25th March 2012; Satyajit Ray's JALSAGHAR

JALSAGHAR
(The Music Room)
A film by Satyajt Ray
Year : 1958
Bengali with English subtitles
Runtime : 100 minutes
25th March 2012
Perks Mini Theater

15 minutes documentary will follow
the main screening with film maker
Mira Nair talking about Jalsaghar

Of all the remarkable things about Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room, perhaps the most striking is its sense of interior space. Almost the entire film takes place inside the palace of a feudal lord whose star has all but burned out. Ray captures the diametrically opposed opulence and decay of the place — it’s simultaneously a refuge and a prison for Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas), a zamindar whose cultural and political importance has been reduced to nil. For The Music Room, Ray invited the distinguished Bengali maestro Vilayat Khan, scion of a long line of musicians, to compose the score.Ray shoots the palace and its contents (a grand chandelier, portraits of ancestors) in ways that make them seem both beautiful and terrifying at different moments. In a film that almost exclusively belongs to Roy, it’s the palace that emerges as the primary supporting character. And inside that palace — the crown jewel of Roy’s existence, a lavish music room where the lord holds concerts and indulges his love of classical Indian music.

Ray’s film is a subtle, illuminating character study that displays empathy for its main character while remaining ambivalent about his behavior and cultural status. The Music Room is a thoroughly Indian film, with cultural touchstones that Ray apparently thought might make it a tough sell outside of the country. And yet, while those culture-specific elements are prominent, the film has an undeniable universality.Ray’s gift for making perceptive, sensitive and artifice-free films is clearly seen here. There’s artifice all around Roy in the ornate palace and the fleeting sense of security its music room gives him, but The Music Room penetrates right through all of it to reveal a broken, obsolete, beaten man.

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.

18th March 2012; Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS

SOLARIS

A film by Andrei Tarkovsky

Country: Russian

Year:1972

Runtime: 162 mins

Russian with English subtitles

18th March 2012; 5.45 pm

Perks Mini Theater

The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky are more like environments than entertainments. He uses length and depth to slow us down, to edge us out of the velocity of our lives, to enter a zone of reverie and meditation. In his second film Solaris, ground control has been receiving strange transmissions from the three remaining cosmonauts aboard the Solaris space station. On the day before his flight, Kelvin is visited by a former cosmonaut, Berton (Vladislav Dvozhetsky), who, years earlier, was sent on a rescue mission, and had a firsthand encounter with the bizarre metamorphosis of the Solaris ocean.

But Kelvin is unmoved, believing that human emotion has no bearing in the search for Truth, and raises the possibility of, not only abandoning the Solaris mission, but aiming radiation at the turbulent ocean in order to destroy its inexplicable activity.

Upon arriving at the space station, Kelvin is greeted by apathy and evasion, along with the tragic news of Gibarian's suicide. A videotaped message shows a frail, disheveled Gibarian driven to despair by tormented visions of a lost loved one, and a profound sense of isolation. However, after a restless night's sleep, he begins to realize the validity of Berton and the crew's seeming hallucinations after his dead wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk) mysteriously reappears on the station.

Solaris is Andrei Tarkovsky's visually hypnotic, deeply affecting, and thematically accessible film on love, conscience, and reconciliation. Similar to other Tarkovsky films, most notably Andrei Rublev and The Sacrifice, Solaris is an unsettling portrait of man's inequitable, often destructive interaction with his environment.

Symbolically, Tarkovsky uses curvilinear structures, confined spaces, and disorganization to represent the emotional and physical turmoil of the space station. Furthermore, periodic changes in lighting and moments of weightlessness preclude any sense of rhythm, creating a literal imbalance. Chromatic shifts, which initially occur to delineate chronology, increase in frequency with the development of the story, reflecting the crew's assimilation of the two states of consciousness.

In the end, the Truth proves to be as elusive as the thinly veiled reality of Solaris: Can a man truly reconcile with his irretrievable past, or is he inexorably bound to the guilt and regret of his spiritual longing?

(Source: Internet)

ANDREI TARKOVSKY

“Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”

Considered one of Russia’s most distinguished contemporary directors, the late Andrei Tarkovsky is known for highly personalized and poetic films. The son of poet Arseni Tarkovsky, he studied Arabic and first worked as a geologist before attending the State Film School in Moscow under Mikhail Romm. While there he made a pair of short films, “There Will Be No Leave Today” (1959) and the acclaimed Katok i Skripka/The Steamroller and the Violin (his diploma film). Following graduation in 1960, Tarkovsky went to work for Mosfilm and made his feature-film directorial debut in 1962 with Ivanovo Detstvo/Ivan’s Childhood. The film earned him top honors at that year’s Venice Film Festival.

His sophomore film, Andrei Rublev, is Tarkovsky’s most renowned work. Ostensibly a portrait of a 15th century Russian painter, the film is actually a metaphorical drama mirroring the plight of Russian artists. Some have expanded the film’s parable to reflect the dramatic effects of war and chaos upon humanity. Many critics consider this film Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, but though it was made in 1966, problems with Soviet censors deferred its release until 1971. The film won a FIPRESCI award at Cannes and brought Tarkovsky to the forefront of international cinema. His 1976 film Zerkalo/The Mirror, with its open-ended narrative and interesting camera techniques, was very popular among Russian intellectuals. An intimate, multi-layered autobiographical story in which the time frames fluidly move forward and backwards, it reflects Tarkovsky’s dreams and his experiences growing up in an artist’s community under Stalin’s rule. It is considered by many a subjective companion piece to Ivanovo Detstvo, which looked objectively at a boy’s experience growing up during the WWII era.

In the early ’80s, Tarkovsky started making films outside of Soviet Russia. But though he would make films in Italy, Sweden, and London, they would remain uniquely Russian in subject and tone. In 1984, Tarkovsky was unable to get formal permission to remain abroad and learned that should he return to Moscow that he would no longer be allowed to make films, so he defected to Western Europe. In 1986, he made his final film, Offret/The Sacrifice. The film won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Later that year, Tarkovsky died in Paris of lung cancer.

(Source:Internet)