Ooops

Hello,

Apologies for the delay in updating the blog. As of today, information about all the screenings have been posted.

Happy reading/watching!


Film Club

Spaghetti Westerns

This week's screenings are a package of four Spaghetti Westerns, directed by Sergio Leone, that Filmclub has received from the Italian Cultural Institute:

A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY
A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE

What are Spaghetti Westerns?

Between 1960 and 1975, European film production companies made nearly 600 Westerns. Critics either blasted or ignored these films, and because most of them were financed by Italian companies, they called them Spaghetti Westerns.

Originally these films had in common the Italian language, low budgets, and a recognizable highly fluid, violent, and minimalist cinematography that broke many of the conventions of earlier Westerns — partly intentionally, partly as a result of the work being done in a different cultural background and with limited funds. The term was originally used disparagingly, but by the 1980s many of these films came to be held in high regard, particularly because it was hard to ignore the influence they had in redefining the entire idea of a western. Most traditional Westerns have clearly defined lines separating heroes from villains; only in Spaghetti Westerns do both sides begin to stray into the gray areas in between.

Sergio Leone
Leone came from a family with roots deep in the Italian film industry. His mother, Edvige Valcarenghi (stage name Bice Walerian), was a silent movie actress who gave up her profession when she married Vincenzo Leone in 1916. Vincenzo (stage name Roberto Roberti) directed and acted in films during the silent era, but for reasons that are not entirely clear he was prevented from working during the 1930s by Italy's Fascist regime. Vincenzo tried to discourage his son from entering the world of cinema, and Sergio briefly studied law before working as an unpaid fifth assistant on Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief in 1948.

Leone's first directorial effort came in 1959, when he stepped in to finish The Last Days of Pompeii for his aging mentor Mario Bonnard. He directed only seven films, his most famous being the three of the "Dollars trilogy".

Filmography

The Colossus of Rhodes (1960)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Duck, You Sucker (A Fistful of Dynamite) (1971)

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

TEN, march 18

After the Makhmalbafs, we now bring to you another key figure in Iranian

Cinema- Abbas Kiarostami, also the last film in our Iraninan package.

TEN
Abbas Kiarostami



Abbas Kiarostami casts his masterful cinematic gaze upon the modern
sociopolitical landscape of his homeland—this time as seen through the
eyes of one woman as she drives through the streets of Tehran over a
period of several days. Her journey is comprised of ten conversations with
various
female passengers—including her sister, a hitchhiking prostitute
and a jilted bride—as well as her imperious young son. As Kiarostami’s
“dashboard cam” eavesdrops on these lively, yet heart-wrenching road
trips, a complex portrait of contemporary Iran comes sharply into focus.

The Director
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.

THE APPLE, march 13

THE APPLE
Samira Makhmalbaf

(the last film we screened was her father's 'Gabbeh')


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There is no family in the film world these days more fascinating than the
Iranian Makhmalbafs. They've been known to sell their house and car to
finance a film, buy them back when they sell the film, and start all over
again the moment the next project comes up.

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THE FILM
~88 minutes semi-documentary~

Richly allusive and beautifully photographed, "THE APPLE" follows the
aftermath of a real-life situation, in Tehran, in which a father had kept
his two daughters confined to their home since birth. Their mother is
blind and their father is a strict religious man who is concerned about
their honour should they be left on their own or subjected to the sinful
influences of the outside world while he is out of the house.

When neighbors reported the situation to the welfare authorities in
Teheran, the daughters, who are slightly retarded, were removed from the
home and returned to their parents only on the condition that the father
allow the two to leave home and explore the outside world.


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THE FILM MAKER

Being the daughter of famous Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Samira’s
upbringing was both privileged and liberal, and in most respects very
different from the experience her two subjects in the film 'The Apple'
shared.

Samira saw the story on television and wanted to film their story using
the real people as themselves. She heard about the story on a Wednesday
and began filming on the Sunday 4 days later.

Samira Makhmalbaf belongs to New wave movement of Iranian cinema. he left
high school when she was 14, to learn cinema in the Makhmalbaf Film House
for 5 years. At the age of 17, after directing two video productions, she
went on to direct the movie The Apple. One year later, the 18 year old
director went on to become the youngest director in the world
participating in the official section of the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

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QUOTES

"The apple like the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible, represents life
and knowledge in Iranian poetry. We have a similar story in the Qur’an.
But I actually found this element in the children’s life. Because while
everyone was worried about the fate of these two girls, they were eating
an apple, and truly enjoying it. So I decided to keep the symbol of the
apple throughout the film".

"The best thing I've learned from my father is not to judge but to love
humanity."

**********************************************************
'THE APPLE' has been invited to more than 100 international film festivals
in a period of 2 years, while going to the screen in more than 30
countries.

poster- Merryn John Tharakan

THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, march 7

As an exta special treat for you, we take you through a thousand nights in beautiful arabia following
the adventures of a prince on his magical journey

THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED
LOTTE REINIGER
1926





The film is animated in a style in which the character are always seen in
silhouette almost like a chinese puppet show.  The story is based on the
elements taken from the collection 1001 Arabian Nights, prince Achmed with
the assistance of Aladdin, the Witch of the Fiery Mountain, and a magic
horse, battles the evil African sorcerer to win the hand of Princess Peri
Banu.




About the director: LOTTE REINIGER

Born June 2, 1899, Berlin; Died June 19, 1989
She spent much of her life creating unique and often amazing silhouette
animation. After a short period of at Max Rienhardt's studio, Reiniger
began began working on intertitle design for Paul Wegener's films at
the age of sixteen. Her titles were made of hand-cut silhouettes, and
in 1919 she developed this technique to create a complete animated
silhouette film. In 1921, Reiniger married Carl Koch, who served as her
producer and camera operator for the next 40 years.

Between 1923 and 1926, Rieniger and Koch, with assistance from animators Walter Rutmann, Bertolt Bartosch, and Alex Kardan, created The Adventures of Prince Achmed. One of the world's first feature-length animated films, The Adventures of Prince Achmed displayed Reiniger's ability to create captivating characters through intricate design and an amazingly graceful sense of movement. The film remains unsurpassed as a demonstration of animated art.

With the advent of sound, Reiniger made a series of short films set to the music of Mozart. Through the 1930's, with the rise of Disney, Fleischer, and Warner Bros., character-based cel animation became the dominant animation form. As animated cartoons, with their costly and labor-intensive production requirements, became the standard, the works of filmmakers like Reiniger became less marketable. But because silhouette animation requires considerable patience and individual skill, but not necessarily the the production costs of cel animation, Reiniger was able to continue creating her unique animation until the 1970s.

Modern audiences seem to have an aversion to viewing silhouette animation, until they've seen the films of Lotte Reiniger. Even her later films, produced for television in the 1950s and noticably less sophisticated than her early work, possess a pure cinematic magic that is present in the work of very few animators. In all likelihood, there will never be a silhouette animator who will match Reiniger's skill, vision, and patience, and her films may well remain a unique testament to the potential achievements of the artform. Her films may easily hold their magic for audiences of the future, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now. If this is true, by patiently creating beautiful silhouette animation based on fable and myth, Lotte Reiniger may have created a legacy of filmwork which will offer entertainment and amazement for the ages.

Rohit Iyer made a poster for the film, clumsy me cant seem to find it, will post it once i get my hands on it again..

Here's a clip from the film!

A TASTE OF HONEY, march 6

In Britain of the 1950s divisions of class were far more rigid than they are today.
The 'new wave' films and the sources that inspired them gave a voice to a
working-class that was for the first time gaining some economic power.

Tony Richardson belongs to that generation of British film directors which includes
Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, all of them university-trained middle-class
artists who were sympathetic to the conditions of the working classes and
determined to use cinema as a means of personal expression, in line with the goals
of the Free Cinema movement.

Taking audiences out of the studio and into the streets, where the real stories
were, Richardson and his partners favored realism above all: young, fresh actors,
location shooting, and narratives featuring controversial subjects such as
interracial dating and sex, homosexuality and class.

This 1961 film is based on an avant-garde play of the 1950s Britain. It talked
frankly about the taboo subjects of pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy, abortion,
and adoption from the woman's point-of-view .

"If audiences throughout Britain were stunned by the in-your-face attitude of
'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', they were left somewhere between tears and a
sense of hope with 'A Taste of Honey',an important film in the history of British
Cinema."

PLOT IN SHORT
Jo is a seventeen-year-old and appears to be a loner. She lives with her mother
Helen who is constantly involved in affairs with men much younger in age. Jo
develops a rather positive take on everything unfavourable that is happening in her
life. She keeps herself busy mostly by sketching and drawing.
She meets Jimmy who she falls in love with, just before he is to go away on a long
voyage. Jo’s mother abandons her after finding Peter, a rich and much younger lover.
It is here that Jo meets Geoffrey, a kind-hearted gay man. Geoffrey and Jo get along
well and share a very similar optimistic take on life despite all its hardships. Jo
eventually discovers that she is pregnant, a shocking result of the last night she
spent with Jimmy. Though scared at first, Jo decides to keep the baby...








more about British New Wave

SATURDAY NIGHT & SUNDAY MORNING, march 4

It was not until the release of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1960 that the true effect of the ‘Wave’ was felt. Directed by Free Cinema veteran Karel Reisz and produced by another Free Cinema pioneer Tony Richardson, the film took over audiences in Britain like an avalanche over a small village in some god forsaken valley. It had all the ingredients for a controversial film: an anti-social protagonist, morally questionable behaviour and portrayal of taboo topics like unwanted pregnancy and extra-marital affairs. Albert Finney brings out the performance of his lifetime in his portrayal of the hot tempered tough guy Arthur Seaton, a role which was considered Britain’s reply to Marlon Brando.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the first film to have all its exterior shots to be filmed on location. This was a major move which would influence the following films in the New Wave to be gradually filmed entirely on location. The film was also well known for its clash with the censor board. A significant amount of dialogue in the film had to be replaced owing to the extensive use of swear words in the script. Another major problem was the depiction of Albert Finney’s character Arthur waking up on Sunday morning in bed with his colleague’s wife, a scene directly implying extra-marital affair which was not seen before in British cinema.

For more on this film and the British New Wave--> http://www.brokenprojector.com/wordpress/?p=33

More about New Wave

Extracts from

791.4303 Hayward, Susan

HAY KEY CONCEPTS IN CINEMA STUDIES

41841

NOUVELLE VAGUE: the French New Wave

1958-1962

New Wave film film makers rejected the cinema of the ‘50s and focussed their attention on the auteur and mise-en-scene. They were not a politicised group.

Their cinema marked a complete rupture with the 1950’s cinematic codes and conventions on both the narrative and visual level.

In terms of narrative there was often no completed or necessarily realistic stories as such, there was no beginning, middle and end- more often it was a slice of lif. There were no “stars”. The time was the ‘now ever-present’ of the ‘60s. Discourses were contemporary and about the people. Taboos around sexuality were destroyed and ‘the couple’ was presented as a complex entity with issues cenering on power relations, lack of communication and questions of identity. This representation of women was more positive, women became more central to the narrative.

Visually, the institutional iconography was deconstructed. The establishing shots which safely orient the spectator in terms of space and time, were excised. A fast editing style, achieved by jump cuts and unmatched shots, replaced the seamless editing style that had prevailed before. The newly lightweight camera abandoned the studios and went out into the streets and suburbs of Paris(the only icon not to disappear). Film stock was fast and cheap. These factors gave this cinema a sense of spontaneity..

1966-1968

The Second Wave was generally more politicised. Bourgeoise myths were denormalised. The consumer boom, nuclear war, Vietnam, student politics, adolescence—all were subjects for treatment. By now, the consumer boom was not about comfort/ a better way of life, but about prostituting the self in order to be better able to consume.

Both New Waves put in place a counter cinema to the standardisation effects of American technology—hand-held camera, no studio, editing practises that drew attention to themselves, no star system.

Although this cinema was criticised for its focus on the individual, it left one very important legacy. Thanks to the huge influx of filmmakers into the industry, production practices had to be reconsidered. For money to be spread around, films had to be low budget. Given the number of filmmakers, the cheaper lightweight camera came into its own. As a result there was a democratisation of the camera. This pioneering effect was to make the camera more accessible to forces formerly marginalised and by 1970s to 1980s women, Blacks and Beurs (an Arab community in France) were entering into filmmaking.

Major figures

Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,

Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy

NEW GERMAN CINEMA

This was a movement that came into forceful being by the early 1970s although its roots go back to the early 1960s when inspired by the Nouvelle Vague, 26 young filmmakers and film critics signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962. The manifesto declared its intention to create the new German feature film and promised the birth of a new cinema that would be international. This movement was directly politically motivated.

It must be remembered that the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, effecting the division of Germany into two distinct parts—the capitalist West Germany and the communist East Germany.

New German cinema emanated from West Germany. Unlike films from East Germany, it was a cinema which attempted to come to terms with the nation’s recent past, namely the Nazi era. The motivation of the New German cinema was to give a renewed credibility to the cinematic apparatus and industry after the abuse it had received under the Nazi rule as a propaganda tool.

The new cinema strove for authentic documentary and its style was one of grainy realism.

In economic terms, this new and resisting cinema emerged at the very moment when the industry itself was in decline due to a major drop in audience numbers, thanks to the increased consumption of television sets. German audiences showed very little interest in this new indigenous product. It was left to the French and American audiences to appreciate this new and strongly politicised cinema.

Major figures

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders,

CZECH NEW WAVE

Educated at FAMU, the Czech state film school, previously unknown filmmakers such as Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel, Evald Schorm, and Jan Nemec began to dominate the festival circuit, creating an incredible concentration of films that ran from the politically oppositional to the lyrical to the realist to the surreal. The Czechoslovak filmmakers of the ’60s rejected the official state socialist-realist aesthetic and produced eclectic, technically skillful, and highly assured features that captured the world’s attention and resulted in two Hollywood Oscars for Best Foreign Film (The Shop on Main Street in 1965 and Closely Watched Trains in 1967). The vibrancy and experimentation of the “Czech Film Miracle,” as it is often called, reached something of a peak in the Prague Spring of 1968, when Alexander Dubcek became first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and instituted his policy of “socialism with a human face.” Prague Spring represented the culmination of a period of social and cultural democratization in Czechoslovakia (provoked in no small part by the ingenious and iconoclastic filmmaking of the period) and the liberal policies of the Dubcek regime afforded filmmakers unprecedented artistic freedom. Sadly, Prague Spring and the creativity it fostered came to an abrupt halt in August 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and began the process of “normalization.” The Soviet invasion spelled the end of the Czechoslovak New Wave and the end, or temporary halt, to the careers of many of its finest directors. However, before its premature conclusion in the summer of 1968, the Czechoslovak New Wave produced a throng of daring and enduring films and remains one of the most fertile and original “new waves” in the history of film.

for more on czech new wave

Also found this nice link-->http://www.criterion.com/asp/explore.asp?id=78