Friday, September 20 at 7pm FULL EXPOSURE Leviathan dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, US, 2013, HD, 87 min.
One of the most critically-acclaimed documentaries in recent years, Leviathan is a groundbreaking, immersive portrait of the contemporary commercial fishing industry. Filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts – at one time the whaling capital of the world as well as Melville’ s inspiration for Moby Dick; it is today the country’ s largest fishing port with over 500 ships sailing from its harbor every month.
Leviathan follows one such vessel, a hulking groundfish trawler, into the surrounding murky black waters on a weeks-long fishing expedition. But instead of romanticizing the labor or partaking in the longstanding tradition of turning fisher-folk into images, filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor( Sweetgrass) and Verena Paravel( Foreign Parts) present a vivid, almost-kaleidoscopic representation of the work, the sea, the machinery and the players, both human and marine.
Employing an arsenal of cameras that passed freely from film crew to ship crew; that swoop from below sea level to astonishing bird’ s-eye views in the sky, the film that emerges is unlike anything that has been seen before. Entirely dialogue-free, but mesmerizing and gripping throughout, it breaks new ground in both cinema and anthropology, while presenting a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’ s oldest endeavors.
Saturday, September 21 at 2pm MOTION PICTURES: KEY CONCEPTS- MISE-EN-SCENE The Rules of the Game dir. Jean Renoir, France, 1939, 35mm, French with English subtitles, 106 min.
Introduced by Leonard Guercio, Temple University
The cinematic image, regardless of aspect ratio, is always a frame or perspective through which filmmakers present the visual information they want us to see and know. In a brief introduction to the film, Philadelphia filmmaker and Temple University Film Tech Specialist Len Guercio will present a point-of-view on the notion and use of mise-en-scène in Jean Renoir’ s 1939 classic film The Rules of the Game.
Considered one of the greatest films ever made, Jean Renoir’ s The Rules of the Game( La règle du jeu) is a scathing critique of corrupt French society cloaked in a comedy of manners in which a weekend at a marquis’ country château lays bare some ugly truths about a group of haut bourgeois acquaintances. The film has had a tumultuous history: it was subjected to cuts after the violent response of the premiere audience in 1939, and the original negative was destroyed during World War II; it wasn’ t reconstructed until 1959. That version, which has stunned viewers for decades, is presented here. ihousephilly. org