The Dove on the Roof

Sunday 26 February | Doors 7pm | Admission free | Hot drinks served



The Dove on the Roof / Die Taube auf dem Dach
By Iris Gusner
Germany (GDR), 1973, 84mins

The VW Complex /Der VW-Komplex
By Hartmut Bitomsky
Germany, 1990, 93 mins

A pamphlet to accompany this screening is available here: http://zinelibrary.info/full-unemployment-cinema-dove-roof-and-vw-complex-0



The Dove on the Roof / Die Taube auf dem Dach

Trailer here:
http://www.defa-spektrum.de/?Verleih/1015889/Filmdetails/trailer


The VW Complex /Der VW-Komplex
















Hartmut Bitomsky's intriguing investigation of Volkswagen combines archival material and his own footage. He writes:

1. What is a complex? A psychic strategy that organizes complicated proceedings according to a particular plan and, at the same time, manages to make the whole thing impenetrable; the hyperactivity surrounding a defect so dramatically emphasized that nobody can get to the bottom of it.
2. A Volkswagen joke that used to be told before the war: A VW employee secretly smuggles out different parts every day so he can build himself a car at home. His bewildered friend asks him why the car still isn't finished. The other: "No matter how I put it together, it always turns out to be a cannon."
3. Sklovskij: "The machine gunner and the bass player are a continuation of their instruments. The underground trains, the cranes and the automobiles are the artificial limbs of humanity...these things are only as good as what man can make out of them."
4. Car stuffing: There have often been jokes made about the capacity of the beetle and record attempts have deduced that more people can fit into a beetle than there is actually room for. VW is a compilation word: "people" and "car." The plant used to belong to the state; then it was privatized and became a limited company. Nobody talks in terms of "people's shares" any more...

At
Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1


More screenings and info:
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

Full Unemployment Cinema
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

Dove on the Roof pamphlet

Available here: http://zinelibrary.info/full-unemployment-cinema-dove-roof-and-vw-complex-0

Playtime

Playtime (1967)
By Jaques Tati
France
125 min

Sunday 29th January | Doors 7pm | Free admission

At COLORAMA CINEMA
52-56 Lancaster St
London SE1
[THIS TIME WITH HEATING!]

DOWNLOAD THE PLAYTIME PAMPHLET FROM HERE!

Jacques Tati's Playtime is perhaps the only epic achievement of the modernist cinema, a film that not only accomplishes the standard modernist goals of breaking away from closed classical narration and discovering a new, open form of story-telling, but also uses that form to produce an image of an entire society. After building a solid international audience through the 1950s with his comedies Jour de fête , Mr. Hulot's Holiday , and Mon oncle , Tati spent ten years on the planning and execution of what was to be his masterpiece, selling the rights to all his old films to raise the money he needed to construct the immense glass and steel set—nicknamed "Tativille"—that was his vision of modern Paris. The film—two hours and 35 minutes long, in 70mm and stereophonic sound—opened in France in 1967, and was an instant failure.

Playtime is what its title suggests—an idyll for the audience, in which Tati asks us to relax and enjoy ourselves in the open space his film creates, a space cleared of the plot-line tyranny of "what happens next?," of enforced audience identification with star performers, and of the rhetorical tricks of mise-en-scène and montage meant to keep the audience in the grip of pre-ordained emotions. Tati leaves us free to invent our own movie from the multitude of material he offers.

One of the ways in which Tati creates the free space of Playtime is by completely disregarding conventional notions of comic timing and cutting. There is no emphasis in the montage to tell us when to laugh, no separation in the mise-en-scène of the gag from the world around it. Instead of using his camera to break down a comic situation—to analyze it into individual shots and isolated movement—he uses deep-focus images to preserve the physical wholeness of the event and long takes to preserve its temporal integrity. Other gags and bits of business are placed in the foreground and background; small patterns, of gestures echoed and shapes reduplicated, ripple across the surface of the image. We can't look at Playtime as we look at an ordinary film, which is to say, passively, through the eyes of the director. We have to roam the image—search it, work it, play with it.

With its universe of Mies van der Rohe boxes, Playtime is often described as a satire on the horrors of modern architecture. But the glass and steel of Playtime is also a metaphor for all rigid structures, from the sterile environments that divide city dwellers to the inflexible patterns of thought that divide and compartmentalize experience, separating comedy from drama, work from play. The architecture of Playtime is also an image for the rhetorical structures of classical filmmaking: the hard, straight lines are the lines of plot, and the plate glass windows are the shots that divide the world into digested, inert fragments.

By Dave Kehr

Read more: http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Pi-Ra/Playtime.html#ixzz1isGUpeJ5

  So Let Me Have My Fun!
A Canzonetta by Aldo Palazzeschi

(excerpt)

Twee twee twee,
froo froo froo,
eehu eehu eehu,
uhee uhee uhee!
The poet’s having fun,
he’s insane,
he’s out of control!
Don’t insult him,
let him have his fun –
poor guy,
these little pranks
are his only pleasure.

Cocca docca,
Cocca docca,
cock-a-doodle-doo!
What are these vulgarities,
these oafish strophes?
Liberties, liberties,
poetic liberties!
They’re my passion.

Farafarafarafa,
Tarataratarata,
Paraparaparapa,
Laralaralarala!
Know what this is?
It’s very advanced stuff,
nothing silly –
it’s the chaff
of other poems.

Sick to Death Double Bill

Death of Mr Lazarescu / The Kingdom
Sunday 18 December | Doors 7pm | Admission Free






Riget / The Kingdom - First Episode - Day 1: "Den hvide flok" / "The Unheavenly Host"(1994)
By Lars von Trier
Denmark (60mins)

Moartea domnului Lazarescu / The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)
By Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu
Romania (150min)

The process by which Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu becomes neglected, is also that by which the film connects him to a dying potentiality which could only be realised through him. This flickering potential, a shadow in his shape, a shadow that is the image-object to which the care of others might be attached, and which has hitherto only appeared within a set of relations defined by his insignificance, is both realised by the film and closed out unrealised by the institution which it portrays. Biopower forecloses on all discourses of redemption and seeks instead to realise, or manufacture, the tangible potentials which it identifies in individuals. Where no useful, achievable, measurable potential is identified its institutions find no purpose, nothing to work on – the shadow, the potential that is care for care’s sake, is dispersed. Mr Lazarescu’s lonely fate is also the fate of the potential that is his alone and which he might have realised in a life lived otherwise. At the end of his life he carries his shadow down into the void. And a potential for society, with him as one of its centres, an alternative circumstance structured on other relations, and other procedures, other means of caring and prioritising, dies with him.
http://theanvilreview.org/movie/dark-passage/">

A pamphlet has been produced to accompany the screening

AT

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

2011-2012 Programme

FULL UNEMPLOYMENT CINEMA

2011-2012 Programme

25 SEPTEMBER – Old School of Capitalism
30 OCTOBER – Elephants' Graveyard / Pretty Dyana
27 NOVEMBER – Jeanne Dielman... / Saute Ma Ville

18 DECEMBER – Death of Mr Lazarescu / The Kingdom

29 JANUARY – Playtime
26 FEBRUARY – VW Complex / Dove On The Roof

25 MARCH – Louise Michel / Shot in the Factory

29 APRIL – Prostitute / Qualeh – Woman's Quarter

27 MAY – News From the Ideological Antiquity

Full Unemployment Cinema
http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.com/

COLORAMA CINEMA

We are just one of the groups showing films at a self-organised, independent cinema in South London.

Colorama Cinema screenings and info
http://coloramacinema.tumblr.com/

Thorough Cleaning Double Bill

Sunday 27 November | Doors 7pm | Admission Free
Now with Added RAGE
presentation by Rage of Maidens: http://rageofmaidens.wordpress.com/

Saute ma ville, 1968 text
by Chantal Akerman
(Belgium, 13mins)
+
MAIN FEATURE
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles, 1975 text

by Chantal Akerman
(Belgium, 201mins)

A pamphlet has been produced to accompany the screening

AT

Colorama Cinema
52-56 Lancaster Street
London SE1

Saute ma ville

In Saute ma ville, Akerman’s first film, a sprightly Chantal bounds up the steps leading to a tiny studio apartment, mostly taken up by a kitchen. Her determination and precision are evident, but the tasks follow a not altogether clear pattern. As she energetically polishes her shoes, Akerman keeps going with the same obsessive gesture – until she has also brushed her legs and stained the floor around it black. The same gesture seems to produce at once disarray and tidiness. For a while, it is enthralling to try to sort out one from the other. The pleasure derived from witnessing these fully finished actions follows from the rapidity with which mess and neatness (contrasting sharply with each other) are reciprocally wiped out. The framing of these unexplained gestures can be likened, in its reduction of focus, to the single-shot frame of minimalist films trained on a single action carried to completion. But while the action in Richard Serra’s Hands Scraping (1971) comes to a close on a blank, clean screen, Akerman’s space is not neutral. The kitchen immediately defines a domestic space, and other social indices are marginally present.

With the kitchen fully in order, Chantal eats spaghetti, spills wine and food over herself. She then she leans her head on the stove and lights a match. The explosion happens over a freeze frame, in sound only. Here, she presents us with the literal image of a compression chamber, the implicit consequence of the mad chemistry she performs in every one of her boxed-in spaces. Saute ma ville announces, literally and with a bang, Akerman’s entry into artistic adulthood. It is well known that suicide is a favorite subject of adolescents’ first films. Indeed, it would be interesting to check if those who go on to live creatively declare so loudly, as Akerman does in this filmic rite of passage, their future tools, elements, genres. Brushes, spaghetti, water and soap dance animistically with Akerman. In this first film-room, droll humor and tragedy, slapstick and rigorously concerted process alternate in disturbing in-distinction. Saute ma ville presents in swift succession – as if they all pertained to the same order of events – cleaning, cooking and committing suicide. This perversion of categories, of banal and dramatic, of the literally performed action taken to the point of a suggested death, is frontally presented, enhancing these actions’ paradoxical equivalence.

With Jeanne Dielman comes the structural lesson: the stark separation between the scene and the obscene defines how an excessively dutiful domestic concern replaces the desire relegated to the elided room. In Akerman, every single space stared at for too long will bear witness to the cost of this economy. In a didactic exposure of the fragility of order, the frame remains the same whether a fork falls, dishes remain unwashed, or a shoebrush drops. This intrusion of objects moving on their own gives plastic shape to the unwelcome, recurring thoughts that obsessive-compulsive characters attempt to suppress.

Excessive doubting is the most common feature of this condition. In Monomania: the Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art, Marina Van Zuylen brilliantly explores how the panic of the mutable engenders the idée fixe and obsessive behavior. (10) Even though rituals are an important part of day-to-day life, and normal people use concentration to keep away what is irrelevant, the obsessive-compulsive finds the manifestation of ambivalence unbearable. A submission to external orders and schedules always feels better than having to decide for oneself. Manic activity is an attempt to bypass a depressed sense of autonomy through a minute, circumscribed competence. The escape from situations felt as being too contingent, too confusing to bear, is performed through invented orders, made-up series and a reasoning that is mostly lacking in logic.

see more at: http://www.rouge.com.au/10/akerman.html