyari
Iran, 2011, color, 123 min.
Persian with English subtitles
Perks Mini Theater
12th Aug 2012 ; 5.45pm

One of the perennial and most fruitful subjects of cinema is relationships, especially those of married couples. Regardless of ethnicity, religion, class, location, or gender, most couples will have problems where the regrettable solution seems to be separation, divorce, or disappearance. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s protagonists, Nader and Simin, have reached such an impasse. After 14 years of marriage, Simin wants to take their 13-year-old daughter and emigrate to another country with or without her husband, to a place where she and Termeh can seek greater opportunities as women.Besides being satisfied with his job and social position already, Nader has to take care of his incapacitated father and consequently refuses to leave Iran. Termeh refuses to join her mother, who definitely will not leave Iran without her daughter. Thus, they have reached an impasse, which could be replicated within practically any country, especially for the “Sandwich Generation” which finds itself taking care of both school-age children and elderly parents. Thus, A SEPARATION is a global film which can speak to all audiences.However, when Simin secures a woman to come clean the house and watch after the elderly, usually bed-ridden father with Alzheimer’s, then aspects of Islamic culture become critical to the story and create all manner of unfamiliar but haunting conflicts and complications. Nader returns one day to find his father tied to the bed and Razieh absent. She has a good reason for this, but Nader doesn't know it and neither do we. He fires her. Meantime she suffers a miscarriage and her husband sues Nader for causing it by pushing her down.The writer-director, Asghar Farhadi, tells his story with a fair and even hand. His only agenda seems to be to express empathy. Although the judge may be tending against our own sympathies, we understand why he does so and may be correct to do so. That a director can make such a sympathetic film in such a troubled time is a tribute to his strength of character.In conclusion, Farhadi has purposely left his film without one. He states very intriguingly and provokingly: “I don’t think it’s important for the audience to know my intention. I’d rather they left the cinema with questions. I believe that the world today needs more questions than answers. Answers prevent you from questioning, from thinking. From the opening scene, I aimed to set this up. The film’s first question is whether an Iranian child has a better future in his or her own country or abroad. There is no set answer. My wish is that this film will make you ask yourselves questions, such as these ones.”

Asghar Farhadi

Asghar Farhadi was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1972. Whilst at school he became interested in writing, drama and the cinema, took courses at the Iranian Young Cinema Society and started his career as a filmmaker by making super 8mm and 16mm films.
He graduated with a Master’s Degree in Film Direction from Tehran University in 1998.
During his studies, he not only wrote and directed student plays, but also wrote plays for national radio and directed for television with such shows as the hit series Tale of a City.
In 2001, Farhadi wrote the screenplay for Ebrahim Hatamikia’s box-office and critical success Low heights.
His directorial debut was with 2003’s Dancing in the Dust. This film went on to participate in the Moscow Film Festival, where it won both the Best Leading Actor and Film Critics awards.
Farhadi made his second feature film, Beautiful City, in 2004 which won the Best feature film award at the Warsaw Film Festival 2004, the India International Film Festival and Moscow’s Faces of Love Film Festival. “Chahar shanbeh souri / Fireworks Wednesday”, his third feature, award winner at the Locarno International Film Festival 2006, has also been successful in other international festivals. The film has been released in both Europe and the USA.
On 19 December 2011, he was announced as being on the jury for the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival, scheduled to be held in February 2012. On 15 January 2012, his movie Nader and Simin, A Separation won the Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Language Film.The film was also the official Iranian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Academy Awards where apart from getting nominated[7] in this category, it also received a nomination in the Best Original Screenplay category. On the 26 February 2012, Nader and Simin, A Separation became the first Iranian movie to have received an Oscar for the best foreign language film at the 84th edition of the Academy Awards. This marked Farhadi as the first Iranian to have won an Academy Award in any of the competitive categories.