- 01-10 Oct -

From the Cinematheque members email:

The British director David Lean was born in 1908 - exactly 100 years ago. Next week, Hanoi Cinematheque joins Cinematheques and film institutes around the world in paying tribute to this great film artist.  Here are seven of Lean’s best-loved movies. If you’ve only seen them once, once is not enough.  And if you’ve only seen them on TV or video, that’s not enough either!  Like all great art, David Lean’s films grow richer and more interesting with each viewing.

For reservations, phone 936 2648 after 1pm daily.

OCTOBER

1   Wednesday
19:00    BRIEF ENCOUNTER
21:00    GREAT EXPECTATIONS

2   Thursday
19:00    OLIVER TWIST
21:00    BRIEF ENCOUNTER

3    Friday
19:00    THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI

4   Saturday
15:00    THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
19:00    LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

5    Sunday
19:00    LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

6   Monday
Reserved for function

7    Tuesday
19:00    DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

8    Wednesday
19:00    A PASSAGE TO INDIA

9    Thursday
19:00    A PASSAGE TO INDIA

10   Friday
19:00    DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
SIR DAVID LEAN

David Lean was born in Croydon, England in 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family. Ironically, as a child, he wasn’t allowed to go to the movies. During the twenties, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding a job in a cinema studio in 1927. He worked as tea boy, clapper boy, messenger, then newsreel cutter and finally feature film editor, notably for Anthony Asquith, Paul Czinner and Michael Powell. By the end of the thirties, Lean’s reputation as editor was very well established.

In 1942, Noel Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war movie IN WHICH WE SERVE. Shortly after, with the encouragement of Noel Coward; Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and producer Anthony Havelock-Allan launched a production company called Cineguild. For that firm, Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Noel Coward: the chronicle THIS HAPPY BREED (1944), the humorous ghost story BLITHE SPIRIT (1945), and most notably the sentimental drama BRIEF ENCOUNTER (1945). Originally a box office failure in England, BRIEF ENCOUNTER was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946) where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.

From Coward, Lean switched to Dickens, directing two well-regarded adaptations: GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1946) and OLIVER TWIST (1948). The latter, starring Alec Guinness in his first major movie role, was however criticized by some for potential anti-semitic inflections.

Lean’s next movie was pivotal in his career as it was the first of those grand scale epic he will become renown for. THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957) was produced by Sam Spiegel from a novel by Pierre Boulle adapted by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. Shot in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) under extremely difficult conditions, the film was an international success and triumphed at the Oscars, winning seven awards, most notably best film and director.

Lean and Spiegel followed with an even more ambitious film, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) based on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the autobiography of T.E. Lawrence. Starring relative newcomer Peter O’Toole, this film was the first collaboration between Lean and writer Robert Bolt, cinematographer Freddie Young and composer Maurice Jarre. The shooting itself took place in Spain, Morrocco and Jordan over a period of 20 months. Initial reviews were mixed and the film was trimmed down shortly after its world premiere and cut even more during a 1971 re-release. Like its predecessor, it won seven Oscars, once again including best film and director.

The same team of Lean, Bolt, Young and Jarre next worked on an adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1965) for producer Carlo Ponti. Spain and Finland stood for revolutionary Russia and, despite divided critics, the film was hugely successful, as was Maurice Jarre’s musical score. DOCTOR ZHIVAGO won five Oscars out of ten nominations.

Lean’s next movie, the sentimental drama RYAN’S DAUGHTER (1970), did not reach the same heights. The original screenplay by Robert Bolt was produced by old associate Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Lean once again secured the collaboration of Freddie Young and Maurice Jarre. The shooting in Ireland lasted about a year, much longer than expected. The film won two Oscars; but, for the most part, critical reaction was tepid, sometimes downright derisive, and the general public didn’t really respond to the movie.

This relative lack of success seems to have inhibited Lean’s creativity for a while. But towards the end of the seventies, Lean was then approached by producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin to adapt E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, a book Lean had been interested in for more than 20 years. For the first time of his career; Lean wrote the adaptation alone, basing himself partly on Santha Rama Rau’s stage version of the book. Lean also acted as his own editor. A PASSAGE TO INDIA opened in 1984 to mostly favourable reviews and performed quite well at the box-office. It was a strong Oscar contender, scoring eleven nominations and two wins.

In 1990, Lean received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement award. He died of cancer in April 1991.

Lean was known on sets for his extreme perfectionism and autocratic behaviour, an attitude that sometimes alienated his cast or crew. Though his cinematic approach, classic and refined, clearly belongs to a bygone era, his films have aged rather well and his influence can still be found in movies like THE ENGLISH PATIENT and TITANIC. In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 greatest British films of the 20th century. Five movies by David Lean appeared in the top 30, three of them in the top five.

DAVID LEAN, PERFECTIONIST OF MADNESS
By Terrence Rafferty

David Lean was famous for his perfectionism, and like every director afflicted with that quality he didn’t - couldn’t - make perfect movies. His films betray the anxiety of their making. He also couldn’t make many. He completed just 16 in his long career, a paltry 4 in the 30-plus years that followed the great international success of his wartime epic THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957). That movie ends, after nearly three hours of conflict, peril, courage, violent death and decidedly mixed motives, with a single summarizing word, spoken twice: the word is ‘madness.’

And if you were to watch all 16 of David Lean’s pictures, you might find that word echoing in your head even as you’re admiring their impeccable craftsmanship: the precise editing, the elegant compositions, the smooth camera movements, the unimpeachable performances. The madness in his method is what gives his work its quivering, almost alarming life.

Maybe the signature shot of Lean’s career is the long, long take of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) approaching across the sands in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962), an indistinct, heat-shimmery figure gradually coming into focus in the blinding desert sun. That spectacular shot is, in a way, this filmmaker’s career in miniature, progressing slowly, waveringly, from very small to very large, and demanding our attention at every stage. Lean, an Englishman to the marrow of his bones, was from the beginning an artist fascinated by both the small and the large, oscillating between his attraction to the one and his yearning for the other - between the domestic, you might say, and the imperial.

His first film, IN WHICH WE SERVE (1942), whose co-director was its writer and star, Noël Coward, is a strange blend of grand-scale naval battle scenes and flashbacks to the mundane lives of the British seamen and their families, both a stirring exercise in patriotic propaganda and an anthology of cozy sentimental vignettes. (The blood and sweat are in the battle sequences, the tears all in the kitchens and parlors.) It was an enormous success with the beleaguered British public, recognized as a pure form of the message that morale-boosting movies always deliver: Men will do extraordinary things to preserve their ordinary pleasures.

In 1944 and 1945, as the war wound down, Lean made three more films written by (or based on plays by) Coward: THIS HAPPY BREED, a portrait of an English middle-class family between the wars; BLITHE SPIRIT, a supernatural drawing-room comedy with an explosive performance by Margaret Rutherford as an awfully enthusiastic medium; and that heartbreaking tale of almost-adultery BRIEF ENCOUNTER, which was, until RIVER KWAI, probably Lean’s most celebrated movie.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER, whose scope is extremely narrow, is perhaps the closest this filmmaker ever came to perfection. The performances by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the repressed would-be lovers are exquisitely modulated; the narrative is tightly constructed (it is, at 86 minutes, Lean’s shortest picture); the black-and-white cinematography of Robert Krasker is eloquent, its crispness a neat reflection of the painfully sharp perception the lovers share in their fleeting afternoons together.

And then, having made this nearly flawless romantic artifact, Lean walked away from the tidy Englishness of Coward and turned his hand to a rather different, considerably messier, kind of expression of the national spirit: the crowded Victorian melodramas of Charles Dickens. Although Lean’s GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1946) and OLIVER TWIST (1948) are markedly less rambunctious than the novels, they are not so fastidious that they violate Dickens’s distinctive comic-gothic tone either. Lean is as careful as ever, but in these pictures (especially OLIVER TWIST) the care pays off in the increased density and vibrancy of the images, and - gratifyingly, a little surprisingly - a heightening of those big, unsubtle Dickensian emotions.

David Lean, who died in 1991 at 83, was himself a prisoner of the will to perfection. He clearly understood too well the impulse to make something beautiful and then to blow it up. His movies are infinitely richer for the conflict. It’s the best kind of madness.

FILM NOTES

BRIEF ENCOUNTER
1945       86 minutes
English Only.  No Vietnamese translation.

From Noel Coward’s play ‘Still Life’, Lean deftly explores the thrill, pain, and tenderness of an illicit romance in the dour, gray Britain of 1945. From a chance meeting on a train platform, a middle-aged married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) enter into a quietly passionate, ultimately doomed love affair, set to a swirling Rachmaninoff score. Over he years, few films have equaled the compassion and realism of BRIEF ENCOUNTER.

‘BRIEF ENCOUNTER remains a piece of cinema remembered with affection by almost everybody who has ever seen it.’
– Film critic Derek Malcom

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
1946      118 minutes
English with Vietnamese audio option

One of the great translations of literature into film, David Lean’s Great Expectations brings Charles Dickens’s masterpiece to robust onscreen life. Taking on this literary masterpiece as a cinematic task, Lean explores and exploits the emotional elements of the story, and makes it a sweeping visual journey as well.

Despite its age, Great Expectations has not lost any of its beauty, grandeur or poignancy. Rated number five on the British Film Institute’s list of all-time greatest British movies, it also earned numerous Academy Awards and nominations.

The opening of the film has been studied for years, as one of the greatest examples of art direction and dramatic film editing. It is also a brilliant synthesis of location shooting (the pan across the marshes) with a studio set (graves with a back-projected church and looming sky), in which the hero, Pip, has his first fateful meeting with the fearsome Magwitch.

The theme of social mobility which lies at the heart of the film, and it’s observations on the dignity of labor (blacksmith Joe Gargery), and its rejection of Victorian values  caught the mood of Britain at the time. One British critic thought the film showed ‘accidental Marxism.’

OLIVER TWIST
1948      116 minutes
English Only.  No Vietnamese translation.

David Lean’s second attempt to bring Dickens to the screen is no less detailed in terms of sheer cinematic craft than its predecessor, GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Expressionistic noir photography suffuses Lean’s OLIVER TWIST with a nightmarish quality, fitting its bleak, industrial setting. In Dickens’ classic tale, an orphan wends his way from cruel apprenticeship to den of thieves in search of a true home.

Alec Guinness as the quintessential Fagin balances a powerfully theatrical performance of looks and gestures with the pathos of his carefully pitched dialogue. He is almost alone in the cast in capturing the spirit of irony that began to be such a feature of Dickens’ work with the publication of Oliver Twist. This was an irony that was evidently lost on many overseas spectators: in the US the film was initially banned on the grounds of ‘anti-semitism’.

John Howard Davies is still perhaps the most memorable and affective Oliver yet seen on screen; the delicacy of his speech, and his muted, often awkward movements perfectly capture the sense of confinement that define the character. Robert Newton’s Bill Sikes is another highlight; the most relaxed performance Lean ever let slip through his directorial net.

The depiction of London is also a key factor in this film’s success. The stark lighting is somewhat softened by the sooty feel of London, and this makes for a perilous atmosphere whenever the story takes us onto the streets. It is the first of Lean’s films to attempt an epic scale with real confidence and assurance.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
1957     161 minutes
English only.  No Vietnamese translation.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI deals with the situation of British prisoners of war during World War II who are ordered by their Japanese captors to build a bridge to accommodate the Burma-Siam railway. Their instinct is to sabotage the bridge but, under the leadership of Colonel Nicholson, they are persuaded that the bridge should be constructed as a symbol of British morale, spirit and dignity in adverse circumstances. At first, the prisoners admire Nicholson when he bravely endures torture rather than compromise his principles for the benefit of the Japanese commandant Saito. He is an honorable but arrogant man, who is slowly revealed to be a deluded obsessive. Unknown to him, the Allies have sent a mission into the jungle, led by Warden and an American, Shears, to blow up the bridge.

From review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times:

Most war movies are either for or against their wars. THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI is one of the few that focuses not on larger rights and wrongs but on individuals. Like Robert Graves’ World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, it shows men grimly hanging onto military discipline and pride in their units as a way of clinging to sanity. By the end of KWAI we are less interested in who wins than in how individual characters will behave.

The film’s central relationship is between Saito and Nicholson, a professional soldier approaching his 28th anniversary of army service (“I don’t suppose I’ve been at home more than 10 months in all that time”). The Japanese colonel is not a military pro; he learned English while studying in London, he tells Nicholson, and likes corned beef and Scotch whisky. But he is a rigidly dutiful officer, and we see him weeping privately with humiliation because Nicholson is a better bridge builder; he prepares for hara-kiri if the bridge is not ready on time.

The scenes in the jungle are crisply told. We see the bridge being built, and we watch the standoff between the two colonels. Hayakawa and Guinness make a good match as they create two disciplined officers who never bend, but nevertheless quietly share the vision of completing the bridge.

That obsession is with building a better bridge, and finishing it on time. The story’s great irony is that once Nicholson successfully stands up to Saito, he immediately devotes himself to Saito’s project as if it is his own. He suggests a better site for the bridge, he offers blueprints and timetables, and he even enters Clipton’s hospital hut in search of more workers, and marches out at the head of a column of the sick and the lame. On the night before the first train crossing, he hammers into place a plaque boasting that the bridge was “designed and built by soldiers of the British army.”

It is Clipton who asks him, diffidently, if they might not be accused of aiding the enemy. Not at all, Guinness replies: War prisoners must work when ordered, and besides, they are setting an example of British efficiency. “One day the war will be over, and I hope the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built, and who built it.” A pleasant sentiment, but in the meantime the bridge will be used to advance the war against the Allies. Nicholson is so proud of the bridge that he essentially forgets about the war.

Although David Lean won his reputation and perhaps even his knighthood on the basis of the epic films he directed, starting with THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, there’s a contrarian argument that his best work was done before the Oscars started to pile up. Before KWAI, he made smaller, more tightly wound films, including BRIEF ENCOUNTER, GREAT EXPECTATIONS and OLIVER TWIST. There is a majesty in the later films  that compensates for the loss of human detail, but in KWAI he still has an eye for the personal touch, as in Saito’s private moments and Nicholson’s smug inspection of the finished bridge. There is something almost Lear-like in his final flash of sanity: ‘What have I done!’

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
1976         228 minutes, including 10-minute intermission
English with Vietnamese audio option.

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is usually regarded as director David Lean’s masterpiece and contains some of the most amazing photography ever captured on film. The plot involves the true story of T E Lawrence, a young English officer who led the Arabs to victory in their revolt against their Turkish imperial master during the First World War but who then after achieving so much fame and glory died in a motorbike accident that could have been suicide.

David Lean spent several years in Jordan and Morocco making the film and is said to have spent days waiting for the ‘perfect’ sunrise. However his perfectionism paid off and the shots are fantastic with wonderful pieces of editing. However LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is not just a sandy visual feast. The performances are also superb. The two young leads (Omar Sharif as Ali and Peter O’Toole as Lawrence himself) deserve the most credit. Neither actor had starred in an international film before LAWRENCE OF ARABIA but they proved themselves worthy of their casting and, of course, went on to have very successful careers. Through their subtle performances, O’Toole and Sharif make one of the most interesting aspects of the film the interaction of the two main characters. When Lawrence first meets Ali, the latter guns down a fellow Arab for drinking at a well belonging to Ali. Lawrence accuses Ali of being ’silly, barbarous and cruel’ and yet ultimately as the plot unfolds it is shown that it is Ali who is the more humane and rational of the two.

Although it is true that Lawrence was instrumental in enlisting the desert tribes on the British side in the 1914-17 campaign against the Turks, the movie suggests that he acted less out of patriotism than out of a need to reject conventional British society and identify with the wildness of the Arabs. As his mission takes off, Lawrence becomes caught up in his own glory that increasingly brings out his sadism and near insanity. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA exemplifies Lean’s amazing sense for beautiful shots, brilliant editing, and thrilling music, but is also a sensitive study of an enigmatic and tragic figure.

A quote from Chicago film critic Roger Ebert:

‘I’ve noticed that when people remember LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, they don’t talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words. Although it seems to be a traditional narrative film–like BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI which Lean made just before it, or DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, which he made just after–it actually has more in common with such essentially visual epics as Kubrick’s 2001 or Eisenstein’s ALEXANDER NEVSKY. It is spectacle and experience, and its ideas are about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it does not contain a complex story with a lot of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passages, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand.

You can view LAWRENCE OF ARABIA on television, but to get the true feeling of Lean’s masterpiece, you need to see it on a big screen. This experience is one of the things that must be done during the lifetime of every lover of film. It is a truly majestic piece of cinema.’

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
1965     210 minutes, including 10-minute intermission
English only.  No Vietnamese translation

After the blistering deserts of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, David Lean took on the harsh, snowy landscapes of Russia, its Revolution, and aftermath. Using virtually the same crew (even some of the same locations, with Spain doubling for Russia), LAWRENCE writer Robert Bolt adapted Boris Pasternak’s classic novel.

At the heart of the story is the love between Yuri and Lara. The inevitability of this is suggested early on when, still unknown to each other, Yuri brushes past Lara on a crowded tram and we cut to a shot of the tram’s electrical contact sparking on the power lines above. From there, we follow the relationship through the Revolution, marriages, wars, and other tragic events that constantly separate Yuri and Lara just when it seems as though they have found each other again.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is David Lean’s last great film and is sometimes unfairly criticised. Perhaps this is because it does not quite equal the quality of his previous works. The love story doesn’t illuminate ZHIVAGO’s vision of history the way, say, the psychological portrait of T.E. Lawrence in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA makes sense of the historical events that film records. In ZHIVAGO, history is presented not as a subject for curious inquiry, but as an implacable, impersonal force that keeps mucking up the private lives of the protagonists.

As the steely-eyed revolutionary leader Strelnikov, puts it, ‘The personal life is dead in Russia - history has killed it!’ By chronicling Zhivago’s love and his poetic art, ZHIVAGO the movie sets itself in opposition to Strelnikov; but in dividing the personal and the political into warring camps, it accepts his terms of argument.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA
1984     163 minutes
English only.  No Vietnamese translation.

Tensions between Indians and the colonial British come to a boil when Adela, a white female tourist, accuses young Indian Doctor Aziz of rape during a visit to caverns. What happened in those mystical caves touches off a mystery, and brings to light the shameful hypocrisy and racism prevalent in the ruling British class. A beautiful study of colonial relations and the nature of memory.

Adapted from the novel by E. M. Forster, A PASSAGE TO INDIA is a truly excellent piece of film-making proving that even in old age and after a fourteen year break, Lean could still deliver the goods. of course there are all the old Lean hallmarks: The photography is amazing with lots of wonderful vistas of spectacular scenery such as the Marabar caves sequence. The acting naturally involves the cream of British thespianity with superb performances by all except perhaps Alec Guinness who was somewhat miscast as Professor Godbole. Lean’s film also brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the Raj society - the contemptuous racism of colonial British who have no wish to comprehend the mysticism and wonders of the subcontinent and equally the brewing resentment of the Indians who are quite prepared to take Aziz as their champion, no questions asked, just because he seems to be an obvious victim of British rule. Lean also managed to infuse into his film with a great sense of continuity. A PASSAGE TO INDIA really flows with the mounting tension and Adela’s deepening neurotic crisis reflected in the weather and society around her.

A PASSAGE TO INDIA was nominated for eleven Academy Awards (including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay), scoring wins in the categories of Best Supporting Actress (Peggy Ashcroft) and Best Original Score (Maurice Jarre).

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE
Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 100,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE 22A Hai Ba Trung Street (at the end of the alley leading to Artist’s Hotel) RESERVATIONS: Tel: 936 2648 (14:00 - 20:00) Fax: 936 2649 Email: info2@hanoicinema.org CAFE CINEMATHEQUE from 17:00 weekdays and from 13:30 weekends.