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THE LANDSCAPE OF NEW BRAZILIAN CINEMA

THE LANDSCAPE OF NEW BRAZILIAN CINEMA offers an encounter with scholar – and now filmmaker – Lúcia Nagib and others, on Tuesday, 30 June 2020.

Participants will be invited to see, in advance, Lúcia Nagib and Samuel Paiva’s 94-min long film PASSAGES: TRAVELLING IN AND OUT OF FILM THROUGH BRAZILIAN GEOGRAPHY (2019, Portuguese, English subtitles), which was presented at the most recent IFF at Rotterdam and other festivals around the world. We will make available the link for viewing for attendees during the weekend preceding the event, so that you can see the film in your own time.

Then, on 30 June 2020, Tuesday, we will convene for a 75 min-long online meeting and discussion with Lúcia Nagib (University of Reading), Samuel Paiva (Federal University of São Carlos), and Tiago de Luca (University of Warwick).

The event will be moderated by Dina Iordanova (University of St Andrews) and the access information will be sent to you in advance. The discussion will take place at 3 pm BST (Please take note of your own time zones respectively, for example 11 am São Paulo, 10 am NYC, 4 pm Paris, Hong Kong/Shanghai 10 pm, Tokyo 11 pm).

This is a free event requiring registration. Everybody welcome (for the Zoom meeting we will admit up to 45 participants; we will send the link to the film to all that register). Faculty and students of the University of St Andrews will have priority, and the rest will be registered on a first come-first served basis. To register, please send a note with your name and affiliation to Julia Lennon at [email protected]. We will be in touch once the list is finalised.

We will close registrations on 25 June and will send out the link to the film to those registered on 26 June, Friday, for viewing over the weekend.

The film’s official trailer can be viewed here:

https://youtu.be/QGVAYRlcBNA

Looking forward to welcoming you to THE LANDSCAPE OF NEW BRAZILIAN CINEMA.

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Events

On the Practice of Film Criticism, with Jean-Michel Frodon

In this workshop on THE PRACTICE OF FILM CRITICISM we will combine viewing of a film an a discussion with renowned French film critic and essayist Jean-Michel Frodon.

 

Participants will be invited to see, in advance, a 52 min long film, ALLER-RETOUR (2018), in which Jean-Michel Frodon discusses the practice of film criticism with French director Benoit Jacquot (in French with English subtitles). We will make available the link on the weekend preceding the event, so that participants can view in your own time.

 

Then, on 29 April 2020, Wednesday, we will convene for a 75 min-long online meeting and discussion with Frodon. The event will be moderated by Dina Iordanova and the access information will be sent to you in advance. The discussion will take place at 1 pm GMT (Please take note of your own time zones respectively: 8 am Chicago, 9 am NYC, 2 pm London, 3 pm Paris, Shanghai 9 pm, Tokyo 10 pm).

 

This is a free event requiring registration and is limited to 50 participants for the live part (the link to the film will be made available to all interested parties). Faculty and students of the University of St Andrews will have priority, and the rest will be registered on a first come-first serve basis. To register, please send a note with your name and affiliation to Julia Lennon at [email protected]

 

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Events

Kira Muratova @ St Andrews (and now online), 2020

Kira Muratova (1934-2018), who worked mostly in the Ukrainian city of Odessa, is one of the most innovative, imaginative, exciting and versatile directors to emerge out of the Soviet Union, where her early films were censored and her later work – celebrated. Whilst she is well known within the territory of Russia and Ukraine, her work – an oeuvre that comprises more than fifteen feature films made over six decades — remains little seen and not widely recognized as part of the shaping feminist cannon of film history.

With the workshop Kira Muratova@St Andrews, co organized by the IGCCC and CRSCEES, we aim to compensate for this. The event was first planned to take place face-to-face on 8 April 2020, but we had to move it online due to the COVID-19 pandemics. Registered participants are viewing the material made available online in advance, and the discussion is taking place in an online meeting via videoconferencing, on 8 April 2020 at 2 pm GMT. For registration, please email Zofia Soch, [email protected].

The film shown in full is Muratova’s early KOROTKIE VSTRECHI/BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (1967). This is her first solo-directed feature film, made at Odessa studios, starring Nina Ruslanova, Vladimir Visotsky, as well as Muratova herself, B&W, 87 min.

Contributors to the workshop include Prof. Dina Iordanova and Dr Victoria Donovan (St Andrews), Dr. Irina Schulzki (Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich), Dr Masha Shpolberg (Wellesley College), and critic/independent scholar Giuliano Vivaldi (currently based in Russia). As the discussion takes place via an online platform, colleagues, researches, students and other interested parties from other institutions and countries are also welcome to take part.

The materials that were made available in advance can be accessed via the following links:

Masha Shpolberg’s video essay, Between the Fragment and the Ruin:  Socialism in the Films of Kira Muratova. 22 min. Please view first. 

Irina Schulzki’s (Munich) vieo presentation: The Sense of Gesture: Muratova’s Textures, Ornaments and Colours. 20 min.

Giuliano Vivaldi’s video presentation: Setting Out on a Voyage Into the Realm of Ultra-Realism: Kira Muratova’s Getting To Know The Big Wide World. 10 min.

A special thank you for the assistance from Mina Radovic, Zofia Soch, and George Nalbantov.

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Events

Buddhism and Thai Cinema: Screening of Santi-Vina (Thavi Na Bangchang (‘Marut’), 1954)

We are excited to announce that the IGCCC will host a screening of Santi-Vina (Thavi Na Bangchang (‘Marut’), 1954) on Wednesday, 6 November.

Considered lost for almost 60 years, the first Thai film shot on 35mm in colour has been found and restored.

This occasion will be marked by introduction by Sanchai Chotirosseranee (Deputy Director of the Thai Film Archive) and post-screening discussion on Buddhism and Thai cinema with Dr Natthanai Prasannam (Assistant Professor, Department of Literature, Kasetsart University), Dr Rose Harris-Birtill (Post-doctoral researcher, School of English, University of St Andrews) and Dr Philippa Lovatt (Lecturer in Film Studies, University of St Andrews).

Join us in the Film Studies Boardroom on Wednesday, 6 November from 2pm. All welcome!

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Events

Mrinal Sen @ St Andrews, 2019

Mrinal Sen, whose death “marks the end of Golden Age of Indian cinema’s stalwart filmmakers” (Hindustan Times), was commemorated in this workshop which took place on 20 May 2019.

The great Indian Bengali director died in Kolkata on 30 December 2018 at the age of 95, leaving a legacy of award-winning realist leftist films, which had won awards at all major international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlinale and Venice. Mrinal Sen, Satayajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak pioneered the New Wave cinema in India. His obituary in The Guardian spoke of Sen as ‘one of Indian cinema’s most probing recorders of the country’s social fabric’.

The event featured several contributions about the work of the director and its social context, followed by a film screening and a discussion. Sanghita Sen spoke on curating Mrinal Sen’s work for various programming situations. Shruti Narayanswami discussed Sen’s early film Neel Akasher Neechey (1958), which tells the story of an immigrant Chinese worker in Calcutta: one of the rare instances where Indian and Chinese cultures intersect in the cinema of the subcontinent. The programme included video contributions from the director’s son Kunal Sen, as well as by famous actress Nandita Das, who had most recently appared in his Amar Bhuvan (2002).

 

We screened Sen’s classic film Calcutta 71 (1972), a black and white complex masterpiece with a narrative that alternates between stories and different points in time. An angry young man is on trial in 1971, a rainstorm wrecks a slum in 1933, a lower-middle-class family is starving during the 1943 famine, teenagers turn smugglers in 1953, and a middle-class group chatter in a posh hotel in 1971.

Workshop initiator Sanghita Sen went on to discuss the work of the director in the transnational context of Third Cinema, at a talk in Bangladesh later in 2019, as covered in The Dhaka Tribune.

 

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Events

Ten Years: Asian Political Cinema, University of Hong Kong, January 2019

The film TEN YEARS HONG KONG (2015) is considered the most important example of post hand-over political cinema, charting the anxieties of a whole generation of Hong Kong residents. In 2018, three further politically topical films were made in Asia, to the same model: TEN YEARS THAILAND, TEN YEARS TAIWAN, and TEN YEARS JAPAN, involving young independent filmmakers but also more established auteurs such as Hirokazu Kore-eda who co-produced the Japanese film, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Aditya Assarat, who contributed to the Thai one. The model for these politically thopical omnibus films is likely to be spread even furtehr afield. We felt it was important to hold a workshop and discuss the trend of political filmmaking in East Asia through the prism of the TEN YEARS project.

Held at the University of Hong Kong’s Run Run Shaw Tower, the event was organised jointly with our partners, The Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. It brought together producer Andrew Choi (Ten Years Studios HK) and distributor Felix Tsang (Golden Scene), who are behind the whole series of films. Other discussants included Prof. Gina Marchetti (University of Hong Kong), Prof Laikwan Pang (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Dr Elena Pollacchi (Ca’ Foscari University, Italy), Dr Vivian Lee, Dr Timmy Chen, and Dr KC Lo (Baptist University of Hong Kong), and film critic Clarence Tsui.

Technical assistance related to the workshop was provided by Louis Lu, Christine Viscera, and Leila Lee.

Material generated through the workshop was published as part of the Dossier TEN YEARS ASIA in FRAMES CINEMA JOURNAL Issue 15.

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Events Publications

Setsuko Hara @ St Andrews: Dossier Now Published

The 5 February 2018 workshop on Japanese actress Setsuko Hara (1920-2015) was IGCCC’s first workshop to celebrate the work of a female artist, part of our series of events that mark the oeuvre of cineastes that have passed away in recent years.

The essays, published in Frames, Issue 13, are dedicated to Japan’s most admired and universally adored actress. Her presence in the films of Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse and many others made Hara one of the most memorable faces in the history of cinema at large, even if she withdrew from acting in her early 40s and never appeared in film after 1962.

We screened one of Hara’s earliest films, the German-Japanese co-production THE NEW EARTH (a.k.a. The Daughter of the Samurai/Atarashiki Tsuchi/新しき土) 1937, directed in two diferent versions by Arnold Frank and Mansaku Itami – in the version directed by Frank. Even though this was not her first role, Hara is only 17 years old when she appeared in the film, in a period that was marked by substantial propagandistic and political upheavals.

In the presentations that followed, we heard from historian Konrad Lawson (St Andrews), who gave a fascinating contextualisation of the complex period in which Hara started her career. Other contributors included our colleague Philippa Lovatt (St Andrews), Bruce Chu (Communication University of China), and Alex Zahlten (Harvard University).

Frames Cinema Journal (Issue 13, May 2018) published a dossier containing some of the material — an essay, an illustrated presentation, and a video essay — that was created by our range of contributors specifically for Hara’s commemoration. Here are the links:

Dina Iordanova, Introduction: Setsuko Hara @ St Andrews and Now in Frames

Alastair Phillips’s (Warwick), Space and Transition in the Films of Setsuko Hara

Jennifer Coates (Kyoto U./University of East Anglia) Setsuko Hara vs. the Press: The Post-war Trolling of a Wartime Icon, 

Joel Neville Anderson’s (Rochester/Japan Cuts) video essay: Hara Double at the Brattle.

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Events Publications

Om Puri @ St Andrews (and In Media Res)

The workshop dedicated to great Indian actor Om Puri (1950-2017) took place in St Andrews on 18 April 2017. Speakers paying tribute to the actor included Dr. Anuja Jain, Prof Dina Iordanova, and a host of doctoral students including Shruti Narayanswamy, Souraj Doutta, Aakshi Magazine, Shorna Pal and Sanghita Sen. We screened and discussed the film HALF TRUTH/ARDH SATYA (1983, Givind Nihalani) featuring stars Om Puri and Smita Patil.

“No one can say exactly what contributes to an actor’s ability to create empathetic characters, but the sensitivity that Puri brought to his roles, are perhaps products of both the triumphs as well as the disappointments that are were a part of his career and his life,” said Aakshi Magazine. “It is this that probably reflects the sensitivity he could bring in playing not easily likeable characters like the one in East is East, or the Hindu right-wing officer responsible for riots in Dev. Puri portrayed them as contradictions without asking us to take sides.”

A number of texts on Om Puri by contributors such Aakshi Magazine, Souraj Dutta, Shruti Narayanswamy, Dina Iordanova and Shorna Pal were published In Media Res for the week of 22 May 2017.

The event was covered inIndian media, including Hindustani Times and NYOOZ TV

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Events

Andrzej Wajda @ St Andrews, March 2017

on 28 March 2017 we held an evening seminar in commemoration of the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda (1926-2016 ) who had passed away in October the previous year.

Throughout his illustrious career, Wajda  directed fifty six films and authored thirty six clips. Many of his films had been adaptations of key texts of Polish literature (ASHES (1965), based on Stefan Zeromski; BIRCH WOOD (1970), based on Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz; THE WEDDING (1973), based on Stanislaw Wyspianski; PROMISED LAND (1975), based on Wladyslaw Reymony; THE MAIDS OF WILKO (1979), based on Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz; PAN  TADEUSZ (1999), based on Adam Mickiewicz). He had also adapted the work of Dostoyevski, Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad. Others reflected matters of history and memory, often linked to World War II and the Holocaust (including A GENERATION (1955), KANAL (1957), ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958), LANDSCAPE AFTER BATTLE (1970), based on Tadeusz Borowski, A LOVE IN GERMANY (1983), KORCZAK (1990) and KATYN (2007)). Wajda’s name is also connected with some key films of the cinema of ‘moral anxiety’, reflecting on the communist period (MAN OF MARBLE (1977), MAN OF IRON (1981), WALESA: MAN OF HOPE (2013)) and of the period of post-socialism (MISS NOBODY (1996)). Other films where he focused on existential and moral dilemmas included EVERYTHING FOR SALE (1969), WITHOUT ANAESTHESIA (1978), THE CONDUCTOR (1980) and DANTON (1983)

Wajda, who worked not only in Poland but transnationally, was a recipient of a lifetime achievement award, in 2000, and his influence over world cinema at large — East and West — is undisputed. We discussed Wajda’s work with actors like Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Seweryn, Biguslaw Linda, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Krystina Janda and Maja Komorowska. Focusing on his collaborations with Zbigniew Cybulski, who stars in ASHES AND DIAMONDS and is the subject of EVERYTHING FOR SALE, we read excerpts of John Burnside’s novel ASHLAND AND VINE (2017), which talks of episodes involving Cybulski. The writer than discusse dhis long-standing admiration for the director.

We screened Wajda’s classic ASHES AND DIAMONDS/Popiół i Diament (1958). Speakers included Prof. John Burnside and Prof. Dina Iordanova, Rohan Crickmar and Tomasz Hollanek. Rohan had prepared a video essay that included excerpts from a range of Wajda’s films, such as A GENERATION (1955), KANAL (1957), ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958), INNOCENT SORCERERS (1960), PROMISED LAND (1975), MAN OF MARBLE (1977) and KATYN (2007).

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Events Publications

Abbas Kiarostami @St Andrews (and In Media Res)

In February 2017 we held the very first of the workshops dedicated to recently deceased famous international film directors with an event dedicated to the memory of Iranian Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), who had passed away prematurely the previous year. The workshop was opened in a moving tribute by Jean-Michel Frodon, who had been a close personal friend of the filmmaker. Then there were contributions by Sanghita Sen and Shorna Pal, as well as a screening of the director’s Cannes-winning feature film A TASTE OF CHERRY (1997), which we discussed.
Some of the work generated for the workshop was subsequently published online for IN MEDIA RES: A MEDIA COMMONS PROJECT on 24 April 2017. Five short essays dedicated to Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, by Dina Iordanova. Jean-Michel Frodon, Marco dalla Gassa (Ca’ Foscari, Venice), Sanghita Sen and Shorna Pal (St Andrews)

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