Festivals within the Festival!  It’s the Passport Series – films that take you around the world!

Go jet-setting! First stop, Austria, where in Pianomania, piano tuner Stefan Knupfer searches for the perfect sound. Next, drop by Juchitán, a progressive, maternal society in Mexico, colorfully documented in Blossoms of Fire (with co-director Maureen Gosling in attendance). On Tuesday, revisit a horrifying moment in history, the Rape of Nanking, unflinchingly reenacted in the modern Chinese masterpiece City of Life and Death. Then travel to Paris with a gorgeous new restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself. Finally, head to Japan with an archival print of one of Akira Kurosawa’s finest films, the overlooked Ikiru.  Purchase a Passport Series Pass and see all five movies.

Pianomania

2009 / Austria / 93 min / Blu-ray Directors: Robert Cibis & Lilian Franck Featuring: Stefan Knüpfer, Alfred Brendel, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang, and many more!

Print Source: First Run Features

In German and English with English subtitles

Armed with perfect pitch, Teutonic precision, and an extraordinary amount of patience, master piano tuner Stefan Knüpfer is a guardian against imperfect sound. The exhilarating Pianomania follows Knüpfer as he consults with some of the world’s greatest pianists—Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang, and Alfred Brendel—tweaking their pianos to create the exact tones that they hear in their heads. While each pianist has a distinct idea of what their instrument should sound like, Aimard is particularly exacting. The film continually returns to Knüpfer’s year-long near-Herculean effort to prepare two pianos for Aimard’s recording of Bach’s Art of the Fugue cycle. With an incredible wall-to-wall piano soundtrack that will be perfectly suited to the Capitol Theater’s massive sound system, Pianomania is flush with the thrill of watching artists and craftsmen work at the highest level.

Blossoms of Fire

2001 / USA/Mexico / 75 min / 16mm Directors: Maureen Gosling and Ellen Osborne Cast: The people of Juchitán Oaxaca

Print Source: Maureen Gosling

In Spanish with English subtitles

Author Elena Poniatowska described the legendary women of Juchitán, a city in Oaxaca, Mexico, as “guardians of men, distributors of food.” Juchitán is a proudly matriarchal society, and Blossoms of Fire shows the Juchitán women in all their brightly colored, highly opinionated glory. The region is notable for its progressive politics, including an unusual lack of homophobia, and veteran film editor Maureen Gosling (along with collaborator Ellen Osborne) presents a deeply immersive look into the day-to-day lives of its people. Shot beautifully in rich 16mm, Blossoms of Fire was described by The Bay Area Reporter as “a socialist realist travelogue in the style of a latter-day Orson Welles, with the philosophy of a feminist Hemingway and the palette of the great muralist Diego Rivera.” The accolades extend beyond the film world: Blossoms of Fire was presented with an award for Excellence in Visual Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association. Following the screening, Maureen Gosling will present excerpts from two works in progress: Bamako Chic, co-directed with anthropologist Maxine Downs, tells the untold story of the self-empowered African women who fuel the hand-dyed cloth industry in Mali, West Africa; and No Mouse Music!, which documents Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie records, which for years has offered an unparalleled catalogue of blues, Cajun, wild hillbilly country, Tex-Mex, and New Orleans R&B.

City of Life and Death

2009 / China/Hong Kong / 132 min / 35mm Director: Chuan Lu

Writer: Chuan Lu Cast: Ye Liu, Wei Fan, Hideo Nakaizumi Print Source: Kino Lorber

In Mandarin, German, and Japanese with English subtitles

Heartbreaking, horrifying, controversial, epic, and unforgettable, Chuan Lu’s City of Life and Death dramatizes the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking, the then-capital of China, and the six weeks of suffering and slaughter that followed. Based on years of research and eyewitness testimony, and shot in hauntingly beautiful black and white, the film juxtaposes scenes of tremendous brutality (including graphic rape) with intimate stories of several characters, both Chinese and Japanese, moving through the chaos. While this film, which has been compared to the likes of Scorsese and Pasolini at their peaks, is certainly not an easy watch, its unflinching depiction of human barbarism transcends shock value to get at something more primal and essential. As Indiewire’s Karina Longworth writes, the film “manages to convey the total horror of the Japanese atrocities from the perspective of both perpetrators and victims, all with exceptional nuance, sensitivity and sadness…. [It] has the feel of a lost post-War foreign classic, a masterwork implicating the viewer in the horrors of bearing witness.” And Kate Muir of The Times (of London) states that the film “has the grandeur of a classic. It should be witnessed.”

Every Man for Himself (Sauve qui peut la vie)

1980 / France / 87 min / 35mm Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Claude Carrière Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, Jacques Dutronc, Marguerite Duras Print Source: The Film Desk Website: www.everymanforhimself.info

In French with English subtitles. The Olympia Film Festival is proud to present a beautiful new restoration of Godard’s “second first movie,” so called because it marked his return to narrative filmmaking after a decade of hermetic and explicitly political video essays. Every Man for Himself (alternately known as Slow Motion, Run for Your Life, and even Everybody for Themselves in Life) is a richly sensuous meditation on beauty, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships, as masterfully adventurous with image and sound as it is with concept. Lushly cinematic, with unexpected use of slow motion and sound collage, the film follows interactions between a slick, womanizing video director by the name of Godard (French pop star Jacques Dutronc), an unapologetic prostitute (Isabelle Huppert), and Godard’s embittered ex-lover (Nathalie Baye). Though it certainly contains a heady mix of ideas, this is also one of Godard’s most entertaining late-period films, with its rapid-fire humor and wild sexuality. To quote critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, this “lovely, desperate film . . . should be seen by everyone interested in movies or life, without hesitation or delay.” Following the film, Joaquin de la Puente will lead an offsite discussion at The Mark.

Ikiru

1952 / Japan / 143 min / 35mm Director: Akira Kurosawa

Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni Cast: Takashi Shimura, Shin’ichi Himori, Haruo Tanaka Print Source: Janus

In Japanese with English subtitles For most people, the lively Toshiro Mifune is the most familiar of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s regular stable of players. But Takashi Shimura, who heads up this splendid story of dreary postwar Japanese life, may have been his best. His quiet, devastating performance as a lifelong bureaucrat who is dying of cancer is powerful and unforgettable. Every disappointment of his life is written in his face, in the set of his mouth and the movements of his eyes, and his efforts to find meaning at the end of it are as heartwarming as they are heartbreaking. The photography is luminescent throughout, and Kurosawa lets his story unfold and proceed at its own pace. Though Seven Samurai and Rashomon are widely (and rightly) hailed as masterpieces, Ikiru deserves a place beside them, a wrenching and inspiring human drama that impeccably transcends class and culture.