THE ROOF

A film by Vittorio De Sica

1956 / Italy/ Runtime: 95 minutes

24^th Jan 2016/ Perks Mini Theater

THE ROOF, largely considered the last masterpiece of Italian Neorealist cinema, dramatizes a single night in the lives of Luisa and Natale, a strikingly good-looking but destitute pair of newlyweds. The couple share a small two-room apartment with several relatives. 

Following a bitter family dispute, Luisa and Natale pack out of this untenable living situation. Luisa turns to a friend for housing, while Natale finds shelter in a tool shed. Realizing that separation is no solution, the couple struggles to build a small shack for themselves.

With very little money or possessions, the young couple struggle to find appropriate accommodation anywhere in the city. All around Rome, squatters are building meager shacks on unclaimed land. This illegal practice is heavy patrolled by officials and if discovered during construction, the authorities order the immediate demolition of the structure. 

Natale works as an apprentice bricklayer and is aware of the Italian law, which stipulates that once a roof is completed on a dwelling, the authorities cannot pull it down.

In an era of economic hardship, how does a newly married young couple gain independence and break the necessity of living with relatives in an over-populated household? Winner of the OCIC Award at Cannes in 1956, The Roof is a memorable, heartwarming tale of love and community amid tough economic times. (Source:Internet)

Vittorio De Sica

Vittorio De Sica, was one of the great directors of the postwar Italian neorealist movement, which represented a large, loud break with Hollywood tradition and dealt with life as it might exist outside sound stages. As one of the world's most influential filmmakers, and as an actor who starred in some 150 movies, Vittorio De Sica built a remarkable film career that spanned half a century. De Sica directed 34 feature films, for which he won numerous international prizes. He was honored with four Academy Awards: two Special Awards, preceding the creation of the Best Foreign Film category, for "Shoeshine" in 1947, and "The Bicycle Thief" in 1949, and Best Foreign Film Awards for "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" in 1964, and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis in 1971.

De Sica was born in 1902 in Sora, near Rome, and grew up in Naples in a middle-class family. His career took off in the 1920s whenhe joined a local theater company and became a matinee idol. He later formed his own company, producing plays and co-starring with his first wife, Giuditta Rissone During World War II, De Sica turned to directing. His first four films were routine light productions in the tradition of the Italian cinema of the day. But his fifth, "The Children Are Watching Us," was a mature, perceptive, and deeply human work about the impact of adult folly on a child's innocent mind. The film marked the beginning of De Sica's collaboration with author and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, a creative relationship that was to give the world two of the most significant films of the Italian neorealism movement, "Shoeshine" and "The Bicycle Thief."    Some more great films followed. Vittorio De Sica died in 1974 at the age of 72.

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10th January 2016; Tati's Mon Uncle

MON ONCLE

A film by Jacques Tati

1928/ France/117 mins/ Col

5.45 pm; 10th Jan 2016 / Perks Mini theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/

Jacques Tati (1909-1982) only made six features and yet he ranks with the great silent clowns among masters of visual comedy. With Mon Oncle master comedian Jaquese Tati weaves a series of physical gags into a social commentary, creating a rich comedy that can be enjoyed both by casual and intellectual audience. 

For Tati the joke is almost more about the setup than the payoff. Each gag has a meticulous setup that makes the joke all the richer "Mon Oncle" is halfway a silent film, with the dialogue sounding like an unexpected interruption in a library. The music is  simple, cheerful, like circus music while we're waiting for the clowns.

The hero of this tale is Tati’s signature character, Monsieur Hulot, also played by Tati. This small town man lacks grace but makes up for it in heart.  He is often seen in a brown fedora, a tan raincoat, a bow tie, too short pants, striped socks and with his long-stemmed pipe. He hardly ever says anything.

Mr. Hulot  is a lost soul, unemployed, bemused and confused by the modern world. His sister Madame Arpel lieves wants to  help him. She lives with her husband Monsieur Arpel and their young son Gerard n a futuristic architectural monstrosity, and a great deal of the movie's time is spent exploring their cold new world.

"Mon Oncle" introduces us casually to a large cast of local characters, including a street-sweeper who is perpetually in conversation and always means to use his broom but never does, and a produce vendor . There is a tender, subtle subplot involving Betty, the concierge's daughter. There's also a supporting cast of dogs, who are seen in the first shot and the last, and hurry on their doggy business in between. They don't have an important role in the plot; they're just there, checking things out, marking their territory.

Just reach back, take Mon Oncle's hand and head out around the block wherever you live. You never really know just what it is you'll discover on your next stroll through the neighborhood.  (Sorce : Internet) 

Jacques Tati

There are not many filmmaking legends whose entire output can be counted on the fingers of both hands, but this towering, graceful, pipe-puffing auteur, a comedic genius, achieved his reputation on the basis of just six feature films. His theme, his style, his mise-en-scène, all suggested the eternal struggle between Man and Machine; his was a kind of intricate slapstick in which characters found themselves at the mercy of progress, and his affinity for silent-screen comedy was mirrored in his own nearly total abstinence from dialogue (though his uses of natural sound and comic sound effects were nonpareil). In his first feature, Jour de Fete (1949), Tati played a village postman obsessed with modernizing his already-simple job. Four years later, in Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953), he introduced the umbrella toting, raincoat-clad Mr.Hulot. It was an international smash, and Hulot became Tati's screen alter ego for much of the remainder of his career.

In Mon Oncle (1958), Tati's first color film, Hulot is victimized by an automated house in which-you guessed-everything goes wrong. (It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.) He spent years working on Playtime (1967), shot on 70mm film, which pitted Hulot and a group of tourists against the high-tech vagaries of modern Paris, with an extended climax at the opening of a chi-chi restaurant where-that's right-everything goes wrong. Critics hailed it a masterpiece, but it was not a financial success, and a devastated Tati only made two more (small) films before retiring: Traffic (1972), with Hulot traveling to a modern auto show, and Parade (1974), a quasi-documentary showcasing French cabaret acts, with Tati recreating some of his old music-hall routines. He also made a gag cameo appearance as Hulot in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (1968).  It's lamentable that he left behind so few films, but any five minutes of any of them is sufficient to restore his spirit. (Source: Internet)

KWAIDAN

A film by Masaki Kobayashi

1964 / Japan / 183 mins / Col

5.45pm /27th Dec 2015/ Perks Mini Theater

 Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan – which offers a four ghost stories based on old Japanese folk tales is one of the most meticulously crafted supernatural fantasy films ever made, and it  is also one of the most unusual.  This is a  a four-part, three-hour epic that turns each of its tales into full-blown cinematic symphonies. Kwaidan is based on the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, a folklorist of Greek-Irish ancestry who  became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1895, and changed his name to Yakumo Koizumi. As directed by Kobayashi, Hearn’s four tales unfurl across the screen like versions of the classic Japanese paintings of the historical periods in which the film is set.

Kwaidan’s  four short supernatural stories (Black Hair, Hoichi the Earless, In a Cup of Tea and The Woman of the Snow ) all involve an encounter with a ghost's presented in a highly stylized and intellectual manner, that serves up a colorfully exotic offering. The film's plusses are its strong imagery, haunting atmosphere and some memorably striking spooky moments. The best story is titled "Hoichi the Earless" and tells about a blind biwa player (Katsuo Nakamura) called by the spirits to recite his tale of the doomed Heike clan's defeat by their rival Taira clan to a samurai ghost.

"Black Hair" is the tale of a samurai (Rentaro Mikuni) who returns to the wife he deserted for a selfish, wealthy woman some time ago and, after sleeping with the neglected woman, discovers her skeletal remains in his bed and goes raving mad.

"The Woman of the Snow" is a story cut from the theatrical releases abroad but was restored when the film was released on DVD. A young apprentice woodcutter (Tatsuya Nakadai) is saved from death by a mysterious snow maiden who vows to kill him should he ever blab about what went down, as she kills his woodcutter boss with her breath. "In a Cup of Tea" A guard (Ganemon Nakamura) sees a samurai's face in his teacup and absorbs the ghost's soul into his body after drinking the tea.

The film took five years to make and was the most expensive Japanese film to date. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1965. Kaidan seizes on the both the analytical relevance and the irreducible poetry of the tradition it invokes. Despite the longeurs, it provides one of the richest, most entrancing cinema experiences around. (Source:Internet)

Masaki Kobayashi

Masaki Kobayashi is one of Japan's most outstanding  humanist filmmakers. A contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa, Kobayashi's personal experience of the Second World War has marked his pictures with a deep concern for social justice. His most acclaimed films are unflinching explorations into the dark side of Japanese culture, the side that drove men to commit gory suicide for the name of honor and commit horrific atrocities in the name of the Emperor. Kobayashi's exacting professionalism makes his films a visually and emotionally power experience.

Born in February, 1916, in Japan's northern-most island Hokkaido, Kobayashi entered prestigious Waseda University in 1933 . Kobayashi eventually left Waseda to enter Shochiku's Ofuna studios. Kobayashi worked as an assistant for a mere eight months before he was drafted and sent to the front in Manchuria. Opposed to the war, which he viewed as senseless, he refused to rise above the position of private. In 1944, he was transferred to the southern Ryukyu Islands, where he witnessed the war's final bloody tumult. There he was captured by the U.S. and held for a year in a detention camp in Okinawa.

In the fall of 1946, Kobayashi returned to Shochiku and served for six years as an assistant director under Keisuke Kinoshita. He garnered international acclaim and a prestigious San Giorgio prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1960 for his Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1958), the first installment of sweeping trilogy about the war. Kobayashi's films brought to life by the masterful performances of Nakadai in such Kobayashi classics as Harakiri (1962), Kwaidan (1964), and Samurai Rebellion (1967).With the acclaimed Kwaidan, his first color film, he pushed this emphasis on composition with his expressionistic use of color. Kobayashi died in of a heart attack in 1996.

(Source:Internet)

13th Dec2015; Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT

SHADOW OF A DOUBT

A film by Alfred Hitchcock

1943/ USA/ 108 min

13th Dec, 2015; 5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater

http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in

Screening starts exactly at 5.45 pm with a documentary on Hitchcock

Shadow of a Doubt is a disturbing and relentlessly modern look at the corruption of small town American life. In an era when the movies all but had to portray only positive images of this country, Alfred Hitchcock was testing the limits of decency and morality as defined by Hollywood’s Production Code. Hitchcock takes the all-American family and introduces malice so true it consumes.

The horror is, of course, Uncle Charlie. He visits his sister and her family in Santa Rosa, California, and develops a strange relationship with his niece, Charlotte, affectionately referred to as Charlie in honor of her uncle. She soon suspects her Uncle Charlie of being the Merry Widow murderer and is plunged into turmoil over her family obligations and the vulgarity of his acts.

When we’re first introduced to the Newton family, it’s a kind of clichéd look at bucolic family life. Everybody is nice and genteel and pleasant. This might appear dated when we, less as Americans and more as human begins, know that this isn’t the reality of daily life. But the light atmosphere Hitchcock cultivates in the film’s early scenes heightens the dark aspects of the story to follow, dark like the column of smoke snaking behind Uncle Charlie’s train.

Ultimately, Shadow of a Doubt remains one of Hitchcock’s best movies because it is a clear example of the director’s sense of the world. From out of the censored studio era, it’s refreshing that an artist could commit to celluloid a personal, cynical voice. Nothing, it seems, is as it should be in a Hitchcock film. While his films are certainly nail biters, the reason Hitchcock was so great was because he understood the human condition and its flaws. (Source: Internet)

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is known to his audiences as the 'Master of Suspense' and what Hitchcock mastered was not only the art of making films but also the task of taming his own raging imagination. Director of such works as Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds and The 39 steps, Hitchcock told his stories through intelligent plots witty dialogue and a spoonful of mystery and murder. In doing so, he inspired a new generation of filmmakers and revolutionized the thriller genre, making him a legend around the world. His brilliance was sometimes too bright: He was hated as well as loved, oversimplified as well as over analyzed. Hitchcock was eccentric, demanding, inventive, impassioned and he had a great sense of British humor. 

His success followed when he made a number of films in Britain such as "The Lady Vanishes" (1938) and Jamaica Inn (1939), some of them which also made him famous in the USA. David O. Selznick, an American producer at the time, got in touch with Hitchcock and the Hitchcock family moved to the USA to direct an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940). It was when Saboteur (1942) was made, that films companies began to call his films after him; such as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy.He retired soon after making Family Plot (1976).In late 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. On the 29th April 1980, 9:17AM, he died peacefully in his sleep

29th Nov 2015; Aki Kaurismäki's LE HAVRE

LE HAVRE

A film by Aki Kaurismäki

2011 / Finland-France / Runtime 93 minutes

5.45 pm / 29th Nov / Perks Mini Theater

Le Havre is a a perfect, deadpan, impishly optimistic fairy tale from the great Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki. Le Havre offers the director’s usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message.  It is set  in the French port city where many of the cargoes are human: illegal immigrants arriving from Africa. The film's hero, Marcel Marx with no plan in mind becomes in charge of protecting a migrant African boy from arrest.

 

The movie's other characters are all proletarians from a working-class neighborhood. We meet Marcel's wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), who joins her husband in his scheme. Marcel and Arletty are long and happily in love. They cherish each other. Childless, they care for the boy and enlist others in the neighborhood to hide him from Inspector Monet.

 

Filmed in a high, nostalgic style that gives its setting the gleam and romance of another era, "Le Havre" is a movie composed entirely of fantastic faces. Another classic Kaurismäki characteristic very much in evidence is his vivid and idiosyncratic use of color. Working with his regular cinematographer Timo Salminen and French set designer Wouter Zoon, the director does wonderful things with a pastel palette and loves to put unexpected visual accents where you least expect them.

 

This movie is as lovable as a silent comedy, which it could have been. It takes place in a world that seems cruel and heartless, but look at the lengths Marcel goes to find Idrissa's father in a refugee camp and raise money to send the boy to join his mother in England. Finnish film maker Kaurismaki  has set his story of timely issues and timeless values in the French port city of the title.  (Source:Internet)

 

Aki Kaurismäki

Aki Kaurismäki was born in Finland in 1957. After graduating in media studies from the University of Tampere, He 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 To 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.

8th Nov 2015; David Lean's BRIEF ENCOUNTER

 

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

A Film by David Lean

1945 / UK / 86 minutes / B&W

5.45pm; Perks Mini Theater

Brief Encounter is about average and perfectly genuine people in an average and perfectly genuine situation. Here love, more than the grandness of life in total, is the cause for dramatic tension and identification.  Laura Jesson is  happily married.  A chance meeting with Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) sends her emotions reeling. She loves her husband; they don’t have any  domestic issues. But this brief encounter becomes something she never could have imagined. Indeed, she probably never dared. 

The story, set in pre-war England, 1938, is told quite sensitively through a series of flashbacks, with the same scene opening and closing the film (with a short addition included to finish it off.) The action centers almost exclusively on Laura's point of view, her eyes and facial expressions communicating a full range of emotions as she experiences her midlife whirlwind.

Brief Encounter is also a beautiful film to watch. Shot by Robert Krasker (who would photograph Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and Luchino Visconti’s Senso (1954) – two other gorgeous looking movies), the images only add to the dream state of the characters. For Laura, this is exactly what’s it’s like – a dream, a fantasy. But can it be real,  or is this love only to be a fleeting one? Will she eventually just wake up? Either way, it’s extraordinarily romantic.

Touching, emotional, accessible and realistic performances are delivered by the two main, middle-aged characters. Brief Encounte is  one of the great romantic films of all time, with a very downbeat ending. The screenplay was adapted and based on playwright Noel Coward's 1935 short one-act (half-hour) stage play Still Life and the film  maintains chaste minimalism.   ( Source: Internet)

 

David Lean

David Lean is one of the most popular and well-known of British film-makers.  He was the  chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films. In 1942 Noel Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.

After  Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) he returned to prominence again with the prisoner-of-war drama The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). It won seven Academy Awards. Lawrence of Arabia (1962 is often considered Lean’s finest film. It was followed by Dr. Zhivago (1965), a love story set against a backdrop of the Russian Revolution and the romantic Ryan’s Daughter (1970),  both exhibiting the grand scale, lush cinematography, and breathtaking landscapes that had become the hallmark of Lean’s work. His last film, A Passage to India (1984), based on the E.M. Forster novel, was regarded as his best work since Lawrence of Arabia. Lean was knighted by Queen Elizabeth that year, and in 1990 he was awarded the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award. At the time of his death, he was preparing a screen version of Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo.