StudioFilmClub

This week at SFC: Claire Tancons + Carnaval da Vitória

2010-02-10T15:46:00.000-04:00

studiofilmclub
Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday February 11, 2010

Free for all!

8:00pm, doors open 7:30pm

CARNIVAL: ANOTHER RELATIONAL AESTHETICS?

Lecture by Claire Tancons

Since discovering Carnival in Trinidad in 2005, Guadeloupe-born, US-based curator Claire Tancons has been focusing on Carnival as an object of art historical inquiry and curatorial experimentation.
In her writings, Tancons has been arguing for the recognition of New World Carnival, Trinidad's Mas' in particular, as a modern, urban art form, possibly the Americas' true, undiscovered Modern Art.
In her curatorial projects (7th Gwangju Biennial and 2nd Cape Town Biennial), she has promoted the procession as a curatorial format for the presentation of Carnival and performance arts.
She is relentlessly asking the question: why is the art world celebrating performance art while failing to acknowledge Carnival? Can Carnival compare with Relational Aesthetics in which the audience is envisioned as a community and the artwork as a space of encounter whose meaning is produced collectively?

Tancons will share elements of response and invite the public's own in her presentation of Carnival: Another Relational Aesthetics? She will put an emphasis on her work with Trinidadian artist Marlon Griffith and Trinidad-born US-based artist Karyn Olivier, as well as on her ongoing dialogue with the Callaloo Company and a host of other interlocutors in Trinidad.

Carnaval da Vitória (António Ole/Angola/1978/40")

António Ole from 1978 about the inauguration of Angola's Victory Carnival by Agostino Neto, the country's first president. Carnaval da Vitória is a riveting account of the recovery of popular carnival traditions following the travesty of the colonial carnival. António Ole is one of Angola's leading contemporary artist. A multimedia artist whose works spans painting,sculpture, mixed media, photography, video and film, António Ole realized many documentaries on Angolan life and society in the immediate post-independence period. He graduated from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles while simultaneously directing the programs of the National Television Network of Angola and later gained a diploma from the Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies at UC Berkeley.

This week at SFC: I'm Not There

2010-01-07T09:32:00.002-04:00

studiofilmclub
Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday January 7th 2010

Free for all!

film 8:15pm, doors open 7:30pm

I'm Not There (Todd Haynes/USA/2007/135')

Unapologetically audacious, I'm Not There is more post-modern puzzle than by-the-numbers biopic. A title card sets the scene: "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan." Yet the film features no figure by that name. Instead, writer/director Todd Haynes presents six characters, each incarnating different stages in the artist's career. Perfume's Ben Whishaw, a black-clad poet, serves as a slippery sort of narrator. The action begins with the wanderings of an 11-year-old runaway named "Woody Guthrie" (Marcus Carl Franklin)--his raucous duet with Richie Havens on "Tombstone Blues" is a highlight--and ends with a silver-haired Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) watching the Old West die before his eyes. In the interim, there's the folk singer-turned-preacher (Christian Bale), the actor (Heath Ledger), and the rock star (Cate Blanchett, who has Don't Look Back Dylan down to a science). The chronology is purposefully non-linear, and editor Jay Rabinowitz cuts rapidly, Jean-Luc Godard-style, between cinéma vérité black-and-white and saturated color, Richard Lester-like slapstick and Fellini-inspired surrealism (Ed Lachman served as cinematographer).

This week at SFC: Why Jamaicans Run so Fast + Wizard of Oz

2009-12-15T16:21:00.000-04:00

studiofilmclub
Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday December 17th

Free for all!

first film 8:15pm, doors open 7:30pm

This week is our Christmas selection. Firstly a great new documentary out of Jamaica about their outstanding Olympic athletes.
Special thanks to the filmmakers for allowing us to screen their film in Trinidad.
Secondly the newly remastered 'The Wizard of Oz' on 'blu ray'. See this strange and mesmerising work of genius like you never have before...

Why Do Jamaicans Run So Fast (MIQUEL GALOFRÉ/Jamaica/2009/53')

Filming months before the Olympics and continuing the journey from Beijing and back, the 53 minute documentary is the only non-American film nominated at this year’s American Black Film Festival where it won best documentary.
Producer Garcia-Guereta strives to find the answer to Jamaican athletes’ speed in the film and in the process, beautifully captures the spirit and zeal of Jamaicans. Garcia-Guereta said he fell in love with Jamaica at the tender age of 15 when he heard reggae legend Bob Marley for the first time. His love for his second home and its people drove him to document one of the nation’s greatest achievements – a record 13 Olympic medals, including six golds.
After making an overseas call to director Miquel Galofré, the two followed the sport from July of last year with the National Trials, through to the Olympics while in Jamaica and awaiting the athletes as they returned to the Norman Manley International Airport.
As the athletes wowed audiences each week, the two filmmakers hit the streets, capturing the reaction of the public and interviewing a wide array of persons, including Yendi Phillipps, Lisa Hannah, Big Youth, Etana, Vybz Kartel, LA Lewis, Asafa Powell, Usain Bolt and his family, Shelly-Ann Fraser, Melaine Walker and her family, Shericka Williams, as well as Bruce James and Glen Mills.
“Everybody is asking why Jamaica, as such a little country and reach so far, unlike America where they have their big stadiums and fancy doctors,” he said. “But I think the main answer is from school competitions. We looked at how the athletes started running, how difficult it was for them and how some had to walk to training each day to try to make it into a big track star. How strong the culture in schools is and the competition among students of who is better than who and the readiness to compete.”

THE WIZARD OF OZ (Victor Fleming/USA/1939/101')

You don't have to be gay to love "The Wizard of Oz," but a belief in the power of Judy Garland certainly helps when it comes to maximizing your pleasure watching this 1939 masterpiece. Directed by Victor Fleming, the film is based on L. Frank Baum's strange 1900 children's novel, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," which was adapted for the screen by Noel Langley, Edgar Allan Woolf, among others. In the film, Dorothy (Judy Garland; the producers originally wanted Shirley Temple for the part) is a twelve year old girl who lives on a farm in Kansas with her devoted guardians, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Dorothy has a constant companion--her little terrier, Toto. But Miss Gulch, the town bully (the brilliant Margaret Hamilton) feels Toto's a nuisance, and would like nothing better than to have the dog put to sleep. Of course, in an effort to save her pet, Dorothy runs away, only to return home during a hurricane; a blown out window knocks her unconscious, and she wakes up in a fantasy-land saturated in colors as thick and oozy as melting butter laced with psychedelics. But it's in that phantasia that Dorothy's real life begins, in that dreams often tell us who we are, or mean to be, long before we're cognizant of either. While Dorothy takes up with the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), the Tinman (Jack Hailey; Buddy Ebsen was supposed to play the role, but proved to be allergic to the make up) and the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), it's Dorothy's inner journey towards self-discovery that gives the movie its propulsive energy. The only foils on Dorothy's journey down the yellow brick road of life are her self-doubt, the cruelty of older women to younger females, and a deep, dreamless sleep that's brought on when she and her cohorts try to run through a field of scarily vivid poppies. Garland's daughter, Liza Minelli, said that she didn't like watching the film; her mother had to overcome so much in it. And so do we, especially when Garland bruises us with wistful longing when, at the film's start, she sings her signature tune, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Hilton Als 2009

This week at SFC: Cracked Actor + Wendy and Lucy

2009-12-09T15:41:00.001-04:00

studiofilmclub
Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday December 10th

Free for all!

first film 8:15pm, doors open 7:30pm

Cracked Actor (Alan Yentob/UK/1974/52')

A documentary from the BBC archives about an extraordinary period in David Bowie's evolution. Shot in 1974 and transmitted in January 1975, it follows Bowie in Hollywood as he begins to discard the elaborate costume and make-up of his legendary character Ziggy Stardust and assume a new, more enigmatic role. Rake thin, beautiful and chemically nourished Bowie was arguably at the peak of his creativity - Diamond Dogs into Young Americans. Open and astonishing this is voyerism that is compulsive viewing.

Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt/USA/2008/80')

If the cinema houses our dreams, what more beautiful, gentle hostess is there than Michelle Williams? Ever since the now twenty-nine year old actress first became known to American audiences while a regular on the television series, "Dawson's Creek" (which also featured the present Mrs. Tom Cruise--Katie Holmes), Williams has always been greater than most of her projects. Her face and manner are reminiscent of actresses from a by-gone era; she's of a piece with movie star Jean Arthur playing a simple shop girl who wanted to change the world in the nineteen-forties, and Barbara Stanwyck insisting we meet John Doe in a post-Depression US. With her soft good looks--her mouth is a wound--Williams didn't really come into her own until Ang Lee cast her against type in 2005's "Brokeback Mountain," which featured her late partner, Heath Ledger. One felt for her during the media's near pornographic dissection of Ledger's last days. Still, Williams triumphed--through her art. In independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt's 2008 feature, "Wendy and Lucy," the actress gives a performance of such singular intensity that the movie amounts to a near documentary about performance. As Wendy Carroll, a young woman who's down on her luck and trying to get to Alaska to change her life, Wendy's only companion is her dog, Lucy. Broke, her car busted, Wendy ends up in a small town in Oregon where no one knows her name and she tries to steal food to feed her dog--but fails, and is arrested, but not before she's almost assaulted, and brushed off by the only family she has. Has there been a more heart-piercing performance or movie about female despair and poverty since French master Robert Bresson's 1967 study, "Mouchette"? Not in America, certainly, where optimism generally overrides the truth. Hilton Als 2009

This week at SFC: Local Noir + Bresson's The Devil, Probably

2009-11-25T18:13:00.000-04:00

Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday November 26th

Free for all!

first film 8:15pm, doors open 7:30pm

Robert Bresson's penultimate feature The Devil,Probably preceded by a new short film by the Trinidadian
director Ryan C. Khan; the noir fantasy Minutes to MidNite

"For myself, there is something which makes suicide possible-not even possible but absolutely necessary: it is the vision of the void, the feeling of void which is impossible to bear."
Robert Bresson

SFC have previously screened the following Bresson films: L'Argent,A Man Escapes,Pickpocket,Au Hasard Balthazur

Minutes to MidNite (Ryan C. Khan/Trinidad/2009/21')

actors: Wendell Manwarren, Keron Miguel Yan, Tenielle Newallo
A noir, fantasy crime drama unfolds when ruthless Trinidadian gang member, Snake, kills his leader, Mr. Tiger. Shortly afterwards, Snake receives a message that someone named Anansi Spider is going to "take care of him." Following a near-death experience at the hands of a wicked woman, Snake receives a call from Anansi Spider, warning him that his life is in danger. Snake grapples with whether or not to trust this mysterious man, and, ultimately, makes a deadly decision.

The Devil,Probably (Robert Bresson/France/1977/93')

Charles (Antoine Monnier) tells us straight off that he means to kill himself because the world is too foul a place. He can't change it, and can't find happiness in it, so, why be a part of the cesspool most people call iving? Beautiful, grim-faced, thin, Charles is a contemporary-looking guy, but he has the soul of a deep reader of Robert Burton's seventeenth century classic, "The Anatomy of Melancholy." In his 12th feature film, the then seventy year old director, Robert Bresson, tells a tale of the ennui and horror that faced Europe's post-'68 youth, many of whom felt they had nothing to fight for without the drama of the barricades. In charting Charles' interest in death through his past and by using a brilliant cinematographic palette to do so- check out Bresson's book, the fascinating "Notes on Cinemtography"; in it, he refers to the camera as his pen, and making movies as a way of writing--the director not only sketches a portrait of the bourgeois world that created Charles, but the children of apathetic rebellion. "The Devil, Probably," is a movie about the
rock n' roll spirit that can't find a stage. Using non-actors as "models," Bresson, the master of mise en scene, shows us the truth in every day behaviour, dashed dreams, and children who leave home in search of something like parenting, if not hope. Hilton Als,2009

This week at SFC: Ai No Corrida

2009-11-19T13:03:00.000-04:00

studiofilmclub
Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
Port of Spain

Thursday November 19th

doors open 7:30
First film starts at 8:00pm

Free! for all

Oshima's AI NO CORRIDA (In the Realm of the Senses)in a staggering new blu ray edition...
+ Jorgen Leth on Haiti's great painters

Dreamers (Jorgen Leth/Haiti/2002/58')

A celebration of Haitian painters reflecting inexhaustible creativity and optimism. Dreamers, mystics, and storytellers where spiritual forces play an active role in every day life.
The film features the artists of Haiti, exploring their talent, creativity, motivation, imagination and optimism. Andre Pierre, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, Felipe August Salnave, Preffet Duffault, Fortune Gerard, Prosper, Antilhomme, Philome Obin, Jasmin Joseph, and Louise St. Fleurant are interviewed. These artists speak of that which motivates them. Leth presents them as dreamers, mystics and storytellers who live in a country where spiritual forces play an active role in their everyday lives.
Andre Pierre is moved by his strong belief in Voodoo. He relates everything to the Voodo loas which inspire him and which rule his world. For Jasmin Joseph it is his imagination and the "friends" in his mind. Gerard speaks of nights when he cannot sleep and then Jesus speaks to him and encourages him to paint. Leth captures the essence of these famous artists as they relate their personal stories in their own surroundings.

Ai No Corrida (Nagisa Oshima/Japan/1976/108')

Fleshy, voluptuous horror and intrigue are just two of the sensations
that go into making the carnal-themed "Ai No Corrida" (released in the
US as "In the Realm of the Senses") a great and seminal post-war
Japanese film. First screened in 1976, the masterful director, Nagisa
Oshima, avoided having his masterwork completely banned in his native
country by partially bankrolling it through a French production
company. So doing, the Kyoto-born artist gave himself the freedom to
explore the self-reflexive nature of all desire, and the deep rivers
of narcissism that flood us when we let sexuality and power define us,
utterly. Based on the real-life story of Sade Abe (brilliantly
portrayed by Eiko Matsuda), a former prostitute who falls in love with
with Kichizo Ishida (the strong Tatsuya Fuji), the owner of a hotel
were Abe works as a cleaner, the actors go further than most other
performers---including Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Bernardo
Bertolluci's 1973 classic, "Last Tango in Paris"--in telling us
something about the nature of being observed while revealing and not
revealing the self through largely improvised sexual acts. Combining
art and pornography, Oshima also provides us with a bird's eye view
into the beauty and hypocrisy of pre-World War II Japan, where Fascism
was slowly becoming ingrained into a very regimented way of life.
Hilton Als 2009

This week at SFC: trinidad + tobago film festival

2009-09-24T12:57:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB

BUILDING 7

FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE

EASTERN MAIN ROAD

PORT OF SPAIN

Thursday September 24th

8:15 pm doors open 7:30

FREE! + AFTER PARTY

As partners in the T&T Film Festival 2009 studiofilmclub is proud to be presenting three films from the UK by filmmakers of Caribbean origin

MELVIN:PORTRAIT OF A PLAYER (Laurence Cole/UK/2003/15')
Melvin is God’s gift to women. Unfortunately, he’s the only one who thinks so. To everyone else Melvin is a scoundrel, a serial cheater with a cash flow problem. Unexpectedly his childhood sweetheart comes back on the scene, but will Melvin remain faithful to her and end his roguish ways? Completely improvised, made in a mock documentary style—the film is essentially a series of short interviews—and shot in grainy black and white. It is fresh, fast, and full of raucous humour.

FOREVER [HASTA SIEMPRE] (Ishmahil Blagrove/UK/2005/84')
To some people Cuba is a poor, oppressive, totalitarian state. For others it is a country that, despite crippling US economic sanctions, is able to provide for all of its citizens and remain a bastion against US imperialism and the ills of capitalism. But what is Cuba really like? This film looks inside the island nation to see what life is like for ordinary Cubans. Through revealing interviews with a wide cross-section of Cubans a portrait of a country emerges, one in which pride in the revolution and its successes remains strong, yet discontent over a number of issues—racism, censorship, travel restrictions, even the lack of political choice—exists. Recent changes, especially the opening up of the island to tourism, are considered and the increasingly pressing question is posed: After Fidel, what?

AFRO-SAXONS (Mark Currie+Rachel Wang/UK/2008/84')

Afro-Saxons isn’t about the British West Indian post-colonial elite who had internalised the values of their erstwhile masters (Lloyd Best had introduced the term Afro-Saxons to describe just this group of people). Rather, this is a fascinating look at the world of African-Caribbean women’s hairstyling in the United Kingdom. Afro-Saxons takes us through this competitive and ego-fuelled business, following a group of hairstylists vying for top honours in the prestigious Black Beauty & Hair Awards. Angela, the braiding queen; Wayne, a rising star; the formidable (and Thai) husband and wife team of George and Apple; and Michael, a Birmingham stylist all are looking to challenge the London elite. Feel-good and fun, Afro-Saxons is full of warm, observational humour—not to mention mind-blowing, gravity-defying hairstyles.

This week at SFC: trinidad + tobago film festival

2009-09-16T09:29:00.002-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB

BUILDING 7

FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE

EASTERN MAIN ROAD

PORT OF SPAIN

For more info about the Film Festival, click here

STUDIOFILMCLUB is very proud to have Hilton Als select this years program for our part of the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival 2009.
Hilton is an author and staff writer for the New Yorker and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.
He has been actively involved with SFC since agreeing to choose films for the festival - writing syopsis's and his conversations have suggested film after film for screening...
For the festival Hilton has entitled his three night selection THREE WOMEN - and it starts off withwith Robert Altman's classic 3 Women.

Three Women

In 1977, the late Texas-born director, Robert Altman (1925-2006) had a dream. It involved three women living in a desert resort community, somewhere in California. The next morning, with the help of the screenwriter, Pat Resnick, Altman began sketching his film, which remains his most personal, and among the more disturbing produced during Hollywood's late to mid-seventies golden age. Starring three performers from Texas--Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule--"3 Women," is as much about the double-self as Ingmar Bergman's brilliant, "Persona," but with the cock-eyed charm of a M-G-M comedy starring Zasu Pitts. While Janice Rule paints enigmatic murals in a rundown apartment house for singles, Duvall-as-Millie-Lamorroreaux'
s new roommate, Pinky Rose (Spacek) starts to assume aspects of Millie's personality, including her awkwardness, and penchant for sleeping with Rule's husband. For her astonishing work--she improvised a great many of her monologues--Shelley Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes, while Spacek collected a Best Supporting Actress honor from the New York Film Critics.

3 WOMEN Wednesday 16th September 8:15 pm

Directed by Robert Altman

Starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule

Running time: approximately 125 minutes
Color film

Robert Altman is generally regarded as one of America's great directors. By the time of his death, he had made over forty feature length films, including the seminal MASH (1970), "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" (1971) and
"Nashville" (1975). His work was distinctive in its use of overlapping, naturalistic dialogue, and for its criticism of America's status quo. He was awarded an honorary Oscar before his death in 2006

Thursday 17th September 8:15pm

Two Women: Sort Of

The filmmaker Leslie Thornton's "Peggy and Fred in Hell," is a process-oriented work that combines archival footage, and images Thornton's shot and arranged herself, on both film and video, from 1984 to 2009. In the early nineteen-eighties, the artist began filming two children she met in Providence, Rhode Island. In short order they became the focus of her project--to show the last two beings, a pre-adolescent brother and sister, on earth. Inundated by media and natural devastation, Peggy and Fred traverse a post-apocalyptic universe where they can only reflect one another, and the ruin of the world. (Part of the story Thornton means to tell here through metaphor is her own history of duality. How to resolve the image of her father, a gentle man, with the fact that he was a scientist who worked on developing the Atom bomb?) Combining bright lights, pictures and sound from television, as well as pre-sound images from documentary nature films, Thornton's extraordinary document is a near hallucinatory blend of "real" shots and manufactured scenes, or fiction. Taken together, they challenge our notion of what's true and what's false, what defines a boy and a girl, and how to cope in a world that won't let us alone even as it disappears right before our very eyes.

Peggy and Fred in Hell
Directed by Leslie Thornton

Running time: 90 minutes
Color and black and white

Leslie Thornton was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1951. She is a professor in the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University. Her other films include "Let Me Count The Ways..10...9...8...7," which was selected for inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Kalup Linzy

The performance artist and filmmaker Kalup Linzy generally performs in drag, but he's a post-camp artist. While his videos--a take-off on the soap operas he watched as a child--have arch elements, Linzy is sincere in his appreciation of story-telling, pathos, and suspense. But the world seen in long-running television shows like "The Guiding Light," and "The Young and The Restless," are almost all-white, upwardly mobile, or both. Linzy rejects this notion, and makes poor or lower middle-class Southern-based black women the focus of his short, trenchant videos. Following no particular order, Linzy's soap operas track the inhabitants of a small Southern town who need a ride to the club, or disagree with someone's object choice. It's Faulkner by way of Tyler Perry. Crudely dubbed--one troubled character asks, "Is God throwing shade?"--Linzy speaks all his characters lines, both men and women, black and white, the better to maintain control over his fictionalized world filled with real humor and feelings.

Kalup Linzy was born in Clermont, Florida, in 1977. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of South Florida, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

One Woman

In 1997, Kara Walker won the MacArthur "genius" award--one of the youngest artists to be so honored. This was for her body of work, which centers on race, and the powerful psychological projections that are attached to stereotypes. From the start of her career, Walker has used the antiquated silhouette form to address slavery, and it's resulting confusion: "carpet-bagging," "freedom," miscegenation. It was only a matter of time before the artist made the next step--by having her sweeping still narratives move. In 2004, Walker directed her first film, "Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions"--a film that gains in narrative power through its chronological confusion. Things happen, but when? While a Walker film is rooted in the history of slavery--we recognize the plantation, the masters and the slaves--we see it through a modern lens, informed by our knowledge of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," "Mandingo," and other sexed up, vexing conceits. Walker means to incorporate both views in her work--the historical and the ahistorical, the trashy and the exalted--while opening the viewer up to another vista altogether: their race-defined, not to say limited, self.

Friday September 18th 8:15pm doors open 7:30

Directed by Kara Walker

Running time: Approximately One Hour
Color and black and white

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969, and partly raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2007 Time Magazine named her one of the country's one hundred most influential artists.

FILMS:

Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004
DVD video, B & W, silent
8 minutes 49 seconds

8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, 2005
DVD Video, B & W, stereo
15 minutes 57 seconds

…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea., 2007
DVD video, Color, silent
9 minutes 10 seconds

Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009
DVD Video, Color, stereo
13 minutes, 22 seconds

National Archives Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Lucy of Pulaski, 2009
DVD video, Color, stereo
12 minutes, 8 seconds

This week at SFC:Mister Lonely

2009-09-10T11:57:00.000-04:00

BUILDING 7

FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE

EASTERN MAIN ROAD

PORT OF SPAIN

Thursday September 10th

All our screenings are FREE ones

We will pay some homage to the King of Pop before and after the feature which starts at 8:30pm

MISTER LONELY (Harmony Korine/UK Ireland France USA/2007/112')

Mister Lonely by A.O. Scott

It’s with some reluctance that I describe "Mister Lonely" by Harmony Korine, as dreamlike. Dreams are often vague, chaotic and dull, and other people’s dreams are notoriously uninteresting. “Mister Lonely” is enigmatic, its moods and meanings sometimes elusive in the way that dreams can be, but nearly every frame is an image of arresting clarity and beauty. And even when it strays beyond the border of sense, you can’t help accepting its logic and its truth, much as you do when your unconscious spools pictures in your sleep.

Mr. Korine’s previous films — he directed "Gummo" and “Julien Donkey-Boy” after writing the screenplay for Larry Clark's "Kids" — were nightmares, harsh and provocative and hard to shake. In defending “Julien Donkey-Boy” from the scorn of other critics, Roger Ebert once remarked that Mr. Korine had “the soul of a real filmmaker,” a judgment that “Mister Lonely,” arriving nearly 10 years later, decisively confirms. In richly colored, wide-frame compositions that seem at once utterly natural and unspeakably strange, Mr. Korine seems to conjure a strange, haunted world. Or maybe, stranger still, he has uncovered a reality hidden in plain sight on the surface of everyday life.

The geography of “Mister Lonely,” which was filmed in Paris, Scotland and Panama, is divided into two distinct zones. In one, an exuberant priest (Werner Herzog, speaking of cinematic visionaries) supervises an order of nuns somewhere in the jungle and flies over remote settlements dropping food from a small plane. On one such mission a nun discovers she can fly, a professed miracle that may have more to do with the power of film than with the presence of God.

Meanwhile — elsewhere? in another dimension? — a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) who tells him of a commune in the Scottish Highlands where people like them can live without shame or self-consciousness. She describes her own family in the careful language of identity politics: a husband (Denis Lavant) who “lives as Charlie Chaplin” and a young daughter (Esme Creed-Miles) who “lives as Shirley Temple.”

What this means turns out to be a bit puzzling once Michael follows Marilyn home. There, he finds a pope (James Fox), a Queen Elizabeth II (Anita Pallenberg), a Sammy Davis Jr. (Jason Pennycooke) and a notably foul-mouthed Abraham Lincoln (Richard Strange), among others, who tend sheep and think about putting on a big show.

Whether “living as” famous people extends beyond dressing like them is hard to say, and in any case this odd, utopian experiment is soon undermined by jealousy, livestock disease and worse. An undercurrent of persistent pain, suggested in the title, blossoms in the last part of the film, as its low-key whimsy swerves surprisingly and not quite effectively into melodrama.

Though Mr. Luna and especially Ms. Morton play their roles without cuteness or camp, the story does not quite cohere, and perhaps it isn’t meant to. Mr. Korine, who wrote “Mister Lonely” with his brother Avi, seems to be more interested in the expressive power of pictures than in conventional psychology. And there will most likely be those who find his sensibility frustratingly hermetic, morbidly preoccupied with the poetry of compositions and camera movements and archly detached from the emotional currents of the story.

And yet “Mister Lonely,” self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it’s also more than that: it’s a small, imperfect world.

This week at SFC:Three TImes

2009-09-02T08:03:00.001-04:00

BUILDING 7

FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE

EASTERN MAIN ROAD

PORT OF SPAIN

http://studiofilmclub.blogspot.com/

Thursday September 3rd

8:15 pm doors open 7:30 for short films

FREE!

Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien/Taiwan/2005/120')

Does anyone make more rapturously beautiful films than Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien? Maybe so, but you’d never believe it after seeing this ravishing new triumph about the melancholy play of time and memory. The action is broken into three different love stories, each set in a different era—a 1966 pool hall, a prosperous 1911 brothel, and rocking present-day Taipei—but starring the same lead actors, the impossibly glamorous Shu Qi and Chang Chen. While these stories deliberately echo his earlier works, Hou uses them to chart the transformation of Taiwanese life, love, and the relationship between men and women over the last hundred years. He captures all this with the poetic intensity that has come to define his work—an absolute mastery of space and rhythm and a humane tenderness that suffuses every frame.

This week at SFC:The Crying Game

2009-08-26T08:58:00.001-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
PORT OF SPAIN

Thursday August 27th 8:15 pm doors open 7:30 for short films

FREE!

THE CRYING GAME (Neil Jordan/UK/1992/114')

When "The Crying Game," opened in 1992, independent film was enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Not since the nineteen-seventies had American and British audiences been treated to such a wide variety of movies, all generally slotted for audiences that were interested in diversity--an ideological impulse that has since gone the way of fax machines. But perhaps no psychological drama from that time was as chilling--and ultimately as moving--as screenwriter and director Neil Jordan's heart-wrenching photoplay about people not seeming to be who they are. Set against IRA-generated intrigue and English repression, the second half of Jordan's eighth feature quickly flowers into a powerful dissection of the personality inherent in politics. Don't tell your friends about one actor's "secret." Hilton Als 2009

This week at SFC:It's All True

2009-08-20T07:30:00.002-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the back studio of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome to ALL.

Thursday August 20th

Start time 8:15 pm - doors open at 7:30 for docu on Orson Welles

ORSON WELLES IN BRAZIL 1942
This is the story of the aborted production of the young master's 1942 Latin American, three-part film

IT'S ALL TRUE (Bill Khron+Myron Meisel/1993/France USA/85')

The events surrounding the making of "It's All True" aren't mysterious but, like so many chapters in Welles's professional life, they are full of production complications, financial problems and the interference of money men who never see themselves as made of money. Conspiring in the disaster was Welles's own tendency to be high of hand, loving of fun and casual about schedules set by others.

The initial conception of "It's All True": Welles was already planning an anthology film in 1941 when he was approached by Nelson Rockefeller, who was a large stockholder in RKO Pictures (Welles's studio) and the coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs. Rockefeller's idea was for Welles to make an entertainment film to help promote President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy. Up until 1942 it was not certain that the Brazilians would not align with Germany because of their presidents flirtations with fascism. This changed when the Germans torpedoed five Brazilian ships - and when Brazil and America signed a military accord.

It was a busy time for Welles. He was finishing work on "The Magnificent Ambersons" and acting in "Journey Into Fear," which he had supervised though it was being directed by Norman Foster. By chance he had earlier envisioned a short film about a Mexican boy and his bull, "My Friend Bonito," which was to be one of the three segments in the RKO-produced, Government-promoted movie celebrating Latin America. He decided that the second segment would center on the annual carnival in Rio de Janeiro, and that the third would be determined when he arrived in Rio.

In those youthful days, Welles was full of energy and magnificent self-assurance. Yet "It's All True" seems never to have been thought through with any realistic sense of time, place and money. He oversaw the shooting of several sequences of "My Friend Bonito" in Mexico and then, in February 1942, took off for Rio with both Technicolor and black-and-white cameras to photograph the carnival.

That did not go easily, but he did get the idea to use the story of the history of the samba as one of the principal themes of what became the two Brazilian segments. Welles spent close to six months and a great deal of money improvising his way through the film. He delved into the samba world for the episode Carnival in Rio and reportedly spared no expense in his quest for the authentic. Sambista Raul Marques (1913–1991) told how, during the filming of a batucada, the pernada tripping contest turned violent, but the director egged the contestants on and continued shooting until the bitter end. Several participants were injured, and the actor-singer-songwriter Grande Otelo was hospitalized. When people complained of the violence, Welles said, “I’ll pay for everything.”The second segment was to be a re-enactment of the story of four Brazilian fishermen from the northeast who, the year before, had caused a sensation when they sailed their tiny fishing raft across 1,600 miles of open ocean to Rio to seek redress for social ills.

RKO officials quickly panicked about the money Welles was spending in Rio without having a finished script. The carnival material they saw was formless. But they truly hit the ceiling when Welles's interest turned to Rio's favelas (mountainside slums) and blacks in his search for the samba's roots. Poor people, particularly poor black people, did not fit into any good neighbor policy that RKO or the United States State Department wanted to publicize.

The production was halted in midstream by RKO, but Welles persisted in his efforts to finish the film's third segment, "Four Men on a Raft," with a modest budget and primitive equipment. This material, which he shot but never edited, changed hands several times and then was lost. Some of it was destroyed. In 1985, the year Welles died, the surviving material was found in a Paramount vault.

Because there was no screenplay, Richard Wilson, Welles's assistant in Brazil, used letters and memorandums to put together a 22-minute version of "Four Men on a Raft," which was shown at the 1986 Venice Film Festival. That material remains the heart of the new documentary.

The new film also makes use of the remaining Technicolor carnival material and several sequences from "My Friend Bonito," all supplemented by filmed interviews with Welles, both as a young man and in later years; with Wilson, who died of cancer in 1991; with other associates, and with some of the Brazilian members of the project who are still alive.

It's the black-and-white material from "Four Men on a Raft" and "My Friend Bonito" that gives the documentary its importance. There is the initial surprise at the way it recalls the look and style of the great Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein in his monumental "Que Viva Mexico!" (1930-31), a project almost as cursed as "It's All True." Planned as four distinct stories, with a prologue and an epilogue, "Que Viva Mexico!" was taken away from Eisenstein by his American partners before he could put it together. It was later edited into four separate films that could only hazily suggest what Eisenstein would have done.

Yet the Eisenstein material was preserved and, if not honored, it was at least used. Welles's material was casually trashed.

Both "Four Men on a Raft" and "My Friend Bonito" have the gloriously liquid look of the heavily filtered, black-and-white photography favored in the 1930's to ennoble peasants and other common folk. It's corny and possibly condescending, but it still works. Glauber Rocha, a leading talent in Brazil's own Cinema Novo movement, used the same style in his "Barravento" (1961), which is set in the fishing villages of Bahia.

Of special interest is the funeral procession sequence in "Four Men on a Raft," a stunning preview of the even more remarkable sequence that would later open Welles's "Othello."

"It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles" might have been even more fascinating if Welles's raw material hadn't been so smoothly edited that it's impossible to tell how sequences were put together, what was saved and what was discarded. Such a film would be unwieldy, if of more scholarly interest.

Though Welles's own "It's All True" remained unfinished, its place in history is firm: if Welles had not undertaken the project, the chances are that his greatest film, "The Magnificent Ambersons," would not have been butchered by the studio while he was flying down in Rio.

This week at SFC:Ornette Coleman: Made in America

2009-08-12T06:47:00.002-04:00

BUILDING 7

FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE

EASTERN MAIN ROAD

PORT OF SPAIN

Thursday August 13th

8:15 pm

A film portrait of Ornette Coleman (this summer's MELTDOWN selector) by film artist Shirley Clarke. Hilton Als, who will be SFC's guest selector for the forthcoming T&T Film Festival 2009 has written the synopsis.

ORNETTE COLEMAN: MADE IN AMERICA (Shirley Clarke/USA/1985/85')

Born in New York in 1919, the film artist Shirley Clarke identified far more with blacks than she did other women. ("I couldn't deal with the whole feminist thing," she said once.) Originally trained as a dancer and choreographer, the privileged Clarke eventually realized she had no real talent in either field, so she switched to film, where she made her mark not only in terms of form--her gritty, improvisatonal realism presaged that of John Cassavettes and Andy Warhol--but content: her most astonishing work, still, is devoted to the social and inner lives of blacks. In 1967, Clarke shot "Portrait of Jason," which remains one of the more exceptional explorations of truth and portraiture that we have. Eighteen years later, in 1985, the director put together "Ornette: Made in America." The movie is as much about Coleman's "science fiction," phase of musicianship--he liked lots of electronic bleeps in his music then--as it is a further examination of the forms and themes that always fascinated her--specifically, how to tell the truth in a lie while addressing our collective fiction of being. Using the great jazz artist's evolution as her primary story, "Ornette: Made in America," is also an attempt to visualize sound. So doing, Clarke's film tells us more about Coleman's artistry than a million pages of analysis. For all its visual and sonic excess, though, Clarke's final film is filled with silence--a silence that leaves Coleman's essential mystery intact.
Hilton Als 2009

This week at SFC:Klute & A Letter to Jane

2009-08-05T11:59:00.001-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB

BUILDING 7

FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE

EASTERN MAIN ROAD

PORT OF SPAIN

Thursday August 6th

Letter to Jane starts 7:30 - Klute 8:30

All our screenings are FREE ones

This weeks synoposis is by Hilton Als who is to be our guest selector for the upcoming T&T Film Festival 2009

Klute (Alan Pakula/USA/1971/114')

Jane Fonda won an Oscar for her portrayal of call girl Bree Daniels in 1971's Klute. Smart but defensive, controlling and lonely, Bree is being hunted by a former client who wants her to disappear--permanently. And Bree's pretty much on her own until a private investigator named John Klute (Donald Sutherland, father of 24's Keifer Sutherland) comes into her life. Klute's a decent man, new to the world of sex and drugs that Bree introduces him to. And while he's ostensibly in search of a killer, Klute's sense of justice becomes clouded by his eventual love for Bree, the ultimate femme fatale--and actress. With this film, Jane Fonda cast off her iconic Barbarella status and became the personification of the modern woman. Her famous Klute haircut is still a powerful fashion statement--and inspiration.
Hilton Als 2009

A Letter to Jane (Jean-Luc Godard + Jean-Pierre Gorin/France/1972/52')

In 1972, after filming "Tout Va Bien" (Everything's All Right) starring Jane Fonda and Yves Montand, the brilliant French flmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, and his then frequent collaborator, Jean-Pierre Gorin, came across a photograph of Jane Fonda in a magazine. It showed the activst actress in conversation wth some North Vietnamese. Annoyed by Fonda's celebrity and her politics, the two filmmakers--who more or less constituted Dziga Vertov, the filmmaking collective named after the Russan avant-garde filmmaker--produced a movie they originally titled, "Inquiry Into A Still." The "action" of the hour long "Letter to Jane," ends up being Godard and Gorin's voice over narration, wherein the unseen authors produce a scathing film-essay about the nature of celebrity, liberalism, and looking, while indirectly revealing their own complicated, and sometimes thwarted, view of women.
Hilton Als 2009

The films of StudioFilmClub

2009-08-04T23:31:00.003-04:00

StudioFilmClub opened its doors on Thursday, February 13, 2003 with a screening of Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1972). To date almost 250 films have been shown. One film has been screened twice, Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother (1999), which was voted the most popular film shown at StudioFilmClub by its patrons.

The Films of StudioFilmClub
(In chronological order, to Thursday 6 August, 2009)

1. The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972, Jamaica, 100')
2. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999, USA, 116')
3. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000, France, 82')
4. Le Mepris (Jean Luc Godard, 1963, France, 103')
5. Dog Town and Z-Boys (Stacy Peralta, 2001, USA, 91')
6. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951, Japan, 88')
7. Reggae (Horace Ove, 1970, UK, 60')
8. King Carnival (Horace Ove, 1972, UK, 40')
9. A Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997, Iran, 95')
10. Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus, 1959, France, 107')
11. Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986, USA, 120')
12. Rockers (Theodoros Bafaloukos, 1979, Jamaica, 100')
13. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000, Japan, 98')
14. All About My Mother (Pedro Amoldovar, 1999, Spain/France, 101')
15. London (Patrick Keiller, 1994, UK, 85')
16. Gentlemen (Nick Relph & Oliver Payne, 2003, UK/USA, 25')
17. All Around Her the Noise Echoes Her Footsteps (Mario Lewis, 2002, TT, 3')
18. May 1st July 4th (Mario Lewis, 2002, TT, 5')
19. Jules et Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1961, France, 105')
20. East is East ( Damien O'Donnell, 1999, UK, 96')
21. Stepping Razor - Red X Diaries (Nicholas Cambell, 1992, Canada, 103')
22. Talk to Her (Pedro Amoldovar, 2002, Spain, 112')
23. The Importance of Being Morrissey (Tina Flintoff/Ricky Kelehar, 2003, UK, 90')
24. Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002, USA, 114')
25. All of Emily (Elspeth Duncan, 2002, TT, 22')
26. Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937, France, 90')
27. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel, 1977, Spain/France, 102')
28. Crossing Over (Christopher Laird, 2000, TT/Ghana, 58')
29. Konimo - Palm Wine Guitar (Christopher Laird, 2000, TT, 36')
30. Solas (Benito Zambrano, 1999, Spain, 101')
31. The Journey of Lesra Martin (Cheryl Foggo, 1999, Canada, 46')
32. Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973, USA, 91')
33. Space is the Place (John Coney, 1974, USA, 85')
34. Quilombo (Carlos Diegues, 1984, Brazil, 114')
35. Kes (Ken Loach, 1969, UK, 110')
36. Bowing for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002, Canada/Germany/USA, 120')
37. The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002, UK/Ireland, 119')
38. Xala (Ousmane Sembane, 1974, Senegal, 119')
39. Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000, Germany/Denmark/France/Finland/UK/Iceland/Norway/Netherlands/Sweden/USA, 140')
40. City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002, Brazil, 130')
41. The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen, 1998, USA, 117')
42. Black Stalin (Judith Laird, TT, 30')
43. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1973, Germany, 93')
44. Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1956, Italy/France, 110')
45. Dance the Calypso (John Barry, 2003, TT, 35')
46. Tango (Carlos Suara, 1998, Spain/Argentina, 115')
47. Der Lauf der Dinge (Fishli & Weiss, 1986/87, Sweden, 30')
48. Mixtape (Payne & Relph, 2002,UK, 23')
49. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (Johan Grimponez, 1997, TT, 100')
50. Les Fiances du Pont MacDonald (Agnes Varda, France, 3')
51. Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989, UK, 40')
52. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Lecky, 1999, UK, 15')
53. Les Mistons (Francois Truffaut, 1957, France, 17')
54. The Trinidad Tripoli Steelband (Bud Smith, TT, 1971, 28')
55. The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974, USSR, 108')
56. George and the Bicycle Pump (Asha Lovelace, 2003, Cuba, 13')
57. The Filth and the Fury (Julien Temple, 1999, UK/USA, 2000, 108')
58. Afro Punk (James Spooner, 2002, USA, 73')
59. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960, France, 145')
60. Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959, USA, 120')
61. The Story Beneath the Surface (Jason Riley, 2002, TT, 35')
62. Smile Orange (Trevor D Rhone, 1974, Jamaica, 88')
63. Roots Rock Reggae (Jeremy Marre, 1977, UK/Jamaica/USA, 60')
64. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953, Japan, 136')
65. Pierrot le Fou (Jean Luc Godard, 1965, France, 110')
66. Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem, 2001, Spain/France, 128')
67. Together (Lukas Moodysson, 2000, Denmark/Sweden/Italy, 106')
68. BC (Before Columbus) (Robert Yao Ramesar, 2000, TT, 3')
69. The Saddhu of Couva (Robert Yao Ramesar, 2001, TT, 5')
70. The Gospel According to St Matthew (Pier Paulo Pasolini, 1964, France/Italy, 137')
71. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jareki, 2003, USA, 107')
72. 101 Reykjavik (Balthasur Kormakur, 2000, Denmark/France/Iceland/Norway, 88')
73. The Vanishing (George Sluizer, 1993, Netherlands, 109')
74. Baadasssss Cinema (Isaac Julien, 2002, UK/USA, 60')
75. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976, USA, 113')
76. Amores Perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2000, Mexico, 153')
77. Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999, France/UK, 94')
78. L'Argent (Robert Bresson, 1984,France/Sweden, 85')
79. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003, USA, 81')
80. Omeros (Isaac Julien, 2003, UK, 20')
81. La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960, France/Italy, 174')
82. Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel (Gandulf Henning, UK/Germany, 2004, 90')
83. Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (Satyajit Ray, 1955, India, 115')
84. The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973, Spain, 97')
85. Aparijito (The Unvanquished) (Satyajit Ray, 1956, India, 113')
86. Osama (Siddiq Barmack, 2003, Afghanistan/Iran/Japan/Netherlands, 83')
87. Apu Sansar (The World of Apu) (Satyajit Ray, 1959, India, 106')
88. Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano, 2003, Japan, 116')
89. Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2004, Germany/Denmark/France/Finland/UK/Netherlands/Norway/Sweden/USA, 177')
90. Kids (Larry Clark, 1995, USA, 91')
91. The Coconut Revolution (Dom Rotheroe, UK, 50')
92. Rocco and His Brothers (Luciano Visconti, Italy/France, 1960, 177')
93. Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, 1994, Hong Kong, 102')
94. Tape (Richard Linklater, 2001, USA, 86')
95. Old Boy (Park Chan-Wook, 2003, Korea, 118')
96. Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004, USA, 122')
97. Calypso Dreams (Geoffrey Dunn/Michael Horne, 2003, USA, 85')
98. Music is the Weapon (Stephane Tchal-Gadjieff/Jean Jacques Flori, 1982, France, 53')
99. Jump Up (Rune Hassner, 1966, Sweden, 86')
100. Don't Look Now (Nicholas Roeg, 1973, UK, 110')
101. Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989, UK, 39')
102. Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA, 94')
103. Agua, L'Eau, Water (Sonja Dumas, 2002, TT, 15')
104. Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003, USA, 107')
105. A Man Escapes (Robert Bresson, 1956, France, 99')
106. Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999, Cuba/France/Germany/UK/USA, 105')
107. Maria Full of Grace (Joshua Marston, 2004, Colombia/USA, 101')
108. The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev, 2003, Russia, 105')
109. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993, USA, 103')
110. Jeffrey's Calypso (Vashti Anderson, 2004, USA/TT, 25')
111. In This World (Michael Winterbottom, 2002, UK, 88')
112. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971, USA, 93')
113. Dark Days (Marc Singer, 2000, USA, 90')
114. I Have a Dream (Zak Ove, 2002, USA, 22')
115. Suite Havana (Fernando Perez, 2004, Spain, 84')
116. Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939, France, 100')
117. Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar, 2004, Spain, 109')
118. Salaam Bombay (Mira Nair, 1988, UK/India, 113')
119. Day for Night (Francois Truffaut, 1973, France, 115')
120. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA, 93')
121. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965, Italy, 117')
122. Muhammad Ali: The Greatest (William Klein, 1964/74, USA, 120')
123. Hana Bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997, Japan, 103')
124. Rastafari (Herman Lohe, 2004, Sweden, 12')
125. Edward Said: The Last Interview (Mike Dibb, 2004, UK, 205')
126. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat, 2000, France, 84')
127. Bali - Altar of the Gods (Errol Sitahal, 2003, TT, 26')
128. Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (Barbet Schroeder, France, 1974, 90')
129. Basque Ball (The Skin Against the Stone) (Julio Medem, 2003, Spain, 108')
130. Francis Bacon - Arena (Adam Low, 2005, UK, 96')
131. Black Narcissus (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressberger, 1947, UK, 100')
132. Writers and Places: Shiva Naipaul (Adam Low, 1982, UK, 35')
133. Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962, USA, 152')
134. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar, 1999, Spain/France, 101')
135. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1995, Canada, 103')
136. Bus 174 (Jose Padhila/Jose Lacerda, 2004, Brazil, 120')
137. Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001, USA, 99')
138. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1959, Sweden, 99')
139. Spetters (Paul Verhoeven, 1980, Holland, 127')
140. Central Station (Walter Salles, 1998, Brazil, 113')
141. Gadjo Dilo (Tony Gadlif, 1997, Romania,100')
142. Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2002, USA, 111')
143. Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004, UK, 125')
144. Derrida (Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, 2002, USA, 85')
145. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949, UK/USA, 104')
146. The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolluci, France, 2004, 124')
147. The Holy Girl (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2004, 104')
148. The Dream Life of Angels (Elodie Bouchez, 1998, France, 113')
149. The Terrorist (Santosh Sivan, 1998, India, 100')
150. Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956, USA, 99')
151. Belle de Jour (Louis Bunuel, 1967, France/Italy, 101')
152. Bullet Boy (Saul Dibb, 2004, UK, 89')
153. Rues Cases Negres (Euzhan Palcy, 1983, France/Martinique, 103')
154. Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004, USA, 100')
155. A Film About Jimi Hendrix (Joe Boyd, 1973, UK, 100')
156. George Washington (David Gordon Green, 2000, USA, 89')
157. Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005, USA, 97')
158. Who the Fuck is Pete Doherty? (Greg Rosselli, UK, 2005, 50')
159. 8 Femmes (Francois Ozon, 2002, France/Italy, 111')
160. 2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004, China/Germany/France/Hong Kong, 130')
161. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring (Kim Ki-Duk, Korea, 2004, 108')
162. Moolade (Ousmane Sembene, Senegal/France, 2004, 120')
163. The Agronomist (Jonathan Demme, 2003, USA, 90')
164. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005, USA, 103')
165. Baldwin's Nigger (Horace Ove, 1969, UK, 45')
166. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959, France, 75')
167. 3 Iron (Kim Ki-Duk, 2005, Korea, 90’)
168. Mad Hot Ballroom (Marilyn Agrelo, 2005, USA, 105’)
169. Fire (Deepha Mehtra, 1996, India/Canada, 106’)
170. A Dream to Change the World (Horace Ove, 2004, UK/Trinidad)
136. Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1992, Senegal,113’)
137. The White Diamond (Werner Herzog, 2005, Germany, 90’)
138. Capote (Bennett Miller, 2006, USA, 114’)
139. DiG! (Ondi Timoner, 2004, USA, 107’)
141. Lucia (Humberto Solas, 1968, Cuba, 160’)
142. La Vida es Silbar (Life is to Whistle) (Fernando Perez, 1998, Cuba, 106’)
143. Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) (Mikheil Kalatozishvili, 1964, USSR/Cuba, 141’)
144. Le Souffle au Coeur (Murmur of the Heart) (Louis Malle, France, 1971, 158’)
142. The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2005, 81’)
143. Beijing Bicycle (Wang Xiaoshuai, China, 2002, 113’)
144. Badlands (Terence Malick, USA, 1973, 90’)
145. De Battre Mon Coeur s'est Arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) (Jacques
Audiard, France, 2005, 102’)
146. Block Party (Michael Gondry, 2006, USA,114’)
147. Lady Vengence (Park Chan Wook, Korea, 2005, 117’)
148. Cache (Hidden) (Michael Haneke, Austria, 2005, 118’)
149. Barrel Children (Cara Weir, USA, 2006, 24’)
149. Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, USA, 1990, 78’)
150. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell& Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1948, 134’)
151. The Road to Guantanamo (Michael Winterbottom & Mat Whitecross, UK, 2006, 98’)
152. Vers le Sud (Heading South) (Laurent Cantet, France, 2006 108’)
153. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, UK, 2006, 127’)
154. Mamute Siberiano (The Siberian Mammoth) (Vincente Ferraz, Brazil, 2005, 90’)
155. The Proposition (John Hillcoat, Australia/UK, 2005, 104’)
156. Au Hasard Balthusar (Robert Bresson, France, 1966, 95’)
157. Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, USA, 1941, 90’)
158. Crna Macka, Beli Mackor (Black Cat, White Cat) (Emir Kusturica,
France/Germany/Yugoslavia, 1998, 127’)
159. Bread & Roses (Ken Loach, UK, 1998, 110’)
160. Suna No Onna (Woman in the Dunes) (Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japan, 1964, 123’)
161. Volver (Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 2006, 121’)
162. Wassup Rockers (Larry Clark, USA, 2006, 111’)
163. The Yacoubian Building (Marwan Hamed, Egypt, 2006, 161’)
164. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Mexico, 2006, 112’)
165. Ping Pong (Fumihiko Sori, Japan, 2006, 114’)
166. Water (Deepa Mehta, 2006, India, 140’)
167. Up and Dancing: The Magic Stilts of Trinidad & Tobago (Harald Rumpf., 2007,
Trinidad & Tobago/Germany, 51’)
168. Carnival Roots (Peter Chelkowski, 2003, Trinidad & Tobago, USA, 90’)
168. Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, USA, 1978, 114’)
169. Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett, France/USA, 2002, 88’)
170. Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, USA, 1976, 100’)
171. The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975, Spain/Italy/France, 119’)
172. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2006, USA, 135’)
173. Cockfighter (Monte Hellman, USA, 1974, 83')
174. The Wild Blue Yonder: A Science Fiction Fantasy (Werner Herzog,
Germany, 2006, 81’)
175. C.R.A.Z.Y (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2005, Canada, 127’)
176. Junebug (Phil Morrison, USA, 2005, 106’)
177. Etre et Avoir (To Be and To Have) (Nicholas Philibert, France, 2003, 100’)
178. Glastonbury (Julien Temple, 2006, UK, 124’)
179. Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch, USA, 2004, 93’)
180. Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, USA, 1967, 111’) 9/08/2007
181. 24 Hour Party People (Micheal Winterbottom/UK/2002/117') 16/08/2007
182. Round Midnight (Betrand Tavernier/France/1986/133') 23/08/2007
183. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck/Germany/2006/137') 30/08/2007
184. Vagabond (Agnes Varda/France/1985/105') 6/08/2007
185. Choose Me (Alan Rudolph/USA/1984/106') 13/08/2007

BABYLONDON 27 - 29th Sept 2007 (SFC's with Joel Karamath's contribution to T&T Film Festival)
186. A Hole in Babylon (Horace Ove/UK Trinidad/1979/70') 27/09/2007
Playing Away (Horace Ove/UK Trinidad/1986/100') 27/09/2007
The Equalizer (Horace Ove/UK Trindiad/1996/45') 27/09/2007
187. Dread Beat an' Blood (Franco Rosso/UK/1979/45') 28/09/2007
Territories (Isaac Julien/UK - St Lucia/1984/25')28/09/2007
Babylon (Franc Rosso/UK/1970/90') 28/09/2007
188. Cold Dead Hands (Kaz Ove/UK/2006/12') 29/09/07
The West Indian Front Room (Joel Karamath/UK/2006/15') 29/09/2007
Kidulthood (Menhaj Huda/UK/2006/87')

189. Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins/Sweden - Norway/1974/210') 1/11/2007
190. Gates of Heaven (Errol Morris/USA/1978/85') +Scott Walker 30 Century Man (Stephen Kijak/Uk-USA/2006/95') 8/11/2007
191. Fox and his Friends (RW Fassbinder/Germany/1975/123') 15/11/2007
192. Ghosts of the Cite Soleil (Asger Leth/Denmark- USA/2006/86') 22/11/2007
193. The Land of Look Behind (Alan Greenberg/USA-Jamaica/1982/90') + Catch a Fire (Jermey Marre/USA-JA/1999/60') 29/11/2007)
194. Gilda (Charles Vidor/USA/1946/110') 6/12/2007
195. Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg/CAN-UK-USA/2007/100') 27/2/2008
196. Crea Cuervos (Carlos Saura/Spain/1976/107') 6/03/2008
197. Into the Wild (Sean Penn/USA/2007/148') 13/03/2008
198. Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese/ USA/1988/164') 20/03/2008
199. Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety/Senegal/1973/85') 27/03/2008
200. In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Martina Kudlacek/Austria/2003/103') + Dancing Dieties (Emily Rose/T&T/ 2007) + Alonestar 'live!' 03/04/2008
201. Wristcutters (Goran Dukic/USA-UK/2007/88') 10/04/2008
202. Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton Louis Pepe/UK/2002/93') 24/04/2008
203. Little Voice (Mark Henman/UK/1998/97') 01/05/2008
204. Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet/USA/1975/104')_08/05/2008
205. Dark City (Alex Proyas/AUS-USA/1995/100') 15/05/2008
206. Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock/ USA/1954/112') 22/05/2008
207. Lust Caution (Ang Lee/China-USA/2007/148') 04/06/2008
208. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett/USA/1977/80') 12/06/2008
209. Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomas Gutierrez Alea/Cuba/1968/97') 19/06/2008
210. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee/USA/1989/120') + Style Wars (Tony Silver & Henry Chalfant/USA/1983/70') 26/06/2008
211. The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry/France/2006/105') 09/07/2008
212. PERSEPOLIS (Marjane Satrapi/France/2007/98') 17/07/2008
213. A NOS AMOURS (Maurice Pialat/France/1983/102') + Part 1 WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (Spike Lee/USA/2006/256') 24/07/2008
214. 'Yeelen' (Souleymane Cissé/Mali/1987/105') + pt 2 WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (Spike Lee/USA/2006/256') 30/07/2008
215. NEAR DARK (Kathryn Bigelow/usa/1987/94') Part 3 WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE:A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (Spike Lee/USA/2006/256') 07/08/2008
216. PIXOTE (Hector Babenco/Brazil/1981/123') + final act WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS (Spike Lee/USA/2006/60') 14/08/2008
216. BROADWAY DANNY ROSE (Woody Allen/USA/1984/84') + pt 1 EASY RIDERS RAGING BULLS (Kevin Browser/USA/2003/119') 21/08/2008
217. el violin (francisco vargas/mexico/2006) + pt 2 EASY RIDERS RAGING BULLS (Kevin Browser/USA/2003/119') 28/08/2008
218. How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira dos Santos/Brazil/1971/80') + pt 1 Midnight Movies : From the Margins to the Mainstream (Stuart Samuels/USA/2005/45') 04/09/2008
219. THE LAST MISTRESS (Catherine Briellet/France/2007/102') 11/09/2008

ISAAC JULIEN at SFC for TRINIDAD & TOBAGO FILM FESTIVAL 2008
220. DEREK (Isaac Julien/UK/2008/76') 18/09/2008
221. PARADISE OMEROS (Isaac Julien/UK/2002/20')
TRUTH NORTH (Isaac Julien/UK/2004/14')
Fantôme Afrique (Isaac Julien/UK/2005/17')
WESTER UNION: Small Boats (Isaac Julien/UK/2006/20')
BALTIMORE (Isaac Julien/UK/2003/20')

222. Let's Get Lost (Bruce Weber/USA/1988/120') + Je Chanterai Pour Toi (Jacques/France/2001/77')
223. Katzelmacher (RW Fassbinder/Germany/1969/88') + I Just Want You to Love Me (Hans Gunther Pflaum/Germany/1992/103')
224. Black and White (James Toback/USA/2000/100') + The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector (Vikram Jayanti/UK/2008/100')
225. Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer&Peter Djigirr/Australia/2006/90')
226. Manda Bala (Jason Kohn/2007/Brazil-USA/85')
227. The Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica/Italy/1948/93') + Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/France/2004/120') PART I
228. MAN on WIRE (James Marsh/UK/2008/90') + Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/France/2004/120') PART 2
229. EXODUS 77 (Anthony Wall/UK/2007/90')
230. CALYPSO DREAMS (Geoffrey Dunn/Michael Horne; T&T/USA; 2008; 90 min.)
231. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa/Japan/1963/143')
232. MIDNIGHT COWBOY (John Schlesinger/USA/1969/113')
233. MY ARCHITECT (Nathaniel Kahn/USA/2003/116')
234. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Julien Schnabel/USA-France/2007/112')
235. Carmen & Geoffrey (Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob/2009/USA/80')
236. MY BROTHER TOM (Dom Rotheroe/UK/2001/111') + Stephen Gill TALK
237. Madame Satã (Karim Ainouz/2002/Brazil/103')
238. TYSON (James Toback/USA/2009/90')
239. VAMPYR (Carl Th. Dreyer/Denmark/1932/73')
240. COOL (Anthony Wall/2009/UK/60') + JAZZ BARONESS (Hannah Rothschild/UK/2008/82')
241. LEY THE RIGHT ONE IN (Tomas Alfredson/Sweden/2008/115')
242. BERGMAN ISLAND (Marie Nyrerod/Sweden/2006/83') + ONE MAN BAND (Orson Welles) (???USA/1996/88')
243. KLUTE (Alan Pakula/USA/1971/114') + A LETTER TO JANE (Jean-Luc Godard+Jean-Pierre Gorin/France/1972/52')

This week at SFC:Bergman Island

2009-07-29T18:24:00.001-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the back studio space of building 7. Last staircase...

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome
Thursday July 30th

BERGMAN ISLAND (Marie Nyrerod/Sweden/2006/83')

Just four years before his death, legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman sat down with Swedish documentarian Marie Nyreröd in his home on Fårö Island to discuss his films, his fears, his regrets, and his ongoing artistic passion. This resulted in the most breathtakingly candid series of interviews that the famously reclusive director ever took part in, later edited into the feature-length film Bergman Island. In-depth, revealing, and packed with choice anecdotes about Bergman’s films, as well as his personal life, Nyreröd’s film is an unforgettable final glimpse of a man who transformed cinema.

This week at SFC: Cool & Jazz Baroness

2009-06-10T18:49:00.002-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the back studio space of building 7. Last staircase...

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome
Thursday June 11th

Parker Nicholas will be making a presentation of his newest illuminated sculptures. This will be the first of a series of presentations at SFC.

COOL (Anthony Wall/2009/UK/60') 8:00pm

Documentary exploring the meaning and history of cool through the American music of the 1940s and 50s that became known as cool jazz. Those who wrote and played it cultivated an attitude, a style and a language that came to epitomise the meaning of a word that is now so liberally used.

The film tells the story of a movement that started in the bars and clubs of New York and Los Angeles and swept across the world, introducing the key players and setting them in the context of the post-war world.

JAZZ BARONESS (Hannah Rothschild/UK/2008/82') 9pm

Documentary, made by her great niece, about the British Jewish baroness who fell in love with the jazz genius Thelonious Monk.

Pannonica Rothschild was born with everything, got married and had five children, but one track by a man she had never met inspired her to leave and start a new life in America.

Helen Mirren is the voice of 'Nica', while Sonny Rollins, TS Monk Jr, the Duchess of Devonshire, Quincy Jones, Lord Rothschild, Roy Haynes, Chico Hamilton and others appear as themselves.

A love story against all the
odds....

The story of a Baroness who fell in love with the musical genius Thelonious Monk.

This week at SFC: Tyson

2009-05-27T06:31:00.001-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN

We are back and back in our old back space!!!
STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the back studio space of building 7. Last staircase...

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.
Thursday May 28 th
Start time 8:15pm
Doors open 7:30pm

TYSON (James Toback/USA/2009/90')

Love him or hate him, Mike Tyson is inarguably one of popular culture’s most fascinating figures. In this riveting documentary portrait of the controversial boxer, filmmaker and friend James Toback... Love him or hate him, Mike Tyson is inarguably one of popular culture’s most fascinating figures. In this riveting documentary portrait of the controversial boxer, filmmaker and friend James Toback lets Tyson tell his own volatile story. It all started in the Brooklyn neighborhood, where Tyson was picked on and beaten up as a youngster. But when he turned his fear into anger, he realized that his fists had the ferocity to frighten everyone around him. As a teenager, Tyson moved upstate to live with trainer Cus D’Amato, who became the devoted and compassionate father figure he never had. This support helped Tyson develop the strength and focus needed to become a devastating champion inside the ring. But when D’Amato died, something inside Tyson died too.. As Tyson speaks openly about the ups and downs in his tumultuous life alternating between moments of sincere introspection and animalistic rage Toback employs a split-screen approach to further emphasize this. Mixed into this talking-head monologue is striking archival footage that shows Tyson in his prime, when he was one of the most feared and idolized athletes on the planet. TYSON is an appropriately subjective journey into the mind of a massively complicated man.

Hard Knocks by David Denby

The spectacle of a savage fight, however ineptly done or digitally enhanced, brings one back to a climactic moment in James Toback’s documentary “Tyson,” a portrait of a boxer once advertised as “the baddest man on the planet.” It was in November, 1996, that Mike Tyson, then the W.B.A. heavyweight champion, got head-butted by the challenger, Evander Holyfield—a blow that opened a cut over Tyson’s eye and led to a T.K.O. victory for Holyfield. My inexpert view is that the head-butt was accidental. But, seven months later, the men fought again, and Holyfield, the taller of the two, leaned over and head-butted Tyson once more. It all happened very quickly, but this time to me the act looked calculated. Tyson certainly thought so, and famously and disastrously went berserk, biting Holyfield first on one ear and then on the other, losing the match, his boxing license, and three million dollars in fines. Confirming the reputation as a semi-psychotic thug he had earned a few years earlier, with a conviction for rape, Tyson hurled himself farther down a spiral of disgrace from which he has never recovered. He behaved abominably—it was an iconic moment in all the wrong ways. At the time, however, the extreme contempt that many sportswriters and fans poured on him felt a little disingenuous. Professional boxing is defined by an elaborate set of regulations and traditions designed to channel violence into craft, aggression into honor. Tyson, flouting all these protocols and baring his teeth in an act that evoked cannibalism, demonstrated what the sport was really about for him—dominance, pain, and survival. Caught up in his own sense of betrayal (the referees didn’t call a foul against Holyfield in either fight), he inadvertently reminded many people of something that they may not have been eager to admit—that they were drawn to the game in the first place by the spectacle of blood. Movies aestheticize violence; an actual fight brings out the desire to see men destroy each other. Perhaps we moviegoers, relishing violence, occasionally need to see how crazy the real thing can be.
Those who were furious at Tyson will be made even angrier by Toback’s film, for here is a fresh provocation—an attempt to restore to Tyson the human dimensions that have been taken from him (by himself, of course, as well as by others). The movie makes it clear that, for all his snarls and outbursts, he is intelligent, candid, and easily wounded; that he is by turns inordinately proud and inordinately ashamed and, above all, intensely curious about himself, as if his own nature were a mystery that had not yet been solved. Out of shape, his face bizarrely marked by the tentacle-like tattoos of a Maori warrior, Tyson was forty when the movie was shot, two years ago, mostly in the luxurious white living room of a house in Los Angeles that was rented for the occasion. In between footage of his fights, he looks directly into the camera, in tight closeup, or is photographed from the side, also very close, a Cubist approach to portraiture that suggests a complicated man trying to express warring impulses. Some of these contradictions are funny, as when Tyson says that he now wants a strong woman, very strong, a C.E.O. type—“and then I want to dominate her sexually.” Even at bay, he must conquer in all things.
Toback, having known Tyson for years, may have helped him shape his memories into a menacing American fable. Fatherless, his mother an alcoholic, Tyson grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a fat kid with a high, lisping voice who was an easy mark for vicious older boys. As a kind of revenge, he became a baby gangster who robbed drug dealers. In detention in upstate New York, he passed into the hands of Bobby Stewart, a retired fighter, who sent him, at the age of fourteen, to the great trainer Cus D’Amato. D’Amato both indulged him as a lawless teen and disciplined him as a fighter, and he inculcated in him the D’Amato doctrine, a way of transforming anger into a relentless attack, in which speed and strength—a hail of full-power punches—drive through an opponent’s defenses. As Tyson tells it, his old humiliations fuelled the strategy. Before a fight, he was frightened of losing, but, as he approached the ring, fear would ebb. In the movie’s most powerful sequence, we hear Tyson narrate his fear-management ritual as he climbs into the ring, his pupils darting this way and that, following an opponent’s movements. The death’s-head face he presented to the other fighter—cobra eyes and flattened cheekbones—was a mask designed to intimidate. He bore in, and the men collapsed like stunned cattle, often in the first or second round.

Perhaps Tyson was fortunate to have avoided school and society, inasmuch as his grim early years were the only background that could have produced the inexorable force that he became. What this early life couldn’t do, however, was protect him from the many dangers outside the ring. Without the guidance of D’Amato (who died when Tyson was nineteen), he fell among idolaters and users, and blew tens of millions of dollars, as he admits, on houses, cars, clothes, girls, drugs, parties, every kind of excess, to the point where the man who was once the wealthiest fighter in history winds up beached (literally—Toback photographs him facing the sea), stranded amid debts and visits to rehab clinics. In that long descent, Tyson acted out his sense of worthlessness. If he cannot be king, he will be nothing; the middle, he says, doesn’t suit his temperament. What he offers Toback’s camera now is savagery recollected in tranquillity—the baddest man becalmed into a state of articulate self-awareness. That victory, at least, no one can take away from him.

Relocating

2009-05-11T11:14:00.000-04:00

Just so you know, we're taking a few weeks break to relocate to the back space.
See you then!

This week at SFC: Madame Sata

2009-04-08T12:26:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
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 to.
Thursday April 9th
Start time 8:15pm

Legendary criminal. Proud homosexual. Cabaret star.Capoeira expert.Passionate lover. Killer. Devoted father of seven adopted children. Saint or devil? Madame Satã.

Madame Satã (Karim Ainouz/2002/Brazil/103')

''I'm a queen by choice,'' the defiant title character of ''Madame Sata'' furiously retorts to a gay-baiting drunk in the dingy Rio de Janiero bar where he has just driven a packed house into a euphoric frenzy with an extravagant drag performance. ''It doesn't make me less of a man.''

It is 1932 in the impoverished bohemian neighborhood Lapa, home to pimps, prostitutes, thieves and misfits of every stripe. And Joao Francisco dos Santos (La¡zaro Ramos), the lean, fiery-eyed street (capioera) fighter and prostitute who transforms himself into Madame Sata, a glittering transvestite singer, storyteller and Brazilian answer to his idol, Josephine Baker, has just begun to feel his show business oats.

His feverish act, driven by the sizzle of samba, is a strutting, writhing celebration of the body during which sweat pours off his rippling torso, and the exotic fantasies he spins in songs and stories match the wildest inventions of Scheherezade. The names of his stage alter egos -- The Negress of the Bulacochac, Jamacy the Queen of the Forest, St. Rita of the Coconut Tree -- names worthy of a Jack Smith fever dream, speak for themselves.

The movie doesn't pretend to be a meticulous biography of the real Francisco, who was born in 1900 to slaves in the wasteland of North Brazil and was sold by his mother at 7. It is a voluptuous, hot-blooded portrait of a social outcast, a black, homosexual criminal who in acting out his gaudiest Hollywood dreams, transcendently reinvented himself. (The stage name Madame Sata was an homage to Cecil B. DeMille's film ''Madame Satan.'')

The film also creates a romantic vision of a bygone urban demimonde with many resemblances to Jean Genet's Parisian underworld. After making his cabaret debut in the early 30's, Francisco rose to become a nightclub legend who never really calmed down. Before his death in 1976 he was imprisoned many times; he spent 27 years behind bars.

Mr. Ramos's incendiary performance burns like a fuse, lighted from deep inside his skin, that explodes with devastating emotional fireworks. When first glimpsed, he is a bedraggled, newly arrested prisoner charged with a crime whose nature isn't revealed until near the end of the film. From here the story drops back nearly a year to show Francisco soaking in stage magic in his job as the dresser and assistant to VitÃ³ria (Renata Sorrah), a European cabaret singer whose act he worshipfully pantomimes backstage while she performs it.

We also meet Francisco's unorthodox extended family: Laurita (Marcaclia Cartaxo), a tough, jolly prostitute and sometime partner in crime; her baby (in real life Francisco adopted eight children); and the couple's giggly live-in servant, Taboo, an effeminate male prostitute who sews Madame Sata's gowns.

At home Francisco is the slave-driving master of his decrepit house. With his slicked-back bush of hair pomaded to gleaming perfection, he conveys an imperious macho authority that his androgynous coiffure and plucked eyebrows only enhance. Francisco is also a practiced street fighter with highly developed martial arts skills who when affronted is quick to wield a razor or aim a gun.

When Francisco meets Renatinho (Felipe Marques), the handsome petty thief who becomes his lover and whom he fawningly calls his ''Indian prince,'' he pursues him into a restroom and the two glare at each other eye to eye like cowboys girding for a final showdown. Once they're out on the street, Renatinho begs Francisco to teach him how to fight. And their sex, a rapacious, lightning-fast duel of jabs and parries, is charged with violence. Their explosive passion does not generate trust. No sooner have they finished making love than Renatinho, true to his profession, steals money from Francisco, who angrily catches him in the act.

''Madame Sata,'' the formidable first feature film of Karim Ainouz, is told as a series of impressionistic flashes into the heart of this flaming creature and his world of proud, nocturnal parasites. Life in Lapa is lived to the full and lived for the moment, and its dizzying highs are as ferocious as its spasms of violence. After Francisco and Taboo run a scam in which Francisco robs a mark, and a panicked Taboo bursts in to announce a phony police raid that sends the client running, the two collapse in mad, hysterical laughter.

Francisco cannot tolerate rejection. When he and his household are refused entry to a nightclub for being lowlifes, he flies into a rage and starts a brawl. He confides to Laurita that he feels increasingly consumed by a rage he can't explain. Performing turns out to be a powerful antidote to that anger. And after his initial triumph he declares that for the first time in his life, he is truly happy.

Filmed in rich high contrast that turns the streets of Lapa into an ominous shadowland, ''Madame Sata'' is no exotic tour of the slums of Rio. It takes you deeper into the soul of its title character and his desperate world than you imagined a movie could go.

This week at SFC: My Brother Tom

2009-04-01T19:31:00.002-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN
Click here BC Pires's new daily film picks

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome to.

Thursday April 2nd

Start time 8:00 pm

Tonights feature film MY BROTHER TOM is by Dom Rotheroe who directed the excellent documentary COCONUT REVOLUTION which we screened some years ago.

Before the feature visiting artist Stephen Gill will make a presentation of his photo based works. STUDIOFILMCLUB in collaboration with SHOW AND TELL/ ABOVE STUDIOS.

"Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His
photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of
experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious
conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man
passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down,
immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and
away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession

What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as
much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones." Iain Sinclair

Stephen Gill was born in Bristol, UK in 1971. Stephen's photographs are
now now held in various collections worldwide. They have also been
exhibited at many international galleries, festivals and museums including
the Victoria and Albert Museum, Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Switzerland the
National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers' Gallery in London,
Victoria Miro Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and Rencontres d'Arles in Arles,
Munich's Haus Der Kunst, and Photo España in Madrid

MY BROTHER TOM (Dom Rotheroe/UK/2001/111')

Rosy Home Counties schoolgirl Jessica (Harrison) is unimpressed by most of her peers' standard acts of teenage unruliness, but intrigued by the boy who hides up trees from them and calls her 'Fee' - fi, fo, fum. This Tom (Whishaw), who shows her his favourite refuge beside a lake deep in the woods, has a hounded, feral quality, as if thoroughly unsocialised. But when Jessica herself experiences the adult world's depredations at the hands of her most trusted teacher, she rejects domestic respectability for the rare, primal intimacy offered by Tom in his sylvan sanctuary. This anti-fairytale is a fervent, effusive account of adolescent metamorphosis that's sharp but not pat on the claustrophobia of a middle-class family. It's almost pantheist out in the woods, where a religious anarchism confronts the complacent hypocrisy of Church and school chaplain with the kids' shows of suffering, communion and ecstasy. It's shot on handheld DV in an intimate go-go style with an urgent intensity; improvising like mad, the two young leads give vibrant, irrepressible performances.

This week at SFC: Carmen and Geoffrey

2009-03-23T00:51:00.001-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN

www.BCraw.com for BC Pires's new daily film picks

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome to.

Thursday March 26th

Start time 8:15 pm

This week we are very pleased to be screening a new film about the extraordinary lives of Carmen De Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder

Carmen & Geoffrey (Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob/2009/USA/80')

This is a love-story of Carmen De Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, who have been happily-married for 53 years. Carmen was discovered by Lena Horne and got her start in the Fifties as a dancer, appearing in Hollywood films like "Carmen Jones"and "Odds Against Tomorrow." However, she achieved fame as a soloist with the Alvin Ailey Company and as a prima ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera. Today, Carmen, a renowned choreographer, has been on the faculty of Yale since 1970. Geoffrey, the 6'6" gentle giant, was born here in Trinidad and made his way to New York where he broke into showbiz on Broadway as a dancer. His myriad talents led to noteworthy accomplishments not only as a dancer but also as an actor, director, choreographer, costume and set designer, painter and musician. His stage career peaked when he won a Tony award for directing "The Wiz." As engagingly chronicled by co-directors Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob, "Carmen & Geoffrey" not only depicts a pair of extraordinary over-achievers but also a touching portrait of a very loving couple.

** NY TIMES review

Carmen & Geoffrey (2004)
NYT Critics' Pick This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
March 13, 2009
Creatively Connected Through Dance and Life
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: March 13, 2009

“I walk through doors,” Geoffrey Holder thunders in the documentary “Carmen & Geoffrey.” “If I’m not wanted in a place, there’s something wrong with the place, not with me.” And when this 6-foot-6-inch choreographer and painter, with a big toothy grin and the oratorical style of a Caribbean James Earl Jones, thunders, the earth moves.

Mr. Holder has been a fixture in the theater and dance worlds beginning with the 1954 musical “House of Flowers.” His words evoke his fearless self-confidence in the face of racism. The Carmen of the title is Carmen de Lavallade, Mr. Holder’s wife and creative partner for more than 50 years; now in her 70s, she is still a beauty.

As the film, directed by Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob, follows Mr. Holder, he radiates the energy of a sun king. By his side is Ms. de Lavallade, the New Orleans-born dancer and choreographer who grew up in Los Angeles and met him when they appeared together in “House of Flowers”; they married in 1955.

The film spends the bulk of its time with Mr. Holder, who recalls that from early childhood he knew he wanted to dance and to paint. He was 7 when he made his performing debut with the Holder Dance Company, a troupe founded by his older brother, Boscoe, with whom he had a loving but competitive relationship. By the time he was discovered by Agnes de Mille in 1952, Geoffrey Holder was already an accomplished painter, and the canvases shown in the movie suggest the sensibility of an extroverted Paul Gauguin steeped in Caribbean folklore.

After “House of Flowers” he formed his own dance company and was also a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. He reached a pinnacle of acclaim in the mid-1970s with Tony Awards for best director and costume design for “The Wiz.” The fantastic outfits bore his artistic signatures: a brilliant palette and wildly playful and inventive imagery. The clips of his choreography and costumes for “Timbuktu!” (a 1978 Caribbean version of “Kismet”) and “The Prodigal Prince,” a dance biography of the Haitian artist and voodoo priest Hector Hyppolite that he calls his answer to “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” reveal work that was even bolder.

“Carmen and Geoffrey” is crammed with excerpts from pieces the couple created or performed in, separately and together, over 50 years. An informed, affectionate commentary on their work is provided by Jennifer Dunning, a former dance critic for The New York Times, whose biography “Geoffrey Holder: A Life in Theater, Dance, and Art” was published in 2001.

The film includes an excerpt from Ms. de Lavallade’s signature piece, “Portrait of Billie,” an angular modern dance tribute to Billie Holiday choreographed by John Butler. Ms. de Lavallade, we learn, was the best friend and dancing partner of Alvin Ailey, who was brokenhearted when she married Mr. Holder, although their relationship was platonic.

The film follows Mr. Holder on one of his annual visits to Paris, where he reflects on the American expatriate performer Josephine Baker. She was a kindred spirit who was lionized in Europe but not in America, where she tried to walk through doors only to have them slammed in her face because she was black.

“Carmen & Geoffrey” leaves you wondering why its subjects are not widely recognized as national treasures. The marginalization of the dance world in American culture is certainly one factor. But so is the subtle but still pervasive racial attitude that views work like Mr. Holder’s as “exotic.” What does it say about our culture that Mr. Holder is probably best known as the voice in the “uncola” commercials for 7-Up?

This week at SFC: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly

2009-03-19T08:44:00.003-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7 (front stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN
http://studiofilmclub.blogspot.com/

The Studiofilmclub is located in the front foyer space of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15 pm.

The Studio Film club presents the four time Academy Award nominated "The Diving Bell and The butterfly" directed by Julian Schnabel.

The Diving bell and the Butterfly is a true story about Elle magazine power player Jean- Dominique Bauby who suffered a severe cerebral-vascular accident that resulted in a rare condition known even in French as "locked-in syndrome." he is completely paralyzed save for one eyelid, but fully alert and conscious. His only means of communication is through blinking that eye. In his 1997 book of the same name, Jean-Do (as he prefers) vividly likens this condition to being trapped, semi-buoyant, in a diving bell beneath the water, the heavy brass suit with a hose to the surface. No words can be heard, no movement made.
Thanks to the staff at the hospital in which he resides, particularly speech therapist Henriette Durand and transcriber Claude Mendibil, he is able to write his story.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly/2007/112mins/France:USA

We wake up when he does, out of a coma of weeks' length, to discover that he is buried alive in his own body: He's frozen, unable to move his body except for one eyelid. It's absolutely horrifying, not just for the sympathy it evokes but
for how director Julian Schnabel puts us so entirely in the head of stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby that you experience his horror: the camera blinks Bauby's panic and disorientation as faces swim in and out of view, as voices burble up as if from underwater, as the nightmare reality sets in. He -- we -- cannot move. Schnabel eventually lets us out of Bauby's head as the limits of his recovery are explored, but we never forget feeling as if we are at Schnabel's small mercy -- we always are, of course, forced to see a cinematic story through a filmmaker's eyes, but this is an astonishing reminder of that, which makes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as intellectually gripping as it is emotionally compelling.
Based on the true story of Bauby, a French magazine editor who suffered a massive stroke in 1995 when he was only 43 and a vigorously alive and vibrant man, this is adapted from the book he laboriously wrote after his brain trauma by blinking out words, one letter at a time, with the help of a speech therapist, about, well, what he learned about the meaning of life by almost dying and having his world reduced to almost nothing. This is not, however, one of those easy or charming movies about overcoming adversity -- Bauby was a complicated man, and the astonishing
performance by Mathieu Amalric (he'll appear in the new Bond movie Quantum of Solace) makes it tough to actually like Bauby. Now nominated for four Oscars -- including for Janusz Kaminski's eerie cinematography, Schnabel's direction (the native New Yorker actually learned French so he could tell this story in its native language), and Ronald Harwood's adapted screenplay -- this truly is one of the best, most haunting films of 2007.

This week at SFC: My Architect

2009-03-11T08:27:00.000-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
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 to ALL.

Thursday March 12th

Start time 8:15 pm

MY ARCHITECT (Nathaniel Kahn/USA/2003/116')

A traditional quest, superbly told. Nathaniel Kahn seeks to understand the life of his father, the architect Louis I. Kahn (considered by many historians to have been the most important architect of the second half of the twentieth century), a task made even more difficult by the fact that Kahn had three separate and coexisting families: a wife and two mistresses with one child apiece. For his part, Nathaniel was an illegitimate son and only eleven when his father died; his interviews are laced with raw, uncut feeling for a man he never really knew. Throughout the documentary, he uses Kahn's buildings (beautifully photographed) as a kind of wedge into his father's motivations and personality. He discovers that Kahn's more famous contemporaries, like I. M. Pei, appear haunted by his career: is it better to have designed three or four unexampled buildings, as Kahn did, or to have had a successful, high-profile architectural practice? Perhaps more surprisingly, the women in Kahn's life don't regret the way he treated them. Anne Tyng, Kahn's co-worker and mistress, explains her affection this way: "The ideas that you work on together connect you always somehow." In the end, Nathaniel's homage to his father demonstrates what it was like to be caught in his creative whirlwind and asks: where does an artist truly live? In his life, or in the work he leaves behind?

This week at SFC: Midnight Cowboy

2009-03-03T09:26:00.001-04:00

BUILDING 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
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 March 5th

Start time 8:15 pm

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (John Schlesinger/USA/1969/113\')

The first, and only, X-rated film to win a best picture Academy Award, John Schlesinger\'s Midnight Cowboy seems a lot less daring today (and has been reclassified as an R), but remains a fascinating time capsule of late-1960s sexual decadence in mainstream American cinema. In a career-making performance, Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a naive Texas dishwasher who goes to the big city (New York) to make his fortune as a sexual hustler. Although enthusiastic about selling himself to rich ladies for stud services, he quickly finds it hard to make a living and eventually crashes in a seedy dump with a crippled petty thief named Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman, doing one of his more effective \"stupid acting tricks,\" with a limp and a high-pitch rasp of a voice). Schlesinger\'s quick-cut, semi-psychedelic style has dated severely, as has his ruthlessly cynical approach to almost everybody but the lead characters. But at its heart the movie is a sad tale of friendship between a couple of losers lost in the big city, and with an ending no studio would approve today.
Edited by Hugh A Robertson (director of BIM and OBEAH)...

This week at SFC: Man on Wire + The Phantom of the Cinematheque

2008-12-16T16:04:00.001-04:00

Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
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 December 18th
First Film 7:30 - Man on Wire starts 8:30pm

MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh/UK/2008/90')
On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the worlds tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the coup. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with numerous extraordinary challenges: he had to find a way to bypass the WTCs security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings. The rigging was done by night in complete secrecy. At 7:15 AM, Philippe took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan James Marshs documentary brings Petits extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as the artistic crime of the century.

Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/France/2004/120') PART 2

Henri Langlois was, in many respects, the ultimate film fan. In 1936, at the age of 22, Langlois became (along with Jean Mitry and Georges Franju) one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, a theater and museum devoted to preserving the history of the motion picture. Initially a tiny operation financed by private funds, the Cinémathèque, with time, grew into Europe's most important film archive, collecting and preserving prints of rare films from all over the world and protecting many rare gems of the French cinema from destruction during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Langlois' enthusiasm for sharing the treasures of his collection with others helped spawn a film-crazy generation who created the French New Wave of the '50s, and in time, the French government acknowledged the importance of the Cinémathèque's work by financing their endeavors. In 1968, the French minister of culture, André Malraux, responded to Langlois' difficult personality and sloppy bookkeeping by pulling the government's financing of his projects, which led to an international outcry leading to the shutdown of the Cannes Film Festival by activists and film buffs. The Cinémathèque's funding and Langlois' leadership were later restored, and in 1973, his work in film preservation was honored with a special Academy Award. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque is a documentary which chronicles the life, times, and passions of the legendary archivist and includes interviews with his friends, contemporaries, and colleagues -- including Claude Berri, Claude Chabrol, Jack Valenti, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Man on Wire by Peter Bradshaw

Before the acrobats of Parkour and the gonzo activists of free-running, before the situationist-anarchists of skateboarding in California's Dogtown, who covertly drained suburban swimming-pools to ride their sky-blue curves, there was Philippe Petit.

This was the 24-year-old French highwire artiste who loved to trespass on famous high buildings and ply his marvellous trade, stringing cables between spires and ledges and masts and walking across without a net. On August 7 1974, he achieved his masterpiece: walking across the towers of the World Trade Centre in downtown New York as a stunned crowd gathered below. He and his crew had had to creep up both structures in twin teams, and then attach the wire by literally firing across the initial guiding rope from one tower to the other with a bow and arrow. It was the epat to end all epats : a sensational piece of victimless criminal daring which required enormous cunning and discipline, not merely in the extraordinary act itself - Petit impishly danced back and forth across the wire over and over again while fuming cops raged near the ledge - but in the preparation and the skulduggery involved smuggling in the gear and disguised personnel, as if for a bank job.

What Petit brought off was a remarkable, even religious gesture of devotion, both to the building and to New York itself; this was, in fact, a unique act of homage no other artist could have managed, and New Yorkers instantly appreciated it. Graham Greene once playfully endorsed the Great Train Robbers' crime, but his praise for these violent men was misjudged; I wonder if he missed a trick in not writing about Petit, instead?

James Marsh's documentary about this sublime piece of audacity does full justice to Petit's vision, using interviews with the man himself and his crew, and using photos from the time, and dramatised reconstructions - there is evidently no home-movie record and no television footage, as this was before the age of rolling coverage and rapid-response news 'copters.

At this point, it has to be said that there is an elephant-in-the-living-room aspect to discussing Petit's great coup: namely, its similarity in some ways to a very much more malign spectacular brought off at the same location 27 years later. But with shrewdness and elegance, a defiant insistence on the subject's purity, Marsh tacitly allows us to realise the various parallels but says not a word about them. So neither will I.

Petit was an artist and a genius: the WTC exploit surely entitles him to both those descriptions. He describes how he conceived a fascination with the World Trade Centre towers even before they were built, reading about the plans in a magazine in a dentist's waiting-room as a boy. He claims that there was something in the buildings that cried out for a tightrope walker's wire to be strung between them. They were built to be used as he wished to use them: a successful high-wire walk would fulfil not merely his own destiny, but that of the two towers themselves. They were like those geographical areas in his In Search of Lost Time that Proust said were predestined to be battlefields because of accidents of geological formation: rivers, rises, gullies, which both hinder and inspire a general or tactician: "You don't make an artist's studio out of any old room; so you don't make a battlefield out of any old piece of ground."

His planning was extraordinarily detailed, involving many recce trips and dummy runs and even an entire fake magazine-journalist expedition, in which, posing as a reporter, he interviewed construction workers at the top of the yet-unfinished structure while his photographer took photos of these men, and also, covertly, photos of the ledges and the structures they would need for the rigging and the harness. Heartbreakingly, I notice they did get some cine-film of this cheeky exploit, but somehow failed to get any of the main event.

What of the aftermath? Petit relied heavily on various faintly dodgy and unreliable local American guys to get him into the building, but the actual technicians of the walk were his tried-and-trusted equipe : Jean-Francois Heckel and Jean-Louis Blondeau. There was also his devoted, gentle girlfriend Annie Allix. Their testimony is somehow unbearably moving - they are awestruck and tearful even now, though Petit is just cordial and ebullient. But what is even more painful is the fact that though big-hearted New Yorkers fell in love with the crazy Frenchman Petit, there was no celebrity status accorded to his humble helpers, who wound up being treated slightingly. Petit even betrayed Annie by having a fling with a beautiful American fan. Could it be that though Petit did not fall, there were others who did?

What Marsh shows us is Petit's childlike innocence and almost transcendental faith: faith in himself, faith in his leadership abilities, faith that the escapade would be a success, and faith that he would not fall. His sheer hypnotic self-belief meant that I found it quite impossible to imagine him losing his balance and plunging to his death: he defies gravity. In our world of health and safety, a world where success and fame means working within very well-understood corporate structures, Petit is a rare, exotic beast, and a wonderful one.

This week at SFC: The Bicycle Thieves

2008-12-11T08:13:00.000-04:00

The Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica/1948/Italy/93')

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) defined an era in cinema. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man, hoping to support his desperate family with a new job, loses his bicycle, his main means of transportation for work. With his wide-eyed young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy: emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty.

Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/France/2004/120') PART I
Henri Langlois was, in many respects, the ultimate film fan. In 1936, at the age of 22, Langlois became (along with Jean Mitry and Georges Franju) one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, a theater and museum devoted to preserving the history of the motion picture. Initially a tiny operation financed by private funds, the Cinémathèque, with time, grew into Europe's most important film archive, collecting and preserving prints of rare films from all over the world and protecting many rare gems of the French cinema from destruction during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Langlois' enthusiasm for sharing the treasures of his collection with others helped spawn a film-crazy generation who created the French New Wave of the '50s, and in time, the French government acknowledged the importance of the Cinémathèque's work by financing their endeavors. In 1968, the French minister of culture, André Malraux, responded to Langlois' difficult personality and sloppy bookkeeping by pulling the government's financing of his projects, which led to an international outcry leading to the shutdown of the Cannes Film Festival by activists and film buffs. The Cinémathèque's funding and Langlois' leadership were later restored, and in 1973, his work in film preservation was honored with a special Academy Award. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque is a documentary which chronicles the life, times, and passions of the legendary archivist and includes interviews with his friends, contemporaries, and colleagues -- including Claude Berri, Claude Chabrol, Jack Valenti, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Bicycle Thieves: A Passionate Commitment to the Real BY GODFREY CHESHIRE

Viewed in retrospect, much of modern cinema can seem to flow from twin fountainheads: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Though separated by World War II, the two movies symbolize the cardinal impulses that came to captivate serious audiences, critics, and filmmakers after the war. The tendencies they signaled—ones soon fused into a singular aesthetic by the French new wave—are not so much divergent as complementary.
Where Citizen Kane heralded the age of the auteur and a cinema of passionate individual vision, Bicycle Thieves renounced “egoism” for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience. Both films reflect their directors’ personal formal gifts, and their distinct approaches to “the real” transmute the very different production circumstances under which they were created. While Welles’s use of deep-focus and other innovations brought a hyperrealist sophistication to the elaborate fantasy mechanics of the Hollywood studio film, De Sica’s uncommon skills as a visual stylist and director of actors imbued the purist tropes of Italian neorealism—social themes, the use of real locations and nonprofessional performers—with a degree of poetic eloquence and seductive dramatic power seldom equaled in his era.
To an extent almost unimaginable today, the very different forms of realism exemplified by these films were seen as matters not just of aesthetic advancement but of moral urgency, too. Welles’s critique of the collusion of media, political, and economic power was unprecedented, and he later paid the price for his boldness. In Europe, the searching self-examination provoked by a devastating war and the revelation of Hitler’s death camps implicated an entire culture, including a cinema of complicity and vain distraction, typified in Italy by the “white telephone” farces and historical superspectacles of the 1930s.
Born in the fires of war, neorealism served as a chastening, dis-illusioning rejection of Fascism and fantasy, yet its resort to documentary-style, street-level filming (especially in Roberto Rossellini’s trailblazing Rome, Open City, from 1945) was initially a matter of sheer necessity. It soon became an ethical stance, one with consequences both immediate and enduring. Today, more than in any other passage in film history, the tactics and ideals evoked by “neorealism” continue to represent the struggle for authenticity and political engagement in cinema.
Yet neorealism, which by some counts produced only twenty-one films in seven years, was finally less a movement than a moment: a rush of creative energies sparked by, and ultimately tied to, a particular historical crisis. Its authors began in Resistance and thought they were headed for Revolution, but Revolution did not materialize. By the time we reach Bicycle Thieves, in 1948, the neorealist trajectory has reached its apogee. With Italy reborn not as a socialist paradise but as a capitalist purgatory beset with massive unemployment (the postwar boom had yet to launch), the film teeters between ongoing idealism and encroaching melancholy, a place where the earnest formulas of ideology are deepened by the intuitions of tragedy.
The film was the third official collaboration between De Sica, a successful actor and matinee idol turned director, and Cesare Zavattini, a screen writer who also served as one of neorealism’s leading theoreticians. Like The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Shoeshine (1946) before it, Bicycle Thieves uses children as characters whose innocence interrogates the dubious adult authority around them. Though loosely based on a book by Luigi Bartolini, the film exemplifies De Sica’s stated desire to “reintroduce the dramatic into quotidian situations, the marvelous in a little news item . . . considered by most people throwaway material.”
The quotidian anecdote dramatized here concerns Antonio Ricci, a young husband who has been suffering a prolonged spell of unemployment when he is offered a job as a bill poster. The catch is that he must have a bicycle, and his is in hock. Rescued by his wife’s willingness to pawn their bedsheets, Antonio sets out proudly and confidently on his new job, only to have his bicycle stolen on the first day. Desperate to stay employed, he mounts a wide-ranging search across Rome, accompanied most of the way by his young son, Bruno.
More than a half century on, it’s hard to recapture how striking Italy’s new realism—with its actual city streets and unfamiliar, hard-bitten faces—was to world audiences in the late 1940s, when any comparable Hollywood movie would have been shot on a studio back lot, with a star like Cary Grant (David O. Selznick’s choice for Antonio) in the lead role. Yet this film’s neorealism is a bit anomalous. Far from being shot guerrilla-style, with minimal crew and technical support, it was mounted by a team of movie professionals working on a budget generous enough to allow for large-scale scenes, hundreds of extras, and even the apparatus necessary to create a fake rainstorm.
Here, the situational imperatives of early neorealism have become a conscious aesthetic—one, it must be noted, with proven market value in the cinephile capitals of Europe and America (neorealist films were always mostly an export commodity). Yet this isn’t to question De Sica and Zavattini’s sincerity. Though they perhaps elected to compete with Hollywood on a comparable level of technique, they were still embarked on the heroic quest of speaking about the real people and places and social hardships that most moviemakers (then as now) took pains to avoid.
Their commitment to the real finds its most immediately gratifying proof in the movie’s capacious, quasi-picaresque portrait of Rome. Like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, À propos de Nice, and Wings of Desire, among others, Bicycle Thieves is one of cinema’s great “city films.” But its wide gaze isn’t simply geographic. In a way that subtly links De Sica’s vision to Dante’s, each of its physical spaces also has a social, emotional, and moral dimension—from the union hall where crass entertainment intrudes, to the sprawling thieves’ market of the Porta Portese, to the church where the poor are run through an assembly line of shaving, food, and worship, to the brothels and rough solidarity of the aptly named Via Panico, to the environs of a soccer stadium where Antonio’s solitary ordeal reaches a humiliatingly public climax.
This city symphony is also, at its most intimate cinematic level, a sym phony of looks. From the first, we are drawn into Antonio’s alternately hopeful and haunted gaze and what it beholds. In the shop where his wife pawns their sheets, the camera leads our eyes up a veritable tower of such linens, a catalog of forestalled dreams. In the search for the bicycle, Antonio both casts his own looks and receives looks of suspicion, curiosity, and, most prevalently, indifference. Sometimes looks are significantly blocked (by a slammed window, say) or misdirected (Antonio hurries on, looking ahead, while Bruno falls twice in the street behind).
In what’s often regarded as the film’s pivotal scene, Antonio decides to treat Bruno to a good meal. This complex gesture from father to son is played out against the subsidiary drama of looks exchanged between Bruno and a supercilious, pompadoured bourgeois boy at the next table. One could not call this passage especially subtle, yet its haunting power and richness show us what cinema can do that novels and theater cannot.
Looks also cue us to a gradual shift in the drama of Bicycle Thieves. Though it starts out focused closely on Antonio’s poverty and desperate need to recover his bicycle, by the latter sections what most concerns us is not what happens between Antonio and the bicycle or his social position but what transpires between the man and his son. Indeed, a second viewing of the film might suggest that this has been the main drama all along, that Bruno has been “looking after” Antonio in several senses that point us toward the film’s justly famous final moments, when a touching gesture of filial solidarity replaces the class solidarity that De Sica and Zavattini evidently saw as receding in Italy.
Given the importance of individual gazes to his drama, it’s no surprise that De Sica depends far more on variable compositions and cutting than did his neorealist colleagues Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, who inclined toward a more distanced camera style. Yet De Sica resists using close-ups or montage for Hollywood-style emotional overkill. Rather, his directing remains impressive for its vigorous inventiveness, the sense that every scene abounds in moments and details that add to the film’s accruing, multivalent meanings. Additionally, his genius with actors accounts here for the indelible performances of the nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani, as Antonio, and Enzo Staiola, as Bruno.

Much has been made of the fact that Antonio is putting up a poster for a Rita Hayworth movie when his bike is stolen. Apologists like Zavattini, in positioning neorealism as the antithesis to Hollywood, often made claims that today look extravagant if not fanciful. André Bazin was surely closer to reality when he spoke of a “dialectical” relationship than when he vaunted neorealism as approaching “pure cinema.” Yet no important contribution to cinema should be condemned by its most utopian rhetoric. Judged by the brilliant conviction of Bicycle Thieves, neorealism still looks like our most potent reminder that a whole world exists outside the movie theater, to which our conscience and humanity oblige us to pay attention.

This week at SFC: The Agony & the Ecstasy of Phil Spector + Black & White

2008-11-19T17:16:00.000-04:00

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 to ALL.

Thursday 20th November 2008

A new BBC documentary about the great Phil Spector.
+
James Toback's controversial 'hip - hop' film starring : Mike Tyson, Claudia Schiffer,Robert Downey Jr, Method Man, Brooke Sheilds, Raekwon, Bijou Phillips (amongst others)...

Spector 7:00 pm - GET THERE EARLY FOR THIS ONE - not to be missed!!
Toback 8:30 pm

The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector (Vikram Jayanti/UK/2008/100')

The legendary Phil Spector invented the role of music producer and transformed rock 'n' roll – giving us Be My Baby, You've Lost That Loving Feeling, Let It Be, All Things Must Pass, John Lennon's solo work and even the Ramones. He soundtracked a generation but has never agreed to give substantial interviews.

Now, as his trial for murder threatens to eclipse his musical legacy, he is participating fully in a no-holds-barred documentary for Arena (BBC), set to the soundtrack of his greatest hits.

The film dissects these songs, from the perspective of Spector's tortured inner world, to spotlight his creative process and celebrate his musical brilliance. Footage from the ongoing trial provides a dramatic counterpoint to this unprecedented material.

The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Phil Spector is produced by nine-time Bafta-winning Anthony Wall and is directed by multi-award-winning Vikram Jayanti, whose hallmark is empathic explorations of genius.

Black and White (James Toback/USA/2000/100')

Like James Toback himself, his new film is in your face, overflowing with ideas, outrageous in its connections, maddening, illogical and fascinating. Also like its author, it is never boring. Toback is the brilliant wild child of indie cinema, now a wild man in his 50s, whose films sometimes seem half-baked, but you like them that way: The agony of invention is there on the screen.

``Black and White'' is one of those Manhattan stories where everyone knows one another: rich kids, ghetto kids, rappers, Brooke Shields, the district attorney, a rogue cop, a gambler, a basketball star, Mike Tyson, recording executives--they're all mixed up in a story about race, sex, music, bribery, fathers, sons, murder and lifestyles. What's amazing is how it's been marketed as a film about white kids who identify with black lifestyles and want to be black themselves. There's a little of that, and a lot more other stuff. It's a crime movie as much as anything.

The sex has gotten the most attention; the opening scene, of a threesome in Central Park, had to be recut three times to avoid the NC-17 rating (you can see the original version, murkily, on the Web). We meet Charlie (Bijou Phillips), the rich girl who ``wants to be black'' and also adds, later, ``I'm a little kid. Kids go through phases. When I grow up, I'll be over it. I'm a kid from America.'' True, the racial divide of years ago is blurred and disappearing among the younger siblings of Generation X. The characters in this movie slide easily in and out of various roles, with sex as the lubricant. Toback's camera follows one character into a situation and another out of it, gradually building a mosaic in which we meet a black gangster named Rich (hip-hop producer Power), a rap group (Wu-Tang Clan), a basketball guard named Dean (real-life Knicks forward Allan Houston), his faithless Ph.D. candidate girlfriend (Claudia Schiffer), a crooked cop (Ben Stiller), a documentary filmmaker (Brooke Shields), the husband everyone but she knows is gay (Robert Downey Jr.), and former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson, playing himself, and improvising some of the best scenes.

The story, which involves bribery, murder and blackmail, I will leave for you to discover. Consider the style. Toback has observed that for musicians like Wu-Tang Clan, their language is their art form, so he didn't write a lot of the movie's dialogue. Instead, he plugged actors into situations, told them where they had to go and let them improvise. This leads to an electrifying scene where Downey makes a sexual advance on Mike Tyson (``In the dream, you were holding me''), and Tyson's reaction is quick and spontaneous.

But now compare that with another scene where Brooke Shields makes a pass at Tyson. Downey is one kind of an actor, Shields another. Downey is in character, Shields is to some degree playing herself, and Tyson is completely himself. What we are watching in the second scene is Brooke Shields the celebrity playing a character who is essentially herself, acting in an improvised scene. So the scene isn't drama, it's documentary: cinema-verite of Shields and Tyson working at improvisation. It's too easy to say the scene doesn't work because Shields is not quite convincing: It does work because she's not quite convincing. Toback's films have that way of remaining alive and edgy and letting their rough edges show.

The plot is sometimes maddening. Without revealing too much, I will say that a great deal hinges on the policeman (Stiller) being able to count on a chain of events that he could not possibly have anticipated. He needs to know that the basketball player will tell his girlfriend something, that she will tell another person and that the other person will eventually try to hire as a killer the very person who suits the cop's needs. Unlikely.

Against such untidiness, Toback balances passages of wonderful invention. Downey has a scene where he tries to tell Shields he is gay. Tyson (``I'm a man who has made too many mistakes to be known for his wisdom'') has a scene where he gives advice to a friend who wants to know if he should have someone killed. Toback plays the manager of a recording studio, who brushes off a rap group that wants to hire space, but the next day is happy to talk to their white manager (wary of the shootings associated with some rap artists, he explains, ``What I cannot afford is a corpse in my lobby''). And to balance Charlie's rich white girl play-acting (``I want to be black'') is a more sensible black girl (``I'm from the 'hood and I don't want to live there. I go back and see my friends, and they wanna get out'').

``Black and White'' is not smooth and well-oiled, not fish, not fowl, not documentary, not quite fiction and not about any single theme you can pin down. Those points are all to its credit.

This week at SFC: Let's Get Lost & I'll Sing for You

2008-10-29T07:36:00.001-04:00

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 to ALL.

We are back after a brief hiatus post T&T Film Fest and the annual European Film Fest

2 music films tonight - different places, different loses...
Bruce Weber's 1988 classic about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker - preceded by a documentary about Mali guitar great
Karkar - Boubacar Traore

I'll Sing for you (je chanterai pour toi) starts at 7:15pm EARLY START!!

Let's Get Lost 8:30pm

LET’S GET LOST (Bruce Weber/USA/1988/120').

A portrait of Chet Baker, the jazz trumpeter and singer who was one of the pioneers of the “cool” West Coast jazz sound. The film opens with Baker near the end of his life (he died a year later), hanging out on the beach with his current partner and another young woman, musing about his life in a stoned, dreamy reverie. Although he’s only 57, his face looks ravaged with age, evidently from years of drug use and living in the fast lane. But the eyes still radiate an intense kind of beauty.

Then the film goes back in time, to the years when Baker exploded on the scene, the peak years in the 1950s and early 60s, when he was most popular. The voice and the playing were wonderful, and he was a strikingly handsome man then, for sure. Weber, who made his name in fashion advertising, shot the film in black-and-white, which matches the old footage and perfectly evokes the smoky, laid-back jazz atmosphere of the time.

The film features interviews with people who knew him well, but the talking heads don’t break the spell. They do, however, reveal Baker’s darker sides, the drug problems and the bad marriages and the failure to honor commitments. The ex-wives and girlfriends are brutally frank; we get the lows as well as the highs. The movie starts to be more meaningful than perhaps Weber himself intended—more than just a film about a talented train-wreck of a man, it becomes a study in the tragic effects of a certain kind of careless approach to life. The music, of course, permeates the film and lends a romantic, melancholy hue to everything. Weber’s fidelity to mood transcends the conventions of biopic, turning Let’s Get Lost into a beautiful, albeit minor, cinematic gem.

I'll Sing for you (je chanterai pour toi) (Jacques Sarasin/France/2001/77')

An exceptional odyssey through the geography both of a country and of the human soul. It seems to be over in no time at all, leaving you wanting to watch it all over again. --Rhythm Magazine

I'LL SING FOR YOU is the musical odyssey of African Blues singer Boubacar "KarKar" Traoré that takes us on a social, political and geographic voyage of Mali from 1960 to today.

In the sixties, the people of Mali awoke each morning to the sound of Boubacar "KarKar" Traoré's voice on the radio, singing of independence. Nicknamed the Malian Elvis, Boubacar Traoré introduced "The Twist" to the West African nation of Mali in the late 1950s, and sang songs of independence to his fellow countrymen in the early 60s. But after a few short years of promise, as Mali's government became increasingly repressive and the economy stagnated, KarKar's career followed a similar trajectory. Both his life and his country's struggles spiraled into poverty and despair, and Traoré was left existing somewhere between myth and obscurity.

Boubacar put aside his guitar for decades and worked to feed his family. After his wife died, Boubacar, heartbroken, left for France where he was able work and sing on weekends in the Parisian immigrant shelters where he lived. Everyone in Mali thought KarKar was dead -- until many years later a music producer discovered an old recording of his and tracked him down, beginning a new career for KarKar.

Director Jacques Sarasin lovingly chronicles Boubacar's journey back home following him throughout Mali, as he plays his sweet and affecting blues melodies with fellow musicians like blues master Ali Farka Touré, percussionist Madieye Niang, Kora player Ballaké Sissoko and photographer Malick Sibide. Archival footage and photos, as well as stories from friends about his life and legacy round out the film.

This week at SFC: TTFF at SFC: Isaac Julien Short Films

2008-09-23T17:53:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to be part of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival again this year and we are thrilled that UK/ St Lucian artist filmmaker Isaac Julien is here to screen two nights of his films. Following last weeks screening of DEREK Isaac will be screening a selection of his recent shorter films including PARADISE OMEROS which is partially inspired by Derek Walcott's epic poem. A biography of Isaac Julien is listed below this synopsis.

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome to ALL.

THURSDAY 25th September - 8:30 pm SHARP (doors open at 7:30)

Isaac Julien short film programme (91 minutes approx)

Isaac will introduce his films and there will be an opportunity for an informal post film discussion

* please note - this is not necessarily the actual running order...

Paradise Omeros

2002
20 mins

Paradise Omeros delves into the fantasies and feelings of "creoleness" – the mixed language, the hybrid mental states and the territorial transpositions that arise when one lives in multiple cultures. Using the recurrent imagery of the sea, the film sweeps the viewer into a poetic meditation on the ebb and flow of self and stranger, love and hate, war and peace, xenophobe and xenophile.

Set in London in the 60s and on the island of St Lucia today, Paradise Omeros is loosely based on aspects of Derek Walcott's epic poem, Omeros. The Nobel Prize winning poet, and the musician and composer Paul Gladstone Reid collaborated with Julien on the text and the score for the film, respectively.

True North

2004
14 minutes

True North is a meditative film comprising reflective images of the sublime, and, like Paradise Omeros, uses the landscape as a key location and theme. The film is loosely inspired by the story of the black American explorer, Matthew Henson (1866-1955). One of the key members of Robert E. Peary's 1909 Arctic expedition, Henson was controversially and arguably the first person to reach the North Pole.

Shot in the spectacular landscapes of Iceland and Northern Sweden, True North offers a fascinating new visual reading of space and time and their relation to counter-histories. The film contests binaries which are present in many notations of expedition and adventure that clutter the history of discovery – here reason, order and stability are replaced by irrational meanderings, symbolic gestures from shamanistic tropes and the constant seeping inertia of the ice.

Fantôme Afrique

2005
17 minutes

In Fantôme Afrique, the impact of both cultural and physical location is explored through a juxtaposition of images of Africa that consist of both the cosmopolitan realities of contemporary African life, and the traces or "fantômes" of an imaginary Africa that exists primarily in the imagination.

The film weaves its references through the rich imagery of urban Ouagadougou, the centre for cinema in Africa, and the arid spaces of rural Burkina Faso, and is punctuated by archival footage from early colonial expeditions and landmark moments in African history. At the same time two actors/dancers move through the constantly shifting landscapes – from ancient mosques and indigenous buildings to urban nocturnes shot during FESPACO, the pan-African cinema congress – offering a study in locomotive contrast.

Western Union: Small Boats

2006
20 mins

To escape deplorable economic and human rights conditions, thousands of African and Asian "clandestines" depart each year from North Africa on the 100-mile journey across the Mediterranean Sea to the southern coast of Sicily. Setting off in large boats they are transferred mid-sea to overcrowded smaller fishing boats where they drift for days on end until they are sighted by the coastguard or sink. Local fishermen often spot the boats first and have been complicit in what is frequently described as the "Sicilian Holocaust."

In Western Union: Small Boats, Isaac Julien depicts the picturesque Sicilian seaside village of Agrigento and the grandeur of Palazzo Gangi (famed location from director Luchino Visconti's masterpiece The Leopard) in stunning juxtaposition to the deadly voyage of the clandestines. Employing a suggestive, non-representational cinematic style, the film subverts strict narrative, creating a collage of sound and image. Throughout the film are a series of choreographed vignettes echoing and rearticulating these dramatic voyages. Western Union: Small Boats is the final installment of Julien's trilogy of cross-cultural cinematic travelogues that includes True North and Fantôme Afrique.

Baltimore

2003
20 minutes

Baltimore is partly a pastiche of 1970's Blaxploitation cinema and partly a surrealistic allegory about race, class and history. Soundtracked by sirens, gunfire and angry dialogue lifted from old films, the movie follows a young woman and a gray-bearded older man (the actor and director Melvin Van Peebles) as they move separately from the gritty streets of Baltimore into the city's Great Blacks in Wax Museum.

Inside the museum the couple become players in a dreamlike cat-and-mouse game that takes them from tacky exhibits into the palatial Peabody Library and the galleries of the Walters Art Museum, hung with European old masters. In one of these galleries, the man discovers a group of sculptures from the wax museum and comes face to face with his own wax image in the company of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the end the man and woman return to the street as a tough male movie voice intones: ''The party's over, baby. It's dawn. It's reality.''

Isaac Julien - biography

Isaac Julien is one of Britain's foremost artists, as equally acclaimed for his fluent and arresting single-screen films as his vibrant and inventive gallery installations. Moving deftly between filmworld and artworld, Julien remains one of the most original voices on the contemporary art scene.

Julien was born in East London in 1960, the son of St Lucian parents. He studied film at St Martins College of Art, London (1980–85). As a student his films dealt with current real life situations such as the death of a young black man, Colin Roach whilst in police custody (Who Killed Colin Roach?). Another film centred on the Notting Hill Carnival riots (Territories, 1985). He was subsequently at the forefront of the new wave of British Black filmmakers, instrumental in setting up the Black film collective SANKOFA where he made films such as This is not an AIDS Advertisement. Julien came to prominence in the film world with his 1989 drama-documentary Looking for Langston, gaining a cult following with this poetic exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. This following was expanded in 1991 when his film Young Soul Rebels won the Semaine de la Critique prize for best film at the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2001 Julien was nominated for the Turner Prize and was the recipient of both the prestigious MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts (2001) and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award (2002). His work Paradise Omeros was presented as part of Documenta XI in Kassel (2002). He won the Grand Jury Prize at the KunstFilmBiennale in Cologne (2003) for his single screen version of Baltimore, and the 2005 Aurora Award. His widely acclaimed documentary film, Baadasssss Cinema was made in 2002.

Julien was a jury member at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and the 2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival. He has had solo shows at the Pompidou Centre Paris (2005), MoCA Miami (2005), the Kestner Gesellschaft Hanover (2006) and Metro Pictures New York (2007). He is represented in the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim and Hirshhorn Collections.

Isaac Julien at StudioFilmClub

2008-09-13T13:06:00.001-04:00

StudioFilmClub is proud to present two evenings of screenings of the films of Isaac Julien, as part of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.

Julien is an acclaimed British director, and is of St Lucian parentage. He will be at StudioFilmClub for the screenings, which take place on Thursday 18 and Thursday 25 September, at 8.15pm.

On Thursday 18, Julien's new feature-length biopic of the late artist and independent filmmaker Derek Jarman, entitled Derek, will be shown. The film is to be preceded by the screening of a number of Jarman music promos for such acts as the Pet Shop Boys and the Smiths.

Then on Thursday 25, a selection of Julien's shorter films will be shown: Paradise Omeros, True North, Fantôme Afrique, Western Union: Small Boats, and Baltimore.

Both nights of screenings are free, and as always at SFC, all are welcome.

The T&T Film Festival, now in its third year, runs from September 17 to 30. This is the second year that StudioFilmClub has partnered with the Festival; last year, SFC hosted a programme of film screenings entitled Babylondon, comprised of films set in London made largely by Caribbean British filmmakers.

This week at SFC: The Last Mistress

2008-09-11T09:43:00.000-04:00

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

www.trinidadandtobagofilmfestival.com OUR VOICES,OUR STORIES,OUR FILMS

** STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to be part of this years Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and we are thrilled that UK/ St Lucian artist filmmaker Isaac Julien will be coming down to screen two nights of his films. Next thursday Isaac will screen DEREK his new film about British artist and film maker the late Derek Jarman. We will also be screening some of Derek Jarman's seminal short music films that he made for the Smiths, Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithful amongst others.

STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome to ALL.

THURSDAY 11th September

Tonight we screen our second film by Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl screened two years ago) - THE LAST MISTRESS - possibly her most ambitious film to date an adaptation of the novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, the film is set in 19th-century France, when the world was a seemingly much more innocent place... starring Asia Argento

7:45 pm

Midnight Movies : From the Margins to the Mainstream (Stuart Samuels/USA/2005/45') part 2 of 2

A testament to the days when word of mouth was carried by live voices rather than group email, Stuart Samuels’s marvellous documentary offers case studies of the half-dozen key titles that defined the alternative film-going circuit of ’70s America. With deft cultural, political and industrial contextualisation and contributions from numerous well-placed sources – including all six titles’ directors – ‘Midnight Movies’ consitutes a warm, rich tribute to an era of fecund perversity, even if it’s as formally conservative as its subjects were transgressive.

Its story starts with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s brilliantly bonkers ‘El Topo’ (1970), which set the midnight movie template by unexpectedly settling into triumphant, dope-suffused residency at New York’s Elgin cinema. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ offered American audiences a more locally identifiable tranche of oppositional excitement that – like ‘Pink Flamingos’ – deployed shockingly coarse corporeal spectacle in the service of a militantly liberal sensibility. ‘The Harder They Come’, meanwhile, married political indignation to a sensationally popular musical form new to the US. We end with a couple of anomalies among such anomalous company: ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, made by a major studio but only at home among the freaks, and ‘Eraserhead’, which is undoubtedly transgressive but not exactly a rollicking party of a picture.

Nodding at the scene’s revival of ’30s oddities and its influence on the later mainstream, ‘Midnight Movies’ leaves some tensions unexplored (could these screenings both hark back to committed ’60s activism and herald the ‘birth of irony’?) but shows a keen eye for practicalities. In many ways, it’s a document of a dying technology, a celluloid cottage industry whose means of production, distribution and exhibition are alien to today’s aspiring auteurs. Most of all, it’s a celebration of cinema-going as a ‘ritual experience or trip’, a communal adventure with no real equivalent in the exquisitely atomised YouTubeverse.

8:30 pm

THE LAST MISTRESS (Catherine Breillat/France/2007/102')

Two of cinema's most thrilling and dynamic female talents - the provocative Asia Argento and the controversial director Catherine Breillat - join forces in this audacious and sexually-charged tale of lust and seduction. Argento gives an electrifying performance as Vellini, the beautiful and headstrong mistress of Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Aït Aattou), an aristocrat who has just taken the young and innocent Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida) as his bride. Lacking the emotional connection and carna passion in his marriage that he shared with Vellini, Ryno attempts to resist temptation bu eventually succumbs to desire, rekindling the illicit affair with tragic consequences

This week at SFC El Violin

2008-08-28T13:29:00.000-04:00

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 to ALL.

Doors open at 7:30pm

We will be screening the 2nd part of EASY RIDERS RAGING BULLS (Kevin Browser/USA/2003/119') the documentary based on Peter Biskind's book of the same title. Narrated by William H Macy.

8:30pm

El Violin (Francisco Vargas/Mexico/2005/98')

"One of the most amazing Mexican films in many a year" says Guillermo Del Toro, director of PANS LABYRINTH

Don Plutarco, his son Genaro and his grandson Lucio live a double life: on one hand they are musicians and humble farmers, on the other they support the campesina peasant guerilla movement's armed efforts against the oppressive government. When the military seizes the village, the rebels flee to the sierra hills, forced to leave behind their stock of ammunition. While the guerillas organize a counter-attack, old Plutarco executes his own plan. He plays up his appearance as a harmless violin player, in order to get into the village and recover the ammunition hidden his corn field. His violin playing charms the army captain, who orders Plutarco to come back daily. Arms and music play a tenuous game of cat-and-mouse which ultimately results in painful betrayal.

This week at SFC: Broadway Danny Rose

2008-08-21T11:13:00.000-04:00

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 to ALL.

THURSDAY 21st August 2008 - Woody Allen gets his first outing at SFC... with BROADWAY DANNY ROSE . Come early to see the great documentary about six movies that kept the freaks in their seats from the midnight hour on... often running for years and years in the same cinema. We will screen this over two weeks.

7:45 pm

Midnight Movies : From the Margins to the Mainstream (Stuart Samuels/USA/2005/45')

A testament to the days when word of mouth was carried by live voices rather than group email, Stuart Samuels’s marvellous documentary offers case studies of the half-dozen key titles that defined the alternative film-going circuit of ’70s America. With deft cultural, political and industrial contextualisation and contributions from numerous well-placed sources – including all six titles’ directors – ‘Midnight Movies’ consitutes a warm, rich tribute to an era of fecund perversity, even if it’s as formally conservative as its subjects were transgressive.

Its story starts with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s brilliantly bonkers ‘El Topo’ (1970), which set the midnight movie template by unexpectedly settling into triumphant, dope-suffused residency at New York’s Elgin cinema. ‘Night of the Living Dead’ offered American audiences a more locally identifiable tranche of oppositional excitement that – like ‘Pink Flamingos’ – deployed shockingly coarse corporeal spectacle in the service of a militantly liberal sensibility. ‘The Harder They Come’, meanwhile, married political indignation to a sensationally popular musical form new to the US. We end with a couple of anomalies among such anomalous company: ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, made by a major studio but only at home among the freaks, and ‘Eraserhead’, which is undoubtedly transgressive but not exactly a rollicking party of a picture.

Nodding at the scene’s revival of ’30s oddities and its influence on the later mainstream, ‘Midnight Movies’ leaves some tensions unexplored (could these screenings both hark back to committed ’60s activism and herald the ‘birth of irony’?) but shows a keen eye for practicalities. In many ways, it’s a document of a dying technology, a celluloid cottage industry whose means of production, distribution and exhibition are alien to today’s aspiring auteurs. Most of all, it’s a celebration of cinema-going as a ‘ritual experience or trip’, a communal adventure with no real equivalent in the exquisitely atomised YouTubeverse.

8:30 pm

BROADWAY DANNY ROSE (Woody Allen/USA/1984/84')

Often overlooked, Broadway Danny Rose has developed a cult following among select Woody Allen fans; Chris Rock claims it to be of his favorite films. Nick Apollo Forte is Lou Canova, a singer not of the first rank, and an alcoholic. He has both a long-suffering wife and a mistress who belongs to a Mafia hood. He's so good an actor that you wonder what became of him, just as you wonder what becomes of Lou when Danny finally has to give up on him. He and Woody are the centre of this celebration of a Broadway not too far from Damon Runyan. Around them are spread the out-of-work no hopers, the vicious and ungrateful success stories, the dumb showgirls and the even dumber gangsters we've come to know so well in lesser if much more portentous movies.

The film starts marvellously, with a group of comics sitting around a Carnegie Deli table trading stories about Danny and his exploits on behalf of his clients. Since Allen wrote the script, even the made-up tales are funny. Then we see how Danny gets Lou on the road again, riding the nostalgia boom of the time, booking him into Top 40 concerts and finally finding him a date at the Waldorf, with Milton Berle in the audience looking for guests for his TV special.

Lou trying to persuade Danny to take his girlfriend to the Waldorf so she won't get upset is another hilarious sequence. But if he's good - a drunken egotist with a heart of silver - so is Mia Farrow as the girl, a brassy Mafia blonde with a taste in hair and dress styles that might suit the fashion sense of a lowly henchman of Capone. (Farrow's performance is superb and unlike anything else in her career: loud, brassy, and comically obnoxious.)

In all, this is a film which inhabits New York just as well as Annie Hall but looks at a different kind of instantly recognisable inhabitant. Perhaps it sails near caricature at times. But then so does the world we're observing. As for Danny Rose himself, this is one of Woody's most actorly performances. For once he forgets himself and plays someone else. Part caper, part-show biz satire, Broadway Danny Rose is a delightful combination of nostalgia and cutting observations about human nature.

This week at SFC: Pixote

2008-08-13T10:54:00.000-04:00

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 14th August 2008

7:3o pm

Final act - 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

Pixote (Hector Babenco/ Brazil/1981/123')

Hector Babenco's Pixote has as its antecedents such works as Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite (1933), Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946), Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950), and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959); the gun-toting youth of Barbet Schroeder's Our Lady of the Assassins (2000) would certainly have been influenced by Pixote. The script was written by Babenco and Jorge Duran, from Jose Louzeiro's novel Infancia dos Mortos.

The film begins as a documentary. Babenco addresses the camera, and states that 50 percent of the population in Brazil is under 21, and this includes three million homeless children. Brazilian law prevents anyone under the age of 18 to be prosecuted for criminal offences; older criminals thus prey on these youths. Babenco, standing in front of a slum area, then introduces Fernando Ramos da Silva, who lives there, as 'Pixote' in the film proper. Los Olvidados had a similar documentary beginning: it is used as a foregrounding of events to come, a merging of the real and fictional, so while we are witnessing events in the fictional story, we must, in fact, take them for truth.

Pixote is divided in two parts. The first details Pixote's ordeals in a juvenile reformatory. He witnesses violence, rape, humiliation. As in the Hollywood prison genre (except in this case, the protagonists are children), the point of view is exclusively of the inmates, and emphasis is placed on power structures operating within personal relationships. Those in power (the guards, the police chief) are corrupt and violent. It is only when the lover of a 17-year-old transvestite, Lilica (Jorge Juliao), gets killed, that escape is necessary.

The second part of the film is set in the urban world outside of the reformatory. The narrative follows four of the protagonists (Pixote, Lilica, Chico and Dito) as they survive by pick-pocketing, drug-dealing, pimping for the prostitute Sueli (Marilia Pera), and robbing the johns whom Sueli brings back. Both Lilica and Sueli act as mother figures to Pixote. Both also sleep with Chico, the father figure and principal breadwinner. Possibly the most disturbing scene in the whole movie is when Pixote discovers Sueli's dead fetus (aborted by her) in a waste-bin in the bathroom. This is directly linked to Pixote suckling on Sueli's breast, at the end, after he accidentally kills Chico. This Oedipal triangle results in her pushing Pixote off (stating that she does not want a child), thus precipitating his aloneness in the universe.

Though Pixote was rejected by the American Academy's Foreign Language Film Award Committee, the film garnered excellent critical reviews in the United States, winning best foreign film from the New York Film Critics Circle. Perhaps it was a reaction against the over-produced and over-budgeted U.S. epics at the time, which seemed to indulge Hollywood directors whilst only inviting critical derision (e.g., Heaven's Gate, One From the Heart). Pixote, on the other hand, seemed to be influenced by Italian neo-realism, with its casting of actual people to play themselves, that is, non-professional actors (Marilia Pera was the only professional actor in the film), and then shooting on the locations where they lived and worked. Babenco used the children's ideas to form almost half of the script. Critics such as Pauline Kael were also impressed by its raw, documentary-like quality, and a certain poetic realism:
"Babenco's imagery is realistic, but his point of view is shockingly lyrical. South American writers, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, seem to be in perfect, poetic control of madness, and Babenco has some of this gift, too. South American artists have to have it, in order to express the texture of everyday insanity. "
The film seemed to capture the spirit of the 'arthouse' cinema of Hollywood of the late '60s and early '70s, itself influenced by European art films and Italian neo-realism. Incidents in Pixote don't seem to be set up for the cameras; the film seems to follow the characters no matter what they do or say.

The ending is genuinely tragic, more so because in reality da Silva was actually killed by police bullets in 1988, when he was 19. And so the ending seems to foretell his real death – after being rejected by the mother figure of Sueli, Pixote/da Silva is walking along a railway line, gun in hand, away from the camera, his figure disappearing in the distance, out of the film (documentary or fiction), and out of our lives.

This Week at SFC: Near Dark

2008-08-07T02:17:00.000-04:00

This week at SFC:Yeelen

2008-07-31T07:22:00.000-04:00

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.

This week at SFC:A Nos Amours

2008-07-23T06:42:00.000-04:00

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

This week at SFC:Persepolis

2008-07-16T09:58:00.000-04:00

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.

This week at SFC:The Science of Sleep

2008-07-09T03:18:00.000-04:00

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.

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

2008-06-26T05:58:00.000-04:00

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

2008-06-18T07:54:00.000-04:00

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

2008-06-11T11:00:00.001-04:00

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.

This week at SFC: Dark City

2008-05-15T13:23:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7 (front stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

The Studiofilmclub is located in the front foyer space of building 7.
Food and drink are available courtesy CAFÉ 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

You are welcome to stay late for our weekly post filmclub lime... Food, Drinks and Music.

This week we present "Dark City" the ambitious sci-fi noir by director Alex Proyas.
Starring: Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland and Jennifer Connelly.

Pre-feature (from 7:30pm) we will be screening "Artifact from the Future:The making of THK 1138", which explores the making of George Lucas's visionary first film "THK 1138"

Dark City trades in such weighty themes as memory, thought control, human will and the altering of reality, but is
engaging mostly in the degree to which it creates and sustains a visually startling alternate universe.
A man (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a hotel room bath without the slightest idea of where or who he is. All
he does know is that there is a murdered corpse in the room and that he is a wanted man. His wallet tells
him his name is John Murdoch. As he roams the gloomy streets of the city in search of his true identity, he
encounters a bizarre underworld populated by The Strangers, a race of ominous beings that want to kill
him. Aided by a sympathetic detective (William Hurt), an eccentric psychiatrist (Kiefer Sutherland) and his
own strange powers, Murdoch is able to elude his pursuers long enough to discover the horrifying truth
about himself and the city around him. Director Alex Proyas floods the screen with cinematic
and literary references ranging from Murnau and Lang to Kafka and Orwell, creating a unique yet utterly
convincing world. At the center of "Dark City" is a mind-twisting question: what if all of your memories
were manufactured, and the "reality" surrounding you were merely a fabrication? Then who would you be?

ALEX PROYAS

Mini Biography
Like David Fincher and Michael Bay, Alex Proyas has moved effortlessly between helming TV commercials and music
videos to feature films. To date, he has specialized in visually stunning action thrillers which utilize myth and
iconography. Born to Greek parents in Egypt, Proyas relocated to Australia with his family when he was three years old.
He began making films at age ten and went on to attend the Australian Film Television and Radio School along with
Jane Campion and Jocelyn Moorhouse. Proyas collaborated with Campion on two of her shorts, A Girl's Own Story
(1984), for which he wrote and performed a song, and Passionless Moments (1983), which he photographed. Proyas'
own short, Groping (1980), had earned him some attention at festival screenings in Sydney and London. Also while still
a student, the enterprising novice formed Meaningful Eye Contact, a production company.Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of
the Clouds (1989) marked Proyas' feature debut as director and screenwriter. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the film,
with its stylized production design and aural texture, was atypical of standard Australian fare, more closely resembling a
longform music video. Critics admired the director's vision, but felt the overall result was lacking. Proyas continued to
hone his craft helming TV advertisements for products like Nike, Nissan and Swatch (earning kudos from advertising
associations in both Australia and England) and directing videos for such artists as Sting, INXS and Crowded House. In
1993, Proyas was tapped to helm the screen adaptation of James O'Barr's comic strip The Crow (1994). While filming,
lead actor Brandon Lee died of an accidental gunshot wound (ironically the film's story revolves around his character's
resurrection). His death cast a pall over the remainder of the filming and its subsequent theatrical release, although
reviews were generally favorably, most singling out the production values which created a colorless rain-soaked
wasteland that invoked comparisons with Ridley Scott's seminal Blade Runner (1982) and Tim Burton's Batman (1989).
Made for about $14 million, it grossed close to $50 million domestically. Proyas seemed set to move on to other projects
and was announced as the director of Casper (1995), but left the project and was replaced by Brad Silberling. After a
four year absence, he returned with another thriller, Dark City (1998), about an amnesiac who may or may not have
been a serial killer. Garage Days (2002) marked Proyas' return to his homeland, Australia: the movie tells the story of a
young Sydney garage band desperately trying to make it big in the competitive world of rock 'n' roll. In 2004 Proyas
returned to Hollywood: he directed I, Robot (2004), a science fiction film suggested by the Isaac Asimov short story
compilation of the same name that starred Will Smith. It was a box office success, but met with mixed reactions by
readers and fans of the Asimov stories.

This week at SFC - Dog Day Afternoon

2008-05-07T06:02:00.000-04:00

The Studio Film Club is now screening its films in the front foyer space of building 7.
Food and drink are available courtesy CAFÉ 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

Doors open 7:30 - Film starts 8:15 pm.

You are welcome to stay late for our weekly post Film Club lime... Food, Drinks and Music.

This week we present actor Al Pacino in his academy nomination performance for the movie Dog Day Afternoon.
In it he plays a ferocious and fed-up bank robber whose plan to rob the local bank to fund his male lover's sex-change goes absurdly wrong.
Director Sidney Lumet crafts his classic film by balancing suspense, violence, and humor.

"Dog Day Afternoon"/Sidney Lumet/1975/140mins/USA

Based on a true 1972 story, Sidney Lumet's 1975 drama chronicles a unique bank robbery on a hot summer afternoon in New York City. Shortly before closing time, scheming loser Sonny (Al Pacino) and his slow-witted buddy, Sal (John Cazale), burst into a Brooklyn bank for what should be a run-of-the-mill robbery, but everything goes wrong, beginning with the fact that there is almost no money in the bank. The situation swiftly escalates, as Sonny and Sal take hostages; enough cops to police the tristate
area surround the bank; a large Sonny-sympathetic crowd gathers to watch; the media arrive to complete the circus; and police captain Moretti (Charles Durning) tries to negotiate with Sonny while keeping the volatile spectacle under control. When Sonny's lover, Leon (Chris Sarandon), tries to talk Sonny out of the bank, we learn the robbery's motive: to finance Leon's sex-change operation. Sonny demands a plane to escape, but the end is near once menacingly cool FBI agent Sheldon (James Broderick)
arrives to take over the negotiations.

This week at SFC - Little Voice

2008-04-30T10:23:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7 (front stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

The Studiofilmclub is now screening its films in the front foyer space of building 7.
Food and drink are available courtesy CAFÉ 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15 pm.

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

"Little Voice" directed by Mark Herman / 1998 / 93mins /UK

Starring: Michael Caine, Ewan McGregor, and an Academy Award nominated performance by Breada Blethyn.

In an English seaside town, one of its timid inhabitants, known as LV (little voice), mourns over her dead father and obsesses over his record collection by singing along to his favorite performers. her rare talents for emulating the dulcet tones of Judy Garland, Marilyn Munroe and Shirley Bassey are soon discovered by her dominant mother's boyfriend, a small-time showbiz agent. Their attempts to propel her to stardom are at first successful when the local town gets to see her perform.
However, LV is soon wise to their selfish intentions and withdraws from performing again, thus forcing an emotional showdown between the three.

This week at SFC - Lost in La Mancha

2008-04-23T21:18:00.000-04:00

The Studiofilmclub is now screening its films in the front foyer space of building 7.
Food and drink are available courtesy CAFÉ 7.
Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome. doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15 pm.

You are welcome to STAY LATE for our weekly post Film Club lime... Food, Drinks and Music.
"Lost in la mancha"
Filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe initially set out to chronicle the making of Director Terry Gilliams, "the man who killed Don Quixote" that was to star Jean Rochefort,
Johnny depp, and Vanessa Paradis. Instead they captured the floods, bombings, and various "acts of god" that shut the movie down. The result is "Lost in La Mancha", a documentary about a courageous but capsizing production.
By presenting Gilliam's story, Fulton and Pepe also illustrate the joy and pain that all filmmakers experience to some degree. We often witness Gilliam's frustration, but we also see his delight when his vision briefly comes to life.

Nominated for Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards and Best Documentary at the European Film Awards.

"Lost in La Mancha" / 2003/ Keith Fulton & Luis Pepe / 93 mins / UK

"Making a film is essentially about two things: belief and momentum" -- Terry Gilliam Lost In La Mancha may be the first "un-making of" documentary. In a genre that exists to hype films before their release, Lost In La Mancha presents an unexpected twist: it is the story of a film that does not exist. Instead of a sanitised glimpse behind the scenes, Lost In La Mancha offers a unique, in-depth look at the harsher realities
of filmmaking. With drama that ranges from personal conflicts to epic storms, this is a record of a film disintegrating. In September 2000, when the cameras began rolling on Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Don Quixote, the production already had a chequered past including ten years of development, a series of producers and two previous attempts to start the film. Gilliam had achieved the difficult task of financing the
$32 million budget entirely within Europe -- a feat that would provide him with freedom from the creative restrictions of Hollywood. The uphill journey was not, however, inconsistent with Gilliam's career: his more than fifteen year history of battling the Hollywood machine had cast him, like Quixote, as a visionary dreamer who rages against gigantic forces. Joining the Madrid based production team eight weeks before the shoot, Lost In La Mancha directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe witness the successes as well as the failures. Problems are quick to emerge: the multilingual crew struggles to communicate detailed ideas; actors remain absent as they run over schedule on other projects; and everything from untrained horses to a sound stage -- that isn't sound-proof -- threatens the film. But through it all, there is the palpable, mounting excitement that Gilliam's ideas will finally come to fruition: the crew watch test footage of marauding giants; puppeteers rehearse a troop of life-size marionettes; Gilliam and Johnny Depp brainstorm over the script. By the time Jean Rochefort straps on his Quixote armour, success, though far off, seems almost possible. Not long into production disaster strikes: flash floods destroy sets and damage camera equipment; the lead actor falls seriously ill; and on the sixth day production is brought to its knees. Uniquely, after Quixote's cameras have
stopped rolling, the documentary continues to record events as they unfold: the crew waits, insurance men and bondsmen scramble with calculators and interpretations of "force majeure" and behind it Gilliam struggles to maintain both belief and momentum in his project. In the best tradition of documentary filmmaking, Lost In La Mancha captures all the drama of this story through "fly-on-the-wall" vérité footage and
on-the-spot interviews. Gilliam's plans for the non-existent film come alive in animations of his storyboards, narrated and voiced by co-writer Tony Grisoni and Gilliam himself. And with the camera tests of the leading actors and the rushes from the only six days of photography, Lost In La Mancha offers a tantalizing glimpse of the cinematic spectacle that might have been. Lost In La Mancha is less a process piece about filmmakers at work and more a powerful drama about the inherent fragility of the creative process -- a compelling study of how, even with an abundance of the best will and passion, the artistic endeavor can remain an impossible dream.

This week at SFC - Paris Je T'aime

2008-04-16T10:48:00.000-04:00

BUILDING 7 (back stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN
http://studiofilmclub.blogspot.com/

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15

Paris Je T'aime is a collection of short films set in paris and directed by such celebrated directors as the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant, Gurinder Chadha, Wes craven, Walter Salles, Alexander Payne and Olivier Assayas. Each of the 18 short film shows Paris in a different light, but all the vignettes aim to celebrate the most famous and cosmopolitan city in France.

Also this Thursday
Time: 6-7pm at the Studio Film Club foyer.

UWI student Michelle Isava will be presenting and recording a performance art piece for her art and design final year project entitled "the machine" - A play about the relationship between human and machine.
The play consists of 6 scenes with three major themes:
Becoming the machine
Reacting to the machine
Fatalism.
Technology and mass media plays the major role of "the machine", and forms the underlying structure of the play.

Paris je t'aime / 2006 / Multiple directors / 120 mins / France / Liechtenstein / Switzerland

Paris, the city of love. Twenty filmmakers will bring their own personal touch, underlining the wide variety of styles, genres, encounters and the various atmospheres and lifestyles that prevail in the neighborhoods of paris.

The movies are as diverse as the filmmakers themselves, who hail from around the world. Each director tells the story of an unusual encounter in one of the city's neighborhoods, portraying aspects of the city rarely seen in feature films. Family, race, religion, crime, love, death, even angels and vampires -- all can be found in this ultimately intertwining narrative.â€¨â€¨Racial tensions stand next to paranoid visions of the city seen from the perspective of an American tourist. A young foreign worker moves from her own domestic situation into her employer's bourgeois environs. An American starlet finds escape as she is shooting a movie. A man is torn between his wife and his lover. A young man working in a print shop sees and desires another young man. A father grapples with his complex relationship with his daughter. A couple tries to add spice to their sex life.â€¨â€¨The all-star ensemble cast includes international stars such as Natalie Portman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fanny Ardant, Elijah Wood, Nick Nolte, Bob Hoskins, Juliette Binoche, Emily Mortimer, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Rufus Sewell, Barbet Schroeder, Ludivine Sagnier, Gena Rowlands, Miranda Richardson and Steve Buscemi.â€¨

The stronger entries include Gurinder Chadha's Quais De Seine, which follows a young white Parisian boy's crush on a beautiful Muslim girl; the Coens' Tuileries, starring Buscemi as a Yankee tourist who makes eye contact with the wrong people at the Metro Station; Place Des Victoires (directed by Nobuhiro Suwa), about an inconsolable mother (Juliette Binoche) who has an encounter with the ghost of her young son who died the week before; and Sylvain Chomet's Tour Eiffel, which follows two mimes who fall in love.

There's also Pigalle, written and directed by Richard LaGravenese, about two old lovers (Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant) looking to spice things up; Wes Craven's PÂ¿re-Lachaise, featuring Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell and the ghost of Oscar Wilde; Faubourg Saint-Denis, directed by Tom Tykwer, about an American actress (Natalie Portman) and her blind French boyfriend; Frederic Auburtin & Gerard Depardieu's Quartier Latin, starring Gena Rowlands (who also scripted) and Ben Gazzara as two aging spouses saying good-bye before their divorce is finalized; and Alexander Payne's, Arrondissement, about an overweight, middle-aged American woman (Margo Martindale) who comes to terms with loneliness while on vacation.

Vincenzo Natali's Quartier De La Madeleine is the biggest oddity; it features Elijah Wood as a young man who has a strange but sensual encounter with a female vampire (Olga Kurylenko). Olivier Assayas' Quartier Des Enfants Rouges -- arguably the worst entry -- is a pointless vignette about a partying American actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal) looking to score drugs from the pusher who pines after her. The most surprisingly weak entry is Alfonso Cuaron's Parc Monceau, shot in one long take and starring Nick Nolte as a father taking a walk with his grown-up daughter.

Paris Je T'aime is a poignant and ultimately rewarding experience. It offers something for everyone, and provides an insightful, multi-cultural look at the City of Lights.

You are welcome to stay late for our weekly post filmclub lime... Food, Drinks and Music.

This week at SFC - Wristcutters: A Love Story

2008-04-09T11:00:00.000-04:00

BUILDING 7 (front stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.
Thursday April 10th

doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15

You are welcome to STAY LATE for our weekly post Film Club lime... Food, Drinks and Music.

THIS WEEK SFC PRESENTS WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY ......... THE SUNDANCE, GRAND JURY AWARD NOMINATED FILM
BASED ON A SHORT STORY BY ETGAR KERET ENTITLED "KNELLER'S HAPPY CAMPERS".

Wristcutters: A Love Story / Goran Dukic / USA / 2007

If a film begins with a suicide, chances are, it won't be the feel-good movie of the year. But WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY is surprisingly sweet and funny even as it proudly features a dark streak that lives up to its title. After a rough breakup, Zia (Patrick Fugit) decides to off himself by slashing open his wrists. Instead of waking up in heaven or hell, Zia arrives in a bland world that looks a lot like the one he just left, though with far less color, life, and--obviously--happiness. In this afterlife reserved for suicides,no one can smile, and the sky is a starless void. But when Zia hears that his ex-girlfriend (Leslie Bibb) has killed herself and lives
in his world, he sets out on a road trip to find her. Joined by Russian musician Eugene (Shea Whigham) and pretty hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), Zia crosses the desolate landscape and encounters a variety of strange characters. With the help of
Mikal, Zia realizes that maybe his ex-girlfriend isn't really what he's looking for.
Most films don't stray from prescribed genres or simple plots, but this dark comedy from director Goran Dukic is audacious in its originality. Dukic adapted Etgar Keret's short story "Kneller's Happy Campers" into a film that succeeds on every level. His cast, particularly Fugit and a brilliant Tom Waits in a supporting role, is worthy of the excellent material and blackly comic dialogue. Though it could be described as a romantic comedy, this film is far closer to ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND than SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE.
WRISTCUTTERS's soundtrack is also something to sing about with several infectious tracks from Gogol Bordello and a pitch-perfect score from Bobby Johnston.

This week at SFC:Dancing Deities & In the Mirror of Maya Deren

2008-04-02T06:44:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB
BUILDING 7 (back stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

Thursday April 3rd

doors open 7:30 - short film starts 8:15

You are welcome to STAY LATE for our weekly post filmclub session... music by this weeks guest: songwriter/producer/artist Alonestar LIVE!

Dancing Deities (Emilie Upczak/USA&TT/2007/23')

Dancing Deities is a documentary short that attempts to depict the practices of the Claxton Bay Orisha community in Trinidad. The film is primarily non-narrative in that it uses imagery to convey the rich musical, rhythmic and mythological aspects of this blend of African and Caribbean culture. Two local
practitioners, do however, give their perspective on Orisha worship as well as descriptions of a few deities in order to provide the viewer with some background information. But really, the film is a collage of images that portrays modern Orisha ritual practice whilst providing viewers with a positive
depiction of this often misunderstood tradition. Dancing Deities is invaluable as one of the few existing present day visual resources on modern Orisha practice in Trinidad.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren (Martina Kudlacek/Austria/2003/110')

Wide ranging, authoritative and often beautiful documentary about the avant garde movie-maker who virtually created the US independent film scene. From her immigrant roots (b. Kiev 1917) to her death aged 44 from a cerebral haemorrhage, Deren was a tireless experimenter in both content and context, a spiritual parent to Jonas Mekas' archive and exhibition activities. According to Stan Brakhage, one of many film-making contributors , her poetic films were 'rituals in moving vision', just part of a portfolio that included pioneering research into Haitian voodoo. For Deren, as demonstrated here, art and life were intense and inseparable.

This week at SFC - Touki Bouki-The Journey of the Hyena

2008-03-26T00:26:00.000-04:00

BUILDING 7 (back stairs)
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15

You are welcome to STAY LATE for our weekly post filmclub lime... music by this week's guest selector - artist Chris Ofili

STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to present our second showing by the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty. Last year SFC screened Hyènes made twenty years after tonight's screening: TOUKI BOUKI.

Djibril Diop Mambéty

Born 1945, Senegal - Died 1998, Paris (lung cancer)

Born the son of a Muslim cleric in Colobane, near Dakar, Senegal, Djibril Diop Mambéty received no formal training in filmmaking. He experimented with theater, but in 1968, he was asked to leave an avant-garde theater group. Shortly thereafter, he made his first film short called Badou Boy (1970), which dealt with the life of a young renegade. By 1973, he directed his first feature, Touki Bouki (1973), about disaffected youth, and it became an instant classic. It would be nearly twenty years before he would create another film, Hyènes (1992), which is considered a sequel to "Touki Bouki" and a parable based on the classic play "The Visit" by Frederich Durrenmatt. Although his films were considered to be politically oriented, Mambéty rejected the realism preferred by most African filmmakers. His films were notable for their dream-like quality that left the themes of his films entirely to the interpretation of the viewer; this was, of course, the desired effect. In spite of the fact that Mambéty only completed a few short films and a meager two full-length features, the quality of his short body of work has rendered him legendary status among African filmmakers and, indeed, the international film community.

tonight's short film

DENKO (Mohamed Camara/Guinea/1992/20')

Set in a small African village this mystical tale explores the taboo subject of incest, ritual healing, sexuality and tradition.

followed by the FEATURE

TOUKI BOUKI (Djibril Diop Mambéty/Senegal/1973/86')

In Wolof with English subtitles.

"Paris, Paris, Paris!" sings Josephine Baker on a scratchy recording that we hear a number of times on Touki Bouki's soundtrack. "You're a kind of Paradise on Earth!"

How many young Africans have dreamed of leaving their homes or villages to make their fortunes in the City of Lights? We could substitute "London" for Paris, or "New York," "Miami," or "L.A."; each would work equally well. These cities have served as magnets for generations of hungry dreamers willing to do almost anything to gain access to a mythical land of opportunity, of modernity.

Touki Bouki tells a familiar, universal story--a pair of lovers who will do just about anything to escape the slums of Dakar. Mory, the young man, has come to Dakar searching for a better life than he had as a village shepherd. He cruises around Dakar on his noisy motorcyle whose handlebars are adorned with a zebu's skull and horns and whose seat bears what looks like a traditional fetish of some sort. Dakar is obviously a disappointment to him, and he concludes that his journey needs to be taken further; he will need to leave the continent entirely, cross over the sea to Europe.

Mory seduces Anta, a young university student, with his schemes to raise money to book passage to France. At first, things don't go too smoothly. Together they try to steal the gate-money at a wrestling contest, only to discover that they have stolen a fetish by mistake. Mory finally resorts to hustling and robbing a gay man named Charlie. Dressed in Charlie's fancy clothes and riding in his car (which looks like a mobile American flag), Mory makes his way in a surreal ticker-tape parade down the streets of Dakar, with Anta beside him, to the docks and the boat that will take them to Paris. Yet something continues to hold him back, to prevent his escape.

Djibril Diop Mambety made Touki Bouki, based on his own story and script, with a budget of $30,000 (obtained in part from the Senegalese government) and a group of nonprofessional actors. It was edited in Rome and Paris and won a number of awards in Europe, including the Special Jury's Award at the Moscow Film Festival and was chosen as part of the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

Stylistically, Touki Bouki has an avant-garde quality that links it to other films of the early Seventies (it makes me think of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baaadasss Song). In any case, it is unlike most of the films previously made in Africa. Rather than use a simple, straightforward chronological narrative, it includes scenes that are deliberately disturbing and confusing (e.g., animals being slaughtered, a wild child who lives in a baobab tree) and leaves it to us to make sense of them. Its editing style is frequently experimental in style: it will cut between two apparently unrelated events and allow us to interpret the connection, or it will repeat the same shots or edit a scene out of sequence. Touki Bouki also uses its soundtrack to disrupt the illusion of realism, distancing us from the story and causing us to ponder its meaning even as we watch it.

The film's title--Journey of the Hyena--points to Mory as a marginal scavenger, both ludicrous and destructive. It is up to the audience to decide just what kind of journey Mory has undertaken, and where it will wind up.

This week at SFC - The Last Temptation of Christ

2008-03-19T21:00:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.

Thursday March 20th

doors open 7:30 - film starts 8:15

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese/USA/1988/168')

Martin Scorsese directs and Paul Schrader writes this thought provoking interpretation of the classic tale of Christ. Adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis's novel, The Last Temptation of Christ explores the idea of Christ as a mere mortal, who, at the threshold of self sacrifice, is tempted by the desire to continue on with his life.
The astonishing controversy that raged around this film was primarily the work of fundamentalists who had their own view of Christ and were offended by a film that they felt questioned his divinity. More than half of Scorsese's films are about battles between grace and sin within the souls of his characters. Schrader, the screenwriter, has written Scorsese's best films ("Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull") and directed his own films about men torn between their beliefs and their passions(Hardcore, Mishima).
This is a film about the subject of Christ's dual nature, about the mystery of a being who could be both God and man.

This week at SFC - Eastern Promises

2008-02-28T14:00:00.001-04:00

We are back....

STUDIOFILMCLUB
CCA7 BACK STUDIO
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE
EASTERN MAIN ROAD
LAVENTILLE
PORT OF SPAIN

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday February 28th

Screen time 8:15 pm

The new thriller reteaming acclaimed director David Cronenberg with his
A History of Violence leading man Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises is
written by Steve Knight (Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of
Dirty Pretty Things). As in the earlier film, director and star together
explore the psyche, physicality, and fortunes of a man whose true nature
may never be wholly revealed. The mysterious and charismatic Russian-
born Nikolai Luzhin (Mr. Mortensen) is a driver for one of London's most
notorious organized crime families of Eastern European origin. The
family itself is part of the Vory V Zakone criminal brotherhood. Headed
by Semyon (Academy Award nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl), whose
courtly charm as the welcoming proprietor of the plush Trans-Siberian
restaurant impeccably masks a cold and brutal core, the family's fortunes
are tested by Semyon's volatile son and enforcer, Kirill (Vincent Cassel),
who is more tightly bound to Nikolai than to his own father. But
Nikolai's carefully maintained existence is jarred once he crosses paths at
Christmas time with Anna Khitrova (Academy Award nominee Naomi
Watts), a midwife at a North London hospital. Anna is deeply affected by
the desperate situation of a young teenager who dies while giving birth
to a baby. Anna resolves to try to trace the baby's lineage and relatives.
The girl's personal diary also survives her; it is written in Russian, and
Anna seeks answers in it. Anna's mother Helen (Sinéad Cusack) does not
discourage her, but Anna's irascible Russian-born uncle Stepan (Jerzy
Skolimowski) urges caution. He is right to do so; by delving into the
diary, Anna has accidentally unleashed the full fury of the Vory. With
Semyon and Kirill closing ranks and Anna pressing her inquiries, Nikolai
unexpectedly finds his loyalties divided. The family tightens its grip on
him; who can, or should, he trust? Several lives - including his own -
hang in the balance as a harrowing chain of murder, deceit, and
retribution reverberates through the darkest corners of both the family
and London itself.

In praise of rapturous truth

2007-12-10T11:57:00.001-04:00

The line between truth and fiction is a mirage in your work.

Some of the documentaries contain fiction, and some of the fiction films contain fact. Yes, you really did haul a boat up a mountainside in “Fitzcarraldo,” even though any other director would have used a model, or special effects. You organized the ropes and pulleys and workers in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest, and hauled the boat up into the jungle. And later, when the boat seemed to be caught in a rapids that threatened its destruction, it really was. This in a fiction film. The audience will know if the shots are real, you said, and that will affect how they see the film.

I understand this. What must be true, must be true. What must not be true, can be made more true by invention. Your films, frame by frame, contain a kind of rapturous truth that transcends the factually mundane. And yet when you find something real, you show it....

You and your work are unique and invaluable, and you ennoble the cinema when so many debase it. You have the audacity to believe that if you make a film about anything that interests you, it will interest us as well. And you have proven it.

-- From an open letter from Roger Ebert to Werner Herzog.

This week at SFC: Gilda

2007-12-05T16:09:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday December 6th

Short films show from 7:30. Main feature at 8:15.

Gilda (Charles Vidor/USA/1946/110')

Gilda contains the most famous role and peak performance of the World War II GI's love goddess, the beautiful, alluring and provocative, red-haired pin-up Rita Hayworth, with her sleek and sophisticated eroticism, lush hair and peaches and cream complexion. Director Charles Vidor lavished admiration on her in this film, helping her to reach her apotheosis as the reigning Hollywood 40s love goddess with this immortal role. Film posters cried: "There NEVER was a woman like Gilda!"

Hayworth's most famous scene is the seductive striptease (to the tune of Put the Blame on Mame) when she only removes long black satin gloves from her arms. Rita Hayworth's life was forever affected by her role, as she once reportedly said: "Every man I knew had fallen in love with Gilda and wakened with me."

The film-noirish screenplay by Marion Parsonnet (and adapted by Jo Eisinger), was taken from an original story by E. A. Ellington. The complex, eccentric, cynical tale was in keeping with the prevailing attitudes of the American post-war era, playing upon US political paranoia of German-Nazi war criminals who escaped and assumed new identities in South America. (Another similar plotline is found in Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious). The film's themes include implied impotence, misogyny and homosexuality, although only suggested with liberal euphemisms and innuendo to bypass the Production Code. The semi-trashy crime drama is also known for the erotic strains of the strange, tawdry, aberrant romantic menage a trois between the three main characters, Hayworth, Glenn Ford and George Macready.

It tells the story of Johnny Farell, a handsome young man who mysteriously becomes the manager of a casino in Buenos Aires. Johnny works for Ballin, a man who enjoys spying on his customers and associates from a control room in a gambling joint. Johnny forms the apex of a three-way love triangle that triggers the plot. Johnny and Gilda were once lovers, but his passion has now turned to a neurotic hatred of her. As the story unfolds, Ballin turns out to be fronting for a group of ex-Nazis; the scarred intensity of character actor Macready serves him well as a stereotypical Nazi.

In addition to the sensuous Rita Hayworth, who is memorably remembered for her song, "Put the Blame on Mame," the picture also stars Ford as Johnny Farell, Macready as Ballin Mundsen, and Joseph Calleia as Obregon.

Gilda is a cross between a hardcore noir adventure of the 1940s and the cycle of "women's pictures." Imbued with a modern perspective, the film is quite remarkable in the way it deals with sexual issues.

Charles Vidor, the director of Gilda, was born in Budapest in l900 and died of heart attack, in l959, while shooting Song Without End in Vienna. Among his best-known films are: Cover Girl (l944), which also starred Rita Hayworth; Hans Christian Anderson (l952); with Danny Kaye, Love Me or Live Me (l956), featuring James Cagney and Doris Day; and the 1957 remake of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, with Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson.

This week at SFC: Catch a Fire and Land of Look Behind

2007-11-28T13:57:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday November 29

First film starts at 7:30pm.

A Jamaican double this week...get here early to Catch a Fire!

Classsic Albums: Bob Marley & the Wailers - Catch a Fire (Jeremy Marre/1999/60')

The Wailers, featuring the legendary Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer, became the most influential band in the history of reggae music. Catch a Fire, their first Island album, released in 1973, introduced them to an international rock audience. Here the principal figures in the creation of Catch a Fire tell the story of how this record was designed to "cross over."

In the late '60s, the notion that reggae would break into the mainstream would have been laughed at. To achieve this, the movement needed a powerful voice of prophetic proportions. This voice emerged from the collective work of three pioneering friends from Jamaica, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and Robert Nesta Marley, who sought to bring about an ideological revolution through deeply meditative, hypnotic, and spiritual music. Catch a Fire was the Wailers' and reggae's introduction to the world and turned Bob Marley into a mega-icon of enormous proportions. It was the first album to remain true to the traditions of reggae music while having enough elements that were accessible to popular culture.

Land of Look Behind (Alan Greenberg/1982/90')

Land of Look Behind is an overlooked poetic document by Alan Greenberg from1982. Filmed in Jamaica in May and June of 1981, Greenberg’s initial intention, to my knowledge, was purely to capture Bob Marley’s funeral, and the impact of his death on the island’s culture. But somehow, like an unusual tropical blossom, the film unfolds into something more striking and beautiful than even Greenberg himself expected. It becomes an organic portrait of the very soul of Jamaica, and the earthy, pervasive sub-strata of Rastafarianism.

Formally the flows easily, seemingly growing from the climate, the music, the speech patterns, and the gentle landscape of the island itself. Footage of Marley’s coffin driven in the back of a pickup along the dusty roadways lined with throngs of devastated admirers does serve as a visual centerpiece. But the heart of the film inhabits its details. For me, specific images seem to recur in my memory (I’ve seen the film several times): the way that, in the opening sequence, a backwoods countryman carefully locates and presents a small indigenous tree toad to the camera; a shot of Gregory Isaacs as he exits a ground floor office and walks into Kingston’s hard sunlight; and the haunting closing sequence involving a young Rasta in the hills undulating to Marley’s music and rhythms floating from a tape player, as though the music contains thee secret code to a deep spiritual mystery. And in fact it does.

In the end Land of Look Behind, in its casual, organic way taps into the true of the gifts of Jamaican culture, both musical and spiritual, to somehow become a near perfect portrait of the strength and pride of its people. In my opinion, Alan Greenberg’s film rounds out a trilogy of great movies from Jamaica which also includes The Harder They Come and Rockers. I’m happy to recommend it as a film that has not yet received the attention it deserves.

-- Jim Jarmusch

This week at SFC: Ghosts of Cite Soleil

2007-11-21T18:11:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday November 22nd

Film starts at 8:15. Short films from 7:30pm.

Ghosts of Cite Soleil (Asger Leth/Denmark Haiti/2006/87')

Studiofilmclub would like to thank director Asger Leth for sending us a copy of his film and allowing us to screen it in Trinidad.

Ghosts of Cite Soleil was produced and scored by Haitian born singer-songwriter Wyclef Jean. This is a transcript of his text from the book about the film.

I remember running outside when it rained to catch drops on my tongue for drinking water. I remember running naked in the streets, laughing and dancing as the water splashed on my face. I remember eating mud to pacify the hunger in my stomach. I remember we didn't have money for basic needs; we didn't even have any clothes.

Yet... I remember being happy. I remember feeling joy in the midst of that poverty, a joy built on the spirit of Haiti, and I remember being okay.

These are my memories of a place called Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti. From there to New York City is a long way, but some things will always be a part of you. Every time I go back to Haiti, I have an almost physical reaction to my homeland. It is an indescribable energy that is unleashed even before the plane touches down. I gaze out at the striking, majestic mountains as the plane makes its approach. I brace for the inescapable heat that greets you upon landing. It hits me; I am home.

The people of Haiti, especially her kids, are my family. No matter how long I have been away, my people always welcome me back with open arms. When I look into their eyes, I see myself, and I am able to savor the connection that we share to a past that I have never really left.

That connection came calling unexpectedly on a stormy June night in the summer of 2004. On the advice of a friend, I sat down with my partners to watch raw footage of a documentary by a Danish filmmaker, Asger Leth and his Serbian cinematographer and co-director Milos Loncarevic. Set in the teeming, violent slum on the outskirts of Port-au-
Prince, Ghosts of Cite Soleil tells the story of the Haitian 2pac, a gang leader.

I guess it was somehow fitting that it was raining that summer night. It was as if the lightning from the storm outside suddenly hit all of us inside. As I sat there in my studio, mesmerized by the images on the screen, my instinctive reaction was to hop on a plane for Haiti the next day. Why?

I needed to understand. I needed to see these kids with my own eyes and not through the lens of a camera. I needed them to tell me what had happened to that Haitian spirit from my childhood. I needed to understand why their lives had such potential, yet their eyes were filled with so much rage and pain. And I needed to figure out what I could do to change it.

2pac, and so many of the kids like him in Haiti, have been completely written off by the outside world. It's easy to discard those that seem so different, so less than. They make up faceless statistics in a far away land and seemingly have nothing to offer to the world. But this movie refuses to let you get away with that, challenging the way we tolerate the misery around us. The faces tell you that something has gone horribly wrong in Haiti. But then you realise that there is more to the story.

After seeing Ghosts of Cite Soleil, I couldn't shake the image of 2pac from my mind - or any of the other kids desperately trying to find a way out of the mess that was their lives. Of course, music is one of the reason that I identified with them so immediately. 2pac wanted to be a rapper. While living in the Brooklyn projects, my mom put a guitar in my hand. Adjusting to a new, hostile culture, learning a new language, living with the typical angst of a teenage boy - music became my refuge. It saved my life; 2pac looked to it for his salvation as well.

But this movie is about much more than a kid who wanted to rap. Whether you are a gang leader in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere or a successful executive in the richest, everyone has dreams, everyone feels pain. Ghosts of Cite Soleil is about the dreams that we all have, the kind that you tuck away only to pull out in the most private of moments. It painstakingly lays bare all of the elements - love, hope, pain, despair - that make 2pac as human as you and I.

In some of the songs from the soundtrack of Ghosts of Cite Soleil, I blend 2pac's music with my own. I work to bring his unique talent, his dreams, his distinctive vision to the world. In other tunes, I try to capture the power of the movie itself, creating tracks that mirror its chaos and serenity - the paradox that is Haiti.

You cannot help but to look at the searing, haunting images in this film and not grasp the beauty and tragedy and potential
of 2pac's life - you will never be able to dismiss these images as the faces of expendable human beings.

I may have shared stages with kings and presidents all over the world, a long, long way from Croix-des-Bouquets, but I will never forget my beginnings. I may have received awards and accolades at the highest levels, but I will always be able to look at anyone in the eye and connect at that fundamental human level. I may have some of the creature comforts of American fame and fortune, but my work will always reflect and pay tribute to what is uniquely Haitian and yet unmistakably universal.

Always reaching back for those who come after me, I choose to live my life in a way that proves worthy of the blessings
that I have received.

How will you live yours?

Wyclef Jean
July 2005, New York City

Read an interview with Asger Leth at: www.filmmakermagazine.com/directorinterviews/2007_06_01_archive.php

This week at SFC: Fox and His Friends

2007-11-15T10:35:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday November 15th.

Film starts at 8:15. Short films from 7:30pm.

Fox And His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder/Germany/1974/123')

If you are unfamiliar with the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), this week's film is a good place to start. Starring in the central role of Fox is Fassbinder himself. A short biography follows the film review.

Fassbinder said of Fox: "It is the most honest film I have made up to now".

At the delicate art of combining the bizarre and the mundane, nobody is more skillful than Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His formula is wickedly simple. He begins, often enough, with elements of lurid sexuality. Then he films against type, looking for deliberately banal characters and locations. And then, in a stylistic double-reverse, he photographs his banal subjects with a highly mannered artificiality. The results are uneven, but then anyone who made some 33 films before he died at 36 can be excused for a certain inconsistency. What's important is that when everything's working, Fassbinder produces work that's hauntingly poignant. 

 That was true of his best film. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, (screened at SFC three years ago) which explored the consequences of a marriage between a 60ish Polish maid and a 30ish Moroccan laborer. It was true, too, of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, with its doomed lesbian triangle, and Jail Bait, with its chubby 13-year-old vixen, and The Merchant of the Four Seasons, with its alcoholic fruit peddler.

  And it's especially true of Fox and His Friends. Fassbinder himself takes the leading role, playing a naive and slightly dense young working-class man who wins the state lottery and soon finds himself -- and his lottery winnings -- embraced in Munich's gay circles. The slightly dazed young hero is adopted by the superficially charming son of a rich industrialist. But then things grow complicated. The industrialist, we learn, is about to go bankrupt. The son hopes to save the business. One solution might be to swindle the easily flattered lottery winner out of his fortune -- using love as a pretext.
 
 Fassbinder is a specialist at scenes in which the unspeakable is spoken, the unthinkable is thought, the undoable is done with a vengeance. All three of those elements come into play in the film's best scenes, including a brilliantly complex dinner scene. The industrialist's son brings his new lover home to meet his parents, and it becomes chillingly clear that sex is not the issue with this family; money is. The relentlessly upper-middle-class parents and their gay son are, in fact, engaging in a form of tacit prostitution, trading the fashionable facade of their lives for the money they desperately need.

  Fox moves in and out of the gay demimonde: its bars with American rock and roll on the jukebox, its parties, its intrigues. And the film's buried content gradually becomes clear. Fox is a victim of the capitalist society that so suddenly made him rich, deceived by "friendships" he doesn't even realize he's paying for. There's an especially poignant scene in which his lover shows him the expensively furnished apartment he's decorated for "them," with Fox's money.

  The point of the movie's title is, of course, that Fox has no friends. Years before Hollywood made its first faltering steps in the direction of a new frankness about homosexuality, Fassbinder was miles out in front. He was so comfortable with gay characters that he felt no hesitation in portraying some of them as selfish, brutal and grasping -- as evil, indeed, as heterosexuals in other movies. Here is a movie about characters who define themselves by their sexuality, but the movie doesn't. It takes the sexuality as a given, and defines them by their values and morals. And in the sad, slow descent of Fox, Fassbinder indicts their materialism and narcissism. It was a neat trick, how often he was about to begin with the materials of soap opera, and expand them into an indictment of society.

Biography

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10, 1982) was a German movie director, screenwriter and actor, a premier representative of the New German Cinema. Famous for his frenetic pace in film-making, in a professional career that lasted less than fifteen years Fassbinder completed 35 feature length films; two television series shot on film; three short films; four video productions; twenty four stage plays and four radio plays directed; and thirty six acting roles in his own and other’s films. He also worked as an actor (film and theatre), author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor, producer and theatre manager.

Fassbinder was distinguished for the strong provocative current underlying his work and the air of scandal surrounded his artistic choices and private life. His intense discipline and phenomenal creative energy when working were in violent contrast with a wild, self-destructive libertarianism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, as well as its central figure. He had tortured relationships in his personal life with the people he drew around him in a surrogate family of actors and technicians. However, his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. He ruthlessly attacked both German bourgeois society and the larger limitations of humanity. His films detail the desperate yearning for love and freedom and the many ways in which society, and the individual, thwarts it. A prodigiously inventive artist, Fassbinder distilled the best elements of his sources -- Brechtian theatrics, Artaud, the Hollywood melodramas, classical narrative, and a gay sensibility into a complex body of work.

Overworked and overdosed in life, Fassbinder died at the age of 37 from heart failure resulting from a lethal interaction between sleeping pills and cocaine. His death is often considered to mark the end of the New German Cinema.

This week at SFC: Scott Walker: 30th Century Man and Gates of Heaven

2007-11-07T10:24:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday November 8th

First film starts at 6:45pm. Feature at 8:15pm.

We will screen the Scott Walker documentary in its entirety this week. For those who only want to see the 2nd half, please come at 7:30.

Scott Walker: 30th Century Man (Stephen Kijak/UK USA/2006/95')

This is an absorbing documentary tracing the career of the great singer-songwriter from boy band pin-up to avant-garde legend. It includes interviews with famous fans as well as extensive sessions with the man himself during the recording of his 2006 album, The Drift.

"I know nothing about him," says David Bowie of his musical hero at the beginning of this captivating documentary. "Who knows anything about Scott Walker?" "I heard he likes to sit in pubs and watch people play darts," offers Jarvis Cocker. "Is he still cute?" wonders Lulu. The rumour mill surrounding Walker, one of the great singer-songwriters, has had reason enough to turn over the years. Famously reclusive, he lets his music do the talking. "Ultimately," he tells us, "your work is yourself". But three albums in the last 30 years doesn't give us a lot to go on. Stephen Kijak's film, Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, tries to shed light on this most fascinating subject with colourful and eloquent contributions from collaborators and famous fans alike (including members of Radiohead, Sting, Brian Eno, Johnny Marr and Damon Albarn). But the real coup of director Stephen Kijak's labour of love is to provide access to the artist himself as he records his critically acclaimed 2006 album 'The Drift'. When we first meet him, the 63 year-old Walker comes across like the timid elder brother of 'Body World' anatomist Gunther Von Hagens. The leonine hairdo that helped make Scott such a heartthrob back in The Walker Brothers days has thinned dramatically, as has his luxurious baritone voice. He looks allergic and is disarmingly self-effacing for a man who, in 1965, had a bigger fanclub than The Beatles. He's also surprisingly chatty yet gives little away, referring to an extensive creative slump in the 1970s and 1980s simply as "that 20 year hiatus". He is, in fact, the least likely music legend you can imagine.

Gates of Heaven (Errol Morris/USA/1976/83')

This brilliant if very depressing documentary always makes Roger Ebert's list of top ten greatest movies of all time. See it and see why. Just don't count on smiling for about two days afterward.

Errol Morris takes his camera around California and interviews various people involved in pet cemeteries. The first person we meet, Floyd McClure, opened his cemetery as his lifelong dream after his dog was killed; he saw his dream wither away when the cemetery went belly-up and more than 450 animal corpses had to be disinterred and moved. We see some people whose pets had been buried there, but the woman who makes the most vivid impression is Florence Rasmussen, who for some reason goes off-topic and starts talking about her lousy son. Morris keeps the camera on her anyway, and this is where Gates of Heaven starts to enter Maysles or Wiseman territory.  Morris moves on to Cal Harberts, who started his own cemetery with the animals left over from McClure's land. We don't get to know him as well as we do his two sons, Phil and Dan, who help run the cemetery. Phil is a former insurance salesman who's listened to one too many motivational tapes. He seems to be psyching himself up to deal with the remainder of his dull life. Dan is a would-be rock musician who drags his amp outside and practices when nobody is around. The sound of his guitar riffs bouncing off the pet gravestones is incredibly sad and chilling.  Did Morris set out to make a quirky documentary about what some would consider a trivial subject? He came back with an unforgettable mood piece about human loneliness, in which the mourned pets seem much more important than if they had been the movie's true focus (not much time is given to reminiscences about pets).

It's true, it's life, and it makes you want to do anything to avoid ending up like any of these people — except maybe Floyd McClure, who comes off as a gentle visionary. 

This week at SFC: Scott Walker: 30th Century Man and Edvard Munch

2007-10-31T09:58:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday November 1st

First film starts at 7:30pm. Feature at 8:15 pm.

This Thursday—back after a long hiatus—we screen Peter Watkins' great film portrait on Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Most famous for painting "The Scream" in 1893, Munch continues to be an influence on artists today.

Preceding Munch we are screening the first half of a new documentary on singer and songwriter Scott Walker. A compelling and complicted artist, Walker has been a huge influence on popular musicians from David Bowie to Radiohead to Pulp. Many of them talk about his inspiration in this fascinating portrait of the reclusive Walker.

Scott Walker: 30th Century Man (Stephen Kijak/UK USA/2006/95')

This is an absorbing documentary tracing the career of the great singer-songwriter from boy band pin-up to avant-garde legend. It includes interviews with famous fans as well as extensive sessions with the man himself during the recording of his 2006 album, The Drift.

"I know nothing about him," says David Bowie of his musical hero at the beginning of this captivating documentary. "Who knows anything about Scott Walker?" "I heard he likes to sit in pubs and watch people play darts," offers Jarvis Cocker. "Is he still cute?" wonders Lulu. The rumour mill surrounding Walker, one of the great singer-songwriters, has had reason enough to turn over the years. Famously reclusive, he lets his music do the talking. "Ultimately," he tells us, "your work is yourself". But three albums in the last 30 years doesn't give us a lot to go on. Stephen Kijak's film, Scott Walker: 30th Century Man, tries to shed light on this most fascinating subject with colourful and eloquent contributions from collaborators and famous fans alike (including members of Radiohead, Sting, Brian Eno, Johnny Marr and Damon Albarn). But the real coup of director Stephen Kijak's labour of love is to provide access to the artist himself as he records his critically acclaimed 2006 album 'The Drift'. When we first meet him, the 63 year-old Walker comes across like the timid elder brother of 'Body World' anatomist Gunther Von Hagens. The leonine hairdo that helped make Scott such a heartthrob back in The Walker Brothers days has thinned dramatically, as has his luxurious baritone voice. He looks allergic and is disarmingly self-effacing for a man who, in 1965, had a bigger fanclub than The Beatles. He's also surprisingly chatty yet gives little away, referring to an extensive creative slump in the 1970s and 1980s simply as "that 20 year hiatus". He is, in fact, the least likely music legend you can imagine.

Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins/Norway/1976/167')

Nothing that Peter Watkins, the English director (The War Game, Privilege, Punishment Park), has done before quite prepares us for the moving, complex, beautifully felt portrait of the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944), one of the most influential painters in the founding and defining of European Expressionism.

The film Edvard Munch is one of the few ever to dramatize successfully the sensitivity, the profound emotional chaos and the discipline that occasionally combine to produce the special molecular structure of a major artist. At the heart of this portrait there remains the mystery of the creative process—still unsolved—which is the way it should be. What Mr. Watkins has succeeded in doing is to suggest the multiplicity of psychological and social factors at work on the man, using a narrative form that is simultaneously journalistic and as freely associated as a dream.

In the past, the director's fondness for a simulated cinéma vérité style has resulted in ludicrous anachronisms—facetious television interviews with people on the point of being gunned to death, hand-held camera footage of situations unlikely to be recorded even by a secreted Kodak Brownie. The method got in front of the subject and then ridiculed it. Not so this time.
The style is now muted. When members of Munch's family, his friends, associates, critics and contemporaries talk directly to the camera, it's the perfectly acceptable device of fiction that's been used by Bergman, Godard and others. You don't get the queasy "You are there" feeling that you once got when Walter Cronkite interviewed Julius Caesar on his way to the Forum.
Edvard Munch covers the painter's life from his childhood when, as he wrote, "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle," until 1908 when, at the age of 45, he had completed his important "Frieze of Life" paintings and was slipping into nervous collapse.

Art historians may object that this hardly gives a complete picture of the man who, though tormented, perhaps psychotic, continued to work fruitfully with increasing recognition for another 35 years, dying at 80, a substantial age for anyone but especially for someone so ravaged by the demons within. That may be so, but Edvard Munch, though it's based upon the life and celebrates the talent of a real artist, is fiction, as are all films except possibly newsreels. The form that Mr. Watkins has imposed on the material illuminates a major part of that life, the obsessions that drove Munch to his seminal attempts to express visually states of mind, including his own anxieties, his fears, his longings to reach to others through love that was was both spiritual and intensely sexual.

The two major themes of the film are his death-haunted childhood in Oslo (then Cristiania), when his sister and his mother both died of tuberculosis, and a tumultuous love affair with a still-anonymous married woman identified only as Mrs. Heiberg. In the manner of an obsessed mind, the film keeps returning to images of his dying sister and to those of later humiliations at the hands of Mrs. Heiberg. At the same time, Mr. Watkins gives us what is virtually a documentary report on the conservative, middle-class, puritan society that shaped his life, a society where (in 1884) prostitution was legalized but there were no laws against child labour.

The movie cuts almost manically back and forth among a half-dozen different periods of time like the thoughts of a man on a couch—from the childhood of disease and death, to disastrous exhibitions in Norway and Germany, to the unhappy love affairs, to youthful discussions in Cristiania's little bohemia, to the later encounters with celebrate dcontemporaries, including Strindberg. We see the artist painting and a number of his canvases, woodcuts and lithographs, but the emphasis is on the man and his time, as the director seems to understand that he can't recreate the process by which these extraordinary works came into being.

Geir Westby is fine as the artist whose vision we share in much of the beautiful color-camerawork by Odd Geir Saether. Gro Fraas, whose looks recall Liv Ullmann's, plays Mrs. Heiberg, seeming to be as arbitrary, untrustworthy and tender to us as to Munch. The film, shot in Norway by Mr. Watkins, has Norwegian, Swedish, French and German dialogue, translated by subtitles, as well as English narration based on Munch's own letters and journals. Admittedly the competition isn't great, but Edvard Munch must be one of the few films about a serious artist that can be taken seriously.

Film premiere: jointpop's Desperate Houseflies

2007-10-23T13:20:00.000-04:00

The Band gave us the masterful Last Waltz. From Talking Heads we got Stop Making Sense, and from REM, Tourfilm. Further down the scale we have U2's Rattle and Hum, Depeche Mode's 101, and that Metallica thing.

Now jointpop give us their take on the rock and roll film: Desperate Houseflies. Shot earlier this year by Walt Lovelace, Desperate Houseflies documents the recording of jointpop's latest album, the excellent January Transfer Window.

Desperate Houseflies

A film by Walt Lovelace

Featuring jointpop and the making of The January Transfer Window

Thursday 25th October 2007

Movie Towne, Invaders Bay, Port of Spain

8pm sharp

Tickets are $100 and available now at the Movietowne box office. Please keep your ticket stub for the after-movie live gig at J Malone's Irish Pub (Movietowne) at 9.30pm.

Double disc CD (The January Transfer Window) and DVD (Desperate Houseflies) available on this night only for $100.

This week at SFC: Babylondon--three nights of Caribbean London filmmaking

2007-09-24T10:50:00.000-04:00

Thursday 27th, Friday 28th & Saturday 29th September

StudioFilmClub is pleased to be part of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival and will be presenting Babylondon--three nights of Caribbean London filmmaking.

All are welcome. Admission is free.

Thursday (September 27th) will be Horace Ove night. Horace has selected the films for this evening. This is a unique chance to see some of Trinidad’s premier filmmaker's less widely screened films.

Friday night has more of a musical theme with films by Isaac Julien and Franco Rosso. Rosso’s Babylon is a classic that certainly needs revisiting. Also, Rosso’s early documentary on Linton Kwesi Johnson will be shown.

Saturday night brings us up to date with Kidulthood, a shocking portrayal of London youth. Written by one of its young stars, the film is influenced by City of God and Kids. After the screening Joel Karamath, filmmaker and senior Lecturer in Visual Culture and Theory at the University of the Arts, London will present a lecture: "The impact of Caribbean culture on the British mainstream and the evolution of a black British identity" followed by a short film programme.

Doors will open half an hour before screenings

Thursday September 27th

A Hole in Babylon (Horace Ové/UK/Trinidad/1979/70’) 7:00 pm

Three men rob a Knightsbridge Italian restaurant. But when the police are called and the robbery becomes a siege, the men find themselves in a situation out of their control.

The Equalizer (Horace Ové/ UK/Trinidad/1996/45’) 8:15 pm

Drama documentary telling the story of a young boy, Udham Singh who survived the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which British troops killed Indian civilian demonstrators. The boy vowed revenge and waited twenty years till all those responsible were together at Caxton Hall, London.

Playing Away (Horace Ové/UK/Trinidad/1986/100’) 9:15 pm

A West Indian cricket team from Brixton is invited to a country village for a match with the locals, who are celebrating "third world week". The West Indians, however, find their hosts less congenial than expected.

Friday September 28th

Dread, Beat an' Blood (Franco Rosso/UK/1978/45’) 8:00 pm

"Inglan is a bitch". That was dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson's assessment of his adopted homeland in 1980. 22 years later the most English of institutions, Penguin Books has made this uncompromising writer only its second living poet ever to appear in their Modern Classics section. This is an early film about Linton Kwesi, Jamaican-born poet, writer and musician, and the Caribbean working class community from which his material is drawn. Made for the BBC, the film's public television screening was postponed until after the general election by the Thatcher government.

Territories (Isaac Julien/UK/1984/25’) 9:00 pm

A provocative and experimental documentary cutting Carnival scenes with archive news reports--police surveillance to rioting in the streets--and crossing looks of desire with alienation, from police to reveller, woman to man, man to man. Add to this a disembodied, political critique and trenchant images of police violence and the audience soon becomes aware that the documentary itself is part of the resistance. Notting Hill Carnival as an event about resistance.

Babylon (Franco Rosso/UK Italy/1980/95’) 9:30 pm

A young Rastafarian toaster (rapper) with Reggae Sound System Ital Lion, hopes to rise above the trials of his daily life and succeed at a sound system competition. Atmospherically shot by Chris Menges with a killer soundtrack by Dennis Bovell--the only ever "composed" dub reggae soundtrack. A rare treat for film and music lovers.

Saturday September 29th

Kidulthood (Menhaj Huda/2006/UK/87’) 7:00 pm

When a bullied schoolgirl commits suicide, her classmates are given the day off. What transpires in the next 24 hours is a snapshot of the perilous world that today's British teenagers inhabit.

Lecture: "The impact of Caribbean culture on the British mainstream and the evolution of a black British identity"
by Joel Karamath

8:45 pm

Joel Karamath is a filmmaker and senior Lecturer in Visual Culture and Theory at the University of the Arts, London. He was born in London of Trinidadian parentage. Joel also runs UNCUT, an independent film forum at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Short film programme after lecture

The West Indian Front Room (Joel Karamath/UK/2006/15’)

A short film exploring the Caribbean front room in Britain, the film contains interviews with Jazzie B and Stuart Hall amongst others.

Cold Dead Hands (Kaz Ove/UK/2006/12’)

Inspired the Nas track "I Gave You Power", the film addresses gun crime as the gun narrates three violent crimes.

Plus other shorts selected by Joel Karamath.

This week at SFC: Choose Me

2007-09-12T16:37:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday September 13th

Doors open at 7:30pm. Feature 8:15 pm.

Choose Me (Alan Rudolph/USA/1984/102')

This critically praised sleeper stars Genevieve Bujold as Dr. Nancy Love, a romance-phobic radio sex therapist who inadvertently becomes roommates with Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), a sexually uninhibited bar owner and one of Dr. Love's frequent callers. Handsome, smooth-talking mental patient Mickey (Keith Carradine) comes to the bar and proceeds to woo and confuse both women as well as an aspiring poetess, Pearl (Rae Dawn Chong), who suspects Nancy is having an affair with her abusive French husband, Zack (Patrick Bachau). As the wild nights progress, all the women find themselves drawn to the mysterious Mickey, arousing the wrath of Zack and ensuring hilarious, moving, and thought-provoking moments. It's a dreamy concoction of sex, love, and brilliant dialogue, all wrapped up in a purposely artificial neon-drenched atmosphere with deliriously romantic music from soul crooner Teddy Pendergrass. Filled with neat performances and cockeyed grace, Choose Me was a career-defining hit for director Alan Rudolph, who would go on to make acclaimed films such as Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Afterglow.

Alan Rudolph has been an influential pioneer of American independent filmmaking since the 1970s. He is best known for the fluid and unique dramatic atmosphere of his films, as well as his ability to effect outstanding performances. The son of director Oscar Rudolph, Alan grew up in the film industry, quitting college to learn about filmmaking by watching studio people at work. Rudolph began a long and fruitful collaboration with Robert Altman when he signed on as an assistant director on Altman's The Long Goodbye. He went on to assistant direct two more films for Altman, California Split and Nashville, and together, Rudolph and Altman wrote the screenplay for Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, which captured the Golden Bear for Best Picture at the Berlin Film Festival.

Rudolph then set out to carve a distinguished writing and directing path of his own, starting with Welcome to L.A. and continuing with such films as Remember My Name, Choose Me, Trouble in Mind, The Moderns, Equinox and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle which earned Jennifer Jason Leigh a Golden Globe nomination and the Best Actress award from the National Society of Film Critics.

Presenting the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival 2007

2007-09-12T10:31:00.000-04:00

A celebration of the best films from and about the Caribbean and its Diaspora

19th September to 27th October, 2007

Our Voices, Our Stories, Our Films

Award-winning feature films, documentaries, shorts, animations, training workshops with international specialists, a cinema caravan, lectures, are all part of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival 2007 (TTFF). A week of MovieTowne screenings starting on Wednesday 19th September kickstarts a month of activities all around the country, ending at UWI with the Animae Caribe Animation Festival.

Following on the successful TTFF 2006 there will be a host of work from Trinidad & Tobago filmmakers at home and abroad, but also new and classic work from The French and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Among the highlights is Cousines by Richard Senecal, one of the most talented of a new generation of Haitian directors. This dramatic story about the hard reality of being young in a troubled country won awards for the best actress and best producer at the 2006 Brooklyn International Film Festival.

Also to be screened is the new prize-winning feature A Winter Tale by Toronto-based Trinidadian filmmaker Frances-Anne Solomon, and a number of films that received grants from the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company’s production and script development programmes as well as student films from UWI and the MovieTowne Schools Short Film Competition. This year the Festival will once again invite filmmakers to introduce their films and answer questions from the audience.

Of special interest is the ground-breaking work of late director Hugh Robertson and the screening of the legendary Bim, which has not been seen at local cinemas since the 1970s. Suzanne Robertson will be the guest of honour at the Festival, representing her husband and taking part in a workshop on how we can make our renewed efforts to build a film industry in Trinidad & Tobago sustainable.

A new innovation will be the Festival People’s Choice Awards for the most popular films shown, and to ensure that the most popular films reach a wide audience the caravan will take selected films and animation out to the people of Trinidad & Tobago, all free of charge. There will also be three nights of Caribbean London filmmaking at StudioFilmClub featuring, among others, the work of celebrated Trinidadian director, Horace Ove, CBE.

This week at SFC: Neil Young Live at Massey Hall and Vagabond

2007-09-05T08:24:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday September 6th

First film starts at 7:30pm. Feature starts at 8:15 pm.

Some of you will remember Agnes Varda's great auto portrait documentary travelouge, The Gleaners And I, one of SFC's very early screenings. We are pleased to be screening Vagabond, which many rate as her finest film. First up, however, is a wonderful musical treat.

Neil Young Live at Massey Hall, Toronto 1971 (solo aucoustic)

Neil Young performs many of his now classic songs from the album Harvest, for the first time in front of a live audience. The film is interspersed with home super 8 footage. A truly atmospheric film and performance by the then 24 year old Young.

Vagabond (Agnes Varda/France/1985/105')

The French title for Vagabond is Sans Toit Ni Loi, which could be translated as Without Roof or Law.

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a vagabond found dead from exposure in the opening scene, whose final few months we follow in flashback. Traipsing through the French countryside in winter, Mona skips along from one situation to another, more interested in survival and sustenance than making any kind of permanent connection, resolute in her individuality. But she touches the lives of those around her, from a cultured professor who sees in her a romantic symbol of social freedom to a farming couple who offers her their way of life with a plot of land to a widow whose stiffness is mellowed by her directness.

Yet she remains enigmatic as everyone projects their own fantasies on the alienated figure who meets every obstacle with a retreat to the road. Agnes Varda's chilly view weaves in commentaries and direct address of the bystanders and bit players whose lives are touched by Mona, but they ultimately reveal more about the speaker than the drifter. By the end of the film we don't know much more about her beyond her steely immutability and disconnection, and Varda is resolute in her no-apologies, no-excuses portrait. It's an assured film rich in detail with an enigma at the centre.

Like so many of the greatest films, it tells us a very specific story, strong and unadorned, about a very particular person. Because it is so much her own story and does not seem to symbolize anything - because the director has no parables, only information - it is only many days later that we reflect that the story of the vagabond could also be the story of our lives: Although many have shared our time, how many have truly known us?

This week at SFC: The Lives of Others

2007-08-28T17:16:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Film starts 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm.

Thursday August 30th

The Lives of Others
(Florian H Von Donnersmarck/2006/Germany/138')

You know within minutes of watching The Lives of Others, the debut feature that brought writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck an Oscar for the best foreign language film of 2006, that you are in confident, authoritative hands. The film opens with an interrogation in East Berlin in 1984 at the temporary detention centre of the German Democratic Republic's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Ministry for State Security), better known as the Stasi. Forty years earlier, the Stasi's job was being done by the Gestapo, which was active for a mere dozen years and employed around 45,000 agents with some 160,000 registered informants. The Stasi lasted 40 years in only half of the country, employed 100,000 full-time workers and had, so this movie tells us, 400,000 informants.

The interrogator in this initial scene is Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a lean, humourless man seeking a confession from a political prisoner. There is no direct physical torture (though we know there was no form of punishment or persuasion the Stasi balked at). But the accused is made to sit on his hands and is forced to stay awake. Wiesler informs his victim that merely to question the probity of the Stasi is itself a serious crime. When the necessary confession has been obtained, Wiesler places the fabric from the seat the prisoner has been sitting on in a bottle to retain the offender's odour for the use of tracker dogs. Wiesler then uses the tape recording of this scene to lecture recruits in the art of interrogation. While indoctrinating them in his form of mad logic, he's asked a question about the possible innocence of a victim; Wiesler puts a little cross beside the questioner's name. At the end of his lecture, he's buttonholed by a suspiciously hearty old schoolfriend, Lieutenant-Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), now head of the Stasi's Cultural Department.

The colonel asks Wiesler to join him in the staff canteen, where he hears a lieutenant mention a joke about President Honecker. The embarrassed young man is forced to repeat it and we know (and two hours later actually discover) that the joker's career has been seriously blighted. Similar incidents lead to jail sentences in Milan Kundera's novel The Joke and Emir Kusturica's film When Father Was Away on Business. This sense of social unease and constant suspicion, which informs the whole of the film, leads on to the next scene: Grubitz takes Wiesler to the theatre and suggests he take an interest in a potentially dissident playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), whose beautiful girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) is appearing in his new play. It is first hinted at, and then made clear, that an influential minister (Thomas Thieme) has designs on the actress and intends to use the Stasi to tarnish the playwright. Wiesler is assigned to the case by his old friend and proceeds to bug the writer's flat and put him under 24-hour surveillance.

We then see the Stasi at work, doggedly recording everything for the organisation's files, with entries in their log such as (noting the end of a birthday party) 'unwrap presents and then presumably have intercourse'. Their targets, however, are largely innocent of any plans to undermine the state. The theatre people are dedicated socialists who merely seek artistic freedom and a certain licence to criticise and exercise democratic rights.

In John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the Stasi man targeted for destruction is a dedicated true believer, while the man being kept in place by MI6 is a corrupt, time-serving career man. Similarly here, the wily, unprincipled Grubitz is manipulating the honest communist Wiesler, who really does believe what everyone in the Stasi professes, that 'we are the party's sword and shield'. But like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lonely, essentially decent Wiesler comes to doubt what he is doing and to suspect the patriotism of those around him. Listening in on the playwright and his girlfriend, he develops human sympathies for people his superior believes to be suffering from a sickness known as 'anthropocentrism'. He reads Brecht. A little boy he meets on the lift insults the Stasi, but he doesn't inquire, as he should, about the child's father. He begins to make minor interventions, protecting the couple's privacy; then acts in a serious, protective manner that puts his own life and career in danger.

The film turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive. Were there people like Wiesler in the Stasi? Some of its victims say not. However, von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Muhe persuade us of that possibility without suggesting such figures were common. The Lives of Others subtly evokes a vindictive society that exists by turning citizens against each other in the interests of national unity and collective security. It serves as a major warning to ourselves and our elected leaders about where overzealousness and a lack of respect for individuals and their liberties can lead.

The film has a remarkable coda, set in 1992 after the Berlin Wall has fallen and the Stasi files were opened to the public. When Dreyman the playwright visits the former Stasi headquarters, a trolley is required to bring in his bulky files. Reading them provides him with something like the walk down a nightmarish memory lane that British historian and student of Eastern European affairs Timothy Garton Ash describes in his fascinating book The File: A Personal History, which resulted from examining the dossier that the Stasi had opened on him in 1981 when he was doing research in Berlin for a book on the Third Reich. Dreyman finds some illuminating surprises in his files. He also meets the lecherous minister, who, like many of his kind, performed a Vicar of Bray act and recreated themselves in a new Germany as many Nazi sympathisers had done 50 years before.

Favourite foreign-language films

2007-08-27T14:26:00.000-04:00

We're not big fans of "best of" lists here at the SFC blog (who decides? what criteria? to what end?), but we are fans of the blogger Jai Arjun Singh, whose frequent posts on film are always worth reading. So when he posts a list of fifty of his favourite foreign language films (foreign language taken to mean both non-English and non-Hindi, since Jai is Indian), we take note. We also note that of all the films on his list, only two appear to have been screened at SFC, though a few of his "honourable mentions" have been shown, as well as different films by directors on his list.

This week at SFC: 'Round Midnight

2007-08-23T08:22:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday 23rd August 2007

Film starts 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm.

'Round Midnight (Bertrand Tavernier/1986/USA France/133’)

No actor could do what the great jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon does in 'Round Midnight, Bertrand Tavernier's glowing tribute to the golden age of be-bop. Mr. Gordon, who stars in the film as an expatriate American named Dale Turner, becomes the very embodiment of the music itself. It's in his heavy-lidded eyes, in his hoarse, smoky voice, in the way his long, graceful fingers seem to be playing silent accompaniment to his conversation. It's even in the way he habitually calls anyone or anything ''Lady,'' as in ''Well, Lady Sweets, are you ready for tonight?'' In that instance, he's addressing his saxophone.

The film, with its lovely, elegiac pacing and its tremendous depth of feeling, was, according to an opening title, ''inspired by incidents in the lives of Bud Powell and Francis Paudras,'' the American pianist and the French jazz enthusiast who befriended him. Drifting easily between French and English, it takes place largely in Paris in 1959, among the expatriate jazz musicians and the French aficionados they attracted. Dale Turner arrives there from New York, and has an instant caretaker in the form of Francis Borier (Francois Cluzet), who is his longtime admirer.

At first Dale is only interested in cadging drinks from this fan, but he quickly realizes that Francis's helpfulness will be far more substantial. Francis, who himself lives in straitened circumstances, nevertheless undertakes to make sure Dale is well-looked-after. He does what he can to keep the musician's self-destructiveness in check (''S'il vous plait, I would like to have the same thing he had,'' Dale says to a bartender, after watching the man next to him keel over), and even begins to water down his wine. He takes Dale home, introduces him to his little daughter Berangere (Gabrielle Haker), and even borrows money from his estranged wife so as to rent a larger apartment. His present place, she points out, was large enough for a family of three. But now Francis wants to look after Dale on a full-time basis and, as he puts it, ''I want the greatest sax player to live decently.''

'Round Midnight, which takes its title from a Thelonious Monk composition, doesn't have a great deal of narrative, and it moves with the leisurely feeling of a reverie - sometimes it even seems to drift forward in time, so that the vibrant, colorful images of Dale and Francis briefly turn into the black-and-white, home-movie memories they will someday become. Much of the film takes place in the Blue Note, a jazz club, and simply lets the audience experience the place and its atmosphere. Here, and in a recording studio, and in several other nightclub settings, Mr. Gordon plays with musicians including Herbie Hancock, Bobby Hutcherson, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. The music is sublime. Much of the film is purely atmospheric; the camera may move through an empty apartment as a saxophone plays lazily in the background and Dale, in voice-over, offers his thoughts. ''You just don't go out and pick a style off a tree one day -the tree is inside you, growing naturally,'' he says at one point. ''When you have to explore every night, even the most beautiful things you find can be the most painful,'' Mr. Hutcherson (in the role of a fellow musician and neighbor) explains. The screenplay, by Mr. Tavernier and David Rayfiel, is both rich and relaxed, with a style that perfectly matches the musicians'. Some of the talk may well be improvised, but nothing sounds improvised, but nothing sounds forced, and the film remains effortlessly idiosyncratic all the way through.

Among the film's many memorable moments are a Billie Holliday number by Sandra Reaves-Phillips during a party scene, and Lonette McKee's brief appearance as Dale's old flame; there is also the sight of Mr. Gordon, as much of a giant physically as he is musically, wandering around Paris with his diminutive French friend, getting the lay of the land (''Very pretty town,'' he pronounces Paris, with typical sang-froid). Once the action shifts to New York, Martin Scorsese turns up as a club owner, and a very unlikely civic booster. ''When you go back to Paris, you're going to be raving,'' he says, ''just raving about how nice New Yorkers can be.''

This week at SFC: 24 Hour Party People

2007-08-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

Thursday 16th August 2007

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Film starts 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm.

Antonioni, Bergman...Wilson?

This Thursday SFC pays tribute to the recently deceased Tony "Mr. Machester" Wilson, one of the main men behind the Manchester music scene from the late 70s to the early 90s.

24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom/UK/2003/115’)

The Manchester music and dance scene, from punk to post-punk to acid house, is the subject of Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, one of the sharpest and funniest movies about the music business ever made. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and extending from the late seventies to the early nineties, it covers the Sex Pistols and Joy Division, the founding of Factory Records and the Manchester dance club the Hacienda, as well as the ascendancy and crash dive of the group Happy Mondays.

The impresario holding everything together is Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), TV host and Factory co-founder, who continually turns to the camera and clues us in on what's happening. As Wilson moves through the years, he goes from a foppish Oscar Wilde hairdo to tie-dyed shirts and ruffled neckties until, in the end, he looks a lot like David Frost. He has a gyroscopic gift for steadying himself in the maelstrom.

Winterbottom really gets the look and sound of this era in which pathos and slapstick and psychosis were all jammed together. Punk and the rave culture come across without a smidgen of moralizing, which makes the manic intoxication bubbling up before our eyes seem all the more real. It all had to end, of course, but the movie does justice to Wilson's plum observation that this was the "moment when even the white man starts dancing."

The films of StudioFilmClub, updated

2007-08-12T23:19:00.000-04:00

The list of films shown at StudioFilmClub has been updated,
and is now complete to Thursday August 9, 2007. The list can be accessed at any time by clicking on the link on the middle right hand side of the page.

This week at SFC: Two For The Road

2007-08-08T10:54:00.000-04:00

Thursday 9th August 2007

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Film starts 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm.

This week SFC presents what has been called one of the best films ever made about relationships...the stylish and sophisticated Two For The Road, with Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney.

Two for the Road (Stanley Donen/USA/1967/111 minutes)

In preparing his romantic comedy Two For the Road, director Stanley Donen decided to utilize many of the cinematic techniques popularized by the French "nouvelle vague" filmmakers. Jump cutting back and forth in time with seeming abandon, Donen and scriptwriter Frederic Raphael chronicle the 12-year relationship between architect Wallace (Albert Finney) and his wife (Audrey Hepburn).

While backpacking through Europe, student Finney falls for lovely music student Jacqueline Bisset, but later settles for Hepburn, another aspiring musician (this vignette served as the launching pad for the film-within-a-film in Francois Truffaut's 1973 classic Day for Night). Once married, Finney and Hepburn go on a desultory honeymoon, travelling in the company of insufferable American tourists William Daniels and Eleanor Bron and their equally odious daughter Gabrielle Middleton. Later on, during yet another road trip, Finney is offered an irresistible job opportunity by Claude Dauphin, which ultimately distances Finney from his now-pregnant wife.

Still remaining on the road, the film then details Finney and Hepburn's separate infidelities. The film ends where it begins, with Finney and Hepburn taking still another road vacation, hoping to sew up their unraveling marriage. While critics did nip-ups over Stanley Donen's "revolutionary" nonlinear story-telling techniques, audiences responded to the chemistry between Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, not to mention the unforgettable musical score by Henry Mancini.

This week at SFC: Coffee and Cigarettes

2007-08-01T15:51:00.000-04:00

Thursday 2nd August 2007

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Film starts 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm.

The Studiofilmclub is pleased to screen Jim Jarmusch's documentary "Coffee and Cigarettes", a series of short vignettes built on one another to create a cumulative effect, as the characters discuss things as diverse as caffeine popsicles, Paris inthe '20s, and the use of nicotine as an insecticide--all the while sitting around sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. As director Jarmusch delves into the normal pace of our world from an extraordinary angle, he shows just how absorbing the obsessions, joys and addictions of life can be, if truly observed.

Coffee and Cigarettes (Jim Jarmusch/USA/2004/93')

Coffee and Cigarettes was initiated in 1986 when Jim Jarmusch shot the first skit in black and white with Roberto Benigni as Bob and Steven Wright as Steven. The second scene was shot in 1989 with the twins, Cinqué Lee and Joie Lee, and the waiter Steve Buscemi where they discuss Elvis and the oppression of African-American musicians. The third piece was filmed in 1993 with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop meeting in a Californian bar where the two get together. This suggests that Jarmusch has been working on this idea for some years and there is much more to it than what meets the eye. The culmination of Coffee and Cigarettes came when all the 11 skits were put together in a film in 2003 for the audience to experience and ponder.

Self medicated existential philosophy, awkward dialogues with moments of silence, human connection, and health conscience characters drive the story of Coffee and Cigarettes where Jim Jarmusch displays 11 disjointed vignettes all set in different milieus. What ties the 11 incoherent skits together are the coffee and the cigarettes as they function as a brief opportunity for human connection away from time and responsibilities. The characters continue to inhale the nicotine and consume the caffeine during their meetings in order to stay alert and rid any slight hint of social anxiety. Yet, all the characters remain uncomfortable with one another as silence and meaningless conversation seems to fill their time cramped lives. This creates a socially symbolic oxymoron where the coffee and cigarettes are suppose to function as the key to human connection, but instead these two social drugs for self-treatment of anxiety and sleepiness become an impenetrable unfriendly wall.

There are several highlights in Coffee and Cigarettes as the film has a brilliant cast that occasionally seems to improvise. In addition, the characters in the film often play themselves in an invented situation, which enhances the authentic atmosphere around the characters as they sit down around a small table for coffee and cigarettes. Cate Blanchett's dual performance is dazzling as she presents a rich, famous and successful performer and her envious poor cousin. The connection between Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan brings the viewer gleeful vengeance as the two are apparently distant relatives. All the skits offer humor, insight, and some irony as they continue to inhale their nicotine and drink their caffeine leading to a terrific cinematic experience.

"A strange and terrible beauty"

2007-07-31T10:01:00.000-04:00

"In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places of our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting."

-- Jack Nicholson on Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni, who has passed away at the age of 94. Nicholson was the star of Antonioni's The Passenger, which was screened at StudioFilmClub earlier this year.

Farewell to a Master

2007-07-30T08:34:00.000-04:00

""I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it."

-- Ingmar Bergman, 1918–2007

Film reviews

2007-07-23T16:34:00.000-04:00

There used to be a time when there were film reviews in the local newspapers. Proper film reviews, written by people who knew what they were writing about. Now, however, apart from the odd syndicated review from a foreign newspaper, and a feature in one of the Sunday papers that merely recounts the plot of a Bollywood movie and masquerades as a review, film reviews are a thing of the past. (The papers can't seem to get enough, however, of movie star gossip.)

Why we don't have film reviews in our papers anymore is a question worth exploring (along with why we don't have book reviews etc), but at another time. Yet because there aren't film reviews in the papers, that doesn't mean there aren't film reviews and film reviewers. To wit: Andre Bagoo, who at his blog, Tattoo, has written a few interesting reviews of recent films. See here for a short review of the new live-action Transformers movie, and here for a longer, more in-depth piece on the latest Harry Potter film.

An atheist film festival?

2007-07-23T09:02:00.000-04:00

"If you were programming an Atheist Film Festival, what titles would you include?" That is the question Jim Emerson asks at his Chicago Sun Times blog, Scanners.

"I can think of many, many religious movies (from silents like Ben-Hur, through the biblical epics of the 1950s, the Christian parables of Ingmar Bergman, up to The Passion of the Christ and Dogma)," says Emerson. "But can you think of some movies that are explicitly atheistic, that argue against belief not just in religious dogma but in theism itself?"

Emerson himself is unable to think of any such films off the cuff, but there are quite a few interesting suggestions in the comments section, including Bergman's Through A Glass Darkly, Stanley Kramer's Inherit The Wind and, of course, Star Trek V.

Anyone else (assuming anyone still reads this blog) with any suggestions?

(Via Jabberwock, who has incidentally been blogging of late on Delhi's Cinefan Film Festival.)

This week at SFC: Grey Gardens

2007-05-31T07:16:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB
CCA7 BACK STUDIO
FERNANDES INDUSTRIAL CENTRE EASTERN MAIN ROAD, LAVENTILLE PORT OF SPAIN.

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Film begins: 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm
THE SFC PRESENTS 'GREY GARDENS' DIRECTED BY ALBERT AND DAVID MAYSLES.
The Maysles brothers pay visits to Edith Bouvier Beale, nearing 80, and her daughter Edie.
Reclusive, the pair live with cats and raccoons in Grey Gardens, a crumbling mansion in East Hampton.

'GREY GARDENS'
/Albert and David Maysles, / USA/ 1976/ 100mins

Edith Bouvier Beale sits on her bed, wrapped in a housecoat, surrounded by cats, singing in a reverie:
"Tea for two, and two for tea. . . ." And we wonder if it occurs to her that the song is the story of the last,long chapter of her life. For more than 20 years, she and her daughter, Edie, have lived together in a
crumbling old mansion by the sea. They are surrounded on both sides by the summer homes of the
wealthy - of people from their class -- but Grey Gardens stands in Gothic decay.

The house was beautiful once, and so were the Beales. They look through old scrapbooks, this woman of
82 and her 56-year-old daughter, and we see them when they were the cream of society. Edith on her
wedding day. Edie modeling at a charity fashion show. Now a slow disintegration has set in; rooms of their
mansion and areas of their lives have been closed off, one at a time, left to the forages of raccoons and
memories.

Still, they've preserved a few things, while abandoning so much. They still have wit, style and what I would
define as sanity. "Grey Gardens," one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time, preserves their
strange existence, and we're pleased that it does. It expands our notions of the possibilities. It's about two
classic eccentrics, two people who refuse to live the way they're supposed to, but by the film's end we see
that they live fully, in ways of their own choosing.

The film was made almost by accident. Albert and David Maysles, the directors of such documentaries as
"Salesman" and "Gimme Shelter," were approached, by the two Bouvier sisters, Jacqueline Onassis and
Lee Radziwell. Would the Maysles like to make a movie about the Bouviers? They might. Jackie and Lee
supplied them with information about the family, including their two reclusive cousins in East Hampton, NY
The Maysles shot, on and off, for several months. Then they reviewed their footage and decided there
wasn't a movie in Jackie and Lee - but there seemed to be one in Edith and Edie.

They went back to Grey Gardens and all but moved in for two months, using portable cameras to follow
the Beales in their daily routines. Many of the routines seem intended for the stage, Mrs. Beale, once a
highly regarded concert singer, sings several songs for them. Edie, who'd always dreamed of a career as a
dancer, improvises a soft shoe to the Virginia Military Institute fight song. And the two women, in ways that
have been exquisitely refined over the years, fight a little among themselves.

It is here that the film has its fascinating, mysterious center, We gradually realize that these two women are
absolutely dependent on one another; that they form a composite personality (or, as the Maysles put it, a
"closed system"), Edie never married. She brought a few boys home, but her mother didn't like them. So
that's one thing to fight about. "That was just after the fall of France," Edie says at one time, dating a
memory. "France fell," her mother says, "but Edie didn't." The house is surrounded, as Edie observes, by a
"sea of green." The grounds have grown wild. "I lost a lovely blue scarf in there one day and never found it
again," she muses. Inside, plaster is crumbling from the walls, and raccoons coexist amicably with the
Beales and a large family of cats. Old phonograph records are played once again, and on Sunday night
the girls tune in Norman Vincent Peale from New York. "First, think," he advises. "Then, try . . ."

Edie dresses up in bizarre costumes. She likes to wear skirts upside down. She is never seen without
a turban. She dresses in lace curtains, in bedspreads, in bathing suits that were last seen on the cover of
Life, circa 1948. She and her mother talk all the time, sometimes at the same time -- they both know all the
words. And out of this existence comes a movie that, curiously enough, is comic and bright, as well as
sobering. It's hard not to find these two odd women likable.

Moments: Edie feeding the raccoons a loaf of Wonder Bread. Edith placidly observing that a cat is
defecating behind her portrait. Edie, nearsighted, standing on a scales and reading her weight with
binoculars. Edith confessing that she can't turn around just at the moment because her bathing suit has no
back. The two women at night, alone in their room, the crumbling mansion extending around them,
listening to old songs and replaying old memories.

This week at SFC: Blue Collar

2007-05-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday May 10th – film begins 8:15 pm, doors open 7:30 pm

Early film footage of the Chicago bluesman Howling Wolf (who features in Blue Collar’s soundtrack) will precede this week's main feature.

BLUE COLLAR (Paul Schrader/USA/1978/114’)

Blue Collar is the 1978 directorial debut of screenwriter Paul Schrader – who wrote the scripts for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ . This drama (with minimal comic elements...) stars Harvey Keitel, Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto. Its pounding soundtrack compiled and composed by the late great Jack Nitzsche.

Both a critique of union practices and an examination of life in a working-class ‘Rust Belt’ enclave, the film concerns a trio of Detroit auto workers: Zeke Brown (Pryor), Jerry Bartowski (Keitel), and Smokey James (Kotto). Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, the trio hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters. They commit the caper, but find a few scant bills in the union safe. More importantly, they also come away with a ledger, evidence of the union's illegal loan-lending operation and ties to organised crime syndicates.
They soon find themselves wrestling with what to do with this newfound knowledge amidst both a union investigation of the crime and a federal agent's attempts to coerce Jerry into informing on union corruption.

The film is notable for its language, which mimics the street-level profanity found in Schrader's Taxi Driver screenplay and exceeds it in both frequency and rhythm. It is also notable for the performances of its three leads. As Schrader has stated, none of the three got along with each other during the production, and fistfights between takes were not uncommon. Pryor's performance is one of the best of his career.

The film was shot on location at the Checker plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and at numerous locales around Detroit.

Check out Antilles

2007-05-15T15:35:00.000-04:00

SFC fans: check out Antilles, the weblog of The Caribbean Review of Books.

This week at SFC: Up and Dancing & Carnival Roots

2007-05-09T08:21:00.000-04:00

THURSDAY May 10th – films 8:15 pm Doors open 7:30 pm

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Two documentaries this week – both concerning Trinidad Carnival...
Our first feature is a new film about the Kilimanjaro School in Cocorite.

UP AND DANCING- THE MAGIC STILTS OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
(Harald Rumpf.2007/ T&T-Germmany/51’)

The documentary “Up and Dancing” follows the lives of several students and teachers of the “Kilimanjaro School of Arts and Culture” as they prepare for upcoming carnival parades in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
The film takes a realistic yet tender look at the practitioners of the traditional art of stilt walking; characters popularly know as Moko Jumbies.
Practiced primarily by youths from low-income families in the Cocorite hills, “walking” has become a creative diversion from the sometimes harsh realities of poor urban life.

CARNIVAL ROOTS (Peter Chelkowski/2003/T&T-USA/90’)

“Carnival Roots” is an electrifying documentary film about the people and the music that fuel Trinidad’s carnival.
Made over a period of three years while in collaboration with some of Trinidad’s most dynamic designers, musicians, masqueraders and historians, “Carnival Roots” manages to touch on some of the major elements and themes that shape carnival as we know it today.
With great clarity the film offers an insight into the historical links between traditional mas and the development of new forms within carnival.
What emerges as the film progresses is not a presentation of carnival as revelry and fun but a vision of carnival seen as the act of a nation forging it’s own identity.
From camboulay to steelband, to calypso and soca the film emphasizes of the power of transformation that is inherent in the domain of carnival.

“Carnival Roots” which features the music of Machel Montano, Black Stalin, Bunji Garlin and Super Blue among others, is elegantly shot on 16mm film and would have to be considered one of the most definitive films made on the subject of carnival.

This week at SFC: Water

2007-05-02T08:25:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

THURSDAY May 3rd – 8:15pm – doors open at 7:30pm

WATER (Deepa Mehta/2006/India/140')

Production on the third and most powerful chapter of Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy was delayed for years by religious fundamentalists who staged demonstrations, torched the filmmaker's sets, and threatened her life. But she was not to be thwarted. This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom. Her heroines, an eight-year-old widow called Chuyia (played by Sarala, a child chosen from a village in Sri Lanka) and a beautiful woman in her twenties (Lisa Ray), come to embody the spirit of the time (the film is set in 1938), when the great liberationist Mahatma Gandhi was on the rise, but the old repressions were still very much in force.

This week at SFC: Pan's Labyrinth

2007-03-21T06:59:00.000-04:00

Thursday March 22nd - 8:15 pm come early to see an interview with the director

PAN'S LABYRINTH (Guillermo del Toro/Mexico/2006/112')

Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro's masterpiece is an extraordinary collision of exotic fantasy and down-to-earth reality that seamlessly blends themes of personal and political import. Set in war-torn 1944, the narrative finds young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) escaping the brutal realities of Franco's Spain by venturing into a labyrinthine underworld of fauns and fairies. Here she is hailed as a lost princess who must accomplish a series of increasingly surreal tasks to prove her true identity. Encounters with giant toads and terrifyingly beautiful monsters ensue, most memorably in the skeletal shape of the flesh-eating 'pale man' who wears eyeballs in his palms like scary staring stigmata. Meanwhile, above ground, the anti-fascist resistance continues to do battle with Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), Ofelia's sadistic stepfather in whose dark shadow she now dwells.
Part war film, part fairytale fable, del Toro's Bafta- and Oscar-winning gem gets better with each viewing. While owing a clear debt to Victor Erice's Spirit of the Beehive, the film's primary visual influences come from artists as diverse as Goya and Rackham. 'Prestigious musicians are afraid of melody,' observes del Toro astutely, 'just as painters are afraid of being figurative.'

A dark fairy tale ... Pan's Labyrinth by Mark Kermode (This is an edited version of an article from the December issue of Sight and Sound)

'Pain should not be sought - but it should never be avoided'

For sheer imaginative brio, Pan's Labyrinth is one of the films of the year. But the dark fable was a labour of love for director Guillermo del Toro, who says that violence in his native Mexico is key to his extraordinary vision

For those with a weakness for the beautiful monsters of modern cinema, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro has earned a deserved reputation as the finest living exponent of fabulist film. Gregarious and personable, with an almost photographic recall of faces, he has charmed both the hardcore horror fans, who gave him a hero's welcome at London's Frightfest in August, and now the upmarket critical cognoscenti, who snapped to attention following his Palme d'Or nomination for his new film Pan's Labyrinth at Cannes in May.
Set against the backdrop of fascist Spain in 1944, Pan's Labyrinth is a dark fairy tale that distils his distinctive mix of fact and fantasy, poetry and politics, pain and pleasure. It's an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters - a transformative, life-affirming nightmare which is, for my money, the very best film of the year.
Since the early 1990s, del Toro has divided his film-making between personal European projects (the modern vampiric chiller Cronos in 1993; the ghostly Spanish Civil War fable The Devil's Backbone in 2001) and big-budget Hollywood hits (ongoing comic-book franchises Blade II in 2002, and Hellboy in 2004). Those familiar with the guilty ghosts of The Devil's Backbone will recognise key motifs in his new fable, about a young girl's exploration of a labyrinthine underworld in Franco-era Spain.
The young heroine of Pan's Labyrinth is Ofelia, whose widowed mother, Carmen, has recently married Vidal, a vicious captain in Spain's Civil Guard, involved in policing anti-fascist Maquis resistance in the mountainous wooded northern region. Vidal's housekeeper, Mercedes, befriends Ofelia, protecting her from her stepfather's wrath while maintaining secretive connections with the Maquis. Meanwhile, Ofelia meets an alarmingly devious faun who suggests that she may be the lost princess of a beautiful and terrifying netherworld. While Mercedes attempts to help the Maquis in their struggles, Ofelia embarks on a quest that will test her true nature.
This quest involves a journey through a labyrinth, a word with which the Civil War has become intrinsically linked (think of key historical accounts such as Gerald Brenan's The Spanish Labyrinth) and which served as the 'perfect metaphor' for del Toro's endeavours.
'A maze is a place where you get lost,' he explains. 'But a labyrinth is essentially a place of transit, an ethical, moral transit to one inevitable centre. You think of the transit of Spanish society from the 1940s to the incredible explosion of the post-Franco period. The 1980s in Spain were like the 1960s in the rest of the world! In the movie, Ofelia is a "princess who forgot who she was and where she came from", who progresses through the labyrinth to emerge as a promise that gives children the chance never to know the name of their father - the fascist. It's a parable, just as The Devil's Backbone was a parable of the Spanish Civil War.
'I was also trying to uncover a common thread between the "real world" and the "imaginary world"through one of the seminal concerns of fairy tales: choice. It's something that has intrigued me since Cronos, through Hellboy and now to Pan's Labyrinth: the way your choices define you. And I thought it would be great to counterpoint an institutional lack of choice, which is fascism, with the chance to choose, which the girl takes in this movie.'
Del Toro's faun is just one of the film's menagerie of fantastical creatures and monsters, drawn from sources that range from Goya's paintings to Clive Barker's Books of Blood. Amazingly for a film that features around 300 effects shots and boasts complex creature designs, Pan's Labyrinth was completed for a mere £10m, a feat del Toro attributes to the lessons learnt on Blade II and Hellboy ('I love to play with the big toys... and to learn from them'). As always, the director sketched each character in the notebooks that are his constant companions, extraordinary documents of his mind at work and his obsessive attention to detail. Here we find the original drawings for the 'vegetable baby' which Ofelia places beneath her mother's bed, nurtured with milk and magic, and the terrifying 'pale man' whose ire she arouses by stealing from his table.
'I wanted to represent political power within the creatures,' del Toro says. 'And that particular character somehow came to represent the church and the devouring of children. The original design was just an old man who seemed to have lost a lot of weight and was covered in loose skin. Then I removed the face, so it became part of the personality of the institution. But then, what to do about the eyes? So I decided to place stigmata on the hands and shove the eyes into the stigmata. Having done that, I thought it would be great to make the fingers like peacock feathers that fluff and open. That's how that figure evolved.
'The faun proved more difficult. The idea was to make him very masculine, not aggressively so, just sinuous. I remember talking to Doug Jones [who plays both the faun and the pale man] when he first started working on the role and saying, "More Mick Jagger, less David Bowie!" I wanted the faun to have a rock star quality. Everything about the faun and his personality needed to be masculine because you had to pit the female energy of the girl against something monolithic.'
In essence, del Toro is a divided soul, a realist attuned to the strange vibrations of the supernatural, a lapsed Catholic ('not quite the same thing as an atheist') with an interest in sacrifice and redemption who turned down the chance to direct The Chronicles of Narnia because he 'wasn't interested in the lion resurrecting'. Crucially, like the artistic refugees from Franco's Spain who first inspired him, the writer-director considers himself an exile from his home country, Mexico, not least because of the 1997 kidnapping of his father, at the height of a vogue for such ransomed abductions. He was released after 72 days.
'I was 33,' el Toro recalls. 'The perfect age to be crucified! I had lived my life believing two things - that pain should not be sought, but, by the same token, it should never be avoided, because there is a lesson in facing adversity. Having gone through that experience, I can attest, in a non-masochistic way, that pain is a great teacher. I don't relish it, but I learn from it. I always say, even as an ex-Catholic, that God sends the letter, but not the dictionary. You need to forge your own dictionary.'
This willingness to confront pain and to forge his own cinematic dictionary has informed the blend of innocence and brutality that is a trademark of del Toro's phantasmagorical cinema. From the crushing addiction of Cronos, whose ageing anti-hero is reduced to licking blood from the tiled floor of a public lavatory, to the redemptive fantasy of Hellboy, whose titular demon takes an industrial grinder to the horns on his head in a bid to take control of his destiny, del Toro has returned compulsively to these twinned themes. Now in Pan's Labyrinth, which he wrote, directed and produced, he has created a Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema, a masterpiece made entirely on his own terms.
Del Toro is working within the same tradition of cinematic horror that spawned A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven's seminal reinvention of the 'classic dark fairytale', in which Freddy Krueger emerged as an 1980s incarnation of the Big Bad Wolf. 'I think that really is one of the best fairytales of any decade, because Craven understands the roots of those myths,' says del Toro. Pan's Labyrinth is being promoted in America with a classic horror tagline: 'Innocence has a power that evil cannot imagine'.
That power is also self-generating. 'Pan's Labyrinth is a movie about a girl who gives birth to herself into the world she believes in,' del Toro continues. 'At that moment, it doesn't matter if her body lives or dies. And this is something I have experienced. I remember the worst experience of my life, even above the kidnapping of my father, was shooting Mimic [del Toro's first Hollywood feature, in 1997, which was severely compromised by producer interference]. Because what was happening to me and the movie was far more illogical than kidnapping, which is brutal, but at least there are rules. Now when I look at Mimic, what I see is the pain of a deeply flawed creature that could have been so beautiful.'
Pain and beauty, brutality and innocence - once again, del Toro's conversation finds a way back to the central duality of death and rebirth. 'Those things are one and the same,' he says. 'It would be a cliche to say that, because I am a Mexican, I see death in a certain way. But I have seen more than my share of corpses, certainly more than the average First World guy. I worked for months next to a morgue that I had to go through to get to work. I've seen people being shot; I've had guns put to my head; I've seen people burnt alive, stabbed, decapitated ... because Mexico is still a very violent place. So I do think that some of that element in my films comes from a Mexican sensibility.'
Like the heroine of Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro's career now seems to be at a point of rebirth and regeneration. 'Hopefully, this movie will allow me to start a new path,' he says. 'The way I see my craft, and the way I see the stories I tell, has completely changed as a result of this movie. Shooting Pan's Labyrinth was very painful, but it also became a war about me not compromising.
'I gave back my entire salary in order to get the film made the way I wanted it. I probably should have abandoned it the moment the funding fell through the first time, but I stuck with it for almost two-and-a-half years and refused to back down. It's the first time in the six movies I've directed where I've said: I'm doing this one my way, no matter what.
'Financiers ran out on me and everyone involved in my career was saying it was the biggest mistake I could make. But I'm very happy with the result. And for me, nothing will be the same again.'

This week at SFC: Wassup Rockers and End of the Century

2007-03-07T06:39:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Thursday March 8th

WASSUP ROCKERS (Larry Clark/2006/USA/99’) 8:15 pm

+ End of the Century - The Story of the Ramones (2005/Jim Fields&Michael Gramaglia/USA/) 7:30 pm

From the controversial director of Kids, Bully and Ken Park comes a new film about the collision of skateboarding, sex, violence, racism and punk rock on the streets of South Central LA.
Wassup Rockers is a blend of gritty documentary realism and stylish urban drama from acclaimed film-maker Larry Clark. The film follows a pack of teenage Latino misfits who run into trouble when they leave the comfort zone of their tough neighbourhood and roll into unfamiliar territory.
As with his earlier efforts, Clark recruited genuine South Central teens for this portrait of the raw energy of skate culture.

You could think of Larry Clark's "Wassup Rockers" as "Ferris Velasquez's Day Off." In Los Angeles, a group of Latino friends, all about 14, spend a very long day traveling from their homes in South Central to Beverly Hills and back home again, and although they are light-hearted and looking for fun, they don't have Ferris Bueller's good luck. The movie evokes the sense of time unfolding thoughtlessly for kids who have no idea what could happen next.
Clark usually makes movies about teenagers and has a rapport with them that's privileged or creepy, depending on your point of view. His first film was the powerful "Kids" (1995), which launched the acting careers of four first-timers: Rosario Dawson, Chloe Sevigny, Leo Fitzpatrick and Justin Pierce, and the writer-director Harmony Korine. "Bully" (2001) saw how a group dynamic works to drive teenagers toward a murder none of them would have done alone. "Ken Park" (2002) was bold in its frankness about teenage sexuality; a success at Telluride, it was never released commercially in the United States, not because of its content but because, Clark says, a producer never cleared the music rights.
Now comes "Wassup Rockers," containing one and probably two deaths, a lot of tension between Latinos and African Americans, and run-ins with cops and home owners. Perhaps because we hardly meet the first boy who dies and the second is shot offscreen, the movie is not as fraught as it could have been, and indeed is Clark's least harrowing work.
The heroes are mostly of Salvadoran descent, although they are routinely mistaken for Mexican Americans. They come from a poor district; one kid's mother is apparently a lap dancer. But Clark's characters do not carry guns, steal, use drugs or smoke (anything). At 14 years old, you're thinking, let's hope not -- but Clark's subject is often how children get into sex, drugs and violence when they are way too young. These kids don't set out looking for trouble, although it finds them.
The movie opens with a monologue by Jonathan (Jonathan Velasquez), who tells us about his friends; he separates each statement with the phrase "and then ..." He's the one the others look up to, and we meet Kico (Francisco Pedrasa); Spermball (Milton Velasquez), who keeps asking everyone to call him Milton, not Spermball; Porky (Usvaldo Panameno), and two girls, Iris (Iris Zelaya), Jonathan's girlfriend, and Rosalia (Ashley Maldonado), who wants to be everybody's girlfriend.
They have a band, which plays very loudly, and they hang around and tell stories on one another (one kid tried to commit suicide, not very seriously, by drowning himself in the sink). Kico "borrows" a car, and they head in the direction of Beverly Hills High School, but are stopped by cops on bikes. Since they have no license or ID, they abandon the car, but they've made it to Beverly Hills, and now they practice skateboard jumping on the steps of the high school. Having seen countless skateboarding scenes in the movies, I appreciated Clark's realism: They fall or crash, again and again and again, trying to get a trick right.
They meet two rich 90210 girls, Jade (Laura Cellner) and Nikki (Jessica Steinbaum), one of whom gives them her address: "Come over any time." They do. Clark has a good feel for how there is no particular tension between these young teens of different race and class. They're curious and talk openly about their differences. But when the Latinos have to leave suddenly, they begin a tour of upper-class backyards in the hills above Sunset; in one, there's a party going on, and the host is a gay man who tells Jonathan, "You'd be a good model." In another, there's a gun owner who shoots one of them and arranges with the cops to "keep it quiet."
With police looking for them, they're taken in by a rich and drunken woman, whose maid looks out for them while the drunk gives one a bath and is obviously interested in what could happen next, once he's cleaned up.
The long journey home is by bus, rapid transit and foot, and they are tired and scared. The fate of their friend who was shot is left unclear, although he was obviously hit and perhaps killed. The home streets of South Central are not welcoming to them because the black kids are not friendly. But in the world of a Larry Clark film, they've gotten off relatively easy. Despite its horrors, this is his most easygoing movie, in large part because the young actors are at ease, like one another and live with delight.
Clark was an honored photographer before getting into movies in his early 50s. The only subject he feels any passion for is, obviously, the private lives of teenagers. Does that make him a pervert? Look at it this way. Hollywood has a cottage industry in Dead Teenager Movies, all devising formulas in which the young characters die in sudden and colorful ways. Clark listens to them and takes them seriously. His films may be the only truthful ones about some aspects of American adolescence, however we might wish that were not so. "Wassup Rockers," for better and worse, is about lives that might actually be lived.

End of the Century - The Story of the Ramones (2005/Jim Fields&Michael Gramaglia/USA/150’)
In 1974, the New York City music scene was shocked into consciousness by the violently new and raw sound of a band of misfits from Queens, called The Ramones. Playing in a seedy Bowery bar to a small group of fellow struggling musicians, the band struck a chord of disharmony that rocked the foundation of the mid-'70s music scene. This quartet of unlikely rock stars traveled across the country and around the world connecting with the disenfranchised everywhere, while sparking a movement that would resonate with two generations of outcasts across the globe. Although the band never reached the top of the Billboard charts, it managed to endure by maintaining a rigorous touring schedule for 22 years.

This week at SFC: Bread and Roses

2007-01-17T09:56:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Feature film will commence at 8:15 pm this week....

Bread and Roses (Ken Loach/2001/UK/110’)

After surviving a perilous journey from Mexico to the US, Maya (Padilla) enlists the help of her hard-working sister Rosa (Carrillo) to secure a job among other immigrant cleaners with a non-union cleaning agency in a downtown office block. A fated meeting with Sam (Adrien Brody), a committed activist, leads to a guerrilla-style manoeuvre against their employers for standard union benefits. It is a fight which carries the risk of the loss of livelihoods and deportation from the US.
Based on the real life Justice For Janitors campaign in 1990, Ken Loach's first foray into American production (his shooting style remains relatively unaltered) is a typically committed, and politically and socially aware film about ordinary human dignity in the face of corporate might and indifference. As ever, the director draws naturalistic performances from a largely untried cast with Padilla - in her acting debut - revealing the spirit and defiance which characterised the workers' struggle and the plight of those eking out a living in a foreign and often hostile land.

This week at SFC: Black Cat, White Cat

2007-01-10T08:15:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.
Feature film will commence at 8:15 pm this week....
We are back in the back studio!

Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kusturica/Serbo-Croat/1998/124’)

From the acclaimed director of ‘Time of the Gypsies’ and ‘Underground’ this colourful, fast, and farcical comedy of Gypsy life on the Danube develops a wide cast of larger-than-life characters, built around two octagenarian friends and feuding rivals, Grga and Zarije, and their families. One is boss of the garbage dumps, the other is boss of the cement factories, but both have problems with their offspring. Zarije's good-for-nothing son Matko plans a train heist that will finally bring him respect and wealth but is forced to ask help from Grga. He loses all in a double-cross by his partner, the manic, coke-snorting "businessman-patriot" Dadan, who demands that he pay the debt by marrying off his son Zare to Dadan's headstrong sister, Afrodita. Complicating the plot further, the innocent Zare has fallen for comely barmaid Ida, who soon initiates him into the mysteries of love. Frenetically paced and hilariously funny, Black Cat, White Cat builds to its uproarious climax, the arranged wedding of Zare and Afrodita, through a slapstick sequence of wild chases, exuberant parties, fake deaths, skullduggery, double-crosses, mishaps, and pratfalls. Its cinematography, as rich as the action, includes Fellini-esque scenes of pigs eating cars and the obligatory flocks of geese. The rousing sound track of Gypsy music adds to the folklore and fun. Actor Srdan Todorovic as the wild Dadan returns from director Emir Kusturica's earlier somber work, Underground, accompanied by an excellent cast, including many Gypsy non- professionals, who display an uncanny family resembance. A ribald, buoyant comedy.

This week at SFC: Sullivan's Travels

2007-01-03T05:07:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Feature film will commence at 8:15 pm this week....

WE ARE BACK IN THE BACK STUDIO

Preston Sturges was a writer-director the like of which we haven't seen since. He was a well-connected anarchist in a system that frowned on such tendencies - unless they made money. Directors such as Billy Wilder owed a great debt to him.
Sturges's America was cheerfully corrupt, absurd and frequently unaware of its own ridiculousness, and his films were so high on comic dynamism that you could readily forgive the wayward lip service to logic.
His glory days were brief. Within 10 years of his directorial debut, The Great McGinty (1940), he was worn out, and he died bankrupt in 1959. But in his heyday he made half a dozen comedies as subversive as any now, and a good deal funnier. Sullivan's Travels was probably his masterpiece.
It starts off with Joel McCrea's Sullivan, a director of farces who wants to get serious with a script called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (the Coen Brothers were inspired to entitle their movie thus), being berated by studio bosses because he doesn't know the meaning of the poverty that Brother talks about.
So he borrows a tramp's outfit from the wardrobe department andtakes to the road, with a studio bus full of doctors, bodyguards and secretaries a discreet distance behind him. The more he tries to break away from Hollywood, the faster it comes towards him. After picking up a failed actress who says things like "There's nothing like a deep-dish movie for driving you into the open", the rich man's search for poverty ends in a fight with a policeman that has him incarcerated in a chain-gang.
In a key scene, he and the other convicts go to a gospel church hall, where the minister instructs his congregation to welcome those less fortunate. And together everyone roars with laughter at a Disney cartoon. Sullivan may not have found seriousness but at last he has found how valuable true comedy is.
Unconvincing as this may seem - and certainly sentimental - it is an unforgettable moment, perhaps telling us that the high art Sturges despised is worthless if merely inspired by middle-class guilt. Even if you don't appreciate this defining sequence in the film, everything else gels perfectly: the ridiculous studio bus full of hangers-on trying to get Sullivan out of the scrapes he falls into, the butlers who object to the whole enterprise, the ghastly wife who thinks he's dead and lays flowers on his supposed grave like a fashionable zombie.
Is the film serious underneath its hilarity? Perhaps not entirely, since Sturges, like Sullivan, never quite knew how to do it. But the way his assemblage of characters so often seem to realise their own failings at least betokens a sophisticated, perhaps kindly cynic. People have tended to say that Sturges' films were as confused as he was. If that is so, long live abstracted directors, since they tend to see the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be.

This week at SFC: The Proposition

2006-12-12T07:10:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Feature film will commence at 8:30pm this week.

We are back in the back studio (where we belong). Test out our comfy new chairs!

The Proposition (John Hillcoat/Australia/2006/104')

Written by Nick Cave

Starring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Emily Watson

In The Proposition the Australian musician and author Nick Cave (Birthday Party, Bad Seeds, Grinderman etc ) pays homage to the westerns of Sergio Leone and Australia's Seventies film classics.

There was no Australian cinema before the 1970s, just a few cheap flicks for local consumption and movies made by foreign filmmakers, invariably bringing their own stars with them. Then came 'The Last New Wave' (the title of David Stratton's 1980 book on Australian cinema), though there was to be another New Wave in the 1980s with the emergence of a lively cinema in New Zealand. What happened in Australia was less a renaissance than a naissance, and the best of the films were about the birth of a national consciousness, the search for an Australian identity, and transactions the newcomers had with this strange land and the culture of its Aboriginal inhabitants. Many of the best were set in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century: one thinks particularly of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and Bruce Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom.

Nowadays the chief creators of the Australian cinema work in Hollywood, and their successors' films are more concerned with suburban life than with great national issues. Directed by John Hillcoat and scripted by the musician Nick Cave, The Proposition takes us back to the glory days - and a major link to that period resides in the presence in a minor role of David Gulpilil, the country's most famous Aboriginal actor who appeared in a string of Australian classics.

Set in the 1880s in the Queensland outback, it's stylistically influenced by the westerns of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman. But the striking images of isolated buildings, strange rock formations, heat-shimmering desert and curious flora recorded by the French cinematographer Benoit Delhomme evoke the Australian painters Tom Roberts, George Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan rather than Frederic Remington and the chroniclers of the American west. The film begins with a ferocious shoot-out, seen largely from the point of view of some Irish bushrangers and their women besieged by police in a cabin, with shafts of lights coming from the bullet holes that turn the building into a wooden colander. When the battle ends with three outlaws taken prisoner, the English policeman, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), makes an offer to one of them, Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce). Go out into the desert and kill your elder brother Arthur (Danny Huston), or your younger brother, the 14-year-old Mikey, will be hanged on Christmas Day, a mere nine days hence. This is the stark proposition of the title, and the ways in which it is respected or reneged upon defines the film's action.

There is no formal exposition in the film. We learn from various hints that the Burns gang is dominated by the eloquent psychopathic Arthur, that their final outrage was an attack on an isolated homestead and involved rape and murder. Otherwise we are left to gather from their appearances who the people are and what they stand for.

Captain Stanley is a decent enough cop, ruthless but a man of his word, who has apparently come to Australia to better himself. He's determined to protect his genteel wife, Martha (Emily Watson), from the horrors of this world. Evidently a cut above her husband, she's trying to recreate England in this wilderness, with her fancy tea service, an imported Christmas tree, and cotton wool to resemble snow. She lies on her bed, a mail-order catalogue resting on her chest. More active in this direction is Eden Fletcher (David Wenham), an upper-class English landowner who views with contempt all those around him, whether they be the unkempt European settlers in the half-built town of Banyon, the bushrangers or the Aboriginals he wishes to exterminate. 'I will civilise this land,' he declares. Disregarding the deal made by Stanley, whom he controls, he arranges a lethal whipping of the jailed Mikey. This whipping scene has a casual horror about it. The spectators watch the grisly spectacle, oblivious to the swarms of flies that gather on their backs, and the lash ends up as if dipped in a bucket of blood.

Out in the desert, the Burns brothers, wild colonial boys - presumably transported Irish convicts or descendants of convicts - seem at one with the land. Its beauty and implacability evidently appeal to their nature. Arthur, a charismatic madman in the manner of the outlaws of the American frontier, waxes poetic as he watches the sun set each night over the desert; to him it's a premonition of death, the ultimate Celtic Twilight. The Burns brothers respect the Aboriginals and do not wish to tame the land. But on his journey to kill his brother, Charlie is nearly killed by aggressive Aborigines. This happens after a strange, violent encounter with a boozy, gentlemanly expatriate adventurer (John Hurt reprising his drunken cynic from Heaven's Gate).

The Proposition is both a realistic action movie and a forceful fable about the birth of a nation.

This week at SFC: I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth

2006-12-06T07:58:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Feature film will commence at 8:15pm.

Earlier this year as part of our mini Cuban film series we screened Soy Cuba -- this week we screen a recent documentary about the making of that film.

Thursday December 7th

I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth (Vicente Ferraz/Brazil/2004/Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, English subtitles/90')

In 1962, a team of Soviet cineastes and intellectuals, led by the eminent director Mikhail Kalatozov and including the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, traveled to Cuba to make an epic film about that country's recent revolution. After two years of collaboration with local actors, writers and technicians, they produced “I Am Cuba” (Soy Cuba) which displeased both the Cuban public and the Soviet authorities. The movie languished in obscurity until 1995, when Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese helped bring it to the attention of international western audiences. By then, in the wake of Communism's collapse, it could be hailed as a lost classic of a strange, fraught historical moment - a "Bolshevik hallucination," in the words of the film critic J. Hoberman.

"I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth" is a 2004 documentary by Vicente Ferraz, a Brazilian filmmaker, who digs into the past to illuminate Kalatozov's extraordinary blend of formal bravura and revolutionary didacticism. Interspersing shots from the original film - many of which are justly famous for their power and complexity - with interviews, Mr. Ferraz has produced a welcome piece of historical explication.

Mr. Kalatozov's film, whose gloriously overwrought look owes much to the cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, was a product both of Castro's revolution and Khrushchev's thaw. The Cubans who worked on it were happy to be involved in such a sophisticated production, while the Russians were filled with curiosity, occasionally tinged with condescension, about this new, tropical member of the Socialist fraternity of nations. The movie, a hugely ambitious and elaborate project combining four main story lines, was conceived as a grand poem of the revolution.

And it often felt that way as it was being made. Mr. Ferraz's interview subjects are full of fond reminiscences of the process. But their view of the product largely reflects the Cuban response when the film was shown there in the 1960's, and ridiculed in the press for its stylistic excesses and lack of realism. In the Soviet Union, it was officially disowned partly because its images of the Westernized decadence of Cuba before Castro seemed dangerously alluring. It is one of the ironies of modern history that the seductiveness of "I Am Cuba" could only be appreciated after the crumbling of the ideology that sponsored it. The film and its fate, deftly explored by Mr. Ferraz's archaeological excavation, represent one of the chief paradoxes of Socialism, which inspired so much idealism and inspiration and at the same time set about to crush and discard so much of what it inspired.

This week at SFC: Walking on a Sea of Glass

2006-11-15T05:30:00.000-04:00

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Feature film will commence at 8:15pm.

(ERROL WILLIAMS/DOCU/BERMUDA/2003/95’)

Kingsley Tweed, carpenter, preacher, social and political activist, was one of the leaders of the Theatre Boycott that lead to the desegregation of Bermuda in 1959. He fled the island shortly after, living abroad for more than forty years. He returned to Bermuda in 2003, a year after the release of the documentary "When Voices Rise" (also directed by Errol Williams.)...which detailed the events of the boycott. This film, "Walking on a Sea of Glass", reveals a life of extraordinary commitment to social justice, often at great personal sacrifice. It is a story of great emotional impact and was recently screened at the Carifesta Film Festival.

This week at SFC: Heading South

2006-11-07T05:32:00.000-04:00

STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to be back from its hiatus – the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, Carifesta, European Film Festival and Galvanize are all now over (however make sure you check the programme for the new Latin American Film Festival starting today at Movie Towne). Trinidad has gone film fest mad it seems – lets hope that this leads to a new crop of homegrown filmmaking. STUDIOFILMCLUB will continue its weekly Thursday screenings – this will be our 151st – presenting a mix of new and old films from around the globe.

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Feature film will commence at 8:30pm.

Thursday ovember 9th

This is a new film set in 1970’s Haiti which is adapted from the writings of Danny Laferriere, who cites 'sexuality as an instrument of political, social or economic power' as his prime concerns. Please read the piece below from the Haitian website:Haiti Xchange

HEADING SOUTH (Laurent Cantet/2006/France/108’)

Heading South, a film of many complexities By Tequila Minsky for HaitiXchange

The film with a buzz about sex tourism is bound to wake up even the most sleepy of conversations this summer but Heading South –Vers Le Sud in French–is more than just about sex tourism. Those looking for sex on screen have been disappointed.

A work where many textures exist at once, this film has different meanings to different people. Proven to be, in part, a mirror to viewers who see what they want to see in it, it is a film about sexuality and desire, politics, some imperialist attitude, dictatorship, violence, social misery for some, sexual misery for others.

Here’s a narrative film that takes place in Haiti, which is not a vodou exploitation movie ala I Walked with a Zombie, or The Serpent and the Rainbow. The last narrative film of this caliber was commercially released over 10 years ago, Raoul Peck’s The Man By The Shore. (Three years ago Jonathan Demme’s documentary on Jean Dominique, The Agronomist, was distributed internationally).

Heading South is in English, French and Haitian Creole with English subtitles.

French director Laurent Cantet brings the viewer to a Haiti in the ‘70’s under dictator Baby Doc Duvalier. Even before the viewer/tourist and a main character, Brenda, are met at the airport, the pressure for ordinary Haitians living in that environment is presented in an ominous suggestive scene that resonates throughout the film.

In gender role reversal, women find an environment where they are pampered as foreign tourists at a Haitian beach resort and serviced as women. (Not that far from Stella getting her groove back in Jamaica). “I didn’t believe women did this,” one Haitian man naively confessed after seeing the film, the women in his party exchanging chuckles.

“These men were prostitutes,” he further commented, “You see the exchange of cash and presents.”

Legba, the main male character explains to his mother where the money comes from that he’s giving her by saying, “I’m working.” Survival is an on-going current.

On seeing the film, one European woman voiced that the North American women’s search for sexual gratification was pathetic. Other women thought it was right-on even while acknowledging how class and American money measure into these relations. Yes, this romancing was paid for, but writer Dany Laferriere, whose short stories the film was based on, prefers to talk about “love tourism” when everybody gets something out of the exchanges. Legba, the Haitian lead, finds the resort a respite from his harsh life.

The film goes beyond just the waterside/bedroom antics. Cocooned in the beach resort, many tourists live in their own bubble, immune to the Haitian realities. One scene in a nearby town, fully illustrates the locals’ realities: the Haitian teens banter and tease each other in a life outside of the resort and then the mood changes; a local strong arm policeman refuses to pay pennies to a kid selling a soda, kicking his bottle-filled cooler sending a clatter of bottles sprawling onto the ground. The locals have no personal control; there is a looming atmosphere of menace. Only when one of the tourist women ventures onto the city streets does she gain the slightest awareness of a Haitian reality outside of her beach life.

The character-driven film focuses on three white women tourists, Ellen, Brenda and Sue, (Charlotte Rampling Karen Young, Louise Portal), one of their young man, Legba, (locally cast Haitian non-actor Menothy Cesar) and the Haitian resort/restaurant manager, Albert (Haitian non-actor Lys Ambroise). The viewer learns in part where the women and Haitian patriot Albert are coming from in their confessional soliloquies, which they address to themselves and the audience. As for 18-year-old Legba, the film, as a whole, is his story. Each character is a believable archetype even to the child, Eddy, who imitates and emulates Legba and the other resort boys; he’s in training. None the less, he has a mind of his own.

Haitian born and raised Sherley Cooney identified with a very authentic character who had a brief yet important appearance in the film, Legba’s former Haitian girlfriend now forced-to-be mistress to a colonel. Cooney commented, “The Haitian reality was so real to me it gave me goose bumps.” She plans to see it a second time. The film is evocative, provoking, and reflects history and explores many Haitian realities.

How did this film come to be?

Director Laurent Cantet while visiting Haiti on a vacation in 2002 had no intent to make a film about Haiti. He was walking in Port-au-Prince and entered a bookshop and saw La Chair du Maitre by Dany Laferriere on a table, which he bought. “I had heard about Dany, but hadn't read any of his books,” he said. “I read the first two pages and knew that I was going to like it. The same night, I was flying back to Paris. I opened the book before taking off, and couldn't close it before landing in Paris the following morning.” He went to a bookshop close to his house and bought all the books he found.

Though the film is based on three short stories, the director was inspired by situations and feelings from the whole of Laferriere’s works.

It took two and a half months in Port-au-Prince to find the lead, non-actor Ménothy Cesar, who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival for his performance. Llys Ambroise, playing Albert, is also from Port-au-Prince and was cast without previous acting experience. Most of the supporting actors are members of the Haitian community of Las Terrenas, the little town where the film was shot in the Samana area of the Dominican Republic.

“We were supposed to shoot in 2004, but it was the moment Aristide fled the country,” Cantet explains. The shooting was rescheduled and it took seven weeks, the majority of the film shot in the Dominican Republic; nine days were shot in Port-au-Prince.

Cantet adds, “Even one year later, it was difficult to convince the insurance company to insure the film (which explains why it wasn’t primarily shot in Haiti). Then, we had to adapt ourselves to the situation (in Haiti). Locations I had scouted during my long stay in Port-au-Prince were too dangerous and I had to find new locations, which sometimes changed two hours before shooting. The most interesting part of the work was precisely that: adapt the shooting to the reality.”

Cantet acknowledges what the actors brought to the film, “They know more things about the Haitian reality than I do, and I was interested by giving them the opportunity to change things with me. It was a real meeting between us, often more exciting than working with professional actors.” And successful, the film and the actors feel authentic.

Though the story is based on Laferriere’s writings, the author left the interpretation up to the director and provided consultation when needed. Writer Dany Laferriere also wrote the screenplay for the 2004 film On the Verge of a Fever, based on his book, Dining With the Dictator. He wrote How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, made into a movie in 1989, and wrote and directed the comedy, How to Conquer America (2004).

The director, Laurent Cantet, has also directed the films Human Resources and Time Out.

Film Club Tabanca

2006-10-30T08:35:00.000-04:00

When oh when will my thursdays have meaning again?
Sigh...

European Film Festival Round-up and Scorsese's Departed

2006-10-25T13:49:00.000-04:00

This year marks a decade since the European missions in Trinidad first came together to present the European Film Festival, which ended yesterday after a three week run. The first festival, if my ever-increasingly faulty memory serves, was held at the old Deluxe cinema in Port of Spain (now the swanky Zen nightclub) and screenings were free of charge. Many of the films were also of the arthouse or experimental type (including some classics), and audiences were small. Ten years on and the festival finds itself at the upscale, American-style Movietowne multiplex. It's now $15 per film, the films are mainstream and contemporary, and the audiences are bigger than ever.

This year I saw seven films--one quarter of the 28 on offer. If that's a representative enough number by which to judge the festival as a whole (and I don't see why it isn't) then I think it fair to say that the festival was a good, though by no means great reflection of current European cinema. Most of the films were just that, good but not great, competent without really taking any risks, artistically or thematically.There was the chatty French comedy examining the minutiae of bourgeois life (is it ethical to kill mites in your kitchen is about as pressing a problem these people seem to have); the enjoyable but formulaic Dutch one about Moroccan immigrants (traditional patriarch, long-suffering wife, rebel daughter, confused son, etc); the Italian drama crammed full of religious symbols and abstract theological discourse (surely they don't go around quoting St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas all day in Italy?).

Two films stood out. The animated French feature Les Triplettes de Belleville (or Belleville Rendezvous) is a strange, wondrous, original and very funny creation by Sylvain Chomet, deeply satisfying on a host of levels and worth multiple viewings. Then there was Perry Ogden's low-budget, mini-DV Pavee Lackeen: The Traveller Girl, a blend of documentary and fiction, about Ireland's marginalised, itinerant Traveller community. This was the sobering note on which the festival ended last night, and whatever else the slightly stunned and subdued audience, obviously disturbed out of their comfort zones, may have thought of it (Thank God that's not my life? That wasn't exactly what I had in mind for an evening at the cinema?) I couldn't help but think that this is precisely the sort of cinema we here should be concerning ourselves with making.

Overall, then, the European Film Festival continues to give us by and large light fare for our consumption. Nothing wrong with this--the weakest film was probably better than your average piece of Hollywood nonsense, and the audiences seem generally pleased with what's on offer anyway--but if you're looking for something more substantial, you'd be better off looking elsewhere (like StudioFilmClub, for example). Oh, and if you're looking for British films, you should probably look elsewhere as well. Inexplicably there was only one British film at the festival this year, the Constant Gardener, a Hollywood film. I know Britain doesn't think much about being a part of Europe, but does that attitude have to extend to the film festival as well?

****

Also saw the new Martin Scorsese, the Departed, recently. It's been touted as a stunning return to form for the man, his best since (fill in the blank with whatever film you think was his last masterpiece). I was fairly underwhelmed by it. Apart from a fantastic opening sequence (thereby fulfilling half of Who drummer Keith Moon's declaration that it's your entrance and exit that matter most, it doesn't really matter what goes on inbetween), apart from the opening, and a few nice stylistic touches here and there, the Departed is overplotted and desperate, packed with so many Hollywood A-listers jostling for the attention of a guy named Oscar. At times the film feels, if not like Scorsese consciously parodying himself, then like a film not to be taken all that seriously: the trite final shot basically confirms this. There's also a terribly anachronistic scene in a porn movie theatre that's obviously meant as a nod to Taxi Driver. But what a far cry Taxi Driver--which Scorsese made exactly 30 years ago and which was screened at SFC--is from this film! Di Caprio is no De Niro. And Scorsese now is not the Scorsese he was then. But the soundtrack is killer.

Galvanize is on

2006-09-16T15:33:00.000-04:00

StudioFilmClub is taking a break for a few weeks, but Galvanize 2006 is in full swing. Check the Galvanize website for information on this groundbreaking contemporary arts programme, including a schedule of events, a map of Galvanize locations, and notes on the nine "Visibly Absent" artists' projects and other Galvanize events. Galvanize also has a Flickr photoset.