Dionysos

One year after the creation of this film, the famous philosopher and Marxist Louis Althusser published his most well-known essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in France - and it does not take a genius to guess that the main ideological apparatus of modern times appeared to him to be none other than the school. A space of constantly circulating and seemingly imperceptible relationships of discipline, dominance, internalization of external norms, the fabrication of standardized "individuals" in the likeness of writing courses on typewriters - that is, individuals with only one form of communication; in the likeness of fashion courses for girls - that is, with only one form of self-presentation; in the likeness of lectures on sex education - that is, with only one form of intimacy. It is also necessary to remind some of the politically naïve people among us who imagine ideology as a centralized process of deformation led by evil priests (18th century) or totalitarian Nazi-Communists (20th century), that ideology is common to all social formations and serves as a kind of coordinate system in the likeness of cultural patterns - it also serves as orientation in the world and the self-regulation of society, and thus it is spread throughout the fabric of society and necessarily acquired by those who propagate it. Wiseman perfectly shows us this in the final scene with the teacher, who is moved by a letter from a former student who voluntarily went to Vietnam to fight for the safety of a free world. In Wiseman's film, the school is depicted as a self-affirming ideological mechanism of Western (capitalist) society in the late 1960s.

Jissoji developed - this time (mostly) in color - many themes from his earlier film This Passing Life, primarily the themes of desire, religion, death, individual nihilism, the impossibility (?) of community, and human dependence. In the film, even more emphatically, the situation of alienation of the modern individual is depicted - after all, the opening scenes of the film depicting dependence on sexual gratification are simply evidence of the modern individual's attempt to fill their void or squeeze out the trauma of impossibility (?), the difficulty of a real relationship with others, through sex and erotic desire. It is precisely this that gives a person anchoring and certainty - and it is precisely their mirrored reflection in religion, where the essence of an orgasm is manifested - in the suspension of time, the body opens up to eternity: the climax of God or the orgasm of the body. Then there is also a beautifully suggested transition between the situation of the individual and their attempt to replace a dysfunctional ordinary human community with a new one, based precisely on a nihilistic and alienated understanding of sex and religion in the form of a sect. /// Jissoji's film is characterized by a very distinctive aesthetic aspect, and although I acknowledge a certain self-purposefulness in the expressive language, especially of the camera (but not the change between color and black and white), we must appreciate the sense of composition and inventiveness in the construction of film images.

Bertolucci's debut bears clear influences from Pasolini's work - after all, Bertolucci was an assistant director on Pasolini's Accattone (1961), and Pasolini also provided the source material for The Grim Reaper. The Grim Reaper therefore necessarily carries Pasolini’s distinctive interest in the characters of Roman outsiders, lumpenproletarians, youths, and poseurs. It is precisely these types of people who become the main protagonists and about whom the film primarily speaks - the subtly portrayed criminal background serves no purpose other than allowing us, as the focal point of the plot, to get to know several such human types and take a glimpse into their typically spent night (culminating in an atypical event). Although the individual fragments describing the specific tales of the protagonists are unified and related to the moment of the nocturnal murder, it is not, unlike works like Rashomon, primarily about reconstructing the truth of the event from various perspectives (the plot hardly attempts this at all), but rather "only" about exploring the lives of the Roman golden youth of the street through testimonies given to the police. In his debut, Bertolucci already adopted a magnificent camera, similar to that of the then-emerging Elio Petri, and it is precisely in the sequences where the focus is primarily on the use of camera and music - and not words - that the film is at its best.

A brilliantly multi-layered film, transforming throughout its entire duration. This is very rarely seen! 1) The documentary, objectifying introduction transitioning from an impersonal depiction of the situation to a raw story, serves the creator's engaged purpose perfectly - the moment when the viewer is forced to abandon the safety of the documentary (ergo impersonal) voice-over and become a viewer of fictional events perfectly duplicates the situation that Ōshima appeals to in the introduction - namely, "imagine if you were a witness to an execution..." 2) The story demonstrates a sense for the best of existential absurdity and Beckettian tragicomedy. But let us not be mistaken - even here, in this "personal" and fictional dimension/film passage, the societal motivation from the film's introduction is manifested. Observing the confused reactions of prison bureaucracy to an unpredictable event; its (own!) effort to fabricate an object with all its might to execute; showing that anyone is capable of a crime, that a guard can enjoy the crime more than the culprit, means a critique of reality. But above all, it is a classic existential Meursault-like situation, when the individual faces their own past and feels like a "stranger," something that can be better understood by others rather than themselves. 3) The final shift of the story into the plane of Japan's reconciliation with the problem of its racism, history, and imperialism divides the plot into an existential drama about personal guilt and the general theme of acceptance and atonement of society's guilt. This division is overcome by a synthesis made by the main protagonist through self-sacrifice, which is much more than an acknowledgment of own guilt - it is a symbol of taking away guilt from blinded fellow human beings, those who only realize their guilt through witnessing an absolute and radical act. Thus, the film returns to its engaging aspect, as the film viewer was also a witness to such an act...

The Misery of British Cinema II. Just like with other films of the "stream" of Kitchen Sink Realism/Free Cinema, we must not overlook their ambiguity (understood naturally from a historical perspective): they are quality films, no doubt, but rather "quality" than "films." In this film, it is possible to retrospectively observe the fate of British cinema - while in 1959 Breathless was created in France, Room at the Top was created in England. While the dialogues of Belmondo and Seberg appeared to some contemporary viewers as so thoughtless that they believed Godard invented them on the spot, the verbal exchanges of Harvey and Signoret and company are naturally deliberate, pointed, soaring... While in 1959, French audiences started learning to understand the story through editing, references to other films, and getting used to characters literally talking to the audience, understanding Seberg's mood rather than what she says by how she walks along the summer streets of Paris and turns her back to the camera, in the UK in 1959, people were still reliant on the dramatic-literary work of classical editing, "only" (although that is, of course, important) spiced up with new content (thus, a social critique of typical British life). At the time of the rise of new waves in cinema, the British fatefully lagged behind, and as a whole, today, they still cannot free themselves from the captivity of theater and literature.

A nearly ethnological excursion into the subculture of the London gallery, in Brecht's brilliant conception, but also setting a mirror to our entire culture. Pabst's sensitive ability to preserve typical alienation serves not only to satisfy artistic needs but is also a great complement to the ethnographic-cultural component of the film: after all, what is one of the characteristics typical for distinct cultures of the past? That the stories that its members tell and stage represent timeless truths of their lives, that names and situations merge on the side of both storytelling and the listeners. The listeners recognize themselves in the protagonists of the story, which they experience daily, and culture is maintained through this self-confirmation for the future. So, what do we observe? Through musical songs, we observe both Brecht's alienation effect and such a story at the same time. The story also transcends and shows itself as fictional, further reinforcing our insight into the culture of the London gallery! Through the brilliant finale, there is then a penetration of our overall culture by the criminal subculture. And what song will we sing about it?

This film must have been seen by Jean Baudrillard. It is a film about the simulacrum of military games, more realistic than real wars (which are no longer fought). First and foremost, it is a film about the impossibility of escaping the System, which saturates all reality with its effects, because reality itself has long been lost, and everything we experience as reality is just a script of the uncontrolled System, which produces this "reality" with its scenic models. The chance for conscious change does not exist - even that is included in the prediction, and its effect is channeled and fully utilized to strengthen the controlling circuits of the hyperreality-producing programs. This is because the existence of someone who questions the System and fights against is necessary for the System itself and for the appearance of its omnipotence - when we question someone's power, we acknowledge that they have this power, and from this unintended consequence, the System derives its legitimacy and true power. The possibility to challenge the System lies only in unconscious actions, in the true act of spontaneous humanity - this act can be killed, but it cannot be assimilated. It is a pessimistic film, and despite its radical statement not inclined towards contemporarily Maoism in its upswing (the People's Republic of China is put on an /abhorrent/ equal footing with all superpowers), its occasional excessive literalness can be seen as a negative aspect.

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.

Contemporary progressive formal techniques in the service of the classical art figure, and satire on current events serving equally well as a statement on the bacchanalia of political power itself. The brilliant combination of both ends of the chain connecting classicism with modernity and the present with eternity. This is best seen in the final few minutes: the narrator's poetry as the auditory background and the visual caesura of the image through frenetic editing, a long close-up of the governor's face drunk with power crystallizes. It is in this overly stylized, overly awkward, and exaggerated gesture that we can precisely perceive the effect of classical art. Its awe-inspiring bombast and unrealistic exaggeration of the image of Napoleon on the revolting Marengo at the top of the Alps, the statue of Teresa of Ávila in an ecstatic whirl of orgasm, and the light draperies carved from stone is presented to us by Rocha (another example is the footage of the shot poet clutching his weapon in an act of self-sacrifice). This represents the main currency of the film. The classical influences (see also the use of poetry) are also demonstrated in the political message that Rocha presents to the audience – here, the most classic genre, tragedy, is the tragedy of an exploited and humiliated people, who are left with either servility or a radical, bloody but great (we are again at the sentimentality of the classics) rebellion against "fate."

A revolutionary phantasm, a spontaneous outbreak of political and cinematic energy, an unattainable dream; it is unbelievable that it could ever come, and retrospectively unbelievable that it came at all. A film about May 68 filmed in May and June 1968 between France and Italy about everything impossible that May featured in the history of Western Europe. This film is a perfect depiction of everything impossible and chimerical, but again in this case, also beautiful. Just like in Visa de censure n°X that began in the same year, here too it is primarily about a wave of unbridled imagination, predetermined images, a whirl of colors, and constantly fading scenes, images, and dreams. Yet here we have something more under the influence of the turbulent events of those months - political slogans, and revolutionary challenges and demands. It is characteristic that they merge in the form of colored subtitles with the entire background on which they appear - in reality, these slogans were unfortunately mere fantasies, not in the background of the film, but rather in the minds of the May student revolutionaries. But what inspiring chimeras, what a beautiful film!