This week at SFC:Persepolis

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


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

THURSDAY 17th July, 8:15pm

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

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

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

This week at SFC:The Science of Sleep

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



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

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


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



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

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

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

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

THURSDAY 26th June 2008

first film 7:30pm SHARP

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

This week at SFC:Memories of Underdevelopment

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


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

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


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

by Derek Malcolm


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week at SFC:Killer of Sheep

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



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

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

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


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

preceded by short films by Charles Burnett


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week at SFC: Dark City

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.


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 P¿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

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 - Touki Bouki-The Journey of the Hyena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 facade 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

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

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.