Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle as we co-present Squeaky Wheel’s summer film series entitled Three Storms for Summer Eves. We continue with Renée Green’s Endless Dreams and Water Between [2009].
Screening Date: Wednesday, August 14th, 2019 | 7:00pm
Specifications: 2009 / 70 minutes / English / Color
Director(s): Renée Green
Tickets:$7.00 General Admission / $5.00 for Squeaky Members / Free for ArtsAccess pass holders
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
Market Arcade Complex (first floor) 617 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14203
Synopsis
Courtesy of website:
Renée Green’s Endless Dreams and Water Between is a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is woven with the physical locations they inhabit: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. Connected through ruminations on the 17th century author George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), the characters’ reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space.
Professor Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought.
Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals.
Since her arrival at MIT in 2011, Green has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy; Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, Toronto, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. In addition, her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the following institutions: Whitney Museum, New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Museum der Moderner, Salzburg , and many others.
In 2014, Duke University Press published Other Planes of There: Selected Writings.
Ongoing Becomings, a survey exhibition of 20 years of her work was organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; in 2010, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, a survey exhibition highlighting her time-based work was produced in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. In 2008, Le rêve de l’artiste et du spectateur, a retrospective of Green’s films took place at the Jeu de Paume, in Paris.
Other selected solo exhibitions venues include the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Portikus, Frankfurt; Centro Cultural de Bélem, Lisbon; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Vienna Secession; Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam & the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Green’s work has been included in many group exhibitions; selected venues include Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst und Medien (KM–) in Graz, Austria; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MACBA, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York & Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen; her work has also been presented at the Whitney, Venice, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Berlin, Sevilla, Manifesta & Istanbul Biennials, as well as in Documenta 11.
In spring 2014, she completed one phase of her ongoing Cinematic Migrations project, a two-year collaboration with John Akomfrah, OBE, and Lina Gopaul of Smoking Dogs Films, with a symposium.
Her books include:
Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014)
Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010)
Ongoing Becomings (2009)
Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003)
Between and Including (2001)
Shadows and Signals (2000)
Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books
Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (1996)
After the Ten Thousand Things (1994)
Camino Road (1994)
World Tour (1993)
Green has published essays and fictions in Transition, October, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Spex, Multitudes, Sarai Reader, and Collapse, among other magazines and journals. Her essays, as well as essays about her work, have also appeared in an assortment of international cultural and scholarly books.
Green has been a Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1997-2002); a Distinguished Artist/Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara (2003-2005), and Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor at the San Francisco Art Institute (2005-2011). She is also a guest faculty at the Maumaus School of Visual Arts in Lisbon since 2000, as well as of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of Art since 1991, where she was Director of its Studio program in 1996-1997.
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence. We continue with Claire Denis’ critically-acclaimed White Material [2010].
Screening Date: Thursday, July 18th, 2019 | 7:00pm
Tickets:$8 general, $6 students & seniors, $5 members
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202
Synopsis
Courtesy of press kit:
“No more smirking. We’re stopping the bullshit right now and staying put.”
The regular army is preparing to re-establish order in the country. To clean up. To eliminate the rebel officer also known as The Boxer and rid the countryside of roving child soldiers.
All the expatriates have gone home, getting out before things turn nasty.
Of the Vials – coffee planters who have lived here for two generations – Maria stands firm. She’s not about to give in to rumors or abandon her harvest at the first sound of gunfire.
Just like her father-in-law and her ex-husband who is also the father of her son (a little too much of a slacker in her opinion) she is convinced that Cherif, mayor of the neighboring town, will protect them. If she asks him, he will save the plantation. He has a personal guard, a private militia of tough guys, heavily armed and well trained.
Tidbits:
Venice Film Festival – 2009
Toronto International Film Festival – 2009
New York Film Festival – 2009
National Board of Review – 2010 – Winner: NBR Award
Director Statement
Courtesy of press kit:
Had I burdened it with all the intentions I wanted, this film would have sunk like an overladen container ship. Luckily, at every stage – from the writing with Marie, to the location scouting, to the shoot – at every stage we jettisoned them.
It remains, nonetheless, the conduit of a primitive, visceral obsession – fortitude struggling against lassitude, against slackness.
I’d like to dedicate this film to Sony Labou Tansi for his novels, his plays, for the Rocado Zulu Theatre Company, for his struggle against rotten luck.
He said, “We didn’t invent the wheel. We handled that which is found only in the great works of poetry – the sap of the world.” (Les Yeux du Volcan)
Director Bio
“Even if it’s the dream of a voyage, I think it was very important for me that the film offer the two sides of the globe.”
Claire Denis (b. 1948) is a Paris-based filmmaker and one of the major artistic voices of contemporary French cinema. After studying economics, Claire Denis enrolled in the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (now École nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son) where she graduated in 1971. At the beginning of her film career, she worked as an assistant director to Dušan Makavejev, Costa Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch, and Wim Wenders.
Denis has developed a highly individualistic style, favoring visual and sound elements over dialogue, and her editing technique has been compared to jazz improvisation for its rhythmic quality. She refuses to conform to narratives and structures of classical cinema, nor to psychological realism and scenic continuity, thus often blurring the border between dreams and reality. Her films are often based on non-subjective memories and intertextual references to literature and other films. In terms of subject matter, Denis’s films show a deep affection and solidarity with marginalized characters usually absent from mainstream cinema (immigrants, exiles, alienated individuals, sexual transgressives), simultaneously questioning prejudices of the dominant white European culture and its myth of progress. One of the main components of her films is the accompanying music. Her distinctive use of pop songs and musical themes is a result of frequent collaborations with the pianist and composer Abdullah Ibrahi and with the British band Tindersticks. Claire Denis is also considered to be one of the representatives of the “New French Extremity,” a term coined by James Quandt to designate transgressive films made by French directors at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Born in Paris, Claire Denis spent her childhood and formative years traveling across Africa due to her father’s career as a colonial administrator and his interest in teaching his children about the importance of geography. This experience formed the basis for her interest in national identity and the legacy of French colonialism, which was translated into her first film Chocolat (1988), a non-biographical account of post-colonialism. The film begins with a white French woman in her late twenties named France who is returning to Cameroon to visit her childhood home. During a car ride with two strangers, Mungo Park and his son, the film flashes back to her childhood in the colonial outpost. Here, we are introduced to Protée, a local domestic worker patiently serving the needs of France’s parents and their ill-mannered guests. The film relies on visual rather than verbal elements to explain interracial tensions and conflicts and to illustrate the intermingling of power relations and desire. The interactions between members of the household are charged with sexual longing, yet the complicity of their relations is revealed to be based on an inferiorization of the local inhabitants. The film ends with Mungo’s failed attempt to read the future from France’s palm, which is too scarred by burns, and with his refusal to have a drink with her following the pattern of interracial relations established in the flashback. With this ending, Claire Denis seems to suggest that not much has changed in post-colonial Cameroon.
After her debut, Claire Denis made a documentary about the first French tour of the Cameroon band Les Têtes Brulées, entitled Man No Run (1989). She continued to explore post-colonial attitudes in her next feature, S’en fout la mort / No Fear, No Die (1990). This claustrophobic and grainy film tells the story of two men, one from Benin and one from the Caribbean, living on the margins of French society. They become involved in an illegal cock-fighting ring, and the experience depicted is one of cultural displacement and racial conflict. Denis explored these themes further in J’ai Pas Sommeil / I Can’t Sleep (1994), portraying the cultural and familial tensions affecting several immigrants in Paris while the city is in the grip of a serial killer.
In one of her most successful films to date, Nénette et Boni / Nenette and Boni (1996), Denis deepens her dissection of family relations. The film is a coming-of-age drama about a lovelorn brother and his pregnant teenage sister recovering from their mother’s suicide. Claire Denis’s international breakthrough came with her next film, Beau Travail / Good Work (1999), based loosely on Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, Sailor. The story focuses on a group of French legionnaires stationed in Djibouti and observes the rituals of male bonding and codes of repression as displayed in this homosocial, militarized environment. At the center of the film is the extremely antagonistic, and at the same time erotic, relationship between a sergeant, Galoup, and a new recruit, Gilles. The film’s sensual focus is clearly fixed upon the male body as well as its movements and gestures, and many critics underlined Claire Denis’s talent in replacing Melville’s verbosity with a silence that speaks more than words.
In 2001, Claire Denis shocked Cannes audiences with Trouble Every Day, an exploration of the violent poetics of desire, featuring Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle as carriers of a blood-hungry virus released by erotic stimulation. The plot follows a young American couple on honeymoon in Paris, where the husband takes part in a secret experiment by an unorthodox doctor. Although considered to be the film in which Denis came closest to making a horror film, it simultaneously blurred the lines between high and low genres. The scenes of sexual cannibalism examine our society’s violence of desire as well as our anxieties about science and its ethics.
With Vendredi soir / Friday Night (2002), Denis tells the story of an intimate relationship between two strangers who meet during a public transportation strike. A man and a woman engage in a passionate one-night stand, during which the communication between the two occurs through a mere glance. The result is a sensual, ravishing visual experience told through a series of non-voyeuristic images of their bodies.
L’Intrus / The Intruder (2004) was nominated for a Golden Lion at the 2004 Venice Film Festival and represents, according to many, Denis’s most mysterious and invigorating work. The film takes inspiration from the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin’s paintings, and a memoir by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, from whom she borrowed the title and the motif of a heart transplant. The story follows an enigmatic man in his late sixties as he travels across the South Seas in an attempt to find a son he has never met—and a new heart. The result is a poetic, dreamlike experience as this “heartless” man and his new acquaintance, an equally mysterious Russian woman, search for signs of home amidst the borderlands inhabited by aliens and natives, intruders and guests.
According to Claire Denis, the inspiration for her film 35 rhums / 35 Shots of Rum (2008) came from her mother’s relationship with her Brazilian father, while on a formal level it represents a homage to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. The story focuses on a widowed father and his grown-up daughter who is supposed to be starting a life and family of her own. The film seems to be in flux, relying mostly on faces and bodies to depict feelings that are impossible to verbalize. Its focus is on the integrity of a small family unit of two surrounded by a network of outsiders trying to break in. At the crucial moment, the resolution comes with the daughter’s decision to act instead of remaining a passive participant in the flow of life.
Returning to Cameroon, Matériel Blanc / White Material (2009), is Denis’s film scripted by the novelist Marie NDiaye. It depicts the members of a white family in present-day Cameroon, surrounded by unrest and rebellion, who are trying to save their coffee plantation while seemingly blind to the new power constellation established in the outside world. Denis’s most recent film, Les Salauds (2013), a “neo-noir” that, through dense and atmospheric fragments, follows a ship captain’s (Vincent Lindon) return to Paris to unravel the tragedy of his brother-in-law’s suicide, and take revenge. The film’s depth is palpable all the while maintaining its surfaces, and surface tension, in order to find its cracks. Denis has also recently filmed a few film shorts, To the Devil (2011) and Voilà l’enchaînement (2014), and, as one of seventy renowned film directors, contributed a documentary short on the future of cinema to the documentary Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013).
Filmography:
High Life (2018)
Let the Sunshine In (2017)
The Breidjing Camp (2015)
Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013)
Bastards (2013)
White Material (2009)
35 Shots of Rum (2008)
Toward Mathilde (2005)
The Intruder (2004)
Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002) (segment “Vers Nancy”)
Friday Night (2002)
Trouble Every Day (2001)
Beau travail (1999)
Nénette et Boni (1996)
À propos de Nice, la suite (1995) (segment “Nice, Very Nice”)
I Can’t Sleep (1994)
Figaro Story (1992) (segment “Keep It for Yourself”)
Lest We Forget (1991) (segment “Pour Ushari Ahmed Mahmoud, Soudan”)
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle as we co-present Squeaky Wheel’s summer film series entitled Three Storms for Summer Eves. We continue with RaMell Ross’s Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening [2018].
Screening Date: Wednesday, July 17th, 2019 | 7:00pm
An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, Hale County This Morning, This Evening looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years. Collins attends college in search of opportunity while Bryant becomes a father to an energetic son in an open-ended, poetic form that privileges the patiently observed interstices of their lives. The audience is invited to experience the mundane and monumental, birth and death, the quotidian and the sublime. These moments combine to communicate the region’s deep culture and provide glimpses of the complex ways the African American community’s collective image is integrated into America’s visual imagination.
In his directorial debut, award-winning photographer and director RaMell Ross offers a refreshingly direct approach to documentary that fills in the gaps between individual black male icons. Hale County This Morning, This Evening allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South, trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously offering a testament to dreaming despite the odds.
Tidbits:
Sundance Film Festival – 2018 – Winner: U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision
Gotham Awards – 2018 – Winner: Best Documentary
International Documentary Association – 2018 – Nominee: Best Feature & Best Editing
International Documentary Association – 2018 – Winner: Best Music Score
Independent Spirit Awards – 2019 – Nominee: Best Documentary
Directors Guild of America – 2019 – Nominee: Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary
Academy Awards – 2019 – Nominee: Best Documentary Feature
RaMell Ross is a filmmaker, photographer and writer. His photographs have been exhibited around the world and in the US most recently at a solo exhibition at Aperture Foundation in New York and in the landmark exhibition “New Southern Photography” at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans. His writing has appeared in such outlets as The New York Times, Film Quarterly and the Walker Arts Center. In 2015, he was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” and as a New Frontier Artist in Residence at the MIT Media Lab. In 2016, he was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, winner of an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow. In 2017, he was selected for Rhode Island Foundation’s Robert and Margaret Maccoll Johnson Artist Fellowship. RaMell’s debut feature documentary HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING won a Special Jury Prize for Creative Vision at its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and has since gone on to secure international theatrical, broadcast and streaming distribution as well as garnering multiple awards at top tier film festivals. The film was nominated for two IDA awards and five Cinema Eye Honors. The film won the Gotham Award for Best Documentary and the Cinema Eye Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking and is now nominated for the ICS, Independent Spirit Award and DGA Documentary Award. RaMell is currently on faculty at Brown University’s Visual Arts Department and recently completed his first short film, EASTER SNAP, which is premiering at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.
Filmography:
Easter Snap (2019) (short)
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
7/16/19 – “It’s not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born, but watching RaMell Ross’s evocatively titled documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening qualifies.” Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice – link
7/16/19 – RaMell Ross’ Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening picked up another award notice this morning with an Emmy nomination for “Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking” – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle as we co-present Squeaky Wheel’s summer film series entitled Three Storms for Summer Eves. We start with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s feature debut Blissfully Yours [Sud sanaeha] [2002].
Screening Date: Wednesday, June 19th, 2019 | 7:00pm
Roong longs for the day when she can be in the arms of her Burmese lover, Min, an illegal immigrant. She pays Orn, an older woman to take care of Min while she looks for a place for them to share their happiness.
One afternoon, Min takes Roong to have a picnic in the jungle where they feel free to express their love. Meanwhile, Orn has also gone to the jungle with Tommy, her husband’s co-worker.
Filmmaker’s Statement:
“I treasure some kinds of old Thai disaster movies. Many of such tell a forbidden love story between a man and a woman that the mother earth destroyed them. Similarly, Blissfully Yours contains innocent narrative and simple characters. The settings are open landscapes and the disaster plot is there, except that it is transformed into another kind of disaster.”
Tidbits:
Cannes Film Festival – 2002 – Winner: Un Certain Regard
Toronto International Film Festival – 2002
AFI Fest – 2002
Director Bio
“I, as a filmmaker, treat my works as I do my own sons or daughters. I don’t care if people are fond of them or despise them, as long as I created them with my best intentions and efforts.”
Apichatpong grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand. He began making film and video shorts in 1994, and completed his first feature in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998. Often non-linear, with a strong sense of dislocation, his works deal with memory, subtly addressed personal politics and social issues.
His art projects and feature films have won him widespread recognition and numerous festival prizes, including two prizes from the Cannes Film Festival. In 2005 he was presented with one of Thailand’s most prestigious awards, Silpatorn, by the Thai Ministry of Culture. In 2008, the French Minister of Culture bestowed on him the medal of Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letter (Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature). In 2011, he was given another honor for the same field with an Officer Medal, and later in 2017, Commandeurs medal.
His film, Syndromes and a Century, completed in late 2006, was the first Thai film to be selected for competition at the Venice Film Festival. Apichatpong is also one of 20 international artists and filmmakers commissioned to create a short film for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 2009, the Austrian Film Museum published a major English language monograph on his work.
His 2009 project, Primitive, consists of a large-scale video installation, an artist’s book, and a feature film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The film has won a Palme d’Or prize at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in 2010, making it the first Southeast Asian film (and the 7th from Asia) to win the most prestigious award in the film world. In 2012, he is invited to participate in Documenta (13), one of the most well-known art exhibitions in Kassel, Germany. Apichatpong also received the Sharjah Biennial Prize at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial 11, UAE. He’s also a recipient of the Fukuoka Prize, Japan, 2013. In late 2014, he received the Yanghyun Art Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in Korea. In 2016, a retrospective of his films was presented at Tate Britain, UK. Recently, he was the Principal Laureate of the 2016 Prince Claus Awards, the Netherlands. His current project includes Fever Room, a projection performance about displaced consciousness.
Apichatpong currently works and lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Filmography:
Memoria (2021)
The Year of the Everlasting Storm (2021) (segment “Night Colonies”)
30/30 Vision: 3 Decades of Strand Releasing (2019)
Ten Years Thailand (2018) (segment “Song of the City”)
Cemetery of Splendor (2015)
Short Plays (2014) (segment “Thailand”)
Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013)
3.11 Sense of Home (2011) (segment “Monsoon”)
Quattro Hongkong 2 (2011) (segment “M Hotel”)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
Stories on Human Rights (2008) (segment “Mobile Men”)
State of the World (2007) (segment “Luminous People”)
Syndromes and a Century (2006)
Tropical Malady (2004)
The Adventures of Iron Pussy (2003)
Blissfully Yours (2002)
Haunted Houses (2001)
Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
6/12/19 – For those uninitiated in the sleepy (in the best way), sensual work of the great Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, let Senses of Cinema give you a thorough overview of his career – link
6/18/19 – “The film, inflected with local folklore and history, was lauded for its slow, sensual cinema style, landing it the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002. When it premiered in Thailand, it was the recipient of censoring revisions for its explicit sex scenes and nudity, alongside its casting of a real-life illegal migrant to play the lead character. Inspired by Weerasethakul’s personal experience of seeing Thai police handcuffing two illegal Burmese migrants at a Bangkok zoo, the film examines how one’s relation to freedom and pleasure is shaped by acts of small indulgence. Before being arrested, how did a leisurely day at the zoo already position the women as resistors of oppression? Blissfully Yours, or Sud Sanaeha (“extreme passion” in Thai), follows this line of inquiry, prying into how those facing social oppression capture simple, defiant pleasures under limited conditions.” Katrya Bolger, cléo journal – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence. We continue with Gillo Pontecorvo’s Oscar-nominated The Battle of Algiers [1966].
One of the most influential political films in history, The Battle of Algiers, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the occupying French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot on the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Pontecorvo’s tour de force has astonishing relevance today.
Tidbits:
Venice Film Festival – 1966 – Winner: Award of the City of Venice & Golden Lion
Academy Awards – 1967 – Nominee: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Director & Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen
New York Film Festival – 1967
Director Bio
“It’s true I make one film every eight or nine years. I am like an impotent man, who can make love only to a woman who is completely right for him. I can only make a movie in which I am totally in love. If you had the list of films I’ve refused – The Mission, Bethune, etc., you’d have a telephone book.”
An Italian filmmaker (born Nov. 19, 1919, Pisa, Italy—died Oct. 12, 2006, Rome, Italy), gained international acclaim for La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers), a stark black-and-white feature in which he portrayed the fight for Algerian independence from France with gritty documentary-style realism. The film was hailed as a cinematic masterpiece and received the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, as well as three Academy Award nominations, including best director and best foreign-language film. The movie’s controversial content, however, kept it from being distributed in France until 1971. Pontecorvo’s relatively low output included La grande strada azzurra (1957; The Wide Blue Road, 2001) and the Oscar-nominated Kapò (1959). He also made several documentaries.
Filmography:
Firenze, il nostro domani (2003)
Another World Is Possible (2001)
Return to Algiers (1992)
12 registi per 12 città (1989) (segment “Udine”)
Farewell to Enrico Berlinguer (1984)
Ogro (1979)
Burn! (1969)
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Kapo (1960)
La grande strada azzurra (1957)
Die Windrose (1957) (segment “Giovanna”)
Cani dietro le sbarre (1955)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
5/6/19 – “Based on the eponymous campaign during the Algerian war, The Battle of Algiers is perhaps best known for its technical aspects, which have been rarely, if ever imitated: the almost universal use of non-actors; the hand-held, documentary-style aesthetic, so convincing that the film ran in America with a disclaimer that “not one foot” of actual war footage was used. But none of this would be nearly as powerful without the tense directorial prowess and incredible vision of Pontecorvo, who fashioned a political portrait of urban warfare so even-handed and influential that it was an inspiration for both 60’s radical groups and Pentagon officials pre-Iraq. The Battle of Algiers is an always-relevant political film, but more than that, it is one of the great works of fiction-as-documentary.” Ryan Swen, Brooklyn Magazine – link
5/14/19 – “It’s one of the best movies about revolutionary and anticolonial activism ever made, convincing, balanced, passionate, and compulsively watchable as storytelling.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader – link
5/16/19 – “Though Pontecorvo’s sympathies ultimately lie with the Algerians, he powerfully registers the loss of innocent life on both sides, refusing to trivialize war’s casualties for the sake of a radical polemic. Truth transcends all other values in THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, and it’s a testament to Pontecorvo’s talent that the controversy that has always swirled around the film rarely has anything to do with its accuracy.” Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence. We continue with Miguel Gomes’s critically-acclaimed Tabu [2012].
Screening Date: Thursday, April 11th, 2019 | 7:00pm
Acclaimed director Miguel Gomes returns with a sumptuous, eccentric two-part tale centered on Aurora, shown first as an impulsive, cantankerous elderly woman in present-day Lisbon. When Aurora is hospitalized, she sends her neighbor, Pilar, to pass word of her grave condition to Gian Luca, a man of which no one has ever heard her speak. Pilar’s quest to fulfill her friend’s wish transports us to Africa fifty years earlier, before the start of the Portuguese Colonial War. We see Aurora again, this time as the gorgeous, smoldering wife of a wealthy young farmer, involved in a forbidden love affair with Gian Luca, her husband’s best friend. Their moving, poetic tale is conveyed through the older Gian Luca’s suave voiceover, combined with the lush, melodious sounds of its heady, tropical setting, peppered with a soundtrack of Phil Spector songs.
Tidbits:
Berlin International Film Festival – 2012 – Winner: FIPRESCI Prize
Toronto International Film Festival – 2012
New York Film Festival – 2012
AFI Fest – 2012
Director Bio
“Cinema is a game.”
Courtesy of Arabian Nights press kit:
Miguel Gomes was born in Lisbon in 1972. He studied cinema and worked as film critic for the Portuguese press until the year 2000.
Miguel has directed several short films and made his first feature The Face You Deserve in 2000. Our beloved Month of August (2008) and Tabu (2012) came to confirm his success and international recognition. Tabu was released at Berlinale’s Competition, where it won the Alfred Bauer and FIPRESCI award; the movie was sold to over 50 countries and won dozens of awards.
Retrospectives of Miguel’s work have been programmed at the Viennale, the BAFICI, the Torino Film Festival, in Germany and in the USA. Redemption, his most recent short film, premiered in 2013 at Venice Film Festival.
Filmography:
The Tsugua Diaries (2021)
Savagery (2020)
Arabian Nights: Volume 3 – The Enchanted One (2015)
Arabian Nights: Volume 2 – The Desolate One (2015)
Arabian Nights: Volume 1 – The Restless One (2015)
Tabu (2012)
Our Beloved Month of August (2008)
The Face You Deserve (2004)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
4/8/19 – “Truly a time-machine, Tabu does feel like something new (unlike say, last year’s big winner, The Artist). Even, or rather, especially on repeated viewings. Gomes’s movie is so ingenuous, well-executed, and filled with unexpected cinematic pleasures that it’s restorative—a movie to reconfirm your faith in the motion picture medium.” J. Hoberman, Artinfo – link
4/10/19 – “…the thing about Tabu is that it is colonialism of the Out of Africa kind of colonialism, it’s the colonialism if the white people who are self-centered—or white material—who themselves who seem to define colonialism from movies. So they’re staging it, you’re staging it, and then finally there’s the letter, which is the final moment, which is also staging it. So there are all these layers of it being projected. And it being the memories of the dead woman.” David Phelps, MUBI – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we present a year-long series entitled Post-Colonialisms: World Cinema and Human Consequence. We continue with Valeska Grisebach’s critically-acclaimed Western [2017].
Screening Date: Thursday, March 14th, 2019 | 7:00pm
Tickets:$8 general, $6 students & seniors, $5 members
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202
Synopsis
Courtesy of press kit:
An intense, slow-burning thriller, Western follows a group of German construction workers installing a hydroelectric plant in remote rural Bulgaria. The foreign land awakens the men’s sense of adventure, but tensions mount when Meinhard, the strong, silent newcomer to the group, starts mixing with the local villagers. The two sides speak different languages and share a troubled history. Can they learn to trust each other—or is the stage being set for a showdown?
With sweeping cinematography and tightly modulated pacing, Western tells a universal story of masculinity and xenophobia on the contemporary frontier of Eastern Europe. Drawing remarkably nuanced performances from a cast of non-professionals, Valeska Grisebach uses the trappings of the western genre to poke and prod at current anxieties about borders and our relationships with our neighbors.
Tidbits:
Cannes Film Festival – 2017 – Un Certain Regard
Venice Film Festival – 2017
New York Film Festival – 2017
AFI Fest – 2017
Director Bio
“Research can feel very adventurous, and at the same time, because you meet many different people, it creates this community. For me, this is the most beautiful part of filmmaking. Research is the ground that the film is standing on, and for me filmmaking is really about getting in contact with somebody, something, the world.”
Valeska Grisebach’s directorial debut, Be My Star (2001), earned a FIPRESCI Prize special mention at the Toronto International Film Festival and won the Torino Film Festival’s main prize. Her second feature film, Longing (2006), received many awards at international festivals, including the Special Jury Award in Buenos Aires, the Grand Prix of Asturias at the Gijón International Film Festival, and the Special Jury Award at the Warsaw International Film Festival. Her latest, Western (2017), made its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and has received awards from several international festivals.
Filmography:
Western (2017)
Longing (2006)
Be My Star (2001)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
3/11/19 – #5: “Western is a compassionately unsparing dissection of masculinity and the dynamics of all-male groups by a woman filmmaker. Its relationship to the western genre is multifaceted, from the wildly majestic landscapes to the ambivalent, sometimes hostile and sometimes tenderly curious relationships between outsiders and natives, arrogant modernity and traditional community.” Imogen Sara Smith, Film Comment magazine – link
3/13/19 – “One of the films of the year has arrived – maybe the best of the year – a work of unmatched subtlety, complexity and artistry.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian – link
Extras: Stop in early for FREE Breadhive baked goods while supplies last!
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
420 Connecticut St, Buffalo, NY 14213
Synopsis
Courtesy of press kit:
Welcome to Rockford, Illinois, in the heart of Rust-Belt America, home to debut filmmaker Bing Liu. With over 12 years of footage, Bing discovers connections between two of his skateboarder friends’ volatile upbringings and the complexities of modern-day masculinity. As the film unfolds, Bing captures 23-year-old Zack’s tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend deteriorate after the birth of their son and 17-year-old Keire struggling with his racial identity as he faces new responsibilities following the death of his father. While navigating a difficult relationship between his camera and his friends, Bing weaves a story of generational forgiveness while exploring the precarious gap between childhood and adulthood.
Minding The Gap won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and is executive produced by Oscar-nominated documentarian Steve James (The Interrupters, Hoop Dreams). Bing Liu, who developed the film through Chicago’s Kartemquin Films, also serves as producer alongside Diane Quon, and as editor alongside Joshua Altman. Hulu and Magnolia Films will release the film on August 17, 2018 ahead of a POV broadcast in 2019.
Tidbits:
Sundance Film Festival – 2018 – Winner: U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking
National Board of Review – 2018 – Winner: Top 5 Documentaries
Gotham Awards – 2018 – Nominee: Best Documentary
Independent Spirit Awards – 2019 – Winner: Truer Than Fiction Award
Independent Spirit Awards – 2019 – Nominee: Best Documentary
Academy Awards – 2019 – Nominee: Best Documentary Feature
Director Statement
Courtesy of press kit:
Minding the Gap started as a survey film about skateboarders’ relationships with their fathers and snowballed into a verite story exploring something much more personal.
I was 8 years old when my single mother took a job in Rockford, Illinois, an old factory city two hours west of Chicago. She soon remarried and had a child with an abusive man, remaining with him for 17 years. At age 13 I began skateboarding to escape my house and slowly discovered, after many bruises, broken bones and hard-earned tricks, that I’d regained a sense of control over my body. Perhaps more importantly, I found myself in a group of outcasts much happier in the streets than at home. We spent countless hours together, making our own version of family and, through skate videos, our own version of reality.
Heading into my 20’s, I moved to Chicago and began studying to become an English teacher. After graduating, I worked in the camera department in the cinematographer’s guild and was making short docs on the side—I felt like I’d escaped a dark chapter of my life and didn’t have to look back. But I couldn’t ignore that many of my peers were falling prey to drug addictions, jail sentences, or worse. I was still making skate videos and was experimenting with the form; I had made a skate doc called Look At Me about why skate videographers and photographers struggle with what they do.
While making Look At Me, I discovered a pattern of absent, distant, and abusive father-figures in the skate community—something that affected mental health, relationships, and parenting styles. I decided that’d be the focus of my next project.
After a couple years of interviews with skateboarders from around the country, I brought my new project into a fellowship with Kartemquin Films, where I was introduced to verite style documentaries like Hoop Dreams and Stevie. It was eye-opening. I switched gears from the high-concept survey film I’d envisioned and decided to tell a character-driven verite story.
I continued to film with several skateboarders from St. Louis, Phoenix, Portland, and many other places, trying to figure out which characters to follow. And as I cut rough cut after rough cut, there was one interview that kept sticking out: a 16-year-old African-American boy from my hometown of Rockford named Keire. He’d never talked about his parents before and, when we did our first interview, was fidgeting with the sleeves of his sweater. When he told me about his abusive father, I felt my chest tighten. “Did you cry?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you?” he shot back. “I did cry,” I said. We sat in silence, neither of us daring to attempt a joke.
Over the next four years, I reluctantly weaned other characters out of the film and kept returning to Rockford to continue following Keire as well a charismatic 23-year-old named Zack, who was about to become a father himself. Over time, as I got guidance from my EP Gordon Quinn and from the Kartemquin community in feedback screenings, I also drew inspiration from the films that resonated with me in my adolescence: Gummo, Waking Life, Kids, Slacker—stories that made my chaotic childhood meaningful with their representations of growing up in an uncertain world that somehow left room for hope.
As I had even more feedback screenings, which is how I eventually met my co-producer Diane Quon, people were intrigued at how close I was to the subjects and themes of the film without actually being in it. With their encouragement, I began experimenting with weaving myself in the film, which I struggled with because I didn’t want the project to feel too navel-gazing or self-indulgent.
But then everything changed when (spoiler alert) I find out one of the main characters has become abusive. The heart of the film, which had been exploring how skateboarders deal with masculinity and child abuse , suddenly became much more immediate and personal; I began to have trouble sleeping and started seeing a therapist. Eventually, I realized that I had to become an active and vulnerable participant for a more honest story.
In the course of completing the film, I realized that Zack, Keire and I were all harboring toxic experiences buried under the weight of years of not processing the past, and we all chose our own ways of dealing with that pressure. The film has given me a sense of clarity about myself and how, while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, some ways of coping aren’t sustainable.
What’s clear to me from doing this project is that violence and its sprawling web of effects are perpetuated in large part because these issues remain behind closed doors, both literally and figuratively. My hope is that the characters who open doors in Minding the Gap will inspire young people struggling with something similar—that they will survive their situation, live to tell their story, and create a meaningful life for themselves.
Director Bio
Courtesy of press kit:
Bing is a Chicago-based director and cinematographer who Variety Magazine listed as one of 10 documentary filmmakers to watch. His 2018 critically acclaimed documentary Minding the Gap has earned a total of 28 award recognitions since its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it took home the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking. He is also a segment director on America To Me, a 10-hour documentary series examining racial inequities in America’s education system, set to premiere on Starz. Bing was a member of the International Cinematographers Guild for seven years, working alongside master directors of photography including John Toll, Matthew Libatique, and Wally Pfister. Bing is a 2017 Film Independent Fellow and Garrett Scott Development Grant recipient and has a B.A. in Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Filmography:
All These Sons (2021)
Minding the Gap (2018)
Nuoc (2010) (short)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
2/24/19 – Last night MINDING THE GAP director Bing Liu won the Truer Than Fiction Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards!
3/5/19 – “The film is impressive in many ways, but Liu’s balancing act of subjective and objective perspectives is astonishing… Part memoir, part social problem film, Minding The Gap is a treasure of a documentary.” Christopher Campbell, Thrillist – link
3/5/19 – “There isn’t a word of explicit politics in the film, but Liu’s confrontation with abuse and trauma as a way of confronting its unconscious legacy, of changing one’s own behavior and improving one’s own life and the lives of one’s own family and friends, is an essentially and crucially political act.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker – link
3/6/19 – “I tried to offer an opinion beyond ‘masterful’—and it really is—I couldn’t put words together. The film had destroyed me. Part of me felt guilty, since several of the characters in Minding the Gap experienced trauma much worse than my own. But Bing Liu had given me an unlikely gift. In the weeks that followed, I watched the film several more times. I shared the full extent of my humiliations and shame with my wife. And for the first time, I told my therapist, euphemistically, then openly, the tears welling in my eyes. The jealousy had faded. In its place, I found only gratitude.” David Michael, The Paris Review – link
4/16/19 – Congrats to CCC alum Minding The Gap on today’s Peabody Award win! – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we screen both parts of Patrick Wang’s latest film A Bread Factory [2018]. We’ll be screening Part One at 3:00pm and Part Two at 7:00pm so attendees can grab dinner off-site during the hour-long intermission.
Screening Date: NEW DATE – Saturday, February 23rd, 2019 | 3:00pm & 7:00pm
Tickets:$8 general, $6 students & seniors, $5 members
Deal: Use the code CCC19 to get an exclusive 15% off your Torn Space Theater ticket purchase for their adaptation.
Event Sponsors:
Venue Information:
341 Delaware Ave, Buffalo, NY 14202
Synopsis
Courtesy of press kit:
PART ONE:
Forty years ago, Dorothea and Greta moved to the town of Checkford and bought an abandoned bread factory. They transformed it into an arts space. Here they host movies, plays, dance, exhibits. All types of artists visit. It’s where civic groups and immigrant communities can meet, where there are after school programs for children.
Now a celebrity couple—performance artists from China—have come to Checkford. They’ve constructed a huge building, the FEEL Institute, down the street. It is a strange sight for a small town.
Dorothea and Greta learn about a new proposal to give all the funding from the school system for their children’s arts programs to the FEEL Institute. Without this funding, the Bread Factory would not survive. They quickly rally the community to save their space. The commercial forces behind the FEEL Institute fight also, bringing a young movie star to town to help make their case. The school board meeting turns into a circus where the fate of the Bread Factory hangs in the balance.
PART TWO:
Checkford hasn’t been the same since the school board meeting. Mysteriously, the reporter who runs the local newspaper disappears. Bizarre tourists start to show up, then come mysterious tech start-up workers. With all the new people, real estate is booming.
Amidst all these distractions, Dorothea and Greta try to continue their work. They are rehearsing a production of HECUBA by Euripides. On the day they open the play, Dorothea gets the news that the Bread Factory will lose an essential piece of their funding.
The beautiful opening night performance of HECUBA plays to a tiny audience. Brokenhearted, Dorothea and Greta must decide whether to give up their work at the Bread Factory because their community and support has disappeared, or to continue in their struggle to build community through art.
Tidbits:
Independent Spirit Awards – 2019 – Nominee: John Cassavetes Award & Best Supporting Female
Director Statement
Courtesy of press kit:
I have made two films, and they feel like training to have the tools I need to face this new project: a pair of films that looks at the state of art, community and commerce in our lives. This is no small thing. Arguably, it is the soul of everything.
The question of commerce is not new to me. I trained and worked as an economist for many years. But I thought like an old world economist, those who were called worldly philosophers. They were as likely to write treatises on empathy as on trade; they saw all these strands crossing in the same social fabric. It is this complex social fabric that interests me, and to study it, I pull at different threads in my own life.
My introduction into the arts took place in theaters, mostly under the tutelage of women. Women were my directors, my teachers. In the way my first film let me reflect on father figures, this film has given me the opportunity to think back on mother figures. Those golden days were marked by twin loves: my newfound love for dramatic art, and the generous love I received from my mentors.
These warm memories help me face colder contemporary forces. Laughter helps also. In the past, I’ve experimented with different forms of dramatic expression, and now it is exciting to use a wide range of comedy: behavioral, physical, visual, situational, verbal. Comedies often confine themselves to a narrow set of tools and conventions within a single film. Not doing so can quickly become a confused mess. However, a careful mixture of styles can be a unique way of shaping the rhythm of a film, injecting it with the excitement of unpredictability. To me this feels new but natural.
Weaving multitudes into coherence is the recurring task of these films that take place in a small town bursting with characters, plots and ideas. I was frequently on the lookout for aesthetic organizing principles that could gather multiple strands into braids. For example, early on I thought I was writing a musical. But when I tried writing musical scenes, I struggled with the strong stylistic change that comes when characters suddenly start singing. What the song added never seemed to be worth the jolt it created. Then it occurred to me to align the jarring change of characters singing with the jarring changes happening to the town. So all the new tourists coming to town sing, and this bursting into song interrupts the lives of the locals the same way it interrupts the style of the film. It is also performative in the way many contemporary communications are performative. The musical form then becomes a perfect tool for expressing what is happening in the story. The idea then starts to elaborate, and I think of the idea of a chorus of real estate brokers. I give them the most alluring music, singing the siren song of real estate, seducing you with the dream life you wish you could buy.
All the changes that occur in this small town are counterbalanced by a very old anchor: the classical Greek play “Hecuba” by Euripides. This beautiful and deeply humane poetry appears throughout the movies. It is an old echo to the contemporary pains of the characters. I have very particular views of how classical verse drama can be performed in our time. It has been a passion of mine on stage, and it was tremendously exciting to film it.
The two-film form doesn’t sound particularly extraordinary at first, but then you realize how few films have been designed in this format. These movies aren’t just sequels, they intentionally use the two-film form to house a dramatic and aesthetic structure that can’t fit elsewhere. These films are about loss. The first film looks at loss using a more traditional dramatic structure: there is a defined fight to protect something. The second film is about a more subtle, disturbing type of loss: when things slip away because we are not paying attention. It therefore has a slipperier dramatic structure that requires the groundwork of the first film before the audience is prepared to accept it. There is a lot of talk these days of serialized drama, but that talk is almost all confined to television. I believe this is a missed opportunity as film can approach the form asking the most bold, dense and existential questions.
Director Bio
“I think a lot about an emotional experience from the perspective of the characters. I think of it from the perspective of the viewer. Those targets of the emotional experience and the emotional space will in effect create this mood. Mood is often the byproduct of other things going on.”
Patrick Wang (director) was born in Texas, the son of Taiwanese immigrants. He graduated from MIT with a degree in economics and music and theater arts. He has studied game theory, health policy, and income inequality at the Federal Reserve, the Harvard School for Public Health, and other organizations. He is author of the books The Monologue Plays and Post Script, an interactive book about the making of The Grief of Others. His first film In the Family was hailed “an indie masterpiece” by Roger Ebert. His second film, The Grief of Others, premiered to critical acclaim at SXSW and Cannes. He was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine, and the New York Times remarked, “This is a career to keep an eye on.”
Filmography:
A Bread Factory, Part One (2018)
A Bread Factory, Part Two (2018)
The Grief of Others (2015)
In the Family (2011)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
12/27/18 – “A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It’s about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.” Matt Zoller Seitz, ROGEREBERT.com – link
1/10/19 – “Shortly after Christmas, back in Chicago, I caught up with a two-part, four-hour masterpiece, A Bread Factory by Patrick Wang — too late to include it in any of my end-of-year lists, where it clearly deserves to belong” Jonathan Rosenbaum – link
1/14/19 – “Wang is a singular artist, but he taps into a rich tradition. The focus on the workings of an American institution may remind some of the expansive comedies of Robert Altman or the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. But also, the blurring of the line between performance and reality, the embrace of an intimate theatricality, recalls the work of Jacques Rivette. These are cinematic giants, and this director may be on his way to joining them.” Bilge Ebiri, The New York Times – link
Please join Cultivate Cinema Circle and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center as we screen John Cassavetes’ 1978 director’s cut of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [1976] in conjunction with Torn Space Theater’s own theatrical staging of an original adaptation of the film. (Torn Space Theater’s production runs Thursdays, Fridays, & Saturdays, February 15th – March 9th as well as Sunday, March 10. Tickets and production details here.) Torn Space Artistic Director Dan Shanahan will be on-hand to introduce the film.
Screening Date: Monday, February 18th, 2019 | 7:00pm
John Cassavetes explores new worlds in his brilliant career with this new film The Killing of Chinese Bookie. Cassvetes’ protagonist, Cosmo Vitelli, portrayed by Ben Gazzara, the star of the Broadway theatre and films now at the peak of artistic maturity, goes on a journey through the night—but unlike Ulysses, Gazzara’s Cosmo streaks through the night-life of Los Angeles’ gambling world, strip joints, abandoned warehouses, Chinatown’s luxurious exotic restaurants, crooked streets and blind alleys, committing acts of violence and love. Although this is America of the 70s, it is also Berlin, Korea, Saigon, Paris, London, Estoril, Buenos Aires, Acapulco … it is a parable of our own time and space and a man’s struggle to exist in it. He is no lily white hero—but today’s “everyman” who will even murder to keep the pressure out of his life.
Cosmo worships this world—his club The Crazy Horse West is his world—the sensuous colors, the sounds, the bodies, tits and asses of his girls, and he wants the world to adore and worship them too.
His constellation of the stars is the steel-domed roof of his club. The spotlights of amber, violet, blues, playing on the bodies of his nudies, glazing the audience in the dark, capturing quick colored takes of humanity calling for “booze, beer, run and cokes … a hamburger … bring on the girls … take it off.” A thin pointed beam of light hitting a rotating, mirrored ball of a man made moon spinning off darting comets in the dark of Sunset Strip. But like his coming death, he refuses to acknowledge his friends’ identities. Fringe characters, pinky rings, White-on-White set up specialists surround his life with danger.
In the daytime he takes his three girls in the sparkling, dark, rental limousine that American dreams of, filled with stereophonic sound and perfumed champagne. By day he smiles and laughs and emulates the rich token dreams that substitute for “Advertised America.” Like most of us would like to be, he is a human melodrama, creating his own romantic image … reaching dead ends in love and kindness he climbs over them into his nightmare world. It is easy to mistake Cosmo as a cult hero figure for his stumbling aggressive charm is a marvelous disguise for the real gangster.
–Sam Shaw
Director Bio
“My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.”
John Cassavetes was born in New York City on December 9th, 1929. After graduating from high school, he attended Mohawk College and Colgate University before graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1950. Throughout the early 1950s he worked as an actor in films including FOURTEEN HOURS (1951) and TAXI (1953). By the late 1950s he had made a name for himself, with roles in a number of movies including 1958’s SADDLE THE WIND. His big break came with a regular role on the television series “Johnny Staccato” between 1959 and 1960.
Financing his first film with the money he had made in television, Cassavetes embarked on his directorial debut. Working from only a skeleton script, SHADOWS was an experiment in improvisational acting and directing. A low-budget sixteen millimeter production with a jazz soundtrack by Charles Mingus, the film appealed to an audience longing for less mediated art forms.
Winning five awards from the Venice Film Festival, Cassavetes found himself suddenly in the position of making higher-budget films within the studio system. In 1961 he made TOO LATE BLUES followed in 1962 by A CHILD IS WAITING, but neither had the excitement or improvisational energy of SHADOWS. Resentful of studio interference in his work, Cassavetes went back to acting, appearing in a number of films including THE KILLERS (1964), THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), and ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968). By 1968, however, Cassavetes returned to directing, this time working independently.
FACES, a film about the difficulties in a suburban marriage, continued in the vein of SHADOWS, with a loosely drawn script and cinematography that worked in response to the improvised method of the actors. Though some found the work tedious (unscripted scenes going on far longer than Hollywood would have allowed), many realized in Cassavetes the possibility for more genuine and moving moments. After FACES, Cassavetes embarked on HUSBANDS, in which he starred with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. The film centered around three friends dealing with life and mortality after the death of a mutual friend.
Though neither FACES nor HUSBANDS were very popular with the mainstream moviegoing audience, both were pivotal in the integration of cinema verité traditions in future Hollywood films. This crossover of the experimental and popular was clear in Cassavetes most successful film. Though A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974) was produced with a complete script, it retained much of the intuitive and spontaneous acting of Cassavetes’ earlier films. Staring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, the film investigated the mental illness of a woman and the disintegration of her marriage. Financed independently by the cast and crew, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE was a popular and critical success.
Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Cassavetes continued to work as both an actor and director. He directed THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (1976), OPENING NIGHT (1977), and the 1980 film GLORIA which again starred Gena Rowlands, and which many believe was one of her finest performances. By the time of his death in 1989, Cassavetes had directed twelve films, creating a body of work that addressed serious topics and paved the way for a more vibrant American cinema.
Filmography:
Big Trouble (1985)
Love Streams (1984)
Gloria (1980)
Opening Night (1977)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Husbands (1970)
Faces (1968)
A Child Is Waiting (1963)
Too Late Blues (1962)
A Pair of Boots (1962)
Shadows (1959)
Links
Here is a curated selection of links shared on our Facebook page for additional insight/information:
2/17/19 – “In John Cassavetes’s personal cinema, the director was always trying to break away from the formulas of Hollywood narrative, in order to uncover some fugitive truth about the way people behave. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibilities as a form-giving artist, starting with a careful script (however improvised in appearance). Nowhere was the tension between Cassavetes’s linear and digressive, driven and entropic tendencies more sharply fought out than in THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (1976), one of his most fascinating achievements.” Phillip Lopate – link
2/18/19 – “A post-noir masterpiece.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader – link
Cultivate Cinema Circle 