25th March 2012; Satyajit Ray's JALSAGHAR

JALSAGHAR
(The Music Room)
A film by Satyajt Ray
Year : 1958
Bengali with English subtitles
Runtime : 100 minutes
25th March 2012
Perks Mini Theater

15 minutes documentary will follow
the main screening with film maker
Mira Nair talking about Jalsaghar

Of all the remarkable things about Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room, perhaps the most striking is its sense of interior space. Almost the entire film takes place inside the palace of a feudal lord whose star has all but burned out. Ray captures the diametrically opposed opulence and decay of the place — it’s simultaneously a refuge and a prison for Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas), a zamindar whose cultural and political importance has been reduced to nil. For The Music Room, Ray invited the distinguished Bengali maestro Vilayat Khan, scion of a long line of musicians, to compose the score.Ray shoots the palace and its contents (a grand chandelier, portraits of ancestors) in ways that make them seem both beautiful and terrifying at different moments. In a film that almost exclusively belongs to Roy, it’s the palace that emerges as the primary supporting character. And inside that palace — the crown jewel of Roy’s existence, a lavish music room where the lord holds concerts and indulges his love of classical Indian music.

Ray’s film is a subtle, illuminating character study that displays empathy for its main character while remaining ambivalent about his behavior and cultural status. The Music Room is a thoroughly Indian film, with cultural touchstones that Ray apparently thought might make it a tough sell outside of the country. And yet, while those culture-specific elements are prominent, the film has an undeniable universality.Ray’s gift for making perceptive, sensitive and artifice-free films is clearly seen here. There’s artifice all around Roy in the ornate palace and the fleeting sense of security its music room gives him, but The Music Room penetrates right through all of it to reveal a broken, obsolete, beaten man.

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921 in Calcutta into a Bengali family of a distinguished cultural lineage. After graduating from the famous Presidency College of Calcutta, Ray enrolled in the Visva-Bharati University founded by noted poet Rabindranath Tagore. During his stint in the Visva-Bharati, Ray's creative faculties were enriched by the exposure to different nuances of fine arts.

Consequent to the course completion, Satyajit Ray joined advertising agency D.J. Keymer as a visualiser. After a couple of award-winning assignments, he joined publishing house Signet Press with the responsibility of designing cover jackets for books. While the job itself was an exercise in creativity, more importantly it led to Ray's first brush with the cream of Bengali literature. He gradually developed a passion for films and with a few friends founded the Calcutta Film Society in 1947.

In 1949 Satyajit Ray married his distant cousin Bijoya Das. The same year French director Jean Renoir came to Calcutta and the great filmmaker's encouraging words motivated Ray to tread the path of filmmaking. Next year Ray went to London as D.J. Keymer's art director and there he got an opportunity to watch Vittorio de Sica's film 'Bicycle Thief.' The film, a neorealist classic, kindled the filmmaker in Satyajit Ray.

He returned home determined to realize the dream of a film portrayal of Bibhutibhusan Bandopadhyay's novel Pather Panchali. Despite being dogged by financial hassles, Ray and his ensemble of amateur crews finally completed the film and released it in 1955. The film won rave reviews all over the globe and heralded the arrival of a master filmmaker. Satyajit Ray made two more films Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959) based on the life cycle of central protagonist Apu. Riding on the crest massive success and adoration, Ray unleashed a slew of memorable films such as Jalsagar (1958), Devi (1960), Teen Kanya (1961), Abhijan (1962), Kanchenjunga (1962), Mahanagar (1963)) and Charulata (1964).

His credentials firmly established now, Satyajit Ray opted for creative liberty in his later films and dabbled in themes as diverse as fantasy and historical drama. Some of his prominent films during this period are Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969), Pratiwandi (1970), Jana Aranya (1975), crime fiction Sonar Kella (1974), Jai Baba Felunath (1978) and Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977), his first film in Hindi.

In 1983 a severe heart attack crippled Ray's mobility and his last three films, Ganashatru, Shakha Proshakha and Agantuk couldn't create the magic of his earlier films. Satyajit Ray breathed his last on April 23, 1992.

18th March 2012; Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS

SOLARIS

A film by Andrei Tarkovsky

Country: Russian

Year:1972

Runtime: 162 mins

Russian with English subtitles

18th March 2012; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky are more like environments than entertainments. He uses length and depth to slow us down, to edge us out of the velocity of our lives, to enter a zone of reverie and meditation. In his second film Solaris, ground control has been receiving strange transmissions from the three remaining cosmonauts aboard the Solaris space station. On the day before his flight, Kelvin is visited by a former cosmonaut, Berton (Vladislav Dvozhetsky), who, years earlier, was sent on a rescue mission, and had a firsthand encounter with the bizarre metamorphosis of the Solaris ocean.

But Kelvin is unmoved, believing that human emotion has no bearing in the search for Truth, and raises the possibility of, not only abandoning the Solaris mission, but aiming radiation at the turbulent ocean in order to destroy its inexplicable activity.

Upon arriving at the space station, Kelvin is greeted by apathy and evasion, along with the tragic news of Gibarian's suicide. A videotaped message shows a frail, disheveled Gibarian driven to despair by tormented visions of a lost loved one, and a profound sense of isolation. However, after a restless night's sleep, he begins to realize the validity of Berton and the crew's seeming hallucinations after his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk) mysteriously reappears on the station.

Solaris is Andrei Tarkovsky's visually hypnotic, deeply affecting, and thematically accessible film on love, conscience, and reconciliation. Similar to other Tarkovsky films, most notably Andrei Rublev and The Sacrifice, Solaris is an unsettling portrait of man's inequitable, often destructive interaction with his environment.

Symbolically, Tarkovsky uses curvilinear structures, confined spaces, and disorganization to represent the emotional and physical turmoil of the space station. Furthermore, periodic changes in lighting and moments of weightlessness preclude any sense of rhythm, creating a literal imbalance. Chromatic shifts, which initially occur to delineate chronology, increase in frequency with the development of the story, reflecting the crew's assimilation of the two states of consciousness.

In the end, the Truth proves to be as elusive as the thinly veiled reality of Solaris: Can a man truly reconcile with his irretrievable past, or is he inexorably bound to the guilt and regret of his spiritual longing?

(Source: Internet)

ANDREI TARKOVSKY

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

Considered one of Russia’s most distinguished contemporary directors, the late Andrei Tarkovsky is known for highly personalized and poetic films. The son of poet Arseni Tarkovsky, he studied Arabic and first worked as a geologist before attending the State Film School in Moscow under Mikhail Romm. While there he made a pair of short films, “There Will Be No Leave Today” (1959) and the acclaimed Katok i Skripka/The Steamroller and the Violin (his diploma film). Following graduation in 1960, Tarkovsky went to work for Mosfilm and made his feature-film directorial debut in 1962 with Ivanovo Detstvo/Ivan’s Childhood. The film earned him top honors at that year’s Venice Film Festival.

His sophomore film, Andrei Rublev, is Tarkovsky’s most renowned work. Ostensibly a portrait of a 15th century Russian painter, the film is actually a metaphorical drama mirroring the plight of Russian artists. Some have expanded the film’s parable to reflect the dramatic effects of war and chaos upon humanity. Many critics consider this film Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, but though it was made in 1966, problems with Soviet censors deferred its release until 1971. The film won a FIPRESCI award at Cannes and brought Tarkovsky to the forefront of international cinema. His 1976 film Zerkalo/The Mirror, with its open-ended narrative and interesting camera techniques, was very popular among Russian intellectuals. An intimate, multi-layered autobiographical story in which the time frames fluidly move forward and backwards, it reflects Tarkovsky’s dreams and his experiences growing up in an artist’s community under Stalin’s rule. It is considered by many a subjective companion piece to Ivanovo Detstvo, which looked objectively at a boy’s experience growing up during the WWII era.

In the early ’80s, Tarkovsky started making films outside of Soviet Russia. But though he would make films in Italy, Sweden, and London, they would remain uniquely Russian in subject and tone. In 1984, Tarkovsky was unable to get formal permission to remain abroad and learned that should he return to Moscow that he would no longer be allowed to make films, so he defected to Western Europe. In 1986, he made his final film, Offret/The Sacrifice. The film won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Later that year, Tarkovsky died in Paris of lung cancer.

(Source:Internet)

3rd March 2012; Documentaries on Art ; Renaissance Revolution - Piero della Francesca

CONTEMPLATE AND KONANGAL
present
Documentaries on Art


Renaissance Revolution
Piero della Francesca
3rd March 2012;5.45pm
Duration 1 hour
Contemplate Art Gallery
Avanashi Road , Coimbatore

The great Italian master Piero della Francesca was born in the decade between 1410 and 1420 but his exact date of birth is unknown. He studied under the guidance of Domenico Veneziano and Domenico's interest in colour and his study of light made him the perfect teacher for the young artist. Piero is known to have worked with Veneziano, as his apprentice, on frescoes for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Such was the upwards mobility of the times, intellectual as well as social, that he made himself a master mathematician and played a bigger role in the spread of Euclid's geometry than anyone else. He wrote a number of learned treatises, three of which survive.

Perspective and geometry figure both prominently and subtly in all Piero's works. He liked to organise large, plain masses of colour in patterns which suggest an underlying geometrical scheme. That gives his paintings the unfinished look which moderns like. He made a positive virtue of the light palette which the use of old painting methods forced on artists. There are always large areas of white or near-white in his works, the skies are big, light and sunny, and this pleasing radiance, combined with the absence of meticulous clutter, makes his paintings enormously attractive to our eyes. All this was carefully considered and deliberate. If we compare the two sections of altarpieces in the National Gallery, London The Baptism of Christ, and The Nativity the light tone colour scheme is the same in both, though for the first he used egg tempera and for the second oils (both are on panels of poplar).His Saint Michael, in the same gallery, is also light toned and the saint is framed by his white wings and a white marble balcony. Yet this is an oil painting too. Cezanne and Picasso saw him as the real deal: the authentic, honest Renaissance, a model for modern painting. Now he is so in tune with secular modern taste that a tourist trail links his work in the beautiful hills of Umbria, Tuscany, and a few galleries around the world who own a precious panel by him.

26th Feb 2010; Theo Angelopaulos' Landscape in the Mist

Konangal pays tribute to the epic poet of cinema

Landscape in The Mist
A film by Theo Angelopoulos
Country: Greece
Year: 1988
Runtime: 127 minutes
Greek with English subtitles
26th Feb 2012; 5.45 pm
Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003180985905

"In the beginning was the darkness. And then there was light..." Every evening, Voula (Tania Palaiologou) begins to tell her younger brother, Alexander (Michalis Zeke), the same bedtime tale - the story of creation - and is invariably interrupted by the approach of their distant mother as she momentary peers through the door to ensure that they have fallen asleep. It is an appropriate preface for the children's own unresolved story of their origin, as they attempt to unravel the mystery of their father's identity.Each day, they walk to the train station and attempt to stow away on a German-bound train to reunite with their unknown father who, their mother explains, lives in Germany. The children compose letters to their absent father in their thoughts, and await his response in their dreams. Alexander believes that their long-awaited reunion is near, and one day, the children succeed in boarding the train.Landscape in the Mist is a poignant, lyrical, and allegorical fable on the human struggle for identity and connection. Theo Angelopoulos expounds on the transient, yet cyclical process of life as the common, universal bridge of human experience: the image of a dying horse on the snow, juxtaposed against a wedding celebration; Orestes' departure from his family vocation to join the military, the odd image of a large statue hand rising from the sea that metaphorically connects the cultural legacy of ancient Greek civilization to contemporary Greece.Like the symbolic, disembodied sculptured hand, the children, too, are incomplete - severed from their heritage by being denied a relationship with their father. In the haunting, surreal final scene, the children embrace a surrogate connection to their ancestral history - a universal icon that binds all humanity towards a shared purpose of survival and continuity - an enduring symbol of nature and life. (from Internet)

THEO ANGELOPAULOS

Theodoros Angelopoulos (born 27 April 1935) is a celebrated Greek film director.
Angelopoulos studied law in Athens, but after his military service went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. He soon dropped out to study film at the IDHEC (Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies) before returning to Greece. There, he worked as a journalist and film critic.
Angelopoulos began making films after the 1967 coup that began the Greek military dictatorship known as the Regime of the Colonels. He made his first short film in 1968 and in the 1970s began making a series of political feature films about modern Greece: Days of '36 (Meres Tou 36, 1972), The Travelling Players (O Thiassos, 1975) and The Hunters (I Kynighoi, 1977). He quickly established a characteristic style, marked by slow, episodic and ambiguous narrative structures and long takes (The Travelling Players, for example, consists of only 80 shots in about four hours of film). These takes often include meticulously choreographed and complicated scenes involving many actors.
Angelopoulos has made 19 films so far. His regular collaborators include the cinematographer Giorgos Arvanitis, and the composer Eleni Karaindrou.
At the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, during which Angelopoulos received the coveted Palme d'Or for Eternity and a Day, the filmmaker remarked, "I belong to a generation slowly coming to the end of our careers". Nevertheless, despite his seemingly resigned statement, he continues to work diligently at his craft, having begun filming the first installment of an ambitious, large-scale romantic trilogy on the star-crossed destiny of two people from Odessa during the early part of the 20th century. The century-spanning, international three-part epic—the latest chapter in Angelopoulos' evolving, 'work in progress' oeuvre—is scheduled for completion in 2004.

Theo Angelopoulos died at the age of 76 in a road accident while shooting his latest film in Greece.

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