Showing posts with label ecological awareness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecological awareness. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

MARKKU LEHMUSKALLIO, ANASTASIA LAPSUI, SAKARI TOIVIAINEN

Publication of Sakari Toiviainen's book in Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 4 Feb 2009. With presentations by Sakari Toiviainen and Markku Lehmuskallio.
We celebrate the 70th anniversary of Markku Lehmuskallio with a complete retrospective of the feature films of Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui and their carte blanche series. Today, Sakari Toiviainen's book Kadonnutta paratiisia etsimässä (In Search of Paradise Lost) was published, with exquisite illustrations edited by Kai Vase in collaboration with Markku Lehmuskallio.
Markku Lehmuskallio is a great artist of both documentary and fiction films. Their common subject is the life of the Northern peoples in Lapland, Siberia, and Canada. What Robert Flaherty started in Nanook of the North, Lehmuskallio has done during his whole film career, rescuing the vanishing, primordial cultures of the Sami, the Nenets, the Nganasan, the Selkup, the Inuit, and so on, for instance in his great I Am, the history of the art of the people in the tundra.
He is the documentarian of immemorial tradition and man on the last threshold of survival.
He is also a poet of the forest and of nature. He is an ecological visionary.
Since 1992, Lehmuskallio has made his films with Anastasia Lapsui, a Nenets who belongs to a family of shamans.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

MARKKU LEHMUSKALLIO: SHORT FILMS

Four documentary films.
Pohjoisten metsien äänet / De nordliga skogarnas ljud / Sounds of the Northern Forests. FI 1973. 14 min
Mies jolla on kahdet kasvot / Mannen med två ansikten / The Man With Two Faces. FI 1974. 19 min
Elämän tanssi / Livets dans / The Dance of Life. FI 1975. 15 min
Mikä mies metsuri / Skogsarbetaren / The Lumberjack. FI 1977. 19 min
16mm. Viewed at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 14 Jan 2009.
Beautiful colour in Pohjoisten metsien äänet, slightly faded in Mies jolla on kahdet kasvot, OK in Elämän tanssi and Mikä mies metsuri.
Markku Lehmuskallio is the artist of the people and the nature of the North. He makes both documentary and fiction films.
Sounds of the Northern Forests shows us the elks, the cranes, the hawks, the eagles, the fighting wood grouse, the reindeer, the owls, the swans, startled by the sounds of the chainsaw and the screaming jet.
The Man With Two Faces portrays the last wanderer of the forest, the Laplander, who meets swans making love and rearing their offspring.
The Dance of Life shows the man with eyes and hands tied in the forest, experiencing the courtship of the wood grouse and other birds of the forest.
The Lumberjack is the story of two schoolchildren preparing an essay of the modern lumberjack, so completely different from the lumberjack of the past. The modern lumberjack is well educated, versatile, an expert with huge forest machines, pretty independent in executing a clear cutting, living in populated centers, commuting to the forest with cars, working all year round in different aspects of the forest business.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l'an 2000

Jonas täyttää 25 vuonna 2000 / Jonas fyller 25 år 2000. CH/FR (c) 1976 Citel Films etc. D: Alain Tanner. SC: John Berger, Tanner. DP: Renato Berta - Eastmancolor. M: Jean-Marie Sénia. "Le Temps de cerises" (1866, L: Jean-Baptiste Clément, M: Antoine Renard). ED: Brigitte Sousselier, Marc Blavet. LOC: Geneva. CAST: Jean-Luc Bideau (Max Satigny), Rufus (Mathieu Vernier), Miou-Miou (Marie), Jacques Denis (Marco Perly), Dominique Labourier (Marguerite Certoux), Roger Jendly (Marcel Certoux), Myriam Mézières (Madeleine), Myriam Boyer (Mathilde Vernier). 115 min. A vintage print with Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Satu Laaksonen / Maya Vanni. Viewed at Cinema Orion, 1 Jan 2009. - Beautiful colour (warm and vibrant) in the print screened. - Revisited: Alain Tanner and John Berger's masterpiece on the legacy of the 1960's counterculture. It's about utopia, idealism, activism, thinking differently, sometimes naively, even destructively. It's about social awareness, ecological thinking, agriculture, raising children, new kinds of human relations, and tantra sex. Eight main characters, all around 30 years old, all with names starting with Ma-. In the music track, the piano passages (by Jean-Marie Sénia?) are lovely.