Dionysos

Formally, even with Jost's victorious reiteration of Euro-Atlantic liberalism at the turn of the 80s and 90s, there was a prevailing backward movement towards an even more classical narration than what we knew from films of previous decades: the experimental intellectual guerrilla warfare of American social relations with post-structuralist leftist discursive and socio-political critics gradually disappears and what remains is the best of the long-gone promise of reasonable, moderate, intelligent democratic liberalism that was also dreamed of in Czech fields and woods after the end of state socialist dictatorship, and that, as we later discovered, never existed. While watching the film, not only because of the shots of Vermeer and at one moment also of Rembrandt, I remembered Joseph Heller and his "Picture This" from 1988, in which Rembrandt looks down at humanity and its history from the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The film gives off the same feeling as that old good Jewish liberal Heller in all its grandeur: the sensitive irony towards the vanities of everyday life's afflictions and the focus on what is important, even though what is important may not even exist, and even if it did exist, we may never achieve it. And yet, there is no choice but to try. This sentiment is felt much more in this film than in Jost's Rembrandt Laughing from 1988 (Yes! That cannot be a coincidence.). For Jost, just like with Godard, his former inspiration, from whom, however, his work will fundamentally diverge from this moment on, there seems to have been, briefly, a predominance of the desire for something enduring after the disappointment of iconoclasm, something that hides behind the disillusionment of the world and the disillusionment of its effective criticism and transformation, which both authors hoped for but did not come true... Just like in Godard's The Detective (1985), perhaps the only way out of the confusion of life appears to be love, which is eternal.

Jordan Belson apparently regularly destroyed his previous works, which he retrospectively found inadequate during specific phases of his artistic development. At least until the late sixties, he also refused to screen many of his works. The gradual abstraction of the external world at the expense of the internally derived image penetrates the soul of the author. At the same time, the external world is not destroyed or closed off; in 1978, Belson stated, "The distinction between an external scene perceived in the usual way and the scene perceived with the inner eye is very slight to me." From the beginning, the author has been interested in Eastern religions, Buddhism, in which the unification of the internal and external worlds is to occur. American experimental art of the fifties and sixties is excellently depicted in its apparent contrasts in Belson: abstraction and structurality are not a sign of the displacement of the individual, but rather his higher self-realization in a newly perceived world that is abstracted to its most basic and most mysterious foundations through the camera, which resonates retrospectively with the observer and transforms them through this observation. It is only characteristic that it is necessary to proceed through destruction, which is a symptom of the fact that we can never be satisfied if we are seeking the higher foundations of anything: Belson destroys his older works, destroys the avant-garde with material representation, and remains with pure film enclosed in its mandala without reference to material reality.

Image, editing, and temporal loop as cinematographic means of the return of the repressed, suppressed not by the machinery of Hollywood, which would imply consciousness, but by Hollywood mimesis. In the film, Arnold's classic creative approach fittingly meets with the overwhelmingly psychoanalytic theme of the Oedipus complex. Arnold thus liberates the source material from his hidden and suppressed undercurrent, which would hardly find recognition in mass culture, here in the films produced by MGM. However, this also applies to all other films by Arnold explicitly not referring to this theme - moreover, in this film, we are flooded with subversive work with editing and repetition, which releases from the image what is not visible in the normal flow of film frames, but what is always contained in them as a repressed possibility that cannot be escaped without getting rid of the whole (or until we get rid of Martin Arnold).

A perfect nod and postmodern mockery of the film genre - this horror-giallo is a tribute to Argento and his essential overcoming: the film is above all clever and its formal aspect is refined to the edge of the best formal mastery, even leaning towards experimental pioneering. The entire de facto silent film is based on the creation of mental associations through visual shortcuts, establishing "short connections" between (contrasting images for the majority of people, not so much for giallo fans...) otherwise contrasting images - death, pleasure, young bodies in the throes of sexuality, wrinkled corpses; (genius!!!) the coquetry of naked skin with synthetic rubber and metal. In short: a constant reversibility of life and death, morbidity and pleasure, achieved through the frenzy of the camera and editing, fetishistic details (substituting for the viewer's touch), and the actual absence of words and a "plot," which forces us to rely on our most lascivious senses sight and touch. This is further proof that films can be told primarily through images! Another question is the reversibility of the victim and the killer, and above all the killer and the viewer, giving birth to perverse film pleasure.

This post is primarily written as a reminder that it was in the comment to this film by Nicholas Ray where Godard wrote the famous and still endlessly quoted sentence in Cahiers du cinéma in January 1958: "We have already seen theater (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), and music (Renoir). However, there is also film, and Nicholas Ray is film." In addition, for example: "... because Bitter Victory is not a reflection of life, but life itself created through the medium of film... (...) It's not a film, it's something better than a film." (sic!) Well, even a master carpenter cuts himself sometimes, and in this case, in my opinion, the author of these sentences must have cut off his entire hand, because what I saw were hardly believable performances (on which the film stands) in the midst of a screenplay that was not at all convincing. The film is saved by the desert locations, which give some scenes impact when the filmmakers themselves failed to do so before.

The experimental and highly atmospheric film by the acclaimed nonconformist filmmaker G. Bódy creates a sense of endings, futility, and transitions (both in life and history) in which time momentarily slows down. Hungarian soldiers fighting for the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 and in subsequent decades of European national liberation conflicts eventually find themselves in the American Civil War, which itself is nearing its end. Europe and the world have partly fulfilled old ideals, and therefore they can be completely forgotten. Yesterday's outlaws and warriors can return home under amnesty; today it doesn't matter to anyone. The raison d'être of the main characters slowly fades away, and the twilight of wartime turns bullets into the buzzing of bees on a peaceful spring meadow, bees that no longer sting but will soon perish themselves. The characters flow into new directions, forced to choose in timelessness - emigrating back home, starting a new life in a new world as a railway engineer? Bódy divides the image using various masks, excelling in the use of the deliberate cross motif, symbolizing both the gaze of rifles under which the characters' lives unfolded and their possible future as professional surveyors - the work of railway engineers in peacetime, like death after the end of all wars. To appreciate this formal approach, I recommend watching the author's experimental structuralist exploration Four Bagatelles from the same period, which adds a new dimension to both this motif and the film.

What if the seriality of consumer culture became a film image? What if the victim/subject of this image became the one who, as one of the first, was able to capture the fact of mass reproducibility of modern artistic production in its images? Just as Warhol captured the very possibility of serial reproducibility of any object of mass industrial culture, from soup to an art representative, Macumoto imprisoned the pop art Nestor in the horror of his own reproducibility in the multitude of his identical copies. The film image is divided into a mosaic of individual fields, which mask the lack of quality with their quantity, and mask the steps of their own significance with cosmetic differences - how could the sound track gain meaningfulness in Macumoto's film afterward? Andy Warhol becomes a sad Mr. Campbell, trapped in the can of his own creative process.

In December 1968, Garrel completed this film about the young Anna/Anémone, who tries to free herself from her family environment and step into adulthood with her newly found love. In the same year, not only did the French youth attempt the same, but on a larger scale... Can Anémone escape from the clutches of her loving and tolerant father, only until the moment his daughter starts living her own life? /// This is early and somewhat more civil Garrel, and Anémone's main attraction lies in its ending (erasing the difference between private and public, the collision of the state/repression and freedom/ love, reminiscent of the director's debut feature Marie for Memory, filmed the year before. The decent meta-fiction elements are pleasing. /// French actress Anémone (born Anne Bourguignon) chose her pseudonym precisely based on the main role she played in this film.

Another one of the fundamental films of Brazilian cinema marginal from the late 60s and early 70s, overflowing with irony, dark humor, rawness, and uncompromising form and content, all against the backdrop of a brutal story about two heartless criminals fleeing across Brazil. Here, just like in the no less fundamental film of this rebellious "movement" - Sganzerla's The Red Light Bandit - we can only rejoice at the combination of the degraded crime genre with a serious (which does not exclude irony and disregard for good morals and conventional expectations, quite the opposite!) statement about the era and society. After all, the total nihilism of the heartless characters (let's not be deceived by visions of an angel - they only signify that heaven is already here on earth, unfortunately) merely doubles the nihilism of the real world. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is once again the formal side, which perfectly fits the label with ease and originality, characteristic of a young creator: the unpredictable uncompromising nature of impulsive characters corresponds to the surprise of the form, sometimes breaking down the wall between the real world and gangsters, sometimes reveling in the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the film camera (which again precisely corresponds to the labeled - the purposeless pleasure of breaking the law alongside the joy of purposelessly long shots).

Directors Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli made a film set in the Roman counterculture of the 1970s (so it is not about the everyday life of the middle class). The underground content - discussions with friends about politics, open sexual relationships, clashes with the police, demonstrations, and life in a semi-legal state, on the streets - intertwines with an equally independent underground form that blurs the line between fiction and reality. The central plot, revolving around a segment of the life of a sixteen-year-old (approximately) prostitute picked up from the street by an altruistic forty-year-old, is set within an overall framework that at times resembles not only Cinema vérité, but also the "revolutionary" European cinema à la the Dziga Vertov group, meaning the breaking down of the wall between the actor and the character, the film crew and the world being filmed, the application of collective decision-making, etc. The viewer, in fact, almost never knows whether they are watching a staged, improvised, spontaneous/"documentary" scene, whether they are following the character or the actor who is already "playing" themselves and dealing with their own personal matters with another "character." In this aspect, as well as in its focus on the character of the modern young woman, the film resembles (a much more independent hippie) a version of I Am Curious (Yellow), and I Am Curious (Blue) by Vilgot Sjöman.