BICO - Aki Kaurismäki / UNE HISTOIRE DE VENT - Joris Ivens

Dienstag 01.10.2013
20.30 Uhr
vorgestellt von Cristóvão Abreu dos Reis und Jan Künemund

BICO | Episode aus "Visions of Europe" | FI/PT 2004 | 5 min | Produktion, Regie, Buch, Montage: Aki Kaurismäki | Kamera: Timo Salminen | Musik: Abel Alves | Ton: Jouko Lumme


"Aki Kaurismäki's visually most magnificent film with breathtaking views from the snowy mountains of Northern Portugal. The road was built to the village of Bico in the 1970s, and it took the young people away. There is a parallel to Las Hurdes, but there is no parody in Aki's film. It is a dignified account of the traditional way of life (cow rearing, sheep raising) facing modernity. Fine accordeon music by Abel Alves. The closest parallel to this picture is Ingmar Bergman's second documentary of his home island, Fårödokument 1979. A richly beautiful, finely nuanced, gorgeously photochemical print." 
[Antti Alanen]

"Despite officially repping his native Finland, Aki Kaurismaki cops out with a dry, cursory mini-doc about the small Portuguese mountain town of Bico."
[Variety]

UNE HISTOIRE DE VENT | FR 1988 | Produktion: Capi Film, La SEPT | Regie und Buch: Joris Ivens, Marceline Loridan | Kamera: Thierry Arbogast, Jacques Loiseleux | Schnitt: Geneviève Louveau | Musik: Michel Portal | Ton: Jean Umansky | Premiere: 9.9.1988, Filmfestival Venedig 


Venedig 1988: Goldener Löwe (für das Lebenswerk)
1989: Félix (Eurpäische Filmakademie)
Florenz 1988: Großer Preis des französischen Kinos
Paris 1988: Nationaler Preis des französischen Kinos
Moskau 1989: FIPRESCI-Preis
Sao Paulo 1989: Hauptpreis
 
"This is an unusually personal account of his lyrical rather than his political obsessions, largely directed by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, his wife and collaborator since the Vietnam films. It tells the story of an elderly director who wants to film the wind in the Mongolian desert and, while waiting on the edge of a dune, dreams of the life that has brought him here. Childhood reminiscence is mixed with fantasies of mythical Chinese characters, and footage of the frail Ivens meeting children and artists. A most engaging sequence shows him in long negotiations with the management of the museum that holds the Terracotta Army. Unable to film in the way he wants, his assistants buy as many souvenir reproductions of the figures as they can, and the scene is played out among these instead, with the addition of a troupe of dancers in foam Terracotta army costumes."
[Ian Mundell / Senses of Cinema]

"At a press conference the other day, Miss Loridan said that she and Ivens were working in a 'no man's land between Lumiere and Melies,' between the two great early film makers who defined realism and fantasy. There is no better description of the place they map out beautifully in 'A Tale of the Wind.'"
[Caryn James: A Tale of the Wind]  

"Die Masken, die Mauern, die Statuen: Ivens ist unfrei in diesem Land, gefangen in seinem Traum von China. Seit sechzig Jahren hat er Dokumentarfilme gedreht, darunter einige der besten, die es überhaupt gibt: über Brücken, Fabriken, Bergwerke, den Regen, den Wind, den Krieg. „Eine Geschichte über den Wind“ ist nur ein Fernsehfeuilleton. Überall Reminiszenzen: an Méliès, an Eisenstein, an sich selbst. Das ist rührend und schön, aber auch harmlos. Ein Film über China sei dazu verurteilt, schon nach einem Jahr veraltet zu sein, sagt Ivens. Wie wahr. Viel zu spät kommt dieser Film in unsere Kinos. Oder viel zu früh."
[Andreas Kilb: Der alte Mann und der Wind]

Biografie Joris Ivens

"The Dutch film maker Joris Ivens (1898-1989) was one of the founding fathers of documentary film. The career of this eternal traveller spanned over sixty years, from his first film in the twenties to his last, finished at the age of ninety. Among Ivens's friends and collaborators were leading filmmakers and actors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Chaplin, Milestone, Capra, Losey, Flaherty, Grierson, De Santis, the Taviani brothers, Signoret, Montand and Marker.
In his early years Joris Ivens was a prominent figure in the international film avant-garde. From the thirties onwards he became, according to American film historian Robert Sklar, 'the most important political filmmaker of the decade, probably of the century'. His films on Soviet socialism, the Spanish Civil War, the Indonesian struggle for independence, the Vietnam-war and the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, make him a subject of controversy in any debate on the relationship between art and propaganda."
[Hans Schoots: Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens]

THE HOUSES THAT ARE LEFT - Shelly Silver

Dienstag 24.9.2013
20.30 Uhr
vorgestellt von James Bews

USA 1991 | 51 min | Regie, Buch, Kamera, Schnitt: Shelly Silver | Kamera: John Kraus, Kim Higgins | DarstellerInnen: Judy Blazer, Maggie Low, Kate Valk , Quinn Raymond, Bill Raymond, Doug Barron, Larry Maxwell, Sam Coppola, Isa Thomas | Musik: Roy Nathanson, Curtis Fowlkes, E.J. Rodriguez

"The Houses That Are Left is a story of mortality, friendship, revenge, murder and the supernatural, as two friends come together to try to figure out how to live, while being besieged by malignant messages from the dead. While the living are rendered passive by their fear that something bad could happen to them, the dead, who no long can have anything happen to them at all, strive to regain their ability to act through the only tool available to them, their television.

Juxtaposing black-and-white film with color video, and fusing narrative elements of drama, comedy and documentary, Silver provides a structure that allows for a plurality of voices to speak: two women who were childhood friends, people on the street who are interviewed for "market research," and the observations of dead people who watch the living on television monitors. Truth and fiction are blurred as the dead communicate with the living and real people are interviewed by fictional characters."

[Shelly Silver]

TCHOUPITOULAS - Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross

Dienstag 17.5.2013
20.30 Uhr
vorgestellt von James Bews

USA 2012 | 80 min | Regie, Buch, Kamera, Schnitt: Bill Ross IV, Turner Ross | Protagonisten: William Zanders, Bryan Zanders, Kantrel Sanders | Musik: Casey Wayne McAllister |

" “Tchoupitoulas,” a heady hybrid of documentary and dream, is a movie by and about brothers. The directors, Bill and Turner Ross, follow William, Bryan and Kentrell Zanders (along with their dog, Buttercup) along the bustling New Orleans street that gives the movie its name. The boys — William, the youngest, is perched on the edge of adolescence; Bryan and Kentrell are in their teens — set off for a night of wandering that has overtones of an archetypal quest. The last ferry home across the Mississippi leaves at midnight, and if they miss it they risk being trapped in a world of dangerous and alluring enchantments.

Though the film takes place over a single night, it was shot over nine months, on repeated forays into the city. The smeary, hand-held cinematography sometimes turns the streetlamps and headlights into abstract compositions, but the cameras also capture the sensory abundance and kinetic rhythms of a place that pulses with life.

And with music, of course. Even more than the carefully playlisted HBO series “Treme,” “Tchoupitoulas” samples the wild variety of New Orleans sounds. You hear hip-hop beats and marching band brass, nightclub jazz bands and street musicians playing guitars, accordions, fiddles, saws and their own knees. William receives flute lessons from a woman with angel wings and a feathery halo. Strippers relaxing backstage break into the Mardi Gras staple “Iko Iko.” The burlesque artist Perle Noire performs with furious athleticism. Drag queens strut, drunks stumble in the street and an oyster shucker turns his craft into a form of risqué culinary theater.

The image of New Orleans as a caldron of night life and music is hardly a new one, and at times “Tchoupitoulas” has the feeling of a tourist-board montage, beckoning travelers with visions of nonstop revelry. But the Zanders brothers come from Algiers, which is not very far away, and the real heart of the movie lies in their capacity to be intrigued by their own hometown, and also in their contentious, loving rapport.

William is the voice of the film, partly because he has a natural philosophical bent and partly because he likes to talk. In voice-overs he muses on his future dreams and prophecies in the Book of Revelation, while with his brothers he chatters on about everything from Michael Jackson to the predatory habits of bears. When he is criticized for whining too much — not an unfair point — William counters that “girls like men that have feelings.”

“Tonight we became men,” Kentrell declares toward the end of their adventure, and while that might be overstating it, “Tchoupitoulas” does explore the border between innocence and experience. It is alive with the risk and curiosity of youth, and unapologetic in insisting that the pursuit of fun can be a profound and transformative experience. "

[A.O. Scott, The New York Times]

SAISONBEGINN

Dienstag 02.09.2013

20.30 Uhr

Herz Frank: Ten Minutes Older (1978)

Liebe FilmclubberInnen, Ex-FilmclubberInnen und FilmclubberInnen in spe,

nach längerer Sommerpause und Filmclub-Light Exkursen beginnt am Dienstag, den 3. September um 20.30 Uhr im Sputnik Kino unsere neue Saison, und wir würden uns freuen auch wieder neue Gesichter zu sehen.

Entgegen der üblichen Gepflogenheiten gibt es zum Neustart im September eine kleine Reihe von vier ethnografischer Filme im weitesten Sinne:

Zum Auftakt zeigen wir am 3. September CHRONIQUE D'UNE ÉTÉ von Jean Rouche und Edgar Morin, der als einer der einflußreichsten Entwürfe des cinéma- vérité gilt. Bestehend weitgehend aus Interviews mit Pariserinnen und Parisern im Sommer des Jahres 1960, die mit der einfachen und komplizierten Frage "Sind Sie glücklich?" ansetzen, strickt der Film eine beeindruckende Gegenwartsdiagnose der französischen Gesellschaft.

Den zweiten Termin am 10. September bestreiten zwei Filme Luis Buñuels: LAS HURDES: TIERRA SIN PAN von 1933 über die gleichnamige spanische Region und LOS OLVIDADOS (1950) über eine Gruppe von Kindern in einem Slum der mexikanischen Hauptstadt. Die in ihrer Beschäftigung mit moderner Armut thematisch eng verwandten Filme verkomplizieren das Verhältnis Surrealismus/Realismus und die Frage nach der Fantasie als Mittel der Wahrheitsfindung bis heute nachhaltig.

Am 17. September folgt TCHOUPITOULAS. Ein Dokumentarfilm der Ross-Brüder aus dem Jahr 2012, der drei Jungs und ihrem Hund bei ihrem nächtlichen Treiben durch Karaokebars, Straßenkonzerte und den verlassenen Hafen von New Orleans folgt. Unheimlich eindrucksvolle Bilder, philosophische Fragmente eines Achtjährigen und die immerwährende Frage der Grenze zwischen Inszenierung und Dokumentation.

Den Abschluss am 24. September bilden zwei Filme der New Yorker Künstlerin und Filmemacherin Shelly Silver. Der Kurzfilm WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR (2004) zeigt die fotografischen Begegnungen der Künstlerin mit Menschen, die sich in der Öffentlichkeit fotografieren und dabei etwas von sich selbst preisgeben wollen. Außerdem wollen wir IN COMPLETE WORLD (2008) beziehungsweise THE HOUSES THAT ARE LEFT (1991) sehen; zwei Filme, die den Blick auf New YorkerInnen und deren Verhältnis zu ihrer Stadt und ihrem Land richten.

Ansonsten soll aber, was das grundsätzliche Prozedere des Filmclubs betrifft, alles beim Alten bleiben:

Wir treffen uns einmal die Woche, sehen zusammen einen Film, diskutieren ihn im Anschluss, und überlegen was wir als nächstes sehen. Es steht allen frei einen Film vorzuschlagen und willkommen sind alle, die Interesse haben.

Wir würden uns sehr freuen, Euch zu unserem Neustart begrüßen zu können. Der Eintritt ist natürlich – wie immer – kostenlos!

Viele Grüße,
Euer Filmclub