Título original: Man och kvinna
Director: Pál Fejös & Gunnar Skoglund
Año: 1939
País: Suecia
Guion: Pál Fejös & Gunnar Skoglund
Fotografía: Gustaf Boge
Intérpretes: Pó Chai, Mé Ying, Hugo Björne, Gerda Björne, Sol-Britt Agerup, Gunnar Höglund, Jean Claesson
Duración: 69 min.
Producción: Svensk Filmindustri (SF)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Argumento: Filmada en Tailandia, esta película combina documental con elementos narrativos, siguiendo a una joven pareja durante su primer año de matrimonio y las dificultades, incluso desastres, que se encuentran intentando sobrevivir mientras cultivan su arrozal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Datos Técnicos:
Publicada por MARCOS en Karagarga
Man och kvinna (1940).avi [1000.04 Mb]
Subtítulos en español creados por mí:
http://www.subdivx.com/X6XNDM4NDAz
Subtítulos en inglés:
Man och kvinna AKA A Handful of Rice.ENG translation.srt [34.9 Kb]
Preciosa mezcla entre documental y ficción, muy flahertyana pero también fejösiana, pues la pareja protagonista (maravillosa) es comparable a las de Sonnenstrahl o Lonesome. Lo peor es el prólogo filmado en Suecia, que no pega con el resto de la película, quizás filmado por el co-director sueco, que después fue enviado a Tailandia para ayudar a Fejös (que llevaba un tiempo allí) a rodar el film. A nuestro compañero MARCOS le parecía la obra maestra del director húngaro. Yo no diría tanto, prefiero antes Sonnenstrahl, Lonesome y sus filmes húngaros. Rodada en 1938, se estrenó oficiosamente en el Festival de Venecia de 1939, y oficialmente en Suecia, en enero de 1940. Años más tarde, la RKO la distribuyó en USA con el título de Jungle of Chang.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fejos was then approached by Nordisk Film in Denmark, which was eager to raise the prestige of Danish films abroad and thought that a director with Hollywood experience might help. He moved to Denmark in 1934 and made three films for the company, the best of them, and his favorite, being The Golden Smile (1935), in which a great actress discovers that she has carried her acting so fully into her life that she is no longer capable of being sincere. None of them were great critical or popular successes, however, and by now Fejos was beginning to tire of trying to please producers who rarely understood or accepted his vision. But Nordisk refused to release him from his contract. So, in what set off yet another abrupt change of career, he announced that he would make another film for them only if he could shoot it in Madagascar (which he had apparently selected at random on a wall map and thought might be interesting to visit). To his amazement, the studio agreed, and he produced there the first of several ethnographic studies that occupied him exclusively until 1941 and were eventually financed by the Swedish Film Institute. They were shot variously in Asia, Africa, and South America, and in them he shows the greatest respect and sympathy for the native peoples he is photographing and their ways of life, refusing to exploit or manipulate them in any way. The sole exception to his process of simply recording aspects of their daily life, ceremonies, and rituals was A Handful of Rice (1940), filmed in Thailand, which combined documentary and narrative elements, following a young couple through their first year of marriage and the difficulties, and even disasters, they encounter in trying to make a living, surviving through a precarious mixture of luck and often thankless endeavor (a theme familiar from Lonesome and Sonnenstrahl). The film was later released by RKO, under the title The Jungle of Chang, but, significantly, minus the prologue that shows a well-off couple in Sweden throwing away as waste the “handful of rice” that represents the hard year’s struggle of the couple to raise their crop—and, by omitting this, ignoring the central theme of Fejos’s best work: that everyone deserves the opportunity to succeed in life and be happy, and that it is an offense against human dignity to deny or thwart this.
[ Add all 2 links to your ed2k client ]