Filed under: Film Series: High, Top Picks | Tags: comedy, drama, films, high museum of art, India, relationship, tragedy, widow
If the High’s Treasures From India’s National Film Development Corporation has you inspired to put together your own festival courtesy of your local or online DVD outlet, consider these selections shown over the past few years in the High’s Film Festival of India. When I checked, all were available on Netflix so they shouldn’t be hard to find.
The Terrorist
Indie director Santosh Sivan (who began his career as a cinematographer) made this penetrating, visually stunning psychological drama about a young woman in an unnamed guerrilla group who embraces the chance to sacrifice herself for a cause. As timely now as when it was made in 1999, The Terrorist was inspired by the 1991 murder of Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. It’s a movie less interested in politics than in exploring the question, “What kind of person would choose martyrdom and murder?”
Paheli
Paheli
Got a couple of hours? Paheli is shorter than many Bollywood extravaganzas, gorgeous to look at, full of folkloric charm, and its songs and dances seem fresh and unformulaic. Plus it features two superstars: Rani Mukherjee as a bride who’s been abandoned, and Shahrukh Khan in the double role as her workaholic husband and a love-struck ghost who assumes her spouse’s identity.
Filed under: Film Series: High, Guest Blogger, Review | Tags: colonialism, David Lean, empire, India, Raj, Rudyard Kipling
By Eleanor Ringel Cater
There is India, as in the India true Indians know. And then there is the India according Great Britain. As in The Raj. As in, the sun never sets… Our Treasures From India’s National Film Development Corporation series, which ends September 13, looks at India as portrayed by people from India. But should you be feeling the need to consider the colonialist past, here are some suggestions:
A Passage to India
Not the crown jewel in David Lean’s filmography, but a perfectly respectable entry. Two Englishwomen, played by Judy Davis and Dame Peggy Ashcroft (best supporting actress Oscar), travel to India where Davis will decide whether to marry Ashcroft’s son. On a side-trip to discover the “real” India, something happens to the older woman. Something, in her blathering account, unspeakably ancient and evil. The film reminds you of Lean’s twin gifts for detail and scope. He’s not bad with actors, either.
Heat and Dust
Heat and Dust
Granted, there may be more dust than heat in this civilized-to-the-extreme film about two other women’s passage to India. In “modern” time (1982), Julie Christie follows in the footsteps of her great-aunt who found a certain rajah irresistible in the 1920s. The movie time warps back and forth between their reflecting stories. More than a bit languid and tasteful to a fault, the film is nonetheless quite beautiful and a fine showcase for Ms. Christie who’d been absent from the screen for a few years.
Filed under: Film Series: High, General | Tags: behind-the-scenes, Bengali, high museum of art, Jean Renoir, media arts, Satyajit Ray, ten things, trivia
Satyajit Ray
1. From 1943 until 1956, when he became a full time filmmaker after the success of Pather Panchali, Ray worked for a British-owned advertising agency, beginning as a “junior visualizer,” and ending as the north Calcutta office’s art director.
2. Ray met Jean Renoir when the French director was in Calcutta searching for locations and actors for his film The River. As Andrew Robinson recounts in his biography, Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye, “Satyajit recognized in Renoir a real film artist — the first he had come to know — and drew strength for his own work from the knowledge that such a person existed. Forty years later, while receiving the Legion of Honor from the President of France in Calcutta, Ray told him that he had alaways considered Renoir to be his ‘principal mentor’.”
3. In 1950, during a stay in London, Ray saw more than 100 movies, and was shaken to the core by De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. In a 1982 lecture he said, “I came out of the theatre my mind firmly made up. I would become a filmmaker. . . I would make my film exactly as De Sica had made his: working with non-professional actors, using modest recourses, and shooting on actual locations.”
Filed under: Film Series: High, Guest Blogger, Review | Tags: films, high museum of art, India, Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, world war II
Satyajit Ray
In Our Films, Their Films, a collection of his essays published posthumously in 1994, India filmmaker Satyajit Ray wrote about the great French director, Jean Renoir. As part of his tribute, he asked Renoir, who had fled to California from France to escape the Nazis, what was wrong with Hollywood. Renoir named the star system, the endless codes of censorship, and the tendency to regard film as a mass produced commodity as three major factors. He then added that he felt the best movies are created in times of stress:
“Look what the war has done to Italian films. Look at Brief Encounter. I don’t think a great film like that would have been possible without all those air raids London had to suffer. I think what Hollywood needs is a really good bombing.”
Of course, in Hollywood parlance, a bomb has a totally different meaning. But I can see what Renoir is getting at. Hollywood is fat, dumb, and happy — happiest of all during the “high seasons,” summer and the holidays. What would Ray –or Renoir, for that matter– have thought of movies like G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen?
Ray’s final film, The Stranger, showing at the High tonight (August 22) in the Hill Auditorium at 8 p.m., doesn’t have a single robot or explosion. It doesn’t have the acuity and passion of his masterpiece trilogy, The World of Apu, either. But the director was ill when he made it. What it does have is Ray’s customary compassion and seemingly effortless technique.
The plot is simple — a variation on the stranger among us. A well-to-do Calcutta housewife named Anila receives a letter from a man claiming to be her uncle who disappeared 35 years ago, when she was a toddler. In it, he asks if he may come and stay with her for a few days. Her husband is immediately suspicious. Uncertain, Anila nonetheless allows Uncle Mitra into their home. He turns out to be a total charmer with extraordinary tales about his world travels. Still, he must deal with a stream of interrogators as family, friends, and neighbors try to find the truth.
What strikes me most about The Stranger is, if you didn’t know Ray was 70 when he made it, you’d mistake it for a young man’s work. The film has a kind of Sixties idealism in its plea for universal brotherhood and fascination with simpler cultures. Anila’s uncle is an exemplar of these attitudes, and they are again embodied in her young son, who is enchanted by the elderly man’s stories about America’s Indians.
That small boy was played by Vikram Bhattacharjee, who is now a 28-year-old research scientist living in Philadelphia, PA. Bhattacharjee’s family moved to the Atlanta suburbs when he was ten, and he’ll be present at the High’s screening to share him reminiscences of working with India’s most acclaimed director.
Eleanor Ringel Cater
Filed under: Film Series: Online, High Museum | Tags: botany, garden, plants, science, water lilies, youtube
In honor of our final weekend of Monet Water Lilies, another batch of garden-inspired YouTube treasures. Giant veggies from Alaska, another gem from Sir Richard Attenborough — carniverous pitcher plants — and a monarch butterfly caterpillar munching away.
Find tickets and information about the Monet exhibition on High.org; it closes Sunday, August 23.
– Linda Dubler
Filed under: Film Series: High, High Museum | Tags: actor, appearance, event, film series, films, Satyajit Ray, screening, special guest, The Stranger, Treasures from India
Saturday, August 22 in the Hill Auditorium at 8 p.m.
Meet Vikram Bhattacharjee
Vikram Bhattacharjee, who portrays the charming little boy captivated by the mysterious visitor in Satyajit Ray’s The Stranger, will be our special guest for the August 22nd screening of the film, which is presented as part of Treasures from India’s National Film Development Corporation.
Vikram with Satyajit Ray
Vikram was born in Kolkata and lived there until he was ten, when his family came to Atlanta. About a year and a half before their move, he had the opportunity of a lifetime: India’s most celebrated director, Satyajit Ray, personally selected him from a pool of aspiring child actors to play the role of Satyaki in his film. Vikram spent about six months acting in the production, and was there for the film’s premiere shortly before he left India.
Learn more about The Stranger at High.org >>
In Atlanta ,Vikram adjusted to life in the suburbs, attending school and graduating from Norcross High in 1999. He went on to the University of Georgia, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 2003. He stayed in the South, attending graduate school at the University of South Carolina where he received a doctoral degree in 2008.
Vikram now makes his home in Philadelphia, PA, where he works as a research scientist. He enjoys exploring the city, spending time with friends, cooking, and reading. His passions include politics and the sports of boxing and football. Though acting is no longer a part of his life, he looks back at the time he spent pretending to be Satyaki as a very fond memory.
Biography contributed by Ani Agnihotri
Filed under: Film Series: Online, High Museum | Tags: avant-garde, bees, high museum of art, monet, science, water lilies, youtube
Monet Water Lilies is closing at the High on August 23. In honor of its final weeks here, I’ve looked for unusual YouTube videos that feature a garden theme. Without further ado: bees, giant Amazonian water lilies (see 1-foot blossoms at minute 2:00), and an avant-garde lesson in cross pollination from Bill Nye.
Filed under: General, Guest Blogger, Top Picks | Tags: 80s movies, coming-of-age stories, John Hughes, Obituaries
The sudden loss of John Hughes—he was 59, for God’s sake, and he had a HEART ATTACK!!! while walking around New York City— somehow doesn’t make sense.
Budd Schulberg, who died a day earlier, was in his 90s and died of natural causes. But Hughes, he was like a kid.
John Hughes
Okay, like a kid the way all Baby Boomers want to see themselves as still like kids (especially over this Woodstock Anniversary Weekend). But one of the most interesting things about Hughes’ career was, aside from some movies with John Candy and Steve Martin (Planes, Trains and Automobiles) and Chevy Chase’s Vacation pictures, Hughes wrote about kids. Teens mostly, who were all about 15-18 years younger than him
He was, in a sense, the best big brother the Gen-Xers ever had. He got it. And he got it through their often hyperventilating filter, not his or that of his peers. He chronicled the troubles and triumphs of middle-class suburbia with an expert psychological acuity. And he knew when to be funny and when to take stuff (Senior Prom, say) seriously.
And he wasn’t afraid to think like a girl. In this post-American Pie era, it’s amazing to think back and realize he created as many memorable females as males. Molly Ringwald, the teen queen of Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club comes immediately to mind. So does Ally Sheedy, another detention-hall detainee in The Breakfast Club. And the touching tom-boy Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind of Wonderful, as well Lea Thompson, who played a Dream Girl with a heart and a personality in the same film (compare her to the title character in the recent I Love You Beth Cooper and you may feel nauseated).
Molly Ringwald and John Cryer in Pretty in Pink
He didn’t do badly by the guys, either. Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off remains an icon of teen anarchy for the ages. Emilio Estevez showed us jocks could be good guys too, in The Breakfast Club. Jon Cryer did the same for geeks in Pretty in Pink.
The end of the ‘80s was pretty much the end of Hughes and I’m not sure why. The last movie he wrote and directed was the infinitely deplorable Curly Sue (to this day, “She’s Adorable!” remains a code word with certain friends). He continued to write, but, aside from the first Home Alone, which probably owes its reputation to Macaulay Culkin’s Edvard Munch scream more than anything else, he seemed to have dropped into 4th gear. He wrote more Home Alone movies. And the Beethoven series, under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes, which he borrowed from The Count of Monte Cristo. And live-action adaptations of Disney animated features that should’ve been left alone.
I don’t even want to talk about She’s Having a Baby or Baby’s Day Out.
My favorite things in John Hughes movies:
Matthew Broderick’s party in the street in Ferris Bueller.
The friendship between the uncool Mary Stuart Masterson and the very cool Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful.
Some Kind of Wonderful
The scenes between Molly Ringwald and her struggling, probably alcoholic and unemployed dad, Harry Dean Stanton, in Pretty in Pink.
John Candy and Steve Martin, just trying to get home for Thanksgiving in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
And my absolute favorite, from The Breakfast Club: Ally Sheedy, head down and hunched over in the back of detention hell, draws a house and then, to add snow, shakes the dandruff out of her hair onto the paper.
John Hughes understood.
-Eleanor Ringel-Cater
Eleanor Ringel-Cater is an award-winning journalist who previously was the lead film critic for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She currently reviews for The Daily Report and comments on films on WMLB AM 1690. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and FIPRESCI. She will be a regular contributor to the High’s film blog.
Filed under: General, Staff Picks | Tags: Ferris Bueller's Day Off, John Hughes, Obituaries, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club
The Breakfast Club
I am a child of the 1950s, so by the time I was reviewing films in the 1980s, I was too old for John Hughes’s tales of high-school humiliation, stronger-than-SuperGlue friendships, and first kisses to serve as my generational touchstones. But for millions of Gen Yers, the bright, funny, and appropriately tormented kids who populated his films were irreplaceable alter-egos, and were as much a fabric of their youth as mom’s cooking or Saturday morning cartoons. With the director’s untimely death on my mind, I invite readers to join High Museum of Art staff members in sharing their memories of John Hughes’s films.
Linda Dubler
Recent stories
A poignant personal remembrance.
From piece the New York Times Art Beat.
An appreciation from Paste Magazine.
Staff Memories
I was really little when Pretty in Pink came out, but it pretty much defined my childhood. Andie & Iona’s style & attitude taught me how to be comfortable “being myself,” and Duckie’s performance of “Try a Little Tenderness” was a classic that I still mimic when I listen to Otis Redding in the car!
-Mandy Barber, Assistant Manager of Individual Support
_______
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has got to be every kid’s fantasy. Take off for the day. No responsibilities. Cool car. Fancy restaurants. Art museum (shameless plug). Actually, now that I’m no longer a student, I can see it as every adult’s fantasy, too…
– Jennifer Maley, Wine Auction Assistant Manager
_______
John Hughes makes movies that stick in your memory. The words and pictures stick to a safe place in your mind, held captive there until a real life situation needs a good one-liner or some nugget of wisdom: “That’s why they call them crushes. If they were easy, they’d call them something else.”
Even though the movies took place in that distant Shermer, Illinois, the family units, friend groups, conversations and consequences were both painfully and joyfully familiar to each viewer. Every teenager wants to wallow in her feelings, convinced that no one can understand what she’s going through. Through the truth of humor, John Hughes made millions of teenagers realize that someone did understand, that it happened all the time, and that one day things would get better. Somehow, those movies had the power that our parents, teachers and friends lacked. It’s really all we wanted to know.
– Emily Beard, Web Content Coordinator
_______
I both lived and suffered a vicarious day off through Ferris at 14. I mean who would want to go to school when dreams of driving around downtown Chicago in a Ferrari GT and having a parade and fun and food and not have to worry about anything were almost never within reach?
– Tannasha Lindsay, Visitor Services, On-Site Supervisor
_______
Was it seeing Jake Ryan kiss Samantha Walsh that perpetuated my excitement to turn sixteen? Perhaps it was when I spoke up in my 9th grade class and was sent to detention that made me secretly feel rebellious? Maybe it was the time I ditched class and went to Six Flags instead that made me an accomplished senior. No, I actually think it was the day I realized that being a nerd was cool, being a tomboy could still get me a date, and wearing pink didn’t make me any less of a tomboy.
To hope my life has somehow mimicked the pop culture carousel that is John Hughes is to declare to the world that I have grown up, gone through, and now gratefully made it though my teen years.
He was the master of creating adolescent images in film that stay with you long after your first kiss, your first car, and your first slow dance. As my 10-year high school reunion approaches this October, I tip my hat to John Hughes, the father figure of making it more than okay to grow up. And to laugh.
– Julie Marateck, Speakers Bureau Coordinator
Filed under: Guest Blogger, High Museum, Top Picks | Tags: eleanor ringel-cater, garden, gardener, peter sellers, water lilies
From Guest Blogger Eleanor Ringel-Cater
A scene from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Images of gardens have been around as long as we humans have created images of ourselves. The Garden of Eden. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. No wonder artists as diverse as Hieronymous Bosch, who painted the memorably grotestque “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” and Claude Monet, whose exquisite water lily paintings are currently on view at the High, have been attracted to them.
Movies have cultivated gardens too. There’s the hidden play-world of The Secret Garden and the symbolic decay of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Marlon Brando memorably tended tomatoes in The Godfather while Ralph Fiennes buried his emotions as The Constant Gardener. In Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts keeps her minions busy painting her roses red while Sonia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette glories in the vast gardens of Versailles.
My favorite movie garden isn’t quite so glorious. It’s a small patch of dust in John Sturges’s action classic, The Great Escape. Actually, it’s less a garden than part of the POW’s elaborate escape plan. They’ve got to do something with the dirt from the three tunnels they’re digging under the German camp where they’re incarcerated. So one of them – David McCallum (of The Man From Uncle and more recently NCIS) devises a system whereby the Allied prisoners carry the tunnel dirt in the legs of their pants and mix it in with dirt raked up by the faux amateur gardeners.
My favorite film gardener, hands down, is the enigmatic Chance the Gardener aka Chauncey Gardener, in Being There.
Peter Sellers in Being There
Impeccably played by Peter Sellers, Chance is a kind of middle-aged man-child who’s spent his life as a recluse, dividing his time betwteen tending a garden and watching TV. When Chance/Chauncey ventures into the world, his silence and obtuse manner of speaking are mistaken for genius. He ends up the protégé of a wealthy but ailing policital power-broker (Melvyn Douglas) and his equally gullible wife (Shirely MacLain). By the end of the picture, he will be considered seriously as a candidate for President.
Here’s a typical exchange:
Current President: “Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben or do you think we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?”
Chance (after a long pause): “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.”
Sellers pursued the rights to Jerzy Kosinski‘s absurdist novel, from which the film was adapted, for almost eight years. He would do things like leave the author a message reading, “Available, my garden or outside it.” Eventually, he prevailed and filming began under the direction of Hal Ashby. Sellers, who was nominated for an Oscar (losing to Kramer vs. Kramer’s Dustin Hoffman), always claimed he modeled Chance’s voice after Stan Laurel’s. And Kosinski always insisted Sellers “understood my character better than I, for good reason . . . he has no interior life. No sense of himself. No notion of who he was or what he would like to become.”
Perhaps Kosinski understood better than he realized. He committed suicide in 1991.
Eleanor Ringel-Cater
Eleanor Ringel-Cater is an award-winning journalist who previously was the lead film critic for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. She currently reviews for The Daily Report and comments on films on WMLB AM 1690. She is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and FIPRESCI. She will be a regular contributor to the High’s film blog.
High Museum of Art: Films 