BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Brazilian rage, Part III.

Barren Lives (Vidas Secas), right from the start, doesn’t pull any punches. Through subtitles, Dos Santos exhorts his audience to feel pity for the millions of people suffering in Brazil’s north-east, where arid lands and the cruel elite conspire to tread all over the poor workers. He then proceeds to use very uncomfortable distorted sound on the soundtrack in the opening image, the likes which would have made Michael Snow proud. From that opening, you can tell that this isn’t going to be particularly pleasant viewing.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Brazilian rage, Part II.

BEING voted the greatest Brazilian film of all-time is not an accolade that is lightly given. (Also having Sergio Leone quote the film in Once Upon a Time in the West is pretty cool too with Henry Fonda’s jacket). This is also pretty remarkable considering Rocha was only 25 when he wrote and began to direct the film. And, as in Earth Entranced there is some considerable talent on show in Black God, White Devil. However, like Earth Entranced there was a lot that didn’t make sense to a non-Brazilian audience – the anger and frustration is directed at the Brazilian institutions, and consequently the film is a little oblique. However, formally, his films are certainly interesting to watch.

With Samuel Fuller taking post as Film Society’s retrospective resident this year, and Paris Hilton set for hard time in a Los Angeles jail, it seemed only appropriate that I revisit Girls in Prison: a flaccid, if mildly competent pastiche of female prison movies and that shady underworld Fuller maintained. Co-written with wife Christa Lang, it was to be Sam’s last screen treatment before his death, pulped by John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) into something sporadically evoking the B-movie imperfection. Through awkwardly tilted angles, silhouetted lighting, and a staid direct-to-video aesthetic, McNaugton has a Shock Corridor template in mind, but it’s really the late iconoclast’s scripted throwbacks to McCarthyism and red fear that authenticates the Fuller signature (that, and a brief glimpse at Ione Skye brandishing her high heel as a melee weapon).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Brazilian rage.

Earth Entranced (Terra em Transe) is certainly the most controversial film of Brazilian auteur Glauber Rocha’s output, and remains one of the most confrontational pieces of work in global cinema. Rocha was the key figure of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, a movement that has come to be known as the archetypal Third Cinema. So while people may talk about the ideological conflicts in the West during the 1960s, what went on in Paris, San Francisco etc. seems like a first-year university student picking up Das Kapital for the first time when compared to the tumult in Latin America. Few countries, including Brazil, escaped conflict and bloodshed. And while Brazil’s conflicts weren’t so violent, there were a number of highly traumatic changes, such as the sudden 1964 coup which overthrew the leftist government of João Goulart.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

I AM TEMPTED to believe that Bollywood is all set to invade the fascinating French Riviera this summer. The undoubted Queen of Movie Festivals, Cannes, unrolls on May 16 in celebration of cinema, and six decades of the event’s glorious existence.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: an education in the occult.

WATCHING ninety minutes of this film almost made me want to petition the Council to lighten up Wellington’s streets. I’ve never seen this city look so seedy and menacing. It’s also the perfect setting for Glenn Standring’s debut horror film The Irrefutable Truth About Demons. I’ve always thought if you want to make someone feel uncomfortable, show sodden pavement, and that’s precisely what Strandring did. He achieved what the stated aim of horror films through this grunge, and that is make the audience feel uncomfortable.

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

I HAVE noticed a pattern in Indian cinema. The greater the publicity for a film the greater, it appears, is also the disappointment. Two recent examples are Nishabd and Eklavya, both Amitabh Bachchan starrers. Both sank without a trace, despite all the hullabaloo. The run-up for these movies was noisy, and the pre-release publicity was enormous.

MACGREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: America in a straightjacket.

WE DELIGHT in the disturbance.

In Monday’s Film Society offering, after some patience with the projection problems, members were treated to another Sam Fuller film, Shock Corridor. Fuller’s film seems stuffed with all those elements that can buoy up an academic’s career for years – from the sense of noir to the barely concealed political stance that Fuller would seem to be putting up for examination. But in much the same way as Peter Breck’s Johnny falls foul of the institution’s examination, all is not what it seems. However before this all goes too far and as one of the insane inmates says in a rare moment of lucidity: “we have too many intellectuals; we need the pistol of common sense.”