Highlights of the 2007 programme include:
François Truffaut’s life in film began in the darkened cinemas of Paris where he found respite from an unhappy
childhood and discovered the power of the moving image. His enthusiasm for the movies brought him to the attention
of critic André Bazin, who invited him to write for Cahiers du Cinéma where Truffaut led the attack on conventional
French cinema. Truffaut’s critical writing led to the development of the auteur theory, and along with fellow
crtic-turned-filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer, Truffaut formed the
core of the French Nouvelle Vague. In the 60s and 70s, François Truffaut was synonymous with the French cinema,
a pre-eminent light on the world stage. But through the vagaries of modern film distribution, many of these
extraordinary works have fallen into obscurity. This package comprises his two best-known films – his debut The 400 Blows (1959)
and Jules and Jim (1962) – as well as a lesser-known of his early films and his two final films from the early ‘80s before
an untimely death by brain tumour. Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) is one of the most important American filmmakers of the postwar period. Fuller’s
tabloid expressionism seems too singular to imitate, but it exerted a profound influence on countless directors.
He was revered by Godard, who dedicated Made in the USA to "Nick [Ray] and Samuel, who taught me respect for image
and sound" and who featured Fuller in a legendary cameo in Pierrot le fou (screened by us last year); deified by
Wenders, who deployed Fuller’s iconic cigar-chomping mug as "The American" in The American Friend and used his
aged debility as thematic notation in The End of Violence; and worshipped by directors as disparate as Warhol
and Tarantino, Fassbinder and Spielberg, Jarmusch and Scorsese. Stung by his
experience on two films — one commissioned then unreleased (White Dog), the other his dream project, drastically
cut for commercial viability (The Big Red One) — and after a prolonged Hollywood hiatus during which he worked
in television, Fuller exiled himself to Europe. Long lionized in France and England — Cahiers du cinéma pronounced
him one of the three greatest postwar American directors (with Welles and Kazan) and the British academic
journals exalted his work with endless exegesis — Fuller lived in Paris for many of his last years, and made
three films, one each in Germany, France, and Portugal. The distracted or denatured quality of these
final films confirms that America remained Fuller’s passion and abiding theme — from his eccentric debut
through the Cold War masterpieces of the fifties and onwards. Brazilian cinema burst onto international screens in the 1960s and 1970s with something new called
Cinema Novo. Reacting against a Hollywood-dominated domestic studio system that produced escapist entertainment,
filmmakers such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha strove to create works that would express an
authentic Brazilian voice and identity. The results were both socially and artistically complex, a Brazilian
brand of modernism (and in the case of Glauber Rocha, with hindsight we can say postmodernism). Cinema Novo
variously incorporated the “tropicalist” indigenous and African-derived traditions, rhythms, and colors of
Bahia — the desperately parched but culturally rich Northeast — with the most sophisticated (often witty)
analysis of class relations and urban politics. Like the concurrent French New Wave and neorealism before it,
Cinema Novo was the product of critics/theoreticians turned filmmakers, and vice versa. Moreover, while
making art dealing with issues of poverty, social instability, and disenfranchisement, Brazilian filmmakers
had to cope with those very frightening realities themselves. The repressive effects of the so-called April
Fool’s Day coup of 1964 are reflected both on the screen and in the lives of filmmakers, including Glauber
Rocha, who went into exile. 1950s West German films revisiting the final days of the war in Europe. 16mm prints provided by the Goethe-Institut. Box office hits, award winners, daring genre-benders: a range of nice 35mm prints from the past few years,
made available by the French Embassy. The John O'Shea classic Runaway (1964) and a package of Whanau short films, thanks to the NZ Film Commission and
NZ Film Archive. The best French film of all time, according to the French Film Academy, and a mysterious film from 1960s
Japan – selected by members’ voting last year. A couple of 1940s thrillers and a John Lennon doco, chosen from an odd assortment of English-language 16mm prints
purchased by the Federation
of Film Societies a few years back. We wanted a bit more cultural variety in this year’s programme, so picked a recent Canadian/Inuit
film and Colombian film from distributor’s DVD collections. |
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