Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)

By: börek - June 5th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 12 June 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), 97 minutes, in English with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin) proved to be the boldest of all female European filmmakers when she blasted into the scene with her compelling early short movies and her haunting debut feature Ratcatcher. Morvern Callar was her second feature film, and we find her covering radically different territory yet again, with a story about a woman in Scotland whose boyfriend has committed suicide on Christmas Day. She then breaks away and takes off on a trip with her female friend to Spain. Actually, there is a lot more to this story than what I am telling, involving many levels of deception, intrigue, questions about art and forgery, and hidden secrets, but it’s better to let the story unfold itself. And although there is a story, I would say it isn’t a movie for a story-driven audience, one that is looking for thrills and spills… but rather for an audience that can pick up on ambience, the sensuality of the human face, and quiet subdued moments rather than overblown ones.

This is an absorbing portrait of the main heroine portrayed by Samantha Morton, and if you allow yourself to be open, it will suck you into its vast world. The cinematography hits you over and over again with its atypical framing and focusing, which is immersive and revealing. These images are fused with a wide-ranging soundtrack including music by Aphex Twin, Broadcast, German Kraut-rockers Can, Stereolab, Ween, the Velvet Underground, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, etc. The film is based on the debut novel by Scottish author Alan Warner, who dedicated his book to musican Holger Czukay, so of course some of his music also emerges in several scenes. The free-form approach and unrushed speed of this flick, devoid of the normal identification gimmicks, means you won’t connect to our main character like you would in ‘normal’ movies…. she stays independent and mysterious. A poetic stream of both rough and lush textures, with an astounding performance by actress Samantha Morton that is absolutely mesmerizing.

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Movie Night: Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer-Khamis & Danniel Danniel, 2004) + Benefit for the Freedom Theater in Jenin

By: börek - June 1st, 2022  Filed under: Benefiet, Filmavond

Sunday 5 June 2022, Movie Night: Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer-Khamis & Danniel Danniel, 2004) + Benefit for the Freedom Theater in Jenin. Film Language: Arabic & Hebrew (English subtitles). 84 minutes. Doors open at 8pm, film starts at 8:30pm.

The film tells the story of a theatre group that was established by Arna Mer. She comes from a Zionist family and in the 1950s married a Palestinian Arab. On the West Bank, she opened an alternative education system for children whose regular life was disrupted by the Israeli occupation. The theatre group that she started engaged children from Jenin, helping them to express their everyday frustrations, anger, bitterness and fear. Arna’s son Juliano, co-director of this film, was also one of the directors of Jenin’s theatre. With his super 8 camera, he filmed the children during rehearsal periods from 1989 to 1996. Now, he goes back to see what happened to them. Yussef committed a suicide attack in Hadera in 2001, Ashraf was killed in the battle of Jenin, Alla leads a resistance group. Juliano, who today is one of the leading actors in the region, looks back in time in Jenin, trying to understand the choices made by the children he loved and worked with. Eight years ago, the theatre was closed and life became static and paralysed. Shifting back and forth in time, the film reveals the tragedy and horror of lives trapped by the circumstances of war.

The film will be presented by the son of the co-director of the film.

The Freedom Theater in Jenin still exists to this day in Jenin refugee camp. All money donated during the screening will go to the Arna’s theater in Jenin. https://thefreedomtheatre.org/

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to play a movie, let us know: joe [at] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dušan Makavejev, 1967)

By: börek - May 1st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 29 May 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Dušan Makavejev, 1967), 68 minutes. In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

Once again we will be screening another early film by the amazing Dušan Makavejev. In outline, this is the story of the romance between a young telephonist and a middle-aged rat exterminator that goes haywire. Yet in Dušan Makavejev’s hands, this film isn’t just a strange story, but becomes an innovative, free-form exploration on the themes of love and freedom… laying the groundwork for a razor-sharp look at relationships in sixties Belgrade. Breaking away from traditional ideas of narrative storytelling, the film often shifts away, for example, to interviews with a sexologist and a criminologist giving their crazed opinions… or suddenly we find ourselves listening to a poem about exterminating rats. This film is based on a true story, and includes some of the most elegant dramatic filmmaking of the director’s career.

A free-wheeling movie that mixes romance and satire, documentary footage, melodrama and tragedy. And as always with Makavejev, what we are left with is a bizarre cocktail of Yugoslavian-styled surrealism. This is a true cinema of the imagination. It’s one of the crucial films from the Eastern block in the 60s, and it’s a very rare screening, so I hope to see you there!

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Movie night: Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi, 2018)

By: börek - May 1st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 22 May 2022, Movie night: Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) by Asghar Farhadi, 2018, 132 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Laura, a Spanish woman living in Buenos Aires, returns to her hometown outside Madrid with her Argentinian husband and children. However, the trip is upset by unexpected events that bring secrets into the open.
The outer threat, the inner wound and the mystery in between. These are the determinant factors in Asghar Farhadi’s intimately painful and powerfully acted kidnap drama, crucially anchored by three heavyweight performances from Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darín.
It has been conceived by Farhadi on familiar lines, with ideas reminiscent of his own earlier work and, at one further remove, of influences from Haneke and Antonioni.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969)

By: börek - May 1st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 8 May 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969), 111 minutes. In English with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

This is Haskell Wexler’s legendary movie documenting the explosive course of events in America during the 60s. In 1968 Haskell Wexler was one of the world’s best cameramen, and he had lensed films like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the film industry was changing fast, and he became disillusioned with the commercialization of American cinema, so he decided to direct his own low-budget film about racism and the inherent violence in the US. His plan was to take a fictional story with actors, and mix it with documentary situations… and therefore blur the line between a feature film and documentary. He wanted to create a new kind of cinema, one that was more grounded in real everyday life.

His plan was to finish the film by taking his crew to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. This real-life event ended up turning into an apocalyptic “police riot”, with officers beating anyone they could get their hands on. Suddenly the director and the crew were engulfed in a fierce battle, with tear gas flying all around them… as they attempted to still film the actors amidst all the swinging police clubs.

Besides its innovative approach to filmmaking, the movie is also important as a sharp analysis of the mass media in general, and how it was being used to manipulate audience opinions. An incredible time capsule of the social unrest of the late 60s with a soundtrack by Mike Bloomfield (Dylan’s guitarist… Like a Rolling Stone), The Mothers of Invention (Zappa), and Love.

“A definitive document of the political tumult in late-1960s America.”

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)

By: börek - April 21st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 24 April 2022, Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983), 94 minutes. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Rusty James is the leader of a small, dying gang in an industrial town. He lives in the shadow of the memory of his absent, older brother — The Motorcycle Boy. His mother has left, his father drinks, school has no meaning for him and his relationships are shallow. He is drawn into one more gang fight and the events that follow begin to change his life.
Rumble Fish stands as the most realized fulfillment of Coppola’s aesthetic aims during this period of his career, and one of his very best films. It calls to mind many other works of art, cinematic and otherwise, yet its style is completely singular. But most remarkable, perhaps, is that through this filmic language, Coppola is able to grasp something that is not esoteric but simple and universal.
Rumble Fish is about growing up. It’s about grappling with your idols and the mythology of the past. It’s about facing the future, realizing that the youthful sense of invulnerability is an illusion. It’s about the finitude of time. It’s about recognizing the need to adjust your world view. There is no other film like it.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Movie Night: Kung Fu Master! (Agnès Varda, 1987)

By: börek - April 12th, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 17 April 2022, Movie night: Kung Fu Master! (Agnès Varda, 1987), in French with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, Film starts at 20:30.

Made concurrently with Agnès Varda’s portrait of Jane Birkin, Jane B. par Agnès V., Kung-Fu Master! is a true family affair, achieving a sense of of lived-in intimacy by casting the actor’s real-life relatives, including daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, as themselves. Varda and Birkin give the familiar theme of a misunderstood couple searching for a place where their love can survive a provocative twist in this daring romance, in which Birkin (who wrote the story that provided the inspiration for the film) plays a middle-aged woman involved with a fourteen-year-old, video game–obsessed boy (Varda’s son, Mathieu Demy). The taboo relationship plays out with supreme delicacy and restraint, as Varda transforms the explosive premise into a disarmingly tender portrait of a woman’s search for lost youth.

The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Acción mutante (Álex de la Iglesia, 1993)

By: börek - April 1st, 2022  Filed under: Filmavond

Sunday 2 April 2022, Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema: Acción mutante (Álex de la Iglesia, 1993), 97 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Doors open at 20:00, film starts at 20:30.

This was the debut feature movie of director Alex de la Iglesia, who would later become a staple in Spanish cinema. It was produced by queer arthouse provocateur Pedro Almodóvar who went out on a limb to give this first time filmmaker a chance, a completely unknown cartoon-drawing geek with a punky attitude who had almost no filmmaking experience. Although Pedro was supposed to only produce it, he couldn’t keep himself from interfering with the creative side of the project—exactly the behaviour he despised in other overbearing producers that tried to control his own films. Pedro did however bring in his colourful entourage of off-beat celebrities to help out with the acting—for example, transgender legend Bibi Andersen, or the unforgettable bizarre-faced model Rosy de Palma.

This is a sort of sci-fi horror film, but one with a lot of low-budget imagination. The film plunges us into a world in the future, a fully European paradise where everyone is beautiful and glamorous. But unrest is festering in this future Eden, when society is confronted with an uprising of terrorists battling for the rights of ugly people. This movie was a game-changer in many ways. Since there were no Spanish special effects crews back in the early 90s, some had to be brought in from France. Since director Alex de la Iglesia was busy as a comic book illustrator, he brought that entire zaniness into his futuristic vision. With its wild set decors, bizarre futuristic costumes, bold cinematography, and a dynamite concept, this flick splashed into the counterculture scene in Spain, breaking the doors open for a new kind of cinema. It was an intoxicating cinematic cocktail—equal parts comic book, sci-fi, black comedy, and a colourful version of steampunk. The punchy theme song is by Def Con Dos, one of the earliest hip hop duos in Spanish history.

This will be a high-definition screening.

Film night at Joe’s Garage, cozy cinema! Free entrance. You want to screen a movie, let us know: joe [at] lists [dot] squat [dot] net

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