Lights! Camera! Action!

Review: Bagdad cafe (also called Out of Rosenheim) is a film by Percy Aldon, a German director. It is the extraordinary story of ordinary people set in a very ordinary place, a café on a desert highway. It is the story of friendship, hope and endurance with a bit of magic.

After quarrelling with her husband, Jasmin (played brilliantly by Marianne Sagebrecht) sets out on her own. Marching down the Californian desert highway, pulling a long suitcase which contains, ironically, her husbands’ clothes she stops at a highway motel called Baghdad Café run by Brenda.
Brenda, the lady (another acclaimed performance by CCH Pounder) who owns Baghdad café is in almost the same state of affairs as Jasmin; a quarrel with an ever forgetful husband, a break up and an uncertain future. So begins the story of two different women with two different cultures whose touching account of the friendship exemplifies the importance of individuality and self discovery.

This is the exotic story of Brenda, Jasmin and the regulars at the café, that include a tattoo artist, Rudi, an ex set designer from Hollywood, a hiker and many other ordinary people and their ordinary lives. The lives of these people are changed when the mysterious Jasmin takes control (with love and patience) and wins the hearts of the people at Bagdad café, and the once deserted café instantly transforms into a oasis of fun, happiness and magic.

This film is shot in rich colours of gold and red which captures the vast open lands of the Californian desert.

Analysis: This film is a must watch for all aspiring editors, cinematographers, screenplay writers and directors. The film is set in a single location (The café) and mostly the action happens in the interiors and the café exteriors. Due to the limited locations and the nature of the plot the film would have ended as a boring flick but for the slick editing by Norbert Herzner and rich photography by Bernd Heinl and some brilliant shot compositions and a music track (Calling you…..) and radiant characterisations, all in all makes this a film worth watching.

Rating: 8/10

What is cinema? In the words of Percy Aldon:
"I never forced my filmmaking but made the necessary decisions step by step when they were needed - a beautiful and exciting and not always successful procedure.

Style was always very important to me. A lead colour for an entire film. A sparse environment. A limited space. One song. No real score. Just the separate instrumental tracks of the song. A lot of original sounds. Not to much dialogue. No violence. Praise of woman. A mood between tears and laughter. Others later called it my poetic realism. Light and color, motion and calm, emotion, surprise, hope, joy, being touched, fulfillment, images that doesn’t have to be explained. This is what’s important for my films. Some conflict, some suspense. But just very carefully used like some spice that should never overpower the more subtle flavors.

Film for me always was something that feeds itself from other art forms, but is totally unique, distinguished. Dialogue is not the deciding factor but the unspoken.
My stories are like fantasies, or dreams of life. Therefore my colors don’t try to match real life but are filtered through the sieve of memory. For instance we made the desert in Bagdad Cafe golden like in a painting of Salvador Dali, while in reality the desert is mostly gray. In my film, the gold became the lead color. A symbol for warmth. For the possibility of warmth among people. A symbol of friendship.

There is much more to tell..."

Recommended films: ‘Paris, Texas’ a totally different film than Bagdad Café. If ‘Bagdad Café’ is one side of the coin then ‘Paris, Texas’ is the other side of it. Also a must watch. Check out for a review of ‘Paris, Texas’ on this site.

Synopsis:A tiny Buddhist monastery floats on a raft amidst a breath-taking landscape set on and around a tree-lined lake. The film is divided into five segments with each season representing a stage in a man's life.

Amelie: A Text book for Telugu film makers.

Story: It is rare to find a French film that is as positive as Amelie, the film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet whose earlier films include Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and Alien: Resurrection. Amelie is a fable set in present day Paris, a story that is so positive and colourful which makes it almost a fairy tale. All through the film what we see is beauty exaggerated.

Amelie is a whimsical tale of love, friendship, isolation and yearning. This film stars Audrey Tautou in the title role as a young woman who works as a waiter in a small Paris Café. Amelie grows up as a lonesome kid into a young woman who longs for love and care. As a child his father falsely identifies her as a child with a heart trouble and declares unsuitable for school. Adding to this Amelie loses her mother as a kid. As a young woman she finds it difficult to come out of her introvertive character.

Her life falls into a routine of adulthood until one day she discovers a rusty box with the childhood treasures of a one-time young boy from the 50s. With the discovery of the box Amelie sets out to find out the person, in the process of tracking the owner of the childhood treasure she finds the objective of her life: To make people happy and thus begins her voyage.

Amelie sets out on a journey of life with intelligent and inventive plans to straighten the lives of people around her. This film like most of the films has a parallel story, or sub plot in which Amelie plays a love game of hide and seek with a strange young man whose hobby is to collect the unwanted photos from automated photo machines and to form a collage of unsuccessful facial expressions.

Direction: This is out and out a director’s film realised with the utmost perfection. It is a rare and widely successful French film in the sense that we cannot find such overflowing goodness and beauty in most French films. In the hands of any other director this film would have turned out to be one of those ‘family films’ or ‘feel good films’. But the vision of the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet helped this film achieve a greater success all over the world.

The way Jean-Pierre Jeunet handled the character introduction and character build up should be commended for the innovative cinematic devices he used. At times the ideas might seem a bit silly but they worked perfectly for this film. But this film might not interest viewers of serious cinema and also might find repeated audience.

Even though the director succeeded in making this film beautifully green, but some body not so fond of the colour green would hate this film. The whole film is painted with saturated greens (Thanks to the Digital post production).At times the green does appear to be too much of it but as a whole Amelie is a good film to watch.

Rating: 8/10

Analysis: when I was watching this film, two things were constantly in my mind one is a Telugu film (Chakram by Krishna Vamsi) and the other is a novel (Vennello aadapilla by Yandamoori). To my surprise Amelie was like a mish mash of the film and the novel.
The film Chakram is very much similar to the theme of Amelie because in both the films the protagonists embark on a journey of self discovery by trying to solve the problems of others. But in Amelie what inspires her to be a do gooder is to find answer for her own problems, but in Chakram the protagonist discovers that he has an incurable disease and before his death he wants to help as many people as possible.

When we compare the characters of Chakram and Amelie there is a big lesson to be learnt in terms of character development. In Chakram every other character, except the protagonist seems to be in a big trouble and the way Krishna Vamsi (The director of Chakram) portrays the characters is rather silly, obvious and explicit. He chose kids, youngsters, house wives, husbands in groups and tried to portray the problems of the society in general rather than the personal problems of the characters. The film failed miserably because of his explicit categorisation of the characters and generalisation of their problems and even worse he tried to provide collective solution for the problems of the group.

These characters when compared to Amelie, even though they appear out of a fairy tale, have characters of their own. That’s the essential secret of creating good and believable characters: Characters with a character.

The novel, Vennello Aadapilla is similar to Amelie or Amelie is similar to the novel Vennello Aadapilla, because the sub plot of the film (in search of her soul mate) closely resembles the plot of the novel. In the novel a girl plays a cat and mouse game with a chess player and all through the novel she leaves clues for him to find out who she is. But the novel has a slightly sad ending but Amelie ends exactly at the time when she meets her soul mate.

To be honest many of the scenes reminded of scenes from many Telugu films and I was surprised by the way these scenes are handled so differently by the director. It is not to say that this film was hugely inspired by Telugu films, but to say that the feel good nature of this film is very close to the soul of most Indian films (that always deal with the goodness of the protagonist and his or her ways of helping others in trouble).

Conclusion:I strongly recommend this film to Krishna Vamsi and all Telugu film enthusiasts.

C'est arrivé près de chez vous or Man bites dog

Synopsis: Documentary filmmakers André and Rémy have found an ideal subject in Ben. He is witty, sophisticated, intelligent, well liked—and a serial killer. As André and Rémy document Ben’s routines, they become increasingly entwined in his vicious program, sacrificing their objectivity and their morality. Controversial winner of the International Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, Man Bites Dog stunned audiences worldwide with its unflinching imagery and biting satire of media violence.

Review:Man Bites Dog is a pseudo-documentary that follows the killing sprees of the murderous Benoit (Benoit Poelvoorde). With cameras rolling, he calmly explains his theories about killing people and weighing down the bodies so they won't float to the surface of whatever river or lake he dumps them in. He then proceeds to slaughter person after person, respecting neither age nor sex nor race, and murdering in a wide variety of ways from strangulation to a bullet to the head. All the while, the film crew trails him, heedless of the danger they put themselves in, and uncaring as they are drawn deeper and deeper into the psychotic, criminal world of their subject.

As a short, this could have been a brilliant, blistering satire on society's views of violence and how it relates to movies. However, Man Bites Dog is a full-length feature and, as such, spends a little too much time with its subject. Thirty minutes, or even forty-five, would have been a perfect length, but by the end of the third half-hour, certain elements of this movie (namely Ben's endless philosophizing) have grown tiresome. The violence has lost its edge. Nevertheless, despite the possibly-excessive length, there is still a lot to praise in this obscure effort by a trio of previously-unknown Belgian film makers. They have taken violence in the cinema to its ultimate limit and created an always-irreverent, often darkly funny look at killers and victims.

Every moment of this film is shot documentary-style in grainy black-and-white. This pseudo-realism, complete with choppy editing and unsteady, hand-held camera shots, gives an eerie air of legitimacy to Man Bites Dog. Added to that, the three main characters in the film all use their real names. The film makers are Remy and Andre, and the killer is Benoit.

Benoit possesses an especially interesting personae. Heartless as a killer, he's actually a fun guy to be around most of the time. He loves his girlfriend and adores his family. He's smart and thoughtful, often giving lengthy discourses on various aspects of life and death. Then, the next thing you know, he's blowing someone's brains out or raping a woman while her naked husband looks on in horror.

An issue addressed by Man Bites Dog is how intimately the media becomes involved in the stories they cover. Are they simply reporting the facts or, by their mere presence, are they participating in events? Here, the movie makers slowly come to assist Ben in his crimes. At first, it's just little things like shining a light in a certain spot, but it doesn't take long before they're actually joining in.

One of the most incisive moments in the film comes when Ben has a shoot-out with another killer. After Ben kills his rival, the film crew catches up with him standing over the body. At that moment, another group of men with cameras show up -- they were doing a documentary about the exploits of the now-dead man. Dark, twisted humor like this characterizes Man Bites Dog.

Obviously not a movie for everyone, Man Bites Dog boasts graphic displays of murder and rape. There's very little of the human body -- inside or out -- that isn't shown at one time or another during the course of this movie. Nevertheless, if you do venture to see Man Bites Dog, you would have to be made out of stone to miss the visceral, sardonic impact of a highly-unusual film.

Review By James Berardinelli

Lights! Camera! Action!

In 1936, Henri Langlois created the Cinematheque in Paris, France. Since then Cinematheque Francaise is regarded as a centre for film preservation and restoration. Cinematheque of
France has acquired a multitude of films from around the world and it hosts the largest archive of film related documents and objects from around the world. It holds screenings of a variety of films from all parts of the world. The credit for such a huge and diverse collection goes to Henri Langlois along with Jean Mitry and George Fanju.

The collection's origin stems from the intensive efforts of Henri Langlois in the 1930s to collect and preserve old films. Langlois had acquired one of the largest collections in the world by the commencement of World War Two, only to have it nearly wiped out by the German authorities in occupied France, who ordered all films made prior to 1937 be destroyed. He and his friends smuggled huge numbers of documents and films to unoccupied France to protect them until the end of the war.

After the war, the French government provided a small screening room, staff and subsidy for the collection, which was first relocated to Avenue de Messine. The great French filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s, including Robert Bresson, Rene Clement, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Jacques Becker, all frequented the screenings at the Cinémathèque after the war. The new wave school of directors — Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, Jacques Donial-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast — also received much of their film education by attending the collection's screenings.

Cinematheque Francais literally gave birth to the Nouvelle Vague. Henri Langlois was evicted from his Cinémathèque in February 1968 by the De Gaulle government after which the cineasts from all over France round up and obtain his reinstatement, creating a kind of general rehearsal of May 1968. (Watch ‘The Dreamers’ by Bernardo Bertolucci for more info). He was also the creator of the Musée du Cinéma at the Palais de Chaillot, " Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois " makes live again this unic man, rewarded by an oscar in 1974, through archives and testimonies of famous people.

After moving from one small screening room to another through the 1950s, the Cinémathèque moved to its current spacious building at the rear of the Palais de Chaillot at Place du Trocadéro in Paris' 16th arrondissement in 1963. The current location houses a state-of-the-art screening room that is one of the best in Europe.