Dionysos

I have long noticed that my comments repeat a few of the same thoughts year after year. My "reviews," as FilmBooster euphemistically calls these creations of mine, describe the orbits of predictably recurring ideas. Their cyclically closed ellipses circle around the radiant Star, never touching it, but as if with the first repetition they might finally succeed, although, like a cockroach in the shadow of a burning building, I have known from the beginning that they never will. And once again, I will escape from failure into the safety of the darkness of another basement, where I will look up at the next revolution. Chazelle built his cinephile monument on the transition from a revolution in the modern sense to the revolution of the classical origin of this word, which means to return, to rotate around in a circle. It is his Stars of the Silver Screen. His Film not only returns backward in terms of costumes but allows the cinematic idea of itself to cycle - the Idea of the material return of the same as the essence of the film, which is constantly changing and, like a modern revolution, seemingly devours its children. But in reality, it only repeats eternal sameness, giving these seemingly dead children the ability to survive forever through the idea of the essence of film itself. Like a cockroach, the moviegoer always gets what he wants because, even unconsciously, he knows what to expect. A perfect ideological self-deception, which Hollywood has an obsessive tendency to project onto everything, everyone, everywhere... - recently, increasingly into the past (anachronistic rewriting of history according to current politically correct measures, and more), but it is not afraid of a utopian future either, as seen recently in the over three-hour "opus" Avatar 2, where a captivating race of beautiful pseudo-people fulfills a story about the Christian duty of a nuclear bourgeois family connected with a new-age climate greenwashing fantasy of merging with unspoiled nature, delivered to us by a complete CGI oversaturated creation worth millions. Fortunately, in the second half, Chazelle showed the other side of the Film planet, which Hollywood often neglects when creating its perfect products. However, his supposed cinephilic epiphany only reproduces with its entire being the conventional linear plot of love story-desire-collision-crisis-catharsis, etc., which is presented to us as the essence of the cinematic Idea.

The New World has aged, and it no longer surprises us. Kafka's “Amerika” knew that the fulfillment of the promise of classical modernity by embodying it in the United States only meant the birth of a "characterless" New Man, whose Disconnection with oneself and others accelerates movement in contrast to European apparent anchoring in the continuity of place. For example, when one of the authors of the “New Novel” also publishes his "study on the representation of the United States" in 1962, he calls it Mobile: Rossi thus joins the array of Europeans for whom the American way of life will equate to the depersonalization of broken human relationships, which, however, cannot help but sound like a traditional stating the alienation of the universal: the engine of modern life runs on idle. Traveling, conversations, good and sociological society, low and nocturnal, run in vain in the metaphor of a party of futility, whose representation has become a contemporary artistic figure that itself has experienced a shift from one character in film history to another: La Dolce Vita (1960), La Notte (1961), until Rossi moved it to North America in 1962, to end its journey in Eros (1964) of South America by Walter Hugo Khouri. Rossi's work stands out for its remarkable combination of narrative form, in the form of a constantly shifting road movie with characters passing by along the world's roadside, and content that reveals the emptiness of the American (and any other) dream.

Today is yesterday's utopia - it has always been and still is. It's just sometimes difficult to determine whether today's date corresponds completely to the actuality of the calendar, which, like everything in human life, is nothing more than a social construct. What if humanity, for the first time in history, didn't change the calendar based on something that happened, but based on the decision that nothing else will happen... All proponents of conservative values and their liberal supporters in the form of descendants of the Party of Moderate Progress within the bounds of the law must be horrified by the realization that in the year 1973 utopian ideas such as climate justice, freedom of choice of sexual partner, sustainable development, or radical reduction of working hours and transformation of the form of work have become part of the most mainstream ideologically of late capitalism when companies compete in carbon neutrality and every corporation is the greatest ecologist, when political correctness demands that all genders be respected when we have Green Deals and capitalists themselves introduce home offices. Please, teach us all, voters of right-wing and reasonable moderate centers of the world, how foolish, utopian, and destructive it is to want an unconditional basic income, 4 working days a week, marriage for all, higher property taxes, communism... Similarly, the form of "mockumentary" recording of reality that never happened is now a classical repertoire of world cinema, which was bestowed upon the world by the French heritage of cinéma-verité with a touch of Chris Marker's political film essay (but less verbose and serious) and at times reminiscent of Peter Watkins' style.

It's not about one shot or one scene, not even about one motif, one line: it is the seriality of a given quantity of film objects, equally overloaded with meaning as they are hollowed out by becoming mere soulless toys for sequential combinatory, which gives true meaning to the movement of film and cinematic montage, albeit somewhat hypertrophied in terms of suppressing these objects in favor of the structure through which they are generated. This does not exclude, but rather requires, these objects to shine in their senseless material beauty after being seemingly degraded to the role of mere material for a formal game of collisions, dissections, groupings, and rearrangements, driven by the unfolding movement of creative screenwriting predestination, giving rise to an unbounded multitude of other combinations in the viewer, from which the conventional commercial viewer traditionally gets dizzy. This is because it would be their true degradation to restrain them through the chaining of conventional linearity, where narrative objects obediently embody the servants of the plot, which rapes them of their own autonomy - as well as the potential to be unique and embodied in all others at the same moment because, according to the ruling artistic ideology, their appearance and meaning must only be an illustration of this plot.

Sometimes, as written by an Italian poet-director, it is "necessary to be insane in order to be clear" (Pasolini, “Gramsci's Ashes”), and in this eclipse, going hand in hand with clarity, twilight and light illuminate for us the black and white of film, whose sovereign aesthetics liberate people from the nocturnal dictatorship of both politics and logocentrism. In a world where speech is finally revealed as sporadic absurdity, throwing a helpless smirk at the freedom of voluntary aphasic film, personified by the aimless movement of the protagonist, the viewer cannot help but feel sorry that from the beginning, we know that we are only following a construct, which reminds us that the fall of Franco was just a dream during the filming, into which we have fallen, and the fall of our remaining conventional bourgeois reality is still out of reach today. The film is irreducible to its relatives, with which it is equal: the surrealist unveiling of striking unattractiveness of the bourgeoisie and specters of freedom á la Buñuel, the absurdity of lost communication á la Beckett, "eclipsed" wandering through existential wasteland á la Antonioni, and last but not least, at times a prelude to Pythonesque surrealist sketch comedy.

What can revive the dead, move the stiff, fill those who are empty, and create an object of its own description? Interpretation, criticism; a film born from the movable sand of words reanimates the immobility of images, and as a hypothesis, it stands on an endless doubling, from which the mirror reflection gives birth to the pre-image of the image and its reflection; an original that does not exist without its critique. For if imagination itself would inevitably solidify into the solidity of the crystal of its creation, its told story, if the possibility of movement with that crystal did not hurry to arrive, the crystal that can endlessly radiate new reflections of light simply by being rotated - it is thus not an image, but a reflection, not image-ness, but reflectivity, which creates the liberating possibility to delve into Borgesian games of narrative structures and instances, and thus to revive again and anew, to seek meaning in stolen absence, enacting all the rituals to which we are servants here: the ritual of the moving film image.

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.

Stiffness of photography as a path between worlds, a still pendulum swinging between the curves of life and its fiction; photography, not in contrast to movement or to sequence, but to sound and to speech, which are never more than continuity that unnecessarily floods our frozen monument with the desire for unambiguity and resolution. That feeling when you don't know if all this around you really concerns you, and not your double, who was chosen by some director as your perfect doppelganger in life's vicissitude, whose meaning even the screenwriter who wrote it cannot understand. That feeling that at one moment it is you and only you, and someone else, uninvolved, between whom the photograph is the intermediary, towards which the slow pace of the film is directed; these are crowned by lengthy sequences as a more reliable fulfillment of the tendency, expressed through explicit metafictional games with the interchangeability of actors and characters, etc. This is because only in that moment of stiffness can a person be everything they are not and be nothing they are, and in the silence of blissful momentary forgetfulness of their self, they can look forward to their actor, whom they will forever play again.

The embodied memory of the unseen, which we can only see through an image that definitively hides it from our sight: the heavy life of a post-cinematic filmmaker, whose nostalgia for the film image continues to haunt him, a silent reminiscence of the real image of the world captured in the film, only as a trace on Veronica's veil, and which itself must give way to a new medium - video. Capturing the linguistic silence of the image that the director has dreamed up in his inner mental projector is as impossible as the factory owner's attempt to control the result and process of production if a living person should appear in it: the freedom of the worker of the machine and the worker of the image always disappoints the master's original project, who, following Hegel's example, finds himself on the second track in relation to the product in which the presumed theft has already been objectified... hence the freedom of the image from any closure of meaning, Godard's comical gestural pantomime supplementing and futilely contradicting the semiotic impotence after establishing the image in the word instead of movement, which is the movement of the nonsense of the world itself. The grotesque visual and ideological solidarity between the always self-reflective director and the fictional and real factory owner not only demonstrates Godard's tireless effort to simultaneously grasp the position of expression in the creation of film narrative, but also reveals the importance of "Passion" in the transition from a period when the cinematic foundation lay in the material and political search for a non-capitalist possibility, to a new and still de facto final period, when the cinematic foundation lies in the constantly reproduced fascination with the always elusive materiality of the image. It cannot be tamed even by the more fluid video, because even in infinitely multiplied interweaving of video, something will always escape...

Ostia, the place where Romans traditionally enjoy the sea; yet one of them is not rejoicing; incongruity by someone who elevated life to eternal holidays and updated within themselves the traditional Pasolini-like Roman scavengers as well as the eternity of biblical stories against the backdrop of the transience of anarchism of fleeting Lumpenproletariats, who did not find their place in society, which offered them the only place it could create for them - prison, however, cannot bind the brothers in dialectics in which Abel is disrupted by an antithesis moving forward towards that transience, which keeps going further and leaves behind its sons as imprints of a butt in the sand after sex on the beach, washed away by the eternal tide and carried away by the only ebb, which allows those who have not found a place to rest in the wrong place in the water womb, the female womb, from which only discord, sadness, life, and confusion are born.