Dionysos

Multi-layered texture transferred to the film screen (although I doubt that the film has ever been screened in any public movie theater), a psychedelic kaleidoscope of the author's eye under the influence of LSD (Clémenti was accused of possessing LSD and cocaine in Italy in 1972, and although he was eventually acquitted due to lack of evidence /after 17 months!/, there can be no doubt about the impact on his filmography from that time). In this case, the form clearly triumphs over the hallucinogenic content (or rather, the content is clearly suppressed by the hallucinogenic form), merging, and shattering into an endless flow of changing colors and subconscious images - the slogan "the power of imagination" is fully fulfilled. In addition, due to problems with Italian prisons, the film was in production until 1975, and thus the influence of the hippie lifestyle is even more evident on this film than on Clémenti's The Revolution is Only a Beginning: Let's Continue Fighting, especially through the use of music, which guides the viewers throughout the film on a journey full of spontaneous waves of liberated imagination and the aesthetic current of consciousness.

The film debut of Edgar Reitz, a signatory of the Oberhausen Manifesto and a participant in New German Cinema, for which the director received an award for Best Debut at the Venice Film Festival. The film should be shown to those interested in the aforementioned German film movement, as it contains many of its themes (and the film is also a vivid example of the trends of the progressive European films of the 60s): primarily its focus on the problematic present through the story of a young couple gradually building a family, searching for employment, seeking (and not finding) meaning in family life, etc. This sociological shot is demonstrated through various documentary techniques (also similar to cinema-verité), interweaving the fictional story. This documentary detachment is also evident through the use of a "Kluge-esque" narrator, maintaining a distance between the characters and the audience. However, the film is mainly an artistic depiction of crises, emptiness, and unfulfillment in the gray reality of everyday life - it subtly uses other progressive techniques of the time, such as "Truffaut-style" captions in the image, decent intertitles, and appealing black and white cinematography.

Which of the countless levels of significance is the privileged one, in which the creator or viewer can find the key to understanding the film? For people raised on 19th-century bourgeois novels and 20th-century Hollywood films, the film reveals the terrifying (but rather liberating) secret that such a level does not exist. There is only an eternal movement from one instance to another, from one image to another, from one idea to another, without a chance of them merging, and without a chance of their logical chaining. Mutually irreconcilable images find resolution only in the viewer. Here, Godard - brilliantly even by his standards - dissolves the (admittedly fictional) boundaries between the author and his work, between the final product and the process of its creation. In one interview, Godard stated that the most important idea of the film is the idea of capturing the past, present, and future in the act of film montage: here again, we see the dissolved boundary described above. It is because this capture applies not only to cinematic technique but also to the content of the work (the medieval game, the present of Chernobyl, etc.) and its internal references (artworks of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare's era, contemporary personalities, etc.).

In a mining ghost town, the wild and indifferent son wanders around the dead body of his working-class father - a living spirit before death - symbolizing the fate of his class. The deceased father, who dreamed of trade unions during his life, becomes a powerless object in the game, confirming the helplessness of the unions in the face of their killers: we notice a mirrored reflection - a rich murderer controlling and killing the main character X, a mining company that has controlled and instigated these two rival unions from the beginning. If there has ever been a fusion of "subjective" existentialism and "objective" social realism in the history of film (which poor Sartre tried to achieve in philosophy in a slightly different form!), then it is here. Yet the film offers even more: a description of media manipulation or latent social and human conflicts, activated not by the random, but the contingent interplay of events - after all, latent hatred /the two union leaders/ or the inevitability of fate /the main protagonist, the woman from the shop/ are not purely random phenomena, but rather somehow just waiting for their activation. This brings us back to the fusion of the objective pole (the working and living conditions of the characters) and the subjective pole (the characters' reactions to events, their incomprehensibility to the participants, etc.). All of this is captured in a typical Japanese purist camera style.

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.

The Misery of British Cinema I. Everything here is as expected, the misery of British cinema, albeit in its probably best period, in an otherwise relatively decent film. Is this a contradiction? Not at all. It is just a manifestation of the reasons why true cinema has never emerged in the UK (and when it did, it had to be made by lone artists who could have been born anywhere else). Kitchen sink realism - angry young men, meaning literature and theater translated to the big screen. Look Back in Anger - but who is looking back in anger? Cinema as such - the British never learned to express themselves through film and they always resort to words - Richard Burton is not acting in a film by Tony Richardson, but in a drama by John Osborne. Even if kitchen sink does not always come directly from literature, when will we see a play with the film medium in it, the mediation of the story through form? As Greenaway (that lone artist, symptomatic of the UK...) reportedly said: it was just an illustrated text. They are high-quality texts, with respectable and beneficial social themes, standing out in a positive sense in the history of British cinema - and yet, in this film (speculatively), all the misery of British cinema is contained.

You can’t use the M16 submachine to masturbate, and even the red fascist Stalin is not particularly inclined toward sexual love (perhaps except for the release of ecstasy in an unconditional act of submission to the state and the party). Another way to look at it is that the paths to liberation through orgasm and free love are bumpy - in the West, you'll be destroyed by the prefabricated identity of advertising patterns, bourgeois prejudices, or an army killing in the name of peace; in the East, you'll be swept up by the bureaucratic state party, often leaning on no less bourgeois prejudices (in this regard, it's interesting how much Makavejev reproduces the traditional Yugoslav thesis of self-governing socialism in opposition to the ossified bureaucratic state capitalism of the Soviet Union, as Tito's socialism did since the rupture in 1948). The deliberately humorous but also (at least within the framework of the film) sincerely conceived belief in the victory of the sexual revolution and its positive consequences will have to pave its way both through federal American prisons and through the unwillingness of Vladimir Lenin. However, from the perspective of a 21st-century viewer, the bet that was made on playing this card seems odd: leaving aside the unsuccessful East, the West turned sex into something quite different from a means of emancipation, i.e., into one of its other commercial products, a means of spectacle through which the totality of the advertising-industrial complex prescribes correct behavioral and consumption patterns to its consumers. The individual and their orgasm thus cannot soar freely this time either. A film-documentary-essay-collage.

The zero level of film: its decomposition into prime factors - crushing its DNA down to basic bases. In other words: a return to the original foundations of every film experience, which is the interplay of light and shadow, sound and silence. This means that the prejudices and comfort cultivated by decades (and now more than centuries) of conventional bourgeois cinema are painfully disintegrating in the viewer, with unpleasant struggles that mean only one thing: a return to the degenerated sensibility of the viewer to the true roots of their perception. As they say - to bounce off the bottom, we must first finish the bottle - Kubelka has truly brought us down to the very foundation of film.

According to Lyotard, the collapse of the "grand narratives" of modernity was accompanied by mourning - the mourning of the "postmodern" people at the end of the century over the certainties that those grand unifying stories of emancipation, freedom, and progress offered them. Here we can see the collapse of one of these grand narratives twice over - not only the collapse of the story of freedom and equality, the socialist ideal and a better society, but also the collapse of the linearly narrated film story, of a film unified by a certain principle (whether it is the bourgeois Hollywood dream of the main characters' crucial role, whose motivations unify the plot, or another weakened form of unification, such as a certain message, the chronology of events, logical causality of the story, etc.). If we return to the aforementioned mourning, it is clearly evident that it returns to us twice over. Not only within Godard's message, the lamentation over Europe's betrayal of its ideals, its effort to change and become better, but again purely within the framework of the film and its form - after all, what else but this mourning can "connect" (since I cannot use the word unify...) the individual fragments, caesuras, and singular fragments that the film is composed of other than this sad yet liberating human and film mourning?

(If you do not appreciate or cannot handle European art, do not enter!) In the middle of the Californian desert, a group of three women, under the dominance of a despotic high priestess of the cult of human (female?) pain, decides to enter voluntary isolation, hermetically sealed off from the outside world, and men especially. We do not know whether they were led here by purely personal trauma or a human (woman's?) inexplicable obsession with addiction as Schroeter himself supposedly said. With the arrival of a sensitive outsider, the story eventually turns into a classical tragedy - and from it, it takes its character and form, or is complemented by it. Opera music, costumes, and some visual compositions are almost kitschy Baroque – what kind of juxtaposition did Schroeter intend with that? If we add purely film finesse, such as the long shots often taken in large units, we get an enigmatic affair filled with content and formal challenges for the viewer. There are several suggestions to ponder: is the desire to emancipate oneself from the (male?) world and surrender to pain, and torment in the form of a tyrannical ruler - notice that it is a woman - a warning that it is premature or unworthy because death or pain will come anyway (the desert will come to us anyway, so why seek refuge in it during life)? Is the film a pessimistic realization of the impossibility of escaping addiction, both in the past (the classics) and in the present (the demented song "Rum and Coca Cola"), whether by the masters of the world being men (the past) or its potential (female) future embodied in a reduced scale by the desert female community?