This week at SFC:Style Wars & Do the Right Thing

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTER
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

THURSDAY 26th June 2008

first film 7:30pm SHARP

New York City classic 80's double this week - Style Wars and Do the Right Thing.


Style Wars (Tony Silver & Henry Chalfant/USA/1983/70')

Style Wars is an early documentary on hip hop culture, made by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, made in New York City in 1983. The film has an emphasis on graffiti, although breakdancing and rapping are covered to a lesser extent. The film was originally aired on PBS television in 1983, and was subsequently shown in several film festivals to much acclaim, including the Vancouver Film Festival.

Style Wars shows both the young artists struggling to express themselves through their art, and their points of view on the subject of graffiti, as well as the views of then New York City Mayor Ed Koch, one-armed graffiti writer Case/Kase 2, graffiti writer Skeme and his mother, graffiti "villain" Cap, now deceased graffiti writer Dondi, Seen and Shy 147, graffiti documentarian (and director of the film) Henry Chalfant, world renowned breakdancer Crazy Legs of Rock Steady Crew, police officers, art critics, subway maintenance workers, as well as several "people on the street".

Style Wars gives a remarkable view into the graffiti subculture (as well as urban New York City life in the 1980s), documents the embryonic stages of New York City Hip Hop, and shows that its members were a racially and ethnically diverse group of creative young artists.


DO THE RIGHT THING (Spike Lee/USA/1989/120')

The hottest day of the year explodes onscreen in this vibrant look at a day in the life of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Featuring a stellar ensemble cast that includes Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Robin Harris, Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Nunn, Rosie Perez, and John Turturro, Spike Lee’s powerful portrait of urban racial tensions sparked controversy while earning popular and critical praise. Searing soundtrack includes Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power'.

This week at SFC:Memories of Underdevelopment

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTER
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN


STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

THURSDAY 19th June 2008
doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15 pm.


Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomas Gutierrez Alea/Cuba/1968/97')

by Derek Malcolm


Of all the dozens of films produced in Cuba through Castro's insistence on the importance of the cinema, Memories of Underdevelopment is the most sophisticated. So much so, in fact, that those opposed to the revolution tend to call it a magnificent and unrepeatable fluke, produced as it was by a film institute that was virtually a Marxist ministry. Those in favour cherish it as a landmark that avoids almost all of the radical cliches.


The director was Tomas Gutierrez Alea, a middle-class university-educated Cuban who went along with the revolution despite some of the doubts about emerging bureaucratisation displayed by the equally bourgeois protagonist of his film. This is Sergio, a wealthy man who decides to stay behind when his family leaves for the US. The time is 1961 and the film is placed between the exodus after the disastrous Bays of Pigs invasion and the missile crisis of the following year.

The film centres on Sergio's thoughts and experiences as he is confronted by the new reality. He is fundamentally an alienated outsider, scornful of his bourgeois family and friends but also of the naivety of those who believe that everything can suddenly be changed. He continues to live as a rent-collecting property owner and, in his private life, chases women with an almost neurotic fervour.

He is, in fact, the sort of man with whom we can easily identify from our experience of European films and literature. The difference is that he is placed in exceptional circumstances and finds it difficult to understand them. Memories is one of the best films ever made about the sceptical individual's place in the march of history.

None of this would have been enough if Alea hadn't constructed his film so richly, and in excitingly cinematic rather than literary terms. Documentary and semi-documentary footage is presented as Sergio would have seen it and the fictional story that goes along with it is very European in its narrative style.

There are even clips from a porno film - there were many made in Cuba under Batista - and Alea himself and the author of the original novel comment on what is going on in Sergio's mind. As one admiring critic has said, "the film insists that what we see is a function of how we believe, and that how we believe is what our history has made of us".

Memories was Alea's fifth film, and probably his most famous, though at least three others received international attention. Death of a Bureaucrat was an ironic satire on the way revolutions stiffen into deadly bureaucracies; The Last Supper showed how the black slaves of Cuba in the plantation era were reconciled by religion to a life of bondage; and Strawberry and Chocolate was a brave and popular film that, despite Castro's disdain for homosexuality, dared to have a stolid party cadre befriended and changed by a gay man.

Alea was clearly no ordinary product of the revolutionary cinema. He died recently of cancer and was honoured by a government he often seemed to criticise - and even more by ordinary Cubans, who flocked to his films.

This week at SFC:Killer of Sheep

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTER
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN



STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

THURSDAY 12th June 2008
doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15 pm.

You are welcome to STAY LATE for our weekly post filmclub lime... Drinks and Music.


31 years after is was made as a UCLA student film, Charles Burnett's rarely if ever seen classic is a statement about how to make film poetry

preceded by short films by Charles Burnett


"Killer of Sheep" is a wonder any number of ways, from how it was originally made to its reappearance now in handsomely restored form to its getting its first-ever world wide theatrical release a full 30 years after it was completed.

But the greatest wonder of all is that this 1977 film, made for $10,000 by filmmaker Charles Burnett while he was still at UCLA's film school and shot on weekends in Watts with a mostly amateur cast, still has the power to move us.

For while blunter, more blustery films have become yesterday's news, almost nothing about this quiet film has dated. That is in part a tribute to Burnett's gifts, which blossomed in subsequent African American-themed works like the marvelous Danny Glover-starring "To Sleep With Anger" and the too-little-seen "Nightjohn." But it also speaks to the enduring power of poetic cinema, of films with genuine artistic vision that create mood and capture emotion in ways only motion pictures can.

The fact that "Killer of Sheep" has been all but unseeable for years has not hurt its reputation. It's considered such a landmark of both American independent and African American cinema that it was one of the first 50 culturally significant films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress by the National Film Registry. All this for a film made so close to the bone that Burnett served as writer, director, producer, editor and cameraman. A film that is more episodic than plot driven, that offers a character-centered portrait of a community rarely seen on film to this day: people who are part of the working poor, living from check to check and trying to make ends meet and get ahead.

Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), "Killer of Sheep's" protagonist, is inevitably exhausted from his work in a slaughterhouse, but the film finds him unable to sleep. He is in the grip of a kind of existential despair that keeps him from smiling, a malaise that puts him in a place where even his frustrated wife (Kaycee Moore) has difficulty reaching him. There are no conventional narrative or character arcs in "Killer of Sheep." Rather, the film follows Stan through random incidents, events that add up to a portrait of futility, a frustrating inability to feel successful and in control. Yet there are also moments of beauty and pleasure that occur unexpectedly and add meaning to life.

We listen in as Stan is visited by two friends who want him to be part of a criminal plan. We are there when a white woman who owns a liquor store blatantly comes on to him. And we watch in almost despair as complicated negotiations and plans for something as simple as buying an engine in order to fix up a car come to an unfortunate end.

One of the strengths of "Killer of Sheep," one of the reasons it has not dated, is that the naturalness and simplicity with which it unfolds give it the texture of a story told from the inside. The film's sensitivity to mood and moment create a privileged glimpse of reality — scenes like Stan and his wife slow dancing to Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth" — that are indelible.

"Killer of Sheep's" musical component is one of its most ambitious aspects. Burnett has said he envisioned it as an aural history of African American popular music, and it includes artists like Little Walter, Elmore James, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup and Earth, Wind and Fire.

The cost and trouble of clearing the music rights for theatrical distribution was one of the reasons the film had such a tough time getting release: It took six years and cost $150,000 to do the job. But without those haunting sounds floating over its inexpressibly lyrical images, "Killer of Sheep" would not be the classic it remains.