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Thursday, August 28, 2008

This week at SFC El Violin

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.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

This week at SFC: Broadway Danny Rose

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.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

This week at SFC: Pixote

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.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

This Week at SFC: Near Dark

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 7th August 2008

STUDIOFILMCLUB is pleased to be screening our first Vampire Western, Kathryn (Point Blank) Bigelow's cult horror thriller NEAR DARK


7:3o pm

Part 3 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

NEAR DARK (Kathryn Bigelow/USA/1987/94')

A full-blooded vampire movie which gives the well-worn mythology a much-needed transfusion by stripping away the Gothic trappings and concentrating instead on a pack of nocturnal nomads who roam the sun-parched farmlands of the modern Midwest. Kissed by a pale, mysterious girl from out of town, it soon dawns on farmboy Caleb that Mae's love-bite has infected him with a burning desire - for blood. Subsequently snatched by Mae's vagabond pals, Caleb is gradually seduced by their exciting night-life. So, despite his reluctance to make a 'kill', Caleb is soon caught between his blood sister and his blood relatives - father and younger sister - who are in hot pursuit. Western iconography, noir-ish lighting, and visceral horror are fused with an affecting love story in this stylish 'Vampire Western', which is driven forward at a scorching pace, a subtle study in the seductiveness of evil and a terrifying ride to the edge of darkness.

Kathryn Bigelow

A talented artist, Kathryn Bigelow spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in a vault, where she made art and waited to be criticized by people like Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag. She later graduated from Columbia's Film School. She was also a member of the British avant-garde cultural group, Art and Language. Kathryn is the only child of the manager of a paint factory and a librarian. Her films include The Loveless, Blue Steel, Point Blank, Strange Days, K-19 and the music video for the New Order song, "Touched by the Hand of God".

"If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It's irrelevant who or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either respond to it or you don't. There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible. It is."

[About her 1995 film, "Strange Days"] "If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don't like what you see, you can't fault the mirror. It's a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don't forget it when the lights come up. "Strange Days" is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the LA riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that. I was part of the cleanup afterwards, so I was very aware of the environment. I mean, it really affected me. It was etched indelibly on my psyche. So obviously some of the imagery came from that. I don't like violence. I am very interested, however, in truth. And violence is a fact of our lives, a part of the social context in which we live. But other elements of the movie are love and hope and redemption. Our main character throws up after seeing this hideous experience. The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It's not that I condone violence. I don't. It's an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable."