| Subject: April movies |
Author:
Wei Chian
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Date Posted: 00:20:39 04/02/02 Tue
Author Host/IP: solar-gw.zapsurf.com.sg/203.124.0.248
Alright, a few brief summaries of what the Film Society will be showing this month, and all shows start at 6 p.m.
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Children Of Heaven(4th April, Thursday LT10)
The Children of Heaven is a sweet film about a boy, his sister and shoes.
Ali is a 10 year old living in a small town in Iran. His family is poor and
behind in rent payments; his mother ill. Ali sincerely tries to help out,
but he ends up losing his little sister Zahra's shoes during an errand to
have them repaired.
Ali and Zahra work out a plan to share his modest sneakers. Since her school
hours end just as his begin, Zahra wears the worn gymies first. Though he's
an excellent student, this "sneaker relay" causes Ali to be tardy. As for
Zahra, ashamed of the oversized shoes her lamenting gaze falls on the
footwear of all the other children in the playground.
This movie displays stark beauty. Ali's family is poor, but not to be
pitied. The father, loud and full of bombast, is nonetheless loving and
dedicated. The beauty emanates from the eyes of the children. The director
puts into film that wonderful majestic world we used to see before puberty,
when a pair of shoes and a shiny pen could make you come running home from
school with a skip in your step and a smile that no news story could dampen.
When your parents' approval or disapproval was paramount. When the love
between brothers and sisters wasn't something to be contemplated,
manipulated or even expressed -- it simply was.
It doesn't matter where you grew up in; a big city or a poor village, that
childhood spirit proves universal.
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The Society of the Spectacle (5th April, Friday LT10)
The Situationists were a motley bunch of self-styled intellectuals and hangers-on led by one Guy Debord, self-styled leader and ideologue of the pack. As most self-respecting avant-garde groups were wont to do, they conducted their assault on the rest of society on various fronts-through pamphlets, manifestos, books, films, art, and to add to their plans for world domination, a grand architectural plan to transform cities and urban spaces into places for play. The key text of the movement was Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, a book which, considering the generally mischievous spirit evident in their other areas of endeavour, was rather plodding in parts and read like an account of modern European history with a strong emphasis on Marxist ideas and theory. Recountings of Russian history and Karl Marx’s theories aside, however, Debord was concerned with a society that increasingly lived off the ‘spectacle’- i.e. the consumption of not just commodities but images and surfaces, which had been transformed by a capitalist system into almost tangible entities.
What reads as a rather plodding didactic book is brought to life in the film version, where Debord reads out, in a surprisingly dull monotone, excerpts from the book which accompany an assortment of images culled from sources as diverse as pornographic films, popular movies of the day, as well as advertisements. One gets a better idea in the film what Debord is driving at, and there is more than a little humour in the frequent contrasts and juxtaposition between the images and the voiceover. Debord also uses the film to put into practice the idea of détournement, whereby objects, text or pictures when removed from their original contexts and placed in a totally different one would undergo a change of meaning. The film is essentially a collage of images and sounds, and the throwing of unlikely bedfellows together is an attempt to show up new meanings, new angles, and perhaps provoke a snicker or two. It’s also a statement in a way against intellectual property and against a world rife with images-the careless appropriation and combination of uncredited images speaks of a society where everything has been said and done and used for profit, and where the only act possible is to wrest those images from their owners and to turn them into one’s own.
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Trouble (8th April, Monday LT12)
Look here: http://www.penelopebuitenhuis.com/trouble.html
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Can the Dialectic Break Bricks? (9th April, Tuesday LT12)
Vienet’s Can the Dialectic Break Bricks uses the same concepts as Debord, but with different results. Debord’s film is relentlessly polemical and there is an insistence that gets a bit heavy at times, but Vienet’s film is, if such a term were possible, a Situationist comedy. Vienet took an old Chinese martial arts film in its entirety and over-dubbed the dialogue completely with stock lines of Marxist slogans-regardless of one’s familiarity with Marxism, the effect is nothing short of hilarious. Intellectual pedants can probably find sufficient fodder here for discussion, but the film brings home the concept of détournement with an incredible amount of humour that at times approaches the slapstick. Forget about the dialectic and settle down for a few laughs.
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