3rd February 2008 ; Screening of Sydney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon

Dog Day Afternoon

A Film By Sidney Lumet.
Year : 1975 ; Country : USA
Running time : 124 minutes
English with English sub titles.
Won Oscar. Another 10 wins & 17 nominations
3rd Febryary 2008 ,5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

"Dog Day Afternoon" is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously ill-planned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.

CLICK HERE FOR TRAILER OF DOG DAY AFTERNOON

If you can let yourself laugh at desperation that has turned seriously lunatic, the film is funny, but mostly it's reportorially efficient and vivid, in the understated way of news writing that avoids easy speculation.

Each of the several principal lives it touches has been grotesquely bent out of shape. The director and Frank Pierson, who wrote the fine screenplay, don't attempt to supply reasons. The movie says only that this is what happened. No more. Thi

s severely limits the film's emotional impact, though not its seriousness or its fascination. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a gaudy street-carnival of a movie that rudely invites laughs at inappropriate moments, which is in keeping with the city's concrete sensibility.

The incident on which the film is based was the attempt to rob a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank on Aug. 22, 1972. The two bandits, one of whom was seeking money for a sex-change operation for a boyfriend, failed miserably, after they held the bank's employes hostage for 14 hours.

Most of the time the film stays contained within the bank. This concentration in space and time is responsible for much of the film's dramatic intensity.So too are the brilliant characterizations by the members of the large cast, including Al Pacino, as the (probably) more than a bit mad mini-mind of the holdup, a man with bravura style when he plays to the crowds outside the bank but apparently quite demented in his personal relationships.

"Dog Day Afternoon" is Sidney Lumet's most acc

urate, most flamboyant New York movie—that consistently vital and energetic Lumet genre that includes "The Pawnbroker" and "Serpico" and exists entirely surrounded by (but always separate from) the rest of his work. Mr. Lumet's New York movies are as much aspects of the city's life as they are stories of the city's life.

Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet is nevertheless a master of cinema. Known for his technical knowledge and his skill at getting first-rate performances from his actors--and for shooting most of his films in his beloved New York--Lumet has made over 40 movies, often emotional, but seldom overly sentimental. He often tells intelligent, complex stories. His politics are somewhat left-leaning and he often treats socially relevant themes in his films.

As social criticism, Sidney Lumet addresses throughout his long career on numerous issues related to American society - on corrupt police (Serpico, 1973, The Prince of New York, 1981 and in the Night Falls on Manhattan (1997)), on television (A Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 ), on Justice ( Twelve Angry Men In 1957, The Verdict, 1982 ) on MacCarthyism (Daniel, 1983), on alcoholism (Lendemain From Crime, 1986) and on racism (Counter-survey, 1990).

Born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia, the son of actor Baruch Lumet and dancer Eugenia Wermus Lumet, he made his stage debut at age four at the Yiddish Art Theater in New York. He played many roles on Broadway in the 1930s (such as "Dead End"), and his acting debut in films came in One Third of a Nation (1939). In 1947 he started an off-Broadway acting troupe that included such future stars as Yul Brynner and Eli Wallach, and other former members of Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio who had become unsatisfied with Strasberg's concepts.

Lumet made his stage directing debut in 1955. He made his feature film directing debut with the critical and financial hit 12 Angry Men (1957), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, and is justly regarded as one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in film history.

Lumet has made over 40 movies, which earned nearly 50 Oscar nominations. In 1993 he received the D.W. Griffith Award of theDirectors Guild of America and in 2005 a well-deserved Honorary Academy Award.

Click here for complete filmography of Sidney Lumet.

27th January 2008 : Documentary Film Screening : Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin (2003)

Cinema’s First Icon on our Screen

Charlie: The Life and Art of
Charles Chaplin (2003)

Director-writer: Richard Schickel
Narrator: Sydney Pollack
Producers: Richard Schickel, Doug Freeman, Bryan McKenzie
Editor: Bryan McKenzie
Music: Charles Chaplin
Directors of photography: Kris Denton, Thomas Albrecht, Rob Goldie, John Halliday, Ross Keith, Graham Smith
Running time -- 133 minutes
English with English sub titles.
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium, Ganapathy, Coimbatore
27th December 2008 ; 5.45 pm

The film was directed and produced by Richard Schickel, also a film critic for Time, and it's a pretty thorough going-over of both the life and the work, with a decided (and thankful) emphasis on the latter. Sydney Pollack narrates this story of Cockney music hall performer who found glory in Hollywood with a tattered bowler hat, a rickety old cane, and a bit of greasepaint—Chaplin's Little Tramp may be the most identifiable and imitated screen icon of all time.

He was also instrumental in inventing the film grammar that we all take for granted, and for helping to expand the possibilities of this new medium. It's easy to point and shoot, but Chaplin figured out how to expand and compress space, how to use editing for the best possible comic timing, and how to find poetry in little more than two people walking down a street.

Charlie, Richard Schickel's clip-and-chat portrait of Charlie Chaplin, the most celebrated and arguably the most compelling persona on planet earth during the first half of the 20th century, opens by asking the spectator to imagine a world before Chaplin. It's almost impossible.

Richard Schickel's documentary about the 20th century's greatest cinematic figure is a worthy addition to the growing catalog of film history chronicles. This mix of biography and cultural history assembles archival film clips, rare behind-the-scenes footage, and recent interviews to track Chaplin (1889-1977) starting with his harsh childhood in the London slums and his youth as a working-class music-hall performer. We witness the seminal moments of Chaplin's screen career with his improvised mugging in Kid Auto Races at Venice, the 1914 short that records the nascent Little Tramp's first onscreen appearance.

What follows is Chaplin's unprecedented rocket to world-class recognition and wealth. The film spends quality time on his early years with Mack Sennett, the build to his greatest shorts (such as The Immigrant and Easy Street), and the classic features The Kid, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, and Modern Times. Two of Chaplin's later, and lesser, features, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, are placed in good context. Schickel — perhaps to avoid mood-shattering cantankerousness — barely even glosses over the two painful failures that capped the old comedian's career, A King in New York and A Countess from Hong Kong. Home movies give us a warm peek at Chaplin in his twilight years as an exile and doting father in Switzerland.

An impressive array of talking heads add their own personal insights and reflections. Actors Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Bill Irwin, and Marcel Marceau illuminate the intricate physical and emotional components of Chaplin's Little Tramp. Joining fellow directors Woody Allen and Richard Attenborough, Martin Scorsese offers a gleeful exegesis of A Woman of Paris, and Milos Forman gives a personal remembrance of The Great Dictator's impact on Europe under the Nazi threat. Also on hand are critics and biographers Andrew Sarris, David Robinson, David Thomson, Jeannine Basinger, and Jeffrey Vance; Chaplin collaborators Norman Lloyd, Claire Bloom, and David Raskin; and his children Geraldine, Sydney, and Michael. All the while, Schickel reminds us that in multiple mediums he is an engaging writer, and Sydney Pollack makes an able narrator whose authority as a gifted director is equaled by his casual delivery.

Not exactly starstruck but pretty much all celebration all the time, Charlie concentrates mainly on Chaplin the artiste. The documentary comes full circle with some wonderful home-movie performances shot in Switzerland in the 1970s. The mugging octogenarian is not so different from the 25-year-old who forces himself on the audience in Kid Auto Races.

Richard Schickel

Richard Schickel is a film critic and documentary film maker . A film reviewer for Time magazine since 1972, Richard Schickel has attained the stature of a dean of movie history and criticism. Rather than merely turn in his weekly copy, collect columns in occasional book form, and appear as a guest in other people’s documentaries, Schickel has quietly built a respectable body of studies on film .

Richard Schickel has tackled Charlie Chaplin before, in a spirited essay collected in his 1989 book Schickel on Film. There he revealed himself to be that rarest of enthusiasts, an unabashed fan who can celebrate the object of his affection yet won't look away when his subject's hagiography deserves a poking. Schickel is also the writer-director-producer of documentaries on Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, and other filmmaking A-listers. In 2003 he crafted this affectionate, thoughtful documentary on Chaplin. And although he has softened his gruff-love a bit, that distinctive Schickel voice still comes through even as it's spoken by narrator Sydney Pollack.

Richard Schickel has written over 30 books, among them The Disney Version; His Picture in the Papers; D.W. Griffith: An American Life; Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity; Brando: A Life in Our Times; Matinee Idylls; and Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip . His 30 documentaries include Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin; Woody Allen: A Life in Film; and Shooting War , which is about combat cameramen in World War II. He has just completed a book about Elia Kazan and a documentary about Martin Scorsese, which is the eighteenth in the series of portraits of American film directors he has made over the course of his career. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was awarded the British Film Institute Book Prize, the Maurice Bessy prize for film criticism, and the William K. Everson Award for his work in film history. His recently completed reconstruction of Samuel Fuller's classic war film, The Big One , was named one of the year's Ten Best Films by the New York Times , and he has won special citations from the National Society of Film Critics, The Los Angeles and Seattle Film Critics Associations, and Anthology Film Archives. He has been reviewing movies for Time since 1972 and writes a monthly column, Film on Paper, for the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Periodicals:
1965-1972, Film Critic, Life Magazine
1972-present, Film Critic, Time Magazine
2002-present, Film on Paper, monthly column, Los Angeles Times Book Review
1954-present, Essays, articles and reviews, most major publications
Selected Book Publications : 23
Selected Television & Film Productions : 30

20th January 2008; Screening of George Sluizer's The Vanishing

…fiendishley intelligent..chilling and perverse, spell-binding,
a gripping psychological thriller. -  New York Times

. . . . moving; its rigor isn’t alienating, and its symetries are
evocative rather than merely ingenious .The Vanishing has the
elusive but unshakable poetry of nightmare.
- The New Yorker
  
   

A Film by George Sluizer
Year : 1988   Country : Netherlands / France
Dutch / French with English sub titles.
Run time : 107 min
20th Sunday 2008 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital auditorium, Ganapthy, Coimbatore

The Vanishing

This stylish Dutch movie creates one of the most frightening movie monsters in recent history. An unforgettably chilling psychodrama which twists the slenderest of plots into a hellish exploration of human potential. On a driving holiday in France, a young Dutch couple, Saskia and Rex (Ter Steege and Bervoets), stop at a service station to refuel. What happens after that will keep you in a world of sheer suspense till the end .Three years after Saskia's disappearance , an embittered Rex finds himself drawn into a nightmarish relationship with Raymond Lemorne (Donnadieu), who via taunting postcards promises to reveal the fate of his lost love. Consumed by his desire for knowledge, Rex resolves to confront his nemesis and end the Nietzschean conflict of wills in which he is embroiled..

Adapted from Tim Krabbé's novel The Golden Egg, this is a beautifully understated study of obsession that investigates the edges of rationality and the destructive capacity of idealistic devotion. At the heart of its icy spell is Donnadieu's utterly plausible evocation of everyday madness, a resolutely banal picture of evil. Sluizer's direction is seamless throughout, effortlessly juggling domesticity and damnation as it ploughs inexorably towards an appalling dénouement.

How Raymond's experiments tie into Saskia's disappearance makes for a fascinating game that eventually takes on cat-and-mouse proportions — but does not go down the roads you will expect.

The performances are uniformly excellent, with Johanna Ter Steege particularly affecting as Saskia, whose spirit hovers over the proceedings even during long absences from the screen. And Gene Bervoets as her tormented husband and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu as Raymond are also very good.

George Sluizer's "The Vanishing" has a horrifying everydayness that makes it feel close-in and inescapable. It's a thriller, but it doesn't work you over with the usual genre manipulations, the standard tightening and loosening of its grip on your emotions. Its pulse is carefully measured, yet the surface blandness is all the more disturbing because its features are so familiar, so like your own life, so searingly plausible.


George Sluizer

Director, producer and screenwriter George Sluizer is Dutch, but was born in Paris in 1932. He attended the IDHEC film academy in Paris. He made his first film in 1961, HOLD BACK THE SEA, a documentary that won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

During the 1960s until the early 1980s he produced and directed many documentaries and TV specials. He also worked as a producer on numerous films, including Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO and CANCER RISING with Rutger Hauer.
As a writer/director he made his first feature film in 1971, JOAO AND THE KNIFE, which was followed by TWICE A WOMAN with Anthony Perkins and Bibi Andersson, and RED DESERT PENITENTIARY.

With SPOORLOOS (THE VANISHING) in 1988 he received worldwide recognition. The film won him many awards and was the Dutch entry for the 1989 Academy Awards. In 1992 he directed a remake of THE VANISHING for 20th Century Fox, starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock.

In 1991 Sluizer directed an adaptation of Bruce Chatwin’s novel UTZ, starring Armin Mueller-Stahl (Best Actor in Berlin 1992), and in 1993 DARK BLOOD, kept unfinished because of the death of its leading actor River Phoenix. CRIMETIME followed in 1995, a thriller about the dangerous effects of reality TV, starring Stephen Baldwin and Pete Postlethwaite. In 1996, Sluizer produced and co-directed the nostalgic comedy DYING TO GO HOME and in 1997 he directed THE COMMISSIONER with John Hurt and Rosana Pastor. And in 2002 THE STONERAFT based on the novel by Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago.
During his career, Sluizer has directed films in six different languages and regards himself as a truly European director. A master of the thriller genre, Sluizer is known for his unique signature, his “going to the edge” and “search for one’s limits”.

Outreach Programme Screening : Mon Oncle

Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot Ventures Into Suburbia...
And Disrupts...Disassembles...And Demolishes
With His Very Subtle Satire

Mon Oncle
A Film By Jacques Tati
117 minutes, French with English subtitles
13^th January 2008
Aruna Thirumana Mandapam , Opp Spencer’s , NSR Road , Saibaba Colony.

Five years after Monsier Hulot’s Holiday proved a major critical success, Jacques Tati and Monsieur Hulot returned to cinema screens across the world in Mon Oncle, a film which proved to be one of the cinematic highlights of 1958. As with Tati’s previous film, Mon Oncle delighted the critics and was a commercial success. The film won not just the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but also an Oscar (in the best foreign film category).

One of Tati’s favorite themes is our enslavement to technology, or more precisely, how technology makes us do ridiculous things. in Mon Oncle, the central family lives in an ultra-modernized home. Everything is button operated and the layout is a cross between a space station and a museum. It is all for show, of course; the dolphin fountain in the front yard is activated only when guests arrive, causing the porcine matron, Madame Arpel, to rush maniacally to her master control switch each time the doorbell rings. For Tati, repetition was an inexhaustible source of comedy. Watching Madame Arpel push the same buttons over and over again is like watching a circus animal perform the same trick. We are mesmerized by her mechanical, inhuman quality.

Click here to see Tati in the kitchen ecene

Most of the characters in Mon Oncle, with their bizarre costumes and stiff body language, look and act robotic (with the exception of Monsieur Hulot, of course). The secretary at Monsieur Arpel’s plastics factory walks with a metallic clip-clop which clearly announces her arrivals and departures. We don’t think of her as a human; she is an institutional creation designed to serve her masters. To a certain degree, we watch all of Tati’s characters with a similar level of impassivity. There isn’t a single close-up shot in either movie. Observing them from a distance, we may at times empathize with his characters, but seldom do we like them very much.

We do, however, benefit from the presence of Tati in the form of Monsieur Hulot. Never the center of any of his movies, Hulot is part of a larger ensemble cast, and more often than not, he is deliberately placed off to one side of the screen or is partially concealed. His elusiveness makes him all the more likable; it’s as if he has stumbled quite by chance into his scenes. Tall and gangly, Hulot is so likable that we hardly notice that he is virtually mute. Adults regard him as a curiosity, a kid who never grew up, while children take to him almost immediately. Eventually, his personality grows on everyone.

Tati was a perfectionist who designed each shot with excruciating levels of precision. He planned all the details in advance, even if most of them would go unnoticed by the audience. Tati took particular pride in the use of sound effects, which is somewhat surprising because he had his start in silent films, and before that, in live theater. He created specific sounds for each object in his movies, and he would repeat each sound over and over again as a way of giving personality to that object or to the place where it is found.

Not only is Mon Oncle an a greatly entertaining piece of cinema, it is also frighteningly prophetic. Almost fifty years on, the charming world inhabited by Monsieur Hulot has all but disappeared and, to a greater or lesser extent, we have all ended up slaves of technology, much of which is of dubious benefit. To this audience, watching Mon Oncle can be a poignant experience. As we laugh at the exploits of Monsieur Hulot and his inability to adapt to a changing world, we see something of ourselves and perhaps nurture a secret yearning to return to a simpler, less technologically orientated way of life.

Screening supported by Hollywood DVD Shoppe, NSR Road , Saibaba Colony

Jacques Tati
October 9, 1907 – November 5, 1982

Jacques Tati is one of the great comic icons of French cinema, a Gallic equivalent of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, whose works as director, writer, and actor are regarded fondly by audiences as well as harder-to-please critics. Like a true auteur, Tati essentially made only one kind of film, in his case, the physical comedy. There is little to no dialogue in his movies, and the action, frenzied but tightly choreographed, is invariably set to a breezy musical score. The main protagonist of all his movies is also his screen alter ego, the ubiquitous Monsieur Hulot who, with his pipe and trenchcoat, eventually came to personify the Tati canon. From 1953 to 1974, Tati played Hulot a total of five times, winning an Oscar and two Cannes prizes along the way. Two of the best known Hulot films, M. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958 They represent Tati at peak form. They are precisely calibrated films that successfully merge farce with darker social commentary.

Jacques Tati was born Jacques Tatischeff, the son of Russian father Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff and Dutch mother Marcelle Claire Van Hoof, in Le Pecq, Yvelines.

After a career as a professional rugby player, Tati found success as a mime in French music halls. In the late 1930s Tati recorded some of his early supporting cameos on film with some success and thus began his career as a filmmaker. One of his short films, L'École des facteurs (The School for Postmen) provided material for his first feature, Jour de fête. His films have little audible dialogue, but instead are built around elaborate, tightly-choreographed visual gags and carefully integrated sound effects.

In all but his very last film, Tati plays the lead character, who - with the exception of his first and last films - is the gauche and socially inept Monsieur Hulot. Tati's comedic work, most notably in Mon Oncle, Playtime, and Trafic include Western society's obsession with material goods, particularly American-style consumerism, the pressure cooker environment of modern society, the superficiality of relationships among France's various social classes, and the cold and often impractical nature of space-age technology and design.

Tati’s Playtime (1967) was his most ambitious project, Tati invested everything he had in the film, even going so far as to create a set the size of a small town (nicknamed Tativille). Tati, who had used up his own financial resources and turned to friends and relations for money, would be paying of the debts he had accumulated in making the film right up until his death.

As a result of these financial difficulties, Tati found he had lost his freedom as a director, but he still retained his creative urge. He made two further films, Trafic (1971), a satire on mankind’s ill-fated love-affair with the motor car , followed by Parade (1974), a low-budget circus-based film for Swedish television.

In recognition of his contribution to cinema, Jacques Tati was awarded a César d’honneur in 1977. Tati’s final project, Confusion, was aborted at an early stage when the director died from a pulmonary embolism, on 5th November 1982 in Paris.

Since his death, Jacques Tati’s films have grown to be appreciated by increasing numbers of film enthusiasts across the world. The style of the films, based on the language of physical comedy, makes them accessible to all cultures, all ages. They are as entertaining to children as they are to adults, whilst those who regard cinema as an art can only be impressed by Tati’s creativity, discipline and imagination. Although recognition of Tati’s genius has been a long time coming, few would now dispute that Jacques Tati is one of the greatest names on the history of cinema.

6th January 2008 ; Screening of Wind Will Carry Us

Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami

- Jean-Luc Godard

THE WIND WILL CARRY US

Film by Abbas Kiarostami
Country : Iran , Year : 1999
Run time : 113 minutes , Persian with English sub titles.
6th January 5.45 pm , Ashwin Hospital Auditorium , Ganapathy , Coimbatore

"We're heading nowhere," a disembodied voice complains as a battered jeep crawls up a winding road through harsh, scrubby terrain. So begins The Wind Will Carry Us—the latest and perhaps the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.

A busy video producer/engineer Behzad from Tehran is sent to a remote Iranian village to capture an obscure burial ceremony. But the 'subject' of his film , Mrs. Malek is ill, not dead, forcing the man and his production crew to slow down, linger in the village, and mingle with the local families.

Along the way, the engineer encounters a radically different lifestyle than his own, with different priorities. In doing so, his perspective on the natural world is changed.

Behzad recites a poem in the film , a poem by Furugh Farrukhzad (1935-67), one of the most extraordinary Persian or Iranian female poets of the twentieth century, which gives the film its title and which treats the central conflict in the film, “life in the face of death.” In Iran, people at all social levels know poetry and quote it to each other constantly, for all sorts of reasons Poetry and Sufism. Both are useful coordinates for anyone trying to get a fix on the intent behind this gorgeous, semi-opaque film, The Wind Will Carry Us

This film is remarkable in its sustained pace, perspective, and ability to focus so sharply on a single character without revealing too much of that character, allowing him to retain a sense of mystery and delightful ambiguity.

In the title sequence of The Wind Will Carry Us absences define presences in numerous ways. In fact, many major characters in the film -- including Mrs. Malek, Youssef, and all three members of Behzad's crew -- are never seen. Most of the sequence unfolds in semidarkness.

The Wind Will Carry Us offers an intricately constructed spatial world that's as breathtakingly beautiful, as various, and as cosmically evocative as a Brueghel landscape -- a world teeming with diverse kinds of life and activity -- and it teases us whenever we want to get to know this world better, seducing and evading us at the same time. If you're open to the possibility that the world is bigger than you typically give it credit for, and you're willing to invest some effort in letting go of your usual way of seeing, this film will be a revelation for you.

Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian filmmaker who is widely considered one of the world's greatest living directors has written and directed some 41 movies since the early 1970s, and has been compared by critics to such titans of international cinema as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa.

In her survey of recent achievements in film, Susan Sontag declared, “Iranian cinema has been the great revelation of the last decade.” Surely one of those largely responsible for this phenomenon is the screenwriter and director Abbas Kiarostami.

Few new films draw comparisons to classics like Mr. Bergman's "Wild Strawberries," Michelangelo Antonioni's "Red Desert" or Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt." Mr. Kiarostami's movies not only evoke such parallels; they also seem to infuse the beleaguered art-film traditions with fresh urgency.

Born in Tehran in 1940, Kiarostami worked as a commercial artist and children’s book illustrator until he was invited to lead the department of cinema at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Given this background, it’s not surprising that many of his projects feature children. Kiarostami is a graduate of Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Painting

Mr. Kiarostami's own filmmaking began at the end of the 1960's when the loose-knit movement later labeled the Iranian New Wave was just gaining steam. One hallmark of Mr. Kiarostami's work is its esthetic consistency. "Bread and Alley," the first short he made, in 1970, has qualities that distinguish his films up to "Taste of Cherry": a lyrical but concrete feel for the particulars of place and visual atmosphere; a way of eliciting strikingly natural performances from nonactors; and stories in which an anecdotal surface disguises a rich substratum of philosophical, allegorical or social concerns.

Mr. Kiarostami did not consider leaving the country during the Iranian revolution of 1978-79, he said, "because of a revolution going on in my own house." His own marriage was failing.
Pierre Rissient, an executive with Ciby 2000, the French company that handles worldwide sales of "Taste of Cherry," says that Mr. Kiarostami "proceeds the way the Greek philosophers like Heraclitus do, or Chinese figures like Laotzu, or Japanese Zen poets like Basho -- the poetry is completely linked with philosophy."

Seven of his films are best known to us: Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Homework (1989), Close-Up (1990), And Life Goes on... (1991), Through the Olive Trees (1994), Taste of Cherry (1998) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).

The protagonists of his films are the ordinary people who surround us. Their lives represent no more and no less of what constitute ours. Their presence in films provides us with an opportunity to think about the everydayness of our existence and relationships; an opportunity to see them as a mirror that reflects the depth of our human feelings and thoughts..

Abbas Kiarostami's films seek to uncover the deepest human emotions in the most ordinary events in life. His works are a demonstration of the significance and relevance of these emotions to the restless, captive, and tormented individuals of the twentieth century.

Everything in Kiarostami's films speaks to the matter at hand. His films direct the spectator toward central human problems. He has deeply-held ideas and feelings. He wants to say certain things about life. So he doesn't waste his time or ours. Nothing has been done merely for effect, to impress the spectator, to enhance the director's reputation. There aren't so many artists like that around, unfortunately. We need more.

23rd December 2007 ; Screening of 2 Short Films by Krzysztof Kieslowski

TWO SHORT FILMS OF POLISH MASTER
Krzysztof Kieślowski

23^rd December 2007 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

1.

Concert of Requests

‘ Concert of Requests ‘ (Polish : Koncert życzeń ) is a 1967 short film by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and starring Jerzy Fedorowicz, produced while Kieślowski was a student at the Łódź Film School. A rare opportunity to see one of Kieslowski’s first fiction films – his graduation short from the Lodz Film School in Poland (whose students also included Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi) made when he was 26 years old.

The film follows a group of young people on a trip in the forest near Przewoz, Poland. They drink, smoke, listen to rock and roll music, and litter before leaving in a bus. A young man and woman who had been camping leave on a motorcycle. The motorcycle passes the bus on the road, accidentally dropping their tent and the woman's identification card, and the bus stops to pick it up. The motorcyclists drive back to the stopped bus and ask for the tent. The bus driver agrees to return the tent only if the woman comes with them. Ann the story continues .

Concert of Requests is more Godard or Truffaut than Kieslowski - but works either way.

Year : 1968 , Runtime : 16 minutes . Polish with English subtitles.

2.

Dekalog

One of the great achievements in cinema of the last generation, The Decalogue combines tough-minded realism and hallucinatory style.

Dekalog (The Decalogue) (1988) is a Polish film series, originally made as a television miniseries, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski and co-written by Kieślowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with music by Zbigniew Preisner. It consists of ten one-hour films, each of which represents one of the Ten Commandments and explores possible meanings of the commandment—often ambiguous or contradictory—within a fictional story set in modern Poland. The series is Kieślowski's most acclaimed work and has won numerous international awards, though it was not widely released outside Europe until the late 1990s. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick described it as the only masterpiece he could name in his lifetime.

Though each film is independent, most of them share the same setting (a large housing project in Warsaw) and some of the characters are acquainted with each other. There is also a nameless character (Artur Barciś), possibly supernatural, who observes the main characters at key moments but never intervenes. The large cast includes both famous actors and unknowns, many of whom Kieślowski also used in other films. Typically for Kieślowski, the tone of most of the films is meditative and melancholy, except for the last one, which (like Three Colors: White, which features two of the same actors) is a black comedy.

The Decalogue films are noted for their tight dramatic constructions, vividly rendered characters, and emotionally resonant ethical dilemmas depicting characters attempting to live in the modern world according to (or in search of) presupposed ideals.

Dekalog 7 ‘ Thou shalt not steal.’

A young woman (Anna Polony) abducts her own child, who has been raised by her parents as her sister. . A six year old blond girl, named Ania (Katarzyna Piwowarczyk), is kidnapped by her sister Majka (Maja Barelkowska), who is really her mother. Ania believes her grandparents, Ewa (Anna Polony) and Stefan (Wladyslaw Kowalski), are her parents, but Majka decides to tell the truth. She takes Aniato her real father, who was her teacher at a boarding school her mot her still runs.

An extremely believable and thoroughly tragic tug-of-war, Dekalog 7 leaves the viewer emotionally stranded, dying to know more.

In Dekalog 7 Kieslowski takes an upsetting and oblique approach to the commandment that "Thou Shalt Not Steal". Rather than confronting the issue head-on with material possessions, he poses the question of whether you can steal something that is already yours, in the process unearthing highly subtle forms of theft.

Year : 1988 , Run time : 55 minutes . Polish with English subtitles.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

b. June 27, 1941, Warsaw, Poland
d. March 13, 1996, Warsaw, Poland

Kieślowski was born in Warsaw and grew up in several small towns, moving wherever his engineer father, a tuberculosis patient, could find treatment. At sixteen, he briefly attended a firemen's training school, but dropped out after three months. Without any career goals, he then entered the College for Theatre Technicians in Warsaw in 1957 .

Leaving college , Kieślowski joined the Łódź Film School, the famed Polish film school that also produced Roman Polański and Andrzej Wajda. He attended from 1964 to 1968, during a period in which the government allowed a relatively high degree of artistic freedom at the school. Kieślowski decided to make documentary films. Kieslowski also married his lifelong love, Maria (Marysia) Cautillo, during his final year in school (m. January 21, 1967 to his death), and they had a daughter, Marta (b. January 8, 1972).

Kieślowski's early documentaries focused on the everyday lives of city dwellers, workers, and soldiers. He soon found that attempting to depict Polish life accurately brought him into conflict with the authorities. His television film Workers '71, was only shown in a drastically censored form. He abandoned documentary filmmaking due the censorship of Workers '71. He decided that fiction not only allowed more artistic freedom, but could portray everyday life more truthfully.

Kieslowski’s work consists of 40 feature / documentary/ short films made during his short life span which include the evergreen classic Tricolours Trilogy of three films - Red, Blue and White and his 10 parts Dekalog. Series.

The death of Krzysztof Kieslowski in March 1996 was
widely mourned.

16th December 2007 : Screening of Tokyo Story

Ozu doesn't sentimentalise or condemn;
he merely observes human nature with calm and clarity.
- Colin Covert

TOKYO STORY

A film by Yasujiro Ozu
Country : Japan ; Year :1953
Run time : 136 minutes
Japanese with English sub titles.
16^th Dec 2007 ; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium, Ganapathy , Coimbatore
Call 94430 39630

It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help
us make small steps against our imperfections.
- Roger Ebert

Made in 1953 as Japan pulled itself together to face a democratic future after 50 years of aggression and seven years of American occupation, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is the supreme masterpiece of one of the cinema's greatest masters.
Those brought up on the energetic diet of American cinema may find it hard to appreciate the quietist art of the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. He has been called the poet of family life, capable of taking the seemingly trivial and making great drama of it. Nothing was too small to be significant.

No story could be simpler. An old couple come to the city to visit their children and grandchildren. Their children are busy, and the old people upset their routines. In a quiet way, without anyone admitting it, the visit goes badly. The parents return home. A few days later, the grandmother dies. Now it is the turn of the children to make a journey.

From these few elements Yasujiro Ozu made one of the greatest films of all time. "Tokyo Story" (1953) lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn't want to force our emotions, but to share its understanding. It does this so well that you are near tears in the last 30 minutes. It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.

It does this with characters so universal that we recognize them instantly -- sometimes in the mirror. It was made 50 years ago in Japan, by a man who was born 100 years ago and it is about our families, our natures, our flaws and our clumsy search for love and meaning. It isn't that our lives keep us too busy for our families. It's that we have arranged them to protect us from having to deal with big questions of love, work and death. We escape into truisms, small talk and distractions. Given the opportunity at a family gathering to share our hopes and disappointments, we talk about the weather and watch TV.

Ozu is not only a great director but a great teacher, and after you know his films, a friend. With no other director , you do feel affection for every single shot. "Tokyo Story" opens with the distant putt-putt of a ship's engine, and bittersweet music evokes a radio heard long ago and far away. There are exterior shots of a neighborhood. If we know Ozu, we know the boat will not figure in the plot, that the music will never be used to underline or comment on the emotions, that the neighborhood may be the one where the story takesplace, but it doesn't

matter. Ozu uses "pillow shots" like the pillow words in Japanese poetry, separating his scenes with brief, evocative images from everyday life. He likes trains, clouds, smoke, clothes hanging on a line, empty streets, small architectural details, banners blowing in the wind (he painted most of the banners in his movies himself).

His visual strategy is as simple (therefore as profound) as possible. His camera is not always precisely three feet above the floor (the eye level of a Japanese person seated on a tatami mat), but it usually is. "The reason for the low camera position," the writer Donald Richie explains, "is that it eliminates depth and makes a two-dimensional space

Except for a single panning shot and a short sequence in which the old couple go around Tokyo on a shuddering tourist bus, Ozu never moves his camera. Every shot is expressively composed in depth, with the camera placed a little above floor-level. This sense of life quietly observed and captured in tableaux is contrasted with the trains that thunder through the town and the fishing boats and ferries that chug in and out of the harbour, representing life going on, people making journeys elsewhere.

This is an exquisite movie, emotionally tough, psychologically perceptive, universally truthful

(Source : Roger Ebert, Gurdian , & Observer )

Yasujiro Ozu
12th Dec 1903 - 12th Dec 1963

"I have formulated my own directing style in my head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others." - Ozu

Ozu was born on December 12, 1903 in Tokyo. He and his two brothers were educated in the countryside, in Matsuzaka, whilst his father sold fertilizer in Tokyo. Ozu developed a love of film during his early days of school truancy, but his fascination began when he first saw a Matsunosuke historical spectacular at the Atagoza cinema in Matsuzaka. Ozu's uncle, aware of his nephew's love of film, introduced him to Teihiro Tsutsumi, then manager of Shochiku. Not long after, Ozu began working for the great studio—against his father's wishes—as an assistant cameraman.

Ozu's work as assistant cameraman involved pure physical labour, lifting and moving equipment at Shochiku's TokyoThe Sword Of Penitence that became his first film as director (and only period piece) in 1927. Ozu was called up into the army reserves before shooting was completed. No negative, prints or script exist of The Sword Of Penitence—and, sadly, only 36 out of 54 Ozu films still exist. studios in Kamata. After becoming assistant director to Tadamoto Okubo, it took less than a year for Ozu to put his first script forward for filming. It was in fact his second script

Days Of Youth (Wakaki Hi, 1929) is Ozu's earliest extant picture, though not especially typical (and preceded by seven others, now lost) as it is set on ski slopes. Stylistically it is rife with close-ups, fade-outs and tracking shots, all of which Ozu was later to leave behind. Three years later came what is generally recognized as Ozu's first major film, I Was Born, But... (Umarete wa Mita Keredo..., 1932). This moving comedy/drama was a great success in Japan both critically and financially. It was one of cinema's finest works about children.

Thirty years into his filmmaking career Ozu was making films which, like Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), questioned the sense of spending your whole working life behind a desk—something that many of his audience must have been doing.

Ozu's films represent a lifelong study of the Japanese family and the changes that a family unit experiences. He ennobles the humdrum world of the middle-class family and has been regarded as “the most Japanese of all filmmakers”, not just by Western critics, but also by his countrymen

9th Dec 2007 ; Konangal Outreach Programme screening : Chemmeen

CHEMMEEN
A film by Ramu Kariat
Year 1965 , Run time : 140 Minutes.
Malayalam with English subtitles
6pm 9th December 2007
Aruna Thirumana Mandapam
N S R Road, SBColony, Coimbatore

Directed by Kerala's one of the most renowned directors Ramu Kariat, Chemmeen is based on a highly acclaimed Malayalam novel by Jyanpeth award winner Takazhi Shivashankara Pillai. By becoming the first south Indian film to win the President's Gold Medal for best film. At Chicago Film Festival, the movie won a Certificate of Merit. At the 2005 Brisbane International Film Festival, the movie was screened in a retrospective on 50 years of Malayalam Cinema. Chemmeen put Malayalam cinema on the Indian cinema map. While considering the history of Malayalam cinema, the film is attributed epic status.

Chemmeen was recognized as a technically and artistically brilliant cinema. Incidentally, it was also one of the first Malayalam movies in colour. Chemmeen had some of the best names then in India for its technical support, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the editor and Marcus Bartely the cinematographer. Lyrics by Vyalar Rama Varma and the music composed by Salil Choudhury made the songs of Chemmeen highly popular.

Karutthamma (played by Sheila in the movie) is the daughter of a poor fisherman, Chembankunju (Kottarakkara). She is in love with a fish trader, Pareekkutty (Madhu), who helps her ambitious father buy a boat and net. In return, Chembankunju promises to sell his catch to Pareekkutty on credit. However, once he launches the boat, he dishonors the agreement . Chembankunju prospers. .Traditions prevent Karuthamma to marry Pareekutty, and she is married off to Palani, a total stranger who arrives in their village. Even though the affair of the past between Karuthamma and Pareekutty is a matter of talk among the villagers, Palani ignores them and loves Karuthamma while Karuthamma can not erase her love for Pareekutty from her heart.
At the core of the film are the three central performances of Sheela, Sathyan and Madhu. The film offers all three of them their career-defining roles. The three are strongly supported by Kottarakkara Sreedharan Nair bringing alive the wily and greedy Chembankunju.

Chemeen’s tale is multilayered. On one level while it is a tragic love story of forbidden love. On the other hand it proves that true love recognizes no religious, cultural or geographical boundaries. If the film reaffirms the required commitment to relationships, it also shows how deep, passionate love can both save and destroy man. It tells you how people can change with greed and jealousy and it illustrates the deeply rooted nature of superstition in the Hindu psyche while looking at the life of a typical Kerala fishing community of Allapuzha. While its grandeur flows from the wild and powerful ocean that rules the fishing community, its poetic beauty lies in its depiction of those small moments that can make or mar our lives

Direction: Ramu Kariat , Screenplay & Story: Takazhi Shivashankara Pillai
Cast: Satyan, Sheela, Madhu, Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, S.P.Pillai, Adoor Bhawani
Cinematography: Marcus Bartely , Editing: Hrishikesh Mukherjee
Music: Salil Choudhury