7th Sept 2014; Coppola's THE CONVERSATION

 

 The Conversation

A film by  Francis Ford Coppola

1974/ USA / 113 mins / Col

7th Sept ; 5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater

konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Harry Caul (Hackman) is pre-eminent in his field. His trade magazine is called "Security World" and sound is his universe. Harry Caul is an expert professional eavesdropper. From his troubled childhood, Harry has grown up into a lonely man. He lives alone, has no entertainment except playing his saxophone with jazz records . No woman has any influence over him.

Coppola, who wrote and directed, considers this film his most personal project. He was working two years after the Watergate break-in, amid the ruins of the Vietnam effort, telling the story of a man who places too much reliance on high technology and has nightmares about his personal responsibility. 

 

Harry Caul is a microcosm of America at that time: not a bad man, trying to do his job, haunted by a guilty conscience, feeling tarnished by his work. 

Harry has been hired by the director of a large corporation to investigate and report the movements of his wife Ann. ‘The Conversation’ comes from another time and place than today’s thrillers, which are so often simple-minded. This movie is a character study, about a man who has removed himself from life, thinks he can observe it dispassionately at an electronic remove, and finds that all of his barriers are worthless. The cinematography (opening scene by Haskell Wexler, the rest by Bill Butler) is deliberately planned from a voyeuristic point of view; we are always looking but imperfectly seeing.

 The Conversation allowed Francis Ford Coppola to engage in a more personal style of storytelling, crafting a small-scale character study that's steeped in minor-key melancholia. The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America's body politic in the era of Watergate, the wiretapping scandal that brought down the Nixon administration, though the timing of the film's release was coincidental. (Source:Internet)

Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola  was born in 1939 in Detroit, USA, but he grew up in a New York suburb in a creative, supportive Italian-American family. Francis Ford Coppola graduated with a degree in drama from Hofstra University, and did graduate work at UCLA in filmmaking. He was training as assistant with filmmaker Roger Corman, working in such capacities as sound-man, dialogue director, associate producer and, eventually, director of Dementia 13 (1963), Coppola's first feature film. During the next four years, Coppola was involved in a variety of script collaborations.

Coppola won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for Patton (1970), Coppola's 2nd film brought him critical acclaim and a Master of Fine Arts degree. In 1969, Coppola and George Lucas established American Zoetrope, an independent film production company based in San Francisco. The company's first project was THX 1138 (1971), produced by Coppola and directed by Lucas. Coppola also produced the second film that Lucas directed, American Graffiti (1973), in 1973.Coppola's film The Godfather (1972) became one of the highest-grossing movies in history and brought him an Oscar for writing the screenplay with Mario Puzo.

Following his work on the screenplay for The Great Gatsby (1974), Coppola's next film was The Conversation (1974), which was honored with the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival.Also released that year, The Godfather: Part II (1974), rivaled the success of The Godfather (1972), and won six Academy Awards, bringing Coppola Oscars as a producer, director and writer. Coppola then began work on his most ambitious film, Apocalypse Now (1979), a Vietnam War epic that was inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1993).With George Lucas, Coppola executive produced Kagemusha (1980), directed by Akira Kurosawa, and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), directed by Paul Schrader.

Francis Ford Coppola is one of America's most erratic, energetic and controversial filmmakers.

10th Aug 2014; Michelangelo Antnioni's RED DESERT

Red Desert

A film by Michelangelo Antonioni

Italy / 117 minutes / Col

10th Aug ;5.45 pm / Perks Mini Thetaer

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Red Desert is the most ambitious of all of Antonioni’s attempts to ground the condition of our modern existence in a theory of alienation. It is a disturbing ambient drama about post-natal anxiety and the malaise of industrial society: a deeply depressed young mother Giuliana (Monica Vitti), whose husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) runs a factory, finds herself drawn to Ugo's handsome associate Corrado (Richard Harris) who arrived to recruit a workforce for a mining adventure in south America. The landscape is a grim, sludgy mass of churned soil and dark satanic mills, belching out smoke and flame: Antonioni boldly counters the picturesque view of sunny, happy Italy.

Antonioni sought to paint a film, more than write it, and indeed it is a film of picturesque framings and evocative moods. The extensive use of doorways and passageways call attention to the operation of framing, and the manner in which a character may come into or out of frame. The long takes tend to hold both the moment before and after the character has entered the frame, suggesting impermanence and the independent, though vulnerable, existence of the landscape.

The use of color is the most dazzling aspect of Red Desert, which on a purest level, is visual spectacle. There is one sequence of natural color in the film, a brief story sequence related by Giuliana to Valerio. Everywhere else, color is meticulously calculated and arranged, with dynamic colorization correlating with Giuliana’s emotional states.

Antonioni has explored new visual techniques here for the revelation of the inner moods and feelings of psychological narrative. Much of what is conveyed is not presented in verbal terms, but almost outside the scope of verbal expression. Antonioni achieves this expression not only by his use of color, but also by his comprehensive use of composition, editing, character movements, and camera techniques. in Red Desert: we are on earth but also on some remote planet, in the present time but also (perhaps) the future.  The movie is a beautiful, haunting, and complex meditation on the spiritual cost of modernity.

(Source: Internet)

Michelangelo Antonioni

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

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

(Source:Internet)

3rd Aug 2014; Mirnal Sen's EK DIN PRATIDIN

Ek Din Pratidin

A film by Mirnal Sen

1979 / Bengali / Col / 91 mins

3^rd August 2014; 5.45pm ; Prks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

The opening shot of Ek Din Pratidin is of a rickshaw passing through the narrow alley of a deserted residential street, framed between the discolored, weather-beaten walls of a pair of dilapidated boarding houses. This curious image of decaying structure and narrowed field of view proves to be an incisive preface to the claustrophobia, entrenched social class, and inescapable scrutiny that befalls a middle-class family when the family's sole wage earner, the eldest daughter Chinu (Mamata Shankar), fails to come home from work at the usual hour.

When late afternoon turns to evening and Chinu has still not returned home, the parents' reactions to Chinu's unexplained absence begin to betray the underlying social rigidity and cultural myopia that has trapped them in their present circumstances. 

Despite the family's attempt to keep Chinu's absence a private matter, her disappearance soon becomes the main topic of conversation (and conjectural gossip) among the prying neighbors, polarizing their opinions within the spectrum of those who see the situation as the intrinsic folly and lamentable consequence of women's independence and others who recognize the hypocrisy innate in the family's financial dependency on the young, unmarried woman and their ingrained, patriarchal expectations of her continued subservience.

The mise en scène and camerawork of the film reinforce this hierarchical relationship.  The film’s plot covers only one night. Though only 91 minutes in length Ek Din Pratidin is a powerful film, developing a melodramatic situation, fraught with perils for the characters. 

Yet it also encourages the audience to step back and consider the economic and cultural forces that develop the melodrama in a particular way. Sen beautifully subverts this type of story and situation, but allows the audience to both involve themselves in that story whilst [possibly] considering and understanding its position in the larger social scheme.

(Source : Internet – excerpts from Strictly Film School and other reviews)

MIRNAL SEN 

Mrinal Sen was born on May 14, 1923, in the town of Faridpur, now in Bangladesh. His interest in films started after he stumbled upon a book on film aesthetics. He eventually took a job of an audio technician in a Calcutta film studio, which was the beginning of his film carrier.

Mrinal Sen made his first feature film in 1953. His third film, Baishey Shravan (Wedding Day) was his first film that gave him international exposure. Mrinal Sen never stopped experimenting with his medium. In his later films he tried to move away from the narrative structure and worked with very thin story lines.

Mrinal Sen’s film have received awards from almost all major film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Montreal, Chicago, and Cairo. Retrospectives of his films have been shown in almost all major cities of the world. Apart from his films, he has also received a number of personal honors.  He received the Padma Bhushan, and in 2005 he was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest honor given to an Indian filmmaker, by the Government of India. He was also an honorary Member of the Indian Parliament from 1998 to 2003. The French government awarded him the Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et letters (Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters), the highest honor conferred by the country. In 2001 The Russian government honored him with the Order of Friendship. He has also received a number of honorary Doctorate degrees from various universities.

2nd Aug 2014: Documentaries of Anand Patwardhan

THAMIZH  STUDIO & KONANGAL

Documentaries of Anand Patwardhan 

2^nd Aug; 5.45pm; Perks Mini theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Anand Patwardan is the recipient of Thamizh Studio‘s 2014 Lenin Award  which will be presented to him on 15 th August 2014 at Chennai.

1. A Narmada Diary

(1995, Colour, 57 mins)

The Sardar Sarover Dam in western India, lynch-pin of a mammoth development project on the river Narmada’s banks, has been criticized as uneconomical and unjust. It will benefit urban India at a cost borne by the rural poor. When completed, the dam will drown 37,000 hectares of fertile land, displace over 200,000 adivasis – the area’s indigenous people -, and cost up to 400 billion rupees. Ecological, cultural, and human costs – as often is the case with “mega” projects – have never been estimated. A NARMADA DIARY introduces the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the Save Narmada Movement) which has spearheaded the agitation against the dam. As government resettlement programs prove inadequate, the Narmada Bachao Andolan has emerged as one of the most dynamic struggles in India today.

With non-violent protests and a 　determination to drown rather than to leave their homes and land, the people of the Narmada valley have become symbols of a global struggle against unjust development.

But the dam building continues. If it’s height is not checked, the entire adivasi region of the Narmada will drown. In the name of progress, a relatively self-sufficient, egalitarian and environmentally sound economy and culture will be destroyed and a proud people reduced to the status of refugees and slum dwellers.

2. Fishing: In the Sea of Greed

(1998, 42 minutes)

Traditional fishing communities around the world are under threat of mass displacement by the industrial fishing practices of gigantic factory ships. Private capital, with the aid of international lending agencies, have embarked on a mindless offensive to catch fish in quantities unheard of until now.

This frightening abuse of the seas has been actively promoted by governments in the developing world, as territorial waters are handed over to transnational corporations to meet debt obligations. Further, agencies like the World Bank have promoted aquaculture prawn farming as a foreign currency earner in the Third World.

The primary victims are poverty-stricken rice growers and fishing communities. Salination of ground water causes a scarcity of fresh drinking water as waste from prawn farms are emptied into nearby rivers and other fresh water bodies. Within years, large stretches of land are abandoned as unfit for agriculture.

Fishing in the Sea of Greed documents the response of one fishing community in India to the “rape and run” industries that have begun to dominate their livelihood and decimate their environment. Under the leadership of the National Fishworkers Forum and the World Forum of Fishworkers and Fish Harvesters, workers are fighting not only for their jobs, but for the survival of the world’s coastal communities and ecosystems.

Anand Patwardhan

Anand Patwardhan has been making political documentaries for nearly three decades pursuing diverse and controversial issues that are at the crux of social and political life in India. Many of his films were at one time or another banned by state television channels in India and became the subject of litigation by Patwardhan who successfully challenged the censorship rulings in court.

Patwardhan received a B.A. in English Literature from Bombay University in 1970, won a scholarship to get another B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis University in 1972 and earned a Master’s degree in Communications from McGill University in 1982. Patwardhan has been an activist ever since he was a student — having participated in the anti-Vietnam War movement; being a volunteer in Caesar Chavez’s United Farm Worker’s Union; working in Kishore Bharati, a rural development and education project in central India; and participating in the Bihar anti-corruption movement in 1974-75 and in the civil liberties and democratic rights movement during and after the 1975-77 Emergency. Since then he has been active in movements for housing rights of the urban poor, for communal harmony and participated in movements against unjust, unsustainable development, miltarism and nuclear nationalism.

20th July 2014; Milos Forman's THE FIREMEN"S BALL

The Firemen’s Ball

A film by Milos Forman

Czechoslovakia / 1967 / 73 minutes / Col

5.45pm; 20^th July 2014; Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

A milestone of the Czech New Wave, Milos Forman’s first color film The Firemen’s Ball is both a dazzling comedy and a provocative political satire. The last and funniest movie Milos Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia. Presumed to be a commentary on the floundering Czech leadership, the film was “banned forever” in Czechoslovakia following the Russian invasion and prompted Forman’s move to America.

This 73-minute movie, its premise scarcely more than an anecdote, finds an entire universe in the benefit gala staged by a group of inept, officious, mildly corrupt—in short, intensely human—volunteer firefighters. The Firemen’s Ball was shot in Vrchlabí with an entirely nonprofessional cast. The protagonist is the town itself. Forman has assembled an impressive ensemble of grotesque types and fantastic faces. The movie’s droll naturalism occasionally flirts with cuteness, but its deadpan comedy is darkened by an unwaveringly clear-eyed view of human stupidity and deception.

The ball is a series of small catastrophes, absurd ceremonies, and inane intrigues—these rendered all the more ridiculous by the firemen’s tendency toward self-important official rhetoric and coercive authoritarianism. Just about everything that can go wrong does. Decorations fall from the ceiling. The brass band misses its cues.

Forman is not making fun of his characters, but of the system they inhabit. Yet censors criticized the film. Forman doesn't push his political points, being content to let them make themselves, unfolding gracefully from the human drama. The movie is just plain funny. And as a parable it is timeless, with relevance at many times in many lands.

MILOS FORMAN

Milos Forman was born Jan Tomas Forman in Caslav, Czechoslovakia, to Anna (Svabova), who ran a summer hotel, and Rudolf Forman, a professor. During World War II, his parents were taken away by the Nazis, after being accused of participating in the underground resistance. His father died in Buchenwald and his mother died in Auschwitz, and Milos became an orphan very early on.

Formane studied screen-writing at the Prague Film Academy (F.A.M.U.). In his Czechoslovakian films, Black Peter (1964), Loves of a Blonde (1965), and The Firemen's Ball (1967), he created his own style of comedy. During the invasion of his country by the troops of the Warsaw pact in the summer of 1968 to stop the Prague spring, he left Europe for the United States.

 In spite of difficulties, he filmed Taking Off (1971) there and achieved his fame later with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) adapted from the novel of Ken Kesey, which won five Oscars including one for direction. Other important films of Milos Forman were the musical Hair (1979) and his biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus (1984), which won eight Oscars. (Source: IMDB )

6th July 2014; Theo Angelopaulos's THE WEEPING MEADOW

THE WEEPING MEADOW

A film by Theo Angelopoulos

Greece / 2004/ 162 minutes /
6^th July/ 5.45 pm / Perks Mini Theater / Coimbatore

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Master Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos wrote and directed this downbeat look at his nation's often blighted history, as seen through the eyes of an unfortunate young couple. In 1919, a band of Greek refugees who had found a home in Odessa are forced to return to their homeland following the Russian Revolution, and they settle in Thessaloniki, a forbidding riverside village where few wish to dwell.

 

Eleni is a youngster who arrives in Thessaloniki and is taken in by Spyros (Vassilis Kolovos), one of the village leaders. While Eleni is raised as a member of the family alongside Alexis, Spyros' son, the two find themselves attracted to one another as they grow older, and they pledge to someday marry. 

By the age of 16, Eleni (Alexandra Aidini) becomes pregnant by Alexis (Nikos Poursadinis), and she gives birth to twins, which Spyros puts up for adoption. However, after the death of his wife, Spyros declares that he will make the now-grown Eleni his new spouse. Eleni and Alexis see no choice but to run away together, and they join up with a band of traveling musicians led by Nikos (Giorgos Armenis). 

Angelopoulos draws on all manner of Greek myths surrounding wandering, passion and exile in The Weeping Meadow - in interviews he has described his female protagonist as 'the Eleni of myth, the Eleni of all the myths who is pursued... but who also pursues absolute love'. Favouring his trademark lengthy travelling shots, Angelopoulos and cinematographer Andreas Sinanos conjure up a range of mesmerising images created without reliance on digital effects. 

Water is a crucial motif in The Weeping Meadow, where history itself resembles a force of nature, shattering societies and arbitrarily sweeping away the lives of human beings.

Though its story incorporates themes from myth, epic and tragedy, the plot is among the least important elements of "The Weeping Meadow." Instead, the film is a stately procession of enigmatic, starkly beautiful images that seem to gesture toward a mythological world outside the movie itself.e. The haunting score by Eleni Karaindrou (much of it performed by a group of traveling musicians that figures largely in the story) is a far more important sonic element than the sparse patches of dialogue and the long stretches of silence that separate them. 

For those willing to enter into its grave, melancholic rhythms, "The Weeping Meadow" is a beautiful and devastating meditation on war, history and loss. (Source: 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 continued to work diligently.

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

22nd June 2014; Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine

La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast)

A film by Jean Renoir

1938/ France / 100 minutes

22^nd June 2014; 5.45 pm ; Perks Mini Theater

Emile Zola piles on the melo in his drama of murder and infidelity on the railways while Jean Renoir captures the intensity of emotion involved in working with steam engines. The combination of these two creative giants is as dark and electric as a thunderstorm at midnight.

Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) is a manic depressive, with violent tendencies whose love of the train he drives surpasses everything – until he meets Severine (Simone Simon). Severine is married to Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), the assistant station master at Le Havre. Then begins the  love triangle that leads to the disastrous end. 

Roubaud is much older, a company man to his fingertips, unaware of his wife’s “difficult” childhood and previous sexual encounters with her mother’s employer, a philandering aristocrat. Roubaud becomes jealous and angry when he comes to know about this.

Renoir invokes the camaraderie and pride of railwaymen in the years before union strikes and diesel, while ensuring, as with all his films, that the supporting roles are well-equipped with humour and humanity. The film is a study of guilt as it’s all centered around two men and a woman in this world of murder and adultery. The script works as a study of guilt and motivations yet it’s in Renoir’s direction where the film really takes hold. Opening with this amazing, five-minute montage of a train speeding throughout the French countryside, Renoir manages to keep the film pretty straightforward while his compositions are very striking in the way he creates love scenes or some intense, dramatic moments.

(Source:Internet)

JEAN RENOIR

Son of the famous Impressionist painter Pierre Auguste, Jean Renoir had a happy childhood. Pierre Renoir was his brother, and Claude Renoir was his nephew. After the end of World War I, where he won the Croix de Guerre, he moved from scriptwriting to filmmaking. He married Catherine Hessling, for whom he began to make movies; he wanted to make a star of her. His next partner was Marguerite Renoir, whom he never married, although she took his name. He left France in 1941 during the German invasion of France during World War II and became a naturalized US citizen.

As a director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, Renoir, My Father (1962). Renoir exerted immense influence on subsequent auteur directors, including among others Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray, and François Truffaut. Best remembered for such cinematic landmarks as Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), Renoir is considered one of the major figures of French and international film history.

Renoir's films were underestimated when they first came out. They were unconventional, complex, and so energetic and technically daring that few noticed their intricate structure. They were often dismissed as rough, not fully achieved artistically. The generation that came to the cinema in the '60s and '70s (perhaps the richest and most diverse era in European cinema) recognised Renoir as an ancestor who had already made the kind of films they admired or were setting out to make themselves, and justly hailed them as masterpieces.