Sawdust and Tinsel

A film by Ingmar Bergman

1953/ Sweden / 93 minutes/ B&W

28^th April 2013; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

 Ingmar Bergman's thirteenth film is a landmark in the Swedish filmmaker's oeuvre; it's the beginning of a uniquely distinctive style that became known to the international community as a Bergman film. The Baroque style is adapted from the silent screen German expressionism cinema. It's a misanthropic melodrama that has a dim view of marriage and love, believing it only leads to humiliation. It has great performances and is a visual treat, but its masochistic storyline might not be for all tastes.

It's set at the turn-of-century Sweden. Aging, portly, traveling circus owner and ring master Albert Johansson (Ake Grönberg) is passing with his down-and-out troupe through a provincial town where his tobacco shop owner wife Agda (Annika Tretow) lives with his children. He hasn't seen her for three years and has since taken as a mistress his headstrong gypsy bareback rider, the much younger Anne (Harriet Andersson).

 Anne visits a rehearsal of the suave womanizing lead actor of a theater production, Frans (Hasse Ekman). She's humiliated  and  she has been taken for a fool. When Albert learns of her indiscretion, during the nighttime circus show he challenges Frans to a fight in the main ring and gets beaten up. The humiliated Albert thinks of shooting himself.

The memorable film explores such things as betrayal and Bergman's main theme of humiliation between the sexes. It's a scathing look at the human condition, and a key beginning to the filmmaker's vintage trademark films. Film unfolds  the happenings of a day – from the time the circus troupe pitches the tent to the packing up and leaving  the village with extraordinary visuals. In America, the film was titled The Naked Night; Sawdust and Tinsel is the British title.

(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)

20th April 3013; Documentary on Sculpture BERNINI

Contemplate  and Konangal
present

Documentary on Sculpture

Italian master

BERNINI

(from Power of Art BBC series by Simon Schama)

20th April 2013; 5.45pm

Contemplate Art Gallery

Rajshree Ford Bldg. , Avanashi Rd, Coimbatore

Born in Naples, Bernini was an exceptional talent from an early age and went on to dominate the art world of 17th century Rome. His work epitomised the Baroque style and his sculpture, church interiors and exteriors and town planning could be seen everywhere. He was also a painter, playwright, costume and theatre designer. 

Bernini worked under successive Popes; Pope Gregory XV made him a knight and Pope Urban VIII took him as his best friend. He was revered in his time until a jealous rage caused him to have the face of his mistress slashed after discovering her romance with his brother. His reputation fell further after his bell towers for the Cathedral of St Peter's started cracking in 1641. He redeemed himself and kick started his career again with arguably his most famous work, The Ecstasy of St Theresa, in 1652.

Simon Schama on Bernini :
"A century after the creation of The Ecstacy of St Theresa, a French art lover doing the Tour of Rome entered the Church of S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome, peered at the spectacle and said: "Well, if that's divine love, I know all about it". 

What Bernini's managed to make tangible is something that we all, if we're honest, know we hunger for, but before which we're properly tongue-tied. Something that has produced more bad writing, more excruciating moments of bad cinema, more appalling poems than anything else. No wonder when art historians look at this sculpture they tie themselves in knots to avoid saying the obvious, that is, that we're looking at the most intense convulsive drama of the body that any of us experience."

Beasts of the Southern Wild

A film by Benh Zeitlin

2012/USA/Col/Runtime 93 mins

24th March 2013; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

The Bathtub is a place of myths and wonders, a broken down teardrop of Louisiana marsh and mud in "Beasts of the Southern Wild"and the setting for an extraordinary new drama whose fierceness, like its 6-year-old heroine Hushpuppy, grabs on and won't let go. This is the debut film of the young independent director Benh Zeitlin.

 The story begins on an ordinary day in Hushpuppy's life, played with a stunning tenacity by young Quvenzhane Wallis. She lives in a jerry-built shack in a backwater bayou. It's raised on stilts in deference to the water that can rise deadly and fast. There's no sign of a mother, though her presence will be felt at every turn. Her father, Wink (Dwight Henry, a New Orleans baker making an impressive acting debut), lives within shouting distance in the rusted out shell of a bus. It is a reflection of the relationship — there is love, but a certain distance as well.

 Most of the action takes place in the Bathtub, a tiny community of impoverished locals—black and white, some descended from Cajun or Indian fishermen—in South Louisiana's bayou country. Because the Bathtub lies outside the levee system, it will overflow in an impending hurricane, and Hushpuppy knows as well as everyone else that ramshackle homes and precious possessions will be swept away. "Any day now the fabric of the universe is comin' unraveled," she declares. 

Shot on a shoestring, Beasts is some kind of miracle, a tribute to the people who stay rooted to home against flood and forced evacuation. The shimmer of magic realism pervades the film, written by Zeitlin and playwright Lucy Alibar, and cinematographer Ben Richardson catches its grit and grace.

Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius. 

(Source:Internet)

Benh Zeitlin

Benh Zeitlin was born in Manhattan on  October 14, 1982 and raised in Sunnyside, Queens, New York City, and in the suburbs of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He was born to folklorists Mary Amanda Dargan and Steven Joel "Steve" Zeitlin, who founded City Lore in New York City.
In 2004, he cofounded the Court 13 independent collection of filmmakers, named after a neglected Wesleyan University squash court that Zeitlin and his friends used as a filming site. He moved to New Orleans while making his first short film, Glory at Sea, in 2008.
In 2012, his first feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, won the Caméra d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Grand Jury Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival. The film went on to earn the Los Angeles Film Festival's Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature and the Seattle International Film Festival's Golden Space Needle Award for Best Director.[12] Zeitlin was also given a Humanitarian Award for his work on the film at the Satellite Awards 2012.
For his directorial work and screenplay in Beasts, Zeitlin continues to collect additional independent film awards and nominations.

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 )