Chen Kaige, arguably the most noted of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, lived through the Cultural Revolution. Shame at some of his actions as a Red Guard, including denouncing his filmmaker father Chen Huai’ai (“Song Of Youth”) marked his filmmaking ever since. His prizewinning films the decades-spanning “Farewell My Concubine” ( 1993 Cannes Palme d’Or ) and “Together” explored the Cultural Revolution and father-son issues.Working under the dictates of the official Chinese Film Industry, which forbids criticizing the current political regime, Chen Kaige’s “Sacrifice” tales place in Spring and Autumn period Of China’s history (771-476/403 BC) in the Opulent…
Author: Robin Menken
Robin Menken
Robin Menken Robin Menken lives in Los Angeles. She was the Artistic Director of the Second City Workshops, taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Barcelona\'s Ateneu and the Esalin Institute. She was Roberto Rossellini\'s assistant, and worked with Yevgeny Vevteshenku, Glauber Rocha and Eugene Ionesco. She sold numerous screenplays and wrote the OBIE winning The FTA SHow (touring with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Ben Vereen.) She was a programming consultant and Special Events co-ordinator for numerous film festivals, including the SF, Rio, Havana and N.Y Film Festivals. Her first news outlet was the historic East Village Other.
Filmmaker Vikram Gandhi grew up in New Jersey, where his upper middle class Indian-American family exposed him to traditional Hindu culture. As a boy he respectfully watched his grandmother perform her traditional prayers.After studied religion in college he traveled to India, where disgusted by the guru poseurs and hustlers he ran into, began to question the very idea of a Guru. Footage of Kumbh Mela (the tri-annual mass gathering of sadhus from all parts of India) shows Vikram stripped down to his Dhoti, milling around with naked Naga babas (the “sky-clad” holy men) on pilgrimage. The documentary is about “the…
Actor Daniel Auteuil makes his directing debut with this warmly satisfying remake of Marcel Pagnol’s “The Well-Digger’s Daughter”.As in Pagnol’s exceptional films, Auteuil captures the social snobberies and class divisions in provincial France, during the first half of the 20th century.Richly conceived, full of emotional gesture and nuance, Auteuil sets the perceptive social drama in dry, sun burnished Provence.It’s the eve of the First World War, the last days of summer and the last days of peace. Following the death of her mother, lovely Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), daughter of stolid welldigger Pascal (Auteuil) returns from her adopted Paris home to…
The Art Directors Guild Film Society and The American Cinematheque present CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935) at 5:30 Sunday, July 22, 2012, Egyptian Theatre 6712 Hollywood Blvd. Hollywood.The seminal film of the pirate-swashbuckler genre, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland, this program will explore the legacy of Hollywood pirate movies and recognize the film’s legendary Oscar®- winning Art Director Anton Grot. Anton Grot, who was nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Art Direction for “The Sea Hawk (1940), “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex’ (1939), “The Life of Emile Zola”(1937), “Anthony Adverse” (1936) and “Svengali” (1931) was inducted into…
Los Angeles Filmforum presents two films classics of the Portuguese Novo Cinema, Change of Life (Mudar de Vida) and Glória.Sunday July 15,7:30 pmChange of Life (Mudar de Vida), directed by Paulo Rocha. (1966, Portugal, 35mm, b&w, 90 min)With Geraldo del Rey, Isabel Ruth, Maria BarrosoSpielberg Theatre, The Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, CA.The second and arguably most important film by Paulo Rocha (b. 1935), one of the central figures of the Novo Cinema, “Change of Life” is a direct response to Oliveira’s “Rite of Spring” (and, indirectly, to Varda’s “Pointe Courte”) and an important precursor to the radical documentary-shaped…
I had an opportunity to interview veteran Turkish film director Dervis Zaim, who served as the Jury president of The Los Angeles Turkish Film Festival’s inaugural festivities. Zaim, who has long taught at Bogazici University in Istanbul, has influenced a generation of younger filmmakers. His film “Shadows and Faces” (Gölgeler Ve Suretler-2011)), winner Best Film- 22nd Ankara International Film Festival, opened LATFF.Robin: I understand that you have done a series of films, this is the end of the series, and all of them have an element of traditional art as the subtext.Dervish: I am trying to basically translate the structure…
In conjunction with the exhibition Fracture: Daido Moriyama, LACMA will screen a series of films that offer a raw, street-level view of Japanese urban life while also confronting such poignant postwar themes as identity, gender, and alienation. These films, from the taut policiers of Akira Kurosawa and existentialist parables of Hiroshi Teshigahara to rarely-screened films by Susumu Hani and Toshio Matsumoto, shatter social and aesthetic taboos as they fearlessly delve into a bustling underworld of petty criminals, miscreants, outcasts, revolutionaries, and all other manner of stray dogs.This series is in two parts: May 11-12 and June 8 -9.FRI MAY 11Friday,…
Bernardo Rondeau, originally hired by the very missed Ian Birnie, is continuing in Birnie’s vein. Rondeau, who formally worked with Landmark, brings a historically knowledgeable and witty approach to the expanded Exhibition Film Series he’s been programming since Birnie left LACMA.Consider his provocative series High and Low: Postwar Japan in Black and White (shown In conjunction with the exhibition Fracture: Daido Moriyama) which continues next weekend alongside classics like Kurosawa’s “Stray Dog” and Nagisa Oshima’s New Wave masterpiece “Diary of a Shinjuku Thief” Rondeau offered Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existential fetishist “The Face Of Another” (the film shares stylistic explorations with films…
Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary “Searching for Suger Man” is the best documentary I’ve seen so far this year. It’s a riveting tale of a 60’s/70’s singer-songwriter who failed to make it in the US, but unbeknownst to anyone involved with his career became one of South Africa’s superstars. With a micro budget, Bendjelloul has crafted the story of the decade. The unlikely tale is as much fun to watch as Errol Morris’s equally jaw-dropping “Tabloid.”Latino singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez was discovered by two producers (Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey) playing with his back to the audience in a bar in Detroit. (As…
Benoît Jacquot’s “Farewell My Queen” takes us backstage at Versailles during the fateful three days before the General Assembly takes Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette prisoner. (July 14th-July 16 1789.)Shot with the handheld or steadicam approach of a documentary, Benoit’s brisk film puts us in the shoes of Sidonie Laborde (Léa Seydoux-“Mysteries Of Lisbon”, “Midnight In Paris’), an orphan who’s become Marie Antoinette’s favored reader, or as she puts it “the servant of the Queen’s books.” Caught up as bystanders we taste the uncertainty, the chaos of social upheaval. Some of the characters around us kick into survival mode, others…