Fedor Sendak
Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
SUNDAY DECEMBER 21st
20:30
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR(1959)
Directed by Alain Resnais
90 minutes
In French with English subtitles
One of the most touching films ever made, and one of the most philosophical ones also. Where Hollywood incessantly makes bombastic films about the end of the world or trite love stories. here is a film about love and asks the question: what is transferred when one person loves another? And what about ones past...how much is the past present within a person? And how much of that past can really be communicated to another?
This is the masterpiece that initiated the whole New Wave movement in France and which Godard described as \"Faulkner meets Stravinsky.\" Its a film that broke the ice in how to put a movie together- a film doesn\'t have to necessarily follow a rigid chronological plot, it can also be about how we really experience the world around us....it can explore subjectivity and it can also reflect upon the passage of time or how our memory works.
In this film a French actress and a Japanese architect meet in the ruins of bombed-out Hiroshima, and they have an affair. Director Alain Resnais shifts effortlessly between the present and the past- each of them have very different scars left by the war. It is a haunting story written by the legendary Marguerite Duras, who was nominated for an academy award for this script.
\"Hiroshima Mon Amour is equally beautiful and baffling. The challenge of the film is its narrative structure, which fluidly blends past and present through bursts of flashback. You might say that the form of the film is a cinematic attempt at capturing the mechanism of memory at work. Marguerite Duras\' screenplay is chillingly spare, but a subtle beauty, Sacha Vierny\'s cinematography, with all its graceful tracking shots is the work of a master, and Emanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada, the handsomely paired couple at the center are played with tenderness and sympathy, and eventually a bitter edge. Alain Resnais pulls them all together for a film that is something of a revolution.\"
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22:00
GAUDI (1984)
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara
70 minutes
In Japanese /Spanish with English subtitles
A visual documentary with very few words, just flowing images, by the great Japanese director Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes, The face of another).
The cinematography of this documentary is beautiful, and shows us the buildings from afar, and up close in exquisite detail. Mercifully, the film is almost entirely free of taking-head commentary, and there is no narration to distract the viewer from the bizarre and beautiful subject matter. The interiors are as fantastic and surreal-looking as the exteriors. They must be seen to be believed. A haunting musical score by Takemitsu nicely compliments the eerie beauty of the buildings.
SUNDAY DECEMBER 21
CINEMA DERIVE
OVERTOOM 301
20:30 Membership 4 Euros for the evening
Amsterdam, NL
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