6th April 2008 ; Screening of A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence

A Film by John Cassavetes
Country : USA
Year : 1974
English with English Sub titles
6thApril 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Films like A Woman Under the Influence defy a century’s worth of film theory, screenwriting tips, and film school orthodoxy.

What is A Woman Under the Influence? If you look at it from one end of the telescope, it’s a hyper-realistic portrait of a woman going mad, a bravura performance in a vaguely working-class setting . The film is study in shared emotional impotence and individual emotional frustration.

John Cassavetes’s devastating drama details the emotional breakdown of a suburban housewife and her family’s struggle to save her from herself. Starring Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands (in two of the most harrowing screen performances of the 1970s) as a married couple, deeply in love, yet unable to express their love in terms the other can understand, the film is an uncompromising portrait of domestic turmoil.

The story follows Nick on the job, working as a foreman for some city's water department, and Mabel as a depressed housewife. He's a foul-mouthed, ignorant, and often physically and emotionally abusive husband and person, while she's a flaming nut case. It is a dysfunctional household, in the modern sense.

What Cassavetes does better than any other filmmaker is give viewers archetypal situations from which we immediately viscerally understand where his characters are in their lives, as we first enter them through film. When you look at a close-up in a film by almost anyone else, you are looking at a representation of the idea of an emotion, no matter how detailed the acting. In Cassavetes, every blink, every shrug, every hesitation counts and drives the story forward.

If there is one quality that separates John Cassavetes movies from almost everybody else is, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no breaks in rhythm; they are not broken down the way most films are. You have to apprehend them from gesture to gesture, breath to breath. Very few filmmakers in the sound era have chosen to work this way, at least in the realm of fiction. Only Carl Th. Dreyer, of whom Cassavetes was a great admirer, comes to mind. This is not to slight other filmmakers with a different approach to their art, who either break up their scenes in clearly articulated units (Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bresson), build tableau effects that take the action into an eerie timelessness (Stanley Kubrick), isolate certain visual or behavioral events as the focal point of a given shot (Jean Renoir), or dig into the marrow of time to make an event out of duration itself (Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky).

John Cassavetes

John Nicholas Cassavetes (December 9, 1929 – February 3, 1989) was an American actor, screenwriter, and director. He is considered a pioneer of American independent film. An independent film, or indie film, is a film that is produced outside, "independent", of the Hollywood Studio system.

Cassavetes was born in New York City, the son of Katherine Demetri (who was to feature in some of his films) and Nicholas John Cassavetes, Greek immigrants to the U.S. His early years were spent with his family in Greece; when he returned, at the age of seven, he spoke no English. He grew up in Long Island, New York and attended high school at Blair Academy in New JerseyAmerican Academy of Dramatic Arts. On graduation in 1950, he continued acting in the theater, took small parts in films, and began working on television in anthology series such as Alcoa Theatre.
before moving to the

During this time he met and married actress Gena Rowlands. By 1956, Cassavetes had begun teaching method acting in workshops in New York City. An improvisation exercise in one workshop inspired the idea for his writing and directorial debut, Shadows (1959). Cassavetes raised the funds for production from friends and family, as well as listeners to Jean Shepherd's late-night radio talk show "Night People". Cassavetes was unable to get American distributors to carry Shadows, so he took it to Europe, where it won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. European distributors later released the movie in the United States as an import.

His next film as a director (and his second independent film) was Faces. Around this time, Cassavetes formed "Faces International" as a distribution company to handle all of his films. Husbands (1970) stars Cassavetes himself with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. They play a trio of married men on a spree in New York and London after the funeral of one of their best friends. Minnie and Moskowitz, about two unlikely lovers, has Rowlands with Seymour Cassel.

His three masterpieces of the 1970s were produced independently - A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977).

Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of 59.

With every passing year, the films of John Cassavetes are becoming more and more central to debates on cinema. Moving uneasily between Hollywood and independent American cinema traditions, Cassavetes created a body of work which was sometimes difficult but which has also had a lasting influence on the way independent filmmaking is conceived.

23rd March 2008 ; Screening of Mandela - Son of Africa, Father of a Nation

A fascinating portrait of Nelson Mandela

Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation
Documentary / biography
By Angus Gibson &
Jo Menell
Year : 1996
Country : South Africa
English with English sub titles
Run time : 118 minutes

23^rd March 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call 9443039630

Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation is the film biography of the first democratically elected president of the racially united South Africa. Directors Jo Menell and Angus Gibson give us an up-close and personal portrait of this black hero. Mandela was interviewed extensively and who allowed the film makers into his home.

"The struggle is my life," Mandela wrote in a letter from underground on June 26, 1961. "I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days." More than anything else, Nelson Mandela is the living embodiment of the struggle for freedom by South Africa's blacks.

What a fascinating portrait this film paints of Mandela! Named ``Nelson'' by a teacher who did not like his tribal name, Mandela was one of nine children of a polygamist father who had four wives (how did Mandela feel about that? The movie doesn't ask). When his father died, the bright boy was adopted by a chief and prepared to become counselor to the king. He ran away to Johannesburg in the early 1940s to escape an arranged marriage and had soon moved into the Soweto Township home of Walter Sisulu.

The Xhosa tribesman was trained to be a leader. Mandela studied law in Johannesburg and helped found South Africa's first black law firm. He went on to become a forceful presence in the African National Conference (ANC). Freedom was the holy grail that compelled him to initiate nonviolent campaigns against the government's policy of apartheid. And when the ANC was banned, Mandela went underground and organized a nationwide strike.

Mandela's quest for freedom for his people put a strain on his two marriages. During Mandela's 27 years in prison his second wife Winnie courageously stood her ground in the face of bannings, imprisonment, and eventual banishment to the village of Brandfut in 1977. Mandela's sister says of him in the film, "I realize he isn't ours. He belongs to the nation." This inspiring and edifying screen biography celebrates Mandela as a freedom fighter and a liberator — the father of a nation.

16th March 2008; Screening of Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac

A Film By Jean-Paul Rappeneau
Runtime:137 min
Country :France
French with English Sub titles
16^th March 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call 9443039630

At the heart of 19th-century playwright Edmond Rostand's popular "Cyrano de Bergerac" is a great story about unrequited love and a nobleman whose soul is as beautiful as his nose is unsightly.

In Jean-Paul Rappeneau's French production of "Cyrano de Bergerac," the director streamlines much of that flabbiness, preserves the iambic verse (with thoughtful, subtitled translation from Anthony Burgess) and creates, for the most part, a pleasurable interpretation with costume-bedecked romance, intrigue and comedy.

As the title character, Gerard Depardieu, France's one-man acting industry, brings to the role not only his own formidable nose (which nevertheless nuzzles under a special-effects schnozz) but also a swashbuckling swagger that enlivens the production.

"Lug your guts away, Salami," he bellows at a stage performer whose overacting he particularly despises. "Or I'll remove you slice by slice."

When Cyrano cannot have his beautiful cousin Roxane, he helps his friend Christian. He ghostwrites letters and ghost-recites speeches in the moonlight, and because Roxane senses that the words come from a heart brave and true, she pledges herself to Christian.

This 138-minute film, comprising two thousand performers and a helluva lot of musketry, has several good scenes, including the well-known one in which Christian utters romantic praise to Roxanne from below her balcony, while de Bergerac feeds him lines.

The moral may be uniquely French, but the story remains a universal treasure. One of the nation's most expensive productions ever, it is fairly jostling with musket-armed extras and details of the 17th century, in which the story takes place. There's a Dickensian look to the movie, so shadowed and dark it's as if Rappeneau didn't really want us to get a good glimpse of the storied nose. But as Roxane, the French ingenue Brochet brings light and grace to the proceedings.

"Cyrano de Bergerac" is played full tilt, like Don Quixote against the windmills. An enthusiastic melodrama, it spills emotions like stars across the noble screen.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau

Born 8 April 1932

Jean-Paul Rappeneau entered films in a traditional way, as a second assistant to Jean Dréville on Suspects, as collaborator on Vilardebo's short film Entre la terre et le ciel, and as the director of the short Chronique provinciale. During the next few years he concentrated on writing, and acquired a solid reputation with scripts for Signé Arsène Lupin, two films by Louis Malle, Zazie dans le métro and La Vie privée, and a short film by René Clair in La Française et l'amour. The commercially successful L'Homme de Rio, directed by Philippe de Broca and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, was followed by an international co-production, La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo.

These films had crystalized his own tastes and ambitions, and in 1966 he directed his first long film, La Vie de château, a brilliant comedy situated in Normandy on the eve of the invasion by the allies during the Second World War.The film is revealed as the work of an elegant filmmaker who is also sensible to the playing of the actors, particularly Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Brasseur, and Philippe Noiret. His next film was Les Mariés de l'an II, a comedy where heroism is mixed with romance and burlesque with tragedy.

After working previously with his own original scripts, Rappeneau turned his attention to adaptation, and to works he deemed initially to be unfilmable: Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac and Jean Giono's Le Hussard sur le toit. With Gérard Depardieu cast as the larger-than-life, swashbuckling romantic hero, Cyrano deservedly brought Rappeneau international attention. The director's meticulous preparation is evident from the opening sequence in the theatre, the carefully choreographed sword fights and the impressively orchestrated battle scenes involving over 2000 extras. Careful attention to period detail once more characterizes the director's approach in his beautifully crafted evocation of 1830s France. Both films, along with productions such as Berri's Jean de Florette, Manon des Sources, or Germinal, are indicative of a particular trend in French filmmaking (not so far removed from post-war literary cinema) in which classic texts are transformed through film to become a new cultural phenomenon: heritage cinema.

9th March 2008 ; Screening of Fiddler On The Roof

Fiddler On The Roof
A Film By Norman Jewison
Year : 1971
Run Time : 181 Minutes
English with English Sub titles
9th March 2008; 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Fiddler on the Roof, based on the short story "Tevye and His Daughters" by Sholom Aleichem, was one of the first musicals to defy Broadway's established rules of commercial success. It dealt with serious issues such as persecution, poverty, and the struggle to hold on to one's beliefs in the midst of a hostile and chaotic environment. Criticized at first for its "limited appeal", Fiddler on the Roof struck such a universal chord in audiences that it became, for a time, the longest running production in the history of Broadway.

The 1971 film version of this Broadway musical was directed by Norman Jewison. The film won three Academy Awards, including one for arranger-conductor John Williams. It was nominated for several more, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Chaim Topol as Tevye, and Best Supporting Actor for Leonard Frey.

The film follows the plot of the stage play very closely, although it omits the songs "Now I Have Everything" and "The Rumor". It takes place in the Jewish village of Anatevka in Tsarist Russia in 1905 and centers on the character of Tevye, a poor milkman, and his daughters' marriages. As Tevye says in the introductory narration, the Jews have relied upon their traditions to maintain the stability of their way of life for centuries; but as times change, that stability is threatened on the small scale by Tevye's daughters' wishes to marry men not chosen in the traditional way by the matchmaker, and on the large scale by pogroms and revolution in Russia.

Much of the story is told in musical form. "Fiddler on the Roof," has traveled a long way from its source, from pre-revolutionary Russia, from the pages of Sholem Aleichem, even from the Broadway stage. The show focuses on one man's issues within his own family and faith. From that alone the show won universal appeal. Everyone can relate with Tevye's struggle. There on stage or screen we can see another adult who has choices to make everyday. That is a lot of stress and the musical expresses the sentiments wonderfull.

Norman Jewison

Producer, director, screenwriter, actor, cattle breeder, cabdriver . . .
Sometimes Credited As: Norman Frederick Jewison

A consummate craftsman known for eliciting fine performances from his casts, Norman Jewison has addressed important social and political issues throughout his directing and producing career, often making controversial or complicated subjects accessible to mainstream audiences.

Norman Jewison was born in Toronto in 1926. He attended Kew Beach School, and while growing up in the 1930's displayed an aptitude for performing and theatre. He served in the Navy (1944-1945) during World War II, and after being discharged travelled in the American South, where he encountered segregation, an experience that would influence his later work.

Jewison attended Victoria College in the University of Toronto, graduating with a B.A. in 1949. As a student he was involved in writing, directing and acting in various theatrical productions, including the All-Varsity Revue in 1949. During the summer he worked as a waiter at the Banff Springs Hotel, as well as doing local theatre production. Following graduation he was determined to work in show business, preferably as an actor, and ventured to Hollywood and New York in search of opportunities.

Norman Jewison's career as a film director began in 1962. He has directed 41 films till date which include a number of unforgettable movies that deal with many important issues of our world today. His noteworthy films include In the Heat of the Night (1967) ,The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966) , The Cincinnati Kid (1965),...And Justice for All. (1979) , F.I.S.T (1978), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) , Fiddler on the Roof (1971) ,Moonstruck (1987) , Agnes of God (1985) , A Soldier's Story (1984) , The Statement (2003).

Despite his fame for directing the film version of Fiddler on the Roof and The Statement, as well as the appearance of his surname, Jewison is not Jewish.

2nd March 2008 ; Screening of Whale Rider

A story of love , rejection and triumph
of a young girl who fights
to fulfill her destiny

Whale Rider

A Film By Niki Caro
Year:2002
Country : New Zealand
English with English sub titles
Run time : 105 minutes

So many films by and about teenagers are mired in vulgarity and stupidity; this one, like its heroine, dares to dream. - Roger Ebert

"Whale Rider" is a New Zealand film that updates a 1,000-year-old Maori legend about the emergence, once every generation, of a tribal leader. It is based on a folk myth, and it's told with an elemental timelessness that feels like a swan dive into prehistory.

Click here for TRAILER OF WHALE RIDER

In other respects, the movie's as modern as a T-shirt. The young heroine survives her twin brother at birth. ''There was no gladness when I was born,'' says the older Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes) in voice-over. It takes much of the film for that tribal funk to disperse, but the payoff, when it comes, packs an emotional wallop.

Taking place in the village of Whangara, on the northeast coast of New Zealand's North Island, ''Whale Rider'' is the story of a people's decline and a young girl's uphill battle to restore its pride. Paikea, or Pai, is 11 when the film proper begins -- she has a child's playful eyes but a brow furrowing with purpose -- and the wrecked culture she surveys could just as easily be on a Native American reservation or above the Arctic Circle. Drinking and joblessness are pandemic, the women chain-smoke and play cards all day, and the men are either in prison or have, like her father, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), fled to less hopeless climes.
Pai, named for a mythical founding figure said to have led the Maoris to New Zealand on the back of a whale, isn't alone in wanting to reconnect with a more glorious past. Her grandfather, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), is a stiff, humorless patriarch searching for the next generation's leader. He takes it upon himself to train the local boys in such ancient tribal arts as taiaha, or stick fighting, but they're a uninterested lot: Only Pai desperately wants to absorb the lore and the strength Koro has to offer. Because of her gender, though, her grandfather insists she's not meant to ''mess around with sacred things.''

''Whale Rider'' follows their clash to the bitter end, and most of the time it hardly seems like a fair fight. He's a tribal chief and an infuriating zealot, while she's a little girl tuned in to mysteries no one else can hear. But Pai's stubbornness counts for a lot; there's a scene where she outraces a school bus on her bicycle that says everything you need to know about the girl's drive. Ultimately it's enough to bring her family and friends around, including her layabout uncle (Grant Roa), her grandmother Nanny Flowers (Vicky Haughton), and even her grudging, westernized father.

Directed by Niki Caro, a white New Zealand filmmaker who had to fight to win the trust of the Whangara locals, ''Whale Rider'' has been filmed with lush end-of-the-world beauty, and the mysticism that flits about the edges of the narrative becomes satisfyingly overt by the climactic scenes (there are, indeed, whales). Paratene's Koro, for one, is maddeningly bullheaded, to the point where you stop believing in him as a character, and there's a sense that he's carrying all the sins of Western patriarchy in addition to his own ethnic chauvinism.

Castle-Hughes's Pai, by contrast, is a girl growing into her self and her destiny, and she's no more believable than when she breaks down in tears because her grandpa hasn't made it to the school pageant. At its transporting best, ''Whale Rider'' seesaws between archetype and innocence -- it's a re-founding myth that happens in real time, before an audience's wondering eyes.
As it turns out, "Whale Rider" is less an anthropological study of the Maori people than a universal story of female empowerment.

(source: New York Times )

Niki Caro
















Niki Caro (born 1967) is an award winning film director, producer and screenwriter who was born in Wellington, New Zealand. Niki Caro is one of New Zealand's most original and inventive filmmakers. Her work is now known and acclaimed internationally through the film Whale Rider. The film has scooped a sheaf of awards including an Oscar nomination for best actress for 13-year-old leading actor Keisha Castle-Hughes, and eight audience awards at prestigious international film festivals.

Niki directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Witi Ihimaera, based on his book of the same name. She has also been honoured by her peers with a 2003 Humanitas Award, an American-based prize for film and television makers whose work offers insight into contemporary society.

Whale Rider is the culmination of almost 15 years in the film and television industry since her graduation from Elam School of Fine Arts in 1988, during which she has produced a body of outstanding work.

Niki's first feature film, Memory and Desire, was selected for Critics Week at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998 and voted Best Film in the 1999 New Zealand Film Awards. Niki also received a Special Jury Prize for her work as writer and director. Niki has been a leading contributor to local television content, writing and directing a number of dramas including the award-winning best drama series True Life Stories, Jackson's Wharf and Mercy Peak.


Niki Caro has directed seven films till date.

24th February 2008; SATYAJIT RAY FILM FESTIVAL

"The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race,
which are characteristic of all his films,have impressed me greatly. ...
I feel that he is a "giant" of the movie industry."

- Akira Kurosawa

SATYAJIT RAY
FILM FESTIVAL

24th Ferbuary 2008 ; 9.45 am - 7 pm
Cosmopolitan Club , Race Course ,Coimbatore
Call 94430 39630

Satyajit Ray

Director, Producer, Screenwriter,
Composer, Writer, Graphic Designer
Born: May 2, 1921, Kolkata (Calcutta), India
Died: April 23, 1992, Calcutta, India

Satyajit Ray, standing 6'-4" tall, was a towering figure in the world of cinema. He studied at the university in Calcutta and later joined Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore's university to study art. He began his career as a commercial artist (1943-56). He founded Calcutta's first film society in 1947 and made his first film, Pather Panchali (1955) while working at an advertising agency. Pather Panchali was an immediate success and won Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival. Pather Panchali with his Aparajito (1956, The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959, The World of Apu) are known as 'Apu Trilogy'. His later films include Jalsaghar (1958, The Music Room), Kanchenjunga
(1962), Charulata (1964, The Lonely Wife), Ashanti Sanket (1973, Distant Thunder), The Chess Players (1977), The Home and The World (1984), Ganashatru (1989, Public Enemy), and Agantuk (1990, The Stranger). Ray also edited Sandesh, a children's magazine and wrote numerous fiction and nonfiction works. In 1992 he received an honorary Academy Award.

Satyajit Ray, the master storyteller, has left a cinematic heritage that belongs as much to India
as to the world. His films demonstrate a remarkable humanism, elaborate observation and subtle handling of characters and situations. The cinema of Satyajit Ray is a rare blend of intellect and emotions. He is controlled, precise, meticulous, and yet, evokes deep emotional response from the audience. His films depict a fine sensitivity without using melodrama or dramatic excesses. He evolved a cinematic style that is almost invisible. He strongly believed - "The best technique is the one that's not noticeable".

Ray directly controlled many aspects of filmmaking. He wrote all the screenplays of his films, many of which were based on his own stories. He designed the sets and costumes, operated the camera since Charulata (1964), he composed the music for all his films since 1962 and designed the publicity posters for his new releases.

In addition to filmmaking, Ray was a composer, a writer and a graphic designer. He even designed a new typeface. In 1961, he revived and continued to publish the Bengali children's magazine "Sandesh", which was founded by his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray .

Though initially inspired by the neo-realist tradition, his cinema belongs not to a specific category or style but a timeless meta-genre of a style of story telling that touches the audience in some way. All very different in style and content, and yet creators of cinema that is timeless and universal.

Konangal is screening 3 of Ray’s classics , Pather Panchali , Charulatha and Shantranj Ke Khilari at Cosmopolitan Club , Race Course , Coimbatore from 9.45 am to 7 pm on 24^th Feb 2008.

Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road)
1955, India. 115 min, B/W, In Bengali with English Sub titles

"The first film by the masterly Satyajit Ray - possibly the most unembarrassed and natural of directors - is a quiet reverie about the life of an impoverished Brahman family in a Bengali village. Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen."
- Pauline Kael

The time is early twentieth century, a remote village in Bengal.The film deals with a Brahmin family, a priest - Harihar, his wife Sarbajaya, daughter Durga, and his aged cousin Indir Thakrun - struggling to make both ends meet. Harihar is frequently away from home on work. The wife is raising her mischievous daughter Durga and caring for elderly cousin Indir, whose independent spirit sometimes irritates her... Apu is born. With the little boy's arrival, happiness, play and exploration uplift the children's daily life.

Durga and Apu share an intimate bond. They follow a candy seller whose wares they can not afford, enjoy the theatre, discover a train and witness a marriage ceremony. They even face death of their aunt - Indir Thakrun. Durga is accused of a theft. She fall ill after a joyous dance in rains of the monsoon. On a stormy day, when Harihar is away on work, Durga dies. On Harihar's return, the family leaves their village in search of a new life in Benaras. The film closes with an image of Harihar, wife and son - Apu, slowly moving way in an ox cart.

Charulata (The Lonely Wife)
1964, India. 117 min, B/W, In Bengali with English Sub titles

"...The interplay of sophistication and simplicity is extraordinary."
- Penelope Houston, Sight and Sound, 1965

Charulata (The Lonely Wife) was Ray's twelfth feature film. It was also the director's favorite. Ray described the film as the one which has the least defects. In an interview with 'Cineaste' magazine, when asked about his most satisfying film, Ray said, "Well, the one film that I would make the same way, if I had to do it again, is Charulata."It stands out among Ray's films.

The location is Calcutta, around 1880. Bhupati, who edits and publishes in his home a political newspaper called The Sentinel, is persuaded that his wife Charulata has special gifts as a writer. When his young cousin (the relationship is considered to be equivalent to Charu's brother-in-law) Amal, comes to live with them, Bhupati asks him to encourage her cultural interests, but in such a way that she remains unaware of her husband's intervention in setting up their encounter. An increasingly intimate relationship develops between Charulata and Amal: one based on complicity, friendship, writing, and eventually love. Meanwhile, the bookkeeper of The Sentinel, another family member, embezzles the funds supporting the paper and destroys Bhupati's hopes for his enterprise. All he has left is the trust he has placed in Charulata and Amal, which has been compromised by their feelings for each other.

In this film, as well as in Devi (The Goddess, 1960) and Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1984), Ray explores the cultural emergence of the idea of the "modern woman" in the upper class of colonial India, showing with striking sensitivity the pressures this new ideal placed on individual women whose self-identities were also molded by traditional expectations.

Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players)
1977, India. 113 min., Color, Urdu/Hindi and English- with English Sub titles

Shatranj Ke Khilari was Ray's most expensive film boasting of stars from western and Hindi cinema of Bombay. It is also Ray’s one of the two non-Bengali films; other being Sadgati (Deliverance) also based on a short story by Munshi Premchand.

While Munshi Premchand's story focuses on the two chess players Mirza and Mir, Ray expanded the story by elaborating the characters of Wajid Ali Shah and General Outram and adding a few more characters. Ray was attracted to the story by the parallel that Munshi Premchand draws between chess games of Mir and Mirza, and the crafty moves by the British to capture the king.

The action takes place in 1856, in Lucknow, capital of the moslem kingdom of Oudh. The king is Wajid Ali Shah, who prefers to devote himself to the pleasures of art instead of submitting to the subterfuges and stakes of politics. He dedicates his time, sequestered in his palace, to poetry and to recitals of music and dance. The English Company of India, which is strengthening its grip on the country (in 1858 the British crown would directly take over control of the government), charges general Outtram with dethroning the king, who eventually abdicates without a fight. Parallel to this, two aristocrats ravenously indulge their passion for chess while neglecting everything else, beginning

with their respective wives. We first see them playing chess in their houses, and they end up playing outdoors, without having noticed the historic changes ocurring under their noses.

All the lead players, Sanjeev Kumar (Mirza Sajjad Ali), Saeed Jaffrey (Mir Roshan Ali), Amjad Khan (Wajid Ali Shah, Nawab), Victor Banerjee (Ali Naqi Khan, the Prime Minister) and Sir Richard Attenborough (General Outram) give their finest performances.

Courtesy SatyajitRay.org

ADMISSION FREE ; Lunch and tea served for Rs.50

Satyajit Ray Film Festival is supported by
Hollywood DVD Shoppe
& ONGC Chennai

17th February 2008; Screening of documentary and short film

Screening of documentary and short film

Man With a Movie Camera (1929) a celebrated 68 minute
documentary film
West Bank Story a 21 minute Oscar winning musical comedy.
**********************************************
1

"I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine,
show you the world as only I can see it."
- Dziga Vertov

Man With a
Movie Camera

Path breaking avant-garde documentary
A revolutionary experiment in cinema

A Classic Documentary By Dziga Vertov
Country : Russia , Year : 1929
Silent film with music
Run time : 68 Min,
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
17th February 2008 ; 5.45 pm

"My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you." - Dziga Vertov'

Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a stunning avant-garde, documentary meta-narrative which celebrates filmmaking. The film uses radical editing techniques and cinematic pyrotechnics to portray a typical day in Moscow from dawn to dusk. But Vertov isn't just recording reality, he transforms it through the power of the camera's "kino-glaz" (cinema eye). Vertov's rich imagery transcends the earth-bound limitations of our everyday ways of seeing.

Click here for Trailer of Man With A movie Camera

Vertov desired to link workers with machines. His film opens with a manifesto, a series of intertitles telling us that this film is an "experiment," a search for an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based on its total separation from the language of literature and theater." Vertov desired to create cinema that had its own "rhythm, one lifted from nowhere else, and we find it in the movements of things."

The Man With a Movie Camera is divided into nine orchestral-type movements, and several of them use rapid-fire editing, wild juxtapositions (e.g. blinking eyes with shutter blinds) and multiple exposures to mesh workers with machines in a simultaneity of reverence and celebration. Levers and wheels turn and workers synchronously turn with them. Later, Vertov reveals more mechanical reality as he juxtaposes a woman getting her hair washed with another washing clothes, and then shows a barber shaving a man, and sharpening a razor's edge. The sequence ends with newspapers rifling along a printing press, and a young woman packing cigarettes, watching the machine's quick slap pressing, while smiling at her labor.

Dziga Vertov

b. January 2, 1896, Bialystok, Poland
d. February 12, 1954, Moscow, Russia

" Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into he visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten. "
—Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926

So much of what Dziga Vertov thought and wrote about cinema was written at the time of the greatest propagandist uproar in the twentieth century—the birth of the Modern Soviet State. Yet so much, in hindsight, sounds more like a classic realist position than that of the formalist experiments Vertov claimed for his group, Kino-Pravda and its doctrine of Kino Eye—the term he invented to cover both the ideology of his short lived group and the filmmakers in it. For a little more than ten years he was, along with Sergei Eisenstein, the leading theoretician of the new art of cinema itself and by the end of that ten years his career and his outpouring of cinema ideas were effectively over.

Dziga Vertov was born as Denis Abramovich (later changed to Arkadievich) Kaufman in a Jewish book-dealer's family. As a child, he studied piano and violin, and at ten began to write poetry. In 1918 Mikhail Koltstov, who headed the Moscow Film Committee's newsreel section, hired Vertov as his assistant. Among Vertov's colleagues was Lev Kuleshov, who was conducting his now legendary experiments in montage, as well as Edouard Tissé, Eisenstein's future cameraman. Vertov began to edit documentary footage and soon was appointed editor of Kinonedelya, the first Soviet weekly newsreel. His first film as a director was The Anniversary of the Revolution (1919), followed by two shorts, Battle of Tsaritsyn (1920) and The Agit-Train Vsik (1921), as well as the thirteen-reel History of Civil War (1922).

He called the 23 newreels he directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, 'pravda' being the Russian word for the truth .Vertov's films represented an intricate blend of art and political and poetic rhetoric. In recent years Vertov's heritage of poetic documentary has influenced many filmmakers all over the world.

2

West Bank Story
A Short Film by Ari Sandel
Genre: Satire, Musical Comedy, Message Movie
Year 2005 ; Run time : 21 min.
Won Oscar. Another 5 win

Click here for Trailer of West Bank Story

Ari Sandel's allegorical musical comedy short West Bank Story observes the forbidden romance that blossoms between Israeli soldier David and Palestinian fast food cashier Fatima, who meet and fall for one another, despite the intense rivalry between their parents' competing falafel stands on the tumultuous West Bank. Conflict builds when the pastry machine owned by The Kosher King accidentally edges over onto land owned by The Hummus Hut. This prompts the Palestinians to destroy the machine, and the Israelis retaliate by building a wall between the two properties. In the end, however, love prevails, and the obliteration of both restaurants induces the two families to establish a truce and lay the foundation for future harmony.

10th Februrary 2008 ; Stanely Kubrik's Full Metal Jacket

"The dead know only one thing: it’s better to be alive."
– Private Joker (Matthew Modine)

FULL METAL JACKET
A Film by Stanley Kubrick
An Epic Story of the Vietnam War
Year 1987
English with English sub tittles
Run time : 116 Min
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium , Ganapathy
10th Feb 2008 ; 5.45 pm

First movement: At a Marine boot camp on Parris Island, a squad of young recruits are brutalized by Sergeant Hartman, a horrifyingly funny drill instructor whose face and voice so dominate the film’s first section that only two other characters are permitted to develop a semblance of psychological individuality: a wise ass named Joker and a dumb farm boy named Pyle, whose propensity for screwing up makes him the main target for Hartman’s brutality, and that of his own comrades, until he goes mad and shoots his persecutor in the latrine.

Second movement: Cut to Da Nang, where Joker and a gung ho newcomer named Rafter Man have drawn easy duty as correspondents for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, and suddenly the tension of the first part dissipates, the structure of the film loosens to the point of entropy and the narrative is set adrift, as if we were watching outtakes from a film whose story we haven’t completely under stood. We follow Joker and Rafter Man from the placid corruption of Da Nang, broken only by a curiously anemic sequence showing the let Offensive, to the countryside around Hue, where they join a seasoned combat unit called the "Lusthogs" for an assault on Hue, overrun by the Vietcong. The drifting, fragmentary, anti-dramatic feeling of these sequences is heightened in the aftermath of the assault, when a television crew films the characters speaking in choreographed succession like actors in a bad Broadway play about Vietnam, then addressing the camera directly in inter views .

It is only during the last minutes of the film that a sense of narrative progression returns: as the Lusthogs patrol the streets of Hue, they find themselves pinned down by an invisible sniper who turns out, when Joker penetrates her stronghold, to be a teenage girl. Cut down by Rafter Man’s bullets, the sniper is slow to die, and only Joker is willing to put her out of her misery with a bullet through the head. Afterward, we see American soldiers marching at night silhouetted against a fiery landscape, singing the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme song, while Joker, barely distinguished from the horde by the last of a sparse series of laconic voiceovers, informs us that he is no longer afraid.

In war, which from a mass viewpoint predicates success on the acknowledgment of dichotomies and sides, there can be no one answer. Kubrick brings individuality back to cinema viewers by destroying it on screen. The final march, comprised of faceless silhouettes, is as democratic a gesture as an artist can give us. In that moment we are one and we are all.

Stanley Kubrick:
The Master Filmmaker

“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can
retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that
no other art form can hope to tackle.”

July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999

"I would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as
I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself."

Stanley Kubrick was an influential and acclaimed American master of cinema and producer considered among the greatest of the 20th Century. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres in his movies and his reclusive personality about his films and personal life.

Click here for trailer of Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 in the Bronx, New York City. By age 13 he had developed passions for jazz drumming, chess, and photography. At 17 years of age he landed a job at Look magazine as a photographer. Worked there for several years, traveling all over America. He enrolled as a non-matriculating student at Columbia University and attended the Museum of Modern Art film showings as often as they changed the program.
In 1951 at 23 years of age, Kubrick used his savings to finance his first film, a 13 minute documentary . After short films like Flying Padre and The Seafarers , in 1953 he raised $13,000 from his relatives to finance his first feature length film Fear & Desire and in 1955 he raised $40,000 from friends and relatives and shot his second feature Killer’s Kiss. After that with the release of Killing & Paths Of Glory, Kubrick never looked back. Till the day he died . Kubrick was involved in his films and gave the world nothing but masterpieces - Spartacus (1960) , Lolita (1962) ,Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) , A Clockwork Orange (1971) , Barry Lyndon (1975) , The Shining (1980) , Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ,

Cult of Kubrick is alive and well

Death is clearly no deterrent for cult filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. It has been nine years since he passed away, but the next couple of years may reveal a lot more of his unfinished work.
After being credited for creating the film Artificial Intelligence: AI -- adapted by Steven Spielberg -- Kubrick's notes of over half a century ago are being turned to again, for three new projects. Media reports promise one film that could provide a link between the director's two masterpieces, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.
According to a report in The Sunday Times, UK, the manuscripts were found after Kubrick's death, in one of many trunks at his home. His son-in-law Philip Hobbs, who worked with him for over a decade, maintains that two manuscripts were almost full scripts -- an anti-war film called The Down Slope, and the other called God Fearing Man, about a priest who became a bank robber.
The most exciting discovery is that of an 80-page script for a mystery-thriller titled Lunatic at Large, about an escaped axe-murderer. The wheels have already begun to turn and, apparently, Colin Farrell has been offered the lead role. Lunatic at Large may be directed by Christopher Palmer, one of Britain's leading advertisement directors.

Proof that the cult of Kubrick is alive and well.

Hindu write up by Pankaja Srinivasan on Chaplin's documentary screening

A walk with the tramp

As part of Konangal’s series on famous documentaries, it was Charlie Chaplin’s turn

It’s hard to believe. But once there was a world without Charlie Chaplin… These are the opening words of Richard Schickle’s documentary, Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin, that provides a ringside view to the winsome tramp’s real life, warts and all.

Charlie the kid

Chaplin’s music hall beginnings, his difficult childhood — with a father who was never around and a beloved mother who was institutionalised when he was still a lad. (Some of that heartbreak is seen in The Kid, where the little boy is separated from him).

Chaplin incorporated a lot from his real life into his films. His uncle’s pub, East Street, London where he grew up, characters his mom would imitate to amuse him ...all found way into his films.

It was exciting times Chaplin lived in. World War 1, and plenty happening.

He took a pot shot at ideologies, people, society and everything else in between.

And did it all as the slightly befuddled tramp who wandered in and out of situations over which he had no control.

Classic scenes

There are snippets from classics such as The Kid, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Limelight, etc.

Chaplin’s friends, admirers and colleagues (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Marcel Marceau, Richard Attenborough, Robert Downey Junior who played Charlie in Attenborough’s Chaplin) speak about him. So do his sons and daughter (actress Geraldine Chaplin). We learn of Chaplin’s admiration for Gandhi, his run in with authority, and his refusal to conform.

Warts and all

We are told of his unsavoury relationships with women as young as 16 or even younger, his many marriages, messy divorces, and the paternity suits. Being sympathetic to the communists, he was a target of witch hunts. But, he held his own.

When he was informed on his way to England that he would not be allowed to re-enter America this is what he is supposed to have disdainfully said.

“I have no further use for America. I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ was president!” Chaplin spent his last years in Switzerland (there is footage of him there as he plays, play-acts and clowns around with his family).

An appeal

Konangal urges film buffs to help it promote good cinema. It plans plenty of retrospectives, workshops and outreach programmes. For details visit Web:http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com or call 0422-4376226/9443039630

PANKAJA SRINIVASAN