Dionysos

"What kind of actresses do you prefer?" - "Beautiful girls with bourgeois manners, inaccessible to the working class and with the authenticity of a prostitute." This is not a confession of the director's casting preferences, but rather Bonello's description of all European art films produced by artistic "auteurs" since the 1960s. Those who carefully watch the end credits will come across Pasolini's quote: "History is the passion of sons who want to understand their fathers." Bonello's The Pornographer is a sprawling confession by Bonello about his own profession - but it is not pornography, it is the creation of authorial films - which undergoes a similar crisis: revolutionary character, social influence, youth and energy, along with the older generation of classics and the May 1968 movement, have long disappeared from artistic production, leaving only nostalgic, sad, and tiresome contemplation about the meaningfulness of one's own work, which probably no longer interests anyone. The involvement of Léaud is doubly fitting in this sense - the effort to understand his role from the perspective of his film son also means us understanding Léaud himself, who was 24 years old during the May events and played in films by Godard, Pasolini, Truffaut... /// Bonello's biggest problem lies in the form and once again, we are largely confronted with bloodless linear storytelling.

Probably murder, definitely escape. However, it wasn't a person who was killed, but a "parallel cut" that disrupts the idea of the connection of events and confuses the ability of the average viewer to connect unrelated things, like in a children's fairy tale: the director, like a child, replaces the conventional bourgeois continuity of meaningful cuts with the montage of two lines, each dancing its own solo; only the dancers' glances, from the whirl of their closed pirouettes, rhythmically flash onto the other soloist - and at that moment a new, freer meaning is born, one that does not rustle with paper inserted in advance by the screenwriter, but one that is born spontaneously during the dance-film from the viewer's perspective. Symbolically, Hanoun most often uses classical and baroque music in his tetralogy of four annual films - the beats of times when instead of two clearly defined pairs dancing in a close embrace, contradance took place, when, for example, individual dancers intertwined in various combinations in two randomly grouped opposite lines... In this film, no music is playing - a symbolic possibility of even greater detachment from the dictate of expressing logical meaning through editing... Otherwise, it may also be a nice film about fatherhood and a mother-in-law.

Films may be prostitutes, but fortunately, there are directors whose images and sounds cannot be exchanged for money - the French company Darty selling electronics wanted to hire Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville to shoot a promo product for them. Fortunately, not only in France is there awareness of the existentialist tradition, which opposes the capitalist exchange of goods and the enchantment of 'being-in-itself' of things with the 'being-for-itself' of human freedom, 'not being what it is,' freeing oneself from objectification and creating constantly new relationships between them, liberating oneself from the existence of consumerism to the existence of the individual, etc... On the other hand, "the Darty company is content and happy to simply resell almost all successful fundamental images: cold, heat, noise, cleanliness. And now they are material." Adversely, the task of the filmmaker is to find a way to defend against this tendency of solidification: "Voilà, the image, and its brother sound; and their mother and father - desire and unconsciousness are the only things in the world that cannot be negotiated. Except when we transform them into matter." How do we prevent this? Simply by never allowing the image and sound to merge with themselves, not acquiring a given meaning, not allowing themselves to be authoritatively explained, for "it is essential for the image to come from elsewhere. And this elsewhere is here, and nowhere else." / By the way - during the filming, the Darty company of course withdrew its support from the film, and to this day tries to obstruct its distribution through its share of the film rights.

A black-and-white film with the absence of any soundtrack that follows the relationship between a man and a woman and their relationship with their child. The film is mainly a logically inconsistent series of visual expressions consisting of a wordless exploration of interactions between these three beings. The main role (mostly) belongs to the child, which, in my opinion, does not primarily represent itself as the third equal and independent character, but rather as a metaphor, specifically a metaphor for their parents' (current) love and human relationship. The child thus becomes the "Revelator," which, through its factual presence on the screen, represents the otherwise ungraspable inner relationship between two people. What another film would have to "reveal" with words, another character reveals here - moreover, symbolically very fittingly chosen - because what could be a better litmus test for the relationship between a man and a woman than their only truly shared thing (which is not even a thing, but the most vulnerable human being)?

September, 2022, war, from west to east and from east to west, continuity of history, continuity of the film reel, which is born out of discontinuity, out of montage,...out of war, war of image against image, word against word, Slav against Slav. In a situation where on September 13, 2022, the reel of life of the "last utopian of the 20th century" was broken, as the obituary in Liberation put it, it is sad to note that the continuity of the world once again prevails over the utopian element of the freedom discontinuity - the war is being fought between two nation states, the vestige of the 19th century, and not for the reasons of Godard's main metaphorical idea of the film, namely that the West has been at war with Russia since the times of Napoleon and Hitler because it is a country where fiction is born as such and the West has stopped dreaming; in the same way, today's predominant film production revolves around decayed totems, whose Balzac and Hollywood foundations of linear continuity have ideologically rotted, still in the 19th century, while the Godardian modus operandi towards them appears as a pure disrupter of the unbridled flourishing of freedom. If Godard is cast here as Prince Myshkin, then he, who also died without offspring and without successors - leaving behind no school and no epigones because nobody was able to even unsuccessfully imitate his style - played the role of an idiot to the world, just as the character of a sad wise fool is played, whose work will perhaps be understood only by the future, which we ourselves will create, and better, anew, which we will not accept, but which we will find ourselves. Did Godard, therefore, die without true descendants? How will, as per his once expressed wish, the epitaph on his tombstone sound: "Au contraire." - On the contrary.

The film is a monument of its time. Cournot's unique (also in the sense that it is the only directorial work by the author) intellectual film style could be described by comparing it to other greats: it is a combination of Godard's discontinuous editing and parallel montage of the late 60s, surrealistic resemblances in the style of late Buñuel, and Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's games with repetition of scenes and time loops through flashforwards. But the film is not just a compilation of its inspirations because it is a distinctive, although sometimes a bit unfinished (especially the camera, which is forgivable for a debut) artistic work that is difficult to decipher due to its typically European art narration. It is worth mentioning the hiding of meanings and messages in the diegetic space and generally in the mise-en-scène, which complements the play of meanings and associations through non-diegetic editing, and so on. The content must also be combined with a second layer of meanings (consisting of political testimonies, general contemplation of the course of modern European society, and not least the significant play of formal procedures). Cournot presents us with a version of a dehumanized dystopian future, combining the worst of both worlds of the time, namely the pervasive ruthless capitalist relationships of the West in conjunction with the arbitrary authoritarian bureaucracy of the East, against the backdrop of which the struggle of marginalized individuals for simple human happiness takes place.

The film Law of Solitude. There’s always only one face in one shot. A person is alone in the film window, and the shot is alone in relation to all the other shots. Trying to find continuity between the shots would mean simultaneously tearing the characters from their solitude because the story already creates a connection between multiple shots, resulting in the interconnection of characters within a common time and space. This does not happen. Seberg has her frame, and Aumont has hers. Only Terzieff duplicates himself in the mirror. The only case when there are two faces on the screen at the same time is the perfection of illusion. Every viewer who would want to find a story in the film and thus defeat loneliness will find no clue in the film and no legitimate justification for their heroic act: they will be on their own.

"In medieval Europe, it was customary for households to choose their ‘King of Fools.’ The elected person was expected to preside over merriment for a short period of time, overturning or parodying social or economic hierarchy... When the short reign of the King of Fools ended, the usual order of things was restored: the King of Fools returned to his subordinate occupation, while the status of those superior to him was reinstated..." (J. Spence: "Mao Zedong"). This beautifully shows all the "civilization" that the white man brought with him as that famous "burden" - a civilization that evokes in people the need for the Middle Ages. A feeling of helplessness, which leads to only one path - illusory escape. And when Rouch says that the rituals of the cult in question are just a reflection of our civilization, everyone can deduce that it also means that the need for illusory escape from reality did not end with the Middle Ages...

A typical and unremarkable film from the genre of "boulevard anabasis," which was the sandbox for future giants in the early days of the French New Wave, where they experimented with creative techniques and learned the craft. Eustache - although in 1963 it was already quite outdated, it must be noted – also created a simple story about two friends wandering around Paris and chasing girls. Shortly before that, he assisted Rohmer on his The Bakery Girl of Monceau and borrowed from him that slightly moralizing and reproachful tone that characterizes this first completed film by Eustache, despite its overall light-hearted irony. It is all the more surprising that the director's subsequent film Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1967), for which Godard supposedly lent him the film material, is even simpler in this regard, and the main character, played by J. P. Léaud, is a typical adolescent character whose only purpose is to spend time in cafés and nostalgically humorously chase young Parisian girls for the viewer. It is really not much for 1967, although Eustache was able to occasionally demonstrate a greater sense for the camera in both of his first films compared to the aforementioned Rohmer.

Another in the series of Ukrainian films. Undoubtedly, due to the complicated national situation of the Ukrainian people and the contemporary political reality, they turn to the lyrical world of folk myths and fairy tales (not only Ukrainian ones - lovers of ideas about the East as a non-European, the almost Tatar space, should also watch this film). The film truly corresponds to the folk traditional wisdom about the eternal interaction and struggle between the world of nature and the world of humans, about the balance between them - which, when disrupted, is dearly paid for. It is about the cruelty of both, depicted, of course, in the poetically captured relationship between the forest nymph and the local inhabitant. It is simply the understanding that just as in nature death means new life, and in the human world, death can mean a purifying sacrifice for something better. The distinct camera work (the circling camera shots were probably not easy to film in the forest) is accompanied primarily by beautiful mise-en-scène, where Mavka and other characters blend with the surrounding scenery not only on a content level, but also thanks to the coordination of costumes, lighting, and the environment (in various seasons) on a visual level. The film is a total poetic fairy-tale work of art.