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International Cinema at BYU today is a program that brings together films from around the
world from a variety of world languages and world cultures, many of which we teach here
at BYU and many of which we don't teach at BYU, with the hope that it will attract students
and staff, faculty, and community friends to join with us in watching these movies and
enriching our knowledge of culture. My favorite film, I have a couple, but I would have to
say Death in Venice by Italian director Luchino Visconti. I absolutely wept all the way through
it. I was so moved by this man who knows his own life is about over, and he follows this
boy who seems like just the perfect example of promise. I mean, he's like twelve or something,
and he's just on the verge of becoming an adult. He represented youth, beauty, purity,
innocence. It is and probably always will be my favorite fillm because it was the most
heart-breaking and moving and upsetting to me and changed my life really, as far as looking
at other people and what is going on inside them. The Color of Paradise is essentially
the story of a young, blind boy, and this young boy struggles to know whether or not
God loves him, whether or not God knows him, and how those struggles play out in the context
of his family and his culture. This film is made by an Iranian director, who was trained
in France. He was raised in a film making tradition that has a long history of relying
on the visuals and on the sound to communicate the meaning of the film. So here's a film
that is rich in visual symbolism. Here's a film where the mis en scene, the visual composition
of the various elements that the viewer sees on the screen have something to say about
the meaning of the film. The tension between sound on the one hand and the things that
someone who is gifted with sight can see the visions that this young boy can't see. These
are the kinds of elements that are explored artistically and very subtly and beautifully
in this film. The film I've selected is Kagemusha. It's a story about a warring clan in Japan's
Warring States period. It involves a leader and a thief. The thief serves as a double
for the leader until the leader dies, and then the thief is elevated to become the leader's
replacement for as long as they can possibly maintain the ruse. I think as a work of art,
it's a classic of world cinema. It's done by one of the best film makers of the twentieth
century. He was highly influential. Kurosawa originally was a painter, and then he became
a film director, and in making his films, you see painterly attention to detail in the
visuals everywhere, but he also was a great storyteller. You see that in this film in
some of the ways he's told the story. Carl Dreyer's Ordet is my favorite film. Ordet
means the word, and in the film there's reference to the word as that which can bring what is
dead to life again. The film was about a grandfather on this beautiful farm in Denmark, who has
three sons with problems of different types. He is trying to pull his family together.
Today it's so easy to make films, and it's inexpensive, and people do it in standard
ways that it's often done. Dreyer is doing it in classic ways that needs to be done in
order to tell the story effectively. You've got a powerful where we're tracking people
and seeing what it is that they are going through and what they're grappling with and
seeing how they develop. We watch the development of these characters and they're concerned
about big issues, religious issues, religion in our lives, the way that we treat each other
out of our religious concerns. So, we're tracking all of that, and then using the lighting and
the production design and the blocking and the everything and the music, to bring out
all those elements. That's what he was doing. That's why he is considered a consummate artist
and craftsman. Il Postino is a film that takes place in a small fishing village in Italy.
It has to do with a young man named Mario Rupelo, who has no real talents. One day he
receives the assignment to deliver mail to a new visitor. It turns out that that visitor
is the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Pablo Neruda starts teaching him about poetry, and
he gains the courage to write poems for a beautiful young woman who also lives on the
island. He's trying to win her heart. It deals with the power of poetry because Mario Rupelo
before he meets Pablo Neruda is a man of few words. he's so shy he can't express himself.
He starts writing poems, and he starts reading poetry, and he starts seeing the world with
new eyes. I really recommend this film because it has a beautiful theme of love and friendship.
One of my favorite films is Babette's Feast, a Danish film directed by Gabriel Axel. The
story takes place in Jutland, and island off Denmark. It involves two sisters who are the
daughters of a pastor who began his own sect. They've given their whole lives over to sacrifice
and to their faith, even to the point of taking in a refugee named Babette from France, who
in her gratitude after many years, offers to give them a wonderful banquet and in the
process of doing that, it becomes a kind of revelatory, almost sacramental experience
for everybody there and is a comment on the sacrifice and the blessings if you will of
art. So we see with the food the transformation that goes on in these characters. One of my
favorite films of all titled Koyaanisqatsi. Koyaanisqatsi means a world out of balance
in Hopi. It's a film that sort of tracks sort of modern life and modern environments. It's
pretty interesting. There is a moment that I really love in the film. It's right at the
very end, and the camera tracks a satellite, a rocket that explodes, and a satellite that
falls. And it seems to fall forever. It falls and falls and falls, and there's this really
great music that accompanies it. I don't know how to explain the moment except that the
visual and the music absolutely add up to something, and that's really what a good film
is all about. You walk out from a good film or you finish a good novel and you can never
see the world the same way afterwards. One of my favorite films is Ang Lee's 1994 film
Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. This is a film about a family and about a family and his three
daughters. A series of Sunday night dinnners a family tradition occurs, where the father
and his daughters gather together for a large meal, and the father's this professional chef,
so that makes the dinners all the more interesting. The film showcases these preparations the
father goes to to make the dinners, and it's such a vital part of Chines culture--food,
and food as a means of communication, of reinforcing relationships, of showing affection, concern
for people. It's such an important part of Chinese life that a film that showcases that
really gets at one of the important core values, features of Chinese society. The irony in
the film is the father loses his sense of taste, so the film shows all these elaborate
preparations he prepares for these dishes, but sometimes he gets them a little bit off.
A good Chinese dish or a good Chinese meal balances dishes that are sweet and salty and
savory and bitter and sour. The film really captures a lot of the emotions, a whole spectrum
of emotions. Plus, any film that could work in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the Chinese
context, you know, has to be good, right?