1st June 2014; The Match Factory Girl by Aki Kaurismäki

 

The Match Factory Girl

A film by Aki Kaurismäki

1990/ Finland/ Runtime :70 mins

1st June 2014; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

The Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki often portrays unremarkable lives of unrelenting grimness, sadness, desolation. When his characters are not tragic, he elevates them to such levels as stupidity, cluelessness, self-delusion or mental illness. Iris, the match factory girl, incorporates all of these attributes. His camera stares at her, and she stares back. She is a pale blonde, slender, with a receding chin and eyes set deep in pools of mascara.

 

Her job at the match factory is boring and thankless. She is one of the few humans among the machines. She takes the tram home to Factory Lane, where a shabby alley door admits her to the two-room apartment she shares with her mother and stepfather. In the evenings she goes out seeking companionship, and is ignored. At the club, nobody asks her to dance. In the early scenes of this film Iris doesn't smoke at all. When she finally lights a cigarette--with a match from her factory--it summons visions for her; ideas of revenge. We watch as she acts on these notions.

Aki Kaurismäki creates a wickedly incisive and fascinating dark comedy in The Match Factory Girl. In characterizing the unremarkable protagonist, Iris, with an inexpressive, Bressonian demeanor, Kaurismäki reflects the sustained, dispassionate cynicism and alienation of contemporary society. Furthermore, the pervasive silence, emotional callousness, and physical isolation reflect the innate loneliness and dehumanization of the soul. 

Unable to find connection in her cruel life, Iris lashes out at her oppressive environment with the same familiar detachment that has sustained her through disillusionment, abuse, humiliation, and heartbreak, and in the process, destroys all that is left of her dignity and humanity. 

Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki, born in Finland in 1957. After graduating in media studies from the University of Tampere, Aki Kaurismäki started his career as a co-screenwriter and actor in films made by his older brother, Mika Kaurismäki. His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment (1983), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel set in modern Helsinki. He gained worldwide attention with Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Kaurismäki has been influenced by the French directors Jean-Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson. He  has tried and managed to stick totally to the inseparable realities of the real world His minimalist style is all his own (and that of the great cinematographer of all his films, Timo Salminen); he never entered the Finnish Film School (as he was suspected to be "too cynical").

Much of Kaurismäki's work is centred on Helsinki, such as the film Calamari Union, the Proletariat trilogy (Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) and the Finland trilogy (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk). His vision of Helsinki is critical and singularly unromantic. Indeed, his characters often speak about how they wish to get away from Helsinki. Some end up in Mexico (Ariel), others in Estonia (Shadows in Paradise, Calamari Union, and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana). The setting of most of his films is the 1980s, or at least contains elements from that decade. Kaurismäki is, in fact, almost single-handedly responsible for rejuvenating the failing Finnish film industry in the 1980s with a series of highly original comedies made with his brother Mika. Over the past twenty years, Kaurismäki has become one of the pre-eminent auteurs of international art cinema, fusing minimalism and melodrama to poignantly depict the hardships of Finland’s blue-collar class.

18th May 2014; Satyajit Ray's ABHIJAN

ABHIJAN

A film by Satyajit Ray

1962/ 150 mins / Bengali with English subtitles

18th May 2014; 5.45 pm; Perks Mini Theater

  Abhijan was one of the most popular films (in Bengal) Ray has produced: a "conscious" effort to communicate with a wider audience. The project was originally one that his friends had conceived. Ray stepped in when his friends panicked at the prospect of directing. It was Ray's mastery that turned this "conventional" plot to a subtly nuanced story. The theme of the film is the attempt to "buy" over an honest but impoverished young man by a financially successful middle-aged businessman.

 Set on the Bihar-Bengal border, where Marwari businessmen — a powerful Hindi-dialect community of entrepreneurs — and Rajputs of warrior caste (from Rajasthan) have both settled. The central character of Narsingh (Soumitra Chatterjee), is a disillusioned, frequently drunken Rajput reduced in status to an ill-educated taxi driver. 

Proud and hot-tempered, with a passion for his 1930s Chrysler, Narsingh is offered work for Sukhanram, a shady merchant, and finds himself drawn against his better judgment into trafficking opium. Having failed in everything honest, he has to decide whether or not he will engage in criminal activity to make money.

The two main female characters Neeli and Gulabi form a contrast. Narasingh has a soft spot for Neeli who is a strong, reserved Catholic schoolmistress, and has no interest in him. The other female character is beautiful Gulabi who has been forced into prostitution by circumstances. Narasingh falls in love with Gulabi for her basic values. In the end he redeems  himself  and proves that every rule has an exception.

 

Starring Waheeda Rehman  as Gulabi, a prostitute; Rabi Ghosh as Rama, Narsingh's right-hand man; and Ruma Guha Thakurata as Neeli, Abhijan was honoured with the National Award of India in 1962.

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.

(Source: Internet)

4th May 2014; Agnes Varda's CLEO from 5 to 7

Cléo from 5 to 7

A film by Agnes Varda

1962/ France / Runtime: 90 mins

4^th May 2014; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

This movie shows us Cléo, a beautiful  French singer, who is afraid of getting the result of of a test from her doctor. She is counting out the minutes until she learns the results from tests. That time she spends from 5 to 7 in the evening is told  almost in real time on celluloid by director  Agnes Varda. 

Despite the dire premonitions that point to the titular heroine's grueling psychological marathon, Cléo from 5 to 7 moves with grace from one emotional extreme to the next. Whenever Cleo  finds herself drifting too far into melancholic self-pity, she blithely puts on a devil-may-care grin—most stunningly in the penultimate scene in the park when she sashays Marilyn Monroe-style down stairs in the Parc Montsouris in order to face her impending diagnosis.We follow her for two hours while she cruises through the streets of Paris.

Director Varda quietly follows Cleo’s  wanderings about Paris, but not in the conventional discrete fashion of Hollywood montage sequences.  Instead, as Richard Roud has said “Little is omitted, there are no ellipses.  The streets and cafes of Paris, the taxis and the cinema, are seen as they really are and as they appear through the eyes of a woman who is tracked by death.”  

This is a film whose debt to Varda’s life as a photographer is always immanent: Paris has rarely been photographed with such clinical precision.  Paradoxically, this is a relentless first-person narrative.

Hers is not a naturalistic, hostile universe, it is a universe which simply is, and will remain, after Cleo leaves it, and it is the need to speak this deep truth, to tell of the way that the universe shrugs its shoulders and says “eh...” even to our greatest personal upheavals, which is the philosophical foundation of Cleo from 5 to 7.  It is a truth that we, like Cleo, can never realize until we are confronted with a challenge to our own existence so total that the universe’s quiet disinterest in us can be made this plain.

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda was born on May 30, 1928 in Brussels, Belgium. Agnes Varda’s remarkable life behind the camera has always been that of an exception.  As a member of the otherwise male preserve of the French New Wave, she has always stood out, sometimes unwillingly; by mere virtue of her gender, she was a symbol for feminists in the European film industries, and with her renaissance-woman production economy (she is often the producer-screenwriter-director of her films, as well as occasionally) she exemplifies the complete auteur.

In the four decades since Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda has directed many films, and created at least three other esteemed masterpieces: 1977's One Sings, the Other Doesn't, which is the overtly feminist message movie Cléo from 5 to 7 is often given credit for being; 1985's Vagabond, one of the key art-house films of the '80s; and recently, 2000's The Gleaners and I, a widely lauded essay film somewhat in the style of Chris Marker. In a way, Marker was probably always the Nouvelle Vague/"Left Bank" filmmaker that Varda perhaps most strongly resembled, in their shared love for the power of photography, their completely unforced attitudes toward interpretation, and a warm sense of cinematic playfulness. One can't help but compare Marker and Varda to the curious and rambunctious kittens, a significantly entrenched motif in Marker's canon, in Cléo's apartment. Those kittens would grow older and direct the world-wise A Grin Without a Cat and The Gleaners and I, but Cléo from 5 to 7 serves as a reminder that even the most cunning, ruthlessly intellectual filmmakers can also create wondrous playgrounds, so long as they're in touch with their own giddy paradoxes.

6th April 2014; Koreeda's STILL WALKING

Still Walking

A film by Hirokazu Koreeda

2008 / Japan / 115 minutes/ col

6^th April 2014; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

A family haunted by a long-dead son gathers to remember him but spends most of the day consumed by old resentments and tensions in this quiet, compelling Japanese drama. The story, covering 24 hours, centers on the Yokoyama clan, whose first-born died rescuing a drowning boy. The dear departed, Junpei, is very much present as the three generations pass the time preparing food, eating and talking, with the children playing, watching and listening. There's a brief trip to the cemetery and a few other outside scenes, but most of the film takes place in the grandparents' house.

The central figure is Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), Junpei's brother and an unemployed art restorer. He's resented by his gruff father (Yoshio Harada), a retired physician who had hoped Ryota would study medicine, as Junpei did. To make matters worse, Ryota has married a widow with a 10-year-old son.

 Also present are the matriarch (Kirin Kiki), who, like her husband, measures Ryota against the impossible standard of his brother; Ryota's sister (played by the single-named and squeaky-voiced actress You), who would like to move her family into the parents' house; and the siblings' children.

 

The compositions are graceful but not static, and  director Koreeda is a careful observer of small things.The director, Koreeda has said that, though the story was inspired by the deaths of his parents, he hoped to make a film "brimming with life." He's succeeded. 

If anyone can be considered an heir of the great Japanese  film maker Yasujiro Ozu, it might be Hirokazu Kore-Eda, the writer and director of "Still Walking." In "Maborosi" (1995), "After Life" (1998) and "Nobody Knows" (2004), his first three features and now in this film, he has produced profoundly empathetic films about human feelings. He sees intensely and tenderly into his characters. Like Ozu, he pays meticulous attention to composition and camera placement. Acting as his own editor, he doesn't cut for immediately effect, but for the subtle gathering of power. His actors look as if they could be such people as they portray.

Hirokazu Koreeda

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda was born in Tokyo in 1962. Originally intended to be a novelist, but after graduating from Waseda University in 1987 went on to become an assistant director at TV Man Union. Sneaked off set to film _Lessons from a Calf (1991)_. His first feature, Maboroshi no hikari (1995), based on a Teru Miyamoto novel and drawn from his own experiences whilst filming _August Without Him (1994)_, won jury prizes at Venice and Chicago. The main themes of his oeuvre include memory and loss, death and loss, and the intersection of documentary and fictional narratives.

In a short period of time, Hirozaku Koreeda has gained a solid reputation as one of the most significant figures of contemporary Japanese cinema. His oeuvre is currently comprised of eight films including his television documentary work with TV Man Union, Inc. and his narrative films (After Life, Maborosi) which reflect the contemplative style and pacing of such luminaries as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. He has become a cinematographic tightrope walker who almost unnoticeably switches between fictitious and real territories, between narration and invention, the private and the public.

23rd March 2014; A River Called Titas by Ritwik Ghatak

A River Called Titas

A film by Ritwik Ghatak

Bangladesh/ 1973/ 158 minutes, in Bengali with English subtitles, black and white.

Based on a novel by by Advaita Malla Burman.

Restored in 2010 by the World Cinema Foundation and Cineteca di Bologna.

Screening on 23^rd March ; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

Ritwik Ghatak adapts Advaita Malla Barman sweeping novel detailing the downfall of a once-thriving fishing village situated along the River Titas. The tale is set among the Malo fishermen who toil on the waters of the Titas. The community includes both Hindu and Muslim families, though Hindu characters dominate the narrative. The central figures are Basanti, a young girl: Kishore, a fisherman: Rajar Khi, Kishore’s bride; and Ananta, Rajar’s son. 

We first see Basanti as a young girl in the village. Kishore and his brother Subol go on a fishing trip. It is on this trip that Kishore meets Rajar, whom he rescues in a village conflict. He then marries her and takes her back to his village. However, river bandits abduct her and this drives Kishore crazy. Basanti, who envisaged marrying Kishore, marries Subol instead, but he is drowned on the day of the wedding. There is an ellipsis of ten years.

Rajar with her son Ananta arrives in the village seeking shelter. Neither she nor Kishore recognise each other. The situation creates conflicts over traditional values regarding marriage and child rearing. Kishore is attacked and dies, and Rajar drowns alongside him. Basanti now takes care of Ananta; a situation objected to by Basanti’s parents. More village and domestic feuding lead to Ananta leaving to live with another family. At the end the river dries up [partly due to a scheme engineered by the  landowners]. The village falls apart.

The film seems full of Bengali and Indian cultural references. There is a lot more complexity in the plot and characters of the film.. There is also a rich palette in the film’s visual and aural style. Ghatak has a great command of camera and mise en scène. There are numerous fine sequences. In particular late in the film there is a boat race on the river, which is enthralling in its presentation. This is a film which one should encourage local exhibitors to book and screen. (Excerpts from an article in  http://itpworld.wordpress.com )

RITWIK GHATAK

1925 – 1976

Ritwik Ghatak was born in Dhaka in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). He belonged to an illustrious family. His father Suresh Chandra Ghatak was a district magistrate and also a poet and playwright, mother's name was Indubala Devi. He and his family moved to Kolkata just before millions of other refugees from East Bengal began to flood into the city, fleeing the catastrophic 1943 famine and the Partition of India in 1947. Identification with this tide of refugees was to define his practice, providing an overriding metaphor for cultural dismemberment and exile that unified his subsequent creative work.

In 1948, Ghatak wrote his first play Kalo sayar (The Dark Lake), and participated in a revival of the landmark play Nabanna. In 1951, Ghatak joined the Indian People's Theatre Association ( IPTA ). He wrote, directed and acted in plays and translated Bertolt Brecht and Gogol into Bengali. In 1957, he wrote and directed his last play Jwala (The Burning).

Ghatak entered film industry with Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamul (1950) as actor and assistant director. Chinnamul was followed two years later by Ghatak's first completed film Nagarik (1952), both major break-throughs for the Indian cinema. Ritwik Ghatak directed eight full-length films. Ghatak moved briefly to Pune in 1966, where he taught at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) and John Abraham, Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul were among  his students .

Ritwik Ghatak Filmography:

• Nagarik (The Citizen-1952)

• Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy-1958)

• Bari Theke Paliye (Runaway-1959)

• Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud Capped Star-1961)

• Komal Gandhar (1961)

• Subarnarekha (The Golden Line-1962)• Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Named Titas-1973)

• Jukti Takko aar gappo (Arguments and a Story-1974)

9th March 2014; LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE - a film by Abbas Kiarostami

 LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE

a film by Abbas Kiarostami

2012/Japan/ Col/ 109 minutes

9th March 2014; 5.45pm

Perks Mini Theater

Iranian auteur  Abbas Kiarostami proves himself an astute observer of love and loneliness in the Japanese culture.In "Like Someone in Love" gives us people who are with someone but ultimately alone.

Akiko (Rin Takanashi) seems like a woman-child when we first seen her. Her makeup is lightly applied and she seems in serious need of advice. Her bangs help hide her and hang like a curtain as she looks down, modestly and reluctantly accepting all advice about her persona life. Her boyfriend is making obsessive demands,  Yet Kiarostami surprises us. This little willow of a girl isn't so innocent.Akiko is a call girl and her new client is an elderly well-educated man, Takashi (played by the 81-year-old Tadashi Okuno).

A young student cum call girl, her jealous boyfriend and a needy professor, three people of a totally different socio-economic class coming together under false assumptions. Kiarostami presents indefinite people with indefinite motivations and desires.

The way this film ends is perfect, because it's a bracing slap to the face of not just these characters who have been slumming, pretending and withholding, but to many of us who might be going through life on some kind of autopilot. The film's craziest, most easily mocked character emerges as the one most fully alive. Old Kiarostami, master of paradoxes, is set in his ways, but his ways are never set. (Source: Internet)

Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1940. He graduated from university with a degree in fine arts before starting work as a graphic designer. He then joined the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, where he started a film section, and this started his career as a filmmaker at the age of 30. Since then he has made many movies and has become one of the most important figures in contemporary Iranian film. He is also a major figure in the arts world, and has had numerous gallery exhibitions of his photography, short films and poetry. He is an iconic figure for what he has done, and he has achieved it all by believing in the arts and the creativity of his mind.

(Source:IMDB )