Spring 2007 schedule:

This is not necessarily finalized. We'll add the guest speakers later.

Also note the new screening date, ie. sundays.

January 7th; Kung Fu II:

Once Upon a Time in China II (Wong Fei Hung Ji Yi, Tsui Hark, 1992, Hong Kong), Project A part II ('A' Gai Waak Juk Jaap, Jackie Chan, 1987, Hong Kong)

January 14th; The Holocaust:

Night and Fog (Alan Resnais, 1955, France), Passenger (Pasazerka, Andrzej Munk, 1963, Poland), The Shop on Main Street (Obchod Na Korze, Jan kadar og Elmar Klos, 1965, Czechoslovakia)

January 21st; Sweet 'n' Nasty:

Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972, USA) og Flesh for Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973, USA/Italy/France)

January 28th; Documentaries 1:

Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994, USA), Harlan County USA (Barbara Kopple, 1978, USA)

February 4th; Political Thrillers:

Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969, Algier/France), Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962, USA)

February 11th; Feminism:

Cleo From 5 to 7 (Agnes Varda, 1961, France), Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Russ Meyer, 1965, USA)

February 18th; Serial Killers:

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, UK), M (Fritz Lang, 1931, Germany)

February 25th; Avant-garde Documentaries:

Man With a Movie Camera (Chelovek s Kino-apparatom, Dziga Vertov, 1929, USSR), Häxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922, Sweden),

March 4th; Socially Satirical Comedies:

The Firemen's Ball (Horí, Má Panenko; Milos Forman, 1967, Czechoslovakia), Zero for conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933, France), Boudu saved from drowning (Boudu Sauvé des Eaux, Jean Renoir, 1932, France)

March 11th; Attacks on the Sanctity of Home:

Straw dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971, UK/USA), visitor Q (Bijita Q, Takashi Miike, 2002, Japan)

March 18th; Japanese Culture:

An Actor’s Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963, Japan), Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962, Japan)

March 25th; Documentaries 2:

Roger & Me (Michael Moore, 1989, USA), The Thin Blue Line ( Errol Morris, 1988, USA)

April 1st; Romantic Fantasies:

La Belle et la Bete (Jean Cocteau, 1946, France), A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell og Emeric Pressburger, 1946, UK)

April 15th; Political Modernism:

Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarollo, Tomás Gutierrez Alea, 1968, Cuba), Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, France)

April 22th; Shorts-o-rama:

To be Decided...

April 29th; Horror:

Eyes Without a Face (Yeux Sans Visage, Georges Franju, 1959, France/Italy), Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, Ingmar Bergman, 1968, Sweden)

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

The movie takes place in Hong Kong in the 1960´s in a tight built apartment building og follows two neighbors who suspect their spouses of extra-marital activities….with each other.They them self meet together and gradually assess the situation. They make excuses to spend time together in solace but finally the see that they are in fact made for each other but can not act on their true feelings.

The film recreates the same 1960´s Hong Kong that earlier made Wong Kar-Wai´s film Days of Being Wild so authentic. He creates credile characters out of almost nothing using the tension bewteen them. What the audience might see as simmering romance, Wong rather sees as sad resignaton. This is not unrequited love but resisted and forced to the background. The emotional power ot their nonrelationship proves remarkably effective. This is the best representation of unrewarded love of two people in the history of film.

Wong Kar-Wai is today said by many to be one of the best working director and his movies get widely praised, though in Hong Kong Jackie Chan is much more popular. After the expensive Days of Being Wild made its fiasco he took a break for few years. He returned with a string of films that made him the world known artist he is today. Movies such as Ashes of Time (1994), Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997) and later 2046 (2004). In the Mood for Love became so popular around the world that he makes a movie on a yearly basis and keeps his artistic freedom, also attracting every star in Asia wanting to work with him.

L´Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
This wonderful film about the love between two people is one of the greatest and most beautiful attempts in film history to depict the love between a man and a woman. It is the only feature length film Jean Vigo directed but he died soon after its release. Vigo´s legend lives with the film and it has its place on most all time greatest film lists, and rightly so.
L´Atalante deals with love and separation of a married couple in France, the boatsman Jean and his wife Juliette. They live on a barge sailing on river Seine where Juliette has no rest and longs for the city life on land. When she ventures into the parisian nightlife Jean leaves in a fit of rage, while boatsman Jules goes to look for Juliette. Jean, quickly overcome by grief and longing for his wife returns in hope to see his beloved again.
The relationship between the two lovers outlines the agony of seperation, as well as the euphoria of unity. Vigo potrays the genders as two distinctive poles with boatsman Jules, played by Michel Simon, in between. He is as much a man as a woman and as much an adult as a child. Simon steals the show and gives the film a strange feel with a mixture of song, bawdy humor and improvisational acting. Simon is generally thought of as one of France´s greatest (and most french) actors.
The film´s gloom along with its heavy eroticism had a great influence on the directors of the french new wave (Godard, Truffaut, Rivette). It is both a result of experimental films of the 20´s and a preliminary to realism in later films.
But above all the film is a strange and dazzling love story of two humans.

You've been a lovely audience...

Now on the eve of our last screening before christmas and, more importantly, the exams. We'll post more information on the films later on but first we'd like to thank you for your attendance and response, but we'd like to hear more from you. It involves a fair amount of work to put our schedule together and we're not doing this just have a movie-and-a-beer night for you. The goal is to increase the understanding and availability of the medium. That doesn't change that we would like to hear more from you and what expectations or requests you make.

We've already put together the schedule for the new year and will post it soon. It can be altered if we get some good (serious) requests. We're also planning to have more guests introducing the films and discussing the weekly themes.

So it is officially put down in writing, here's what you could call our mission statement:

Kinofíll is a group of students in film studies, who have the goal of expanding access of films to entusiasts. To this end we have a weekly screening. In these we show (thematically), important or intersting films. We do not show the output of Hollywood, which is in no way judgment on Hollywood films, but we think access to Hollywood cinema is sufficiently good to distance ourselves from it. The quality and/or importance of a film outweighs it's entertainment value when we choose what films to screen, but we do try let that also play a role. It's important to us that our films provoke thought in the theme we tackle each time and therefore sometimes pick controversial films which force the viewer to take a stand. It is not done to expressly shock the viewer.

We wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new year and hope for even more (and more active) guests in the coming year.

-Kinofíll.

Man Bites Dog (C'est Arrivé Pres de Chez Vous, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel og Benoit Poelvoorde; Belgium, 1992)

If the film's French title is translated it becomes "Coming to a Neighborhood Near You", which underscores the every-day method of the narrative. But the story and presentation are anything but ordinary.

The film follows two young filmmakers, André and Rémy, who are making a Cinema Verité -style documentary about the serial killer Ben. He's a funny, philosophical guy who just happens to go through a monthly murder routine and depends upon it as his sole source of income. When André and Rémy run out of money, Ben offers to finance the film.

It's this deeply black humour and rough satire that separates Man Bites Dog from most other film and was the main that it was a surprise hit and remains to this day highly controversial. It attakcs the responsibility of the media and the complicity of the viewer, who becomes no less guilty for the acts of violence than the killer Ben.

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, Italy, 1980)

Before going further it is right to warn that film is extremely nasty and goes very far in portraying highly graphic (incl. sexual) violence and there are scenes of actual animal killings.

This is possibly the only in a long series of Italian cannibalism films that has dated well. It's also the only one that could be called a classic because apart from being the brutal exploitation it certainly is, it actually has a poignant and important message, the relevance of which has become considerably more vital now than when it was made.

On the surface the film may not look al that impressive. The acting (and dubbing) can charitably be called acceptable and nothing more, the plot is ridiculous and the subject matter is suspect. But the gruesome effects are skillfully done, the score is amazing and the message is the key to appreciate the film.

The actual subject of Cannibal Holocaust is the media and how it seems more and more interested in disasters and shocking footage than real news or real life in general. Now, when variably real reality shows dominate television, this becomes moree important. One can't help but question the methods of getting news and documentary footage after viewing the film.

The director tries to involve the viewer in this thought process but due to pressures from the producers he was forced to put more emphasis on the violence than the message and the rather questionable title of the film is their invention, not the director's.

Kinofíll hopes that the viewer takes with him more of the message than the massacre after viewing this film, despite the constant barrage of shocking images.

Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

Joan Crawford plays Vienna, bar owner in a small town in the west. A group of townsfolk want her out of town but she won´t budge. The leader of the townsfolk is Emma but her reasons for the hatred of Vienna is not money but jealousy. The love of her life, The Dancing Kid, is in love with Vienna, while Vienna has called an old lover, Johnny Guitar, for help against the mob.

Melodramatic plot of Johnny Guitar can push people to laughter but that is done by intention. There is a strong use of colors and red and green are dominating, but blue is almost nowhere to be found and the movie especially plays with the contrast of black to white. The performance in the movie is in beat with technical features and is exaggerated. This completes the style of the movie of being over the top in all aspects.

In Johnny Guitar there is a complete turn of gender roles in the movie, where Crawford is dressed in black pants, leather boots and has a revolver by her side while Johnny Guitar has but his Guitar. The movie incorporates many traits of western movies but twists some of them. Also there is a great stuggle in the film between female characters so many want to associate the movie to feminism. The scriptwriter was put on a "black list" when the McCarthyism was at its peak in the States, and some criticism against McCarthyism can be seen as the mob in the movie is going against those who go by there own life principles.

Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Django (Franco Nero) is, as any other loner, recently discharged from the Yankee army and travelling south to the Mexico border. Dragging a coffin along with him, he arrives at a bordertown and is put in the middle of a conflict between Major Jackson and General Rodríguez and his bandits. Django has also his own personal vendetta to settle with Jackson and his men for they were responseble for his wifes death. He takes it into his own hands to streighten out this feud in the way only lone gunmen in spaghetti-western can and that?s by killing everybody that is a hostility.

Just as many other spagheti-westerns that came after A fistful of dollars, Django, became a box-office hit in Europe. On the other hand it was banned in Britain, an several other countries, because of its raw and graphic violence. Despite the harsh nature of it all is the violence in a cartoony style and is rather packed with humour, such as extreme characterzation. Corbucci also says that there can be found numerous political topics, the one most obvious is that Django does NOT like rasists.

Django is a ?revolutionary western? and as a such it takes on several political matters and uses the revolution in mexico 1913 as a medium. Corbucci like Leone made many more ?revolutionary westerns? such as Il grande silenzio (1968), Il mercernario (1968) and vamos a matar, compañeros (1970).

Change of Schedule

Due to unforseen circumstances next screening will be on monday night at 8PM.

See schedule here.

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

Realtor Hutter is sent to a remote castle, high in the mountains af Carpathia, to help a Count (Schreck) with some legal matters. Hutter lerns that the Counts name, Orloc, is feard in neighboring towns and when at the castle he is kept locked in a tower and awake at odd hours by his host. Orloc after seeing a picture of Hutters wife, Ellen, leaves the castle one night. Fearful for his wife Hutter escapes from his prison and travels back to Bremen, Germany. When back in Bremen he learns Orloc is already there an tells his wife of his ordeal. She discovers that she alone can bring him to his fate, so she lures the demonic creature to his demise, by the rays of the morning sun.

The movie is the first known movie made after the story Dracula, by Bram Stoker, though nams and places ar changed. The movie is a key work in Geraman expressionism where Murnau puts great detail in every shot and lets them linger for awhile so that the audience may enjoy. The disturbing force of the cinemaphotography, though great on own, ows much to the skills of Max Schreck who in his role seems possessed. Schreck was so convincing to his fellow actors that some avoided any contact with him. So stories have passed through time that Schreck was in fact a real vampire and just been following his instincts as such. The movie Shadow of a Vampire shows the making of Nosferatu from that point of view.

Many theories about the movie are also from a political point of view, such as looking at Count Orloc as a representation of Lenin and the "plague" carrying rats as the communist threat. This notion of the movie as German propaganda movie against communism is not shared by everyone.