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Film Appreciation :
Unforgettable films of yore
K S Sivakumaran
Expressionism was a term used in cinematic parlance as well. Earlier
German films were basically of expressionistic social realism, we are
told. Some critics attribute this mode of cinematic presentation to the
American film idol of the 1940s and 50s – Orson Welles. He was great
actor and film director. His histrionic presentation of playing
Shakespearean characters is legendry achievement. He made a black and
white film called Citizen Kane. The film is a classic in that the
cinematic visuals were fascinatingly and artistically conceived.
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Ingmar
Bergman |
The story was about a powerful tycoon by name Kane. The film is a
study of the rise and fall of a Citizen Kane. I saw this film somewhere
in the 1950s at a showing at the Lionel Wendt, courtesy the then Colombo
Film Society ably existed due to the efforts of the late L O de Silva
and Carwalio.
The film was interesting partly due to the fact that it was about a
newspaper tycoon. Various points of view of different people associated
with his life comment on the hero Kane. He had a secret. He repeated the
word Rosebud several times before he died. It was the keyword in his
life. The film was gripping.
The director Orson Welles had John Ford as his favourite director.
One critic described the structure of the film as ‘the complex and
intrinsically structured narrative which reveals the multiple layers of
Kane’s complex life and psyche.’
Let’s talk about the French director Jean –Luc Godard named Weekend.
This director way back in the 1960s did not much like the materialistic
life styles of the bourgeoisie in France. So his film was an indirect
attack on the upper middle class.
A young couple from Paris ends up their week end in situations where
barbarism takes over. In other words the director implied that the
decadent west at that time was going back to primitivism. The Swedish
filmmaker Ingmar Bergman was one of the Masters of World Cinema. More
than half a century ago he made a film called Smiles of a Summer Night
in black and white. Although I didn’t like the film very much the first
time I saw it as a growing teenager, but on seeing it later I began to
understand the film better. The film may be called an enjoyable comedy.
Readers would note Bergman coming from a cold conservative country that
is Sweden made films on religious and psychological themes and
existential problems.
This film, however, has issues like love, marriage, youth, sex etc
that make us ponder over much realty in the beginning of the second half
of the 20th century. The film might have been influenced by
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The film is like an opera and
more theatrical than cinematic.
As my lecturers observed “defeat and personal humiliation is another
theme of Bergman, and memorable is the suicide scene of the major
character. Like in many of his films, the women come out better than the
men”
Readers can consult a book titled: Ingmar Bergman: Essays in
Criticism: edited by Stuart Kaminsky. I saw a Hungarian film made by a
woman director named Marta Meszaros titled Nine Months at the Pune Film
Institute in 1990. My fellow women students walked out of the screening
perhaps as a way of protest subscribing to Feminism.
I presumed that they didn’t like a scene where an already married
woman could initiate a sex act, illicitly with a fellow worker. They may
have assumed that it was an unrealistic portrayal of a woman. I really
did not know why the educated women students reacted like that.
In this film the role of heroine was played by an actress named Lili
Monori. What is interesting was that the actual birth of the actress’s
child was photographed for the film.
The main character is a married woman who has a child by her husband.
She works in a big iron foundry and studies privately and passes the
exams. The foreman at the foundry strikes up an affair with her. She
introduces her husband to the foreman. Out of the adulterous
relationship with the foreman she becomes pregnant. The foreman refuses
to accept the child. She breaks up her relationship with him and settles
down elsewhere with her new born child. She is independent now.
Apparently she has left her husband and the older child.
This film made in the late 1970s might have been the beginning of
Feminism in Europe.
I am told that the woman director Marta Meszaro ranks among the best
in contemporary cinema. I am yet to see her new films. She has made a
number of documentaries before.
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