25th Jul 2010; Mizoguchi's UGETSU

UGETSU

A film by Kenji Mizoguchi

Year : 1953

Japanese with English sub titles

Run time: 94 mins

25th July 2010; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theatre, Perks School

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

A fifteen minutes documentary on

'UGETSU' by noted Japanese film maker

Masahiro Shinoda will follow the main screening

Two brothers, one consumed by greed, the other by envy. In a time when the land is savaged by marauding armies, they risk their families and their lives to pursue their obsessions. Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu" (1953) tells their stories in one of the greatest of all films -- one which, along with Kurosawa's "Rashomon," helped introduce Japanese cinema to Western audiences.

The heroes are rough-hewn and consumed by ambition, but the film style is elegant and mysterious, and somehow we know before we are told that this is a ghost story.

The opening shot is one of Mizoguchi's famous "scroll shots," so named for the way it pans across the landscape like a Japanese scroll painting. We see a village, the roofs of the rude houses weighed down by tree branches to keep them from blowing away in the wind. We meet Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, and his brother Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa), a farmer.

Ugetsu Monogatari is an exquisitely realized, serenely composed allegorical film on love, greed, and betrayal. Kenji Mizoguchi's seamless fusion of poetic realism and surreal mysticism creates a rarefied atmosphere that is paradoxically beautiful and austere, redemptive and tragic, symbolizing Genjuro's coexistence between the physical and supernatural realm - a reflection of the duality of the human soul.

Chronologically, the protracted feudal war surrounds every villager with the pervasive specter of death.

Episodically, Mizoguchi uses an overhead shot of a woman dressed in a soft, fluttering white kimono to introduce us to the transcendental Lady Wakasa. Genjuro passes through a series of open and screened spaces at the Kutsuki mansion, creating a visual dichotomy of physical reality and ethereal shadows, before his formal introduction to Lady Wakasa.

Inevitably, the tortured Genjuro is forced to confront his beguiling temptress - a metaphor for the dark passion of the soul - and returns to his fractured, haunted past: a diligent, simple potter, inspired by the love of his devoted wife.

(Excerpts from Strictly Film School, Roger Ebert reviews)

Mizoguchi (1898-1956) was famous for the theory that one scene should equal one cut, although sometimes he made exceptions. Yasujiro Ozu had the same theory, with the difference that Ozu's camera never moved in his later films, while Mizoguchi's style was constructed around flowing, poetic camera movement. Consider a scene in Ugetsu where Lady Wakasa visits Genjuro as he is bathing in an outdoor pool, and as she enters the pool to join him, water splashes over the side and the camera follows the splash into a pan across rippling water that ends with the two of them having a picnic on the grass.

Born in Tokyo, in 1898, Mizoguchi was the middle child of a roofer/carpenter. Mizoguchi studied painting at the Aohashi Western Painting Research Institute, Tokyo. In 1922, Mizoguchi was hired as an assistant director for Osamu Wakayama at Nikkatsu Studios. The Japanese film industry was changing rapidly when Mizoguchi entered it, Kabuki-inspired movies of the 1910s were giving way to those inspired by Western films. Mizoguchi, who became a full-fledged director in 1923, quickly showed an enthusiasm for novelty and the West.

As his style matured, his work underwent an astonishing transformation. This former advocate of the faddish and the radical began creating finely crafted period pieces centered on downtrodden women. To be sure, Mizoguchi's metamorphosis was hastened in no small measure by growing political oppression during the 1930s. One of his few contemporary dramas during this time, Osaka Elegy, was banned by the military government in 1940.

Mizoguchi populated his films with marginalized women such as geishas, barmaids, and mistreated housewives. But unlike Naruse's proud, willful heroines who toil for an elusive dignity, Mizoguchi's women selflessly devote themselves to the objects of their love. Characters such as Taki in Taki no Shiraito or Otoku in Story of the Late Chrysanthemums willingly destroy themselves to enable success for their men. The Chinese maid in Empress Yang Kwei Fei molds herself into the king's vision of perfection and then calmly walks to her death to save his life. Mizoguchi's heroines blame no one during their headlong trajectory toward destruction; they seem to transcend the horrors they endure

In his later films, Mizoguchi couched these tragic tales in a quiet lyricism that evoked the impermanence of human life. Like a traditional Chinese scroll painting that depicts unfolding human drama in the midst of an overwhelming landscape, Mizoguchi's camera lingers on the stillness of a natural setting or the passing of a moment, rather than on the machinations of plot. Individual humans seem barely consequential: they work, suffer, love, and die beneath a larger, unchanging order.

In the 1950s, Mizoguchi reached his creative zenith with masterpiece after masterpiece, including The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, Chikamatsu Monogatari, and Ugetsu, often considered one of the most beautiful films ever made. Mizoguchi died, a devout Buddhist, in 1956.

(Source: Internet)

18th July 2010; Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven

A film by Terrence Malick

Year 1978

Country :USA

English with English subtitles

Run time: 94 min

18th Jul 2010; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theatre, Perks school.

Screening will be followed by a 20 minutes

documentary with Haskell Wexler

on cinematography in ‘Days of Heaven’

Terence Malick's "Days of Heaven'' has been praised for its painterly images and evocative score.this is the story of a teenage girl, told by her, and its subject is the way that hope and cheer have been beaten down in her heart.

Days of Heaven takes a quantum leap into the cosmological vision of a F.W. Murnau or Kenji Mizoguchi: suddenly all the forms and materials are in constant motion around each other, constantly defining, re-defining and transforming one another.

Malick's filmmaking is quiet, assured, meditative, and his film slowly parcels out fragments of narrative with a gentle rhythm that matches the steady flow of the natural world surrounding his characters. The film is deeply attuned to a world beyond its characters and their earthbound problems, and Malick seems to be at his best when he's working on a grand scale, when the people are just dots or black outlines in the midst of vast, seemingly endless vistas — or when there are no people at all to clutter the flat, wide-open spaces he's filming.

This is a film of grandeur and beauty, an epic in which there is no epic action, no broad drama, only the wonder of nature and the nearly equal awe inspired by the cinematography that captures nature in such unguarded moments.

The story here is a simple one. Bill (Richard Gere), a laborer in a steel mill, accidentally kills his foreman in a fight, and consequently goes on the run with his girl Abby (Brooke Adams) and his little sister (Linda Manz). The trio, with Bill and Abby pretending to be brother and sister, find work on a wheat farm, harvesting the autumn crop under the attentive eye of an unnamed farmer (Sam Shepard) who soon falls for Abby. The love triangle that develops, and the tragedy that results, are related almost entirely in short, elliptical scenes that strip down the basic story to its most essential details and moments.

Malick is clearly a filmmaker who believes in economy in his storytelling, and there's also a certain flatness of tone that equates all of the film's images and moments.There are many individual moments here that must surely rank among the most beautiful shots ever filmed.

The film is propelled along by tiny incidents, accumulating its force and its emotional impact by positioning its characters' petty drama in a context that is both universal and socially engaged.

Malick's pictorial sensibility, his love of natural beauty, doesn't prevent the film from dealing with the realities of Dust Bowl living in the Depression era. In fact, the film's emotional locus is in its treatment of extreme poverty and transient labor, not in the rather rote love triangle and its effect on the lovers. The driving force of the film's drama is poverty, and when Abby begins gravitating towards the farmer, she seems to fall in love with his lifestyle more than she does with him.

Malick uses his landscape shots as a fully developed language in their own right. These shots have a wide variety of meanings, signaling the passage of time, suggesting metaphorical content that relates to the story, as rhythmic inserts for purposes of pacing, and sometimes, simply for their own sake, to bask in the beauty of a natural world in which even the most melodramatic of human-scale stories can seem small and inconsequential. (Source:Internet)

Myth-making With Natural Light

Nestor Almendros & Haskell Wexler were in charge of the cinematography. Nestor Almendros won the Oscar for cinematography.

"Since I lack imagination," Almendros wrote in his marvelous book, A Man With A Camera, "I seek inspiration in nature, which offers me an infinite variety of forms." Almendros, who died in 1992, shot seven films for Eric Rohmer, nine for Francois Truffaut, and four for Robert Benton. He worked with Alan Pakula on Sophie's Choice, Martin Scorsese on his Life Lessons episode in New York Stories, and won his Oscar for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven.

Terrence Malick

The world was like a faraway planet, to which I could never return ... I thought what a fine place it was, full of things that people can look into and enjoy.

– Holly (Sissy Spacek) in Badlands – (malick’s second movie)

When making a film, Terrence Malick speaks to his collaborators in poetic images. To Martin Sheen in Badlands (1973), he said: ‘Think of the gun in your hand as a magic wand.’ To the post-production team (editors and sound mixers) on The Thin Red Line (1998), he advised: ‘It’s like moving down a river, and the picture should have the same kind of flow.’ And to Jörg Widmer, his Steadicam operator for The New World (2005), he whispered: ‘You have the quail at the wing when it’s about to fly.’

Malick grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and Texas, working on oil fields as a young man. He moved to Austin, Texas and graduated from St. Stephen's Episcopal School.

Malick studied philosophy under Stanley Cavell at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1965. He went on to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After a disagreement with his advisor, Gilbert Ryle, over his thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, Malick left Oxford without a doctorate degree. In 1969, Northwestern University Press published Malick's translation of Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes as The Essence of Reasons. Moving back to the United States, Malick taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology while freelancing as a journalist. He wrote articles for Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Life.

Malick got his start in film after earning an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in 1969, directing Lanton Mills. At the AFI he established contacts with people such as Jack Nicholson and agent Mike Medavoy, who acquired freelance script-doctoring work for him.

After working as a screenwriter and script doctor, Malick directed Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). Following the release of Days of Heaven, Malick moved to France and disappeared from public view for 20 years. He returned to film in 1998 with The Thin Red Line. The movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but did not win any of them.

His fourth feature was The New World, whose script he finished in the late 1970s. The film features a romantic interpretation of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, filmed in his customary transcendental style.

Malick is famously reclusive. His contracts stipulate that no one may photograph, and he routinely declines requests for interviews. Malick married Alexandra "Ecky" Wallace in 1998. They reside in Austin, Texas.

(Source:Internet)

11th July 2010 ; Wildlife Photography Exhibition

Click on the image to get enlarged poster image.

Contemplate Gallery is in Rajshree Ford Building

opp to Krishnammal College at Avanashi Road.

13th June 2010; To Kill a Mocking Bird

To Kill a Mockingbird

A film by Robert Mulligan

Year 1962

Country:USA

Runtime:129 min

English with English subtitles

13th June 2010; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater, Perks School

Screening will be followed by 20 minutes

documentary with director Robert Mulligan,

Gregory Peck and others

Harper Lee's highly regarded and eminently successful first novel has been artfully and delicately translated to the screen."To Kill a Mockingbird" is a major film achievement, a significant, captivating and memorable picture that ranks with the best of recent years. Its success in the literary world seems certain to be replicated in the theatrical sphere.

As it unfolds on the screen, "To Kill a Mockingbird" bears with it, oddly enough, alternating overtones of Faulkner, Twain, Steinbeck, Hitchcock and an Our Gang comedy. The power and fascination of the story lies in the disarming and enthralling contrast of its two basic plot components.

A telling indictment of racial prejudice in the deep South, it is also a charming tale of the emergence of two youngsters from the realm of wild childhood fantasy to the horizon of maturity, responsibility, compassion and social insight.

It is the story of a wise, gentle, soft-spoken Alabama lawyer (Gregory Peck) entrusted with the formidable dual chore of defending a Negro falsely accused of rape while raising his own impressionable, imaginative, motherless children in a hostile, terrifying environment of bigotry and economic depression.

The characters are strict where they stand, whether it’s good or evil, or anything that the kid’s memory makes up. It’s all really well made and I applaud these two for their work. I also applaud Horton Foote for his fine adaptation of this great book.

The performances are dead-on. Gregory Peck is masterful in the role of Atticus Finch, never overdoing his emotions. Mary Badham (who is sister of director John Badham) is also impressive as Scout but is closely matched by Phillip Alford as Jem. All three combined steal the show. The rest of the cast is also great, and you will forever have James Anderson as the evil “white trash” Bob Ewell.

It’s a family film that everyone should enjoy. One of the finest films ever made, this film will really make you remember those days when you were a kid and how great and happy and good looking the world around you looked, plus at the same time, teaching and refining some moral values that are still effervescent today as they were many years ago.

(Source:Internet)

Robert Mulligan

Robert Patrick Mulligan was born in the Bronx on Aug. 23, 1925. Mulligan studied at Fordham University before serving with the United States Marine Corps during World War II. At war's end, he obtained work in the editorial department of the New York Times, but left to pursue a career in television.

Employed by the CBS network, Mulligan began his television career at the bottom of the ladder as a messenger boy. He worked his way up, learned the business and by 1948 he was directing important dramatic series. In 1959 he won an Emmy Award for directing The Moon and Sixpence, a made-for-television production that marked the American small-screen debut of Laurence Olivier.

In 1957 Robert Mulligan directed his first motion picture (Fear Strikes Out) and five years later received wide acclaim and Academy Award and Directors Guild of America nominations for To Kill a Mockingbird. In the same year, he also directed a film with stars Rock Hudson and Burl Ives, called The Spiral Road, based on the book by Jan de Hartog.

In 1972, he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director and another Directors Guild Award for the highly successful Summer of '42.

His final film was 1991's The Man in the Moon

In “To Kill a Mockingbird” and many other films, Mr. Mulligan was commended for his keen attention to the inner lives of young people, and for coaxing nuanced performances from the actors who played them.

"You never really understand a person," Atticus says, "until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Tolerance ripening into fascination, and then to empathy: that was Mulligan's strength, especially in his psychological portraiture of the young. You could call him the J.D. Salinger of directors and be grateful that, in his movie heart, he stayed so young so long.

Mulligan passed away at the age of 83.

23rd May 2010; Herzog's Nosferatu

Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night

A film by Werner Herzog

Country: Germany

Year:1979

Runtime:107 min

German with English subtitles

23rd May 2010; 5.45pm

Perk’s Mini Theatre, Perks School

The general popularity of the Dracula story was significantly expanded with F. W. Murnau’s landmark German Expressionist film, Noferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), which was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. Werner Herzog directed an explicit remake of Murnau's film, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979). Murnau's film is a considerable improvement over Stoker's novel and that Herzog's film is an equally significant improvement over Murnau's classic.

Set aside for the moment the details of the Dracula story. They've lost their meaning. They've been run through a thousand vampire movies too many. Consider instead Count Dracula. He bears a terrible cross but he lives in a wonderful sphere. He comes backed by music of the masters and dresses in red and black, the colors De Sade found finally the most restful. Dracula's shame as he exchanges intimacies and elegant courtesies with you is that tonight or sometime soon he will need to drink your blood.

The crucial section, which conveys the existential sense of doom in Nosferatu, was about 24 minutes in Murnau’s version, but has been enhanced and expanded to 44 minutes in Herzog’s version. With many additional touches, Herzog creates a vision of a city fallen to a calamitous and hopeless dystopia. Van Helsing, the original voice of faith in human reason, is here reduced to pitiful fragility and impotence, utterly unable to deal with the out-of-control Renfield.

There is an added scene in which Dracula visits Lucy in her room and asks for her love. Lucy expresses firm confidence that, despite Dracula’s supernatural powers, the sheer power of her love for Jonathon, whom she loves greater than God, will restore him to her. It is only faith in love that makes us human.

Herzog completes the transformation of the Dracula story that Murnau initiated. It is now an existential horror story that captures our society's apocalyptic intimations of doom. In the end with Lucy and much of Wismar annihilated, Harker has become a vampire, himself, and sets out on horseback to wreak further death and the imposition of nothingness on a helpless and unsuspecting world. This is Herzog’s vision, masterfully brought to perhaps his ultimate expression. It also stands at the top of the scale in the history of horror films.

(Source:Internet)

Werner Herzog

“You should look straight at a film;

that's the only way to see one.

Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”

One of the most influential filmmakers in New German Cinema and one of the most extreme personalities in film per se, larger-than-life Werner Herzog quickly gained recognition not only for creating some of the most fantastic narratives in the history of the medium, but for pushing himself and his crew to absurd and unprecedented lengths, again and again, in order to achieve the effects he demanded.

Werner Herzog (Werner Stipetic) was born Sept. 5, 1942 in Munich. He grew up on a farm in the Bavarian mountains. After his parents' divorce, Herzog and his mother moved to Munich where he attended High School (graduated in 1961). He travelled through Jugoslavia and Greece, worked in Manchester and - fact or fiction? - as a rodeo rider.

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski

In 1974, he walked from Munich to Paris to see the sick Lotte Eisner. He wrote a dairy about his pilgrimage entitled Vom Gehen im Eis (Walking on Ice) for which he received a literary award (Rausirer Literaturpreis) in 1979. He said that when he was 14 years old, he knew that he would be making films. His first short was completed in 1962 (Herakles) and one year later he founded his own production company.

Herzog studied history, literature and drama in Munich and Pittsburgh (Fulbright) but not for very long. He never attended a film school and had no formal film education. 1964 he won the Carl Mayer Prize for the screenplay that was to become his first feature film, Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen), which was financed by the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (300.000DM) and won the Bundesfilmpreis for best first feature.

Among Herzog's most popular films, though not an immediate success, was Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) with Klaus Kinski, who also starred in Nosferatu (1979),Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987). One of his biggest successes was Every Man for Himself and God Against All / The Mystery (Enigma) of Kaspar Hauser (1974), which won the Special Award in Cannes (1975) and several Federal Film Prizes (1975).

Herzog is famous for dealing with marginalized figures and for his choice of 'exotic' sets (Peru, Brazil, Australia). Herzog, the "visionary" of the NGC, insists that "film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates."

In recent years, Herzog released a number of documentaries and directed various operas. His latest feature film is Invincible. He lives in Munich and Los Angeles.

9th May 2010 ; Le Samourai

Le Samourai

A film by Jean-Pierre Melville

Country:France

Year:1967

French with English subtitles

Runtime : 105 min

9th May 2010 ; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theatre ,

Perks School, Off Trichy Road.

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

An empty room. No, not empty. In the shadows we can barely see a man on the bed. He lights a cigarette, and smoke coils up toward a wisp of light from the window. After a time the man gets up, fully dressed, and moves to a hat stand near the door. He puts on his fedora, adjusting the brim with delicate precision, and goes out into the street.

Like a painter or a musician, a filmmaker can suggest complete mastery with just a few strokes. Jean-Pierre Melville involves us in the spell of ``Le Samourai'' (1967) before a word is spoken. He does it with light: a cold light, like dawn on an ugly day. And color: grays and blues. And actions that speak in place of words.

The man, named Jef Costello, is played by Alain Delon, the tough pretty boy of French movies. He was 32 when this movie was made, an actor so improbably handsome that his best strategy for dealing with his looks was to use a poker face. He seems utterly unaware here of his appearance; at times he seems to be playing himself in a dream. A ``beautiful destructive angel of the dark street,'' film critic David Thomson called him.

Costello is a killer for hire. The movie follows him with meticulous attention to detail while he establishes an alibi, kills a nightclub owner, survives a police lineup, is betrayed by those who hired him, and becomes the subject of a police manhunt that involves a cat-and-mouse chase through the Paris Metro. All the while he barely betrays an emotion.

Two women help supply his alibis. A woman named Jane loves him, we guess, although she has a rich lover and Jef knows it. (She is played by Nathalie Delon, his real-life wife.) The other woman, a black musician named Valerie (Caty Rosier) who plays the piano in the nightclub, lies at the lineup and says she has never seen him. But she knows she has. Is she lying to help him? The film is masterful in its control of acting and visual style.

One of the pleasures of ``Le Samourai'' is to realize how complicated the plot has grown, in its flat, deadpan way. With little dialogue and spare scenes of pure action (most of it unsensational), the movie devises a situation in which Jef is being sought all over Paris by both the police and the underworld, while he simultaneously puts his own plan into effect, and deals with both women.

The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense--how action releases tension, instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don't care about are happening constantly. Melville uses character, not action, to build suspense.

Le Samourai is a supreme example of Melville’s ‘baroque minimalism’ – a style that is at once understated and self-conscious, pared down and emphatic, distanced and affecting. Le Samourai moves in the rarefied, mythical space of film noir, yet we are in the streets, nightclub and underground of 1967 Paris.

Jean-Pierre Melville

Poet of the underworld

Film-maker Jean-Pierre Melville's life

was a running battle with critics and fans alike.

But the 'garlic gangster' won in the end.

Born in Paris, France, Melville, who was an Alsatian Jew, served in World War II and fought in Operation Dragoon. When he returned from the war he applied for a license to become an assistant director, but was refused. Without this support, he decided to direct his films by his own means.

In 1963 he was a member of the jury at the 13th Berlin International Film Festival.

He became an independent film-maker, owning his own studios, and became well known for his tragic, minimalist film noirs, such as Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1969), starring major, charismatic actors like Alain Delon (probably the definitive 'Melvillian' actor), Jean-Paul Belmondo and Lino Ventura. His directorial style was influenced by American cinema and fetishized accessories like weapons, clothes and especially hats.

His independence and his 'reporting' style of film-making (he was one of the first French directors to use real locations regularly) were a major influence on the French New Wave film movement, and he appears as a minor character in Jean-Luc Godard's seminal New Wave film Breathless. When Godard was having difficultly editing Breathless, it was Melville that suggested that he just cut directly to the best parts of a shot. Thus, the films famous and innovative use of jump cuts were made.

In 1973, Jean-Pierre Melville died. In a career spanning 25 years, the director had made just 13 full length films, but many of these are regarded as genuine triumphs of French cinema.