[screenings/discussion] The Joan P. Mencher Lectures: We are What We Eat

'The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.'

- John Berger

‘We’ve begun to eat our own limbs’

- Arundhati Roy

As the world tilts increasingly and unsustainably top heavy and as many species, tribes, lives and livelihoods are looking towards extinction and the human imagination is deluded and curtailed; the need of the hour is first, the lucid understanding of the human condition and how the bigger global trends are affecting and shaping our lives on a day to day and very intimate basis. Renowned anthropologist Dr. Joan P. Mencher has been working for many years in India on topics that are increasingly acquiring urgency across the globe- sustainable agriculture, inequitable food distribution, climate change, the condition of the farmers. It is an honor for Bangalore Film Society to present ‘The Joan P. Mencher Lectures: We are What We Eat’, a series of film screenings and discussions, as the professor herself introduces us to the complex world of our daily bread- the history, the systems, the structures, the intrigues, the deceits, the stories of tragedy, and of hope.


Friday 20th November, 2009 Time: 6.30pm


Screening of the ‘The Story of Stuff’ (20min)



From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

Introduction to ‘The Joan P. Mencher Lectures: We Are What We Eat’ by Dr. Mencher.

Screening and discussion of ‘Fresh’ (90min) A Film by Ana Sophia Joanes



Filmmaker Ana Sofia Joanes takes a close look at the innovative alternatives to industrial food production that have been championed by visionaries from around the country: urban farmer and activist Will Allen, sustainable farmer and entrepreneur Joel Salatin, and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among others. Where our current system fails us by contaminating the soil, water, and sometimes the food itself, smaller scale sustainable practices offer a hopeful new vision of healthier land, animals, and, ultimately, people. Fresh celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision of a future of our food and our planet

Saturday 21st November, 2009 Time: 6.30pm

Talk by Dr.Joan Mencher "Women and Alternative Visions for the Future of food in India"



Screening and discussion of ‘The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil’ (53min)



When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate. This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call "The Special Period." The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis – the massive reduction of fossil fuels – is an example of options and hope.

Sunday 22nd November, 2009 Time: 6.30pm

Screening and discussion of ‘Thirst’ (65min) A film by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kauffman



Global corporations are rapidly buying up local water supplies. Communities suddenly lose control of their most precious resource. “Thirst”, a character-driven documentary with no narration, reveals how water is the catalyst for explosive community resistance to globalization. A piercing look at the conflict between public stewardship and private profit.


Screening and discussion of ‘Caminos- The Immigrant’s Trail’ (20min)


Caminos: The Immigrant's Trail traces a group of U.S. and Canadian citizens retracing the immigrant trail from El Paso, Texas to Oaxaca, Mexico. This documentary, based on our summer 2007 trip led by Food First executive director, Eric Holt-Giménez, reveals some of the factors that drive these migrants to leave their families and risk their lives to seek work in the U.S. Hear the stories of Mexican farmers who were driven off their land by U.S. farm subsidies and the globalization of food trade.

ADMISSION FREE

Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road cross, Op. State Bank of India

Tel:25493705/9886213516

Email:bangalorefilmsociety@gmail.com

Joan P. Mencher is an Emerita Professor of Anthropology from the City University of New York's Graduate Center, and Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the chair of an embryonic not-for-profit called The Second Chance Foundation, which works to support rural grassroots organizations in India and the United States who work with poor and small farmers on issues of sustainable agriculture. She has worked primarily in South India but also in West Bengal briefly, on issues of ecology, caste, land reform, agriculture, women, and related issues over the last half century, and has published widely both in the United States and in India on all of these subjects, primarily in academic journals.

[screenings] It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘to the facts of how Terra is run. Two entities maneuver around each other, with the first one ruling and then the other. These entities-‘

‘I’m not either one,’ his son said. ‘I’m an Old and a Regular. I don’t want to take the test; I know what I am. I know what you are and I’m the same.’

- Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8

‘In autumn, that miserable year, the province witnessed, for the first time in 18 years since the el presidente’s visit to inaugurate the new mural done across the walls of the town hall by self-proclaimed indigenous artist and son of the soil, Juan de la Iglesia, also a veritable pig who happened to be the then minister of foreign policy’s only son, of a feeble blind-folded donkey being a led by an angry and disturbingly muscular farmer wielding no less subtle symbols than a hammer and sickle, the honking screaming chaos of a traffic jam. The dust blown graveyard with its gentle melancholic candles and quiet reverence to the souls departed had overnight, to the surprise of one and all, transformed into the head of a mechanized octopus sprouting Volkswagen, Cadillac, Honda and Godknowswhat tentacles across the eight roads from here to the ends of towns and beyond. The village idiot Santiago’s death had seemingly, to the open mouthed surprise of one and all, stirred a pageantry that far surpassed the hushed magnificence that marked the heavenly passing of that redoubtable nobleman Don Camancho and the solemn multitudes that gathered to pay their last respects to Father Font. Senor Santiago had breezed into town a decade ago, an emperor in rags, stinking of cheap wine, not a godforsaken peso to his name but a tongue so rich that it would put poet laureates to shame in one boozy breath. Beneath his muddy tatters lay a body so beaten with wrinkles and scars that one imagines that when he curled up at night under a lamp-post or in a shed he would have resembled no more than a crumpled piece of paper, something a Parisian poet discarded at a café. With his stock of exploits around which he spun grand narratives of adventure and romance, he quickly established himself as the mid-noon to late-night attraction at the Rio Hondo Bar. Tales of lumberjacking in Alaska, of raiding the tombs of Egypt, of whale-fishing in Japan, of the Hot Balloon Ride over Borneo in the search of a frog, of getting stranded without papers in Rawalpindi, of his many conquests of exotic women(eight fifty two, in all); all of which the townsfolk took in enthusiastically but also being rational men and women, with a pinch of salt. Not that the punch-drunk troubadour ever seem to care. He was only too happy to drum it up for the listening ear.

He passed away in his dreams. His crumpled body was found by the undertaker’s apprentice Juan Ferrero who took it upon himself to ring the town bell announcing the loss. No one had any clue as to how the news spread. But by mid-noon, a procession of strangers began to enter town. Strange men and women, strange cars and even stranger hats and boots came to take one last look on that face, beatific and ever the fool, even in death. After the funeral, the Rio Hondo Bar erupted in an impromptu carnival. The town, plagued all year by pestilence, suddenly found the warmest of whisky poured down its soul bringing with it a glow in the grip of which it was impossible (to use a cliché) to forget life’s sorrows and celebrate. Senor Santiago would be never be anointed a saint but his heaven would be one with eight hundred and fifty two exotic angels.’

- Javier Reyes, The Gospel of Unknowns



Bangalore Film Society is proud to pay tribute to the masters of the greasy collars and hardened knuckles- Fuller, Imamura, Olmi, who roughed it up with the hard times and the hard life over a lifetime and two before they made their first film. When so much of cinema is about the cinema itself and less about life, to witness these masters at work is to be reminded of the glory and the beauty of the cinematic image. Their pursuit was neither realism nor the abstract. If you ask them- they told stories; and within these stories they saw and captured with their well-worn eyes, the poetry of life. Something the great Richard Linklater had in mind when he named his first film- It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books

Friday 30th October, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Pick Up on South Street (80min/1953) Dir: Samuel Fuller

‘We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense.’

A decorated infantryman who fought in the hellfire frontlines of war, an itinerant journalist who famously strapped a typewriter on his back riding cross country in box cars and freight trains, an insanely prolific writer of cheap lurid fiction; Samuel Michael Fuller- the veritable prince auteur, madman and shootist had survived all three lives, life and limb intact before he took his place behind the camera and leaving his indelible mark on the French Nouvelle Vague, The American Brat Pack, The Japanese and Icelandic New Waves all the way down to Tarantino. The seminal 50s noir ‘Pick Up on South Street’, one of his most influential masterpieces- a tale of petty pick-pocket who inadvertently finds himself embroiled in a high-level government conspiracy, is filled with the grit, wit, poetry and humanism that only Fuller could summon. Nominated for Golden Lion, Venice 54’.

Saturday 31st October, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
The Pornographers (128min/1966) Dir: Shohei Imamura

‘As for me, I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction.’

Never has cinema brimmed with the green glow of subversive glee as it has in the films of Shohei Imamura. Living among the ruins of post-war Japan, he spent several impressionable years working in the black markets of his country peddling cigarettes and alcohol. Not that he would complain, for in these gutters he found a found a world teeming with life and when he finally occupied the director’s chair, he bought all his love and obsession of the down, the deadbeat and the downright margins to the glory of the cinemascope. ‘The Pornographers’ widely regarded as the two time Palm D’Or winner’s early classic chronicles a seedy underworld of blue collar porno directors and gangsters and their friends and family as they do what they do, if only to get by in a world that doesn’t give a damn.

Sunday 1st November, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Il Posto (93min/1961) Dir: Ermanno Olmi

‘There is another reason I am behind the camera. Because otherwise it would be like going up to a girl and saying, “I love you but now he’s going to kiss you for me.’

A son of peasant factory workers, Ermanno Olmi had it tough when at a tender age he had to support his family through World War 2 working as a clerk in an electric company. His experiences came together with his intuition as he went on to become a director with a unique aesthetic that seems to able to evoke the sorrow and the beauty of the world in the most commonplace of things. ‘Il Posto’ is a masterwork, a tender coming of age tale of young boy who travels from his village to the town in search of unemployment only to find himself on the wrong end of the absurd structure that society has arranged itself in. Winner of the Film Critics Award at Venice 61’.

Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road cross, Op. State Bank of India

Tel:25493705/9886213516

Email:bangalorefilmsociety@gmail.com

ADMISSION FOR FILMS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. NON-MEMBERS ARE REQUESTED TO ARRIVE 15 MINS EARLY AND REGISTER.
(Members whose membership has expired are requested to kindly renew their membership.)

[screenings/discussion with director]Neerundu Nilamundu

"Those who look for the laws of Nature as a support for their new works collaborate with the creator. Because of this, originality consists in returning to the origin."
- Antonio Gaudi



You are cordially invited to the screening of film, ‘NEERUNDU NILAMUNDU’, by Bala Kailasam. The Director will be present at the screenings to introduce his film and interact with the audience in a post-screening session.

Day: Saturday

Date: 10th October 2009

Time: 6:30pm

Venue: ASHIRWAD, OPP. STATE BANK OF MYSORE, ST. MARK’S ROAD,

BANGALORE -560001; Phone: 080-22210154

About the film:

The word ‘reforms’ with respect to Government functioning is almost always understood only in its economic context as disinvestment and privatization. Very rarely it is understood as the reform of the functioning of the individuals within the Government, and a change in the form and style of Governance. It is taken for granted that such a mission is impossible!

This film is about a group of engineers working in the water sector in Tamilnadu who are engaged in such a mission. The film traces their journey to 2003; how it started in the ‘The Tamilnadu Water Supply and Drainage Board (TWAD)’ and showcases exemplary stories of individual transformation leading to institutional transformation. The narration is from the point of view of an engineer from the Agricultural Department (AED) undergoing training by a couple of TWAD engineers who share their experience with unbelievable passion.


B. Kailasam, son of Mr. K. Balachander, is an Engineering graduate from the Madras University, trained in Film and Broadcasting at the University of Iowa, USA. His thesis project The Twice Discriminated (1987) was an analysis of the state of Dalit Christians of Tamilnadu. On his return to India he worked in various capacities as Director, Script Writer, Editor and Sound Recordist for several films and videos. His 1990 documentary on the art of Temple architecture and sculpture called Vaastu Marabu won the Best Film on Art and Culture at the 38th National Film Festival 1991. In 1992, he produced and designed the sound of Veli, an imagistic ode to the river Cauvery.


ADMISSION FREE

This is being Co-organized by:

Bangalore Film Society contact: George Kutty @ 9448064513

Visthar contact: Shyam Khalil @ 9845442453

The Other Media contact: Santhosh Kumar @ 09446529991













(A shout out to the Mad Architect of the Twisted Columns of Malwan)

[screenings] The Year of the Swine

“F-f-first they told me to lose the stutter, now they tell me I'm not funny anymore! It's a pain in the butt being p-p-politically correct."

- Porky Pig, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)

“Whether it was the violent sharp shock of the ambulance siren outside the thin milky glass windows or the gentle rustle of the nurse’s sandals on the terracotta tiles which woke him up, he couldn’t really know but as he sublimated from the amorphous to flesh and blood between dream and dawn he saw a plump silhouette dressed in white, balanced on high heels leaving the whiteness of his room into the dark corridor beyond the door and heard the last circular strains of the music of the siren snake beyond the glass further outside the reach of his ear. Coming together in half-lucid wakefulness, he felt the bed-prison contraption of hard foam and steel chains within which he had been trapped for the last nine days pull and anchor his body and soul back into rigid stasis. He moaned the end of his dreams and freedom as the dreaded word ‘quarantine’ rose in his head and the walls seemed to close in blinding him in a blaze of sedate white. ‘Is there an end to this?’ He prayed for the apocalypse to end his misery when his memory got better of the dry white room and drifted into the liquid sphere of memory and beauty. ‘There she lies’. He turned his head as far as it could go and from the corner of his eye, he saw her, trapped and tied just like he was. From all the angle he could achieve he could see only her glorious sculpted feet. The word ‘chrysanthemums’ rose in his head. His heart went into ache and longing. And just then, as if he made an unwarranted indiscretion, he was reminded of the roving camera eye that stared at them from the walls. They were always watching, always listening, making sure in a manner most clinical that there would be no inkling of a disturbance. All the unseen eyes, the walls, the white, the emptiness- all descended upon him with cold wrath. ‘Damn them. To hell with them.’ He closed his eyes and with all the soul he had, gently folded his toes at her in the greatest of hope. He looked back at her. The beautiful feet lay quiet and still in the big empty white room. ‘What a fool I am? What was I thinking?’ And then, it moved. She moved. Ever so slightly, ever so slowly, each toe on her marble feet began to curl and bloom. And he was reminded of Yeats. ‘With the earth and the sky and the water/ remade, like a casket of gold/ For my dreams of your image that blossoms/ a rose in the deeps of my heart.’

- Margaux Rollin, Like a 30th Century Man


The dreaded Swine flu is very much the forgotten news of yesterday but at Bangalore Film Society we have developed an unhealthy obsession with the events that followed the outbreak and have formed a firm belief that it needs further contemplation and thought, if not as a comment on modern life then only to send it off with a blast. The fear and loathing thrown up by the epidemic was no mean spectacle and for a few weeks, the city and the world went about it’s business looking very much like something from Romero’s ‘The Crazies’. So bring out those masks and turn up for the weekend when BFS ever so proudly presents three days of reflection, celebration and the macabre in ‘The Year of the Swine’.

Friday 25th September, 2009 Time: 6.30pm

Dead Ringers (116min/Canada) Dir: David Cronenberg

The very fact that the apocalyptic filmography of David Cronenberg, one of the greatest directors of our time, acquires increasing importance and seems uncannily prophetic does not bode well for our times. ‘Dead Ringers’, regarded by many as the very best of Cronenberg’s strange and brilliant visions, chronicles a bizarre true tale of two identical twin brothers and their obsession with a disturbed woman. A tale of addiction, love, madness, identity and a meditation on the frailty of the human body in times like the one we live in, ‘Dead Ringers’ swept the Critics Association Awards before being typically and unfairly side-lined at the Oscars and features a great performance by thespian Jeremy Irons as the brothers Mantle.

Saturday 26th September, 2009 Time: 6.15pm

The Kingdom Pt-1 (140min/Denmark) Dir: Lars Von Trier

Enfant terrible, egoist, mad man, amateur, prankster, auteur- the films of Lars Von Trier have always had critics and spectators sitting on the fences, fuelling raging unending bouts of dialogue and debate. Never one to heed the sign over the red button that says ‘Do Not Push’, Mr. Von Trier is the ace rabble rouser and we at BFS have conceded to let his eccentric film-making take over our programming and for the first time in our three decades of existence, we’re proud to present an acclaimed television mini-series in two parts, over two days. Von Trier’s ‘The Kingdom’ premiered in 1994 in Denmark and became a television event like never before, acquiring acclaim and a fevered following across the globe. A satirical, farcical, macabre story set within the confines of The Kingdom Hospital- a site of strange happenings, Mr. Von Trier can be found in all his magnificently crazed element.

Sunday 27th September, 2009 Time: 6.15pm

The Kingdom Pt- 2 (93min/Denmark) Dir: Lars Von Trier

What is the secret of the ambulance? Will the evil doctor Dr. Helmer get his due? Will the spirits that roam the confines of the Kingdom Hospital be put to rest? Is there redemption in store for the doctors and inmates? Will there be a consensus on the mad Mr. Von Trier? Watch and find out. Part 2 of The Kingdom. The Grand Finale.


Th-th-th-that's all, folks!

Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road cross, Op. State Bank of India

Tel:25493705/9886213516

Email:bangalorefilmsociety@gmail.com

ADMISSION FOR FILMS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. NON-MEMBERS ARE REQUESTED TO ARRIVE 15 MINS EARLY AND REGISTER.
(Members whose membership has expired are requested to kindly renew their membership.)





(Indebted in no small measure to the very evil Madame L.)

[water film festival] Voices from the Waters 2009: 4th International Water Film Festival

“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free. Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction-up, down, sideways-by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.

The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.”

- Jacques Yves Cousteau

“When a great tree, over a hundred years old, is uprooted and killed in a few seconds to make way for a couple of inches of tar where no life will ever take root, one cannot but help contemplate a nagging feeling that the world is about to collapse under its own dead weight. When so much of life revolves around the plastic, the bland and the cheaply disposable, it is only natural for that which is human inside of us to revolt, rebel and pronounce its doom. As the world steps and rolls over all that is life and the living and moves towards the thoroughly modern, it is our collective imaginations that are being cramped, colonized, swamped by TV boredom and other detritus of an ugly civilization. But to contemplate the apocalypse, however fashionable and easy, is to yield your imagination, the only thing of true and pure value that makes one human, to the modern atrocities. Rebellion is made of stronger stuff. To rebel is to hope beyond the odds, to rebel is to tell tales of life in 4000 AD where man first comes in contact with his nearest neighbors in outer space, to rebel is to plant a sapling whose fruits will be eaten by children yet to be born. It is incomprehensible, it cannot be put into words, in a modern scheme it may be rendered useless but don’t stare at the horizon, don’t stop to look at the landscape presented before you. Stare far and beyond. It is there that lies the first light to lead you to a new dawn- where life is teeming and the imagination unfettered and greater still.”

- Prof. Ly Saiwa, The Book of Bright Futures

Bangalore Film Society in association with Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, Svaraj, Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca College, USA (FLEFF), Charter of Human Responsibilities, Karnataka Chalanachitra Academy, Suchitra Film Society, Federation of film societies of India (Southern Region) and YWCA is proud to present the fourth edition of Bangalore’s biggest environmental Film Festival and the biggest water film festival in the world- Voices from the Waters 2009: 4th International Water Film Festival from the 4th to the 6th September 2009.

From neighborhood ponds to the holy rivers to the oceans- the images of the acclaimed, feted and riveting films from across the globe will take you on a journey through time, place, memories and civilizations in an attempt to rediscover and celebrate water as the source and origin of our lives. We welcome you to add color and noise to the texture of the festival. Without you it’ll just be another screening of films but it is only with you that it will be what it was always intended to be- ‘a festival’


Venues and Schedules:

[Main venue] Alliance Francaise de Bangalore, Vasanthnagar For screening schedule click here

YWCA, Koramangala For screening schedule click here

Badami House, NR Road For screening schedule click here

(for school children)Balbhavan, Cubbon Park For screening schedule click here

(for college students) MES College, Malleswaram For screening schedule click here

Suchitra Film Society screenings on 5th and 6th September from 6pm onwards

ADMISSION FREE.

For information on the Conference on Critical link between Climate changes Food, Water, Livelihood and Ecosystem Security to be held on 7th September, 2009 click here.

Contact: 25493705/9886213516

bangalorefilmsociety@gmail.com

http://voicesfromthewaters.com






‘If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in water’
- Lora Eiseley

Voices from the Waters 2008
Voices from the Waters 2007 Day 1-2-3

[screenings] Bastards out off Hell

She stayed until the Greek came back, about an hour. We didn’t do anything. We just lay on the bed. She kept rumpling my hair, and looking up at the ceiling, like she was thinking.

‘You like blueberry pie?’

‘I don’t know. Yeah. I guess so.’

‘I’ll make you some.’

-James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

Everyone on these streets knew if you turned around and saw the man, all seven feet, looking down at you, you had at best start saying your last and final prayers and make them good, remember everything, cash in your chips and for what its worth, ask for forgiveness from the Man up there cause down here, about a second ago, your last chance just passed you by. And if don't believe in the Almighty then, do what you have to do. You have a got a minute at most. No point running or making a fuss about it or asking to speak to your mother and kids. Go down easy. Rest in Peace. And that's one half of the reason they call him `Tombstone'. The other reason's got to with that beautiful face of his. A striking mug- whichever way you stare at him, like one of those ancient Greek statues they dug up from the grime of centuries ago but now they been beaten in by time and weather so much that they look like something that came from outer space. Of childhood and memories, there is no trace, neither does it look modern. It is a face marked by graves of what must once have been a gorgeous masculine profile. Eyes hardened and purpled during the time he spent as a POW in a Nazi camp in Litzmannstadt, Poland. One ear lost in a scuffle with some dealer punks during his time in Harlem, the other ear burnt from sleeping too close to the boiler from when he worked the railroads. The mouth was slit at Johnny Friendly's Bar and the nose punched in by the feds trying to get him to rat on his customers. But if there was indeed a scar on that dead face which he sported like a goddamn charm, it was the gash across his forehead. Before every hit, he licks his fingers and runs it along the flesh-and-wound barb-wire. No one knows where he's got that from. Legend has it, that he got it from a dame. He had turned up piss-late and dirt-broke for a meeting, having blown every dime in his pocket at the crap tables. It didn't go down too well with her. She went at him with a stiletto.

-Elwood Reinhardt, Severe Burns

Noir is in the air. Blood-stained collars are back in fashion and ladies, it is very very chic to sport a gun. As a tribute to the glorious second half of ‘Kaminey’ and on the eve of the new Tarantino, the much awaited and greatly debated ‘Inglorious Basterds’, Bangalore Film Society is proud to present to you a weekend of the tough, the dead, the crazy, the wild and the reckless. We present to you the works of one of cinema’s masters-by-default Seijun Suzuki, the man who knew very clearly where to point and what to shoot. We present Bastards out Off Hell.

Friday, 21st August 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Out of the Past (1947/93min) Dir: Jacques Tourneur

‘We called them B-pictures’
- Robert Mitchum

‘So what’s the big idea? I thought it was going to be Seijun Suzuki.’ Well, BFS would advise you not be vocal if you get the aforementioned thought it your head. Why? Simply cause you don’t want to mess with the kid. The original gangster-preacher, the charm, the suave, the street- Robert Mitchum in his most explosive performance yet in the great Jacques Tourneur’s tour-de-force noir joined by no less than the seductive Jane Greer and a terrific Kirk Douglas. Regarded now as a classic Hollywood noir, ‘Out of the Past’ is a sensationally told tale like only Tourneur could, of dead-end detective whose past returns to catch him in a tale of deceit and intrigue. The dialogue itself is a doozy.

Saturday 22nd August, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Branded To Kill (1967/98min) Dir: Seijun Suzuki


“People think I have an interesting walk. Hell, I'm just trying to hold my gut in.”
- Robert Mitchum

Now that the kid’s outta the way, we can bring in The Man. And at his flamboyant best. A blue-collar director hired to churn out movies off the assembly line, Suzuki was a true visionary- ask Tarantino, ask Jarmusch, they’ll tell you. He may not be able to hold sway on it like Godard, but for Suzuki, like the greatest- Fuller, Houston, Imamura, Kurosawa, Hawks et al, he had a gut feeling about it and went all over town with it. ‘Branded to Kill’ is one the epitomes of the Suzuki aesthetic, a brash, perverse, fast and furious dynamic tale of ‘No.3 Killer’ who must hang on to his life and fight his way to No.1. If you haven’t seen Suzuki, you haven’t seen anything like it ever before. Starring the one and only Joe Shishido- imagine Elvis playing a yakuza.

Sunday 23rd August, 2009 Time: 6.30pm
Youth of the Beast (1963/92min) Dir: Seijun Suzuki

“Where are the real artists? Today it`s four-barreled carburettors and that`s it.”
- Robert Mitchum

Visually, the pictures have seldom done better. Suzuki outdoes himself in this exciting twist-laden tale of crooks, cops and revenge. Mirrors, smoke, yellow dust, strange landscapes, hallucinations- Seijun turns it upto eleven and sweeps the senses turning yet another run-of-the mill script handed to him by his bosses into plush extravagance and searing beauty and cinema- oh yes, the cinema! The great Joe Shishido turns up yet again as the protagonist Joji 'Jo' Mizuno and sometimes it just doesn’t get any better than this.

Venue: Ashirvad, 30, St. Mark's Road cross, Op. State Bank of India

Tel:25493705/9886213516

Email:bangalorefilmsociety@gmail.com

ADMISSION FOR FILMS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. NON-MEMBERS ARE REQUESTED TO ARRIVE 15 MINS EARLY AND REGISTER.
(Members whose membership has expired are requested to kindly renew their membership.)

[screenings] One Time and One Time Only

‘There is great disorder under heaven and the situation is excellent’
-Gen. Li, Doonesbury by G.B. Trudeau

‘Each will have his personal Rocket.’
-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

"The whole world was watching us, and we had a chance to show the world how it could be if we ran things,” growled Wavy Gravy, the Woodstock 69’ MC . You can either take it or leave it at that. But for what it counts, Woodstock Music & Art Fair 1969: An Aquarian Exposition was more than its base statistics- 400,000 people, 3 days, 32 of the best rock, folk, blues, jazz, psychedelic acts, 600acres of dairy farm, one of the 50 Moments that changed Rock & Roll History and for all you know, 43miles away from the actual town of Woodstock. It was more than the ‘fitting end to a beautiful generation’ that it is often purported as. For a time that believed that the present and the now were the infinite and the glorious, nostalgia is an ill-spent dime and any and all speculation, just so much paper.

As the 40th anniversary of those 3 glorious days knocks on the door, we will not commit the mistake of remembering Woodstock or commit something as ignoble as pay tribute. Woodstock was an event of our collective consciousness, a concert of our mind, pure color- the first plucked string still vibrates an aurora borealis somewhere along the atmosphere. It is not a place and time far, far away that we seek but a dimension, where if you turn back mad flowers bloom and sweep, rain falls on guitar strings, people frolic manic in the mud arms akimbo awaiting the promised beautiful embrace and the air is made of the sweetest music ever played. Woodstock 69 is the eternal and Bangalore Film Society is proud to celebrate the Love, Peace, Freedom, Beauty and Music, and play it like it once played and plays forever- ‘One Time and One Time Only’

Sunday 16th August, 2009 Time: 4.30pm
Woodstock: The Director’s Cut (1970/225mins) Dir: Michael Wadleigh

225minutes of not only the greatest concert ever played but 225minutes that changed cinema forever. Iconoclast film-maker and counterculture icon Michael Wadleigh along with 100 member rag tag which included a very young Mr. Scorsese not just executed one of the greatest films of all time but captured what no film had or has since captured- a unique time, a unique mood of a crumbling utopia having its greatest howl. Stylistically revolutionary at the time with its inventive use of editing and the split-screen, Wadleigh’s free-wheeling and gorgeously painted frames and expositions translate with not a missing vibe the grand human poetry that was and is ‘Woodstock Music & Art Fair 1969: An Aquarian Exposition’. Winner of the Best Documentary Feature, Academy Awards 1971.

THE FOLLOWING WILL PERFORM:-

CROSBYSTILLSANDNASHCANNEDHEATRICHIEHAVENSJOANBAEZTHEWHOSHANANAJOE
CROCKERANDTHEGREASEBANDCOUNTRYJOEANDTHEFISHARLOGUTHRIETENYEARSAFTER
JEFFERSONAIRPLANEJOHNSEBASTIANCARLOSSANTANASLYANDTHEFAMILYSTONEJANISJOPLIN
AND
JIMIHENDRIX

Admission Free. Permission to Arrive Deranged at the Premises granted.

Venue: 33/1-9, Thyagaraja Layout, Jai Bharath Nagar, MS Nagar PO, Bangalore- 33.

Tel: 25493705/9886213516