Dionysos

The curtain rises, the frame anchors, the screen expands, the perspective focuses, the viewer looks - from an unchanging angle on matter that knows only transformation, as if the viewer of this present-day mental “Minecraft” saw digital Muratti 30s cigarettes marching by and pondered the dilemma of whether this thematic and constantly bending and newly rutting monism of audiovisual matter refers to the original code of the film god, whose every step has been written into all future since the beginning of experimental film, and every color, material, and sound transformation only follows a brilliant divine plan, or if we are watching the aleatorics of self-producing matter lost in the randomness of the universe, whose random generation of meaningless patterns duplicates the history of film and humanity as the interplay of absurdity and pure childish joy from moving senseless audiovisual pleasures - and nothing more. Nothing less.

The pitfalls of the big city are unpredictable. For one brother, money, booze, and prostitutes can destroy a promising career, life, and character, while for the other, his gigantic altruism can paradoxically lead to self-destruction and more harm than good (it's no coincidence that all ancient and medieval saints end up crucified/dismembered/decapitated, etc.). However, the film's ending belongs to neither of them (despite the tragic culmination of their love triangle), but rather to the unobtrusive brother in the background, who until then was probably the most unremarkable character in the whole drama. It is he who carries the message that was very useful for Italy in its difficult post-war "neo-realist" times - to stick to honest work, not to come up with risky attempts to get rich, not to lose will and hope, not to forget about family, and grit your teeth and wait for a better world to come.

Lost in the room, lost in the film. A study of the viewer's relationship to the fictional world of film, diegesis. Gidal himself: "This film is a consequent continuation and contraction of my film work, research which began with Room (1967). The film is not a translation of anything, it is not a representation of anything, not even of consciousness." The film represents nothing (except itself, it must be added - a topic very close to experimental cinema of that time) and only maps the room and, through its procedures, maps the ways in which the viewer allows him or herself to be drawn into its game. Slow camera voyeurism, always following partial shots of a darkened space, constantly teases the viewer's expectations, who is used to, from classic productions, crutches, instructions, and clear maps on how to navigate in the pre-camera area. Here, orientation is always difficult, made impossible, and postponed, while the inability to recognize scales and objects is used as a springboard for aesthetic values - from objects that we do not recognize, Gidal keeps only their basic contours or colors, which he further abstracts, examines, absolutizes). Ironically, sometimes Gidal lets the picture light up to the max - even then the mysterious room will not and cannot be visible and open to light. Gidal thus mostly allows almost complete darkness to rule.

A work of art is always born from its historical and social conditions. While the pre-war avant-garde, especially European, discovered abstract forms of moving geometry and the dance of objects captured in the possibilities of film montage, Cornell mostly adhered to figurative creation in his entire body of work and his most famous piece, Rose Hobart, is one of the classic works of its author and is an embodiment of the found footage method. Therefore, from what conditions does this film emerge? It emerges from modern mass culture, which, unlike Europe, began in the USA in the 1930s. With his film, Cornell created a dream, but he could only do so because Hollywood had first created the consumerist dream East of Borneo. Cornell, with his found footage style, only utilizes the "artistic" prefabricated items of mass culture and tries to create higher-level art from them, or rather to make something valuable out of the ubiquitous junk, which is the fate of today's world.

The opening quarter-hour passage is already full of ideas and dynamics - the flashforward of the end of the robber gang is presented to us as a flashback of the narrator/detective, who also gives general information about the growth of crime in Milan in the form of interviews (e.g., in a cinematically interesting form of thought reconstructions of typological cases, which the detective only comments on with voice-overs, which are eventually supplemented by the actual reconstruction, which he is personally present at). The flashbacks (actually flashforwards) are inserted into this fast-paced introduction, and by following the panic of the Milanese, the viewer at first has no idea what storyline he or she will follow, until eventually the main story axis crystallizes. This story is already told in a conventional way, and it is interesting (whether you consider this a plus or a minus) that we do not return to the documentary style at all in the end. Dino De Laurentiis has always been able to raise money and here he indeed raised enough money, so the crowd and action scenes are certainly not embarrassing, quite the opposite.

Objectivity was clearly disregarded and trampled upon in 1955 by the impartiality of that time's ideologies, historians, and, last but not least, screenwriters and directors. Ideology truly emanates from every scene like the heat from a well-heated furnace of the Kladno steelworks, yet the film describes real events that actually took place, only the behavior or attitudes of the characters, the overall tone of the film, and its message are marked by the socialist realism of the 1950s and its ideology. However, it is precisely this ideology, and not the film, that is being evaluated by the majority of those who mechanically assess it as trash! By the way, I believe that a large part of the people who called it trash haven't even seen the film.

Did anyone notice that the film is about the eternal struggle of Good against Evil? But seriously, this film won't dazzle the demanding viewer with the complexity of expressed thoughts, but rather with how it can convey them to the viewer - through an exceptional merging of content and form. This is something that is one of the greatest strengths of a work of art. The photogenic and unreal landscape, especially for a Central European, provides ideal material for this purpose: towering mountains and proud rocky peaks as counterparts to equally proud heroes, around whom both stories revolve; the purity and mountain sun as a mirror of an immaculate Virgin, the harsh yet real and honorable life of mountaineers compared to the pettiness and vanity of people from the plains below them. Add to that the excellent play of contrasts of the black and white camera - the devil balancing on the edge of darkness and daylight, a funeral scene where the characters emerge plastically from the encompassing darkness, reminding us of the rarity and brevity of life.

The unstable floating disjunction between words and images, absolute inadequacy of visuals as illustrations of text, endless surpassing of non-totalizable quantities of the potentialities of the camera over any discursive reductionism, the limit of the documentary and limit of all efforts for correspondence between thought and world. The nickel-and-dime psychologizing criminal-sociological description of an absolutely ordinary story "from adolescent delinquent to criminal" always and again shatters against the wall of the image and shows that the attempt to connect these two worlds is colossally pointless. The paradox of the infinity of the seen detail against the absolute generalizability of the textual construct. The uniqueness of the personal story is neither denied nor affirmed by the documentary detachment of the camera, which only captures public space and strangers - in this field of indecisiveness, everyone can find either the sociological search for the roots of the criminal's fate or the transcendent spirit of the criminal, which is absent and surpasses its conditions, which rather than its anchoring in that sociological story, dazzle the viewer with their total indifference towards it. In such a space, everyone is both an innocent witness and a perpetrator. The use of supremely cacophonous "abnormal" music only emphasizes the artistic core of any apparent documentary “with distance,” which makes one wonder whether it was not the aim from the beginning to create a visual poem. This is affirmed by nothing other than the self-contained shots of the camera, which turn the public space into material for the creation of paintings with its details - any attempt to objectify the individual always turns into the subjectivization of the world. In their apparent unity, however, the modern human being finds no reassuring pantheism, but rather a simple indifference of reality towards the individual, which, although dissolved in the image of the world, logically disappears therefrom.

We should evaluate a work of art only "here and now" and try not to overly incorporate external factors into its assessment: the most dangerous thing in this regard is the inclusion of the author's personal life. I mostly agree, but here I cannot - Chantal Akerman's life and work should serve as an example as the muse of cinema. Certainly, Blow Up My Town is not an extraordinary work in and of itself, but... the freshness with which a barely adult girl decides to jump (and certainly in no way sophisticatedly) into the film, mainly into a socially, gender-sensitive topic. Here, of course, Jeanne Dielman is born, whose defiance against the conventions imposed on women by the male world takes on a reversed form in Blow Up My Town, as the author herself expressed later and there is no doubt about it. The muse of cinema: making films experimentally, sometimes lightly (even musicals, comedies) - but always striving to make something new and, most importantly, to make films ABOUT SOMETHING. Although it may not be evident to the conventional viewer at first glance, beneath the heavy experimental form or, as in this case, under the façade of youthful barefoot comedy, there was always a real person hidden, whether female or male, but always real.

Is it the infuriating abundance of overripe pleasures that begin and end within themselves, or the purity and simplicity that are never as simple as they seem because there is something else hiding within them? The headache is caused by the claustrophobia of details that cannot be visually processed in the same way, just as the stomach cannot digest an excess of even the best food... The image: Salome's body stripped of everything, including hair, against the backdrop of purifying fire... setting vengeance in motion. Vengeance, religion - no longer can one be here and now, enjoying life; it is necessary to see something more behind everything. Dance is no longer just movement, but a crime; the body is no longer an object of pleasure, but a (self)destructive idea. The moon is no longer just the moon and that's enough, but a sign that always signifies something more than the night, which should belong to joyous and colorful revels like those in a moving Rubens painting, but now it belongs to a principle that seeks something more in everything. Purity, therefore, kills; final purification and a flood of light can do nothing but torment.