We’ll watch this film on February 3rd, friday (18:OO). Zrinyi 14, Room 412, as usual.

“The movie tells the story of a blue-haired young girl by the name of Coraline Jones (voice of Dakota Fanning), who has moved to an out-of-the-way, 150-year old mansion in Oregon. Unlike the usual animated heroine, she’s not sugar and spice and everything nice; Coraline has a nasty side that peeks through at times (most notably in her treatment of others). Her mother (Teri Hatcher) and father (John Hodgman) are writers with little time for their daughter, so Coraline is left on her own to explore the house and its grounds. [...] One day, Coraline discovers a hidden door that appears to lead nowhere; the opening has been bricked up. That night, however, a portal opens behind the door that transports Coraline to a strange world of unsuspected wonders, where her ‘Other Mother’ and ‘Other Father’ are interested in only pleasing her and things are warm, beautiful, and colorful. But the time-honored cliché applies: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” (James Berardinelli, ReelViews.net)

“Like [Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch] Mr. Selick is interested in childhood not as a condition of sentimentalized, passive innocence but rather as an active, seething state of receptivity in which consciousness itself is a site of wondrous, at times unbearable drama.” (A. O. Scott, NY Times)

But we’ll watch 4-5 films in sequence, films which focus on children’s morality, perspective and feelings. We start (on Jan 20, friday, at 18h) )with a simple, almost minimalistic film from Mongolia, directed by Byambasuren Davaa: The Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005).

“A Mongolian nomad family find themselves in disagreement when the oldest daughter, Nansal, finds a dog and brings it home. Believing that it is responsible for attacking his sheep, her father refuses to allow her to keep it. When it’s time for the family to move on, Nansal must decide whether to defy her father and take her new friend with them.

Oscar-nominated director Byambasuren Davaa’s follow up to the hugely successful The Story of the Weeping Camel is a thought-provoking mix of documentary and drama that tells the story of the age-old bond between man and dog, a bond which experiences a new twist through the eternal cycle of reincarnation in Mongolia.” (*)

And then, on January 27 Friday (at 17:50), we’ll have a film from Japan: Nobody Knows, by Hirokazu Kore-eda. (2004)

“Keiko is a single mother who moves with her 12-year-old son, Akira, into a small flat in a large city; however, what the building management doesn’t know is that Keiko also has three other children, all fathered by different men. One day, Akira finds a note from his mother, saying that she’ll be away for a while and that he’s in charge while she’s gone; the message is accompanied by an envelope full of money. Akira takes this news in stride, since it isn’t the first time this has happened; he sees to it that the bills are paid, Kyoko takes care of the housework, and the youngest kids look after one another. But days stretch into weeks and it becomes clear that Kieko may not be coming back for a while. At first, the children try to keep up appearances as if their mother were still around, but as time goes on and money gets low, things become increasingly chaotic, and Keiko starts running out of ways to dodge the landlord and keep their problem a secret.” (Rottentomatoes.Com)

 

“Shooting chronologically over the course of 12 months, Kore-eda crafts this real-life story into a moving docu-drama about the loss of childhood innocence. With just one principal location – a tiny apartment – and four non-professional child actors sharing the burden of the film’s focus, it’s a dazzling technical achievement: instead of producing a conventional script for the children, Kore-eda simply explained their lines to them on-set each morning and let them improvise.” (BBC.co.uk)

Stacy clumsily pursues a life without much self-involvement. She starts a new job in the TV, becoming the assistant of an associate producer (Barb) of a wicked talk show, where any controversial or personal matter can be abused for the sake of reckless spectacle. One day she gets curious about her boyfriend’s past with other women. Barb tempts Stacy to take advantage of the available resources, namely the boyfriend’s palm handheld and the status of working for the TV itself. So Stacy begins to find the ex-girlfriends and pretends that she’s interviewing them for the show.

December 16, Friday, at 18:00, Zrinyi 14/Room 412

And, as I said before, we’re giving a break after this, meeting again on Jan 20.

The first English language film by the Italian director is loosely based on a short story by Julio Cortazar. (*) The unnamed protagonist of the film is a professional photographer, apparently making a living in the fashion world. He also relishes taking spontaneous pictures of people. In one of these occasions, he captures a romantic couple by spying on them from a distance. He gets caught by the woman, who insists on his giving the negatives. Upon this he first thinks that an illegitimate affair is the issue, yet a very detailed observation of the photos suggests him that something more dreadful is involved.

[Blow-Up] is an influential, stylish study of paranoid intrigue and disorientation. It is also a time capsule of mod London, a mindscape of the era’s fashions, free love parties, music (Herbie Hancock wrote the score and The Yardbirds riff at a club) and hip langour.

                               – from the backcover of the DVD relased by Warner Bros.

(*) The story can be found in this edition. After reading it you may want to take a look at this analysis of the story.

CHELOVEK’S KINO-APPARATOM (1929) 

The Man With a Movie Camera

by Dziga Vertov

Silent film, with added music by The Cinematic Orchestra
67 mins.

Chelovek’s Kino-Apparatom starts with this warning:

“ATTENTION VIEWERS! This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events without the help of intertitles, the help of a story or the help of theatre. This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature.”

“Cinema-Eyes” were a group of Soviet filmmakers in the 1920′s, who held that the camera was superior to the human eye with regards to (re)producing the dynamic visual motley — that is, the world before us. Dziga Vertov was the central figure of Cinema-Eyes in terms of both theory and practice, and in this highly-acclaimed exemplar of the group’s manifesto we are presented the ordinary yet chaotic life in the Soviet Russia back in those days: or, the amazement in virtue of recording and editing, the fascination with being able to give an order to the jumble of imageries.

*The next film (Dec 9) in the series is going to be Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni. One more will be screened on December 16, then the Club will give a break for a month.

This week on Friday (November 25) we’re gonna watch:

Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2006)

in German (with English subtitles), 137 min

One of the five Best Foreign Film nominees for this year’s Oscars, The Lives of Others essays life under the Stasi secret police in 1984 East Germany. With 100,000 employees and twice as many civilian informers, the Stasi strangled free expression and spread fear or recrimination. Under constant surveillance, all the world truly is a stage. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck paints a glumly absurd landscape, and if the story of a stodgy but conflicted Stasi captain gives sympathy to a historical devil, it also allows for an intriguing angle on the evergreen cinematic theme of voyeurism. <GrouchoReviews.Com>

Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the recent Academy Awards, writer-director Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives Of Others is one of the most accomplished feature film debuts in recent memory. Set in East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the film revolves around Stasi captain Weisler entrusted with the job of spying on a successful playwright Dreyman suspected of anti-party activities. Gradually, as Weisler becomes increasingly vested in the lives of Dreyman and his performer-girlfriend, Christa-Maria, he begins to question his own affiliation with the GDR.

However, while the film is, on the surface, a historical-political drama, the narrative gives much greater weight to the human dimension that lies at its core. Raising questions about power, responsibility and morality, Weisler, who is initially established as the film’s antagonist, increasingly becomes the audience’s point of identification within the drama that unfolds. And it is the very stage of human drama that serves as an allegory for the interactions between the characters as Weisler’s surveillance transcripts start to resemble Dreyman’s plays.  Josh Nelson, <Philmology.Com>

Taken from VertigoMagazine.Co.Uk

P.S. The next film in the series will be The Conversation (1974) by Francis Ford Coppola. In one sense it’ll be a different film in our Gaze and Surveillance / Voyeurs and Intruders series, as it highlights the situation of the person spied on.

The series will continue with Das Leben Der Anderen (2006),  Blow-Up (1966) and probably Lovely & Amazing (2001) as well.  (The order is amenable to change.)

(*) Taken from the Abstract of Ara Osterweil’s review of the film: “Caché”, Film Quarterly Vol. 59, No. 4 (Summer 2006)

The Italian drama by Paolo Franchi (2004) is about unfulfilled and asymmetrical love affairs between three people. The main character, Valeria, is a simultaneous translator in Turin who lives a somewhat alienated life. She watches her neighbour Massimo secretly, seemingly without conscious or ready enough to admit herself that she is in love with him. When the man moves to Rome unexpectedly, Valeria abruptly takes the bold step to go after him. There she finds out that Massimo is flirting with Flavia, a widow in her 50′s. Through some inept and deceitful deeds, Valeria ends up working with Flavia, and later meets Massimo. Hence a love triangle is formed.

The screening will be on the 4th of November (this friday), in Room 412 in the Zrinyi 14 building, at 18h.

So far, in the Gaze and Surveillance / Voyeurs and Intruders Series we have watched four films: Kika, Empty House (3-Iron), Decalogue VI and Following. (Check the previous posts, and 1 2 3 4) The next one will be The Spectator (La Spettatrice, dir: Paolo Franchi, 2004 / Italy), which we’re going to watch on friday this week (November 4).

Very crudely put, what these have in common is that their stories are based on intervening and/or illegitimately observing others’ lives.  This theme itself might open up some philosophical discussions (ethics and morality). But I personally care more about issues given rise by each film: I prefer delving into the differences between these films, the dissimilarities in the ways they handle voyeurism, intrusion, surveillance and so forth.

For instance, Empty House vs. Following: There are housebreakers in both. Yet the difference is, speaking narrative-wise, the former depends more on breaking and entering,  while in Nolan‘s film it’s used as one of the two initiators of the puzzling series of events. [1] This is to say, this particular theme is highlighted more in Empty House than in Following; it’s given a much more principal attention. And this is for good reason: While Nolan fancies crafting an intelligent story where “what happens” seems to matter a lot more than themes, the director Kim Ki-Duk is after a questioning mood in Empty House: a mood of uncertainty regarding existing in the world, I’d say. The point in Bill and Cobb’s intrusions in Following is to let people know that someone was there, and they deliberately intervene into others’ lives. As Cobb says to Bill: “That’s what it’s all about: Interrupting someone’s life, making them see all the things they took fro granted.  (…) You take it away and show them what they had.” (I can’t stop thinking how good, how better it’d be if the film got more of this very idea of the association of people with their belongings. [2]) This is in stark contrast with what the mute characters of Empty House do: They don’t take anything away. Just by inhabiting these houses for a while, they do intervene into the others’ lives; but they do their best to keep the intervention at the minimum and for the benefit of the actual owners of houses. Now, what can be the motivation behind this? We can guess the woman’s: After all she’s abused by her husband, so she needs a physical shelter, and an emotional one as well, so she’s attached to the male protagonist, etc. Fine, but the more important question is, then: Why the latter is into housebreaking? We are never given the answer.

But this is surely not a flaw of Empty House–quite the contrary, the lack of explanation for the guy’s motivation is the point. Later, as the issue verges into ghostlike presence/non-presence, I infer that Ki-Duk foregrounds different levels of existing in the world. (Actually it is more than my inferring this, for a closing line making this point is superposed on the last shot. I doubt if the audience really needs such a blunt move.) I don’t want to impose my interpretation, therefore I finish after saying the following: Housebreaking in Empty House does not look like housebreaking simpliciter. It rather has a figurative-metaphorical use here.

Cem

—

[*] Read: “Cem Kay’s personal thoughts”

[1] The other initiator: “Shadowing”, as Bill says to the old man — “Shadowing. Following. I started to follow people.  (…) somebody at random.”

[2] In my opinion Nolan does better in his next film (Memento, 2000), with respect to how much he exploits a certain concept (amnesia) without letting it be shaded off by the exciting flow of the story.