Dionysos

Theater within theater in film; film as a link between two dramas, one performed in front of the fourth wall and its sets, the other behind it; two in one, it’s not 1 + 1, but rather 2 + 1 = 3. The first half falls into the classical genre of "theater as an image of the world," where we primarily do not understand the world as theater, but theater as a world in miniature, and thus theatrum mundi folded within itself. It portrays the reality of the Odessa world brilliantly, just like in The Asthenic Syndrome or German's Khrustalyov, My Car!, we see the anarchic, farcical, darkly humorous, bitter, superficial, and profound reality of the bizarre Eastern European reality. The second half offers apparent discontinuity (it also has a different screenplay writer), where the plot is truly different, but at its core lies the continuity of the director (the director as a representative of the film connecting the two screenplays as representatives of the dramatic genre) and the artistic approach: through visible means, especially great cinematography, but mainly through the smooth connection of the two stories that carry the same message - after all, the second half is equally bizarre, absurd, full of burned-out or characters wandering in the meaninglessness of their lives. In short, the combination of two images of a people's society without finality in a film that therefore cannot have its own conventional plot.

The film is definitely not superficial in terms of content. However, it can be rightly argued that, compared to other films by the director from that time, it lacks a deeper second level in terms of form and work with mise-en-scène. Indeed, the choreographic elaboration of endless long shots, ranging from wide shots to character details depending on their internal and external movement, practically gives up completely in favor of simple long shots of naked bodies. It was (and still is) absolutely legitimate to liberate the female and male groin from the captivity of clothes and place them triumphantly and with the accompaniment of the sound of a band directly in the center of the movie screen – in this regard, it is highly entertaining to watch how the camera, where it would discreetly move away in conventional films, moves directly and gracefully in the opposite direction toward the target. This deliberate mockery of conventional camera work is probably the funniest aspect of the film. At first, the subject also appears simple, and although it is not ultimately profound, it is certainly not as light-hearted as it initially seems. Does the decadence of the protagonists only arise from their generational rebellion against a pedantic father, or does Jancsó primarily present us with an image of the necessary consequences of the behavior of the Austro-Hungarian political establishment, i.e., the necessary transition from binding meticulous bureaucracy to the radical denial engendered by IT, which ultimately led to a different destructive decadence – the massacres of the First World War?

An awakening and self-critical sobriety-generating film for a European viewer. It's not just about the content being self-reflective and clearly unfavorable for a European who daily walks around public buildings and bourgeois palaces from the turn of the century built on the bones of Africans and the severed hands of their children in the capitals of our cities. This could (and sometimes they truly do) also be proven by a white filmmaker. It is about the complete absence of any attempt at exculpation of white characters, about cowardly psychologization and individualization, through which European artists escape painful self-reflection simply by showing... how morally difficult it actually was for white people to kill or rob black people, that someone among the colonizers always tried to help them too (and let's not forget who built those railways!), that massacres (Amritsar, Sétif, Guelma et Kherrata, etc.) were a matter of unsystematic excess on the part of certain officials, and so on and so forth. No, from the perspective of an African filmmaker, we will not see any of this, completely legitimately and understandably - on the screen, we will only see what those white bastards, carrying the burden of civilization to Africa, actually did. That image is indeed "flat," but is accurate precisely because of it - the factuality of their actions cannot be concealed from the eyes of an African by anything that exceeds their actual external behavior.

To perceive the film as a "direct" reaction to Cassavetes' Husbands certainly bears fruit but categorizing Wives as "direct cinema" seems a bit distorting to me - however, the film uses a simple 16mm camera, the absence of non-diegetic music, and similar "artistic" techniques and figures, primarily capturing the speech and dialogues of the characters. But why should it be a direct documentary approach and not a method of a certain film realism and a question of (mere) aesthetic choice by the director, is not entirely clear to me: the fact is that the film is fictional, just like any other fictional film. This is not meant as an insult to the film because it works very well in achieving its goal regardless of scholastic formal classification. The disorientation of established gender roles and life goals is convincingly captured in the main protagonists' personal experiences and issues, as well as in the social environment in which they are forced to live. /// The dialogues were created with the contribution (and improvisation) of the actresses in the main roles.

The second part exploits the boundary between fiction and reality, but this time using different techniques: instead of sociological research and a documentary objective detachment from the protagonists, it emphasizes the personal aspect of the protagonist’s personality, which is also connected with the emphasis on a "more traditional" metafictional approach, thus subverting the uniqueness of the fictional character by showing its secondary nature in relation to the film's creator. Compared to the first part, the second part is more visceral, and moreover, it is also gloomier and bleaker (after all, it is melancholic blue compared to the cheerful yellow): the search for oneself from the perspective of the protagonist and her exploration of her place in contemporary society cannot be carefree because it concerns the establishment of identity in an uncertain world. Fortunately, it is uncertain - freedom, which is always open, proclaims its anxious share. Otherwise, the second part is in no way just a continuation of the first part, as it differs not only formally but also in terms of content, and in the second case in that the "events" of the second part often precede the events of the first part and in a way "anchor" it. However, that is a strong word because here too the viewer is confronted with the necessity of acknowledging the non-reconstructability of the difference between the fictional plot and the alienating splitting, which turns the main character into an actress or the director into an actor, intervening in the world of fiction and what is "real" (the one that controls fiction). The viewer thus gets used to the permeability of both instances, thanks to which reality also serves fiction in its artistic effect.

A feminist educational film, which shows the greatness and tragedy of Soviet cinema at that time. Without a doubt, there is nothing to criticize here in terms of the content of the deserving and progressive theme of the struggle of a wife-employee from the electrical plant for recognition of her right to work (by this I mean emancipation from the "natural" sphere of "women's" self-realization). The question of women's emancipation was raised in the USSR in the 1920s - thanks also to that abominable "totalitarian" always criminal ideology that ruled there at that time... - as a problem for an accelerated/"revolutionary" solution. We can also state that, compared to the West, there were often more discussions about such "feminist" issues in public discourse. So, wherein lies the tragedy? In the fact that the main protagonist’s struggle, during which she exposes both her husband and high-ranking people as advocates of surviving bourgeois sexist views, will soon become the norm for Stalinist purges and denunciations – yet now, they are of a political nature. /// The fact that Dzigan managed the formal aspects of the matter very well - his sense of composition of large units, also filmed in the studio, or dynamic editing (which, although not reaching the sophistication of the classics of the montage school, is nevertheless aesthetically impressive) - is also worth noting.

The film was shot in the 60s but not completed until 1984, which coincides with H. Frampton's death. The entire film takes place between two camera perspectives: that of A) J. Wieland and B) H. Frampton. These two are both the subject and the creators, the subject-substance of the film. Thanks to their mutual effort to film each other during their own filmmaking/cinematography work, an image of themselves and the image of the city of Ontario gradually emerged. This fact is characteristic: all the other film cameras in all other films progress in a similar manner, despite the absence of such an obvious splitting that I witness here. Each camera primarily records itself and only secondarily the world/what it wants to depict because it always destroys the world and shapes it according to its own nature (referring to both the technical aspect and the artistic intentions of the director and cameraman, etc.). A and B in Ontario is a material demonstration of this.

The perfect mastery of a not very commonly used cinematographic procedure - film combinatorics. Fassbinder completely deconstructed the film world into a series of individual elements: constantly recurring locations, within whose boundaries the precise behavior of the film characters unfolds. The film itself is created precisely by combining these elements - the regularity of sequences and expectations are deliberately built up in the first half to be restructured into a slightly different pattern with the arrival of an unknown element, a foreign migrant worker, and thus the very skeleton of the film process stands out. Given that the essence of the plot changes are not changes in the characters' personalities (except for one), but rather their relocation from one predefined location to another, i.e., again a form of combinatorics, although not in space (but let us not forget, as we have seen, that space defines the characters' actions, so it is an integral component of the story), but rather personal (especially the mutual cheating by the couples - their changes in partners substitute for the immutability and stereotyping of their lives).

A very "plot-driven" (and therefore more accessible to the majority of viewers) film by Godard. Formal techniques are not (unfortunately) utilized as an additional layer of meaning, but rather as a stylistic element - primarily the traditional disjunction of sound and image (an interesting aspect is the absence of classic intertitles). The contrast between the use of classical or classicist (beautiful/kitschy - according to each comrade's taste) beauty in Mozart's music and shots of the seaside, and the horrors of the Yugoslav war, is not as groundbreaking as one might expect. A similar, yet more interesting, juxtaposition can be seen on the content level, where several plot lines intertwine with reflections on the function of art. And art fails in the face of tanks and consumerist viewers, in the hands of the young and the old. Here, as is latent throughout the entire film, a certain painful nostalgia and pessimism are most strongly felt - the young die radically and bravely, but unnecessarily, unable to create anything truly new (in fact, they only reproduce de Musset and Camus), while the elderly director continues to create but cannot reach the superficial external world, which watches the new Terminator in theaters against the backdrop of artillery shells. I am not sure if it's just a correlation or a real causality, but the director's films, in which the aging, unsuccessful, and mocked director is played by Godard himself, playing himself through his own eyes, are better than this one, where he allowed himself to be replaced by an actor.

The film does not use any specific expressive means to communicate with the viewer in a privileged manner but instead addresses the viewer as a whole. If no single approach (the plot, the blurring of the boundaries between dream and reality in the main character, allegory of fascism through social institutions, etc.) can dominate the others, "only" the whole remains - the all-pervading atmosphere. The atmosphere of the film perfectly imitates a slowly decaying, vain, self-destructive, unnecessary fascist society on the brink of war. Just as the atmosphere gradually penetrates each cinematic shot, from the more "realistic" ones to the delirious ones, so too does the stagnant, putrid hospital water gradually seep out into the world - casinos, streets... The significance of the work lies in the fact that the viewer, often "not understanding" the specific events and necessarily being uncertain about the many symbols that Daneliuc places on the film screen, understands the same events thanks to the atmosphere they emit and through which they connect (and retroactively strengthen) with the film as a whole.