October, November, December 2015
Chris Marker/Alain Resnais and Alfred Hitchcock

‘The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing.’
― Roland Barthes, ‘Roland Barthes’

The third cycle of Bengal Cinematheque, inflamed our greed for the traumas and pleasures of our past and then revealed to us their brutal, unbridgeable distance.

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3 October 2015, 7:00 PM Saturday
Sans Soleil (Marker)
1983, 104 minutes, colour

Fictions within fictions, memories coursing through memories. A cameraman sends back footage from his travels through Japan and West Africa coupled to intricate letters that think through his being—his existence and coexistence. Natural idiosyncrasies and perplexing wisdom slowly cement a character that plays, smiles, cries, and confesses—yet who always slides away, always escapes. The absurdity and persistent re-emergence of meaning is felt, catalogued and thrown into the sea. The fractal details of his discursive being combine into a form that is the closest the medium has come to the act of thinking and reverie.

4 October 2015, 7:00 PM Sunday
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
1958, 129 minutes, colour

There is a rhythm to obsession and murder. This flow of seduction and entrapment entangles a solitary and weakened man into labyrinthine desires and subterfuge. What is shown is so captivating that we too become one with his unbearable fixation. His feelings are ruthlessly exploited and shamed, and the epistemological lacunae lead to a catastrophic breakdown. He recovers not into his old self, but into a compulsive
searcher, looking for his own victim to control, his own remaking of the past. Driven by incompleteness he finds an accurate simulacra where physics and hope can tangle. The perpetrator as victim is slowly worn down to her soul. The sun goes out.

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বেঙ্গল সিনেমাটেক বিশিষ্ট চলচ্চিত্র নির্মাতাদের কাজ এবং ধারণা সর্বোচ্চ দক্ষতায় উপস্থাপন করছে। বাংলাদেশের চলচ্চিত্র নির্মাতা, লেখক এবং নির্বাচক সমাজকে অনুপ্রাণিত করতে।

Bengal Cinematheque presents the films and ideas of cinema’s greatest auteurs, shown at the highest quality, to support a community of emerging film-makers, writers and programmers in Bangladesh. Free entry. Doors close at 7:00 pm. Limited seating.

This Cycle is Programmed by Omar Chowdhury