8th May 2011; Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror

The Mirror
A Film by Andrei Tarkovsky
Country:Russia
Year:1975
Runtime :141 minutes
Russian with English subtitles
8th May 2011;5.45pm
PERKS MINI THEATER
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Two documentaries related to Tarkovsky
and The Mirror will be screened
along with the main feature.

Mirror is a direct image of time created by a flux of thought-images (or thought-waves) propagating in the time-memory universe of Alexei’s mind. Mirror is Andrei Tarkovsky's visually transcendent, artistically revelatory autobiographical film on lost innocence and emotional abandonment.

Each cut is an event, a moment not simply to collide images but also to layer the collage of the film: picture and sound, married and abutted, proffering new sights, new landscapes, new emotions and new realities in light. Andrei Tarkovksy’s Mirror is full of such event-cuts, each defining or sensing the cohesive whole of the film, like its maker, as discrete moments hung together through time, however disparate and dispersed its instances, like his limbs, may seem.

Presented as a languidly paced, achronological cinematic montage of modern day life, personal memories, historical news footage, and dreams, Mirror is an introspective journey through the course of human existence, hope and despair, success and frailty: a television broadcast of a young man seemingly cured from stuttering through hypnosis; a neglected wife (Margarita Terekhova) humoring a village doctor who has lost his way; a custodial argument between a faceless narrator (Innokenty Smoktunovsky) and his ex-wife; a precocious young man trying the patience of his military instructor (Yuri Nazarov).

Andrei Tarkovsky deliberately obscures time by using the same actors to portray the two phases of the narrator's life: the fatherless boy attempting to reach out to his distracted mother, and the distant father unable to relate to his self-absorbed son.

Instead of simply reflecting, Tarkovsky’s Mirror refracts light through the prism of memory, itself a condensation of time. Each event—that is, each cut, each encounter, each memory flashed back or forward—in the film’s networked composite is skewed by the film’s narrator. This narrator is the camera, and the film. His face is never seen. We are denied an identifying reverse shot. We are simply presented with his point of view.

To attempt to conform these images into some coherent plot or universal conclusion is meaningless. After all, Mirror is a reflection of Tarkovsky's haunted soul: his search for spirituality, connection, Truth - exposed through indelible images that inevitably define our own imperfect lives, however trivial or mundane.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky is almost certainly the most famous Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein. His visionary approach to cinematic time and space, as well as his commitment to cinema as poetry, mark his oeuvre as one of the defining moments in the development of the modern art film. Although he never tackled politics directly, the metaphysical preoccupations of films such as Andrei Rublev (1966), Mirror (1974) and Stalker (1979) provoked ongoing hostility from the Soviet authorities. Like many other artists in the Soviet Union, his career was marked by constant struggles with the authorities to realise his vision. Although this meant he completed only seven features in his 27 years as a director, each one is strikingly uncompromising in its thematic ambition and formal boldness. Whether or not he would have fared better under the capitalist film industry in the West is open to debate – Bresson and Dreyer, for example, both suffered frequent frustrations in creating their formally radical investigations into human spirituality.

Tarkovsky was born in 1932 in Zavrzhe in what is now Belorus. He was the son of noted poet Arseni Tarkovski and actress Maria Ivanovna. His parents divorced while he was still a child. His father’s poetry features in Mirror, Stalker and Nostalgia (1983) and his mother appears in Mirror.
Tarkovsky studied Arabic at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Languages between 1951 and 1954 and geology in Siberia, before enrolling in the famous VGIK Moscow film school in 1959. His teacher was Mikhail Romm. While there, he worked on a short piece for television There Will Be No Leave Today (1959). His prize-winning graduation short, The Steamroller and the Violin (1960), was written in collaboration with future director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky who would also work on the Andrei Rublev script.
His first feature, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), was an adaptation of a war story by Vladimir Bogomolov.van’s Childhood won its director notice in the West by being awarded the Golden Lion at Venice.Andrei Rublev displayed an enormous advance in Tarkovsky’s technique. Vividly textured images of nature abound in Tarkovsky’s cinema, with the four elements – earth, air (in the form of wind), fire and water – highlighted time and again. Even the still-occupied rural homes in Mirror and The Sacrifice (1986) are isolated in the countryside, vulnerable to the ever-present elements.
Another landscape important to Tarkovsky is that of the human face. Like Garrel and Pasolini, he is one of cinema’s great portraitists. His camera lingers on his actors’ faces.Tarkovsky made prominent use of actual paintings in many of his films.
In the early 1980s, Tarkovsky left Russia permanently. The few remaining years of his life were plagued by a constant struggle with the Soviet authorities to allow his family, particularly his young son, to join him. His filmmaking career started again in Italy. By the time Tarkovsky started work on his next and final film, The Sacrifice, he knew he was seriously ill with cancer. A Swedish production, The Sacrifice is an allegory of self-sacrifice.Tarkovsky died in 1986 and is buried in Paris. His influence is visible in the work of several major contemporary directors.

24th April 2011; When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
A film by Mikio Naruse
Country : Japan
Year : 1960
Japanese with English sub titles
24th April 2011
Perks Mini Theater

* 13 minutes interview with actor Tatsuya Nakadai
will be shown with the main film.

Mikio Naruse creates an exquisitely realized, somber, and deeply affecting portrait of dignity and perseverance in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Using the recurring image of Keiko ascending the stairs that lead to the bar, Naruse reflects Keiko's symbolic transcendence from her increasingly disreputable profession. The dilemma is that she is approaching an age when her looks might be expected to fade, and so she is encouraged either to start her own bar or to get married. Either path seems to involve a sacrifice of independence

At the film’s center is Hideko Takamine, one of Naruse’s favorite actresses and indeed one of the most striking, gifted, and charismatic stars in Japanese cinema. She plays Keiko, a widow who supports herself as a bar madam, the chief attraction in whatever bar she works, by virtue of her beauty and superior refinement.

Every afternoon, Keiko (Hideko Takamine) walks from her modest apartment to her job as a senior hostess in a Ginza bar. Compassionate and courteous, she is affectionately called "mama" by the younger hostesses who see her graciousness and charm as an unattainable ideal..

Naruse’s filming style, never ostentatious, shows exquisite tact. Like Roberto Rossellini, another filmmaker of unfailing intelligence, Naruse directs facts; he constructs the image only enough to get its essential meaning across. There are no bravura 360-degree camera movements, but there are subtle little tracking shots of Keiko walking through Tokyo, with or without company; and when Keiko goes up the stairs to her bar, the camera delicately ascends with her for just two seconds.

Though we cannot but sympathize with Keiko, we are also allowed to judge her dispassionately. She comes across at times as self-righteous, at other times as hard. It is a strength of character that is reflected in her early narrative: "After it gets dark, I have to climb the stairs, and that's what I hate. But once I'm up, I can take whatever happens." Inevitably, the daunting stairs provide a reassuring ritual from crushing disillusionment and personal tragedy - a validation of courage and resilience in facing the unknown - a quiet triumph of the human spirit.
(Source:Internet)

Mikio Naruse

Mikio Naruse, often ranked with Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu as one of the three master Japanese directors who were at their peak in both the prewar and postwar eras, was born in Tokyo on August 20, 1905. The son of an impoverished embroiderer, Naruse developed a love of literature from an early age. Because of his family’s financial problems, he was unable to continue his education into middle school, attending instead a technical school. Naruse’s father died when he was 15, forcing him to take a job to support the family. Through a friend, he began working as a prop man at the Shochiku film company in Tokyo in 1920. Naruse finally had an opportunity to direct, making his debut with a slapstick comedy, Chambara Fufu . Naruse demonstrated a lyrical style in his second film, Junjo (Pure Love) (1930), a work which won the praise of another Shochiku director, Yasujiro Ozu.
In 1933, Naruse reached his pinnacle in the silent cinema with two masterpieces crystallizing themes that would dominate his work for the rest of his career. In 1937, Naruse married Sachiko Chiba, who had played the heroine of Tsuma yo Bara no yo Ni. The two had a child, although they later divorced, and Naruse resumed his bachelor way of life, residing in a modest apartment and frequenting bars, until his second marriage in later years. Naruse continued to make films throughout the war years. The director recovered from an apparent postwar slump of lesser films with his 1951 drama, Ginza Gesho (Ginza Cosmetics), starring Kinuyo Tanaka.
Naruse that he went on to direct for Toho a series of films in the 1950s and 1960s that rank as the masterpieces of his maturity. Six of these films were adapted from stories by Fumiko Hayashi, a woman writer who had dramatized her own struggles in fiction and whose point of view held enormous appeal for the director.Other classic films Naruse directed in the postwar years include Okasan (Mother) in 1952, Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain) in 1954, Nagareru (Flowing) in 1956, and Onna ga Kaidan o Agaru Toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) in 1960.
Naruse continued to direct for most of the 1960s, his final film being Midaregumo (Scattered Clouds), He died on July 2, 1969, at the age of 63. In 37 years of directing, he had made a phenomenal 87 films. Through all those decades, he had maintained a consistent personal vision in most of his work. However, he had modified his cinematic approach since his earliest films. Whereas in many of his silents, he had experimented with a wide variety of techniques, in his talkies, he opted for a more subdued visual style. He now limited camera movement and avoided unusual camera angles and rapid montage in order to place full emphasis on the facial expressions and gestures of the actor. In the years since his death, Naruse’s reputation has continued to grow with retrospectives of his work, and many now recognize him as one of the supreme masters of world cinema.
(Source: Internet)

17th April 2011; Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock
A film by Peter Weir
Year: 1975
Country : Australia
Run time:115 minutes
English with English subtitles
17th April 2011; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater

On a drowsy St. Valentine's Day in 1900, a party of girls from a strict boarding school in Australia goes on a day's outing to Hanging Rock, a geological outcropping not far from their school. Three of the girls and one of their teachers disappear into thin air. One of them is found a week or so later, but can remember almost nothing. The others are never found.

On this foundation, Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975) constructs a film of haunting mystery and buried sexual hysteria. It also employs two of the hallmarks of modern Australian films: beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home.
The movie is based on a 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, then 71, who presented it as fiction but hinted that it might be based on fact. A cottage industry grew up in Australia about the novel and the movie; old newspapers and other records were searched without success for reports of disappearing schoolgirls.
Did the girls disappear into another time line? Were they raped by two teenage boys who were also on Hanging Rock that day? Did they simply fall into a crevice? What about the girl who was found alive a week later?

"We worked very hard,'' Weir told an interviewer for Sight & Sound, "at creating an hallucinatory, mesmeric rhythm, so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotize the audience away from the possibility of solutions.''
Visually it probably is one of the most beautiful picture ever seen, with Australian flora and fauna and wonderful blue skies. Everything has been carefully re-created with loving exactitude.
(Sorce : Internet )

Peter Weir

Peter Weir helped to define the rebirth of Australian cinema, while addressing some of the most pressing concerns of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s. His intriguing images of Australia, evocative and transcendent, made an impact in the international art house scene, eager for compelling visions of geo-political areas and cultures overlooked by mainstream cinema. After achieving international recognition as an emblematic Australian filmmaker, Weir made his transition to Hollywood while maintaining a sense of experimentation and artistic exploration. His films, including his Hollywood ones, cannot be pigeonholed in terms of themes, genres or geographical locals; but they do display an approach to filmmaking, a sensibility, a drive, that amount to one of the most searching trajectories in contemporary cinema.

Weir was born in Sydney. attended The Scots College and Vaucluse Boys' High School before studying art and law at the University of Sydney. His interest in film was sparked by his meeting with fellow students, including Phillip Noyce and the future members of the Sydney filmmaking collective Ubu Films.After leaving university in the mid-1960s he joined Sydney television station ATN-7.Weir then took up a position with the Commonwealth Film Unit (later renamed Film Australia), for which he made several documentaries.After leaving the CFU, Weir made his first major independent film, the short feature Homesdale (1971), an offbeat black omedy.Weir's first full-length feature film was the underground cult classic, The Cars That Ate Paris (1975), a low-budget black comedy about the inhabitants of a small country town who deliberately cause fatal car crashes and live off the proceeds.

Weir's major breakthrough in Australia and internationally was the lush, atmospheric period mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), made with substantial backing from the state-funded South Australian Film Corporation and filmed on location in South Australia and rural Victoria. Weir's next film, The Last Wave (1977) was a supernatural thriller.Between The Last Wave and his next feature, Weir wrote and directed the offbeat low-budget telemovie The Plumber (1979).Weir scored a major Australian hit and further international praise with his next film Gallipoli (1981). Gallipoli was instrumental in making Mel Gibson (Mad Max) into a major star.The climax of Weir's early career was the $6 million multi-national production The Year of Living Dangerously (1983).On 14 June 1982, Weir was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his service to the film industry.

Weir's first American film was the successful thriller Witness (1985),It was followed by the darker, less commercial The Mosquito Coast (1986), Paul Schrader's adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel. Weir's next film, Dead Poets Society (1989) was a major international success. Next came Green Card and Fearless. After five years, Weir returned to direct his biggest success to date,The Truman Show (1998), a bittersweet fantasy-satire of the media's control of life. In 2003 Weir returned to period drama with Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, starring Russell Crowe. Weir wrote and directed ‘The Way Back’ which was released in late 2010.
(From Wikipedia)

2nd April 2011; Henri Matisse , Louis Bourgeois -Documentaries on Art

Contemplate & Konangal present
Documentaries on Art


Henri Matisse
and
Louis Bourgeois

2nd April, 2001 5.45pm
Contemplate Art Gallery,
IIfloor, Rajshree Ford Bldg,
Avanashi Road
(opp) Krishnammal College

Louis Bourgeois
1911 to 2010

(13 minutes – segment from Art 21 series)

A brief introduction to Louis Bourgeois. - renowned French-American artist and sculptor,best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman. She is recognized today as the founder of confessional art.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and died in 2010. Bourgeois studied math at the Sorbonne, then studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Grande Chaumiere in Montparnasse.

Bourgeois has worked in marble, wood, paint, bronze, plaster and latex. In the In the late 1940s, after moving to New York City with her American husband, Robert Goldwater, she turned to sculpture. Though her works are abstract, they are suggestive of the human figure and express themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness.

1940s, she produced several tall, thin wooden abstract sculptures. Her later work remains abstract but makes more overt references to the body.

Henri Matisse

The art of our century has been dominated by two men: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They are artists of classical greatness, and their visionary forays into new art have changed our understanding of the world. Matisse was the elder of the two, but he was a slower and more methodical man by temperament and it was Picasso who initially made the greater splash.
Matisse, like Raphael, was a born leader and taught and encouraged other painters, while Picasso, like Michelangelo, inhibited them with his power: he was a natural czar.
Matisse's artistic career was long and varied, covering many different styles of painting from Impressionism to near Abstraction. Early on in his career Matisse was viewed as a Fauvist, and his celebration of bright colors reached its peak in 1917 when he began to spend time on the French Riviera at Nice and Vence. Here he concentrated on reflecting the sensual color of his surroundings and completed some of his most exciting paintings.
In 1941 Matisse was diagnosed as having duodenal cancer and was permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Vence.
Matisse's art has an astonishing force and lives by innate right in a paradise world into which Matisse draws all his viewers. He gravitated to the beautiful and produced some of the most powerful beauty ever painted. He was a man of anxious temperament, just as Picasso, who saw him as his only rival, was a man of peasant fears, well concealed.

Both artists, in their own fashion, dealt with these disturbances through the sublimation of painting: Picasso destroyed his fear of women in his art, while Matisse coaxed his nervous tension into serenity. He spoke of his art as being like "a good armchair"-- a ludicrously inept comparison for such a brilliant man-- but his art was a respite, a reprieve, a comfort to him.
(Soure:Internet)

1869 - 1954
(55 minutes documentary on Matisse
Segment from Modern Masters series)

13th March 2011; Robert Bresson's Mouchette

Mouchette
A film by Robert Bresson
Country: France
Year:1967
French with English subtitles
Runtime:78 minutes
13th March 2011; 5.45 pm
Perks Mini Theater, Perks School
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Robert Bresson's film, made in 1967, understands the sensitivity of those who have no friends. Mouchette is a girl from an impoverished family. Her mother is dying of cancer. Her father physically abuses her. When the baby cries, she is expected to clean him and feed him. At school, smarter girls tease her for wearing clogs and being a peasant. When she earns money at the tavern for doing odd jobs, her father pockets it. She has nothing.
Bresson's use of spare and minimal camera work serves a greater purpose than to merely provide a signature style. From the extreme close-ups of the opening scene, showing only Arsene and Mathieu's (Jean Vimenet) eyes, to the headless shots of people in the bar, Bresson creates a metaphor for the fractured soul. Mouchette is profoundly alone, incomprehensibly searching for connection and acceptance, but is answered with betrayal and violence.
Bresson always forces the viewer to construct his own, individual diegesis. Bresson argued that when we experience immediate events in our everyday lives, there is no causality. A causal understanding of experience is only produced later, upon reflection.
Bresson wanted the audience to have this direct causal-construction experience with his film narratives, and for this reason he didn’t want his actors (which he preferred to call “models”) to inject their own interpretive causal renderings in their roles.
Mouchette is one of the purest Bressons. Mouchette so abused by everyone in her village that death seems like God's caress, and so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning herself. Its effect as you watch it is beautifully unforgiving; as you recall it, brutally radiant.

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson’s 13 features over 40 years constitute arguably the most original and brilliant body of work over a long career from a film director in the history of cinema. He is the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of all major filmmakers, in the sense that he always tried to create precisely what he wanted without surrendering to considerations of commerce, audience popularity, or people’s preconceptions of what cinema should be. And although it might be argued that his venture into colour from Une Femme douce (1969) onwards was probably against his better judgement, he shows mastery in its use.

Born in central France and educated in Paris, Bresson’s early ambition was to be a painter. He ventured into filmmaking with the short Les Affaires publiques (1934), a satire with nods to Clair and Vigo, which was rediscovered in the 1980s after being thought lost. After a year or so as a prisoner-of-war he was approached by a Paris priest with a proposal for a film about the Bethany order of nuns, which became Les Anges du péché (1943). His next feature was also made during the Occupation, and filmmaking had by then definitely supplanted painting. The confusion over his date of birth, symbolic perhaps of his reclusive nature, caused reviewers of his final filmL’Argent (1983) to marvel over how a man "in his late 70s" or alternatively "in his 80s" could show such youthful exuberance in his filmmaking.

Three formative influences in Bresson’s life undoubtedly mark his films: his Catholicism, which took the form of the predestinarian French strain known as Jansenism; his early years as a painter; and his experiences as a prisoner-of-war. These influences manifest themselves respectively in the recurrent themes of free-will versus determinism, in the extreme and austere precision with which he composes a shot, and in the frequent use of the prison motif (two films are located almost entirely inside prisons).

All Bresson’s features after the first have literary antecedents of one form or another, albeit updated. Two are from Dostoevsky (Une Femme douceand Quatre nuits), two from Bernanos (Journal and Mouchette), one from Tolstoy (L’Argent), one from Diderot (Les Dames), while Un Condamné and Le Procès are based on the written accounts of the true events. In addition Pickpocket is clearly influenced by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Balthazar has a similar premiss to the same author’s The Idiot. Lancelot du Lac is derived from Malory’s Arthurian legends, while Le Diable probablement (1977) was inspired by a newspaper report, as is stated at the start of the film.

A critic once wrote that Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu (1954) "is one of those films for whose sake the cinema exists". For many of us, the same can be said of the work of Robert Bresson.

(Source : Roger Ebert , Senses Of Cinema , Ozu's World Movie Reviews )