Dionysos

A film from a time when a white man in a suit symbolized the existence of Man, and the bourgeoisie could drown in a torn spirit without having to step into a reality that had long ago escaped it: but the split man does not lie therein, because our film man consistently reaches a point of excited catatonia from which no consequences can escape - he becomes whole in the power of his decision to become a powerless witness of his own life if the entirety of time takes hold of him. This is because a film that constantly moves forward and backward, unraveling from the reel only to immediately wind onto the wheel of time, which closes into the perfection of a circle, from within whose prison insanity screams the truth of the impossibility of escape, reminds us who are split that it is better to live our lives as split-souled androgynes.

Love slides along the telephone line like a gaze through deserted shots. Where we expect to find a person, we find emptiness, and where we come across a face, we find someone else, someone different from who we were looking for, than who we always looked for, but never wanted to see: because she, whom sight would not recognize and would only truly know with eyes closed in the darkness of the world, cannot be seen, but especially not by me - there is no image in the text of desire, there is nothing to see here. The Boat called Night faces the Night of Time. Blind. Only with a blind gaze, wandering over her black image, can one see the one who needs to be hidden behind words, voices, Paris, so that they can merge with her, the one who cries in the night, dissolved in general desire, distorted by a chasm; the one transformed beyond recognition, beyond their own recognition… It is because only the one who allows themselves to be lost in the general desire of the night, where love knows no names, only faces that can belong to anyone at any moment, will not be afraid to tear away the scratch from their self and their you and look behind the black image, enter it, from which everything came and into which everything will submerge. The whole night...

Repetition to the new, or a direct route to always the same thing? A clear example, obviously escaping the authors: the original book logo MaM changes to MM in the miniseries, and in this difference everything is contained - the illusory conjunction & created internal differentiation and the appearance that two M's are something different than the single person Milo Minderbinder, who stands behind all the business: we thus had sameness that differentiates itself from itself and creates something new, a constantly expanding world within a world, a circular economy from M to M with the symbol &, full of twists and circularity of time. In contrast, MM connected by a common vertical line where one M ends where the other begins refers to unidirectional verticality of time, also known as linearity of time and storytelling, which in the case of American TV series, Netflix series, Apple TV products, HBO miniseries, and Hollywood films is always the same, an eternal return of the same narrative pattern, visual and narrative clichés, and with it, the smoothed contents that are so contrary to the very basic building block of the book source that this cannot be reflected, as it is not a legitimate change (because any adaptation from a book to a film is always perceived by the original readers as simplification/distortion, etc., which is not the case with this rape of the basic narrative structure itself), but it is political, ideological, and Artistic with a capital A, against which one must fight always and everywhere and by all means!

Traditional criticism of Robbe-Grillet: Unfortunately, there is practically no plot. If only the storyline was directed toward some direction. The director pretends that there is something more to it, but there isn't. The storyline really doesn't go anywhere because it always circles back to the starting point - if we don't consider the cyclical nature of form, structure, and ultimately life as a cinematic goal in itself, then it will hardly be a goal for us as viewers. What is more important is that the storyline doesn't just pass through the film on its journey, but in the author's classic extreme intertextuality and intermediality, it passes through cinema, as well as painting and literature, and thus the film's diegesis finds meaning beyond its own horizons - without references to this cinematic world, the story of the revenant fiancé of Count Henri de Corinth will not make any sense at all. Almost every proper name and narrative fragment contains or is modeled as a reference to another work of art or another Robbe-Grillet creation. However, the lack of knowledge of these references doesn't matter at all since even with their knowledge, the story doesn't make any more sense because the aim of surrealism was never to reconstruct conventional meaning but to discover a different meaning... Could it be a mere coincidence of an anagram that the "onirie" dream structures of the protagonist's experience pass through irony, with which conventional forms of voice-over and flashback (postulating the reconstruction of past events) present the deconstruction of the character's space and time, from whose dream neither she herself nor the viewer wakes up? There is simply nothing to wake up from...

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.

There is no role here that needs to be grasped and played; there was no past before the arrival of the camera that needed to be experienced; there will be no end of filming that delimits. There has always been and is the role that I have played, without knowing that I would one day have to accept it as my own past - the aesthetic finesse of decentralizing characters within the composition of the shot refers to the decentralization of human consciousness in the hierarchy of the world, which instead of a sorted reality with humans in a privileged position encounters the reality of the fictional world, which refuses to be just an extension of these self-deceptions. Therefore, enjoying the invasion of the camera into the shots in moments when the actress's life is indistinguishable from her role, this film creates a situation in which reality and fiction are not only inseparable but individual egos are not separate either. Instead of separate instances of time and characters, we have analepsis and prolepsis of a single unsorted time of the subject, which must continuously painfully form itself, and this formation is as decentralized as its own camera shot and its own consciousness in front of itself as a stranger, into whose role it is necessary to immerse. This new continuity of time of interweaving strangers in the body of one's own self evokes film editing, which through cinematographic psychoanalysis erases the differences between characters A and B and playing with the spatiotemporal codes of conventional editing allows the viewer, enslaved in the channels of standard cognitive processes, to be surprised by how smoothly one can transition from one character to another, from one narrative line to another.

Existential horror, punk dystopia, a terrorist road movie of the free fall of a man, the search for lost time, and finding a lost film through which the forgotten Nihil has become - a mere nothingness that tears apart and collapses even the characters. As if the Red Army Faction, after the explosion of the remaining values of the world, set off on a wild race towards the final battle of discovering the absolute, whose purified "Being" is as terrifying as a raw body shedding its flesh; where the hidden inner being is only its stitched underside like the face of Frankenstein, and the journey of film surrealistic symbolism ends in images not unlike those of the later Begotten (1990). In a film where purity is conditioned by blood and the moment of redemption is stretched out by illusion, the purism of expression finds nothing contradictory in the extreme stylization.

"A person has no fate or privileged place in the universe. If they didn't exist, nature wouldn't miss them." Khouri's privileged theme: the disintegration of an individual from the whole world into the monad of a useless human being; Khouri's privileged place: a luxurious abandoned hacienda, in a broader sense territorialization of the privileged theme to the privileged class - the bourgeoisie (and secondarily Brazilian). The universe of this film created by Khouri's successful mise-en-scène: the contradiction between the individual and nature, the anxiety of life and being simultaneously attracted to it as someone who doesn't belong; an island of a functionalist villa amidst a flood of greenery; solitude against the backdrop of the city. But above all, this monadic poetics of alienation leaves its mark in the framing of the human face by the camera which, with frequent details filling the faces of the actors, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere and emphasizes the inner and outer separation much better than the sometimes insensitive and exaggerated use of "oppressive" non-diegetic music, which, in my opinion, has aged the most in the film. If during watching I pondered why there are so many allusions to the 1920s in the film, it is perhaps due to their unsurpassable and beautiful portrayal of the human face, as only silent film could do, and which Khouri also used quite successfully, although in this film it leads the actors to a certain - but characteristic - lifelessness not only in their facial expressions.

Doors that lead nowhere end up in a place that cannot be reached... The more dialectic of mise-en-scène, camera, and editing the film is, the more crystallized is its higher developmental level in their synthesis: the nudging of the doors in the pre-camera space accompanies the permanent denial of the axis rule duplicating the permanence of the movement of hinges and the cyclicality of editing, which is comparable to the cycle of botanized human life, from which escape is possible only into a wilderness without doors and without flowers. The dew of meaning on the surface of things and people; slow absorption and fast transplantation, without either strategy being able to definitively close the doors or leave them open, as they are, following the example of Magritte's paintings, just an illusory means of movement that only seemingly divides the space. And if there are no boundaries in life, there is no place to reach, because we already got there long ago, and therefore it is not possible to hide from anything - especially not from oneself.

A brutally precise post-sorella film for Latin America that somewhat misses every box in which the viewer would automatically want to put it, and it is precisely this missing that leads to its greatness. It just needs a few short speeches of self-confusing introspection of the main character and a few scenes whose musical motif and overtly parodied filming undermine the seriousness of the situation, and the blocks of capitalist slave masters, carved by workers, take on a completely different meaning than the precise fulfillment of their function in the historical drama of a class on the path to realization. Paradoxically, the author didn't add anything to the characters' false chimera of psychological depth (which none of us have ever had), but still remains at a higher level, albeit still just a "mere" function, allowing them to perish in the hundreds in the audiovisual dramatization of the choreography of the idea of execution and brutal injustice, reminiscent of works of this type by Miklos Jancso.