3rd NYDFF - May 29, 2010
Saturday, May 29 - Anthology Film Archive - Maya Deren Theater
6:30 PM
NYWIFT - New York Women in Film and Television presents
LIFE AFTER LIFE, by Enrica Colusso
(Italy, 1995, color, 93’)
The film explores the extreme experience of life of four inmates sentenced to life imprisonment on the island Prison of Porto Azzuro (Italy). Shot during Christmas and the first weeks of 1994, the documentary focuses on the everyday reality and the interior lives of people caught between a timeless existence and the routine of a total institution.
Q&A with Enrica Colusso moderated by Tanja Meding.
8:30 PM
THE FEELING OF BEING THERE (1958 - 1965)
SEVEN YEARS OF DOCUMENTARY CINEMA
A journey through the creative forces that have crossed (and continue to cross) modern cinema. Eleven short films that have changed documentary film history in a period of great creative fervor corresponding to the birth of the Festival dei Popoli.
LAMBERT & CO., by D A Pennebaker
(USA, 1964, b&w, 15’)
One morning in 1964 Dave Lambert arrives by taxi at RCA Studios to rehearse with his new quintet, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Pennebaker’s camerawork weaves fluidly inside the recording studio, observing musicians and opera singers, capturing gestures, faces, glances, filming the music and emotional flow that animates the group.
THE SNOWSHOERS, by Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx
(Canada, 1958, b&w, 19’)
In 1958, during an annual meeting of «snowshoers», Michel Brault films what was supposed to be a four minute news report for a television magazine. The film, which for the first time used synchronized sound and a wide-angle lens, let him showing people in crowds demonstrating with evident freshness the rituals, chats, and pleasures of the gathering. THE SNOWSHOERS is the film that will mark the Direct Cinema.
LA CANTA DELLE MARANE, by Cecilia Mangini
(Italy, 1961, color, 10’)
On a hot summer day, a group of children from the Roman outskirts joke and play around in one of the city’s many canals. The camera scrutinizes them, gets close to them, shows their gestures and expressions, and sweeps them up in a visual dance while the commentary (thanks to the poetic sensibility of Pier Paolo Pasolini) tells their stories, hopes, dreams, and future.
...A VALPARAISO, by Joris Ivens
(Chile/France, 1962, color/b&w, 28’)
Built on a series of steep hills dividing the bourgeois neighbourhoods near the sea from the working-class areas in the outskirts, in this case high up on the hilltops, the port city of Valparaiso is a theatre for human toil, hardship and the feverish will to live despite everything. Depicting the verticality of the city, its bizarre architectonic peculiarities and the routine of daily life, stigmatizing its social divisions, Joris Ivens achieved full artistic maturity.
SALUT LES CUBAINS, by Agnès Varda
(France/Cuba, 1963, b&w, 30’)
From 1962 to 1963 Agnès Varda traveled to Cuba and took hundreds of photographs. Her subjects were common folk, as well as artists, poets, musicians, officials of the party in power. Later she will realize a film with a sense of montage, in which music and audio commentary transform the photos into frames, and carry them into a vortex of idealism and fervor. The result is a small film set to a Cha-cha-cha rhythm and full of contagious energy.
THE WHITE BELLS, by Ivars Kraulîtis
(Latvia, 1961, b&w, 20’)
A small child is crossing the heart of the city looking for a bunch of flowers. Produced as a feature film, THE WHITE BELLS brilliantly documents the fast-growing Riga of the 1960s, while also reservedly showing the daily rush of its inhabitants. One of the best Latvian documentaries and an excellent example of poetic cinema.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street), New York, NY 10003
www.nydff.org