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Thursday, July 31, 2008

This week at SFC:Yeelen

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 31st July 2008

STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to be screening our first film by Malian director Souleymane Cissé . Prior to this we will screen the second part of Spike Lee's recent acclaimed HBO documentary 'When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts'. We will screen the third and forth acts prior to the next two screenings.

7:3o pm

Part 2 WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (Spike Lee/USA/2006/256')


This intimate, heart-rending portrait of New Orleans in the wake of the destruction tells the heartbreaking personal stories of those who endured this harrowing ordeal and survived to tell the tale of misery, despair and triumph.

The film also looks at a community that has been through hell and back, surviving death, devastation and disease at every turn. Yet, somehow, amidst the ruins, the people of New Orleans are finding new hope and strength as the city rises from the ashes, buoyed by their own resilience and a rich cultural legacy.

"New Orleans is fighting for its life," says Lee. "These are not people who will disappear quietly - they're accustomed to hardship and slights, and they'll fight for New
Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss, as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleaneans."

8:30 pm

Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé/Mali/1987/105')

In this epic drama drawing on Bambara culture, which echoes mythic legends in an invented tale, a hero undergoes ordeals that allow him to renovate a decaying society. A young man must penetrate the secrets of the Komo cult (a real caste of specialist knowledge among the Bambara), whose members have abused their spiritual powers. Niamankoro suffers his father's wrath as he travels throughout the Bambara empire and Dogon and Peul societies.

He is in search of the Kore, a long wooden icon that mysteriously holds the key to his search. (Cisse likens it to the tablets of Moses.) His mother gives him one part and explains he must find his father's twin brother, a prophet who has the other part. On his journey, he is challenged by another of his father's brothers, whom he kills, and he spends time with the Peul, where he finds a wife and fathers a son. After a long journey he encounters his father's twin, who explains that the Kome cult has become corrupt.

His father finally catches up with him, and in a showdown they both die, although the boy's wife and son live on, symbols of the purified society he has sacrificed himself for.

"Brightness," the title of the film, resonates with the beginning and closing images of the film, which critic Manthia Diawara in the Library of African Cinema catalog has interpreted as bringing "us face to face with the Big Bang of our own creation. Past and future are reunited; only we in the present must remember and search."

This film diverges sharply from the heretofore social realist style and subject matter of Cisse's work. In a 1988 interview at the DC Filmfest, Cisse explained to Pat Aufderheide, "At the beginning of my work, I didn't have technical material means or the money, and I had a strong desire to make films...So I adopted a realist style. I worked with nonprofessionals, I located my stories in the contemporary period, I chose situations where I would not need artificial lighting." After three successful features, "I allowed myself to dream." The fantasy he envisioned was tempered by the possibilities of filmmaking in Mali, although he managed nonetheless to give the film an epic, even ageless look and tone with its precolonial (even pre-Muslim) setting, animist religion, vaste rural landscapes and iconic characters. Indeed, Cisse was striving for a kind of universality. In interview he commented, "I used the Bambara and Dogon people in Yeelen. But I could have used Zulu people or American Indians. It's something we're able to express for any society. The bad father, for instance, is selfishness." He saw the film having a universal appeal as a result: "People [who don't know Bambara culture] go beyond, they see the history of mankind in that film."

Cisse has made three earlier feature films, each of them openly concerned with social issues, e.g. the tensions of modernization, workers' organizations and rights, human rights. This film was funded by Burkina Faso, France, German and Japanese TV.

He has also been a leading spokesperson for the importance of African cinema as an expression of cultural autonomy. But for some, Yeelen catered too much to an international audience. In interview, Cisse explained, "The cinema is universal for me. It's not because cinema was created by Europeans, by 'whites'--a term I don't like to use,because I like to talk about mankind, not to refer to color. The person who had the genius to create cinema didn't do it just for himself or his people but for all humanity." Dwelling upon the Africanicity of African films, he argued, was a sign of the art's immaturity in Africa: "The day when African cinema reaches the level of the other cinemas, we won't be talking in these terms."

Landlocked Francophone West African nation Mali's greatest claim to cinematic quality is Souleymane Cisse, who shares with Senegalese Ousmane Sembene and, increasingly, Burkina Faso's Idrissa Oudreaougo, the prestige and burden of representing African cinema to the world. It is also home to Cheick Omar Sissoko (see Finzan), another increasingly important filmmaker. Malian government both supports and controls cinematic production.

The Bambara, still the most powerful ethnic group in Mali, ruled a river valley empire for more than 200 years until the late 19th century. The Dogon, a small but well-known sedentary ethnic group and the nomadic Peul are important minority groups. Each maintains its distinctive culture. The vast majority of the country practices Islam, but animism continues a vital and pervasive belief system. Although Cisse himself is not Bambara, he was able, he asserted, to penetrate Bambara culture because his family had strong ties to the Bambara group.

Bambara religion is referred to throughout Yeelen. The supreme deity, Ngola or Bemba, is creator of the universe, with the Help of three spirits, represeting respectively air, wind, and fire; water; and earth. In several versions of a Bambara myth, Bemba destroys the earth in order to create it anew.

Bambara society features ancestor worship, and initiatory brotherhoods, two of which are the Komo and Kore. Komo is associated with human knowledge, a powerful and dangerous tool; Kore is the final step in learning, promising transcendance. Initiatory societies bring their members closer to a connection with cosmic reality.

Yeelen won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival on its release, as well as the British Film Institute award for most imaginative and innovative film of the year. It garnered near universally positive critical reviews in the West, with some calling it the greatest African film yet made.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

This week at SFC:A Nos Amours

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 24th July 2008

STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to be screening our first film by French director Maurice Pialat. Prior to this we will screen the first part of Spike Lee's recent acclaimed HBO documentary 'When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts'. We will screen the second, third and forth acts prior to the next three screenings.


7:3o pm

Part 1 WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (Spike Lee/USA/2006/256')


This intimate, heart-rending portrait of New Orleans in the wake of the destruction tells the heartbreaking personal stories of those who endured this harrowing ordeal and survived to tell the tale of misery, despair and triumph.

The film also looks at a community that has been through hell and back, surviving death, devastation and disease at every turn. Yet, somehow, amidst the ruins, the people of New Orleans are finding new hope and strength as the city rises from the ashes, buoyed by their own resilience and a rich cultural legacy.

"New Orleans is fighting for its life," says Lee. "These are not people who will disappear quietly - they're accustomed to hardship and slights, and they'll fight for New Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss, as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleaneans."


8:30 pm

A NOS AMOURS (Maurice Pialat/France/1983/102')


With his raw style of filmmaking, Maurice Pialat has been called the John Cassavetes of French cinema, and the scorching À nos amours is one of his greatest achievements. In a revelatory film debut, the dynamic, fresh-faced Sandrine Bonnaire plays Suzanne, a fifteen-year-old Parisian who embarks on a sexual rampage in an effort to separate herself from her overbearing, beloved father (played with astonishing magnetism by Pialat himself), ineffectual mother, and brutish brother. A tender character study that can erupt in startling violence, À nos amours is one of the high-water marks of eighties French cinema.


Maurice Pialat (Obituary)


French film master exploring the dark secrets of family strife

Brian Baxter
Wednesday January 15, 2003
The Guardian

When the audience hissed as Maurice Pialat received the Palm d'Or at Cannes for his masterpiece Sous Le Soleil De Satan (1987), the director raised his fist and responded, "I can tell you I don't like you either." Pialat, who has died aged 77, was notorious for his incendiary nature, making considerable demands on audiences, collaborators, and actors.
Such non-conformity led to difficulties in obtaining finance, and he wrote and directed just 10 features, of which at least half were masterworks. Their primary concerns were childhood and family, and Pialat drew on his own experiences to present unyielding portraits of familial cruelty and infidelity. Despite a surface harshness, his films were compassionate in the tradition of his fellow Frenchman, Jean Renoir

Pialat was born in Puys-de-Dôme in the Auvergne, from where his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he studied at the École des Arts Decoratifs and the École des Beaux Arts. He struggled to make a living as a painter, taking odd jobs and acting; and, in the 1960s, made seven short films, the first of which, L'Amour Existe, won him a prize at the Venice festival. The turning point came with his role as the caustic police inspector in Claude Chabrol's Que La Bête Meure (1969).

By then, Pialat was immersed in cinema, and François Truffaut co-produced his feature debut, L'Enfance Nue (1970). Using non-professionals, this was a stark and moving portrait of a boy pushed into frenzied adolescence by his father's infidelity and his mother's inability to cope; it won critical acclaim and the Prix Jean Vigo. A second personal film, Nous Ne Vieillirons Pas Ensemble (1972), was a harrowingly accurate account of a love affair turned sour.

Two years later, Pialat directed his first masterpiece, La Gueule Ouverte, the story of a 50-year-old mother dying of cancer, told from the perspective of an impotent son and a promiscuous father, rather than the protagonist. Its long takes emphasised the claustrophobic intensity of the situation, and, released in English as The Mouth Agape, its power was underpinned by a documentary fidelity suffused with compassion.

It was five years before his next film, Passe Ton Bac D'abord, a portrait of attractive young graduates seemingly destined to a sterile future, which received less exposure than his trilogy. But that changed with Loulou (1980), the first of four collaborations with Gérard Depardieu, whose hard-bitten early years and blend of physicality and tenderness seemed a reflection of the director's contradictory personality.

Loulou cast Depardieu as a sex-obsessed slob seducing a refined Isabelle Huppert. The film caused consternation, but was a commercial success, and led to Pialat directing four defining masterworks.

A Nos Amours (1983) introduced the teenage Sandrine Bonnaire, as a girl seeking sexual partners in consolation for a desolate life and an inability to make peace with her father (played by Pialat with characteristic force). As before, it used non-professionals and a blend of experienced and novice actors to give authenticity, and won the César (France's equivalent to the Oscar) as best film, an award echoed by the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc.

Its success allowed Pialat his first big-budget venture, Police (1985), starring Depardieu as a racist detective waging war against Arab drug dealers in Marseilles. The brutality of the opening, and the cop's practice of the bottin treatment - using telephone directories on suspects' heads - were controversial, though mollified by the presence of the star as anti-hero.

The Pialat-Depardieu collaboration reached its zenith with Sous Le Soleil De Satan (1987), adapted from one of the two novels by Georges Bernanos, featuring two portrayals of the character of the teenage girl Mouchette, which he said were united "in nothing except the tragic solitude in which I noticed both of them live and die".

Bresson's incomparable film of the same name, Mouchette, depicts that life from a spiritual viewpoint, but Pialat's response is almost visceral in its depiction of the self-flagellating priest who fails to reform a wilful, and ultimately murderous, youngster (Bonnaire). Her wildness and suicide are - as with the Bresson - underpinned by a stark sense of rural life.

Four years later, Pialat wrote and directed the ambitious Van Gogh, detailing the painter's life from May to July 1890, with the iconic singer-writer Jacques Dutronc as the artist - a role that won him the best actor César. The most exuberant of Pialat's films, it retains the underlying warmth and integrity of all his work.

For his last film, Le Garçu (1995), he returned to childhood and family themes, casting his son Antoine, who survives him, as the four-year-old victim of adulterous parents. It closed a career dominated by a rigorous, never facile, view of humanity.

Brian Baxter

Maurice Pialat, filmmaker, born August 21 1925; died January 10 2003

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

This week at SFC:Persepolis

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 17th July, 8:15pm

Winner of the 2007 Jury prize at Cannes, we are pleased to be screening the animated film of the graphic novel of the same name "Persepolis".

PERSEPOLIS (Marjane Satrapi/France/2007/98')

“Persepolis” is a simple story told by simple means. Like Marjane Satrapi’s book, on which it is based, the film, directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, consists essentially of a series of monochrome drawings, their bold black lines washed with nuances of gray. The pictures are arranged into the chronicle of a young girl’s coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted. In this age of Pixar and “Shrek,” it is good to be reminded that animation is rooted not in any particular technique, but in the impulse to bring static images to life. And “Persepolis,” austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit. Its flat, stylized depiction of the world — the streets and buildings of Tehran and Vienna in particular — turns geography into poetry. If “Persepolis” had been a conventional memoir rather than a graphic novel, Ms. Satrapi’s account of her youth in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran would not have been quite as moving or as marvelous. Similarly, if the movie version had been conventionally cast and acted, it would inevitably have seemed less magical as well as less real.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

This week at SFC:The Science of Sleep

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 9th July 2008
doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15 pm.
This week......
From french writer/director Michel Gondry 'The Science of Sleep', a romantic fantasy set inside the topsy-turvy brain of Stephane Miroux (Gael Garcia Bernal) an eccentric young man whose dreams constantly invade his waking life.


Gondry, well know for his 2004 release 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind', applies his highly inventive cinematic vision,creating a whimsical-yet-melancholy aesthetic honed working on videos by Bjork, the White Stripes, and others.



The Science of Sleep/2006/Michel Gondry/105 mins/FranceThe French magician and director Georges Méliès was arguably the first master of special effects, filling the silent movie houses of the early 20th century with camera trickery that stunned and delighted audiences. A century later, Michel Gondry works very much in the spirit of his artistic predecessor and countryman, creating films and music videos that feel just as hand-crafted and visually fantastical. The Science of Sleep concerns the flirtations and misunderstandings of Stéphane (Gael García Bernal,
Babel), an aspiring visual artist, and Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 21 Grams), his Parisian neighbor who creates whimsical sculptures from cotton balls and felt. As Stéphane toils in a caustic office for a company that makes calendars, he retreats into his dreams and finds them increasingly hard to distinguish from reality, and vice-versa. The Science of Sleep is a trilingual film, with dialogue spoken in
French, English, and Spanish by characters who are very much global citizens, crossing boundaries of consciousness as easily as they cross boundaries of culture. Gondry decorates his love story with deliberately low-tech special effects, including cellophane made to look like bath water and a subconscious television studio constructed largely of corrugated cardboard. This is filmmaking with all
the seams and stitches exposed, an appreciation for the patent falseness of films that nonetheless transport and enchant us.