Purple Television
Alejandro González Iñárritu TV Takeover
Fondazione Prada presents the “Flesh, Mind and Spirit” film festival, a selection of 15 films chosen by Academy Award-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revernant, and Babel) in collaboration with Elvis Mitchell. To commemorate the exclusive festival, Purple TV presents a look at 6 of Iñárritu’s chosen videos with a short text by the director as to why they were selected.
“Despite this extremely eclectic selection, there is a common factor: they are all experiences full of emotion,” said Inarritu of the curation.“All these films provoked in me appetites that I never knew I had. Great art comes when you feel a hunger that you never experienced, and as a result, there are films that satisfy certain parts of your being. There are those movies that spoke to my spirit in a gentle and luminous way. The ones that feed the flesh; films made with the pelvis, the lever… they grab your throat in a sensual and sensorial bombardment. And then there are those movies that just blew my mind. They’re really like the undiscovered country, these films—there’s so much in them that I had never seen before.” The free screenings will take place, every day except Tuesdays, between now and February 1st 2016.
[January 13 2016] : love
Flesh, Mind and Spirit TV Takeover curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu – La Ciénaga by Lucrecia Martel
Lucrecia Martel wrote and directed the 2001 domestic drama about a pair of middle class Argentinean families in crisis that brings to mind the subtle command of Ingmar Bergman—in which the self-absorption of adults slowly and insidiously brings about the ruin of all around them. An unattended, fetid swimming pool works as image and metaphor. “It’s a big, yet subtle examination of the Latin upper middle class. She creates tension through observation. Observation, not description. Everything through the point of view of a girl who offers to us the beauty of a decadent, dysfunctional family. The control of the tempo and breathing through the eye is a sublime achievement.”
La Ciénaga by Lucrecia Martel will be... Read More
[January 13 2016] : love
Flesh, Mind and Spirit TV Takeover curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu – Fists in the Pocket by Marco Bellocchio
Pauline Kael of the New Yorker described 1965 Marco Bellocchio’s first film as, “one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies.” The deadpan precision of Fists in the Pocket—a teenager plans the murders of his entire family—functions as social satire and displays the pitch-perfect control that signaled Bellocchio’s style and was a break from the melodramatic melancholy of Neorealism. “It was like nothing else that came before it. It’s a dysfunctional family show in a grammar that he invented, and it affected me physically,” marvels Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Fists in the Pocket by Marco Bellocchio will be screened at the Fondazione Prada on Saturday 16th January at 9pm.
[January 13 2016] : love
Flesh, Mind and Spirit TV Takeover curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu – I Am Cuba by Mikhail Kalatozov
I Am Cuba is director Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 meditation on the need for revolution, told through the hunger for freedom from repression created by the citizens of Cuba living under the thoughtless rule of Battista. It may be one of the most visually seductive films of all time, and a tribute to the power of art. “It’s an amazing formal and intellectual exercise,” Alejandro González Iñárritu offers. “It’s just hard to simply surrender to propaganda—for that to happen, it has to be so impregnated with poetry that then it becomes something else and it crosses over into masterpiece, which the film does. After the first shot, you are on the floor by knockout.”
I Am Cuba by Mikhail Kalatozov... Read More
[January 13 2016] : love
Flesh, Mind and Spirit TV Takeover curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu – You, the Living by Roy Andersson
Writer and director Roy Andersson combines understatement to create comedy with an off-key emotional pitch, and a visual clarity that suggests Matisse. His 2007 film is a series of vignettes that play like absurdist melodrama, comedy with an inner life and a stark, simple staging. Though the film is a group of episodes, You, the Living, builds to a satisfying climax. “I love this film. They make me laugh, and think. But they are also art,” Alejandro González Iñárritu says.
You, the Living by Roy Andersson will be screened at the Fondazione Prada on Sunday 17th January at 6:30pm.
[January 13 2016] : love
Flesh, Mind and Spirit TV Takeover curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu – Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett
The debut film by writer / director Charles Burnett, set in Los Angeles, about a man determined to keep his family and soul intact while putting in long, debilitating hours at slaughterhouse, brings the unadorned fervor of Neorealism to the African- American community. Made in 1977, it was only released theatrically in 2007.
Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett will be screened at the Fondazione Prada on Sunday 17th January at 6:30pm.
[January 13 2016] : love
Flesh, Mind and Spirit TV Takeover curated by Alejandro González Iñárritu – The Good, The Bad, The Weird by Jiwoon Kim
The Good, the Bad, the Weird: Director Jiwoon Kim’s 2008 action masterpiece, combining his own gift for kinetic set pieces with the wide–screen ferocity of Sergio Leone and the man-to-man emotional competition of John Huston to 1930s Manchuria, as three Korean criminals race the Japanese Army and a band of Chinese thieves for a cache of gold.
The Good, The Bad, The Weird by Jiwoon Kim will be screened at the Fondazione Prada on Monday 18th January at 6:30pm.
