Dionysos

Impressions of the world, or rather the awakening world of youth, protest, liberated sexuality, rock music, and drugs of the late 60s. Matsumoto mocks the established idea of visual perception of the world with the film’s name and subsequent contradictory processing - two healthy eyes can see an object from two different perspectives, but in the end, the brain merges them into a single image. On the other hand, when one eye is broken and non-functional, we only see the object from one perspective, followed by a change of place and a new single perspective. So, what does Matsumoto have to say about it? We see the film as if it were divided by the view of two eyes, but in fact, it is two one-eyed perspectives placed side by side. While in a healthy view, the synthesis of two points of view is automatically carried out in the brain, the synthesis of a number of separate points of view must be carried out by the viewer through his or her activity, whether rationally or emotionally conceived. It depends on the viewer and what kind of synthesis/single image he/she creates on the retina in the end.

Hollywood in Rome or Romance from the Main Train Station. She is a housewife, but still: in 1953, an American housewife could float in the middle of the station hall like a princess (apparently, all American women in Italy at the time were like Audrey), simply because she was from a country that then constituted 60% of the world's GDP. She can give Italian children chocolate like G.I. Joe did in '45. Strange, just a year earlier, Sica's film about a starving pensioner premiered, and in 1956 a film called The Roof premiered, and wasn't this terrifying contrast worth exploring for De Sica/Zavattini? Perhaps because David O. Selznick and Truman Capote assured them. Yes, that Capote, who did the dialogue for this film. And what dialogues they are - they always have wistful music playing when they are heartbreaking and uplifting music plays when there is hope... basically, the film itself shows that their clichés, dullness, and predictability alone cannot produce an impact. But it may be unfair to criticize this fact because in the 50s that's just how things were mostly done. This is a film that today can only serve as an object of interest for cultural studies, film scholars, and film and non-film historians, particularly as a demonstration of the fact that Hollywood can transport itself anywhere on the planet, yesterday and today, and create a vacuum that negates the entire real world and the specific culture around it.

A film from the category of left-wing cinema and the political (or at least in their political dreams) guerrilla, radicalism in content and form. Considering the duration, Kramer skillfully merged two different approaches into one film: 1) enlightening-propagandistic sequences of political views and social analysis, serving the film's actors (and also the film's creators) to express their political theses, and 2) a fictional narrative line depicting the story of an illegal conspiracy network and its protagonists, thus humanizing and dramatizing the film with a more personal plot. While the second component of the film - conceived conventionally and linearly - takes up more screen time, the first component is more interesting, in which Kramer demonstrates his experimental skills. It is somewhat appropriate that he avoids excessive formal obscurity and instead chooses a language that is experimental yet understandable, analytically and semantically comprehensible, and often humorous or ironic. This shows that Kramer and other filmmakers conceived this film as a kind of political weapon, which was meant to be part of a broader socio-critical and radical political movement that emerged in the West in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Local intellectuals and historians, of course, in 80% of cases, do not comment on the film, but rather express their opinions on the nature of regimes and states, totalitarianism, etc. I did not want to, but I have to ask three questions to everyone who thinks that the USSR and Nazi Germany were the same: 1) How is it possible that a totalitarian regime could perfectly capture the essence of Nazi dictatorship when it would be exposing itself? In that case, the USSR would destabilize itself in front of the eyes of its citizens = viewers, which would put it in a peculiar contradiction, because as a proper totalitarian regime, it should eliminate any signs of its own degradation, imperfection, etc. and eliminate its critics, who would essentially become M. Romm. And not to make that movie at Mosfilm! /// 2) Related to the first question: When I criticize another person for their bad behavior and behave the same way myself, I cannot accurately and insightfully uncover the reasons for the badness of their behavior from a psychological or any other perspective. In other words, how is it possible that the USSR accurately described Nazism when it was to have behaved the same way and the true causes of its own behavior should have been hidden from it, as objective assessment is only capable of by a non-totalitarian consciousness? /// 3) This film is precisely an example that the USSR was capable of self-reflection: after all, criticism of Stalin's cult could not be avoided due to the description of Mussolini/Hitler, and yet it is captured very suggestively in the film, even though it must have been clear that every Russian would recognize it just 12 years after Stalin's death! How is it then possible that totalitarianism changes and criticizes itself when it is supposed to be all-powerful and unchanging, as it is, after all, totalitarian and controls everything and everyone and therefore has no reason to change?

Truly loneliness and isolation, but this time on a higher level: as if the transition from the jungle to the city not only meant a change of scenery but also a transition from one structure of the human self to another - the unconscious and the fantastic. It is as if the phantasm, embodied by Vargas as the main hero on the silver screen, only doubled Vargas' despairing isolation as a real person, instead of serving the human subject in a better light (as a proper psychoanalytic phantasm). No, Vargas is both in the world of illusory film and in the real world, all alone, sentenced to become a literal wandering "specter" (a literal "phantasm") alongside the other characters of the film ("Los Muertos" and "Phantom"). A crushing view of humanity, which cannot escape reality even in its dreams and films, from which it seeks to escape through them. The comparison to Hotel Monterey is fitting (hallways, elevators) and we can also appreciate the overall change of location - after all, the cold lines of lifeless architecture correspond better to the fate of the human characters (and make them precisely "human" indecent) than the vibrant green of the rainforest.

The significance of this work cannot be overestimated - it is the symbolic beginning of the so-called direct cinema approach enabled by advancements in film technology (light cameras, improved options for synchronizing and recording sound on location), and it still influences the concept of documentary filmmaking today. In conjunction with cinema-vérité (which, however, direct cinema should not be completely mistaken for, as anyone who has seen representatives from both movements knows), it brought about a revolutionary change in capturing reality that did not end in the 1960s but must still be fought for again and again. Therefore, even Primary is not just a piece of history today. The utopian and inspiring core of direct cinema lies in the following: the attempt to dissolve the camera and the documentarian in the observed object through pure observation; capturing a pure and unrestricted presentation of individuals/society externally; capturing unfolding reality through transparent observation, but doing so gently, like catching a butterfly, without any external interventions that disrupt the smooth flow of unreflected reality. The author of the documentary only appears on the scene in the editing process - the camera and editing as the creators of the film. Handshakes, fake smiles, endless car rides, rows of people waiting for rehearsed jokes - these are the truths of politics that only direct cinema was able to discover.

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.